Abstract

"Where the word breaks off: Voice of the mother/writer/academic" is a hermeneutical and feminist study of aspects of what it means to be an embodied encountering being in the Western world. Written as dialogue with a multiplicity of interrupting voices, it explores what it means to be in the midst of things, in a state of becoming, part of the motion and tensions of existence. It takes us back to the original question, the original difficulty, the difficulty of being human. ;In both format and content, the dissertation is about marginality, otherness, about fear/desire to be heard. It is about inherent consequences of being languaged, gendered and experiential. It asks to whom does the language be-long, this dis-em-bodied body of language that in part prescribes, scribes beforehand, how we should be in an ontological sense? It explores some of these consequences through the voice and experience of being named as mother, writer and academic, and takes them up in a conversation about living-in-between, between modernist and postmodernist thinking, between being and belonging, being and becoming, being and being defined. ;Ironically, the dissertation itself bespeaks many of these tensions as it too is replete with difficulties: of format, style, genre, linearity, defining, meaning, and language. It wrestles with the contradictions, tensions, consequences for writing, naming, defining, speaking, using language. For having voice. And this dissertation is about curriculum: what we deliberately teach in and out of our schools, what is imbedded in the very language that we use in speech, in teaching and writing, what is in our very gendering, and in our experience as beings living out what it means to be human