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Between the Door of the Unknown and the Book of Old Plots, Ambivalence, Femininity and Identificatory Practices

Marnina Gonick

出版	University of Toronto, 2000
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=BYNTzwEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋

This thesis is an ethnographic investigation into the complex, contradictory and textured structure of the discourses available to girls through which to negotiate their identities. My interest is in exploring the social and discursive practices through which girls can (or cannot) become "knowable," recognizable, identifiable and acknowledged as subjects within discourses of femininity. These include those discourses and practices defining female sexuality, embodiment, relationship to self and other, material culture, use of social space, and cultural-political agency and power. Woven throughout the thesis and integral to the project is a second area of concern relating to the way in which ethnographic writing as a discursive practice is also implicated in the production and signification of social identities. The study took place over a two and a half year period, where I met weekly with a group of girls, of diverse racial backgrounds, in grades 5-8 in a Toronto public school. As a group we produced a magazine, in the first year, and a video in the second. Using feminist post-structuralist theories of subjectivity, power and agency, I analyze the finished products and the process of their production. I ask: through what regulatory norms and practices is gendered experience materialized in the video's narratives so that a character becomes intelligible as a position that makes sense within available discourses of femininity? Once materialized, how does a given gender formation regulate identificatory practices such that certain fantasy positions are deemed desirable and others are disavowed? Within the matrix of gender relations how do both desired and disavowed positions work together to produce and define the "self"? And within the array of identificatory sites that femininity might offer, what are the possibilities for disrupting normative femininity? The thesis raises questions about the consequences for girls in having to position themselves within discourses that are internally contradictory and have conflicting expectations and pressures. Finally, it suggests that these irresolvable contradictions may be potential sites of disruption of hegemonic forms of femininity engendering alternative identificatory possibilities.