Search Results (20)

This paper builds on insights in disability studies, queer theory, feminist philosophy, and critical phenomenology to reframe the meaning and value of ordinary, physical objects that are part of the worlds that people with dementia share with their close family and friends. I offer a queer crip critical phenomenological reframing of dementia’s objects to better understand and critique normalized structures of ableism that shape dementia experience, especially when first-person experience of dementia cannot be transparently communicated. I argue that such a reframing of dementia’s objects furthers understanding of how dementia is a disability justice issue and opens possibilities for more just care for people with dementia and members of their care communities. Full article

Spiritual care is summoned by suffering—by ‘wounds’ that are psychological, relational, spiritual, embodied, and political at once. As disciplines continue to be entrenched and siloed amidst the growing sociopolitical tensions and global crises in a decolonial age, what is at stake is the ability to care for each suffering Other in their complexity. This article offers a selective genealogy and relational integration of psychoanalysis and spiritual care (in a decolonial age). Against both clinical reductionisms and theological certainty, we argue for renewed dialogue between psychoanalysis and spiritual care through a relational integration framework, both as an ethical stance and hermeneutic framework. We first trace how pastoral and practical theology have approached each ‘wound’ in spiritual care through clinical pastoral education, psychoanalytic pastoral care, practical–theological hermeneutics, and liberationist, intercultural, postcolonial, and decolonial turns. We then consider how psychoanalysis itself has undergone significant transformations through object relations, relational–intersubjective theories, existential–phenomenological approaches, and feminist, intercultural, liberationist, and decolonial critiques. Finally, we propose embodied, hermeneutical, developmental, and intercultural commitments for relational integration, further clarified through spiritual dwelling, seeking, and crucibles of transformation. These commitments orient practitioners toward more accountable forms of interdisciplinary formation, witness, healing, justice, and liberation with the suffering Other. Full article

This article examines how contemporary domestic noir fiction and its online reception relate to the pathologization of women’s testimony. Combining feminist narratology, critical phenomenology, and Ian Hacking’s concept of “making up people,” we analyze Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train and A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window alongside Goodreads reviews of both novels. We argue that these texts mobilize women’s psychological distress—addiction, agoraphobia, depression, trauma, and gaslighting—as sources of narrative suspense while simultaneously casting doubt on women’s credibility as witnesses to their own experiences. Drawing on a thematically coded corpus of Goodreads reviews, we identify a spectrum of reader responses, ranging from diagnostic and moralizing readings that reproduce testimonial injustice to empathic and feminist readings that challenge pathologizing assumptions. By bringing textual analysis and reader-response research into dialogue, the article demonstrates that the credibility of female narrators is not determined by narrative form alone but is negotiated through broader cultural assumptions about women’s reliability and authority. Domestic noir thus emerges as a key site where women’s suffering becomes a contested object of interpretation in contemporary reading culture. Full article

Female fashion models face intense bodily surveillance within a competitive and largely unregulated industry. While many young recruits endure the industry’s initial demands, less is known about how these formative experiences are later interpreted. Grounded in feminist and phenomenological perspectives, this article presents an inductive analysis of 18 semi-structured interviews with female models aged 25+, exploring entry into modelling, socialization into industry norms, and longer-term effects on body image, eating attitudes, and embodied practices. Five interconnected themes were identified: growing up “superfast”; learning to eat less; being treated as a product; boundary violations as a darker side of modelling; and building resilience within a callous industry. Early immersion in modelling culture shaped psychological development, with self-worth becoming closely tied to conformity with a narrowly defined thin ideal. Aesthetic labour extended beyond paid work to continuous bodily regulation and self-surveillance, producing a persistent tension between the lived, sensing body (Leib) and the body as an object for evaluation (Körper). Disordered eating emerged as a normalised employment strategy. While maturity could soften this process, participants described ongoing attempts to reconcile bodily needs with external judgements. The fashion industry thus emerges as a concentrated site of objectification, with enduring consequences for embodied wellbeing. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic intensified faculty emotional labor as instructors were expected to sustain learning while responding to students’ grief, isolation, and uncertainty. Educational leadership educators occupy a distinctive role as mentors and models for current and aspiring PK–12 and higher education leaders. Using a secondary phenomenological analysis, we reanalyzed de-identified Zoom interview transcripts (2022) from nine U.S. educational leadership educators (seven women; four educators of color) originally collected to examine caring pedagogies. Guided by Hochschild’s emotional labor theory and feminist care ethics, with particular attention to Tronto’s political theory of care, we conducted a theoretically informed thematic analysis focused on caring expectations, role boundaries, and well-being. Findings highlight five interrelated themes: serving as an “anchor” during crisis; blurred instructional–counseling roles and invisible care work; gendered and racialized expectations of availability; competing care obligations across work and home; and boundary-setting as resistance and sustainability. Participants described deep relational commitments to students alongside exhaustion, role strain, and frustration with institutional cultures that assumed limitless capacity to care without reciprocal support. Emotional labor in leadership education should be recognized as central leadership work, and sustainable cultures of care require systemic policies that redistribute and resource care labor. Full article

