Return to search

Reconfiguring gendered independence: conceptual struggles in women's organizations

This research explores how concepts of women’s independence are constituted, through neo-liberal and feminist discourses, by members of a feminist organization for women leaving abuse. Analysis of eight interviews and eight focus groups with organizational members, collected over a four year period, surface contesting discourses about individualism, choice, economic independence, collectivity and structural analyses. These discourses interact to produce complex conceptualizations of women’s independence, and produced new subjectivities for women within the organization. In the data, neo-liberal and feminist influences produced an integration of self-responsibility and collectivity, creating new ways of understanding women’s agency. Knowledge of these changing notions of gendered independence in organizations allows feminists to be strategic and reflexive about feminist political work within changing social and political terrain.

  1. http://hdl.handle.net/1828/274
Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVIV.1828/274
Date17 December 2007
CreatorsGartside, Crystal Rose
ContributorsReitsma-Street, Marge
Source SetsLibrary and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
LanguageEnglish, English
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
RightsAvailable to the World Wide Web

Page generated in 0.0021 seconds