“We are doing this together”: Processes of Feminist Identity Among Professional Counsellors

Date
2017
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Abstract
Feminist counsellors can quite simply be understood as counsellors, therapists, or psychologists whose professional identities and related practices are aligned with the values, beliefs, aims, and theoretical underpinnings of feminist ideology. However, feminist ideology, or rather ideologies, are not monolithic or unified undertakings. Instead, feminist counsellor professional identity is informed by feminism(s)’ complex history, rife with incommeasurabilities, heterogeneities, and tensions among the various discourses informing the ideology. As a result, feminist counsellor professional identities represent ongoing relational negotiations that involve encountering and navigating ideological dilemmas − a complexity often overlooked in feminist counselling research. Using social constructionist, situational analysis (SA), I explored the messiness of feminist counsellor professional identity construction and maintenance through an analysis of interviews with nine self-identified feminist counsellors. Through the analytic mapping of participants’ rich descriptions, I identified human and non-human elements related to feminist counsellor professional identity, including “hot-button” tensions: power, feminist values, and responsibility/accountability − sites of discursive contest over the thinking, saying, and doing of feminist counsellors. Through a juxtaposition of these results with a commonly cited developmental model, I invite new conversations regarding what is involved in processes of feminist identity among professional counsellors, advocate for pluralism in the counselling profession, and offer sentiments of feminist solidarity across differences.
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Educational Psychology, Education--Guidance and Counseling
Citation
Vegter, V. (2017). “We are doing this together”: Processes of Feminist Identity Among Professional Counsellors (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/28678