On being “too much“: Exploring how women in heterosexual relationships in Sweden experience the Anger gap

Sammanfattning

Research shows that anger experience and expression are heavily gendered processes, with women being discouraged from expressing anger due to socialization. Women express less anger than they are experiencing, a phenomenon termed the anger gap by research. There is little research centralized around women’s anger in Sweden, yet alone around the anger gap. This study explores how women narrate and recount their experiences with the anger gap in heterosexual relationships in Sweden through qualitative research. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with N = 5 participants, performing a structural narrative analysis. The Labovian model was applied in analysis. Women narrate stories that are centralized around the evaluation of their experiences rather than the events that occurred, with narratives oftentimes lacking components of results or resolution. They furthermore reproduce dominant public narratives of traditional femininity and self-silencing of anger, but also counter narratives that break with gendered expectations around anger expression. This gives new insights into the state of gender (in)equality and gendered anger expression in Sweden, and calls for more attention in health care, the media and policy making.