In the last post, I discussed the things that I learnt during my undergraduate degree and stated at the end of it that it led me to discover the basics of gender studies and feminism which I wanted to know more about and which grew into me jumping straight into a master’s degree. This blog post discusses my master’s degree and what I learnt whilst I did it and looking back at it now. The photo above is the main entrance building, Richard Hoggart (all the buildings were named after alumni or famous scholars), on what was a very snowy day!
I studied my one year full time course at Goldsmiths, University of London between 2017 and 2018 and graduated with a Merit. The course was combined between the Media school and Sociology school within the university which we could choose modules from these two as well as gender modules from the schools of Anthropology, Politics and Cultural Studies. I completed a range of modules during the three years that consisted of topics on gender and sexuality in China and Russia, gender and happiness, disabled female comediennes and homophobia in relation to female footballers.
Although I really enjoyed doing the course, there were some downsides as well as ups. At the time I did the master’s, during the Spring term lecturers across the country went on strike for three to four weeks over pension pay. Though we supported our staff members, it did mean that we missed rather a few lectures and this was even more despairing due to the fact that it was near the end of teaching time (if you’ve been to university, you’ll know that teaching time only lasts from the beginning of the academic year to April/May). The class size in compulsory modules was also WAY TOO BIG – forty people.
Affect, Intersectionality, Feminist Disability Studies
What I did get to learn about was new theories such as affect and intersectionality. Although I am writing and will be creating a separate web page or blog post of a glossary of terms which may help anyone who wants to study or get a career in media and marketing, I’ll quickly explain the two last words I wrote. Affect is emotion that exceeds and escapes emotion or the acting and moving we do before and during emotion whilst intersectionality is a fluid model of difference between women that was originally used as a description for the oppressions faced by black women.
“I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whom or to someone else’s ignorance.” (bell hooks in 1998)
Although I explained part of the reason why I wanted to do this course at the end of my undergraduate blog post, the other factor was that I wanted to specifically learn about and do research into women with disabilities. This first came to light when I had to write a 5000 word introductory essay a few weeks before the course began which I chose to write on my identity and media representations of disability. I myself am a disabled woman as I have Asperger’s Syndrome.
This led me to learning about feminist disability theory, a form of academic cultural work that tries to challenge dominant assumptions and unsettle tired stereotypes about gender and disability. The theory was helpful for producing an academic approach for my thesis as well as giving me a theoretical understanding of disabled women. Scholars from both sides (feminism versus disability) still appear to not include one another in their arguments and mainstream feminism itself still gives prominence and more attention to campaigning for the able-bodied.
“From a feminist perspective, if we are to tackle the fact that women have been historically oppressed because of characteristics that are seen to be different from the male norm, how can we protest such treatment while simultaneously excluding from our movement the needs and agendas of those with other stigmatized characteristics?” (Laura Bates)
My Master’s Dissertation
My dissertation in the end was on how disabled women experience being fans of television dramas. The research focused on two specifically chosen programmes (Game of Thrones and Poldark) and was made up of two half-an-hour interviews with four women through Twitter direct messaging AND an autoethnography of my own personal Twitter account to show my own experiences of being a disabled female fan of these shows. For those who do not know (and this will also be in the glossary), an autoethnography is when the academic uses self-reflection of written content to explore personal experience – mine was done via the social media artefacts of tweets that I had posted within a period of six months.
The data from both the eight interviews and my tweets were analysed within three themes: Disability Affects, Communication and Interaction, and Eroticism. The analysis that came out of the data meant I had to both reflect upon myself as well as the four participants. My dissertation as a whole argued that being female, disabled and a fan are identity categories constructed in relation to the fantasy spaces of the television dramas rather than real life situations and that these categories are tied together as an assembled identity.
I absolutely adored reading, researching, interviewing people, writing and editing my thesis – I got to write about subjects that I was and still am passionate about whilst also learning new things about myself and the topics throughout. The handing in process made it all a little difficult though – the file of the PDF was too big so I had to get rid of some images which can muck up a Word document and so the final edit I submitted was a little all over the place in terms of layout. Though this distressed me rather a lot at the time, I felt happy with what I had written and would not change anything about the whole process of doing the dissertation from conception to completion.
What I Learnt
So, what are five things I learnt during the course overall? One was how different it was being at university whilst living back at home with my parents rather than living in student accommodation. The journey took 45 minutes by bus and I went in most days during the week for lectures, meetings and to use the library. It was nice only having to think about lunch and travel in terms of money but it did feel a little weird sometimes having to shut myself in my room when I wanted to work. Second was discovering a great local coffee shop which became my favourite place to go to when I didn’t want to be in the library.
Third, was spending time in the library and doing lots and lots and lots of reading. Some of my now favourite writers are feminists – Laura Bates, Mary Beard, bell hooks, Rebecca Coleman, Rhiannon Bury and Sara Ahmed. I also always recommend Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler. Fourth is the friends I made and fifth was that some lecturers can teach well whilst others really simply can’t – also lecturers who let guest lecturers do a session and then say they don’t agree with anything the guest has said?!
All in all, I’d heavily recommend either doing a master’s degree or doing a course in gender studies - particularly in these prevailing yet wonderful times we currently live in.
Hope you’ve enjoyed reading about my master’s experience and definitely check out the women I’ve recommended – if you have any suggestions of feminist writers/academics that I might not have read, then let me know in the comments.
Beth x