Embodiment in Qualitative Health Research: a Feminist Phenomenological Perspective
Hello Qualitative Mind,
Today’s blog post was written by a colleague, fellow dietitian, Quali Q contributor and passionate qualitative researcher, Tanya L’Heureux. Tanya has delved into embodiment throughout her PhD, and was able to share her wealth of knowledge with us. You’ll realize the complexity and nuance of this topic while appreciating her writing, including citations and references. Before we jump to the blog post, here is a bit more about Tanya...
“I have a passion for asking critical questions and sitting in tensions as I live and learn through my life as a dietitian heARTist, adoptive mom, family caregiver, military spouse, and PhD student. I have worked as a clinical or public health dietitian since 2005. I completed my Master’s of Adult Education degree in 2018 where I examined my own journey to learning about and beginning to disrupt my social class privilege. Through my PhD, I hope to use storytelling and visual arts-based methods to examine what helps and hinders Canadian dietitians attune to, resist, and challenge forms of oppression and suffering within their everyday practice.”
~ Tanya L’Heureux
“...despite... the centrality of embodiment to research and sense making, many qualitative researchers still do not know how to deliberately embody their research practices in ways that make bodies a meaningful presence in their research.” (Ellingson, 2017, p. 1)
“When [researchers’] reflexive accounts do not include discussions of their desires and repulsions, (un)romantic encounters, and bodily reactions and interactions, then research narratives are impoverished.” (Joseph, 2013, p. 6)
As a health researcher and/or practitioner, have you thought about your and your participants’ experience of having bodies, being bodies, and acting bodies? In reading, analyzing, writing, and/or practicing, have you ever experienced that feeling when your thoughts and words seem to catch up with what your body already seems to know? Have you ever wondered what drives your interests and guides your thoughts? Our bodies orient our attention and interactions towards or away from topics. They are an important, yet often overlooked aspect of research as a whole. Within health research, bodies become more central as health and illness live in and through bodies that eat, drink, move, breathe, die, love, endure pain, and are afraid. MacLachlan (2004) argues, the body is what makes up the middle ground between clinic and culture within health sciences.
I write from a feminist phenomenological perspective where bodies are simultaneously experienced as subjects and objects as they inhabit the world and the social, structural, and material worlds that inhabit us. Embodiment simply refers to “lived experience”. Yet, focusing on embodiment shows us that lived experience is a nuanced, layered, ambiguous, and complex interplay between our bodies and our worlds as we make sense of these intimate exchanges (Weiss, 2015). In research, our embodiment is entangled with our relationships to our participants, real and perceived audience, data collection instruments, as well as the organizational and institutional bodies throughout data collection, analysis, and representation. These embodied processes often fade from view; yet, they play an integral role within our research by influencing what we come to notice and represent (or not). Examining our embodiments helps us to more deeply explore how we are situated both inside and outside our research (Joseph, 2013). Exploring the erotic subjectivity of our visceral thinking, feeling, acting, and expressing body as well as the spatial-temporal somewhere in which we find ourselves, offers powerful tools for critical reflexivity of the operations of power, privilege, and oppression within our research. This is because what our body senses, how we focus on time, and how we feel within spaces inform what we discover in our health research.
Erotic subjectivity refers to the process by which we become turned on and off within the research process. This occurs through our excitement, attraction, desire, love, (dis)comfort, (dis)passion, repulsion, fear, disgust, frustration, and shame. These sensual and intimate intensities produce and limit what we notice, record, analyze, and represent within the research process (Joseph, 2013). They arise through our desires and needs that emerge within relationships with others and our socio-material worlds (Weiss, 1999). Our responses to these demands shape or modify the meanings that are created through our research interactions (Joseph, 2013). Interrogating our erotic subjectivity through asking how, when, where, and why these intimate senses and imperatives arise, can help to increase awareness of our everyday research decisions. This can help expand our ways of knowing, responding to, and representing our research (Joseph, 2013). It can draw our attention to what is amplified and silenced in health research.
Embodiment…
Or simply the lived experience.
