Doctoral Thesis About . . . Well, You Figure it Out!
From New Real Peer Review, the abstract of a Ph.D. thesis:
Self-Storying to (De)Construct Compulsory Heterosexuality: A Feminist Poststructural Autoethnography of a Self-Wedding Ritual
Written from the perspective of a white-settler, obese, bisexual, middle class cisfemale graduate student in Canada, the wedding ritual and bride are explored as sites of ideal female/feminine formation of the subject. Compulsory heterosexuality is implicated. “Single” and “married,” like “woman,” are constituted in discourses. The author explores ways that she, as an unmarried and therefore “single” woman has been positioned as personally deficient as single-ness is produced as an illegitimate and undesirable position for female/feminine subjects to take up. This research uses an autoethnographic methodological frame augmented by feminist poststructural epistemology to open up, trouble, disrupt and interrupt the figuring of the bride in hopes of (re)signification and new practices of the female and feminine self for the writer. The writer privileges story in the forms of narrative, poetry, theatrical vignette and photography; theoretical literature provides context and a methodological framework and adds a supplemental layer of analysis. The story is told from various temporal positions including past, present, and future, blurring the idea of chronological age. Practices of self and the limits of agency and resistance to dominant discourses are explored. Many accounts of a feminist self-wedding are presented to illustrate the opportunities for resistance, disruption and deconstruction of sociohistoric subjects and discourse, in this case, the heterosexual bride.
Labels: Academia, Colleges and Universities, Gender Theory, New Real Peer Review, Political Correctness, Thesis
posted by John McAdams at 8:57 PM
4 Comments:
What's it about? "Me, me, me", apparently.
In what discipline is that considered a suitable topic for academic research?
It says she/he/it is from the University of Vagina(sic)
At least within the narrative social structures and polices of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) it is male singleness, not female singlesness, that has historically been more suspect.
While the accuracy of various quotes from Brigham Young that men over given age x are a "menance to society" seems a bit suspect, they are widely repeated.
The Church does have a policy that makes certain forms of employment only open to married men. This is specifically the positions of fulltime paid seminary and institute teachers. These constitute proably somewhere from 1000 to 1500 people overall, in a Church of 15,000,000 plus. Even this policy has not always been in place, but it has been decided that being married is a key indication of full maturity for men, while unmarried women are viewed as potentially mature. In part this is a reflection of US culture making it so men can take the lead in pursuit of marriage, but there are probably other issues, including avoiding issues of sexual abuse of minors, not that having married staff avoids the later, but unmarried men in their early 20s teaching teenagers in high emotion religious subjects is an open invitation for misuse by the sexual abusing charlatan.
While there have been female general officers of the Church who were single, the only male general authorities who have been single have been widowers.
In actual talks by general authorities, the mention of things like "opportunities to marry for those who do not have that opportunity in this life" are open to both sexes, but I have heard BYU professors who had a view that it was only females who would really lack that opportunity. OK, I knew one professor, who had views on a varety of other subjects that would probably get him fired today if he had not retired a decade ago. His views were never an actual mainstream in LDS thought, and more his own peculiar jaded take on life.
However the point still stands that male singleness is at least is denounced, if not more so than is female singleness.
Oh fgs call this 'thesis' what it is - an utter load of bullcrap.
Amazing what universities will take seriously.
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