Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Feminist wave'
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Briggs, Alison. "[Nietzsche the third-wave feminist /." Diss., Connect to the thesis, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/10066/700.
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Protic, Serena. "The impact of fourth wave feminism: Using social media as a feminist resource." Bachelor's thesis, Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, 2019.
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There is little doubt that the Internet, and especially social media, has revolutionised our lives, transforming the way in which we communicate (Liveperson 2017), read the news (Pew Research Center 2016), shop and conduct business (Deloitte 2015), work (Zetterstrom 2012) and even find love (Pew Research Center 2015).
The Internet has had an impact on feminism as well, revolutionising the way feminists participate in political and cultural activism and contributing to the creation of a fourth feminist wave. Thanks to the Internet, virtually anybody who has access to it can become an activist and fight for the movement from the comfort of their home, whether by contributing to the creation of an online archive, signing petitions, supporting boycott movements or sharing their experiences on a blog (Cochrane 2013). But what is the real impact of the Internet on the way activists operate? Will it replace grassroots activism with time, or is it contributing to the development of new strategies, which will cooperate with existing methods, in an effort to collectively change the culture we are living in? This study suggests the unfolding of a new, fourth feminist wave, analyses the contribution of the Internet to fourth wave feminism and explores the potential of online activism as a tool to combat misogyny.
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Katona, Leah Andrea. "The Use of Violence as Feminist Rhetoric: Third-Wave Feminism in Tarantino's Kill Bill Films." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2008. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/2759.
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For the purpose of this thesis, the main focus of the feminist rhetorical criticism method was specifically linked to gender-related power inequities. This method was especially appropriate for the analysis of how film violence is used as a feminist rhetorical strategy in the Kill Bill films. This thesis is more closely aligned with challenging rhetorical standards as it sought to identify feminist counter positions of rhetoric in film violence.
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Llewellyn, Dawn Louise. "Women's spiritual reading as a third wave feminist practice." Thesis, Lancaster University, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.547942.
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VanNewkirk, Robbin Hillary. "Third Wave Feminist History and the Politics of Being Visible and Being Real." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2006. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/wsi_theses/1.
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This project works to illuminate some of the main theoretical claims that writers of the third wave make in order to understand these claims as rhetorical devices used to make themselves visible and real. Being visible is a common theme in third wave texts and realness is a site that is both contested and embraced. Being Visible and being real work together to situate third wave actors in a U.S. feminist continuum that is sprinkled with contradiction and ambiguity. This thesis will examine the contextual development of third wave feminism, and then using examples of realness and visibility in the three third wave anthologies, Being Real, Third Wave Agenda, and Catching a Wave, this thesis will interrogate at the rhetorical significance of those themes.
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Fibbe, Leigh Ann. "Personal theorizing: a strategic approach to third wave feminist theory." The Ohio State University, 2000. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1382549735.
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Bly, Elizabeth Ann. "Generation X and the Invention of a Third Feminist Wave." Cleveland, Ohio : Case Western Reserve University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1259803398.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Case Western Reserve University, 2010.Title from PDF (viewed 2009-12-30). Department of History. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references and appendices. Available online via the OhioLINK ETD Center.
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Wallenberg, Louise. "Upsetting the male : feminist interventions in the new queer wave /." Online version, 2002. http://bibpurl.oclc.org/web/32833.
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Janowick, Tara. "Feminist discourse across the waves : a rhetorical criticism of first, second and third wave women's discourse /." Available to subscribers only, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1559850881&sid=10&Fmt=2&clientId=1509&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Sofia, Björklund Viktoria. "Constructed Gender Roles in City of Glass : A Third Wave Feminist Approach." Thesis, Högskolan Dalarna, Engelska, 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:du-23188.
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Oldale, Frances. "From fragmentation to a new wave : identity and citizenship in feminist theory." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/2622.
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This thesis will argue that feminism is at the edge of a new wave brought about by the fragmentation of the feminist political movement and the rise of postmodern theory. It contends that postmodern theories have been used by feminists as a 'critical strategy' to understand why the movement fragmented and to move towards the acceptance of more strategic and conventional politics. Thus many feminists are now prepared to leave behind the utopian and separatist legacies of the second wave. These feminists are willing to consider how a future feminist movement can be built that will account for the differences between women, and realise that there will thus need to be a painful and precarious process of alliance-building. It is argued that given the precarious nature of the alliance, feminists in a new wave must also re-conceive democratic models of citizenship to ensure that women and feminists' concerns are met in the wider political sphere. This second concern also makes sure that they have institutional and procedural support should fragmentation recur. The thesis considers three such models of citizenship: Seyla Benhabib's deliberative model, Iris Young's communicative model and Chantal Mouffe's agonal one. It contends that these models only partly address the concerns of new wave feminism, because they are based on transformative and participatory models of politics. These models undermine the importance of feminists finding legitimate political relationships that respect the multiplicity of their demands as feminists, as women and as citizens. This thesis concludes that representative models of democracy are more suited to feminist concerns in a new wave. Such models have distinctive characteristics that allow women to be politically included in terms of a range of political concerns and identities. Representative models of democracy, moreover, make it clear that the political relationship is one of formal authorisation and not one of personal identity recognition and transformation.
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Goh, Talisha. "Re-Composing Feminism: Australian women composers in the new millennium." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 2019. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/2194.
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In the age of postfeminism and fourth-wave feminism online, Australian women composers are theoretically able to “have it all,” however, the proportion of women in the occupation appears to have plateaued in recent years. In this thesis, I explore the multiple ways in which gender and feminism interact with practising Australian women composers. Feminist musicology has had a large impact on the Australian musicological scene, with theorists such as McClary and Macarthur bringing the subject of women in music to the fore in the 1990s, aiding efforts to advocate for reform on behalf of women composers. Additionally, third-wave feminist scholars such as Hartsock have argued for the study of women’s experiences within maledominated disciplines such as musicology. Using feminist standpoint theory as a foundation, this thesis examines the experiences of practising Australian women composers, finding multi-faceted and contradictory views of feminism and gender. A principal case study of composer Kate Moore examines how gender has shaped her career trajectory. Finally, a neo-Riemannian analysis of Moore’s work, Violins and Skeletons (2010), illustrates how gender may shape compositional strategies, speculating upon the fraught relationship women composers have with the conventions of Western art music because their work implicitly functions outside of, or against, the canon. This research highlights the importance of studying minority experiences in musicology, and how they relate to the dominant aesthetic and intellectual traditions.
