Title:
|
Being-in-Motion: movement, femininity and space in young women's narratives of their embodied experiences in everyday life
|
This thesis explores young women's embodied experiences in everyday life. Three
empirical studies utilising different methods were conducted exploring specific topics
relating to women's everyday embodiment. Firstly, life history interviewing and
participants' own pre-existing photographs from different time periods were used to
explore specific, meaningful experiences in relation to women's embodiment over
time. Secondly, diary writing and photo-production was used to explore heterosexual
women's experiences of embodying pleasure in everyday life. And lastly, a memory
work group method was used to explore heterosexual feminists' experiences of
embodying anger in specific interactions with sexual partners. The accounts produced
were analysed using a poststructuralist hermeneutic phenomenological narrative
method of analysis, exploring simultaneously the embodied and phenomenological
detail of specific experiences and the grounding of such experiences in wider sociopolitical
processes and contexts. Women's accounts of their everyday embodiment
suggested that experiences of being treated as object-like and experiences of
movement were central. As such, incidents of being treated as object-like were
experienced as disempowering and contrasted with experiences of movement felt as
positive and liberating. Furthermore, aspects of time and space were central to
women's explorations of their embodied experiences in everyday life. This thesis
enjoins poststructuralist and phenomenological principles in proposing a critical
feminist social psychological approach to women's embodiment, which theorises
embodied experience as sensuous process lived through the spatial, material and
socio-political world. This approach allows explicit embodied focus on how persons
negotiate, accept or resist power dynamics, and thus live through and embody social
practices and action.
|