The self and body within the mother-daughter relationship : voices of young South African women.
Date
2012-02-28
Authors
Browde, Cara
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Abstract
This study is an attempt to understand the place of the body in the mother-daughter relationship.
The mother-daughter relationship has long been recognised as important in understanding female
identity. The current research explores young women’s relationships with their mothers, as well as
with their bodies, and seeks to comprehend how these two forces interact in the shaping of the
daughters’ identity. Within the broad framework of qualitative research, this investigation can
further be characterised as utilising a psychosocial approach. This approach recognises social and
psychological elements of the human subject as necessarily interdependent. The data for the study
was collected using a purposive sample sourced from a convenient sampling group. The criteria for
selection concerned the participants’ ages and, to some extent, their ability to represent South
Africa’s population diversity. Female students from the School of Human and Community
Development at the University of the Witwatersrand were approached. The final sample comprised
six participants, with equal numbers of black and white women. All participants were between the
ages of 21 and 25 and had no children of their own. The interviews were transcribed and subjected
to a narrative analysis using psychoanalytic techniques. What emerged from the analysis were the
multiple and varied ways in which unconscious desires and fantasies – many of which are rooted in
the mother-daughter relationship – shape a woman’s relationship with her body and inform her
unique engagement with dominant social discourses of the body. This study illustrates that the
critical triangle of “self, mother and body” is a messy one that demands a complex and dynamic
understanding.