Gazing back

The thesis presents an account of a participatory research project in which community experts collectively engaged in uncovering and contesting gendered power, heterosexism and cisgenderism. Initially the project had sought to engage with and tackle gendered power and sexual violence as community issues; however as the collaborative group work developed so did the issues to be addressed. Through the collective work it became clear that it was impossible to engage with gendered power without engaging with the interconnected and pervasive forms of heterosexism and cisgenderism and to engage with violence was to entirely rethink and critique how violence is constructed in 'common sense' terms as well as in contemporary mainstream literature.
The collective group work used memory work techniques in challenging dominant
and problematic knowledges. A version of critical discourse analysis was adopted in analysing the fieldwork text. The analysis worked from a poststructural feminist standpoint and was constituted by five lines of inquiry. A reflexive reading was written in order to map the connections between the issues arising in the fieldwork with those that were examined as part of the analysis.
Based upon the insights rendered from the reflexive reading and the five lines of
inquiry three knowledge claims were constructed. Firstly; with regard to embodiment, subjectivities which resist or transition through the gender binary are subjugated through essentialist constructions of the sexed body which strategically reinforce the legitimacy of a prescriptive alignment of sexed bodies, (hetero)sexuality and gendered status. Secondly, that gendered subjectivity is worked, reworked and potentially resisted through an interconnected and normalised set of gendered discursive resources which have implications for the
construction and constraint of sexualities, bodies and gendered status. Thirdly, that violence in all its forms from subtle paternalism to overt hostility is concerned with the maintenance of oppressive relations and thus the subjugation of particular forms of subjectivity.