Abstract:
In my presentation I use time as the binary I am disrupting, and disintegration as my creative method. Drawing upon journal writings from the first year of my enrolment as a full time PhD student after 30 years of working life as a full time employee, I allow a disintegrative process of rhythmic destabilisation to unfold with full force. This unmaking provides the basis for an excruciated confrontation with time projected as a metronomic, and thus binaric, presence and agent, underpinning my understanding of the nature of the thesis task. This writing practice follows Margaret Somerville’s body place writing methodology (Somerville, 1999) which she developed as a way of undertaking her own thesis. In Somerville’s Body Landscape Journals, body place writing is a tentative and partial but powerful answer to the question of ‘How does the settler belong?’ (Probyn, 2002). In my own thesis I examine family stories from my maternal line of pioneer landholders in Gippsland to consider female settler subjectivities through the language of family stories, where the metaphor and metonymy of the feminine in landscape create complex diffractions of meaning and interpretation.The tick-tock of binaries starts to stutter and fail as time falls apart in the new territory of doctoral study. By naming time as a binary I am able to re-claim control over the possibility of agency.Probyn, F. (2002). How does the settler belong? Westerly, Vol 47, November issue.Somerville, M. (19990. Body/landscape journals. Carlton: Spinifex.