On the cutting edge? : Marking gender, embodiment and knowledge

Abstract

In this thesis I use creative methodologies - a “new writing” (Denzin, 2003: 118) strategy - to explore body marking practices (‘self-injury’ and body modification) in the context of gendered embodiment. The overarching question is framed in terms of whether sociological knowledge can provide a model of engaging with and understanding these body practices which avoids hierarchy, dualism and objectification. I aim to demonstrate that a feminist model of embodiment, which works through an ethics of both theoretical and methodological practice, as well as a relation to experience, can indeed facilitate this aim. Such a position engenders a radical shift in terms of normative research and representation practices and transforms the roles of the researcher and the reader, as well as the structures of evaluation and merit. It is precisely this refiguration of the norms of academic practice and its relationship to experience that connects with, and indeed emerges from, human embodiment. Overall, my thesis explores and represents the ways in which a feminist position of embodiment can be effective as a sociological strategy, and in particular a strategy that is ethically salient and experientially grounded in both empirical and epistemological terms. From this position body marking is no longer a stigmatised or objectified spectacle of the other, but is a process that is social and subjective, symbolic and corporeal, gendered and transformative, and fundamentally embodied, not unlike the methodological strategies that I employ for its articulation.