Katrina RoenThe University of Waikato · School of Social Sciences
Katrina Roen
Ph.D.
About
85
Publications
128,002
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
6,100
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (85)
In this commentary, we examine the role of non-Indigenous psychology researchers in settler states such as Aotearoa / New Zealand. A key focus is on demedicalising and decolonising intersex. We describe approaches to knowledge production that are based on the decolonising thinking of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, and that open up oppor...
This paper builds an argument about genital surgery in the context of medical treatment of children and young people with variations in sex characteristics. First, I set out what is known from existing research including psychological research, surgical follow-up studies and parental regret studies. Second, I present an analysis of surgeons' talk a...
Classrooms are important spaces for young people with variations in sex characteristics and their classmates. Sex education can promote agency and well-being by helping young people make sense of their embodiment and form rewarding social relationships and by changing societal understandings about variations in sex characteristics. Realising this p...
Human rights statements on intersex characteristics distinguish legitimate “medically necessary” interventions from illegitimate normalizing ones. Ironically, this binary classification seems partially grounded in knowledge of anatomy and medical interventions; the very expertise that human rights statements challenge. Here, 23 European health prof...
When people experience rare medical conditions or variations, searching online may be the only way to find others with similar experiences. This study examines what happens when people do just that. The dataset for the research has been generated from online posts by people living with variations of sex characteristics, which some call intersex var...
This is an interview study with 32 British and Swedish health professionals who worked in multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) that delivered care for children and adults with intersex traits or variations, otherwise referenced in biomedicine as disorders of sex development (DSD). The present qualitative analysis focuses, first, on the health professiona...
How do young people interpret and negotiate their sense of being affected in the context of social media use? Our study draws on recent theorizing that views affective practices as discursive, relational and imbued with power. We specifically address practices that users engage in as they pursue forms of digitally mediated emotional involvement whe...
Intersex or diverse sex development (dsd) can be conceptualized as an aspect of bodily diversity that has particular psychosocial implications. This is a review of psychosocial health care literature, published from 2007 to 2017, focusing on the well-being of people with a diagnosis relating to sex development. The analysis I offer here takes a cri...
Objectives
Clitoral surgery on minors diagnosed with differences of sex development is increasingly positioned as a violation of human rights. This qualitative study identified how health professionals (HPs) navigate the contentious issues as they offer care to affected families.
Design
Qualitative analysis of audio-recorded semistructured intervi...
When sex characteristics develop in ways that do not conform to binary models, dilemmas arise regarding how to understand the situation and what terminology to use to describe it. While current medical nomenclature suggests that it should be understood as a disorder of sex development (DSD) prompting medical responses, many describe intersex as a h...
The past 15 years have seen the growth of puberty suppression as the prevailing approach to supporting gender non-conforming children and youth. Puberty suppression is considered to provide time for weighing up the pros and cons of medical transition. Research based on binary understandings of gender has demonstrated that a carefully selected group...
This article works across psychology and feminist media studies to offer an empirically grounded investigation of affective expression in social media. To work empirically with understandings of affect, and to examine affective engagements via social media, we explore Instagram fans’ responses to the Norwegian TV series Skam (translation: “shame”)....
Introduction
Psychological research provides insights into how parents approach medical decisions on behalf of children. The medical decision of concern here is the surgical alteration of a hypospadic penis, whose urethral opening does not appear at the tip. Hypospadias surgery is routinely carried out in infancy, despite criticism by international...
Various umbrella terms refer to sex characteristics that do not fit typical binary notions of somatic sex. Key terms include Intersex, reclaimed by 1990s activists, and Disorders of Sex Development (DSD) used in medicine since 2006. Professionals across diverse disciplines express strong preferences for specific terms, making assumptions about what...
This article examines trans youth embodied distress in relation to the workings of normativity. I consider the normative cruelties that structure the embodied and gendered experiences of trans youth, and I locate trans youth embodied distress in relation to a notion of queer failure. Central to this analysis is the way emotion is implicated in norm...
Objective:
To investigate specialist clinicians' experiences of treating vaginal agenesis.
Design:
Semi-structured interviews.
