Power, Agency and Emotion Work in American College Women's Heterosexual Lives Presented by: Mrs. Cooper Date: 20 April 2022 Research Questions - What can be said about how college-aged women negotiate and navigate their heterosexual experiences with men? • To what extent do women exercise a sense of agency and empowerment? • How do they cope with unpleasant sexual situations? • What theoretical and conceptual tools can be helpful to understand their experiences? Evolution - - Evolution 1.0 Fraternity men focus • Cultural make-up and high incident rate of sexual violence • Reflections of sexual consent and sexual consent practices • 6-month fieldwork period at a U.S. institution of higher education • Focus group sessions • Sampling issues Evolution 2.0 College-aged women focus *Overarching research question remained the same* • How do young women in college reflect upon sexual consent, theoretically (in what they have been taught) and practically (in their sexual lives)? • Consented to unwanted sex and ambiguous harms What About Law? - Socio- Legal Origins • - Consented to unwanted sex and complex sexual harms Labeling these Experiences • Reflected upon using language of the law (e.g., rape, sexual these assault?) Tolerated, normalized part of heteroarylations? - Larger Tapestry of Women's Lives • Contextualized by stories of pleasure and harm Empirical Methods - Focus Groups: 5 total conducted 20 women involved • Fostering collection of voices and stories • Group Commonalities • Semi-structured Approach • Centering what is important women? • Sexual Stories and Consciousness Raising Discourse Analysis - Dominant discourses: widely shared ways of talking about the world • - (e.g., heterosexual discourses of male sexual drive) Feminist Discourse Analysis: discourses enable or constrain people's options for how to be and act in the social world (Gavey, 1989) • "What the talk is doing and achieving" (Wood and Kroger, 2000) Narrative Analysis - Set within stories of experience: investigate way individuals experience the world depicted through stories - Feminist Narrative Analysis: Young women telling their stories, listening well, pressing stories to be heard • Sensitive research and importance of honoring the women's experiences • Concentrated focus on experiences, feelings emphasis on individual 'meaningmaking' (Ling, 2013). Findings Experiences marked by interplay of gendered, discursive power and emotion work - Gendered, coercive power • - Restrictive ideologies: acceptable femininity • - - Contemporary harms and dynamic of male dominance/female subordination "Madonna-whore" dichotomy Carved-out empowerment • Experimenting sexually • Joy in casual sex Emotion work • Managing emotions of others, hypervigilant to male anger