Rag doll or rebel? Recognising girl's body language as everyday resistance in discursive therapy with their female caregivers

Girls in Western countries are often sent to therapy to better manage their behaviour. Once in the therapy room, children often rely on nonverbal means to express their thoughts or feelings in therapy interactions. Children demonstrate their understandings of their mental health and awareness of their experiences through bodily postures. Yet there is limited literature that critically examines girls’ body language in therapy. The current study uses a critical discourse analysis to investigate reoccurring patterns of postures across two girls’ discursive therapy sessions. A Foucauldian power analysis illustrates girls’ body language is a form of everyday resistance to deficit-focused interactions. It shows how the girls were identified in problematic ways at times, and how they used their bodies to actively resist and reposition themselves in the therapeutic encounter by using the physical space around them. Findings demonstrate the need for professionals working in therapy contexts to critically examine the meaning of girls’ body language to avoid inadvertently positioning them as gendered docile bodies in need of modification and self-management.