I began my inquiry into women's lawbreaking from a disquiet between what I
"knew" from academic feminist accounts and what I "saw" as a worker. My
understanding of women's lawbreaking came from a distorted representation of
women lawbreakers as victims produced by academic feminist scholarship.
This distorted representation came from a feminist practice of emphasizing
women's victimhood as an explanatory framework. As a result, women have
been rendered 'victims' - a representation that relies on women's object, rather
than subject, status. Further, this distorted 'victim' representation fails to
examine the way women can, and do, negotiate 'structures' to shape their own
lives. As a result of my disquiet, I began to ask what is it about victimization
that contributes to women's lawbreaking? I adapted Dorothy Smith's method of
inquiry to develop a method which includes women's agency and yet retains
feminist insights into economic and cultural gender inequities. This method
allows one to understand agency in the context of victimization and its
entanglement with lawbreaking by understanding the dialectic nature of social
interaction. This dialectic understanding of action is important because we can
examine not only what things come into view as structural or institutional
processes, but also see more clearly the undercurrent of resistance and
survival so relevant to feminism. Further, this method looks at women's
lawbreaking differently - it captures women's agency as a counter-discourse to
existing feminist discourses of victimization. A small research study was
conducted for this thesis. Nine women were interviewed about their lives
growing up and their experiences with lawbreaking. From this data, three areas
were explored: "invalidation", "addiction" and "negotiation". The analysis of
these themes explores, and then maps out, courses of women's lawbreaking
action and how those courses are coordinated by the ruling relations. This
project aims to contribute to feminist scholarship on women's courses of
lawbreaking action by offering Smith's method of inquiry as a way to capture
both women's agency and how that is coordinated by the organizational and
social relations of ruling.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/14250 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Frizzell, Erin T. |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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