• About
    • Login
    View Item 
    •   Institutional Repository Home
    • Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    •   Institutional Repository Home
    • Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Browse

    All of Institutional RepositoryCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsDepartmentThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsDepartment

    My Account

    LoginRegister

    Hand/Arbeit/Buch/Schrift: Approaching the Female Hand

    McEwen, Kathryn Elizabeth
    : https://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/etd-03222013-034444
    http://hdl.handle.net/1803/11040
    : 2013-04-17

    Abstract

    Hand/Arbeit/Buch/Schrift investigates the persistent absence of the female hand from representation. It suggests that the female hand embodies a pernicious blind spot in the humanist discourse, resisting representa-tion precisely because it challenges the accepted and often implicit narrative, which reads the hand as not only uniquely human, but also uniquely superior. This absence is, in fact, a constitutive gesture of the human hand as the triumphant instrument of humanity, in so far as to admit of limitations—for instance, those imposed by culturally determined, asymmetrical relations of gender—would be to concomitantly compro-mise the narrative of superiority expressed in the hand and its technical accomplishments. Against such a reading, and in contrast to previous assumptions, alternate narratives of the hand suggest that the female hand is in fact of central importance to an understanding of the human hand and, consequently, the human subject. Through a series of unlikely encounters—Hannah Höch’s early essays on embroidery alongside Sigmund Freud’s work on femininity to explore the working hand and its consequences; the psychology of the hand developed by Charlotte Wolff in dialogue with the many hands of Rainer Maria Rilke; and Rahel Levin Varnhagen and Friedrich Nietzsche meet at the question of the gender, genre, and the authority of the writing hand—this thesis unfolds a peculiar history to find evidence of the female hand in manual accomplishments excluded from most accounts. And it is by first exploring the ways in which the very familiarity of the hand and its capabilities obscure complicity in a complex of socially and historically determined conventions, which would seek to outline and define proper limits, proper actions, and, in turn, proper agents, that the variety of gendered, handed experience becomes intelligible. By offering a more nuanced consideration of the hand as a cultural object, restored to the cultural body, this project finally also suggests to a more general reconsideration of the cultural body as a space of negotiation.
    Show full item record

    Files in this item

    Icon
    Name:
    McEwen.pdf
    Size:
    1.612Mb
    Format:
    PDF
    View/Open

    This item appears in the following collection(s):

    • Electronic Theses and Dissertations

    Connect with Vanderbilt Libraries

    Your Vanderbilt

    • Alumni
    • Current Students
    • Faculty & Staff
    • International Students
    • Media
    • Parents & Family
    • Prospective Students
    • Researchers
    • Sports Fans
    • Visitors & Neighbors

    Support the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries

    Support the Library...Give Now

    Gifts to the Libraries support the learning and research needs of the entire Vanderbilt community. Learn more about giving to the Libraries.

    Become a Friend of the Libraries

    Quick Links

    • Hours
    • About
    • Employment
    • Staff Directory
    • Accessibility Services
    • Contact
    • Vanderbilt Home
    • Privacy Policy