Misfit Memory Work: Challenges to K-12 Self-Portraiture Lessons Stigmatizing Female Students with Scars and Illnesses
Open Access
- Author:
- Hwang, Eunkyung
- Graduate Program:
- Art Education
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 30, 2024
- Committee Members:
- Karen Keifer-Boyd, Program Head/Chair
Aaron Knochel, Major Field Member
Wanda Knight, Major Field Member
Janet Lyon, Outside Unit & Field Member
Karen Keifer-Boyd, Chair & Dissertation Advisor - Keywords:
- Misfit Memory Work
Women with Scars and Illnesses
Misfit
Feminist Disability Studies
Stigmatization of Scars
Memory Work
Arts-based Research
Self-Portraits
K-12 Self-Portraiture Lessons
South Korean Art Education - Abstract:
- In this dissertation, I use memory recollection to examine the pervasive ableist and sexist assumptions about women’s scars and illnesses within South Korean K-12 self-portraiture lessons. Over the last seven decades, South Korean K-12 self-portraiture lessons have tended to disregard female students with scars and illnesses’ emotional turmoil regarding their bodymind differences and related stigmas. This study adopts misfit theory as a theoretical framework to understand those students as misfits who are not well-aligned to bodymind normativity in an ableist society. Developing a misfit memory work methodology, I integrated an arts-based approach and memory work to explore my own memories of scar and illness stigma in self-portraiture lessons. In this process, I contemplated the relationships between my misfitting experiences and cultural artifacts, such as my family photographs, self-portraits, and self-portraiture curricular resources, and I engaged in informal conversations with my mother about those experiences. As an outcome of this dissertation, I constructed a digital curricular resource archive, the Misfit Curricular Box, to encourage art educators and students to critically reflect upon scar and illness stigma in self-portraiture lessons. Through layered analysis, this study found that South Korean K-12 self-portraiture lessons implicitly idealize female students without scars and illnesses as normative post-colonial subjects. I also illustrated that female students with scars and illnesses often engage in unattainable negotiations with societal expectations and experience misfit feelings in such lessons. Moreover, this study argues that memory work is effective in uncovering and challenging ableist and sexist assumptions about female students with scars and illnesses in these lessons by visualizing misfitting experiences through arts-based memory recollection. Ultimately, this dissertation underscores the urgent need for an anti-ableist art pedagogy that can revalue the misfit knowledge of female students with scars and illnesses and encourage their critical identity construction in K-12 self-portraiture lessons.