Psychological Healing in Feminist Time-Spaces: A Chronotopic Study of Martial Arts for Women After Trauma

Abstract

This paper offers theoretical and methodological innovation in feminist research by utilising a Bakthinian dialogical-chronotropic framework in order to examine the experience of participants engaging in a women-only martial arts programme, Healing Moves.  Drawing on six in-depth qualitative interviews with women who chose to engage with Healing Moves, following experience of trauma, we argue that a distinctive configuration of time and space creates a feminist chronotropic time-space. Here, Healing Moves itself is the chronotope locus, that supports trauma recovery through embodied practices and dialogical connections. In doing so, the study explores how a shared feminist chronotropic time-space, through martial arts training, carves out a space for participants to not only re-negotiate their self-perception, but also re-claim their bodily agency (embodiment), and cultivate resilience.
Under a feminist chronotropic lens, the analysis revealed four inter-connected genres which promoted individual and collective recovery: (1) the establishment of a physical safe-space, (2) the re-claiming of embodiment through physical movement, (3) collectivity experience via dialogue, (4) and the re-shaping of personal narratives beyond the Healing Moves Chronotropic time-space. For example, participants described the practice space as a site where physical strength and psychological empowerment could unfold simultaneously, allowing them to experience themselves differently, and often more positively, than in everyday life.
Therefore, the study positions Healing Moves as more than simply a physical intervention. Rather, it functions as a psychological and cultural (feminist) Chronotropic time-space of healing. Where temporal and spatial community-based structures, potentially, contribute to recovery from trauma in a manner that traditional therapeutic settings may not. Hence, broadening psychological understanding of trauma recovery and offering researcher insight into how to contextualise such experiences.