Ingrid Lynch

Menstruation affects more than 2 billion people globally, yet many still face barriers to managing it with dignity, essential resources, and social support. The concept of "menstrual justice" broadens the focus from individual challenges to systemic inequalities underlying these barriers, drawing on feminist thought and reproductive justice, especi...

Introduction Policy decisions about young people’s sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) have far-reaching implications for their well-being. Few SRHR policies, however, focus specifically on youth. Rather, youth SRHR tends to be subsumed within national policies of Health, Youth, Education and Development Ministries, particularly in the...

Science investments should benefit everyone; however, research still predominantly lacks gender integration, resulting in incomplete findings and inequitable outcomes. Moreover, despite some progress, gender disparities persist in the research workforce. Research funders, including science granting councils, are pivotal in driving gender transforma...

Research on gender and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) beyond women’s biological susceptibility is limited. A gender and equity lens in AMR research is necessary to promote gender equality and support the effectiveness, uptake, and sustainability of real-world AMR solutions. We argue that it is an ethical and social justice imperative to include gen...

Both significant progress and profound backlash have occurred in the inclusion of sexual and gender diversity across eastern and southern Africa. This includes the decriminalization of homosexuality in Mozambique in 2015 and the introduction of the Anti-Homosexuality Act (later annulled) in Uganda in the preceding year. Simultaneously there is incr...

The dominant ‘heterosexual script’ positions men as sexually desiring subjects who initiate sex and use active displays of power to attract women, and women as passive sexual objects who use indirect means to attract men (e.g. physical appearance). While much research has highlighted how this script is deployed in high school settings, less work ha...

The linguistic coding of sexual and gender diversity remains highly contested in African contexts. While English language terminologies reflecting rights-based talk proliferate, such terms fail to fully reflect the lived realities of African queerness. This paper engages existing South African research on indigenous terminologies to describe sexual...

In the past, women’s participation in the labour force was largely limited to their domestic roles. Along with changes in gender norms, post-apartheid employment equity legislation and attempts to ‘mainstream’ gender in State and private sector spheres contributed to significant growth in women’s employment. Still, more than two decades after apart...

What makes kinship queer? This collection from leading and emerging thinkers in gender and sexualities interrogates the politics of belonging, shining a light on the outcasts, rebels, and pioneers. Queer Kinship brings together an array of thought-provoking perspectives on what it means to love and be loved, to ‘do family’ and to belong in the Sout...

This Research Brief provides a snapshot of the state of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) of young people in Namibia. Constraints in young people’s SRHR are underpinned by social and structural factors that shape the actions and resources available to them. It is for this reason that the Brief first engages selected key factors in th...

Queer persons enjoy constitutional protection of their rights in South Africa, yet still encounter a great deal of persistent stigma and discrimination (Human Rights Watch 2011; Msibi 2009). Much of this negativity relates to how those from gender and sexual minority groups ostensibly disrupt the procreative imperative. For the most part, having an...

In the past decade South African policy-makers have increasingly focused on the family as a site of state intervention. To date, several family-related policies have been developed to support societal wellbeing and cohesion. The most recent policy document is the White Paper on Families (Department of Social Development 2012), which aims to facilit...

Sexual agreements between same-sex practising men facilitate communication about health promotion activities, including HIV prevention. In African contexts, male couples negotiate their sexual agreements in relation to rigid cultural prescriptions about male power and privilege, intense hostility towards same-sex sexualities and persistent heteroge...

What makes kinship queer? This collection from leading and emerging thinkers in gender and sexualities interrogates the politics of belonging, shining a light on the outcasts, rebels, and pioneers. Queer Kinship brings together an array of thought-provoking perspectives on what it means to love and be loved, to ‘do family’ and to belong in the Sout...

As a concept, ‘the family’ continues to be central to discussions of kinship—both scholarly and more broadly. Such discussions invariably include claims about the centrality of the family to social life, such as ‘The Family is the building block of society’. Responses to queer kinship are frequently shaped by fear and underlined by a heteronormativ...

Background. Very young adolescents receive little research and pragmatic attention regarding their sexual and reproductive health (SRH) needs. As a result, their experiences are often overlooked. Furthermore, when this age group is included in SRH education, the dominant public health lens tends to focus on health risks associated with sex, with le...

Background. Early adolescence (ages 10-14) is a crucial stage of development. The importance of early intervention in improving adolescent sexual and reproductive health (SRH) is increasingly acknowledged. Yet, school-based sexuality education largely focuses on older adolescents, leaving very young adolescents to contend with conflicting informati...

Existing reviews of research on voluntary childlessness generally take the form of narrative summaries, focusing on main topics investigated over time. In this chapter, the authors extend previous literature reviews to conduct a systematic review and content analysis of socio-historical and geopolitical aspects of knowledge production about volunta...

The subject of human well-being continues to gain traction in disciplines as diverse as psychology, sociology, development studies, and economics. Current scholarship, however, is still largely framed by normative assumptions about what being well means, and the overwhelming majority of conceptual approaches to well-being being have been conceived...

