The Phenomenology of Femininity Implications among Female-Headed Households

This research was conducted with the purpose of examining the phenomenology of femininity implications and the understanding and interpretation of femininity by female-headed households using Max van Manen's phenomenology method. In the theoretical approach of the research, femininity is equivalent to the embodied performance of roles, behaviors, and characteristics that are produced and gradually mastered in the discursive way in the conditions of gender inequality. In the present research, the representations of the female-headed households' perception of this dominant femininity were reviewed in four areas of social relations, action space, lived time, and lived body. The population included all female-headed families of the city of Bahar, and 23 of them were selected by the judgmental sampling using a criterion with maximum distribution. The data were collected by in-depth individual interviews and thematic interpretation-analysis method until theoretical saturation was reached in the interviews and were analyzed using a qualitative method of thematic analysis. The research results showed that female-headed households experience the realities in the field of social relations such as playing conflicting roles, gradual isolation, alienation, multifacetedness, and communication contradiction. Moreover, the most important components of the action space in which they live are as follows: feeling of insecurity, boredom with the environment, mistrust of others, dominance of gender stereotypes, and conflict between private and public life. Therefore, these women's lived experience of time includes elements such as boredom, loss of time, rupture of time, and slow passage of time. In such a situation, they understand and interpret their body in the framework of categories such as the body as a work tool, the body as a sexual prey, body shame, inverted body consciousness, and the body as capital. Therefore, it can be said that the components of these four areas in the daily life of female-headed households have a mutual link, which leads them to accept dominant femininity. The conflicting life and contradictory identity of these women in the patriarchal society, rather than causing the formation of autonomy and a strong feminine self-concept in them, cause them to return to the internalization of traits and behaviors that are traditionally labeled as feminine.