CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Bagyina, Eszter Adrienn |
|---|---|
| Title | Balancing Between Traditional Gender Representations: Lesbian Women's Quest to Create a New Form of Self-Expression |
| Summary | This paper focuses on how lesbian women attempt to create an androgynous mode of self-expression for themselves through negotiating between various forms of body modification practices and the related gendered norms that pressure them into either adhering to or subverting certain normative discourses. Chapter 3 discusses the respondents tattooing practices which reveal that through the reappropriation of the domain of tattooing which was traditionally understood to be a masculine domain they visually express their inner strength through symbols traditionally understood as strength motifs in order to challenge the stereotypical representation of women as weak and passive. Chapter 4 in contrast, discusses three other themes that are either specifically related to tattooing or are more indirectly related to their perception of the ideal woman: body hair removal, other forms of body modification such as body building or plastic surgery and alcohol consumption. The three themes are all connected to each other in the sense that they have been used to regulate women's behaviour and they all have gendered norms to which my participants relate in different ways. The study shows that they adhere to the norm of removing body hair but instead of liking it to femininity they link it to the notion of being human. The respondents also accept normative body shape standards and reject overly muscular or overweight bodies as possible objects of desire. The only area in which they did not seem to have any form of consensus is alcohol consumption in which case some respondents exhibited traditional values while others had more of a post-feminist position on the question. |
| Supervisor | Fodor Éva |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/bagyina_eszter.pdf |
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