Bredström, Anna, Post Doc

By Katherine Harrison on 21 May | 0 comments

GEXcel project: Sex, Risk and Safety: Intersectional Perspectives on Youth and Sexual Health

My current research project focuses on young people and sexual health. The project is exploratory and aims to grasp young people’s own interpretations of sexual risk using focus- group interviews and individual in-depth interviews. In order to grasp as many different experiences as possible the participants in my study come from different backgrounds in terms of both class and ethnicity. As concerns gender and sexuality, the participants will include both men and women who identify themselves as heterosexuals, bisexuals, gay, lesbian and transgender.

The project proceeds from a social constructionist understanding which maintains that social structures and cultural contexts shape the understanding of what constitutes ‘risky’ and ‘safe’ sexual practices. During my stay as a GEXcel visitor, I am particularly interested in developing a feminist intersectional analysis of sexual risk-taking that goes beyond the gendered discourse of ‘passive feminitity’ and ‘active masculinity’ prevalent in much feminist research on safer sex. My research shows, for instance, that racialized and classed boundaries permeate young men and women’s understandings of what constitute proper heterosexual masculinity and femininity. I thus argue for a contextualized approach that takes into account several power relations simultaneously and my aim is to explore how class, race/ethnicity and age intersect with safe sex discourses on gender, sexuality and the body. In addition to this, I would also like to engage in critical discussion on behaviouristic and common sense knowledge on what constitutes a risky behaviour in medical sex research and how it is linked to class, gender, sexuality, age and race/ethnicity.

Biographical notes:

Anna Bredström is a researcher at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO) at Linköping University. Her doctoral dissertation Safe Sex, Unsafe Identities: Intersections of “Race”, Gender and Sexuality in Swedish HIV/AIDS Policy (2008) explores the ways in which migration, ethnicity and racism have been approached in Swedish HIV/AIDS policy since the early 1980s. More specifically, the dissertation examines when and how migrants are linked to understandings of public risk and safety in sexual relations, and how notions of ‘race’ and ethnicity in HIV/AIDS educational materials and policy documents are related to issues of gender and sexuality. Her work has been published in Race & Class, Sexualities, European Journal of Women’s Studies and Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies.