Talking body talk, an analysis of feminist therapy epistemology

grantor: University of TorontoThe central contribution of this study is its analysis of feminist therapy epistemology, an area which remains virtually unexplored. Two distinct yet related questions are pivotal to this investigation. First, how do feminist therapists formulate the relationship between eating problems and sexual violence among women? Second, what does this formulation reveal about feminist therapy epistemology? The first question serves as the entry point to the second, the focal point for this inquiry. By investigating how feminist therapists understand the relationship between eating problems and sexual violence I am investigating the construction of an account. In these accounts, the therapists interviewed necessarily invoke their epistemology. Feminist postmodern critique challenges feminism to interrogate its foundational constructs and underscores the critical importance of explicating conceptual practices as ideological features of social organization. I explore the degree to which feminist therapy epistemology challenges existing gender relations through interrogating these accounts. This thesis concludes that feminist therapy epistemology enables both the disruption and reinforcement of social relations. The use of concepts like experience and empowerment reveal that feminist therapy is rooted in standpoint epistemology. While the emphasis on women's experiences, women's voices, and on their authority to speak of their experiences has been an important contribution of feminist therapy, authorative, essentialist and ahistorical conceptual practices of women's experience are not ultimately advantageous to women. The conceptualization of empowerment remains problematically uninterrogated. An authorative expert narrative is deployed by feminist therapists in their practices of reframing client's stories. Unacknowledged contradictions with therapists' authority, knowledge and power are revealed through the trauma discourse invoked to understand the relationship between eating problems and sexual violence. At the center of a reformulated feminist therapy influenced by postmodern epistemology is a diverse female subject with multiple socially constructed and non-essentialized experiences. This reformulation is politically positioned in its women centered approach and remains committed to an empowerment based practice. Reconstructed notions of empowerment allow the therapist to acknowledge her authority, knowledge, and power, and emphasizes the interrogation of experience.Ph.D