Becoming Feminists/ Doing Feminism(s)
Date
2000
Authors
Kmech, Lori-Anne
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
This thesis describes ten feminist graduate students' pathways to feminist self identity and their experiences of doing feminism in the social sciences. I draw from symbolic interactionist theory which conceptualizes individuals as actively interpreting their lived experiences. Symbolic interactionism theorizes self and identity as social processes that emerge in interaction. A contemporary interactionist model of generic social processes is used to understand how graduate school organizes graduate students' experiences of becoming professionals in the social sciences. Narrative theory is used to re-read feminist models of self and identity especially those feminist models that theorize women as cast in the role of "Other" which leads them to develop negative or contradictory evaluations of self in comparison to masculine models of self and identity. Feminism is read as a narrative which provides women with strategies for resisting constructions of self and identity as organized in late modern capitalist society. The participants' stories of constructing feminist self-identity and doing feminist social science are presented as resistance narratives. Using interpretivism and feminism as a methodological approach, I interviewed ten feminist graduate students about their self transformations in the processes of becoming feminists and becoming feminist social scientists.