Setting:
12 hospitals in Sweden and the UK.
Sample:
32 health professionals connected to multidisciplinary teams including medical specialists and psychologists.
Methods:
Theoretical thematic analysis of recorded v...
This study estimates sexual debut ages in young heterosexual, lesbian, gay, and bisexual men and women in Norway. A questionnaire survey was completed online by 27.2 % of a representative national web sample of 2090 persons aged 18–29 years. Three self-selected samples of 924 respondents completed an extended version of the survey online. Lesbian a...
Gender variance refers to a wide spectrum of gendered possibilities, with the understanding that the usual binaries (woman/man and girl/boy) provide only a partial picture. The term gender variance may be used in preference to alternative terms (such as transgender or gender dysphoric) in an attempt to avoid politicized or pathologizing frames of r...
Objective:
This study investigates various kinds of knowing that European parents use when caring for their children with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). METHODS: Semi-structured qualitative interviews with 20 parents of 22 children with CAH. RESULTS: Parents emphasized the importance of knowing what CAH is and what support their child needs...
Offering a new way of understanding the high self-harm and suicide rates among sexual and gender minority youth, this book prioritises the perspectives and experiences of queer young people, including those who have experience of self-harming and/or feeling suicidal. Presenting analysis based on research carried out with young people both online an...
Knowledge about how to prevent youth suicide and self-harm is extremely limited and this is partly due to, as White (forthcoming) indicates below, the dominance of narrow, psychomedical formulations of suicidal despair:
To date, suicidology scholars have generally shown little enthusiasm for engaging in any form of reflexive critique that would all...
Research on suicidality has often engaged with themes of connection and isolation, and these themes were taken up in our earlier work too (Roen et al., 2008). It was Durkheim (1952 [1897]) who first theorised suicide in relation to social context and social bonds, with the understanding that many instances of suicide can be attributed to people fee...
Some young people, who write online about embodied distress, self-harm and suicidality, write specifically about transgender, genderqueer, or other aspects of gender diversity. This chapter presents an analysis of such online posts, with a view to considering the role of both bodily intervention and online posting in the production of agentic, quee...
Investigations of LGBT youth suicide and self-harm very rarely engage with the idea that queer youth who are poor and have few resources might have greater difficulties coping with hostile (homo/bi/transphobic) environments. One exception is a recent UK study which suggests that low income is a predictor of suicide attempts and self-harm for young...
In this chapter, we outline the theoretical framework we are using to understand the relationship between being young and queer(ed), and being suicidal or self-harming. We argue in Chapter 1 that we are aiming to reframe the parameters of the field of study because they rigidly adhere to an at-risk, psychopathological frame of explanation which lim...
This book addresses the fundamental question of why young people whose sexualities and genders are marginalised may become distressed and sometimes harm themselves. Youth who are minoritised in relation to sexuality or gender identity can face a range of embodied, emotional, discursive and material challenges. These challenges are sometimes evoked...
Research on gender non-conforming, or transgender, youth and suicide and self-harm has been relatively sparse until very recently. Most research on youth suicide and self-harm does not mention transgender youth at all. When suicide and self-harm research takes gender as its focus, gender is usually treated as a binary, allowing researchers to repor...
Throughout our work, we have been concerned with the ways queer youth may seek help when they feel they have failed to meet normative expectations of adolescent heterosexuality. We are interested in whether they request help and when, how and why they seek help and support from youth organisations, adults and peers, mental health services and queer...
The present article maps out understandings about embodied distress among gender non-conforming youth. Feminist bioethics and queer-inflected clinical perspectives are used to inform thinking about ethical, non-pathologizing health care in the case of gender-related distress. Specific attention is directed at self-harming among gender variant and t...
Study objective:
To understand young women's experiences of receiving a diagnosis related to diverse sex development (DSD) DESIGN: A qualitative narrative analysis of interviews.
Setting:
Karolinska University Hospital.
Participants:
Nine women (aged 20-26) with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, XY or XX gonadal dysgenesis.
Interventi...
