Feminist listening and becoming: voice poems as a method of working with young women’s stories of domestic abuse in childhood

ABSTRACT

This article presents reflections on using the listening guide, focusing on reflexive work with voice poems. It is based on research which explored the stories of ten young adult women who experienced parental domestic abuse in childhood. A dialogical theory is used to reflect on the process of working with three voice poems, showing that we engage with the material we work with in embodied, emotional, and personal ways. It considers working with voice poems as a ‘way in’ to our own stories and selves, by way of moving beyond empathy and attending to discomfort as a bodymind reflexive practice. Reflexivity is therefore not a mind-based activity that relies on declaring and engaging with a unitary self. Rather, researchers are dialogical selves that are both affected by, and that affect, the material we work with. This has implications for domestic abuse research where survivor-victim voices tend to be smoothened out resulting in dominant, binary narratives that risk reproducing epistemic injustices. This article concludes that poetic inquiry can be considered a method of resistance to such epistemological injustices, using bodymind reflexive engagement with our own selves, and examining the implications of this for knowledge production.

KEYWORDS:

• Voice poems
• reflexivity
• narrative
• feminist
• domestic abuse

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the people who participated in this research and who generously and openly shared their stories with me. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers who offered insightful comments which challenged me to develop my theorisations and understandings of myself in relation to my doctoral research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tanya Frances

Dr Tanya Frances is currently employed as a Psychology Lecturer at Teesside University. She is also a counsellor/psychotherapist in private practice, with a research and practice interest in domestic abuse, gender-based violence, and other forms of trauma.