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Item Resistance, healing and empowerment through autobiographical therapeutic performance–– 愛，媽媽 (Love, Mum) : a solo matrilineal memoir and autoethnographic inquiry on Chinese womanhood and ‘The good woman’ ideal : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing at Massey University, New Zealand. EMBARGOED until 30 July 2027.(Massey University, 2024) Lam, Cynthia Hiu YingMy research is an autoethnographic inquiry that employs creative and critical methodologies to examine the question: How does the process of writing and performing one’s life experiences and trauma act as a form of resistance to the dominant ‘good woman’ narrative, leading to personal healing, empowerment and transformation? Through the creation of my one-woman show, 愛，媽媽 (Love, Mum), a matrilineal memoir about three generations of Chinese women, I investigate how the creative process involving the writing, rehearsing and performance of my play can become a form of resistance and counter-storying against the dominant ‘good woman’ narrative, leading to personal healing and empowerment. I begin by discussing the historical context of the virtuous Chinese woman, and present research by scholars who demonstrate that depression in women contains a gendered lens, resulting from the socio-cultural pressures of living up to the ‘good woman’ ideal. My analysis uses the methodological framework of autobiographical/autoethnographic therapeutic performance (ATP). This is a method that focuses on the working through of personal traumatic material through writing and performance. My research utilises a transdisciplinary praxis, combining both arts-based and psychoanalytic theories and practice related to trauma recovery and the healing processes of ATP. My investigation is autoethnographic and deeply personal as my own life experience and creative process is used to answer my research question, as well as shining a light on the socio-cultural structures we live in. Employing a mixture of creative practice, personal reflection, theoretical examination, and a close reading of my play script and performance, I demonstrate how the creative process I went through has led to a form of personal healing and transformation, with the potential to impact and engage with the wider community.Item She's a lush : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters in Creative Writing at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand(Massey University, 2018) Collette, MarianaIn this thesis I examine the form of memoir and look at how and why female memoirists use fictional techniques to establish their narrative of problem drinking. Over the last decade, there has been a rise in the number of memoirs being written about the problematic relationship between women and their drinking, yet there is still very little about this topic from a New Zealand perspective. I argue that memoir is an important tool to examine larger social issues through a personal viewpoint and that the use of memoir gives power to women’s voices on particular issues. This thesis is comprised of two parts. Section one is a critical essay entitled ‘Women who Drink and Memoir.’ Section Two is a creative component consisting of a memoir piece entitled ‘She’s a Lush.’ The critical essay examines Drink: The Intimate Relationship between Women and Alcohol by Ann Dowsett- Johnston (2013) ; Lit by Marry Karr (2010); Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp (1996); Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget by Sarah Hepola (2015); A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin (1977) and Mrs D. is Going Without by Lotta Dann (2014), exploring how and why they use social and medical data, metaphor, chronology, characterisation and intimate detail to tell their story of problem drinking. The creative component is my own memoir.Item So let it fall : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Creative Writing, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand(Massey University, 2017) Greeks, Stevie ReneeWhat are you? This Master of Creative writing thesis seeks to explore this question and other questions it leads to. The thesis consists of a collection of linked autobiographical stories that explore identity, “So Let it Fall” (80%), and an accompanying exegesis, “What Are You?” (20%). Through the writing of “So Let it Fall” I tell the story of my own experiences as a multi-‐ethnic woman growing up in New Zealand with mixed Māori, Chinese and Pākehā heritage. I explore this mixed identity throughout my project through evoking contrasts and contradictions within my own personal experiences. Specifically, I tell a story of living between two parents, and I focus on the separations that developed within my life and my identity as a result of living between two cultural upbringings. When evoking different identities in “So Let it Fall,” I wrote in scene to highlight formative moments in my life as well as scenes that illustrate important characteristics in each of my parents that have been formative of my own identity. In the creative work as a whole I delve into the different roles that I have moved through as I grew up, and by doing so discover who I am. The accompanying exegesis “What Are You?” places “So Let it Fall” in context by exploring the driving questions behind this project and explicating the creative process involved. The purpose of this exegesis is to illuminate the ideas and research that went into the production of “So Let it Fall.” This is done first by outlining why I chose the the form of autobiography, then examining a range of recent autobiographical writing in New Zealand and the various perspectives these works offer. Specifically, I discuss how the nonfiction writing of Witi Ihimaera, Manying Ip, Alice Te Punga-‐Somerville, Tina Makereti, Tze Ming Mok, Ashleigh Young and Tracey