Women’s trauma and resilience through a feminist Lens : the psychological consequences of gendered traumatic events in the context of the Arab uprisings and their aftermath
(2021)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- Philippot, Pierre
- Abstract
- This thesis is the outcome of a doctoral project on using gender as an analytical lens to help understand women’s traumas and design context-specific psychological interventions. In particular, the project focused on traumas resulting from sexual and political violence and traumas associated with political conflicts, war and displacement in Egypt and Syria, in the context of the uprisings of 2011 and their aftermath. Based on a theoretical framework grounded in feminist psychology, the dissertation postulates that women’s interpersonal traumas are forms of systematic abuse anchored in patriarchal gender norms and shaped by the socio-cultural and political features of a specific context. The research is presented in five papers. The first study investigated the structure of prototypical femininities and masculinities in the two contexts of interest. In both cultures, two co-existing prototypes of femininity were identified: the Good Wife, and the Assertive Competent Woman, in addition to four co-existing prototypes of masculinity: the Family Man, the Macho Man, the Rebellious Man and the Soft and Tender Man. The second paper examined how the two identified femininity profiles relate to women’s exposure to sexual violence, abstract rumination, depression, and PTSD. The results point to marked differences in the way in which each femininity profile relates to sexual violence and the psychological consequences thereof, while showing different patterns of association among variables in each context. The third and fourth papers feature a quantitative analysis of the narratives of five Syrian and five Egyptian women, respectively, with a view to understanding modes of victimization and resistance in response to exposure to trauma, as well as the impact of possible changes in femininities and masculinities following the Arab uprisings. One key focus throughout both papers was how the context has contributed to the participants’ exposure to, perception of, and response to trauma. The fifth and final paper aimed at evaluating the reception by women’s trauma survivors of a tailored version of Narrative Exposure therapy. The intervention was directed in light of a feminist reading of women’s trauma and the themes that were identified from participant narratives. The results pointed to the potential value of the proposed intervention, showing that integrating a gendered reading of the survivors’ socio-political contexts into their post-trauma narratives may foster meaning-making and help survivors construct more positive self-perceptions. The dissertation concludes with a general discussion of the results and reflections on the overall doctoral journey. Most importantly, I discuss the position of the project, and my own position as a researcher and practitioner, within the psychology scholarship, engaging with some central theoretical, methodological, epistemological, and moral issues, and most notably, the possible role of psychology in pushing for social change to undermine the foundations of gender-based violence and discrimination.
- Affiliations
Citations
Barakat, K. S. (2021). Women’s trauma and resilience through a feminist Lens : the psychological consequences of gendered traumatic events in the context of the Arab uprisings and their aftermath. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/113903