The Emotional Experience of Motherhood in Planned Lesbian Families in the South African Context: "… Look How Good a Job I'm Doing, Look How Amazing We Are".

This article focuses on lesbian mothers' emotional experience of motherhood. It forms part of a larger qualitative and exploratory study with 10 lesbian couples in South Africa on their lived experience of planned motherhood. The study is located in a feminist phenomenological framework.

Masculinity, sexuality and vulnerability in 'working' with young men in South African contexts: 'you feel like a fool and an idiot … a loser'.

South Africa has seen a rapid increase in scholarship and programmatic interventions focusing on gender and sexuality, and more recently on boys, men and masculinities. In this paper, we argue that a deterministic discourse on men's sexuality and masculinity in general is inherent in many current understandings of adolescent male sexuality, which tend to assume that young women are vulnerable and powerless and young men are sexually powerful and inevitably also the perpetrators of sexual violence. Framed within a feminist, social constructionist the oretical perspective, the current research looked at how the masculinity and sexuality of South African young men is constructed, challenged or maintained.

Motherhood and the "Madness of Hunger": "...Want Almal Vra vir My vir 'n Stukkie Brood" ("...Because Everyone Asks Me for a Little Piece of Bread").

It is widely assumed that the social and economic conditions of poverty can be linked to common mental disorders in low-, middle- and high-income countries. Despite the considerable increase in quantitative studies investigating the link between poverty and mental health, the nature of the connection between poverty and emotional well-being/distress is still not fully comprehended. In this qualitative study, exploring how one group of Coloured South African women, diagnosed with depression and residing in a semi-rural low-income South African community, subjectively understand and experience their emotional distress, data was collected by means of in-depth semi-structured interviews and social constructionist grounded theory was used to analyse the data.

The whales beneath the surface: the muddled story of doing research with poor mothers in a developing country.

In this article I attempt to show how research ideals of social change and usefulness can lead to "research paralysis." I also argue that if there is sufficient reflexivity about the research process itself, paralysis is not inevitable, and useful knowledge can indeed be generated. I substantiate this by illustrating how the same interview data can be analyzed on multiple levels, rendering it useful in different ways in different contexts.

Manifestations of affective disturbance in sub-Saharan Africa: key themes.

Background: Affective disorder, once seen as rare in sub-Saharan Africa, is now viewed as more common. There are however challenges in assessing rates of depression, exploring manifestations of depression, and understanding risk factors for depression, especially those related to gender.

Aim: To identify key themes and new directions for research on affective disorder in sub-Saharan Africa, with particular reference to gender issues.

Mothers, daughters and sexual agency in one low-income South African community.

Statistics indicate that sexual health problems like HIV/AIDS and teenage pregnancies are prevalent among young South African low-income women. To improve the effectiveness of preventative programmes for adolescents it is important to focus on adolescents' own understanding and experience of their sexual behaviour within the contexts in which it occurs. Female adolescents' experiences of their own sexuality are shaped by a range of contexts: from the very specific context of their intimate relationships to the broader contexts of gender, ethnicity and social class.