ABSTRACT
To conclude, it is imperative that a socially aware arts therapy acknowledges distress with reference to the cultural norms that produce it. In my chapter (and other works), I have given pregnancy and motherhood as an example of an arena that is very contested (and therefore is a field which is unstable and destabilising). I have argued that this ‘field instability’ is affecting and inherently dislocating and that addressing the distress brought with these concepts in mind will help arts therapists from reinforcing entrenched ideas about female inadequacy or instability, which are inherently anti-therapeutic and which consolidate subjugation. But gender too, as the introduction attests, is itself contested terrain. Braithwaite and Orr suggest that ‘gender nonconformity is often viewed as threatening to social institutions’ and this is another area of tension (2017, p.181). I have attempted to theorise why this is. Ambiguity can be disconcerting. Ostentatious difference may be particularly threatening, but I suggest that gender always has to be negotiated and subject to variable tensions, because it is subject to variable pressures and constraints, through different and competing gender styles being operational. Gendered subjects are constituted through social relations and so the regulation of gender is always going to be an important aspect of our human flourishing or floundering.