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Liladhar, Janine. "Third wave feminist analysis : an approach to the exploration of discourses of femininity." Thesis, Sheffield Hallam University, 2001. http://shura.shu.ac.uk/20746/.
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This thesis suggests that whilst feminist theory has been, and remains, a significant political influence which has contributed to wholesale legislative and social changes, the climate in which this theory circulates is now markedly different from that of the 1960s, when Second Wave Feminism began. Consequently, a new form of feminist theory is developing, which attempts to respond to an increasingly more complex situation, without losing sight of the many important elements of the earlier work. This thesis is situated within this movement and I term the approach it takes Third Wave Feminist Analysis. Third Wave Feminism seeks to challenge sexism and to explore notions of femininity as they are manifested in texts, looking for both the restrictions these seek to impose on women and for the potential these offer for liberatory ways of behaving and being. As this reference to texts might suggest, Third Wave Feminist Analysis is primarily a form of literary criticism. However, it does not only draw on work from that discipline. Instead, it employs ideas and approaches used by feminists working in other fields, in order to formulate a more comprehensive analysis than was generally found in earlier feminist literary criticism. Moreover, the thesis is not limited to an exploration of only literary texts but also explores other cultural forms. This diversity is important because constructions of knowledge and subjectivity are enabled by all types of representations. Thus, interdisciplinarity moves analysis on from a straightforward identification of the Tacts' of literary cultures to an exploration of cultural identities, a step which is assisted by Third Wave Feminist Analysis's insistence on the importance of extra-textual features, including the analyst's own background knowledge of the society in which the texts being explored are produced and interpreted. The object of this emphasis on the cultural and the societal is a more equitable world; in other words, I am claiming that Third Wave Feminist Analysis aids feminist praxis. As part of this attempt, Third Wave Feminist Analysis attempts to interrogate the ways in which femininity is defined in the case studies explored. In this thesis three texts in circulation in the 1990s are examined: Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (1992); The Rector's Wife by Joanna Trollope (1991); and the TV Soap Opera archetype, the Soap Queen. As part of this examination, femininity is understood as one of a number of inter-connecting discourses which not only reflect but shape gender. Thus, discourses disseminate social and institutionalised values and also create them, influencing people's behaviours and attitudes, although individuals do have the potential to resist or challenge this influence. A recurrent discursive theme in the three case studies explored here is the association of femininity with the 'private' or domestic realm of home and family. In many ways, this association is rooted in an outdated notion of femininity; the Victorian concept of the feminine domestic ideal. To this extent, this thesis argues that its case studies are implicated in the promulgation of anachronistic discourses. However, all three texts also subvert this ideal in a number of ways and the ways in which this subversion occurs are also explored.
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Seow, Nathalie, and Emilia Hallgren. "Heja Livet – en medvetenhetshöjande grupp där det personliga är politiskt." Thesis, Malmö universitet, Fakulteten för kultur och samhälle (KS), 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-22387.
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Vilka erfarenheter har enskilda medlemmar av den svenska separatistiska facebookgruppen Heja Livet? Ur ett feministiskt perspektiv har vi genomfört kvalitativa personliga intervjuer vilket gav ett resultat som visar att gruppen bidrar med något betydelsefullt. Det personliga är politiskt och genom att ta del av andras berättelser kan enskilda kvinnor få ett högre feministiskt medvetande som kan bidra till feministiska handlingar. Det visar sig också att gruppen kan fungera som ett stöd i olika frågor för enskilda kvinnor i deras vardag. Vi presenterar ett teoretiskt resultat, omdefinierar innebörden av ett högre feministisk medvetande och argumenterar för att Heja Livet kan ses som en medvetenhetshöjande grupp. Faktumet att de flesta av våra intervjupersoner inte delar med sig av sina erfarenheter i facebookgruppen hotar dock konstruktionen av Heja Livet som en subalternativ offentlighet som utmanar dominerande offentligheter. Den vita medelklass cis-kvinnan är idealet i gruppen och det bristande intersektionella perspektivet gör att vi kritiserar Heja Livet som ett ett lyckat feministiskt projekt.What experiences do individual members have of the Swedish separatist Facebook group Heja Livet? We have conducted qualitative personal interviews from a feminist perspective and have come to the conclusion that the group is contributing with something meaningful. The personal is political and by reading other women’s stories, individual women can achieve a higher feminist consciousness which can contribute to feminist actions. Another finding is that the group can also function as a support in different matters for individual women in their everyday lives. We are presenting a theoretical result, we redefine the meaning of a higher feminist consciousness and argue that Heja Livet can be seen as a consciousness raising group. The fact that most of the interviewed did not share their own experiences in Heja Livet, threatens the construction of the group as a subaltern counterpublic that challenges dominant publics. The white middle class cis-woman is the norm in Heja Livet and we criticize it for not being a successful feminist project because of the lack of an intersectional perspective.
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Crump, Adrienne. "Feminisms, Rhetorics, and the Polemics of State-Sanctioned Marriage." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/293590.
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This dissertation contributes to the discipline by demonstrating successful and productive incorporation of feminist research methods and methodologies in rhetorical studies and the application of the rhetorical arts to feminist projects. Specifically this dissertation examines the history of state-sanctioned marriage in the US and its contribution to normative discourses of family that problematically inform public policies and mainstream arguments directed at some working and parenting women struggling to care for their families and provide for them economically. Through feminist rhetorical analyses of congressional testimony on welfare; feminist rhetorics on women, work, family, and economics; and narratives of women's lived experiences derived from an interview-based study, this project renders visible and disrupts mechanizations of privilege and oppression deployed through hegemonic discourses on marriage and family. It concludes that feminist rhetorical scholars are uniquely trained and therefore called upon to address inequities promulgated through national attachment to state-sanctioned marriage and normative models of family.
