Proposing a justice approach to ethics of care in art psychotherapy

Charting engagement with the work of intersectional feminists, this paper sets out the feminist approaches necessary for informing an ethics of care that art psychotherapy can orient to enable it to be a socially just enterprise. Queer and Black feminists and feminists of color have been central in challenging heteropatriarchal racialized capitalist social structures that have worked to harm and punish women and other marginalized and oppressed people. Their work is combined with a critically informed approach to ethics of care and a set of primary data. The primary data presented comes from a qualitative study about young women and girls’ experiences of art psychotherapy. There were 10 participants in the study aged between 13-16, each taking part in a one-to-one interview. Data were analyzed using theoretical thematic analysis. This paper proposes that first encounters in art psychotherapy can act as a portal to feminist work on the politics of emotion, affect and the sensory. Such feminist work is crucial for showing why the disconcerting and worrying are virtuous moments of critical feminist knowledge production and agency.