Reconstructing womanhood : a method and an account
Creators: name: Cole, Cynthia
Publisher: name: University of British Columbia
Year: 2010

description: This work explicates the social construction of womanhood by providing an instance of its reconstruction. I organise the body of the text into three chapters: a frame, a method and an account. In the frame I outline the context of my research, sketch the organisation of my inquiry and provide my location in relation to the discipline of sociology. The frame makes explicit the need for and view from my shift to women's perspective. The inquiry begins in the rupture I lived between experience grounded in my physical female being not yet mediated by words and the social forms of expression available to me. I extend the work of Dorothy E. Smith to account for the bifurcation between women's bodies / work in the body and ruling forms of mental production. These forms exclude women and constitute us as objects by building in and taking for granted as the source the consciousness of (ruling class) men. This construction annihilates women's subjectivity and is manifest as our inability to generate authoritative statements. The practical lack of ability to decide and to speak for ourselves is a consequence of a ruling relation in which women exist for men. To enter the dominant forms of expression we must suspend our sex, cut off our bodily power and attempt to stand outside ourselves. Sociology practices a ruling relation by working in the abstract-conceptual mode that excludes concrete, local and particular embodiments. The female body discredits and disqualifies us for positions in the head world of ruling. However only by adopting the stance of insiders to ourselves can we account for the practice of the ruling mode because our work in the body provides the conditions of the abstract-conceptual mode. This insiders' stance allows us to reclaim mental work by generating social forms of expression that make visible / speakable / knowable our bodies and bodily work upon which work in words depends. Writing from women's perspective is the means by which I reconstruct my knowledge of womanhood as sociology. The chapter on method lays out the specific procedures I use in accomplishing an alternative construction of womanhood and provides the conditions of producing the account which reconstructs my past. The focus is on performing a relocation of myself from object to subject by starting from myself, my female body and my everyday experience as a woman and originating forms of expression from this centre. I create this shift through writing a journal. In the account I relate how I came to know myself as a woman in the process of growing up, uncover how family relations constructed the social meaning of womanhood and account for my experience of inferiority. I learned to practice bifurcated consciousness of head and body and a ruling relation to myself by internalising the split between my father as the agent of ruling class authority and my mother as the exemplar of woman's silenced embodiment work. The thesis contributes to the body of knowledge explicating the split between public and private domains by presenting personal relations as social relations of corporate capitalism and linked to social relations of public production.