Scholars have long shown that post-separation abuse continues through legal channels and that legal institutions often reinforce existing social relations. Nevertheless, little is known about how abused mothers’ legal experiences shape their understanding of legality and how this dynamic may function to perpetuate coercive control. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 32 Israeli mothers co-parenting with abusive ex-partners, this study offers a phenomenological account of how post-separation abused mothers experience family law proceedings, based on a feminist imperative to bring their voices to center stage. The analysis reveals a dialectical legal consciousness comprising three interconnected orientations—characterized by internal contradictions and tensions that paradoxically serve to maintain rather than disrupt existing power relations: Institutional Trust and Disillusionment in the law’s protective promise, Institutional Asymmetry as experienced from the abused mothers’ perspective, and Recognizing Entrapment—the realization that legal processes reproduce the very dynamics they sought to escape. Abused mothers thus describe a paradoxical relationship with the law of both needing and distrusting a system that mandates continued contact with their abusers. Caught in a second-order abusive relationship, they feel compelled to comply with processes they perceive as harmful. We term this Entrapped Legal Consciousness—a form of legal subjectivity shaped by institutional norms that reconfigure resistance and reinscribe coercive control. This study offers empirical and theoretical insight into how legality may become a mechanism for cultivating continued control. Full article

Background/Objectives: Adolescent girls’ physical activity levels are well below the minimum recommended levels for health and wellbeing. Rural-dwelling adolescents may also experience decreased physical activity levels than their urban counterparts, placing rural adolescent girls at a greater disadvantage. The reasons for these low levels are multifactorial, including, but not limited to, age, geographical locations, and gendered stereotypes surrounding activities. Qualitative investigations into adolescent girls’ physical activity can provide deeper understandings on the key barriers and supports that specific populations experience and have been limited in the current literature. This study explores the physical activity experiences of adolescent girls living in rural Nova Scotia to provide deeper understandings of the needs of this population to inform physical activity policy and programming. Methods: Heideggerian hermeneutic phenomenology and feminist post-structuralism were used in a bricolage fashion to analyze six semi-structured interviews from adolescent girls between 11–13 years old living in rural eastern Nova Scotia. Results: Three major themes were identified from the interviews: (1) what physical activity looks like depends on your definition; (2) “What do you do when the boys take over the gym?”; and (3) “It’s really nice to have space…but there’s a lot less options out here”. The themes were not independent, but rather all were linked by the threads of gendered sociocultural expectations and hegemonic femininity. Conclusions: Distinct physical activity identities were exposed within the stories, shaped by parental and peer supports, personal ideals, sociocultural gender roles, and individual sense of agency surrounding physical activity engagement. Rural adolescent girls need both increased social and parental support to better navigate barriers of location and gender stereotypes that may be limiting their physical activity. Full article

Black women come from a lineage of survivors who have faced threats to their economic livelihoods since the emancipation of slavery. These threats are deeply rooted in the systemic expectation of free labor, which dates to the illegal enslavement of Black individuals beginning in 1619. A new emerging concept of complex economic intergenerational trauma (CEIT), grounded in Black feminist theory, examines the historical and contemporary economic exploitation of Black women at the intersection of gendered anti-Black racism. CEIT highlights ancestral capital—an essential form of wealth and survival—that has enabled Black women to succeed in a society built through their marginalization. Findings from an exploratory phenomenological study of thirteen Black women’s experiences with wealth accumulation reveal that Black women have thrived beyond the confines of the U.S. economy, despite its design to exploit their labor without providing them benefits. Ancestral capital, rooted in knowledge, values, cultural resilience, and community support, has been key to their survival and success. Today, Black women continue to face significant barriers to true economic security due to ongoing gendered anti-Black racism. However, they survive and adapt. A thematic analysis from the study shows that Black women approach economic security and wealth differently than others, placing a strong emphasis on community, collective organizing, and mutual aid. These approaches stem from a lack of access to traditional avenues of wealth accumulation available to others. Despite these ongoing challenges, Black women persist, drawing on both their inherited trauma and their unique forms of capital to navigate the economic system. This paper underscores the uniqueness of Black women by uplifting their resilience and survival, offering a testament to their ability to thrive beyond traditional financial means and continue their legacy of strength. Full article

