Normative Aspirations: Sex/Gender Conformative Transsexual Women's Agency and Political Subjectivity in Contemporary Feminist Discourses.

Abstract

Engaging with existing epistemological narratives regarding sex/gender conformative transsexual women's agency and political subjectivity within contemporary modernist and postmodernist feminist discourses, this thesis seeks to demonstrate how prevailing definitions of agency are rooted within a hegemonic epistemological narrative that continues to devaluate normative expressions and experiences of sex/gender. Drawing upon the premises of what Braidotti (2008) has named the post-secular turn in feminism; Haraway's (1988) theory of situated knowledges; and Kolozova's (2014) non-philosophical approach, I seek to propose an alternative epistemological model of situated agencies.