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Abstract
This research was built around my intellectual interest in trying to understand the ways that discourses of gender difference support and/or challenge gender inequalities.
Many women turn to books as a resource for accessing information and knowledge that will help them navigate their jobs and careers. There is a large body of personal and professional development literature (what I call "informative literature") written specifically for women, and these books nearly always construct women and men as dramatically different, often even oppositional. Employing cultural studies theory that takes popular culture (e.g. informative literature) to be a site where discourses of gender are crafted, negotiated, and reconfigured, and using audience ethnography as a research method that focuses on audiences' engagement with texts, I studied 30 women readers and the books they read. I was interested in finding out what relationships exist among the texts, women's engagement with those texts, and the gender identities that women craft for themselves. I conducted multiple in-depth interviews with participants and spent several days with them at their jobs. My focus was to observe and analyze the ways that women articulated multiple (e.g. classed, raced, and sexualized) discourses of gender difference in developing gender strategies to navigate, transgress, and/or transform gender hierarchies in their workplaces and careers.
Participants read a broad range of books, had different reading practices, and engaged the content of books in dramatically different ways, and the 30 women in my study performed 30 different gender identities. Indeed, there were more than 30 because participants often performed multiple, context specific, gender identities that were imbued differently by race, class, sexuality, and sexual orientation. This dissertation is built around the one salient uniformity in the data which is that women did, despite extraordinarily diverse backgrounds, experiences, jobs, work environments, and identities, craft creative and effective gender strategies that served their interests in their work lives, and books were often importantly related to those strategies.