The term resilience is overused and under theorized. This dissertation challenges prevailing resilience discourses, exploring the tensions of embodied and experiential relationships with resilience that complicate the overly reductive and overly positive notion of resilience as a virtue of neoliberal subjects. Understanding resilience in the context of contemporary Western society necessitates unraveling the societal conditions shaped by the dominant neoliberal capitalist ethos of production. To address these problems, I explore how resilience is lived in the impasse of the crisis ordinary. Guided by affect theory, critical phenomenology, and queer theory, my study centers on ambiguity, subjectivity, and normativity in order to contend with the complexities and contradictions of resilience. Through a novel impassive bricolage methodology, I explore the lived and embodied experiences of resilience through relational, reflexive, and creative processes of autohistoria-teoría, flashpoint methodology, heuristic inquiry, and a participatory, reflexive thematic analysis. This study engaged with three women co-researchers who have recently completed graduate programs in design-related fields. Data collection included written reflections, interviews, focus group recordings, and creative works. Analysis revealed three central themes: disorientation, movement, and disconnection. For these co-researchers, resilience emerged as a complex and ambiguous phenomenon, responding to the push and pull between self and the normative world. Reconceptualizing resilience as emerging from and including queer affects, I redirect focus from linear progression, attending instead to ambiguous and awkward movements of the impasse. By unraveling resilience, my project opens up ways to live the impasse by loosening attachments to good-life fantasies and embracing happiness without guarantees.

This thesis considers the use of Young Adult Chicana Literature in the classroom to help young Chicanas work through their process of finding their identities. It begins by making the case that Chicana identities are complex because of their intersectional borderland positioning between Mexican and U.S. American cultures, which makes the identity formation process more difficult for them than others. By relating these complex issues facing young Chicanas to literature that is more relevant to them and their struggles, it is argued that teachers can help ease some of the tensions that exist within their students and help them work more easily through the identity issues they may be facing. This text engages in an analysis of two pieces of Young Adult Chicana Literature, Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street and Isabel Quintero’s Gabi, A Girl in Pieces, through the critical lens of autohistoria-teoría to argue that because the forms of these novels follow this pattern of theorizing through experience and reflection, they can be of critical assistance in helping young Chicanas work through their own experiences and issues. Finally, this thesis moves into my own autohistoria-teoría in which I reflect on my own experiences with the identity formation process and how recognition of myself in literature played a critical role in my own process, and how the overwhelming lack of this type of literature stunted my identity formation process.