Visualising the spatial subtexts of gender and place.
The thesis project aims to tackle a number of conceptual tensions and conflicts relating to subjectivity in feminist gender theories. Taking the case of gender perceptions in Sudanese culture, it first examines the theoretical disparities between critical and constructed subjectivities through interviewing female Sudanese women. Secondly, it develops this concept further by reconstructing the information provided by the interviewees through a carefully considered interpretive process. The project then transacts with subjectivity as the specific foundation to create and design a methodology that pulls together strands from ethnographic research methods and feminist theory. It presents how feminist theories have clashed on theorising the entity of gender, as a result disintegrating gender and its subjectivities, and proving gender to be of paradoxical nature. The thesis then responds by foregrounding that which inhabits the space between seemingly polarised debates on subjectivity and gender by engaging the theme of ‘place’. This, ultimately, allows creative exploration into the spatial subtexts of gender and place.
For a number of reasons – some obvious, others not so – the vehicle for expressing this bespoke methodology is an instruction manual.
