CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Alexandrov, Anna |
|---|---|
| Title | Interpretations of Experiences Related to Sexuality in the Lives of Young Women in a Temporary Home of Families in Budapest |
| Summary | In my thesis, I argue for the constitutive role of class difference in the way people interpret their own sexual and romantic experiences, an aspect that I see as missing from “mainstream” psychological accounts of sexuality. After introducing a theoretical framework that builds upon the convergences of critical psychology and feminist phenomenology, I use the methodology of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to discuss the way two young women living at a Temporary Home of Families in Budapest, Hungary interpret the sexual and romantic aspects of their lives. I argue that the participants’ social positions, characterized by poverty and the constant struggle not to live in poverty, add central layers of classed meaning to their accounts. I discuss the six master themes emerging from the IPA case study as a gendered trajectory ranging from the past (characterized by abusive environments and threatening homes which the participants left behind) to the future (that may be “built” at the temporary space of the shelter and that is connected to a hope of social mobility). Romantic relationships and sexual experiences represent a “reciprocal island” for the two women, granting an intertwined sense of bodily, emotional and economic safety from a threatening outside world. I discuss the two women’s negotiations of normative womanhood – such as separating themselves from images that represent life in poverty or claiming the normative identity of the good mother (e.g. Csányi and Kerényi, 2018) – as a form of symbolic upward mobility which I connect to Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism” (Berlant, 2011). My thesis is the first study to use Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis in researching the sexual and romantic lives of women living in poverty. Beside responding to a gap in psychological research, it is also a “pilot study” that demonstrates the usefulness of feminist phenomenology, queer phenomenology (Ahmed, 2006), and IPA for critical psychological research. |
| Supervisor | Timár, Eszter |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/alexandrov_anna.pdf |
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