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Thomas, Tracey. "A Case Study of BustMagazine: A Publication Provides a “New” Perspective on Womanhood through Alternative Means." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1193086932.
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Gurun, Anna. "Second-wave feminist approaches to sexuality in Britain and France, c.1970-c.1983." Thesis, University of Dundee, 2015. https://discovery.dundee.ac.uk/en/studentTheses/23072114-94b9-412a-88a6-64f536725a13.
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This thesis compares the campaigns and debates on sexuality by the British ‘Women’s Liberation Movement’ (WLM) and the French ‘Mouvement de libération des femmes’ (MLF), in the period c.1970 – c.1983. It examines five significant topics: abortion, lesbianism, pornography, prostitution, and rape, all of which were campaigned on by feminists in each country. There has been a distinct lack of historical comparative works on the two movements, and few attempts to compare their discussions and activism on sexuality, which has resulted in a limited view of each movement, something this thesis aims to rectify. Using written grassroots sources, published primary material, and oral history interviews, it argues there were broad similarities between the two movements, but differences in the scope, shape, and progression of their campaigns as a result of national, cultural, and social factors. This study covers the period when each movement was at its height but also when it began to wane in activism, and explores how each approached sexuality in public campaigns and discussions. Examining multiple topics allows a deeper comparison of the feminist approach to sexuality, including: how they dealt with outside organisations; the significance of personal experience; and connections between class, sexuality, and the limits of ‘sexual liberation’. By providing the first historical comparative analysis of the movements’ approaches, this project shows there were many parallel ideas between the two as result of similar origins and outside influences. Yet it was national events and contexts that converted these ideas on politicising the personal into distinctive feminist activism, and a ‘global sisterhood’ manifested differently on each side of the Channel.
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Ivanescu, Yvonne. "Bridging the Gap: Feminist Movements and their Efforts to Advance Abortion Rights in Chile." Thèse, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/26270.
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Chile allowed therapeutic abortion (cases in which the mother’s life was in danger) from 1931 until 1989, the last year of the Pinochet military dictatorship. After Pinochet stepped down, Chile underwent a democratic transition in 1990 that was heavily reliant on a moral fundamentalist mentality, primarily influenced by the Catholic Church and conservative political parties. It has been widely argued that after the democratic transition, the previously strong and united women’s movement lost much of its visibility and cohesiveness due to its progressive fragmentation. This thesis holds that the women’s movement in Chile is not dead, but instead there are numerous small movements that apply different methods in an attempt to change abortion legislation in Chile. Through the dissemination of secondary research and first-person interviews conducted over a period of six months in Chile, the results show that Chilean third-wave feminists have re-shaped the women’s movement in an effort to introduce innovative ideas and tactics to advance abortion rights. Nonetheless, these new voices have also created tensions between new and old feminists further dividing the movement and limiting their ability to effect real change in regards to the abortion debate in Chile.
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Parent, Robin A. "A Feminist Examination of How Girls and Women Engage with a Female Protagonist in Dystopian Young Adult Literature." DigitalCommons@USU, 2015. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/4483.
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This qualitative research study used a theoretical framework of third-wave feminism and reader response theory to examine two research questions: How do girls and women relate to the female protagonist in dystopian young adult literature (YAL)? and How are the responses to dystopian YAL similar and different for the targeted teen audience and the adult audience? A group of four teenaged girls and another group of three adult women read and discussed the YAL dystopian text Uglies. For this project, I collected participant journals and transcripts from individual interviews and book club discussions. I selected quotations from each data source that highlighted the participant’s reactions to the protagonist.
Data were analyzed in two phases. In phase one, I used discourse analysis, and in phase two I used constant comparative analysis. The analyses revealed that participants from both groups identified with the protagonist’s attempts to improve society, which aligns both groups’ responses with inclusive aspects of third-wave feminism. However, other aspects of feminism were incorporated into their answers as well. The women participants demonstrated a broader societal concern, such as those shared by second wave feminists. The girls, in contrast, were firmly situated within individualist aspects of third-wave feminism. Whereas, the women related to the protagonist on both a personal and broader societal level, the girls related only on a personal level. Findings from this research extend reader response theory by showing that responses to literature are strongly shaped by generational position.
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Schlosser, Danielle M. "Woman Tagged : a poetry collection deploying a Fourth Wave materialist feminist approach to corporeal image transposition." Thesis, University of Gloucestershire, 2015. http://eprints.glos.ac.uk/4176/.
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This thesis is a creative and critical examination of transposing corporeal imagery from quotidian sources such as women’s beauty and fashion magazines into poetic form and engaging with the Fourth Wave of Feminism and the material conditions of women. As such, it contains a creative element, which is a collection of poetry entitled Woman, Tagged. The creative element is accompanied by a reflective critical commentary examining the methodology and creative process of writing Woman, Tagged, research and observations into corporeal imagery as it is presented in women’s poetry and the waves of feminism with emphasis on the Fourth Wave and materialist feminism. Moreover, as the poetry collection is the original contribution to knowledge, the critical aspect exists not to critique the Fourth Wave, but to contextualise Woman, Tagged as a poetic response to the Fourth Wave. This thesis deploys a methodology of close reading and critical engagement with women’s poetry, women’s magazines, and the online strategies and campaigns of the Fourth Wave of feminism.
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Breheny, Caitlin. ""By any memes necessary": Exploring the intersectional politics of feminist memes on Instagram." Thesis, Uppsala universitet, Medier och kommunikation, 2017. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-325221.
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Internet memes are exemplary forms of user-generated content in the age of social networking and user participation. This study draws attention to the work of an intersectional feminist community on Instagram who make use of this platform to discuss their personal politics via image macro memes. The community is made up of femmes who typically blend politics, pop culture, and a personal perspective into their content. This practice is identified as a contemporary feminist use of new media and is explored in relation to a theoretical reading of the current Third Wave of feminism as “embodied politics”. The theory of “disciplinary power” by Michel Foucault, and connections between disciplinary power with systems of oppression and social media are also employed to construct an understanding of feminist memes as a means of embodied resistance to disciplinary norms. This study seeks to explore how Internet memes are harnessed as a feminist mode of discourse, and why feminist meme creators (or “memers”) are motivated to use memes in this way. Therefore this research locates an intersection between digital culture and feminist use of new media. The research explores the possibility that Internet memes can serve as a creative and effective mode of feminist discourse in resistance to various forms of marginalisation - which occur both online and offline.
