Narrating Affective Tensions: Women's experiences of heterosexual relationships

This article-based doctoral thesis in Gender Studies is an empirical investigation of affective tensions that emerge in women’s experiences of heterosexual relationships. My research is situated in two fields of research: critical heterosexuality studies and feminist research on heterosexuality. The point of departure in investigating heterosexual relationships is that of critical heterosexuality studies, which foregrounds the formative role of heterosexuality in generating intelligible social relations.

Theoretically, the study builds on insights from affect theory and queer temporalities research. Affect theory highlights a visceral way of knowing, in which feelings and intensities are central. Queer temporalities research provides a theoretical lens for investigating the way in which norms concerning gender and sexuality rely on a temporal paradigm.

The research material of the study consists of 19 interviews with mid- to later-life women who have experience of a relationship with a younger man. The uncommon age-difference brings an unconventional element to the relationship. Methodologically, the study deploys diverse analytical tools provided by narrative inquiry.

The doctoral thesis includes three empirical analyses. The analyses show that the tellability of gender hierarchy that takes place in heterosexual relationships rests on a temporal order of progress. Progress narrative as a temporal order organized both the societal conditions for couple relationships and the experiential dimension of women’s life course. Progress narrative formed a complex basis for women’s pursuits to dissolve gender hierarchy as it took place in their heterosexual relationships.

Moreover, the interviewees attempted to manage the affective tensions that connect to cultural understandings of gender by alternating the temporal and spatial placement of the situations in their narration. Identifying this temporal and spatial placement highlighted the processes by which diverse feelings emerged in relation to the tensions. Furthermore, the unfavourable situations that women faced in their heterosexual relationships bore the effect beyond the moment they took place. The tensions lingered as a potential scenario and formed a point of reference for the relationship’s future, which also had a bearing on experiencing the current relationship.

This doctoral thesis states the argument that the affective tensions that emerged in connection to cultural understandings of gender in heterosexual relationships were organized temporally in women’s narration. First, temporality brought forth the societal conditions that framed heterosexual relationships and their contribution to gender hierarchy in heterosexual relationships. Second, temporality connected affective tensions to the conventions of a normalized life course, in which a heterosexual couple relationship and family life were central. Third, temporality highlighted the materiality of the aging body, and especially its needs and limits. Consequently, these functions that temporality served in women’s narration about heterosexual relationships enabled nuanced analyses about the ambivalence that characterized women’s experiences of relationships.

This study develops the concept of affective orientation. It is proposed as a methodological tool for analysing affect as an embodied experience in empirical research. Affective orientation is a concept that enables an analysis of the ways in which past, present, and future intertwine and overlap with each other in the process by which experience is created. Past experiences lay the ground for future expectations, which has affective effects on the present.