The third shift: Addressing emotion work in couple therapy.

Research on the gendered division of household work in western political economies often neglects its emotional dimensions. This conceptual paper draws on concepts of emotion work and feminist care ethics to explore gendered and intersecting divisions of emotions and emotional work in couple relationships and their implications for couple therapy. Although emotion work has been studied in workplace settings, less attention has been paid to inequalities in the privatized realm of interpersonal relationships, including romantic and filial ones. Women and feminine partners' culturally presumed expertise in emotions typically positions them as carrying primary responsibility for managing emotions in intimate relationships. Couple therapy is an important site of interaction that can both support and, potentially, disrupt the invisibility and gendering of emotion work in intimate relationships, thus shedding light on recurring patterns of women's subordination and exploitation. We conclude by advancing suggestions for addressing gendered and intersectional dimensions of emotion work in therapy practice.

The problem of heteronormativity in family-based health promotion: centring gender transformation in Ontario, Canada.

OBJECTIVES: Social scientists have demonstrated that family health work is interlinked with heteronormative gender inequities. Yet family-based public health interventions rarely incorporate a gender transformative approach or address heteronormativity as a potential health barrier in North America. Instead, attention to gender surfaces primarily in family health interventions conducted in low- to middle-income countries with majority Black and racialized populations. The objective of this article is to establish the importance of designing health interventions that account for heteronormative relations in Ontarian families by drawing on empirical data from the Guelph Family Health Study (GFHS). METHODS: We draw on data (February-October 2019) from (1) semi-structured interviews with 20 families and with 4 health educators facilitating the GFHS home visits and (2) observational data of 11 GFHS home visits and 1 health educator training day. Informed by gender transformation theory, data were analyzed and coded to understand the impact of gender, sexuality, and place in family health interventions. RESULTS: Pre-existing heteronormative parenting relations were reinforced through GFHS participation: the GFHS was mother-led, increasing some mothers' stress levels. Fathers tended to consider paid work a justification for disengaging from the GFHS, and their detachment sometimes obstructed mothers' intervention efforts. Health educators (all women) were caught in these relations, feeling like because of their gender, they were viewed by parents as confidants and marriage counsellors. CONCLUSION: Findings emphasize the need for expanding the epistemic and methodological approaches to family-based health interventions, changing the demographic and geographic emphasis within the field, and designing interventions that focus on societal-level changes. Heterosexuality has not been analyzed as a risk factor within the public health field, but our findings indicate the need for further study.

RéSUMé: OBJECTIFS: Les spécialistes des sciences sociales ont démontré que le travail en santé familiale est indissociable des inégalités hétéronormatives entre les sexes. Il est pourtant rare que les interventions sanitaires axées sur la famille intègrent une approche transformatrice du genre ou abordent l'hétéronormativité en tant qu'obstacle possible à la santé en Amérique du Nord. Au lieu de cela, l'attention au genre fait principalement surface dans les interventions en santé familiale menées dans des pays à faible revenu et à revenu intermédiaire dont les populations sont majoritairement noires et racisées. Notre article vise à souligner l'importance de concevoir des interventions sanitaires qui tiennent compte des relations hétéronormatives dans les familles ontariennes en puisant dans les données empiriques de l'étude Guelph Family Health Study (GFHS). MéTHODE: Nous avons fait appel aux données (février­octobre 2019) : 1) d'entretiens semi-directifs avec 20 familles et avec 4 éducatrices sanitaires ayant facilité des visites à domicile dans le cadre de la GFHS; et 2) d'observation de 11 visites à domicile menées dans le cadre de la GFHS et d'une journée de formation des éducatrices sanitaires. Éclairées par la théorie de la transformation de genre, les données ont été analysées et codées pour nous aider à comprendre les effets du sexe, de la sexualité et du lieu dans les interventions en santé familiale. RéSULTATS: Les relations parentales hétéronormatives préexistantes ont été renforcées par la participation à l'étude GFHS : ce sont surtout des mères qui y ont participé, ce qui a accru les niveaux de stress chez certaines. Les pères ont eu tendance à considérer leur travail rémunéré comme une raison de se retirer de l'étude, et leur détachement a parfois fait obstacle aux efforts d'intervention des mères. Les éducatrices sanitaires (toutes des femmes) ont été prises en étau dans ces relations et ont senti qu'en raison de leur sexe, elles étaient vues par les parents comme des confidentes et des conseillères conjugales. CONCLUSION: Nos constatations soulignent le besoin d'élargir les approches épistémiques et méthodologiques des interventions en santé familiale, de changer l'accent sur les données démographiques et géographiques dans le domaine et de concevoir des interventions axées sur les changements sociétaux. L'hétérosexualité n'est pas analysée en tant que facteur de risque dans le domaine de la santé publique, mais nos constatations indiquent le besoin de pousser la recherche en ce sens.