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Adams, Elliot C. "American Feminist Manifestos and the Rhetoric of Whiteness." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2006. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1151349899.
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Dean, Kimberly Michelle. "Simulacra Of The (un)real: Reading Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle As A Feminist Text Of Bodily Resistance." ScholarWorks @ UVM, 2018. https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/graddis/883.
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This thesis project is centered on the female body, specifically body image, in relation to Western, cultural images of women. This is a problem that has been around, essentially, since the beginning of Western art. While different scholars argue whether or not this problem has become worse, it is nonetheless problematic that we are still, in 2018, fighting patriarchy’s control of our bodies via body image. Grounding my project in Susan Bordo’s 1993 text Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, this thesis explores Bordo’s argument that the female body is culturally produced through the lens of Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation and simulacra. Reading Bordo via Baudrillard allows us to explore this age-old problem at a new angle, giving us new reasons that explain why we are still stuck in patriarchy’s chains.
Through this lens, I demonstrate how and why Third-wave feminist activism (I focus specifically on the Body Positive Movement) is failing in their attempts to reclaim the female body: the issue lies within Third-wave activism’s desire to portray othered bodies as beautiful and desirable. This becomes problematic in the era of simulacra: abject bodies do not resemble the (un)real ideal so they become “unreal” in the eyes of society. This attempt to represent abject bodies (obese, racialized, trans, disabled) as beautiful results in stigmatization and disgust towards said bodies, and thus the Body Positive Movement leaves out abject bodies because these abject bodies cannot be seen as beautiful in a society that deems them unreal. I argue that in order to reclaim the female body, we must first reclaim the mind side of the mind/body dualism before we can successfully reclaim our bodies.
To demonstrate how this is possible, I use Margaret Atwood’s novel Lady Oracle as a case study that not only shows how the female body is culturally produced in the era of simulacra, but also allows us to see how reclaiming the mind side of the binary does allow the protagonist, Joan, to reclaim her past and body as her own, without shame. It is through fiction that reality is represented, and I conclude my thesis with my own personal anecdotes, showing how resistance via fiction can transcend into real life and point to a new, hopeful future.
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Davies, Edward Burlton. "Reconstruction of gender law via a critical discourse analysis of trans and 3rd wave feminist narratives of sexual subjectivity." Thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2013. http://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/314067/.
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The factions and discourses of feminism and transgender are often perceived as reciprocally exclusive. Those taken to belong to subjectivities associated with each faction have frequently held this perception. This exclusion may operate because each faction is only supposed to be associated with certain sexual subjectivities. The possible alienation between transgender and feminism is the social problem that the researcher addressed, in order to consider what positive outcomes on the law, as it pertains to gender, may emerge from cooperation between the two factions. To assess this emancipatory potential, the researcher compared primary data in the form of online narratives ventured by a group of trans people with secondary data in the form of published texts identified as narratives of 3rd wave feminism. 3rd wave feminism, transgender theory and post-1970s trans narratives showed potential to align with the inclusive philosophy evident in ethics of care while not foregoing focussed rights pertaining to certain ethnic, sexual and social subjectivities. The resulting postconventional ethics promised to facilitate a legal process that could benefit oppressed genders and that could recognise gender as genre and genealogy rather than as fixed essence. Images of fixed gender essence should give way to the transformation of trans and gender variant people from the ‘Others’ of heteronormativity to empowered others whose difference can be valued or, for those who wish to be accepted as men and women, whose similarity can be respected. The research for this thesis found that value and respect for gender, based upon knowledge and not stereotype, can be facilitated by both by woman’s inclusion-ist politics and by the care of maternal relations in order to reveal trans subjectivity and gender variance as legitimately whole subjectivities. This knowledge has revealed how oppressive elements of discourse such as silence/secrecy, infantilisation, interpellation, gatekeeping, separatism and heteronormativity have affected trans and gender variant people’s ability to manifest a social voice.
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Evans, Melissa Albie. "Investigating the feminist significance of Lars von Trier's representation of women in his Golden Heart Trilogy (1996/1998/2000) and Antichrist (2009)." Thesis, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10948/d1011634.
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Despite critics‟ negative appraisal of Lars Von Trier's Antichrist (2009) for its ostensible misogyny, a deep thematic resonance exists between its representation of women as historical victims of patriarchal discourse, and the positive representations of women as Christ-like figures found in his Golden Heart Trilogy (1996/1998/2000). Arguably, it is important to recognize this, because these films together comprise an exercise in cinematic resistance to the narratives of the „backlash‟ against women's rights, thematized by Susan Faludi in her Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women; resistance which is undermined when these films are considered disparate or incongruous.
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Stead, Nicola Jayne. "The anxiety of feminist influence : concepts of voice in Margaret Atwood and Carol Shields." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10036/69973.
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This thesis explores the concepts of “voice” and “influence” through the case studies of two famous English-speaking Canadian women writers, Margaret Atwood and Carol Shields. The “voice” is multiple, ambiguous and influenced, but it is also apparently unique. How, therefore, is it constructed and where does it come from? I examine, work with and adapt Harold Bloom’s paradigmatic study of influence to a feminist context, exploring the idea that a literary voice can be developed and influenced by Atwood and Shields. I discuss how these writers searched for an appropriate literary role model, exemplified by nineteenth-century English-Canadian writer Susanna Moodie, at the moment when Canadian nationalism and feminism coincided. Atwood and Shields are now canonical writers themselves and important in both the nationalist and women’s tradition, but have they gone on to influence new Canadian women writers? I test the pleasures and the anxieties of Shields’ influence with regard to her creative writing students and her own daughter, Anne Giardini, who has published her first novel. I compare Shields with Atwood, who has achieved a high level of fame, and examine what kind of influence each exerts. I discuss whether literary influence is politically different for women than men and whether there is any jealousy or power struggles between the sexes. Rivalry and competition between writers are not purely caused by the aesthetic issues that Bloom discusses, therefore I contextualise his concept of influence using literary celebrity studies to consider the economic basis of cultural production. This is in order to show that tensions are determined by market conditions, just as much as the new poet’s desire to overthrow a literary precursor. Finally, I examine fan letters to Atwood and Shields as another important source of literary influence. I discuss how fans are constructed through a commercial relationship and how they can also provide an amateur literary voice. Atwood and Shields have helped to create a network of writers across the globe. I explore whether both authors can be role models who will inspire the next literary generation.
