| This dissertation is a cultural analysis of 'talk' about embodied experiences and personal and political agency in the narratives of young (ages 24-38), professional Women working in polities in Washington, DC. Twenty-three young women identifying across a range of political affiliations in the current U.S political spectrum (social conservative, economic conservative, liberal democrat, and progressive environmentalist) were recruited using a purposive, snowball technique. Generally, these young women were well-educated most having an undergraduate degree and beyond) and middle class and they self-identified with a variety of race/ethnic backgrounds, religious affiliations, and sexual orientations. They were each interviewed in-depth for approximately four hours on topics such as their political beliefs, how they came to be politically involved, their beliefs about the bases of gender difference, and their experiences in and of the body in politics and more broadly.;Working from the premise that individuals use, engage with, transmute, and participate in the creation of social discourses, or cultural scripts, and that these discourses or scripts represent what is epistemically available to them to narrate how they make sense of their experiences, the analysis focuses on three things: (1) what salient embodied experiences are invoked; (2) how the body is positioned in the narratives; and (3) how available social discourses acnially circumscribe, enable, and constrain the kinds of agency that are possible, personally, politically, and in larger social change processes. Chapters are organized to explicate five different ways in which the body is positioned and kinds of agency that result---as an "it" needing to be controlled; as "I" to be connected with, or as something in between that is enabling, disabling, or some combination thereof. Identifying these positionings allows us to look, in an overarching way, at what is discursively available and epistemically possible for this group of young, professional, middle class women working in politics---namely de-gendered, disembodied discourses in the public sphere and essentialized, embodied discourses in the private sphere. Implications for theorizing agency and for refining methodology in terms of studying embodiment are discussed. |