The Game of Queer Family Life: Exploring 2SLGBTQI+ Parents' Experiences of Cisheteronormativity, Racism, and Colonialism Through Digital Storytelling in Ontario, Canada.

In this article we describe and analyze five videos created through an arts-informed research project, Precarious Inclusion: Studying Ontarian 2SLGBTQI+ parents' experiences childrearing in a post-legal parity framework. Precarious Inclusion used interviews and digital storytelling to investigate Ontario 2SLGBTQI+ parents' current experiences of inclusion and exclusion when navigating institutional and social interactions in everyday life in a post-legal parity context. The study centrally explored how intersecting identities with regards to sexuality, gender, geography, disability, class, race, Indigeneity, and ethnicity intersect with structural forces to influence 2SLGBTQI+ parents' inclusion and exclusion experiences. We examine research creation activities that supported 2SLGBTQI+ parents in making short videos about their experiences of parenting. Our analysis of the five videos created by Indigenous, racialized, trans, nonbinary, Two-Spirit, and disabled parents show how consistent experiences of exclusion mark 2SLGBTQI+ parents' everyday lives. We deepen theorizations of the material and psychological impacts of exclusion for 2SLGBTQI+ families through foregrounding three themes: 1) the operations of racism, white supremacy, and colonialism in makers' lives; 2) misrecognition and its psychic effects of bifurcation and disjuncture; and 3) love, joy, and multi-species kinship as powerful sites of healing and belonging. We further demonstrate how parents used their videos as self-advocacy for resisting precarious inclusion.

Revisioning aging: Indigenous, crip and queer renderings.

In this article, we re-vision Anishinaabe, crip and queer futures of aging against and beyond dominant successful aging narratives by drawing on our archive of digital/multimedia videos (short documentaries) produced in conjunction with older/e/Elder persons and the Re•Vision: Centre for Art and Social Justice. These documentaries are directed and come from the lives of those older and e/Elder persons whose aging embodiments intra-sect with their Indigenous, disabled and queer selves. Disrupting hegemonic successful aging narratives, and specifically heteronormative and ableist trajectories of aging, these alternative renderings of aging futures offer rich, affective relationalities and cyclical timescapes of older experience that draw on the past even as they reach into divergent futurities. Anishinaabe, crip and queer aging emerge. While we discern resonances in relationalities and temporalities among and between the Anishinaabe and non-Indigenous stories, we also identify significant differences across accounts, indicating that they cannot be collapsed together. Instead, we argue for holding different life-ways and futures alongside one another, following the 1613 Two Row Wampum Treaty between the Dutch and the Haudenosaunee, in which each party promised to respect the other's ways, and committed to non-interference, as well as to the development and maintenance of relationship.

Gendering of care and care inequalities in couple therapy.

Reciprocal partner or spousal caregiving in romantic relationships has been identified as a key determinant of the quality of couple relationships. In this article, we interrogate this premise concerning the presumed reciprocity of caregiving in romantic relationships, focusing on cisgender heterosexual relationships and offering implications for relationships of all genders and sexualities. Looking beyond the conventional focus on individual or dyadic processes, we theorize imbalances in care as gendered. Feminists have repeatedly critiqued gender ideology that devalues caring labor and allocates it to women. Gendered power dynamics can lead to imbalances in care-seeking and care provision. We discuss how the gendering of care and care inequalities can manifest in couple therapy, illustrating with examples from recorded interactions. Implications for therapy practice are discussed.

The politics of vulnerable masculinity in couple therapy.

Couple therapy and related literature has problematized men's emotional inexpressiveness as constraining for men and as contributing to men's privileged and dominating position vis-à-vis women. Fostering men's emotionality in and outside of therapy has been proposed as a way to improve men's well-being and relationships and promote gender equality. Critical masculinity scholars have noted that many men now enact vulnerable ("softer") and emotional forms of masculinity. Yet, there is lack of insight into how such enactment may intersect with gender inequality. This article presents a critical thematic analysis of 30 transcribed videotaped couple therapy sessions focusing on the performance of men's affective masculinities and the political dimensions of men's increasing emotionality within couple therapy. The study shows that vulnerable masculinities, although argued as bearing the potential to foster relational and social change, may also obscure continuing commitment to dominant masculinity norms. Implications for practice are discussed.

What a body can do: Rethinking body functionality through a feminist materialist disability lens.

A burgeoning body of literature shows a positive relationship between body functionality and positive body image. Although still nascent, research centring experiences of people with disabilities and bodily differences develops this literature. In this article, we offer directions for this research, bringing body functionality into dialogue with feminist materialist disability theory to examine relations between people's bodily perceptions and the socio-material worlds they occupy. Feminist disability theory re-imagines difference through an affirmative lens, conceptualising body image as relational and processual, and approaching difference through four orientations: difference is basic to the world; difference is not deficiency; difference is not the problem, our inhospitable and ableist world is; and centring difference exposes the mythical norm. We apply this lens to body functionality research, and outline implications for research, practice, and theory, arguing that building a bridge between these frameworks offers a stepping off point for exciting directions for body image research.

