Okay. Here's the rough, rough draft of the body of my sop. I know I need to add in why the various departments will help me with my research, but I figured I would offer it to the wolves before I got too attached to it. Thanks in advance.
The first encounter I had with feminist theory was my junior year in high school, where I read Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics by bell hooks while I was enrolled in a class entitled Women’s History. While we covered the history of the women’s movement in the United States, the class became much more, turning into a consciousness-raising space where we rewrote fairytales from a feminist perspective, learned about safe-sex practices (information that was sorely lacking elsewhere in a state that had just switched to abstinence-only sexual education), and told our own biographies, all of which helped me to “come to voice” as hooks urges. While I did not know it at the time, that course would be the touchstone for my studies today.
The themes of text, the body, and “voice” have been central to my studies at (undergrad university). As an undergraduate, the courses I have taken in both the English and Women’s Studies departments have often worked together in tandem, allowing me to draw from my experiences in one department to apply them to another. This experience taught me firsthand the power of interdisciplinary thought to enrich and expand my intellectual horizons. Challenges to truth and knowledge that feminist theory poses as an alternative epistemology changed the way I read the texts not only in my Women’s Studies classes, but in my English classes as well.
Feminist theory, especially theory with a focus on the body, sharpened my desire to focus in the field of women’s studies and brought my future research into focus. The body as a site of inquiry became the topic of my research paper for my capstone course in Women’s Studies. Examining two different texts – the diet book written by Susan Estrich and the writings of the fat acceptance movement, my thesis examined how two different conceptions of the body and power are at work in each of these discourses. The body became a site of resistance for both dieters and non-dieters, but the ways in which they conceived of that resistance in relation to their bodies varied dramatically. At the end of the semester my professor nominated my paper for the XXX award, the Women’s Studies yearly departmental award.
Given my experience in both literature and women’s studies, I plan to continue my research on the body, and the ways in which both literature and theory interact to give us new conceptions of our embodied experience. I want to continue to use texts, not only those considered traditional literature but those that escape from the boundaries of literature, such as film, advertisements, and personal writings. The concept of community, especially the community of women that forms around the issues of weight is another area I want to include in my research.
I have been fortunate to be a part of the feminist community during my time at (undergrad university), both with my fellow students and as a participant in several feminist classrooms. As I witnessed my professor in my class on feminist political theory work with us in our learning – teaching us not only political theory but how to work collectively in our learning, I knew that I this was a process I wanted to be a part of, not only as a student, but as an educator. The concept of community appeared again and again in my undergraduate studies, from my class on feminist rhetoric where I researched how women involved with anti-Vietnam War protests used motherhood rhetoric to the graduate seminar entitled Theorizing Black Feminisms, where definitions of community where challenged. The experience of this course coincided with my decision to attend graduate school, but it also forced me to consider several questions; If I am going to be a part of the academic feminist community, how can I write about a process and community based on collectivism as an individual? If I become something of an intermediary between the academic and non-academic community, what does that mean for my membership within the two groups? Where is the line between examining the real physical presence of the body and the preformative aspects of identity?
Having recently been selected as a recipient for the XXX travel scholarship, I plan to begin some of my research into these questions in the field this summer. I will travel to Hungary, not only to continue to enhance my language skills, but to interview and work with several feminist groups working mainly on issues of domestic violence. I hope to compare the process of legal reform and community activism undertaken in Hungary with that in the United States to see how the response to challenges and the successes of the two communities can enhance the work towards their common goals.
