The ethics of performance care: A pragmatic feminist analysis of policy for singing voice rehabilitation

Introduction: This paper uses pragmatic feminist poststructuralism to explore how ethical theory is applied to singing voice rehabilitation by specialist singing teachers.

Methods: A critical literature review examines the relationship between traditional and feminist ethical theories and their potential impact on practice. Themes have been extracted from the literature to create an intersectional feminist poststructural analysis framework, facilitating a document analysis of the foundations of three policy documents currently available to singing voice rehabilitation specialists. Poststructural deconstructivism was applied to thematic analysis to consider the impact of ethical theories on policy and practice.

Findings: Policies we found to be rooted in traditional enlightenment ethics, with a focus on hyper-rationality, androcentrism and legalism. Person-centred care ethics was found to be lacking in all documents. Contrary to best-practice recommendations documents failed to provided practical guidelines for practitioners.

Conclusion: Findings indicate adopting an intersectional feminist ethical policy could improve existing documents via a move from legislation and authority towards care and reflexivity.