Date of Award
2025
Degree Type
Restricted to Claremont Colleges Dissertation
Degree Name
Cultural Studies, PhD
Program
School of Arts and Humanities
Advisor/Supervisor/Committee Chair
Eve Oishi
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Darrell Moore
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Lucía Cantero
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Amanda Apgar
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2025 Lindsay Donaldson
Keywords
Autoethnography, Cultural Studies, Gender, Lesbian, Motherhood, Sexuality
Subject Categories
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Women's Studies
Abstract
This dissertation is a feminist autoethnography that explores how subjectivity is produced, regulated, and reoriented through personal experience in South Orange County, California. It focuses on my life as a late-in-life lesbian, mother, and former Evangelical Christian, and examines how gender, sexuality, and moral expectations are internalized across time and context. Through narratives of memories and reflections on journals, I explore the role of silence, emotional control, and social obligation in shaping who I believed I was allowed to become. These forces were embedded in everyday interactions, sustained through repetition, and enforced through institutions like the family, church, and community. My goal is to trace how subjectivity is formed and regulated through everyday practices shaped by gender, sexuality, and moral expectation. I also aim to show how personal narrative can reveal the subtle ways that power operates within environments that present themselves as tolerant or inclusive.
This project is based on over thirty years of journals, fieldnotes, and memories, which I revisit by incorporating elements of genealogical inquiry and reflexive analysis. I engage in a process of looking back in order to understand how norms were taken up, how I learned to regulate myself, and how I eventually began to live differently. This method allows for a close reading of experience across time, paying attention to the conditions that gave certain meanings power and excluded others from view. Rather than separating data from theory, I use writing as a way of generating insight, reflecting on moments of confusion, tension, or resistance to understand what they reveal about power and subject formation.
The cultural setting of South Orange County is central to this project. It is a region shaped by wealth, order, and the appearance of inclusion. Beneath that surface, however, lies an investment in normativity and control. As a mother raising children in this context, I was surrounded by expectations about what a “good” parent, wife, and woman should be. These expectations were reinforced through neighborhood schools, parenting groups, and faith-based communities. Much of the pressure to conform was unspoken, and silence was a defining feature of this landscape. It marked the boundaries of acceptable conversation and served to smooth over conflict, discomfort, or difference. I examine how silence operated within relationships, in social environments, and internally to avoid risk, maintain belonging, or suppress doubt.
This project is also a reflection on coming out as a queer person in midlife. I explore what it means to “become” a late-in-life lesbian, after having spent years performing heterosexuality in marriage, motherhood, and community life. Coming out was a slow, often painful shift in orientation, social standing, and self-understanding. This shift brought visibility, but also isolation. I lost relationships and social supports that had defined much of my adult life. At the same time, I began to understand queerness as both a label and as a way of seeing, moving, and relating differently. I reflect on how this reorientation changed the way I parent, form community, and understand care.
Silence is a recurring theme throughout this dissertation. I explore how it functions as a mechanism of power, shaping what can be expressed and what remains hidden. In my early life, silence was used to avoid conflict and maintain the appearance of order. It created a sense of emotional containment that made it difficult to name harm or articulate desire. Over time, I learned to participate in this silence by withholding, complying, and avoiding confrontation. I examine how silence became a form of self-discipline that preserved social belonging at the expense of personal truth. I also explore how silence eventually gave way, as certain moments, relationships, or reflections created openings for speech, movement, and change.
This dissertation contributes to feminist theory, queer studies, and critical motherhood studies by offering a detailed account of how normative expectations are lived, absorbed, and sometimes challenged. I focus on subtle shifts, moments of doubt, and quiet refusals that mark the beginning of change. Using personal narrative as a primary source of knowledge, this project argues that everyday life is a critical site for examining how power works and how subjects are formed. Writing about experience becomes a way to make sense of the conditions that shape us and to imagine how those conditions might be altered.
In telling this story, I do not seek resolution. I offer an account of becoming that remains ongoing, full of contradictions, and shaped by the forces I continue to navigate. The project is an effort to speak through what was once unspeakable, to understand how silence takes hold, and to consider what becomes possible when it is broken.
ISBN
9798293806195
Recommended Citation
Donaldson, Lindsay. (2025). Coming of Age in Coto: An Autoethnographic Account of Silence, Subjectivization, and the Experience of Becoming a Late-in-Life Lesbian in Orange County, California. CGU Theses & Dissertations, 1078. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/1078.
