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Dissertation Information for Susanne Luhmann

NAME:
- Susanne Luhmann

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Women's Studies

SCHOOL:
- York University (USA) (2001)

ADVISORS:
- Deborah Britzman

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Renaldo Walcott
- Shannon Bell
- Alice Pitt
- Sharon Rosenberg
- Patti Lather

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Improper subjects? An inquiry into social differences as knowledge and pedagogy in women's studies

Abstract: This dissertation studies questions of subject formation in women's studies and attends to the role and function of social differences (race and sexuality) in conflicts of the field. This study is organized by two distinct but related sites of inquiry. The first part studies discourses of differences, particularly race and sexuality, and traces how these circulate within the field of women's studies. It argues that race and sexuality are signifiers of difference in discourses of knowledge that exceed social identities. For example, I investigate the ways that race and sexuality are invoked and figure in conversations constitutive of women's studies. These concern its self-definition, history, location in the university, commitment to interdisciplinarity, as well as questions of epistemology and pedagogy. I also take differences to be central to the histories of learning of those involved in the field. The second part of this study works with interviews in which faculty and students speak of their experiences of learning and the attachments they make to knowledges about race and sexuality within women's studies.

The dissertation focuses on these two sites--knowledge production within women's studies and histories of learning--in order to explore the dynamics between the demands that knowledge places on teaching and learning subjects, and the psychic demands that teachers and learners bring to their own teaching and learning. The study explores the psychical dynamics of teaching and learning and brings psychoanalytic questions to the study of differences, namely: how does difference within affect difference between the subjects of women's studies? How do subjects, who produce and are produced by the demands of women's studies, answer to disciplinary and psychic desires? How do symptoms of learning such as identification, resistance, and ambivalence become sites of interest when disciplinary and psychic dynamics meet? Drawing upon both Judith Butler (1997) and Foucauldian genealogy, I suggest that this dual approach--the consideration of disciplinary demands and psychic desires--allows insight into the complex dynamic of subject formation, of both the formation of the subject of study and the studying subject in teaching and learning in women's studies.

MPACT Scores for Susanne Luhmann

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-04-21 13:34:00

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