Jennifer K. Wesely

The Gendered “Nature” of the Urban Outdoors Women Negotiating Fear of Violence

Women who participate in outdoor recreational activities reap many physical and emotional benefits from their experiences. However, gender-related feelings of objectification, vulnerability, and fear in this space limit women’s participation. In this study, the authors investigate how women pursue their enjoyment of urban outdoor recreation at South Mountain Park in Phoenix, Arizona, despite their perceptions and experiences related to fear of violence. Through surveys and interviews with women who recreate at South Mountain, the authors look at the ways the women cope with their fear using various strategies. This study reveals the gender-related conflicts that persist for participants, who grapple with their appreciation of uncompromised nature and their need to feel safe in this environment. Ultimately, they illustrate how an ongoing negotiation exists for the women as the authors balance choices and concerns related to their outdoor recreation and what aspects of surveillance and control they consider, reject, or accept.

Exotic Dancing and the Negotiation of Identity The Multiple Uses of Body Technologies

This study investigates the multiple uses of body technologies by female exotic dancers and the relationship to dancers’negotiations of identity. Using ethnographic methods, primarily in-depth interviews, this article probes the ways that dancers alter their bodies to earn money while also attempting to re-create different meanings through their bodies. In fact, the women use body technologies for multiple purposes but make choices about their bodies in a context that rewards them for only sexualized one-dimensional meanings. Body technologies both hinder and help the attempts these women make to manage subsequent identity complications and are engaged on different levels. This article highlights the ways that body technologies reflect the dancers’ struggles concerning body and identity.

Considering the Context of Women’s Violence Gender, Lived Experiences, and Cumulative Victimization

Womens violence has been viewed in gendered ways that are limited and one-dimensional. Such constructions are problematic in that they do little to address underlying disadvantages that foster this violence. This study investigates the complex context in which women’s violence is rooted. Through in-depth interviews with two marginalized populations of women—those who are homeless and those who work as exotic dancers—the author explores participants’ lived experiences of cumulative victimization characterized by abuse and violence, economic vulnerability, gender inequality, loss and dislocation, degradation, and social exclusion. This context severely constrains opportunities and choices available to the women in terms of livelihood, safety, coping, and survival. The women engage in violence as a way of resisting and responding to their cumulative victimization, and this violence has multiple meanings and is manifested in different ways. Ultimately, this study contributes to understandings of women’s violence while arguing for the expansion and reconsideration of related gender constructs.

Negotiating myself : The impact of studying female exotic dancers on a feminist researcher

This article grows from research in the form of in-depth interviews with female exotic dancers but foregrounds the ways that the authors lived experiences were informed by the interviewees and other aspects of the project. While engaging and then complicating feminist theory and methodology, this article focuses on howthe authorwas drawninto this research in variousways, including conversations, observations, and confrontations. Narratives outline the process of her disillusionment about her own safety as a woman. Overall, this piece challenges the notion of any one, fixed identity as the author negotiates meanings of herself related to objectification and privilege.

The Pertinence of Partners Examining Intersections Between Women’s Homelessness and Their Adult Relationships

This article explores the relationships between homeless women and their intimate partners. Based on results from a focus group of homeless women at a domestic violence shelter and 20 in-depth interviews with women at two centers for the homeless, the authors suggest that the nature of the intimate relationships homeless women have are varied and impact their social exclusion and subsequent homelessness in different ways. For instance, women may become homeless without their partners or with them, by force or by choice. Homeless women may be financially dependent on the partner, but they also may be providing the only income for the family. Ultimately, the authors explicate the complex intersection between women’s homelessness and their adult relationships to add to the understanding of homeless women.

Growing up Sexualized: Issues of Power and Violence in the Lives of Female Exotic Dancers:

In a modern patriarchal society, women often receive the message that their appearance and sexuality dictate their value as human beings. Some populations, like exotic dancers, capitalize on this construction by receiving monetary rewards for the visual and physical consumption of their sexual bodies. Through interviews with female exotic dancers, the author investigates the ways that these women were sexualized at a young age, often through abuse. The author probes how they negotiated both their child and adult sexual selves and how this intersected with feelings of power and powerlessness and their eventual choices to become dancers. This study demonstrates the complexity of the lives of these women as they try to reclaim power by selling their sexualized bodies for money while still enduring abuse within this context.

The lived body experience of domestic violence survivors: An interrogation of female identity

In this article, female identity is explored through an analysis of the lived body experience of domestic violence survivors. Qualitative interviews focused on the conceptual relationships between eight survivors and their bodies. The female body, as it is degraded and sexualized in patriarchal Western culture, is socially accepted as the core of female identity. Along with body awareness, the very identities of the abused women in this study seem to disappear, and we argue that this is largely made possible by these systems of patriarchal domination and definition. We also suggest the possibility of reclaiming the female self by reconnecting with the body. Based on the womens responses, we explore the feasibility of various recreational activities (e.g., sports, camping, hiking) as a means of reconnection and probe the ways that patriarchal norms may affect this aspect of recovery.

Rehab Retrospect: Former Prostitutes and the (Re)construction of Deviance

In this study, in-depth qualitative interviews with former street prostitutes currently in an outpatient drug rehabilitation program are utilized to examine the transition out of prostitution and from a deviant to a non-deviant identity. Little extant literature explores the relationships between stigma management and desistance as prostitutes attempt to exit the industry. This research finds that while in rehab, the women activated meanings of their previous drug addiction both as a stigma management technique and as a cognitive process that distances them from the prostitute identity. They conceptually bundled their prostitution identity with that of drug addiction, ultimately reinforcing that they completed the transition out of deviance.

From the Inside Out: Efforts by Homeless Women to Disrupt Cycles of Crime and Violence

The premise that childhood victimization is a risk factor for crime and violence in adulthood finds general support, though few agree that there is a direct causal relationship. Mediating factors and intervening variables are often studied. Rarely investigated, however, are the complex and difficult dynamics experienced by those enmeshed in these “cycles of violence.” In this study we explore the struggles of homeless women to disrupt patterns of violence in their lives. Using in-depth qualitative interviews, we illustrate how these women learn and understand that they are caught up in cycles of crime and violence and, to varying degrees, have made active efforts to disrupt them. However, we find that they have very few tools or resources with which this could be accomplished, which ultimately thwarts potentially successful efforts for lasting change while foregrounding deficiencies in systemic support.

Justice System Bias Perceptions of the Dually Marginalized: Observations from a Sample of Women Ex-offenders

ABSTRACT Social constructions of race, gender, and class are known to shape stereotypes that condition interaction and behavior across various contexts, including the criminal justice system. From an intersectional framework emphasizing dual marginalization, this study relates in-depth interviews with women ex-offenders regarding their justice system experiences to explore perceived race and gender themed discrimination. Findings of reported pejorative language and degrading behavior reaffirm a well-documented generalized assumption by women of color that disparate treatment is normative. Discussion centers on how these views are detrimental to rehabilitation enrollment, related implications for offender programming objectives, and the utility of intersectionality theory for analyzing related justice topics.