Heartworks: Feminist Encounters with the Gendered Selves of Young Divorcées

Abstract

Compelled by personal connections to women in my life experiencing the gendered complexities of divorce, this study explores how young, divorced women (in their 20s and 30s), without children, were influenced by different gendered ideologies—including femininity, coupledom, and pronatalism—along with other social, cultural, and relational contexts and pressures, all of which can be variously experienced, reproduced, and resisted within leisure. Aligning feminist theory with narrative inquiry, I conducted one-to-one interviews and group interviews with 12 young, divorced women. I represented the findings using Creative Analytic Practice through a variety of literary forms, including monologues, social media posts, and researcher field notes. The findings elucidate women’s experiences within a framework I conceptualize as the Heartworks, which details the heart-work of women’s divorce processes and the feminist research praxis it fosters. Collectively, the findings highlight the challenges women faced as they navigated the “shattering” of their married selves and engaged in “re-creating” distinct post-divorce selves against the sociocultural backdrop of gendered ideologies. This research expands current conceptualizations of identity, grief, transition, and transformation. It also adds complexity to our thinking about women’s relationships as a shifting cultural nexus where leisure contexts both confine and expand notions of femininity and love. As a feminist social justice project, this research exposes the marginalization and stigmatization faced by young, divorced women and shares new understandings of their complex, lived experiences, including possibilities for resisting and re-creating limiting narratives of women’s divorce through counter-narratives of (re)claimed agency, solidarity, and empowerment.