“Therefore, deeply interrogating the spatial and temporal somewhere that guides our definitions of health and illness…can increase our awareness of how we might be pulled by or be resisting the power and structures, such as race, class, ability, gender, and sexuality, that create and inform our research positionality and the health experiences and practices that we are studying.”
Spatial-temporal orientation refers to the somewhere from which the body projects itself onto the world (Ahmed, 2007). It is the senses of here-there and now-then (past and future) to which our bodies orient. This leads to an essence of (non)belonging (Ahmed, 2007), (dis/re)orientation (Ahmed, 2006), and (dis)ability to transcend situations (Young, 1980). Structures, such as whiteness, create ongoing, ever-living stories that orient our bodies towards specific directions that affect what spaces they (can) inhabit and what they can and should do (Ahmed, 2007). Therefore, deeply interrogating the spatial and temporal somewhere that guides our definitions of health and illness and in which we find ourselves or hope our research and lives take us expands our knowledge. It can increase our awareness of how we might be pulled by or be resisting the power and structures, such as race, class, ability, gender, and sexuality, that create and inform our research positionality and the health experiences and practices that we are studying.
The following questions may guide you to begin to explore your erotic subjectivity and spatial-temporal orientations:
-What do you see as the function of your and your participants’ bodies in research as you collect, analyze, and represent your data?
-What spaces (here-there) and times (now-then) become foregrounded and backgrounded within your research?
- How do these shape your formulations of health and illness, research questions, methods, and writing?
-How does your and your participants’ bodies perform their researcher and researchee identities? Why, where, and when do these bodies perform this way? What are your and your participants’ senses of belonging, comfort, and ability as you perform these identities? How might these be shaped by the structures that surround this research and health care as a whole?
-Do you notice aspects of yourself that you attempt to elevate or turn off? What spaces, times, and relationships might be driving this?
-What moral obligations and/or conflicting desires or needs do you experience throughout the research and how do you seek to meet them?
-What are you oriented towards and away from while doing this research? What do you fear in this research and when you consider your own experiences of health, living, dying, and illness? What are you relating to and not relating to both internally and externally within the here-there and now-then of your research? What influences this orientation?
-What sensory descriptions, figurative or poetic language, and/or images resonate with you at different moments within your research? How, when, where, and why do they resonate? What additional knowledge do they help you uncover about power, privilege, and oppression?
-How do your bodily senses move you (or not) towards and away from knowledge and data? How do you notice your body constrict or open itself up to your participants and data? How do you (dis)connect from research participants and your data? Why?
-In what ways do you feel oriented or disoriented in the research? How, where, when, and why might you become reoriented throughout your research process?
-How do you feel freed and/or constrained within the research process? Where, when, and why might this occur?
-How do these lived experiences shape your research questions and research decisions?
While embodiment is a broad and complex topic, I hope this brief introduction to feminist phenomenology, erotic subjectivity, and spatial-temporal orientation provides a generative tool to expand your critical reflexivity and research vigour by attuning to, understanding, and challenging your “gut instincts”. In doing so, I hope these questions offer a way to ground who you are, where you are, with whom you are, and what is important and possible within your research endeavours. This can help you expand your research narratives and work to uncover and disrupt the operations of power, privilege, and oppression in everyday life and health care.
~ Tanya
Ahmed, S. (2007). A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist Theory, 8(2), 149-168.
Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ellingson, L. L. (2017). Embodiment in qualitative research. Routledge: New York, NY.
Joseph, J. (2013). What should I reveal? Expanding researcher reflexivity in ethnographic research. Sport History Review, 44, 6-24.
MacLachlan, M. (2004). Embodiment: Clinical, critical, and cultural perspectives on health and illness. Open University Press: Berkshire, England.
Weiss, G. (2015). The normal, the natural, and the normative: A Merleau-Pontian legacy to feminist theory, critical race theory, and disability studies. Continental Philosophy Review, 48, 77-93.
Weiss, G. (1999). Body images: Embodiment as intercorporeality. New York, NY: Routledge.
Young, I. M. (1980). Throwing like a girl: A phenomenology of feminine body comportment motility and spatiality. Human Studies, 3, 137-156.