Talking Body Talk: Merging Feminist and Narrative Approaches to Practice

Brown, Catrina

doi:10.4135/9781452225869.n14

Cited by 17 publications

(29 citation statements)

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“…Rendering ambivalence stories as invisible simply serves to reify women's existing uncertainty. This paper has argued that: 1) researchers need to recognize that posttraumatic responses often involve uncertainty and ambivalence about telling stories of trauma; 2) uncertainty is not just a product of trauma but as much a reflection of the discursive cultural context of meaning in which women's experiences and stories of them emerge; 3) uncertainty reveals the dangers of speaking and often a struggle with simultaneous speaking and hiding; and 4) research questions can be designed to counterview dominant discourse (Brown, 2007c). This research emphasizes an ethical obligation to ensure that uncertainty is not recorded as an absence of trauma.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…People turn their gaze upon themselves to gain control over how they are seen, valued, and treated (Berger, 1972). Tensions between who one perceives oneself to be, who one would like to be, and who one is expected to be are often evident (Brown, 2007c;2007d). Trauma stories are likely to be edited or censored through this self-surveillance.…”

Section: Dominant Discourse Self-surveillance and Trauma Narrativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This research is influenced by contemporary postmodern feminist and narrative theory (Bordo, 1990(Bordo, , 1993Brown 2003Brown , 2007cBrown , 2011Brown & Augusta-Scott, 2007;Butler, 1990aButler, , 1990bButler, , 1992Butler & Scott, 1992;Foucault, 1980;Haraway, 1988Haraway, , 1990Nicholson, 1990;Scott, 1988Scott, , 1992White, 2007). Although I use the language of "trauma" and "posttrauma," I am not endorsing a deficit or disease-based paradigm of women's responses to violence.…”

Section: Writing In the Social: A Narrative Approach To Storying Expementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Further, as McKenzie-Mohr and Lafrance argue, women try to find a way to make sense of their experiences within dominant social narratives, which provide inadequate accounts of their experiences and tend to reify oppressive dominant discourse, including the blaming of women for rape. As women rely on the dominant discourses available to them, they often tell unhelpful stories about their lives (Brown, 2007a(Brown, , 2007c. In addition to the constraints of discourse, one way of coping with violence and abuse is to minimize its harmful impact.…”

Section: Uncertainty and Minimizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Women’s Narratives of Trauma: (Re)storying Uncertainty, Minimization and Self-Blame

Brown

2019

Self Cite

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Women's stories of trauma often reveal uncertainty, minimization, and selfblame. This paper explores community-based research findings on women's narratives illustrating powerful, yet uncertain, stories of chronic, multiple, and severe trauma. This paper argues that 1) research needs to recognize that posttraumatic responses often involve uncertainty and ambivalence about telling stories of trauma; 2) uncertainty is not just a product of trauma but also reflects the influence of the dominant discourse on women and trauma that creates fragmented memory of the events and supports blaming women for the violence and minimizing the serious of the violence; 3) uncertainty reveals the dangers of speaking and often a struggle with speaking and hiding simultaneously; and 4) research questions can be designed to counterview dominant discourse which will bring forward the prevalence and nature of the violence. Despite powerful stories of chronic, multiple, and severe trauma, women's narratives of trauma reveal uncertainty, minimization, and selfblame in this community-based research. This paper explores how uncertainty is reflected in women's struggle with interpreting and talking about their trauma experiences. Uncertainty functions as a constraint against and regulation of speaking about violence, suggesting that speaking challenges ongoing cultural supports for violence against 1 This research was supported through a generous grant from the Nova Scotia Health Research Foundation to Dr. Catrina Brown (principal investigator) and Dr. Sherry Stewart. I would like to acknowledge the assistance of service providers and the program directors for their contribution to their project, including their assistance in providing access to the women in their treatment services and their assistance in participant recruitment. I would also like to thank Kathy Petite, Sarah Norris, Sherry Stewart, and Peter Horvath for their research assistance and to Tod Augusta-Scott for his thoughtful reading of this text and his helpful comments. And of course, I extend thanks to the women receiving services at these programs for their participating in the study.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Dominant Discourse Self-surveillance and Trauma Narrativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Writing In the Social: A Narrative Approach To Storying Expementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Uncertainty and Minimizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Women’s Narratives of Trauma: (Re)storying Uncertainty, Minimization and Self-Blame

Brown

2019

Self Cite

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“…The powerful metaphor of fearing to take up space, becoming larger and more visible, also arose in Brown's (2007) therapy sessions with anorexic women. In fact, one of Brown's clients described herself as a "waste of space" (p. 287).…”

Section: Self As Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

“I Am a Waste of Breath, of Space, of Time”

Bates

2014

Qual Health Res

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According to recent research on eating disorders, heavy users of pro-anorexia (pro-ana) sites show higher levels of disordered eating and more severe impairment of quality of life than non-heavy users. A better understanding of how pro-ana members self-present in the virtual world could shed some light on these offline behaviors. Through discourse analysis, I examined the metaphors the members of a pro-ana group invoked in their personal profiles on a popular social networking site, to talk about the self. I applied the Metaphor Identification Procedure to 757 text profiles. I identified four key metaphorical constructions in pro-ana members' self-descriptions: self as space, self as weight, perfecting the self, and the social self. These four main metaphors represented discourse strategies, both to create a collective pro-ana identity and to enact an individual identity as pro-ana. In this article, I discuss the implications of these findings for the treatment of eating disorders.

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Feminist Therapy

Jasper

2015

The Wiley Handbook of Eating Disorders

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Talking Body Talk: Merging Feminist and Narrative Approaches to Practice

Cited by 17 publications

References 0 publications

Women’s Narratives of Trauma: (Re)storying Uncertainty, Minimization and Self-Blame

Women’s Narratives of Trauma: (Re)storying Uncertainty, Minimization and Self-Blame

“I Am a Waste of Breath, of Space, of Time”

Feminist Therapy

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