Slaughter have informed my work. The intent of this combined creative and critical project is to find value in personal experiences and to create a wider pool of experiences within creative nonfiction writing in New Zealand. This thesis is not constructed to represent or speak for any ethnic groups or identities. This is formation of an identity through autobiographical writing that is my own.Item The different shapes of love : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Communication in Expressive Arts at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand(Massey University, 2016) Wheelock, TiffanyThe work is an extract or part of a creative non-fiction book in the autobiographical genre. The book is based on the author’s romantic relationships throughout her life to this point. The book follows a developmental journey as the author discovers who she is, what qualities are most important to her and what type of person she wants to end up with. The book describes different stages of relationships and the emotions one experiences, such as being very in love or very heartbroken, and touches on the author’s experience in dealing with these emotions. There are three sections to the critical component of my predominantly creative thesis. The first part involves looking at conventions of female autobiographical writing, how it often, (through different time periods), includes elements from the romance genre, and how my writing fits into this paradigm. The second part explores an array of different academic sources on how writing about one’s own experiences can be therapeutic for the author. Lastly, the third and final part of the critical component highlights writing styles, techniques and approaches used in some recent successful non-fiction books that include examples of autobiographical writing on the topic of romantic relationships, as well as aspects of life journeys, bildungsroman or self-development. The section explains how I adopted aspects of these approaches alongside my own writing style to write my book.Item Death and individualism : Joan Didion's year of ruptured thinking ; Walking grieved : a meditation on love, loss & memory : a thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Creative Writing, Massey University (Wellington)(Massey University, 2013) Howland, Peter JIn this thesis I explore the contemporary grief memoir, an increasingly popular subset within the autobiography genre, and one that primarily concerns authors’ subjective recollections and responses to the rupture in the fabric of their lives caused by the death of an intimate other – typically a spouse, parent or child. In my exegesis I examine Joan Didion’s grief memoir – The Year of Magical Thinking (2011 [2005]) – written in the year following the sudden death of her husband of forty years and fellow writer, John Dunne, and the concurrent serious illness and hospitalisation of their adult daughter, Quintana, in 2004. In particular I analyse how Didion’s memoir addresses the rupturing of her reflexive individuality and especially her dispositional orientation and idealization of an agentic, informed and progressive self as key components of her self-identity. In my creative non-fiction writing – Walking Grieved: a mediation of love, loss & memory – I explore the rupture and my responses occasioned by the death of my wife in 2003. I specifically reflect on how this has impacted on my romantic, familial and other self-identities and on my understandings of the constructs (social, historical and subjective) of intimate love, dying and death, memory, enduring grief, elective sociality and the narrations of self and other. Contemporary grief narratives represent an emerging body of literary work and socio-psychological theorizing that contests the ‘denial of death’ (Ariès 2008 [1981]: 559) ethos prevalent in modern Western societies. They also contest the equally prevalent Freudian model of pathological grief that asserts survivors need to ‘move on’ from grieving to form new intimate attachments, ideally within months (Dennis 2008; Neimeyer et al 2001). These memoirs represent a contemporary, even post-modern, form of ars moriendi and promote varied forms of ‘textured recovery’ (Prodromou 2012: 57) that are based on subjective, nuanced and eclectic grieving processes and outcomes. These include highly personal searches for understanding and comprehension of the death, of rupture and grieving, and the fashioning of post-rupture identities, ideas, values and practices that frequently incorporate the deceased and which span a range of themes – restorative, evaluative, interpretive, affirmative, affective, transformative (Dennis 2008). As a form of autobiography, grief memoirs also address issues of self-identity as a series of constantly evolving narratives or stories that individuals tell about themselves and which, in feedback loop, both generate and reflect the evolving modalities and ethics of autobiography (Eakin 1999, 2008). Narrated self-identity is always period and socio-culturally specific. For the middle-classes and higher social strata of post-industrial societies, self-identity therefore routinely coalesces around the hegemony and practices ‘reflexive individuality’ (Beck 2002: 3) – especially the ideals of agentic, knowledgeable, reflective (self and social) and progressive individuality. Indeed authors of grief memoirs typically highlight their personal experiences of rupture and loss, and particularly their responses to first experiencing a ‘death blow’ (Rimmon-Kenan 2002:10) followed by an ‘identity crisis’ (Rimmon-Kenan 2002: 10). Furthermore grief memoirs are subject to the norms and expectations generated within the ‘autobiographical pact’ (Lejeune 1989: 22) that exists between authors and readers. The autobiographical pact asserts that the text’s narrator is the author (or that any connection to a ‘ghost writer’ is