Elements of a counter-exhibition: Excavating and countering a Canadian history and legacy of eugenics.

Into the Light, a recently mounted collectively curated museum exhibition, exposed and countered histories and legacies of 20th-century "race betterment" pedagogies taught in Ontario's postsecondary institutions that targeted some groups of people, including Anishinaabe, Black, and other racialized populations, and disabled and poor people, with dehumanizing ideas and practices. This article advances understandings of the transformative potential of centralizing marginalized stories in accessible and creative ways to disrupt, counter, and draw critical attention to the brutal impacts of oppressive knowledge. The "counter-exhibition" prioritized stories of groups unevenly targeted by such oppression to contest and defy singular narratives circulating in institutional knowledge systems of what it means to be human. The authors draw on feminist, decolonial and disability scholarship to analyze the exhibition's curation for the ways it collectively and creatively: (1) brought the past to the present through materializing history and memory in ways that challenged archival silences; and (2) engaged community collaboration using accessible, multisensory, multimedia storytelling to "speak the hard truths of colonialism" (Lonetree) while constructing a new methodology for curating disability and access (Cachia). The authors show how the exhibition used several elements, including counter-stories, to end legacies of colonial eugenic violence and to proliferate accounts that build solidarity across differences implicated in and impacted by uneven power (Gaztambide-Fernández).

Recovering Uncertainty: Exploring Eating Disorder Recovery in Context.

Attending to the shades of grey in eating disorder recovery may help to illuminate possibilities for navigating recoveries in their full complexity and diversity. There is a need for more complexity and flexibility in understandings of the timelines, processes, endpoints, and versions of eating disorder recoveries. In this article, we explore eating disorder recovery as a dynamic, intercorporeal, and non-linear process. Drawing on interviews with 20 people doing significantly better than they were during a time of acute distress around food and body, we articulate "recoveries" in relation to four themes: Fuzzy Logics of Time, Not Only Recovered, Recovery is Not All Sunshine and Rainbows, and The Life of Recovery. These themes speak to the ways in which participants struggled to articulate the temporalities of their recoveries, situated recovery as one among many events and processes that shaped their being in the world, resisted "too perfect" articulations of recovery journeys/ endpoints, and described preferred versions of and open-ended guidelines for recovery. We argue that eating disorder recoveries are as complicated and messy as lives themselves and are equally entangled in social contexts. We suggest that articulations of recovery be attuned to power dynamics as they operate in dictating which performances of eating disorders and recovery will be honoured as "legitimate" and whose pathways to recovery will be respected.

Healthcare providers' engagement with eating disorder recovery narratives: opening to complexity and diversity.

Interdisciplinary healthcare providers (HCPs) receive only minimal training in identifying, referring for and treating eating disorders and may feel ill-prepared to manage them. There is a need for brief interventions that prepare HCPs for work with people with eating disorders, particularly when they do not fit stereotypes about who might experience an eating disorder. One method for enacting brief interventions that make change in this realm is using digital stories (short videos) to generate awareness and knowledge. In this article, we discuss the results of a pilot study exploring the impact of viewing digital stories created by people in eating disorder recovery and their supporters on an interdisciplinary group of HCPs. We showed five stories to 22 HCPs who filled out qualitative prequestionnaires and postquestionnaires about their experiences of viewing the films and how they conceptualised recovery. Providers found the stories evocative; the stories appear to have complexified their perspectives on recovery. HCPs desired more diverse, detailed and lengthy stories, indicating that pursuing digital storytelling for HCP education and awareness may hold promise. Through centring the voices of people with eating disorders and in recovery, digital stories may also provide new ways of talking about recovery that open up possibilities for embracing difference.

Living Dis/Artfully with and in Illness.

This article experiments with multimedia storytelling to re-vision difference outside biomedical and humanistic frames by generating new understandings of living dis/artfully with illness. We present and analyze seven short videos created by women and trans people living with illness as part of an arts-based research project that aimed to speak back to hegemonic concepts of disability that create barriers to healthcare.1 We call for a welcoming in of disability studies' disruptive and re-imaginative orientations to bodily difference to unsettle medicine's humanistic accounts. In turn, we advance medical post-humanistic approaches that call on disability studies to re-embody its theories and approaches.

Difference Within and Without: Health Care Providers' Engagement With Disability Arts.