BACKGROUND. Very young adolescents receive little research and pragmatic attention regarding their sexual and reproductive health (SRH) needs. As a result, their experiences are often overlooked. Furthermore, when this age group is included in SRH education, the dominant public health lens tends to focus on health risks associated with sex, with le...

BACKGROUND. Early adolescence (ages 10 - 14) is a crucial stage of development. The importance of early intervention in improving adolescent sexual and reproductive health (SRH) is increasingly acknowledged. Yet, school-based sexuality education largely focuses on older adolescents, leaving very young adolescents to contend with conflicting informa...

A monosexual configuration of sexuality assumes that sexual desire is directed at either men or women. Bisexuality resists a choice between oppositional categories and is often theorised as having a transgressive potential to destabilise binary logic, not only in relation to sexuality but also to gender. There is, however, a lack of empirical work...

Discourses surrounding sexual and reproduction health and rights (SRHR) are primarily linked to heterosexual, cisgendered women’s access to various health, and health related, programmes and services. This linkage plays an important role in constituting both normative and non-normative subject positions; justifying why some enjoy stronger instituti...

Intimate partner violence is increasingly recognised as occurring not only between heterosexual partners but also in same-sex relationships. Heterogendered relationship norms have been identified as intersecting with other social inequalities to create and sustain power differentials between partners – and fuel violence – yet remain largely unexplo...

Racism is a moral issue and of concern for moral educators, with recent social movements such as #BlackLivesMatter highlighting how far we are from obliterating racial oppression and the unearned privilege whiteness confers. To contribute to a more formalised approach to anti-racist moral education, this article systematically reviews 15 years of p...

Worldwide, sexual and gender minorities struggle to access sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services. In South Africa, sexual prejudice is entrenched and pervasive in health systems and SRH services do not cater for a diverse range of people. Though health reform is underway, little attention has been given to how sexuality is being addressed i...

In predominantly isiXhosa-speaking township communities in South Africa, men who have sex with men negotiate their identities and sexual practices alongside heteronormative cultural scripts of what it means to be a man. Such idealised notions of masculinity are predicated on the selective appropriation of cultural practices that preserve (heterosex...

There is increasing visibility of dissident sexualities and genders in media debates about families, including resistant discourses that challenge delegitimising claims about queer families. There remains, however, a lack of research that assesses the ways in which discourses seeking to defend queer parenthood function to challenge or, at times, re...

South Africa is internationally recognized for its progressive Constitution which guarantees fundamental human rights, freedom, and equality. In stark contrast, the country continues to struggle with endemic crime and violence, ongoing intentional unfair discrimination, hate speech, and hate crime. Post-apartheid South Africa also continues to wres...

People who are voluntarily childless, or ‘‘childfree,’’ face considerable stigma. Researchers have begun to explore how these individuals respond to stigma, usually focusing on interpersonal stigma management strategies. We explored participants’ responses to stigma in a way that is cognisant of broader social norms and gender power relations. Usin...

In this article, we outline the position statement on sexual and gender diversity adopted by the Psychological Society of South Africa’s Council on 24 September 2013. In line with the Society’s constitution, the statement contributes to transforming and redressing silences in South African psychology in order to promote human well-being and social...

Research indicates that a substantial number of lesbian and bisexual women and other women who have sex with women (WSW) in South Africa are living with HIV, yet this grouping is rarely included in efforts to curb the spread and impact of the epidemic and is generally invisible in sexual health policies, research and service provisions. This resear...

Although heteronormativity remains firmly in place in many contexts, challenges to a construction of heterosexuality as natural and superior increasingly emerge. However, despite increasing visibility of such challenges, bisexuality remains largely absent from such debates. Bisexual women occupy a potentially interesting position in discourses arou...

This report is based on research conducted by Triangle Project as part of the organisation’s on-going monitoring of LGBTI related hate crimes in the Western Cape, South Africa. This report first highlights some recent cases of hate crimes against LGBTI persons and then examines the broken promise of LGBTI human rights protection under the Constitut...

The aim of this document is to provide, under the auspices of the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA), an affirmative Position Statement on sexual and gender diversity, including LGBTI, queer and asexual concerns. This Position Statement is aimed primarily at psychology professionals in South Africa, though it is applicable to all mental...

Despite an appreciation of the need to increase gender sensitivity and awareness among tertiary students in the field of science, engineering and technology (SET), there is a paucity of research that explores how students in this field construct gender. A greater understanding of such constructions can assist in transforming gender relations and cr...

Male sexuality in Africa is often associated with harmful sexual practices, which, in the context of HIV and AIDS, often positions men as central to the spread of the epidemic. Despite this focus on men's practices, there is a lack of research exploring the subject positions of men living with HIV. This study explores how masculinity is constructed...

Worldwide, sexual and gender minorities struggle to access sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services. In South Africa, sexual prejudice is entrenched and pervasive in health systems and SRH services do not cater for a diverse range of people. Though health reform is underway, little attention has been given to how sexuality is being addressed i...