This case study aims to problematise concepts of equine and human co-relational agency in the context of ‘mis-re-presentations’ in the Australian media of harms experienced by the Anglo Arab stallion, Cambridge, following his development of laminitis and his consequent confinement at a leading national Equestrian centre. Autoethnographic narrative is used to retrospectively and selectively narrate the evolving relationship between Cambridge and his owners, farrier, and treating veterinarians within the dominant housing and veterinary practices and welfare paradigms in equestrian culture of 1990’s Australia. Structured author/owner autoethnographic vignettes are framed by newspaper and internet reportage to highlight a productive tension between the public mediation of the case, and what it means to be fully embodied in relationship with an equine companion agent within a particular, racialised, gendered, and biopoliticised location. Adopting a phenomenologically informed intersectional feminist ethics of care perspective, a counternarrative to the gendered, racialised and essentialising rights-based judgements about Cambridge’s illness and eventual death that dominated the popular media is provided. Crucially, the autoethnographic vignettes are chosen to capture the corporeal reciprocity and rapport of forces that produced a co-created agentivity that characterised the horse’s birth, training, and treatment. The embodied interspecies knowledge that informs the training and care of equines (and all animal species) is always historically situated within permeable, dynamic worlds of self and other that are fluid, contextual, and always in relation. It is suggested that the case of Cambridge illustrates how competing stakeholder investments in animal welfare can play out in the public mediation of particular cases in ways that exclude their historical and interspecies situatedness and serve to reinforce dominant ideologies governing human and animal relationships. Full article

Given the various shortcomings of classical phenomenological methods identified by critical and liberatory theorists, this paper considers what phenomenology has to offer theorists of multiply marginalized experience. The paper begins with an account of the major reasons for which Latinx feminists such as Linda Martín Alcoff, Jacqueline Martinez, and Mariana Ortega have found a phenomenological approach useful in their projects. This account reveals that though Latinx feminist phenomenologists have found useful resources for theorizing multiply marginalized theory and identity in the classical texts of phenomenology, experiences unique to those subjected to marginalization remain significantly underdeveloped or absent from classical accounts. Taking seriously the primacy of lived experiences of ‘rupture’, this paper argues, is therefore necessary in the development of a phenomenological approach that does justice to life in the borderlands and the lived experience of being-between-worlds. Informed by the work of Latinx feminist theorists such as Gloria Anzaldúa and María Lugones, this paper closes with a proposed critical feminist phenomenological approach that centers the moment of ‘rupture’ described in such work. Ultimately, this paper argues that the communication and documentation of these ruptures in the form of phenomenological description allows for the examination and interrogation of sedimented logics of oppression on the way to liberatory ends. Full article

Lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans and other gender diverse persons assigned female at birth (heretofore referred to as “LBQT+ persons”) in Western Kenya experience intersectional oppression and stigma. This stigma can manifest in acts of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) and sexual and gender minority (SGM)-based violence, as well as various forms of discrimination—all of which have been linked to disproportionately higher levels of negative health outcomes for this group. Despite these challenges, many LBQT+ persons have been able to gain personal and collective power and thrive in this oppressive environment. The Empowerment for Us by Us (E4UBU) project is a mixed methods feminist participatory research study focused on exploring how LBQT+ persons conceptualize and define empowerment for themselves, and to understand their perspectives on how feelings of power and powerlessness influence their physical and mental health. This paper focuses on data from the first phase of the study, in which qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted with 40 LBQT+ persons (ages 19 to 50) from Kisumu and Homa Bay in Western Kenya. A participatory interpretive phenomenological analysis was conducted to understand the lived experiences of LBQT+ persons as they navigate intersectional oppression and its influence on their experiences of empowerment and subsequent health outcomes. Findings from this analysis were presented to two different focus groups composed of participants who had participated in the in-depth interviews to gather their insights on the interpretations of the interviews as a form of member checking. Findings revealed that “empowerment” was not experienced and viewed by LBQT+ persons as a monolithic construct, but rather a process through which LBQT+ persons are able to transform negative forces of intersectional oppression and powerlessness into experiences of power and subsequent individual and collective action and impact—all leading to improved mental health and well-being. This process is facilitated at several junctures by participatory seeking and attainment of community-appropriate resources at multiple socio-ecological levels that, when accessed with sufficient intensity, frequency, and duration, enhance one’s journey through the process of empowerment. These facilitation junctures are viewed as likely points of focus for public health intervention. Analysis also revealed that the process of empowerment is dependent on the context within which the process is occurring, the specific issues being faced, and the population of focus. Recommendations for how this model can be used for future research and practice to improve the lives of LBQT+ persons in Kenya are discussed. Full article

