Feminism, theology and everyday domestic skill within a phenomenological framework: An autoethnographic reflection

Butt, Patricia Mary (2024). Feminism, theology and everyday domestic skill within a phenomenological framework: An autoethnographic reflection. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

Academic theological writing on the incarnation avoids or contains very little phenomenologically unless informed by a feminist approach, such as that of Karen O'Donnell. This demeans or diminishes, implicitly or explicitly, the value of everyday lived experience in the life of faith, especially that of women, with whom the shaping of people's everyday remains, excluding them from a sense of being incarnated. To this end, my project reflects theologically on an autoethnographic account of my everyday domestic lived experience. Recognising the complexity of representing such an elusive concept/activity, I interweave five different thematic approaches because I work from a conviction that human lived experience is always embedded, entails integrative elements of 'both/and', and doesn't fit into reductionistic binaries, however convenient those categories are in writing about human living in a dissociated fashion. Wanting to be explicitly inductive in my approach, and framing the study within the phenomenological viewpoint of Maurice Merleau-Ponty on lived experience, especially in relation to his notion of 'flesh', I use an emergent analysis of Constructive Grounded Theory (Kathy Charmaz). My inability to 'untangle' the 'tangled web' of my everyday life into a dominating thread of theory leads me to the theorisation of the everyday in the work of Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Ben Highmore and Luce Giard. I turn to the theopoetics of Catherine Keller, Richard Kearney, Mayra Rivera and Heather Walton to provide a richer, edgier, more mysterious sense of the flux, fluidity, dynamism and messy chaos of fleshy being in the home than are to be found in may feminist theories of embodiment. Finally, I resolve that all of these lenses are need to enable the 'appearing' or 'making visible' the 'flesh' that creates my daily living, especially when it comes to the facilitation of relationships with those who are non-verbal, pre-verbal, or 'othered' in some way, as Iris Marion Young and Mary McClintock Fulkerson, amongst others, have identified.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):