Living as a chameleon
Subtitle: a feminist analysis of young women's lived experience of anger.
Published: 2004
Language: eng
Number of pages: 240
Description: This feminist qualitative research project explored young women's lived experience of anger. Through eight focus groups and nine one-to-one interviews involving 65 diverse young women between the ages of 14--24, several key insights have been gleaned. Continued experiences of denied rights, denied agency and a denial of the freedom to verbalize these experiences eventually led to the self-silencing of the experience of this emotion. This same self-silencing eventually led the participants to a disconnection from their anger.The pervasiveness of oppression in young women's overall lived experience of anger is clearly associated with gender role expectations including taking responsibility for relationships and defining oneself in relational terms. These gender role prescriptions stem from a patriarchal culture that fears women's power and strength. Anger has been found to be associated with both defining and diverting the self, leading many young women to live as an ultra-adaptive chameleon in order to maintain relationships. Because anger is an emotion of authentic self-knowing, I will argue that to be disconnected from anger has serious mental health implications, not the least of which is denied authenticity.Recommendations for nurses and other girl-serving professionals included re-framing anger away from the negative, rooting anger in the political, embracing a child rights lens through which to understand young women's lived experience of anger, and valuing feminist consciousness-raising as an intervention to counter damaging gender-role prescriptions that silence young women's voices and contribute to a disconnection from their anger and ultimately from themselves.
Notes: Adviser: Helen Lenskyj.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2004.

Electronic version licensed for access by U. of T. users.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-05, Section: B, page: 2339.