Spoken sexism as a threat to women’s well-being

Abstract

While the consequences of gender-based violence on women’s mental health are well documented, the impact of everyday sexist comments on their psychological well-being is still understudied. For this reason, the present paper aims to explore how women discursively construct spoken sexism as a threat to their well-being, drawing upon a feminist discourse, while sculpting for themselves a subject position of oppression. The study was qualitative in nature and thirty women took part voluntarily in individual semi-structured interviews. Post-structuralism was adopted as an epistemological perspective while a Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) was employed for the analyses of the material. At the same time, a feminist viewpoint was upheld throughout the entire research due to its gendered nature, given that spoken sexism is discursively constructed within patriarchal power structures. In their discourse, the participants constructed sexist comments as restrictive and threatening to their mental health while experiencing them as oppressive and abusive.

Keywords

• spoken sexism,
• Foucauldian discourse analysis,
• feminist discourse,
• feminism