Female subjectivity and agency in cultural time: a politicised space where women can florish.

This thesis considers the significance of agency for women, specifically for those who have been intersectionally disadvantaged. The research is positioned within a feminist poststructural framework, with a particular focus on language and how meanings construct individuals in ways that are socially and culturally specific. A QQI level three module, called Intercultural Awareness, was utilised for context where a politicised analysis was carried out on the level of understanding of the culturally constructed discourses that are shaping the subjectivities of the women within this group. Using a critical qualitative approach to research, seven participants took part in semi-structured, one-to-one interviews along with a focus group. This small study has no claims to universal generalisations, instead the findings critique whether the women within this specific group consider themselves to having more choice and agency in recent years. What the research reveals is that freedom and choice are predominantly illusory. In this era of neoliberal understanding, the individual is constructed into a capitalist subject by their dependency to the market-defined model of the self. Hence, a significant site of political struggle that warrants consideration is the mind, where power and control are not only exercised in the market, but in a hidden and insidious way by controlling the means of consciousness. The poststructural framework does not claim to an understanding of the world in all its complexities, but what it does offer is an altered epistemological stance which disrupts the gender status quo to some extent and allows for an exploration into the possibility of a different kind of agency