The influence of neoliberalism on culture and subjectivity is well documented. This paper contributes to understanding of how neoliberal ideology enters into the production of subjectivity. While subject formation takes place in multiple and contradictory ways and across multiple social sites, we focus on the increasingly popular media discourse of...
Psychologists have made significant contributions to how intersex or diverse sex development (dsd1) is understood, at key historical junctures (e.g. Kessler, 1998; Money et al., 1955), while medical research has played a greater role in defining this topic area. This chapter addresses the questions: what has psychological research offered so far, a...
Using data from a national survey (n = 6979) of young people in their last year in Norwegian secondary schools in 2007 (aged 18–19), this paper explores the relationship between sexual abuse and experiences of violence among young people in Norway and their reporting of suicidal ideation and self-harm. This investigation includes three types of abu...
makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the "Content") contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in...
Research on the experience of receiving and living with a diagnosis of dementia is sparse. Existing studies have focused on the initial reactions to the diagnosis rather than longer term adjustment and coping. The current study uses interpretative phenomenological analysis to explore personal experiences of receiving a diagnosis and to investigate...
International research has demonstrated that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth have elevated rates of suicide and self-harm. What is missing from the evidence base, however, is qualitative research investigating LGBT youth perspectives. This is a sensitive subject area presenting ethical, methodological and epistemological challen...
This study investigates 122 people's descriptions of their self-harm experiences using thematic analysis. Analysis revealed four themes: What counts as self-harm, What leads to self-harm, Intentions and Managing stigma. Our participants challenged commonly accepted understandings in terms of method, outcome and intentions. Several difficulties asso...
This study investigates self-harm among young lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) people. Using qualitative virtual methods, we examined online forums to explore young LGBT people’s cybertalk about emotional distress and self-harming. We investigated how youth explained the relationship between self-harm and sexuality and gender. We found that...
This study investigates whether positive and negative conventional gender roles relate to suicidal ideation and self-harming in different ways among young adults. Participants completed an online survey about previous self-harm, recent suicidal ideation, and positive and negative aspects of conventional masculinity and femininity. Logistic regressi...
Research shows clear links between lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth and deliberate self-harm (DSH), but there is a lack of research investigating the social context of young LGBT people's lives and helping to explain the higher DSH risk. In this article, we report on a small-scale methodological study intended to test the feasib...
This article draws from focus groups and interviews investigating how young people talk about self-harm. Some of the research participants had personal experience of self-harm but this was not a prerequisite for their inclusion in the study. Thematic coding was used initially to organise and give an overview of the data, but the data were subsequen...
This article focuses on therapeutic interventions with gender variant youth and, in particular, pubertal suppression. The aim is to address the question of which kinds of subjects are enabled, and which are made invisible, through discursive and clinical practices. The analysis demonstrates the conceptual value of drawing on discursive and queer th...
Transsexuality was produced as a psycho-medical, social, and discursive phenomenon during the 20 th century. Struggles over the meanings of 'transsexuality' and 'transgenderism' persist today and are evident in Norwegian trans-discourse. We offer an analysis of these struggles with a focus on (i) how particular discursive positionings render some t...
There is evidence suggesting that self harm among young people is beginning earlier, in childhood and adolescent years. This paper reports on a qualitative study of primary school staff responses to self harm among children. Some studies with adolescents show self harm presents challenges to education professionals who may lack training or resource...
Previous research investigating the risks of female street sex work has tended to focus on the most tangible risks to physical health and safety. This is reflected in the provision of support services for sex workers, where these aspects are prioritised. There is little research focusing solely on the psychological risks of sex work. This qualitati...
The present article seeks to bring together ideas from legal, medical, social science, artistic, and activist perspectives, through dialogue among the four authors. Sarah Creighton is a gynecologist working with women who have atypical genital development or intersex conditions. Julie Greenberg is a professor of law whose work on gender and sexual...
This paper reports on findings from qualitative research conducted in the UK that sought to explore the connections between sexual identities and self-destructive behaviours in young people. International evidence demonstrates that there are elevated rates of suicide and alcohol abuse amongst lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth. Rar...
