ThePhdMom

So it official I now I have a very rough and very crude outline/chapter subjects for my dissertation. I have also a rough timeline for completion of each chapter. Now lets see if it works! I guess I should start at the beginning and let you all know exactly what it is I am researching.

My Research Questions:

1. What role did African American women play in the history of morality campaigns, vice control, and the problem of vice itself in the West?
2. How did the ideology of respectability factor into the discourse of twentieth century vice in the West?

I choose this subject because I am extremely interested in the ways that "womanhood" is redefined over space, time, class and racial differences. I actually became interested in this subject as an undergraduate when I did research on the stereotypes of African American women in films. It was interesting because here I found that actresses actually assigned a different meaning to the roles they were portraying on the silver screen. For example Hattie McDaniel once said it was better to play a maid in a movie and make $8,000 than to actually be a maid in real life making $8.00 a day. My reading of this statement lead me to conclude that McDaniel was referring to the "economic necessity/ incentive" for accepting and in many redefining acceptable notions of womanhood. For most African American woman living during the 1930s and 30s, they were circumscribed to menial economic, social and political niches in society. Many adapted to this by creating and re-creating new notions of "traditional" social expectations. This includes traditional notions of womanhood and femininity. Women adapted new identities for various reasons. Sometimes,like in the instance of McDaniel, the economic viability outweighed the future social implications of the image she portrayed on the silver screen. McDaniel was living in a time when African Americans, male or female, where accorded limited social mobility.

Fast forward to graduate school. While reading Confessions of A Video Vixen one winter break about 3 years ago, I again began to questions definitions of womanhood, such as why do women accept roles in the media and even in their everyday lives that seem to run counter to "traditional" definitions of womanhood? Why has a new definition of womanhood emerged? When did this emergence take place? What of the Girls Gone Wild and the Video Vixens or the countless reality shows that show women willing to bare all because they are "embracing" their "womanhood." How did we get to this point? Why are acts that would have been considered disreputable less than a century ago, today seen as exercising agency and autonomy or embracing our womanhood? How and why has the definition of womanhood changed? I know that McDaniel's case is not explicitly related to the phenom of "buck wild reality show woman" but her statement about the economic viability stuck with me and in short was very interesting.

So ultimately my questions surrounding the emergence of 21st century femininties led me to question the historic development of such ideas amongst African American women in the West-prior to the 21st century. I largely choose this parameters around my research because African American women in the west is largely an understudied area.

Ok Ok So as I mentioned earlier in the post, I have my chapter subjects figured out and even a timeline for writing each one. Roughly it looks like this:

1. Introduction (obviously I cannot fully complete this until the end)
   
2. Chapter 1: Fall 2010: What is a Train Ride? Gender and Respectability in San Francisco's Streetcars
3. Chapter 2: Winter 2011: Undermining, Redefining, and Performing the Politics of Respectability
   
4. Chapter 3: Spring 2011: The Dialectic of Disgrace and Respectability
   
5. Chapter 4: Summer 2011: Renegotiating Respectability through the 1920s and 30s
   
6. Conclusion: Summer 2011

Each chapter is broken down into 3-5 subcategories. I have alloted 2 months for each chapter and a month each for the introduction and conclusion. Based on the amount of research I have done and my argument, I have estimated (but of course you never know) that each chapter will be anywhere from 40-60 pages and my introduction and conclusion anywhere from 10-30 pages. Because I have researched and briefly outlined each chapter, I do not have to work in any particular order and it breaks up the monotony...I am however going to try to work from the beginning to the end...I will use the free write techniques suggested in the Bolker book, but I do modify them.

Thephdmom