CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Hansen, Ida Hillerup |
|---|---|
| Title | Reading Textures of Grief : Developing an Anti-essentialising and Affectively Entangled Framework for Exploring Grief |
| Summary | The 2013 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders presented the official entry of bereavement into a psychobiological discourse. The scientific research that precedes this latest development reveal a discourse that defines "prolonged" and "excessive" bereavement after the event of loss through death as symptomatic of an "underlying pathology". While works in the fields of poststructuralist, feminist and queer scholarship have reimagined a concept of mourning with a critical potency inter alia to charge deaths produced by current biopolicies, their ethical and political promises of relieving the subject from such grievances have left experience of loss - now under increasing pathological intervention - largely unexplored. My project sets out to develop and enact a research practice which engages the affective and bodily experiences of loss through death to explore them as sites of alternative knowledge production on grief as well as points of resistance to the increasing biopolitical interventions on the bereaved subject. Moving to stage an anti-essentialist and affectively entangled encounter with Joan Didion's auto-biographical writings (Blue Nights 2011), I first review existing literature on bereavement and mourning against which I compose a framework for reading "textures" of grief in an intersection of affect theory and literary theory. Reading "textures" of grief thus brings together and engages the works of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Sedgwick 2003) and Rita Felski (Felski 2015) in developing a research practice which initiates in and develops from the intimacies of personal experience of loss and embodies the reflections and negotiations of the situated and implicated nature of knowledge production. My work offers a threefold contribution in initiating a dissection of the psychobiological discourse on bereavement; in recontextualising and re-imagining grief via different theoretical trajectories as a mode of living in proximity to death and, finally; in developing a framework for reading "textures" of grief. |
| Supervisor | Yoon, Hyaesin; Lukic, Jasmina |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/hansen_ida-hillerup.pdf |
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