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Brown, Hayley Marina. "'A Woman's Right to Choose': Second Wave Feminist Advocacy of Abortion Law Reform in New Zealand and New South Wales from the 1970s." Thesis, University of Canterbury. History, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/948.
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This thesis interrogates the abortion debate in New Zealand and New South Wales over the period 1970 to the present from a feminist perspective. The arguments of this thesis are five fold. First, it argues that abortion was the central issue for second wave feminists in the 1970s because they believed that until women had complete control over their bodies any other gains made by the movement would be of little significance. Second, feminists who did not support abortion law reform left the mainstream movement and set up their own groups because that movement was not prepared to tolerate a diversity of opinions on the abortion issue. Third, not only was abortion a central issue for feminists; it became a central issue for parliament, illustrated by the establishment of royal commissions in both New Zealand and Australia to investigate abortion among a number of other issues. Fourth, from the 1970s New Zealand women travelled to Australia for abortions. After the 1977 restrictive law change this travel was made possible by women's groups in both New Zealand and New South Wales working together to help New Zealand women. Until now this trans-Tasman relationship has been invisible in the literature. Fifth, in the 1980s and 1990s, when there was a backlash against the women's movement, abortion was targeted by many groups because they too saw it as central to women's liberation. Despite the funding and active support of anti-abortionists in New Zealand and New South Wales, they were not able to restrict access to abortion. In short, this thesis addresses how feminists supported, or in some cases opposed, women's access to abortion during the 1970s and the challenges they faced in the 1980s and 1990s.
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Brown, Terri L. "Me and My Shadow: An Exploration of Doppelganger as Found in the Music and Text of Susan Glaspell's The Verge." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1208826442.
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Bolmefalk, Jennifer. "The Failure of Promoting a Sense of Sisterhood in the Face of Patriarchy : A Feminist Reading of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres." Thesis, Mälardalens högskola, Akademin för utbildning, kultur och kommunikation, 2012. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mdh:diva-18735.
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This study is a feminist reading of Jane Smiley's novel A Thousand Acres. It focuses on the Cook sisters and their lives in a farming community at a time that coincides with the end of second wave feminism. In particular, it pays attention to the absence of sisterhood among the three sisters in the novel. It analyses first each individual sister including their different approaches to sisterhood and then their failure to unite in the type of strategic, politically motivated notion of sisterhood that was promoted by second wave feminism. By looking at different reasons why the sisters cannot establish a strong sisterhood my essay aims to demonstrate that A Thousand Acres not only criticises patriarchal society in its portrayal of the Cook family but also, and more importantly, that it criticises second wave feminism by pointing out its failure in terms of promoting a sense of sisterhood.
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Rocha, Fernanda de Brito Mota. "A quarta onda do movimento feminista: o fenômeno do ativismo digital." Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos, 2017. http://www.repositorio.jesuita.org.br/handle/UNISINOS/6728.
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A presente pesquisa contemplou o estudo da Quarta Onda do Movimento Social Feminista, justificando-se diante das mudanças sociais provocadas pela tecnologia da informação na promoção e divulgação dos ideais que constituem essa faceta do Movimento. Enfocando a ação do feminismo na internet, especificamente abordou-se a coleta de dados num blog feminista. Como objetivo geral, pretendeu-se analisar a configuração do movimento feminista na especificidade do ativismo digital, suas proposições de discussão e pautas oportunizadas via ferramentas tecnológicas, especificamente a internet, no processo de disseminação da luta feminista pela ampliação de direitos. Optou-se por verificar um ano de postagens no blog Escreva Lola Escreva e selecionar, por mês, os posts com maior número de comentários para, posteriormente, fazer uma análise das temáticas discutidas. Essa escolha metodológica se pauta no fato dos posts mais comentados terem suscitado maior discussão e interesse. Não foi objetivo dessa pesquisa analisar o teor desses comentários. Eles serviram de critério para seleção do corpus. Diante dos resultados apontados pela análise de dados realizada no corpus documental, o que chama atenção é a interação dos(as) leitores(as) enquanto sujeitos ativos, e eventuais mudanças de opinião e modo de encarar a vida, a partir daquelas interações. Destaca-se como categoria recorrente a crítica ao patriarcado em diversas perspectivas. Isso reforça a ideia da percepção crítica do sistema opressor, centrado no homem. À luz da análise empírica e apoiando-se na literatura pode-se afirmar a existência da Quarta Onda do Movimento Feminista, caracterizado pelo ativismo digital. Por apresentar e oportunizar as discussões e pautas vivenciadas no âmbito social, atesta que os movimentos sociais digitais estão conquistando espaço e representatividade.
