Abstract

Enacting femininity is a contested matter. In this dissertation I explore performances in which I engaged in acts of femininity. These acts of femininity are unified in that each entails an action typically viewed as funding a traditionally feminine gender performance. By traditional I mean those female performative enactments or activities often called into suspicion by feminist scholarship for how they may promote a hegemonically sanctified view of femininity as an abiding and compulsory part of performing woman. The performance of traditionally feminine actions, then, marks the contentious space where agency and choice butt against political agendas and ideological constructs. ;That these acts of femininity are contested suggests that when enacted, they potentially transgress cultural and/or contextual norms and potentially alienate given audiences. Through the performance of these acts, I render myself abjectly, both in terms of performing self-abjection and by prompting active abjectification by the audience. However, while these acts are abjectifying, transgressive, and potentially alienating to some, I argue that for others these enactments may be subversive as well. Moreover, to the extent that norms are representative of reigning ideology, I suggest how ideology is inscribed upon the performing body. ;I argue that acts of femininity may subvert by calling into question the hegemonic, and therefore unegalitarian, conceptions of what it means to be a woman and, concomitantly, by challenging feminist disavowals of these acts. Furthermore, I argue that by challenging situational norms, the taken-for-granted constructs within some selected feminist arguments may be revealed and critical reflection upon the arguments that support those constructs may be enabled. Specifically, through a critical hermeneutic phenomenological approach, I explore how particular feminist arguments condition and constrain selected performative enactments, as well as how these arguments are constituted in and by the performing body. ;Finally, in this dissertation I endeavor to explore various ways of deploying phenomenology as a method of inquiry. In each chapter, I write with a different style; in so doing, I discover that what knowledge is brought forward depends, at least in part, upon how the method is marshaled