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ETD Abstract Container
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Am I a Bad Feminist? Moments of Reflection and Negotiation in Contemporary Feminist Identity
Author Info
Brownlow, Elizabeth Ryan
Permalink:
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1594398482655803
Abstract Details
Year and Degree
2020, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, American Culture Studies.
Abstract
In 2014 Roxane Gay published Bad Feminist, a collection of personal essays written from her position as a Haitian American feminist academic. This work quickly skyrocketed in popularity across both academic and nonacademic audiences. Representative of the increasingly public-facing authoethnographic scholarship of feminist academic women, Gay's work is a product of its time. For this dissertation, I examine Bad Feminist along with two other also wildly popular autoethnographic works produced in the same decade, Tressie McMillan Cotton’s Thick: And Other Essays and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. I examine these texts as public-facing, accessible works that communicate their academic feminist authors'; feelings of feminist inadequacy in order to address larger issues of feminist practice and theory. Utilizing Sara Ahmed's theory of becoming feminist, I analyze the "bad feminist moments" expressed in these texts as moments of feminist crisis to identify what causes them and what functions they might serve. Using qualitative methodological triangulation, better known as mixed-methods research, I employ topic modeling and content analysis across all three texts to identify patterns that reveal not only why and how academic feminists might feel like they are bad feminists, but how and why they choose to share the moments in which they feel like bad feminists with others. Fighting to maintain their feminist identities in a world rife with gendered and raced violence, neoliberal ideals of self sufficiency and individual perfection, rapidly evolving technologies, and intersecting historical structures of oppression, these authors utilize moments of feminist imperfection to create space and time to disarticulate and rearticulate their relationships to feminism, their relationships to other people, and their relationships to academia. In this project, I conclude that bad feminist moments might be reactions to the pressures of both historical and contemporary structures of oppression, but the choice to reflect on them and share with others is based in feminist principles of reflexivity and collective inspiration to resist perpetuating ongoing structures of oppression inside and outside of the academy.
Committee
Sandra Faulkner, Ph.D. (Advisor)
George Bullerjahn, Ph.D. (Other)
Susana Peña, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Jolie Sheffer, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Pages
343 p.
Subject Headings
American Studies
;
Womens Studies
Keywords
bad feminist
;
feminism
;
feminist
;
autoethnography
;
sara ahmed
;
roxane gay
;
tressie mcmillan cottom
;
trauma
;
becoming feminist
;
feminist identity
Recommended Citations
Refworks
EndNote
RIS
Mendeley
Citations
Brownlow, E. R. (2020).
Am I a Bad Feminist? Moments of Reflection and Negotiation in Contemporary Feminist Identity
[Doctoral dissertation, Bowling Green State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1594398482655803
APA Style (7th edition)
Brownlow, Elizabeth.
Am I a Bad Feminist? Moments of Reflection and Negotiation in Contemporary Feminist Identity.
2020. Bowling Green State University, Doctoral dissertation.
OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center
, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1594398482655803.
MLA Style (8th edition)
Brownlow, Elizabeth. "Am I a Bad Feminist? Moments of Reflection and Negotiation in Contemporary Feminist Identity." Doctoral dissertation, Bowling Green State University, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1594398482655803
Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)
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Document number:
bgsu1594398482655803
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Copyright Info
© 2020, some rights reserved.
Am I a Bad Feminist? Moments of Reflection and Negotiation in Contemporary Feminist Identity by Elizabeth Ryan Brownlow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by Bowling Green State University and OhioLINK.