The present dissertation contemplated the study of the Fourth Wave of the Feminist Social Movement, justifying itself in the face of the social changes provoked by information technology in promoting and disseminating the ideals that constitute this facet of the Movement. Focusing on the action of feminism on the internet, specifically addressed the collection of data from a feminist blog. As a general objective, the aim was to analyze the configuration of the feminist movement in the specificity of digital activism, its proposals for discussion and timelines opportunized via technological tools, specifically the internet, in the process of dissemination of the feminist struggle for the expansion of rights. It was chosen to check one year of posting of the blog “Escreva Lola Escreva” and select, each month, the posts with the highest number of comments to later make an analysis of the topics discussed. This methodological choice is based on the fact that the most commented posts have generated greater discussion and interest. It was not the purpose of this research to analyze the comments. They served as criteria for corpus selection. Considering the results pointed out by data analysis performed without documentary corpus, what draws attention is an interaction of readers as active subjects and possible changes of opinion and ways of facing life, from those interactions. It is highlighted as a recurrent category the critique of patriarchy in several perspectives. It reinforces the idea of the critical perception of the oppressive system, centered in men. Considering the empirical analysis and based on the literature, one can affirm the existence of the Fourth Wave of the Feminist Movement, characterized by digital activism. By presenting and opportuning the discussions and guidelines experienced in the social sphere, it testifies that digital social movements are gaining space and representativeness.
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Gen, Bethany MunYeen. "In the Shadow of the Carceral State: The Evolution of Feminist and Institutional Activism Against Sexual Violence." Oberlin College Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1621882615561857.
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Miller, Rachel R. "The Girls' Room: Bedroom Culture and the Ephemeral Archive in the 1990s." The Ohio State University, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu159361168956799.
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Hubler, Katherine E. "Man's Duty to Woman: Men and the First Wave of German Feminism, 1865-1919." Thesis, Boston College, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/3769.
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Thesis advisor: Devin O. PendasThesis advisor: Paul Breines
"Man's Duty to Woman: Men and the First Wave of German Feminism, 1865-1919" charts the modernization of gender relationships in Imperial Germany through an exploration of German men's engagement with both organized feminism and the so-called "Woman Question." An examination of German men's contributions (as well as challenges) to feminist newspapers, women's suffrage societies, women's educational and vocational organizations, and the discourse of expanding women's civil and political rights illuminates not only the ways in which German men helped shape the "first wave" of German feminism, but also the process by which German men were, in turn, shaped by feminism and women's breach of a male-defined public sphere during the second wave of the Industrial Revolution. While Germany is better known for its misogynistic intellectual legacy of thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as the maxim of "Kinder, Küche, und Kirche" (children, kitchen, and church) used to describe the so-called "women's sphere," my dissertation demonstrates that the cause of German women's rights enjoyed a broad base of male support during the Imperial era and that women's reforms were pivotal to progressive liberal, socialist, and conservative social policies. My examination of male allies, therefore, counterbalances and critiques the longstanding view of Imperial German society and German men as fundamentally hostile to women's rights. Male allies of German feminism, I contend, were motivated by a twin mission to genuinely improve the lives of and opportunities for women in the industrial economy, and to utilize feminine energies--both spiritual and biological--for their own ideological designs. While these male allies retained some degree of principled commitment to expanding women's opportunities in Germany society over time, they were opportunistic men, as well, who sought to harness and direct the power of the "eternal feminine," a power which the moderate female-led feminist movement celebrated and deployed in their own work. My dissertation also considers the ways in which German men reconciled their own masculine identity with their support of reforms that ultimately undermined male hegemony. In the late 1870s, after female leaders took the helm of women's educational and vocational associations and began to embrace the rhetoric of maternalist feminism, men committed to women's reforms were forced to carve out new forms of pro-woman and feminist advocacy within, or alongside of, woman-led feminist organizations. As a result, male allies of German feminism developed a variety of masculinities. Although a few feminist men like Karl Heinzen, Georg von Gyzicki, and Hanns Dorn advocated a gentler, egalitarian masculinity that rejected most aspects of traditional masculinity, the majority of male friends of first wave feminism embodied a hyper-masculinity to balance their commitment to increasing women's social, economic, and (in some cases) political power. The act of becoming a "modern German man" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century necessarily entailed figuring out how to retain one's manliness and maintain refuges of male authority in a world in which women were becoming ever more powerful and visible. Male allies of German feminism represent an essential case study in this project of modernizing masculinity
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: History
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Fuller, Elizabeth A. "'New femininities' fiction." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/3573.
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I identify and analyse an emergent sub-genre of contemporary literature by women that I am calling ‘New Femininities’ fiction. This fiction is about the distinctly feminine experience of contemporary domestic life written by women about the lives of heterosexual female characters that are married or in committed partnerships, often with children. These texts are concerned with the nature of the self, with a self that is plural and ‘in process’, and make use of particular narrative devices – ironic voice, unreliable narration, free indirect discourse, and interrogative endings that exceed their roles as simply telling stories. ‘New Femininities’ fictions allow their language the necessary freedom to multiply meanings and enact the narrative conflicts they raise and by so doing, undermine the binary oppositions which structure a gendered world. In this dissertation, I argue the models of existing criticism would do a disservice to these texts because much of the criticism either overvalues the theoretical and ignores the literariness of the text or seeks to identify a ‘feminine’ language the definition of which serves to reinforce and revalue patriarchal notions of femininity. The readings that this fiction requires necessitate a negotiation with established models of feminist literary criticism. I attempt to identify the characteristics of their style that allows them to straddle binary oppositions and to look at the language these authors use without having to label it ‘feminine’ and by so doing establish, build, or reinforce a boundary with some undefined ‘masculine’ language which stands in for all occurrences that are not ‘feminine’. Additionally, I attempt to forge a transformed, adapted concept vocabulary for dealing with this group of writers. To this end, I make use of various discourses to show how the different authors either negotiate with that discourse or prove its inadequacy to describe or explain these new femininities.
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Wolk, Magdalena. "Fourth Wave Feminism Through Lana Del Rey." Thesis, Malmö universitet, Malmö universitetsbibliotek, 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-46016.
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Smith, Edith Carleton University Dissertation Sociology and Anthropology. "'The Birth of CCLOW at that time was no coincidence'; covergences and divergences in feminist theorizing and organizing practices during the second wave women's movement: a case study of the Canadian Congress for Learning Opportunities for Women (CCLOW)." Ottawa, 1996.
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Kokoli, Alexandra Marianthi. "'Pourquoi sorcières?' : second-wave feminism and the uncanny." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2004. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.398758.
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Smith, Alisa Dawn. "Rethinking first-wave feminism through the ideas of Emily Murphy." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp01/MQ32697.pdf.
