A New Generation of Women in the Wilderness

This article presents the author's personal account of her experience as a mentor for several young women who participated in a group independent study entitled "Women in the Wilderness." The young women's difficulty re-entering society after their profoundly transformational experience in the Sierra backcountry is told from the point of view of China Galland, a seasoned wilderness educator and guide. This article is excerpted from a non-fiction work-in-progress, Running Wild.     

”I Know What It Means But It's Not How I Feel”

The use of the term survivor is widespread in the feminist therapy community. While the term survivor has been described in primarily positive terms in the abuse literature, this article examines some of the conflicting meanings it holds for women who have been sexually abused. Drawing from the words of clients, the authors argue that women's experiences with abuse are diverse and complex. This paper outlines the dangers of labeling in the therapeutic context, and advocates for approaches to working with women which acknowledge women's experiences of violation while not reducing women to those experiences. Finally, the authors encourage a therapeutic process which offers women an opportunity to explore language and acquire control over the naming of their realities.     

Patterns of Women’s Aggression Against Partners and Others: Broadening Our Understanding of Violence

Research on women's aggression typically focuses on relational aggression. However, the study of violence must include multiple forms of violence such as aggression against partners and non‐partner others, while also considering victimization experiences by partners and non‐partners. The focus of this study is the multiple experiences of violence (perpetration and victimization) of women who are incarcerated. Incarcerated women are likely to experience higher rates of both than women in community settings, but most will be released in a brief period of time. Using a random sample (N = 580) we conducted cluster analyses to identify five patterns of women's aggression. Clusters varied depending on the target/s of aggression (i.e., partner and/or others), and type of aggression (i.e., physical and/or intimidation). Multinomial logistic regression was performed to determine the relationship between women's membership in a perpetration cluster and their victimization. Victimization history was related to an increased risk of perpetrating aggression, and varied depending on the target and type of aggression. Our findings provide support that research and interventions addressing women's use of aggression must also address their victimization history. Furthermore, results indicate that for some women, aggression towards partners and others is related. Future research should investigate multiple forms of aggression.     

Consumption and community: choices for women over forty

• Women in their 40s face a range of issues regarding how they choose to present themselves to the world; often these choices involve forms of consumption. We talked to two groups of British women and discussed how they felt about themselves and the pressures upon them. We present a discussion which aims to synthesize some of the key features of how these women face their futures and suggest potential theoretical positions to help encapsulate women's present and future selves. We suggest that there are a number of pressures that may engender alternative consumption choices and these are often set within a wider sense of female community. The concept of community should prove useful for further theorising on women's future consumption choices.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Arriving at a “New View” of Women's Sexual Problems

Abstract

This essay offers an all-embracing narrative of the “new view” project to explain how and why a feminist critique of current sex problem nomenclature, an alternative vision, and an activist campaign have emerged since 1999. The story begins with 15 years of urology-promoted medicalization of men's sexuality and the building of a female market near the end of the 1990s. The Food and Drug Administration role is illuminated by the author's advisory panel experience and the FDA's proposed guidelines for testing sex drugs for women. The prevailing theory of women's sexual problems is traced to Masters and Johnson's biased research and continuing debates about orgasm. Finally, the origins of the “new view” campaign are described: a growing discomfort with the aggressive roles of urology and the drug industry in women's sexual medicine, the decision to take public as well as professional positions, the creation of a working group, and ongoing activism.     

Touch,enjoyment and health: In infancy

The paper explores Peter Lomas's influence on the author as a therapist, and in particular his idea that therapy is inescapably an ethical endeavour, however much we try to avoid this. Less persuasive, however, is Lomas's belief in therapy as a moral influence. The author sees it more as an ethical space (after Roger Poole) where people can feel free to explore, without judgement, the difficulties that have brought them there - despair, loss, inauthenticity, unfulfilled lives. The paper also explores R.D. Laing's idea of ‘fear of the soul’ which afflicts therapists (including those who do not hold much with ideas of technique) - despite our title - as well as many of those who come to see us. This fear is, it is argued, understandable as it takes us into uncharted waters, a minefield. In other words, therapy can be dangerous. The paper draws both on the author's work with individuals, and in the Philadelphia Association's community house, with which he has been involved for many years.     

