CEDOC

In bringing together contemporary theoretical perspectives (feminist, literary, and cultural theories), this dissertation addresses issues of gender, identity, and difference with reference to the life trajectories of a group of women living in a squatter settlement in Florianópolis, Brazil. It combines analyses of narrative forms (life-histories) and ethnographic description to assess the extent to which theories about the subject and agency in feminism and poststructuralism speak to the material reality of the women interviewed. Against the textualism of many contemporary theoretical tendencies, and working within the available "scenarios of representation", this study develops a feminist self-reflexive, politically accountable, and theoretically situated reading (from several translocations) of the stories theories tell us about ourselves and the stories the women interviewed tell about their life experiences. The attempt is to provide the outlines of a critical practice that does not lose sight of the materiality of "women's experience" at the same time that it interrogates naive and romantic notions of an empiricist self and unmediated experience.

• Universidade de Illinois em Urbana-Champaign
• Doutorado