Re•Vision, an assemblage of multimedia storytelling and arts-based research projects, works creatively and collaboratively with misrepresented communities to advance social well-being, inclusion, and justice. Drawing from videos created by health care providers in disability artist-led workshops, this article investigates the potential of disability arts to disrupt dominant conceptions of disability and invulnerable embodiments, and proliferate new representations of bodymind difference in health care. In exploring, remembering, and developing ideas related to their experiences with and assumptions about embodied difference, providers describe processes of unsettling the mythical norm of human embodiment common in health discourse/practice, coming to know disability in nonmedical ways, and re/discovering embodied differences and vulnerabilities. We argue that art-making produces instances of critical reflection wherein attitudes can shift, and new affective responses to difference can be made. Through self-reflective engagement with disability arts practices, providers come to recognize assumptions underlying health care practices and the vulnerability of their own embodied lives.

Story-Making as Methodology: Disrupting Dominant Stories through Multimedia Storytelling.

In this essay, we discuss multimedia story-making methodologies developed through Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice that investigates the power of the arts, especially story, to positively influence decision makers in diverse sectors. Our story-making methodology brings together majority and minoritized creators to represent previously unattended experiences (e.g., around mind-body differences, queer sexuality, urban Indigenous identity, and Inuit cultural voice) with an aim to building understanding and shifting policies/practices that create barriers to social inclusion and justice. We analyze our ongoing efforts to rework our storytelling methodology, spotlighting acts of revising carried out by facilitators and researchers as they/we redefine methodological terms for each storytelling context, by researcher-storytellers as they/we rework material from our lives, and by receivers of the stories as we revise our assumptions about particular embodied histories and how they are defined within dominant cultural narratives and institutional structures. This methodology, we argue, contributes to the existing qualitative lexicon by providing innovative new approaches not only for chronicling marginalized/misrepresented experiences and critically researching selves, but also for scaffolding intersectional alliances and for imagining more just futures.

The Primacy of Discourse in the Study of Gender in Family Therapy.

Family therapists and scholars increasingly adopt poststructural and postmodern conceptions of social reality, challenging the notion of stable, universal dynamics within family members and families and favoring a view of reality as produced through social interaction. In the study of gender and diversity, many envision differences as social constructed rather than as "residing" in people or groups. There is a growing interest in discourse or people's everyday use of language and how it may reflect and advance interests of dominant groups in a society. Despite this shift from structures to discourse, therapists struggle to locate the dynamics of power in concrete actions and interactions. By leaving undisturbed the social processes through which gendered and other subjectivities and relations of power are produced, therapists may inadvertently become complicit in the very dynamics of power they seek to undermine. In this article, we argue that discourse analysis can help family therapy scholars and practitioners clarify the link between language and power. We present published examples of discourse analytic studies of gender and sexism and examine the relevance of these ideas for family therapy practice and research.

New Sexism in Couple Therapy: A Discursive Analysis.

The persistence of gender inequality in postindustrial societies is puzzling in light of a plethora of changes that destabilize it, including shifts in economy, legislation, and the proliferation of feminist politics. In family relations, such persistence manifests as a disconnect between couples aspiring to be more egalitarian yet continuing to enact traditional gender roles and hierarchies. There is an emerging consensus that gender inequality persists because of people's continued reliance on sexist ideology or gendered assumptions that constitute women as innately distinct from and inferior to men. Sexist ideology changes its form to accommodate to changing socio-economic conditions. Contemporary forms of sexism are old ways of legitimizing male power articulated in new and creative ways, often by incorporating feminist arguments. To effectively recognize and address "new sexism," scholars and practitioners require new, innovative research frameworks. Our objective in writing this article is two-fold. First, we seek to advance discursive (i.e., focused on language in use) approaches to the study of sexism. Second, we present the results of a discursive analysis of "new" sexist discourse in the context of couple therapy. The study provides preliminary evidence that, despite endorsing egalitarian norms, couples studied continue to rely on gender binaries and remain entrenched in old-fashioned patterns of gender inequality. Implications of these results for the practice of couple therapy and for future research are discussed.

Beyond "healthy eating" and "healthy weights": harassment and the health curriculum in middle schools.

In this paper we use data from interviews conducted with grades 7 and 8 girls to explore connections between body-based harassment and girls' body modification practices. We discuss how the elementary health curricula fail to consider harassment and other cultural factors that influence the body modification practices and eating patterns of diverse girls. More specifically, we argue that the "healthy eating, healthy weights" approach of the grades 7 and 8 Ontario health curriculum has five limitations: (1) it sends contradictory messages; (2) it increases anxieties about body weight; (3) it ignores the multiple causes of eating problems; (4) it marginalizes issues most relevant to racialized girls; and (5) it ignores dilemmas associated with physical development. We conclude with suggestions for developing a curriculum on body dissatisfaction and eating disorders prevention that considers the various socio-cultural factors influencing the range of body monitoring and modifying practices taken up by girls.