Constructing feminist counselling: ‘equality’ as a discursive resource in counsellors' talk

Abstract

Feminist counselling has an uneasy relationship with mainstream counselling approaches. Feminist counselling/therapy is diverse both in theory and in the practice of those who refer to themselves as feminist counsellors, which means that many counsellors outside the feminist tradition are unclear about what it entails. There are also tensions between the discourses of feminism and of therapy (Maracek and Kravetz, 1998). This makes for confusion in the wider counselling population about the nature and validity of feminist counselling. In this study I asked counsellors (not selected on the basis of feminist identification) about their understanding of feminist counselling. They attached four main meanings to feminist counselling: exclusivity, imposing a viewpoint, broader perspectives and a commitment to equality. In exploring the validity of feminist counselling the participants drew on competing meanings of equality, namely relational equality and external equality. This contrasts with much feminist counselling writing, which claims these as complementary.