Relationships among attitudes toward children,women's liberation,and personality characteristics

Replication and extension of a 1973 article, Who Wants the Children?, were undertaken. Attitudes toward child rearing, one's own remembered childhood experiences, views of women's liberation, and personality characteristics were assessed for 76 college students and 63 community residents. Some of the earlier findings were replicated: individuals with highly positive attitudes toward child rearing considered it a more creative and socially valuable activity and anti-liberation women expressed greater personal interest in child rearing than pro-liberation women. The failure to replicate other results suggests that attitudes have changed, with attitudes of the sexes converging. The inclusion of a sample of community subjects here clearly points to the need to employ a representative sample when studying attitudes of far-reaching social significance. Analysis of personality differences between pro- and anti-liberation women revealed some differences but also pointed to contradictions in literature.     

Women who do and women who don't,join the women's movement: Issues for conflict and collaboration

The women's movement as a social movement with intentions to create social change has had a cyclical history of appearance and disappearance. At its periods of reemergence, “backlash” reactions also occur. This paper deals with the women's movement in this context. Using a social movement analysis, it considers the possibility of success in creating social change, given that powerful groups of women oppose it. There is a renewed interest in antifeminism since the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment. Questions that arise: (1) Why do some women become feminists and others antifeminist? (2) What are the characteristics of social movements and the backlash that would explain these differences and lead to possible reconciliation? The material that forms the empirical basis of this paper is drawn from 24 feminists and antifeminists in five countries who wrote according to a structured outline about their relationship to the women's movement. Contributors differed in background, age, race, sexual preference, and life-style. Through their stories the issues that both separate and unite women emerge—issues such as abortion, men, motherhood, and the family. Surprising similarities emerge between those supposedly on different “sides” of the fence, and it becomes evident that no clear dividing line does exist, but rather a complex interweaving of the issues, experiences, and difficulties of being “woman.”     

Erotic Education: Elaborating a Feminist and Faith‐Based Pedagogy for Experiential Learning in Religious Studies

This essay explores intersections among Jesuit, Quaker, and feminist theologies and pedagogies of social justice education in order to propose and elaborate an innovative theoretical and theological framework for experiential learning in religious studies that prioritizes relationality, called erotic education. This essay then applies the relational rationale of erotic education to interpret the author's design of a service or community‐based learning component in a course about contemporary U.S. Christian social justice movements, offered in both religiously‐affiliated and religiously‐inspired liberal arts colleges. The course case study not only chronicles the author's evolving pedagogical praxis as a feminist theologian teaching in Jesuit and Quaker institutions, but also is grounded in how the author's course embodies erotic education, that is, how specific objectives, learning practices, and assignments build and bolster relationships among students (in peer‐to‐peer small groups inside and outside the classroom) as well as among students and their community sites. In developing this framework and implementing it within this particular course, the author argues that erotic education emphasizes the naming and training of our existential desires for interpersonal relations in order to upbuild not only the individual but also the common good.     

Coming Out in Voices

This paper articulates the personal experiences of a woman with a physical disability who enters therapy to explore issues involving lesbian identity, health and illness, disability oppression and pride, and relationships. Written in the first person, the article uses anecdotes, poetry, and journal entries to chart the author's process of self-discovery. As a woman, a lesbian, and a person with a disability, the author frequently finds herself at odds with the culture around her. This creates conflicts between the author's real self, and the self she must present to others. She discusses how she had learned to "silence the voices" which were not useful in challenging the stereotypes, making others comfortable, or communicating with assistants. The author describes how therapy offered her the opportunity to unlearn the silence, value all of her voices, listen to herself, resolve her internal dilemmas, and develop a deeper sense of self.     

Shameful selves: Women's feelings of inadequacy and constructed façades

This paper explores women's experiences of shame as a political, existential and psychological emotional state. In particular, it focuses on women's accounts of the specific shameful experiences containing the employment of a ‘façade’ to protect the ‘true’ self constructed as inadequate and shameful. The key argument in this paper is that women's shame should be understood as discursively, politically and psychodynamically over-determined. It therefore presents a reading of women's shame that brings together Foucauldian ideas of self-surveillance and positioning in discourse, with a psychodynamic theorization of shame as resulting from a constant negotiation between external forces and internal agencies. The paper also argues for the necessity of a multiplicity of readings to make adequate sense of such over-determination.      

Remembering Medard Boss

Abstract

The life and work of Medard Boss is reviewed. This overview includes the development of his daseinsanalysis, presenting its roots in psychoanalysis, existential phenomenological psychiatry, Heideggerian philosophy, and Indian thought. Also examined are Boss's contributions to the fields of psychotherapy, philosophy, and human scientific psychology. The latter contributions include Boss's explication of the meanings of three specific kinds of psychological phenomena: sexual disorders, bodily illnesses and injuries, and dreams. The article then concludes with the author's personal reflections on his experiences with daseinsanalysis and Medard Boss.     