In the current qualitative study, we explored father (and varying father figures’) ethnoracial and gendered socialization messages toward Latina and Black college women. We conducted six focus group interviews with Black (n = 3 groups) and Latina (n = 3 groups) college women. Guided by Chicana and Black feminist interpretive phenomenological analysis, we identified four clusters which detailed perceived paternal influences in the lives of these college women: (a) paternal caring, (b) gender socialization, (c) value of education, and (d) developing platonic and romantic relationships. Full article

Undertaken in Kolkata, India, our study aimed to explore the experiences of Bengali middle-class women on perceived stressful events, social support, and coping experiences following childbirth. Becoming a mother following childbirth is a shared phenomenon irrespective of culture, social strata, or country, while stress during the postpartum period or depression is not. Discrete medical intervention does not sufficiently address the complexities of postpartum experiences since influencing factors also include economic, political, cultural, and social backgrounds. Adopting a feminist and phenomenological approach, individual in-person interviews were conducted with twenty women recruited via snowball sampling. Our findings revealed that events experienced as stressful may lead to poor postpartum well-being. Underpinned by gendered discourse and biases, stressful events included familial imperatives for a male child, poor social and emotional support from the family, mostly partners and fathers, and systemic workplace barriers. The women in our study commonly resided with their mothers postpartum. They expressed feeling sheltered from these experiences, cared for, and supported. We discuss the women’s experiences from a feminist pragmatic worldview, which advocates for a flexible feminism recognizant of the unique and nurturing relationship experiences between Bengali middle-class women and their mothers. In conclusion, we advocate for culturally sensitive, women-centered postpartum care practices that may entail the inclusion of intergenerational care during this critical phase of maternal well-being. These insights underscore the necessity of tailoring postpartum support systems to align with the cultural and familial contexts of the individuals they serve. Full article

This article thinks alongside the feminist ethic of care tradition to articulate a Tibetan Buddhist ethical approach to the more-than-human world. It begins by unpacking the characterization of Tibetan Buddhist ethics as a moral phenomenology before highlighting the major parallels between Buddhist moral phenomenology and the ethic of care tradition. Having made these parallels evident, this article then looks at how the ethic of care tradition has been applied to issues in animal ethics and environmental ethics to similarly think through how a Buddhist moral phenomenology might function in these more-than-human contexts. To further nuance this ecological application of Buddhist ethics, this article then takes up the question of veganism and argues that a Tibetan Buddhist care ethic would ideally adopt the positions of ethical veganism while also recognizing the socio-economic barriers to doing so in certain contexts. Ultimately, this article argues that when Buddhist moral phenomenology is applied to the more-than-human world, it presents as a Buddhist ecological ethic of care which recognizes the interconnected nature of duhkha, the necessity of approaching situations with care as one’s primary conative mode, and an emphasis on context, relationships, and positionality. Full article

This study aims to shed new light on the sex industry by questioning the lack of government assistance for female sex workers during the COVID-19 pandemic and looking at their rights from a feminist perspective. The study employed the conflict theory to understand the manifestation of sex work as a profession and its associated drivers. It used a phenomenological approach to understand the lived experiences of sex workers in their own words. A sample of 11 female commercial sex workers operating in the towns of the uMhlathuze Local Municipality, South Africa, was interviewed. The study found that assistance from government and non-government organisations was available. Still, sex workers had no access to it due to their occupation falling outside the legal beneficiary framework. During the pandemic, the criminalisation of commercial sex work exacerbated poverty, inequality, and socio-economic desperation among those in the profession. The study recommends that government strengthens resources to support sex workers and introduce safety net programs to restore livelihoods and dignity in criminalised settings. Various interventions are required to change the legal framework regarding sex work and view the profession from a legalised, regulated and as valid occupation. Full article