Snipp- och snoppsnack : En studie av feministiska föräldrars tal med barn om kropp och sexualitet

In this paper I have studied how feminist parents talk to their children about body and sexuality and with which intentions they speak the way they do. The aim of the study was to locate strategies applied to give children positive relations to their bodies and their sexuality. My data are constituted by answers from a questionnaire sent out to an e-mail list for feminist parents. The answers have been compiled and analyzed, mainly qualitatively by the use of discourse analysis, with support of poststructuralist theories about language, gender and heteronormativity, as well as theories about children’s sexuality. In the reports I found several patterns. The most obvious ones were that these parents made great efforts to talk as openly as possible with their children about sexuality, and communicating with them about sexual and bodily integrity appeared to be important. The parents generally showed a relaxed attitude to children’s sexual behaviour. Many of them were also anxious not to force the children into static normative models, such as heterosexuality or fixed gender roles. Naming all body parts, female genitalia in particular, was another important issue to many of them