| Popis: |
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. |