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Tolan, Fiona. "Connecting theory and fiction : Margaret Atwood's novels and second wave feminism." Thesis, Durham University, 2004. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/2972/.
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This thesis undertakes an examination of the manner in which a novelist interacts with a contemporary theoretical discourse. I argue that the novelist and the theoretical discourse enter into a symbiotic relationship in which each influences and is influenced by the other. This process, I suggest, is simultaneous and complex. The thesis demonstrates how the prevailing theoretical discourse is absorbed by the contemporary author, is developed and redefined in conjunction with alternative concerns, and comes to permeate the narrative in an altered state. The novelist's new perspectives, frequently problematising theoretical claims, are then disseminated by the novel, promoting further discussion and development of the theoretical discourse. The thesis focuses on the novels of Margaret Atwood, considering them in relation to the history and development of second wave feminism. "Second wave feminism" is understood as an umbrella term that incorporates a wide variety of related but diverse and occasionally contradictory discourses, centring on the subjects of gender, femininity, and sexuality. The focus of the discussion is dual and presented simultaneously. Atwood's novels are analysed chronologically, and within the parameter of this analysis I demonstrate how her work has been influenced by earlier feminist theories, how it comments upon a variety of contemporary feminist ideas, and how it can be seen to anticipate further discussions within feminist discourse. Finally, I identify moments in Atwood's writing when alternative discourses compete with feminism to create new directions for feminist criticism. Examples of these discourses include Canadian nationalism, liberalism, communitarianism and environmentalism. The specificity of the novelist's interests and politics create a unique site of interaction for feminism which, I argue, benefits feminist theory by challenging, broadening and diversifying its focus. The thesis concludes that the symbiotic relationship of the theorist and the novelist is self-perpetuating and is also necessary and beneficial to both parties.
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Lemke, Clare R. "Femme Feelings: Mapping Affective Affinities between Femme and Third Wave Feminists." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1306179604.
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Whelehan, Imelda. "Anglo-American second wave feminisms : the ethics of heterogeneity." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 1993. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/11310/.
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This thesis investigates debates and tensions in Second Wave Anglo-American Feminisms since the sixties. It interrogates claims that feminism is in crisis, and that the term 'feminism' itself is now semantically overburdened. Its chief purpose is to show that despite feminism's heterogeneity, there are central features of feminist politics which offer an oppositional identity to theorists concerned with exposing the way meanings of gender still shape society and academic discourse. The scope of this work extends from early Second Wave writings to current scholarly reflections on the interface between feminist and other critical theories. This study emphasizes that even the apparent 'anti-theory' thrust of early writers stand testimony to an abiding concern with theories of knowledge, power and representation. Even feminism's early antagonism to 'high theory' could be interpreted as a challenge to the means by which 'theory' is constructed. The first three chapters examine the emergence of a 'Second Wave' in feminist thought, and the various investments of its differing 'strands' in existing political and theoretical positions. Chapters Four and Five scrutinize what are deemed gaps or sites of conflict in Second Wave theory: theories of ideology, culture, sexuality and subjectivity. Feminism is arguably at its most radical and contentious where its methodology drifts furthest from the epistemological 'mainstream'. Chapter Six considers recent developments in feminist thought - many of which emerged during the writing of this work - illustrating a growing chasm between academic feminism and political feminism. The conclusion engages with critical discussions of feminism's alleged 'identity crisis', and the means by which feminist agendas are put to anti-feminist uses in face of a political swing to the Right in Britain and the USA. It suggests that the worst effects of a 'backlash' might be countered by greater attention to feminism's recent past. This is not to advocate nostalgia, but to indicate that feminism can learn from its past and present 'mistakes'. Recent questions are not new, but ones which merit ever more complex solutions, for the sake of feminism's survival as an autonomous and challenging philosophy.
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Elston, Cherilyn Ruth. "Modernity's rebel daughters : feminism, writing and conflict in contemporary Columbia." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.709072.
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German, Lindsey. "Contrasting debates and perspectives from second and third wave feminists in Britain : class, work and activism." Thesis, University of Hertfordshire, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/2299/16331.
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The dissertation rests firstly on the author's previously published work (German, 1989; German, 2007; German, 2013) which attempted to analyse the position of women in British society in terms of their relationship to class, work and oppression; and secondly on original research in the form of interviews with a number of Second Wave and Third Wave feminists, which aimed to elicit their responses to a variety of questions in relation to class, women's role at work, and feminist activism. The aim is to contrast the expectations and influences of the different generations of feminists in order to understand what has motivated them and what issues continued to be important for them. The research investigates differences between the two groups of women, considering the extent to which this reflects the different economic and social circumstances in which they were shaped politically. It argues that there is a strong ideological commitment to women's equality across the different age groups, itself based on the inability of successive generations to achieve full equality, but that there are considerable differences of approach to activism and campaigning priorities, as well as to some theoretical questions. It considers the extent to which the Third Wave reflects a fragmentation from Second Wave approaches. It argues that the continued centrality of class in understanding women's oppression and other forms of oppression is related to the discrepancy between the expectations of oppressed groups for equality and capitalism's structural inability to deliver such equality.
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Peck, Sabina Josephine. "Multiracial activism around reproductive rights in America from the second wave of feminism." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2018. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/21498/.
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This thesis examines the relationship between reproductive rights activism and white feminists’ efforts to work multiracially between the years 1977-1989. It charts a shift from strategies that focused on white women’s ‘outreach’ and ‘recruitment’ to those that were more concerned with coalition-building and anti-racism work. The second part of the thesis considers the ways that white feminists have interpreted right-wing threats, both to reproductive rights and to their own ability to shape feminist narratives – and, in turn, how those interpretations affected their efforts to work multiracially. This thesis examines four major case studies: the 1977 National Women’s Conference, the Reproductive Rights National Network (active c.1978-1984), the Marches for Women’s Lives in 1986 and 1989, and the In Defense of Roe conference held in 1989. It draws on oral history interviews and archival research to identify several overarching themes that have characterised white women’s efforts towards multiracial activism: networks, education, racially autonomous spaces, and narrative creation. The original contribution to knowledge of this thesis is twofold. Firstly, it departs from existing scholarship which broadly portrays multiracial organizing (particularly in ‘mainstream’ feminist organizations) as having failed. It explores what successful multiracial activism might look like when looking beyond traditional norms of defining ‘success’. It argues that taking a longer-term view is more useful when examining ‘successes’ of multiracial activism: short-term failures sometimes served to lay foundations for future success. Secondly, this thesis moves away from narratives of the second wave which portray white feminists as, for the most part, uninterested in working across racial lines. This thesis demonstrates that many white women did want to work multiracially – but that their strategies, priorities and motivations shifted throughout the period.
