PhebeAnn

Wolframe

Honours Bachelor of Arts in Women's Studies

 

Women's Studies was an exciting new world which allowed me to consider my own experiences, identity and emotions as important sites of knowledge and inquiry. This feeling was fostered in part by the personalized attention I received from the dedicated, fun and diversely knowledgeable faculty at Lakehead, who encourage students to initiate discussions and projects that matter to them. Women's Studies was the first educational experience of my life where I felt that, rather than simply being a student, I could bring my whole self to the table. I was immediately captivated by the idea of the personal being political: things I had experienced my whole life, but didn't know how to talk about––like sexism––were suddenly understandable in a broader historical, cultural and political context. Women's Studies gave me a language to talk about the ways in which gender, race, class, sexuality, ability and other aspects of identity, shape, and are shaped by each other in a shifting system of ideas. I learned to be a keen critical thinker, something that not only prepared me well for graduate school and my current PhD project but which has also made me a more engaged and empathic citizen.

 

I am a PhD candidate at McMaster University's Department of English and Cultural Studies. My dissertation examines the ways in which post-WWII Anglo-Atlantic (British, Canadian, American) women's literature works to critique psychiatry as an apparatus of biopolitics. It queries how we might consider madness as a way of reading texts, as a space for re-envisioning identity politics, and as a venue through with to build new kinds of community across difference.