The Gentle Violence of Therapists: Misrecognition and Dis‐location of the Other

Abstract

Using Pierre Bourdieu's ‘theory of symbolic violence’ and ‘misrecognition’ this paper focuses specifically on the way sexuality and gender are negotiated in therapeutic training. Drawing from UK‐based research over the past decade with 70 qualified and registered, predominantly cis‐gendered, heterosexual and non‐heterosexual therapists, I reflect upon, and offer reasons for, the way therapeutic studies continually struggle to offer legitimacy and recognition to mainstreaming anything other than heteronormative versions of social, sexual and emotional life and how an alternative reading using queer theory, can complicate the terrain of sex, sexualities and genders and offer a way out of the present impasse. My own interest in ‘misrecognition’ focuses on the epistemic violence perpetrated when there exists a complicit subordination to the dominant group, and how this is a far more violent practice towards those who are already marginalized, disempowered and socially excluded in relation to sexed, sexualized and gendered bodies because it legitimates oppression, resists radical shifts in power and has wider implications for citizenship (particularly emotional) and sociality. I focus on the strategies employed by therapists to perpetuate this type of ‘gentle violence’ and how it impacts on the construction of the social and emotional self. Although sex, sexuality and gender form the basis of this research, I am only too aware of how these may be used to provide discrete categories within ‘interlocking systems of oppression’ that also include race, ethnicity, class and ableism. For the sake of this article, intersectionality is considered a useful tool, from which to re‐negotiate and re‐cognize the violent context of therapy and its underlying practices.