Though there is a substantial body of literature on youth suicide, relatively few studies provide a detailed analysis of young people's own understandings of suicidal behaviour. The present research pays particular attention to how young people make sense of suicide, in the understanding that suicide only becomes possible insofar as it is imaginabl...
The research presented in this paper set out to explore the cultural context of youth suicide and more specifically any connections between sexual identity and self-destructive behaviour, in the light of international evidence about the disproportionate risk of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT)...
This paper reports on an empirical study concerning educational professionals' understandings of self‐harm in primary school children. There is little research available about self‐harm in primary‐school aged children, and literature searches for the current study have revealed no research on primary school professionals' understandings of self‐har...
When an atypically sexed child is born, surgical practices are employed for the explicit purpose of bringing into being a normatively sexed subject. Intersex adults have argued that such surgical practices inevitably produce queer embodied subjects. The present article is concerned with the cosmetic procedures aiming to rework intersex children's b...
This is an introduction to the Special Issue: ‘Surgery and Embodiment: Carving out Subjects’. The collection of articles in the special issue demonstrates how surgery, as a set of discourses and practices, has become central to the mediation between body and psyche in cultural understandings and individual experiences of embodied subjectivity. This...
Unintentional injury is a leading cause of mortality and disability among young and old. While evidence about the effectiveness of interventions in reducing injuries is accumulating, reviews of this evidence frequently fail to include details of implementation processes. Our research, of which the work reported here formed a part, had two main obje...
Issues of sexuality and gender present particular kinds of challenges to young adults. Particular challenges concern those who have experienced sexual abuse, those who feel under pressure to conform to heteronormative and gender-normative ways of interacting, and those seeking to make safe choices about romantic relationships and sexual interaction...
To explore data on factors affecting implementation processes in papers contributing to a Cochrane systematic review (SR) of smoke alarm interventions, supplemented by further papers not included in the review.
Screening for data on implementation on the basis of: (1) primary studies included in a Cochrane SR, (2) further papers relating to these a...
The treatments carried out with intersex children for the purpose of helping them live in a normatively gendered world have raised increasing levels of controversy in the past decade. This paper outlines key debates that are taking place highlighting the relevance of critical approaches to evidence. It points to the value of working across discipli...
Systematic reviews of evidence in social care need to draw on a range of sources of evidence, including qualitative research and research using mixed methods. This report presents an overview of current developments in synthesising evidence from these different sources.
Focuses on the description of transgenderism, challenging aspects of the psychomedical construction of gender identity and transexuality in the U.S. Contrast of radical politics of gender transgression and liberal transsexual politics; Construction of discrete political approaches; Information of the contemporary transgender politics.
A neglected way of talking about risk is to focus on one of its correlates, 'safety'. This study examines how fire-safety knowledge is put into action. We are concerned with how knowledge of household fire 'risk factors' may, or may not, gain a concrete existence in the interactions between firefighters and householders. Using a 'translation' model...
Queer theories have received criticism for their ethnocentrism and their lack of careful attention to the lived realities of transsexual and transgendered people. A forum is being established through the publication of transgender theorists' work, where transgender theorists may rework ' queer' , but how well does this reworking address concerns ab...
Throughout the twentieth century, there has been speculation about what is technologically possible in terms of transforming sexed bodies. This chapter argues that what can be done is actually less important than how we understand what is being done. As psychologists and psychiatrists are approached more and more often by people wishing to “change...
Typescript (photocopy). Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Canterbury, 1998. Includes bibliographical references (p. 297-311).
The treatments carried out with intersex children for the purpose of helping them live in a normatively gendered world have raised increasing levels of controversy in the past decade. This paper outlines key debates that are taking place highlighting the relevance of critical approaches to evidence. It points to the value of working across discipli...
Projects
Projects (4)
The United Nations has charged New Zealand with abusing children’s human rights when our surgeons do elective genital surgery on infants. The surgery is carried out on the basis of parental consent, on children born with variations of sex characteristics (VSC). To tackle the questions this raises, we bring together knowledge from legal, medical and psychosocial research. We investigate the concept of consent, asking: under what circumstances is it appropriate to invite parents to consider elective genital surgery on their infants? And, what counts as fully informed consent in this situation?
