Intro Paragraph and Annotated Outline

While ruminating on the myriad possibilities of what to focus on in this project, I found myself constantly returning to the issue of my positionality and my development of a feminist belief system, which is still evolving, impacting and troubling any subject I can think of as it relates to feminism. Through this desire, always popping up in my thoughts regarding any possible subject for this paper, I discovered the necessity of investigating this positionality and where I find myself in respect to feminist theory. This necessity originated in what I felt to be an underlying essentialism inherent in feminism, especially in regard to my recent exposure to the interventions of influential queer theorists into the field of feminism. Through an exploration of my positionality and an exploration into what I felt to be this essentialism in feminism, I realized that what I was feeling as a point of contention with feminism in general was in reality an issue of how feminism is taught in academic institutions. Through my own path through two different universities, I have seen that, although there are a multitude of feminist theoretical works addressing identity in relation to gender and sexuality, the institutionalization of women's studies still discursively limits conceptions of gender identity. This project, then, has become a means of addressing how gender identity is constructed as an experience that leads to a knowable truth through a discourse that still incorporates the term "women" as an identifiable group through academic institutions.
In this project, I will investigate the idea that the feminist discourse, as it is taught and engaged with in academic institutions, constructs gender as an experience that is a site of knowledge production, the negative consequences of this and possible interventions in this through the work of influential queer theorists. My goal is to question my feminist beliefs through queer theoretical understandings and deconstructions of gender and gain a deeper understanding of my positionality as it relates to feminism and the category of women.