Perceptions of the Sexual Self:

This paper explores the role of women's sexual self in the formation of friendships between lesbian and heterosexual women. The Stone Center (Wellesley College) developmental theory is used as a framework through which to identify and examine the gaps in current thinking about the definition of women's sexual self and the impact of the erotic on "women bonding." Recent literature exploring women's friendships is used to illuminate the ambiguous, and sometimes distorted, definition of women's sexual self. A multi-ethnic, multi-racial approach is applied to reflect the diverse experience of American women.     

Striving for God's Attention: Gendered Spaces and Piety

This article looks at the inadequacy of space available to women in the two most holy sites for all Muslims: Masjid al‐Haram in Makkah and Masjid an‐Nabawi in Madinah, Saudi Arabia. I argue that religious discourse, shaped by geopolitical factors, has framed piety for women primarily in terms of modesty, such that a woman is often considered a good Muslim if she is visible only within her female community but invisible to the larger society. Furthermore, I argue that the allocation of meager space affects not only the perception of women's religious standing in society, but also women's own perception about their moral selves. The article claims that by being relegated to small sections within religious spaces, women's collective worship is evident neither to the community at large nor can it be fully experienced by individual women, thus placing obstacles in women's path to seek to closeness to God.     

Women's roles in a disaster

In this study I examine women's roles in the 1997 Grand Forks flood. Based on field research and sixty in-depth interviews, I explore women's community, family, and work roles before, during, and after the disaster. By examining the ways in which women's roles shifted and the meanings the women attached to the roles, I find that the women experienced role accumulation, which resulted in an expansion of both their roles and their sense of self. By successfully performing the “greedy” family role, the emergent community role, and expanding work roles the women often discovered a new sense of confidence, self-worth, and competence.     

Powerful Occupational Therapists: A Community of Professionals, 1950–1980

A powerful community of therapists changed occupational therapy in the United States between 1950 until 1980. These innovators, primarily women, strategically positioned themselves to market the emerging profession. These therapists, categorized as theorists and futurists, political movers and new and old guard sustainers, determined occupational therapy's direction. Participating in the 1950s rehabilitation, the 1960s equal rights, and the 1970s women's movements, the community of therapists separated from the male-dominated medical model to gain professional and scientific authority. An internal tension arouse between those therapists embracing an objective, and arguably male, science and those supporting a characteristically feminine caring philosophical base.     

Feminist Organizing in Rural Nicaragua: Assessing a Psychosocial Process to Promote Empowered Solidarity

This study examines a psychosocial process linking women's involvement in a grassroots women's organization with skills and experiences to promote empowered solidarity. Empowered solidarity is described as a process of increasing the sense of connection and capacity to create social transformation among a group of people united by interest in addressing a social issue. Data collected and analyzed for this research were 298 quantitative surveys conducted with two groups of women living in rural Nicaragua. One group of women were members of a grassroots feminist organization, and the other group lived in nearby communities where the organization did not offer programs. Findings document higher levels of leadership skills and sense of community, and lower levels of powerlessness among members of the organization. Additionally, tests of a process model using structural equation modeling provides support for a model that links involvement in the organization to women's increased interest in, capacity and experience in working to support women, broadly. Overall findings from this research are valuable to both community psychologists and groups seeking to enhance social justice and uphold feminist values of equity and community well‐being.     

I loved him and he scared me: Migrant women,partner visas and domestic violence

This study considers the experience of migrant women engaging with the Australian Department of Immigration through the Family Violence Provisions (Migration Regulations, 1994). These provisions allow women applying for partner visas to remain in the country after separation, if they can prove they experienced domestic violence. Forty semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty migrant women from diverse backgrounds, focusing on their experiences of intimacy and violence and their emotions regarding the relationship. Using the Listening Guide methodology, data was analysed focusing on women's voices and the emotions concerning this subject. This paper considers Australian Immigration Law's requirement of a ‘genuine and continuing relationship’ and how it engages with women's emotions. The study argues that there is a distance between women's emotional responses to their relationships and immigration demands for proof and emotional consistency. The result is that women's emotions are dismissed by the same immigration system that has been historically shaped by emotions towards immigrants. The article ends by proposing that women's stories and emotions are valuable sources of information for visa processes and indicates countries where, in some cases, immigration laws already engage with women's emotions as reliable sources of information.