dc.contributor.advisor |
Wetherell, M |
en |
dc.contributor.advisor |
Braun, V |
en |
dc.contributor.author |
Martinussen, Maree |
en |
dc.date.accessioned |
2019-03-04T20:27:08Z |
en |
dc.date.issued |
2019 |
en |
dc.identifier.uri |
http://hdl.handle.net/2292/45721 |
en |
dc.description.abstract |
Friendships between women are a significant site of knowledge production for intimacy, gender and sexuality. Yet, despite the unprecedented re-shaping of the landscape of personal life over the last half-century, academic interest in friendships between women remains rare. In this thesis, I analyse data from interviews, group discussions and vignette methods, carried out with women in 'early midlife' (late twenties to late forties), in Aotearoa New Zealand. I detail how subjects are recruited into gendered technologies of self through the practices of friendship. Sketching out the trends within the current era of 'liquid' modernity where the gendered norms of emoting and intimacy can be difficult to read, I demonstrate why interdisciplinary research is needed which bridges critical social psychology and a sociology of personal life. Through my use of discursive affective practice theory, I explain why the forms of affect imbuing friendships between women are best conceived of as social practices. These collaborative performances are creatively constructed in the heat of a moment but can be nevertheless be studied systematically, contextualised across a range of social scales, including historical, interactional and personal. In the first of the three empirical chapters, I examine how participants wrestle with the dilemma of needing to carve out a space for friendships, while living out the hierarchical ordering of personal life where long-term sexual relationships are prioritised. The second analysis chapter investigates the gendered operations of the psy-complex, demonstrating participants' flexible use of individualising sense-making resources which denote 'healthy' friendships between women. Although the gendering of neoliberal subjectivities remains a concern in the third analytic chapter, I suggest that when 'just hanging out', women friends contravene hegemonic postfeminist injunctions to self-manage and self-transform. This thesis contributes to a politicised mapping of the competing assemblages that make up women's intimate relating today. Although the contradictions bound up within neoliberal discursive formations make the relational-scape of women's friendships challenging to operate within, I propose that the tensions between the everyday experiences of friendships and the dominant knowledges about how to develop one's relational self, may be a fruitful place to seek out creative becomings in novel directions. |
en |
dc.publisher |
ResearchSpace@Auckland |
en |
dc.relation.ispartof |
PhD Thesis - University of Auckland |
en |
dc.relation.isreferencedby |
UoA99265119511102091 |
en |
dc.rights |
Items in ResearchSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated. Previously published items are made available in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher. |
en |
dc.rights.uri |
https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/docs/uoa-docs/rights.htm |
en |
dc.rights.uri |
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/nz/ |
en |
dc.title |
Significant Others? Friendships between women and neoliberal relational life |
en |
dc.type |
Thesis |
en |
thesis.degree.discipline |
Psychology |
en |
thesis.degree.grantor |
The University of Auckland |
en |
thesis.degree.level |
Doctoral |
en |
thesis.degree.name |
PhD |
en |
dc.rights.holder |
Copyright: The author |
en |
dc.rights.accessrights |
http://purl.org/eprint/accessRights/OpenAccess |
en |
pubs.elements-id |
765476 |
en |
pubs.record-created-at-source-date |
2019-03-05 |
en |
dc.identifier.wikidata |
Q112552593 |
|