Marjorie Jolles

Michel Foucault's ethics of embodiment, focusing upon care of the self, has motivated feminist scholars to pursue promising models of embodied resistance to disciplinary normalization. Cressida Heyes, in particular, has advocated that these projects adopt practices of “somaesthetics,” following a program of body consciousness developed by Richard Shusterman. In exploring Shusterman's somaesthetics proposal, I find that it does not account for the subjective challenges of resisting normalization. Based on narrative theories of subjectivity, the role narrative plays in normalization, and a commitment to developing concrete, feminist practices of embodied ethics, I develop a model of “narrative somaesthetics” based on an updated consciousness-raising model that emphasizes group heterogeneity and narrative conflict that deals with these challenges. Through an analysis of interviews with self-identified femme lesbians and a “female to femme” transition support group featured in the documentary film, FtF: Female to Femme, I argue that narrative somaesthetics enables the analytical, genealogical work required to identify and weaken normalization's constraints on embodied feminist ethics

In this dissertation I examine notions of liberalism in nineteenth and twentieth century philosophical discourses of personal authenticity and their uses of, and implications for, the feminine. I analyze the projects of Ralph Waldo Emerson and G. W. F. Hegel to highlight the modern conflation of authenticity with autonomy, and the ascription of moral value to those who transcend or defy others. In both of these archetypically modern accounts, identity is presented as something to be set free. I then examine the works of Simone de Beauvoir to present a model of ambiguous, situated selfhood in which the self is necessarily bound to the Other, challenging the modern view. ;I further this challenge by using critical theories of the self that maintain that identity emerges not through emancipation from others but instead through regulation, discourse, and dependence including the work of Eva Feder Kittay, Iris Young, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, and Judith Butler. I use Butler's notion of the performative to propose a model of individual agency without exclusive self-authorship, in arguing that identity is never purely self-determined but instead informed by relationship, expectation, culturally conditioned subjectivity, and repeated practice. ;Lastly, I claim that consumption is a normalizing and normative practice, especially for middle-class American women, relying on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and other theorists of consumer culture to support the view that selves exist as commodities. Using the work of Sandra Bartky, Susan Bordo, Anne Cronin and Rita Felski, I trace the meanings of the feminine in contemporary women's culture by closely reading twenty examples from a broad selection of American women's magazines, finding an overwhelming dominance of representations of triumphant feminine authenticity. I argue that these representations rehearse Emersonian and Hegelian rhetorics of self-determination and transcendence, exploiting a distinctly American preoccupation with choice, nonconformity, defiance and radical individualism---a preoccupation rooted in race, class and gender privilege. These representations are more reflective of the long reach of liberal theory, and the limitations of identity formation and transformation within that theoretical frame, than indications of women's liberation.