ABSTRACT
Current media discourses on femininity and gender-equality in the Global North recur heavily on a rhetoric of choice, the repudiation of feminism and an already-established gender equality. From cultural- and social-theoretical points of view, however, scholars have developed a postfeminist critique that exposes this trope as a mask of “the continued existence of gender hierarchies” (McRobbie). Against this backdrop, everyday negotiations of feminism and questioning patriarchal structures need a careful psycho-social analysis, systematically shedding light on the individual and the socio-cultural interpellations. In this chapter, we discuss the methodical conditions of such a psycho-social analysis by proposing the documentary method of interpretation (Bohnsack) as explicitly suitable for understanding the “self” and her social constitution, specifically the selves of young women as gendered in a two-sided way: on one hand, as a reflexively uttered presentation of one’s gendered self and, on the other hand, as a document of one’s gendered practice intertwined with societal conditions. We therefore aim to show how the presented approach helps methodically unfold the entanglement of explicitly uttered positions and habitual practical orientations by using the central methodological premise of the documentary method – a distinction between explicit and implicit knowledge and its functions for everyday practices.
