(Un)Contained Breasts: A Phenomenological Analysis of Flesh, Femininity and Feelings
Abstract
This thesis offers an original examination of the affective relations between bodies, clothing, and space by examining women’s experiences and feelings towards their breasts and wearing a bra in public. Exploring participants' contained and uncontained experiences with their breasts provided an opportunity to interrogate how heteropatriarchy requires a fashioning or containing of both feelings and flesh in public. Drawing on feminist and queer methodologies including ‘dirty participation’ and autoethnography, I report on insights gathered from twelve walking interviews conducted in Edmonton in the summer of 2019. Walking interviews included participants navigating their everyday geographies twice: once while wearing a bra and another while bra-less. These interviews demonstrate how social discourse on breast containment shapes women’s embodied experiences and their engagement with their bras. Utilizing the bra as an object of study, I offer an analysis of the corporeographies of how wearing—and not wearing—a bra impacts women’s spatial experiences. Findings include that participants differentiated between physical, social, and psychological comfort in relation to bralessness, using a range of strategies to navigate daily trade-offs between these categories. The concept of abjection provided a useful lens for interpreting participants’ experiences of feeling vulnerable and out of place. Finally, I propose some preliminary features of a ‘braless geography’ based on women’s feelings of (dis)comfort, safety and vulnerability in a range of urban spaces (e.g. particular neighbourhoods) and specific locales (e.g. bars, hair salons). This research affirms that the bra acts as a potent social and physical force in shaping and containing bodies spatially, socially, and psychologically.