To date there has been very little research regarding the relationship between women's personal experience of expressing anger and societal perception of that expression. Yet as Kippax et al (1988) note "the duality between the individual and the social structure must be recognised and incorporated into any successful theory of emotions" (p20). The relationship between these factors of the personal (discourse about self being angry) and the social (discourse about how society views women being angry) was scrutinised. This was achieved by the participation of sixty-five Scottish women in a three phase research project. The first phase involved nine focus groups, phase two involved using a two tier (self and society) Q-sort and the third phase involved qualitative interviews with the exemplars of six factors. These methods offered a way of elucidating and articulating women's accounts of their anger experiences. A thematic discourse analysis of the focus group material uncovered several discourses notably 'relationships mediate women's experiences of anger' and 'society constructs women's anger as unfeminine'. Other discourses highlighted were: 'control & aggression'; 'angry but guilty'; 'anger as a positive experience'; 'gender similarities and differences' and 'crying when angry' . These discourses were fed into a two tier Q-sort which produced 14 factors (8 of which are qualitatively analysed) emphasising the paradoxes and complexities of the different subject positions that the participants occupied. However, anger was frequently constructed as a passion - an 'all or nothing' event. The majority of parti~ipants constructed a society which opposed their right to express their anger. Discourses taken up by the participants demonstrate that there are several constructs that remain important for feminist psychologists to pursue, namely: power relations; context; and stereotyping
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:368542 |
| Date | January 2001 |
| Creators | Cahill, Sharon |
| Publisher | Glasgow Caledonian University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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