“Should I have to learn to live with that?”: Dynamic research into gender, sexism and feminism with teenagers

Abstract

In the past five years, there has been a remarkable surge in the visibility of feminism and gender inequality in a context previously understood as hostile to feminism and analyses of gendered power. As critiques of sexism gain mainstream traction and a host of public figures ‘come out’ as feminist, questions remain regarding the political implications of these phenomena and their imbrication with postfeminist, neoliberal discourses. This thesis investigates how New Zealand teenagers were making sense of gender, feminism, sexism and (in)equality in 2013. Working from a commitment to opening the spaces of ‘what might be’ while researching ‘what is’, the project entailed the development of a novel, dynamic research methodology that could offer participants opportunities to interrogate and diversify savoir concerning gender and power in the course of the research. Drawing insights from Freire, Foucault, feminist scholarship and action research, the empirical research entailed participatory group workshops followed by 20 individual interviews. Following an introduction in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 presents dynamic sociocultural research as a methodological and ethical response to the challenges of researching gendered inequalities that can be difficult to perceive and name, while Chapter 3 outlines the research methods in detail. Four analytic chapters follow. Chapter 4 explores how interviewees perceived and made sense of everyday sexism and gender stereotyping, examining how their accounts balanced boys’ and men’s experiences against women’s and girls’. Chapter 5 examines interviewees’ detailed descriptions of sexism to develop an account of its choreography: the organising patterns that shape how sexism is enacted and resisted in young people’s everyday interactions. Chapter 6 examines how feminist-identified teenagers navigated entrenched discourses of ‘fair’ versus ‘unreasonable’ feminism in order to normalise and justify a politicised feminist position. Chapter 7 expands the analytic frame to consider how young people’s narratives of being feminist take shape in conjunction with an ideal of personal authenticity, asking what ‘authentic feminism’ might achieve in relation to feminist politics. In Chapter 8, the concluding discussion, I consider how this research advances an understanding of the possibilities for feminist politics within and in relation to a neoliberal and postfeminist cultural context.