overt); secondly, that revelations about the author’s identity, experiences, memories, beliefs, etc are truthful; and finally, that recollections are tactful, especially in terms of revelations concerning others. Clearly notions of tactfulness are a matter of evolving debate. Moreover, perceptions of truthfulness are framed within understandings of the limitations, inherent idiosyncratic biases and the selectiveness or justificatory character of personal memories. Issues of truthfulness are also framed by standards of ‘emotional truth’ (Williams quoted in Miller 2007: 543), in which recollections of the author are orientated toward producing verifiable, subjective truths that are not directly contradicted by historical or agreed fact.Item Infinite regress : metafictional memoir : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters in English at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand(Massey University, 2011) Rawson, Christopher JohnWriters like James Frey, author of the controversial work A Million Little Pieces, have shown aspiring memoirists the negative consequences of deliberately fabricating portions of a memoir. The question memoir writers now face: how much can an author add to or omit from a memoir before it risks betraying the reader’s trust in the author, which is essential to the proper functioning of memoir as a genre? I discovered I would be unable to produce a coherent or truthful memoir without fictionalising portions of it in a manner that could have subjected me to the same criticisms Frey faced. Because I did not want to produce a wholly fictional work but felt unable to reveal certain aspects of my true life in a straightforward memoir format, I instead made the problem of producing a truthful memoir the central focus of my work. My novella, Infinite Regress, uses metafiction to subvert the genre of memoir as an attempt to work around this issue of truthful self-representation. The analysis following Infinite Regress examines the characteristics of memoir as a genre, how reader response to memoirs hinges on readers being able to trust the memoirist, and the consequences of a memoirist breaking that trust. I then examine metafiction as a possible method of side-stepping the issue of truth in memoir; through use of metafiction, an author can deliberately draw a reader’s attention to the problematic nature of truth in any narrative. Finally, I demonstrate how metafiction does not ultimately represent a solution to the problem of truthful self-representation, and I determine that writing a memoir in a metafictional mode may only be preferable to not writing a memoir at all.Item Playing with freud: radical narcissism and intertextuality in frame's intensive care and daughter buffalo(Rodopi B.V. Amsterdam-New York, 2009) Lawn JMIn this essay, my aim is to place Frame and Freud in an interpretative relationship by pursung just one point of intersection between them: the modulations of the Narcissus myth in Intensive Care and Daughter Buffalo, focusing on scenes that concentrate the dilemmas of transference, "desperate capture," and misapprehended love descsribed so acutely in Frame's autobiography.Item Putting 'Humpty' together again : a testifying of the embodied nature of human experiencing : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand(Massey University, 2009) Tuck, Brian WilliamThe complex functioning of the human body produces the biological, historical and environmental contingencies of lived existence. These experiences of embodiment are chiasmic, dialectical and dialogical, and underpin the narrative dilemmas we create through the storied nature of our attempts to make sense of them. In testifying my own embodiment this autobiographical form of sensual scholarship emphasizes the subjective basis for my body’s psychology. By developing the complicating action segments of my life story told through interview data into a chronologically-ordered and textually- layered account of personally significant memories, I craft a story of my panicking body. My upbringing was influenced by discourses that reinforced parental and family affiliation at the expense of my feeling body. Unravelling my need to exercise as a contingency of this affiliation provides retrospective meaning to the distress my panicking caused. Situating my feelings, thoughts, emotions and actions within the broader constraints of my family’s history, community, religion and culture reveals the contingent nature of my embodiment. Describing the shifting contingencies of a life lived since my upbringing in the small, rural town of Inglewood, New Zealand, provides the opportunity to recognize and to re-align the dialectics of identity that help to make up my body’s psychology. Juxtaposing this narrative meaning-making are my revelations of experiential integration achieved through the flow of exercise. Understood as an extension of my body’s fundamental sensuality, this evolutionally-refined capacity for engagement underpins my lived experiencing. Together these sentient and reflexive forms of testimony confirm the inherence of my sensuality and the circumstance of self-hood, and invite you, the reader, to explore the workings of your own body. By revealing the sensual and symbolic strands of my embodiment this story of human contingency reveals something of the fleshy consciousness that we all share, not by speaking for anyone else, but by calling attention to the taken-for-granted nature of its unfolding. By arguing for a psychology more relevant to lived experiencing, my thesis questions the body of Western science and, in particular, psychology’s version of it. Articulating the felt nature of my experiencing situates my mind back in my body and, in doing so, fleshes out its psychology. While the insights shared here are personal, the relevance of the felt-body is found in the ways it becomes discoursed and narrated.