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Molloy, Clare. "Being "Roller/Derby girl": Subcultural femininty, empowerment, and third wave praxis." Thesis, Molloy, Clare (2012) Being "Roller/Derby girl": Subcultural femininty, empowerment, and third wave praxis. Honours thesis, Murdoch University, 2012. https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/13514/.
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It's 4pm on a Saturday afternoon in suburbia. Twenty women and men, some in brightly coloured uniforms and stockings, some in regular 'civilian' clothes, are rolling bags and boxes into a recreation centre, waiting for the basketball games to finish. As soon as the last buzzer goes off, they begin taking over the space, setting out chairs around the outside of an oval track upon which a crew in striped ref uniforms- "Team Zebra"- are taping down raised rope to mark the boundary. The group load consignment beer into the bar area, set up sound equipment borrowed from friends, organize scores of volunteers to staff the door and 'merch' booth. One woman, lanyard denoting her "Attila -Head Bouting Wench" flapping around her neck, is rushing around, briefing the hired security staff on the liquor licensing, making sure the trackside floor seating - the "suicide zone"- is the correctly insurable distance from the track, and overseeing the placement of chairs to ensure adherence to council guidelines on fire exits and wheelchair accessibility. In another room, a family are preparing for their daughter's wedding.
By 6pm the crowd has lined up out the door, the music is pumping, the beer is chilled, and there are 28 uniformed women on old-fashioned quad rollerskates slowly skating circles around the track. They chat casually to one another, stretch out their muscles, practice moves on one another. As the spectators slowly file in- families gathered together in the seating, over 18 's only in the suicide zone, young men with beers in the licensed stands- the atmosphere builds with the crowd eagerly anticipating the night's smashes and crashes. An announcer's voice booms out over the PA: "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to rollllllllller derrrrrrrrrrbyyyyyyy!" The first lineup gather on the starting line- five in red, five in black- and when the whistle blows, they begin the strategic and physical manoeuvring of heavy blocks and quick agility that will help them win the game. They use their hips, bottoms and shoulders to throw each other off balance; falls and pile-ups are common and by the end of the game many are sporting rips in their stockings and bruises on areas not covered by their safety equipment. After the game, skaters cross the floor to hug members of the other team, and all line up to high five one another as each team do a victory lap for a bout well-fought. Brave members of the crowd line up to talk to their favourite player, and after all the spectators have left, the skaters begin the process of restoring the venue to its usual state before heading to the requisite after party. The neighbouring wedding has concluded and the party which has dwindled to ten curiously peer in the doors of the now-deserted stadium.
The sport of flat track roller derby is complicated, with two half-hour periods broken into jams which last a maximum of two minutes. Each team fields a line-up of five skaters in each jam- one jammer who scores the points, three blockers who hit other skaters and play both offense and defence, and one pivot who plays as a blocker while communicating strategy. In a jam, the first whistle allows the blockers to start skating and the two whistles shortly after allow the jammers to sprint towards the pack; the first jammer through the pack without a penalty is the lead jammer, and has the power to end the jam at any point before the two minutes is up. On each following pass, jammers score one point by passing each opposing player's hips; the blockers use their bodies to legally knock the opposing jammer down or out of bounds while trying to help their jammer past the opposing blockers unscathed. It's fast-paced, physically aggressive, and wildly entertaining.
Roller derby started as a profitable spectator sport in 1930s America, the brainchild of businessman and promoter Leo Seltzer. The rules evolved over the course of the twentieth century and the various incarnations of the sport from the original endurance races to include co-ed teams, staged fights, and pre-written WWF-style storylines. With the advent of television, broadcasting bouts brought a greater audience, but eventually the live immediacy of the sport was choked and it waned in popularity in the 1970s. The current revival grew out of the alternative music and punk communities of the West coast of America, and Austin, Texas is widely regarded as the birthplace of modern roller derby, starting the first team in the early noughties and continuing to be the headquarters of the Women's Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA) today 1 • It has evolved from a burlesque- and punk-inspired performance to a legitimate sport boasting over 1000 leagues and is being considered for inclusion in the 2020 Olympic Games2 •
Most modern roller derby leagues operate with a grassroots, do-it-yourself (DIY) ethic where members participate in all aspects of management and production. This is embodied in the WFTDA's central governing philosophy of" for the skater, by the skater"3 , which means that "[f]emale skaters are primary owners, managers, and/or operators of each member league and of the association"4 . Aside from bouts- the publicly-spectated events described above- the women spend between two and five times a week training together, as well as fundraisers, league meetings, informal social events and countless hours spent behind the scenes in organizational roles. League members participate in every aspect of management and event production, including financial planning, media relations, coaching, writing policy, and so on. In his study of the importance of do-it-yourself (DIY) in the roller derby revival Beaver states "the DIY ethic is about non alienated self-activity"5 , and this can be seen in both the on- and off track interactions of roller derby participants. They physically work together on the track, and off the track collaborate in the running of the league. The collectivity of the roller derby community leads Beaver to assert that "rollergirls subscribe to a 'do-it ourselves ethos"'6 , and this networking and formation of friendships are central motivators for participating in roller derby. Thus, derby is both an 'alternative' sport, and a subculture dominated and defined by women.
Within the subculture, the physicality of sporting elements combined with the gendered dimensions of a female-dominated space allow for experimentation with "doing gender"7 , and the participants engage with this on several levels. Firstly, they adopt pseudonyms, which are often word plays and puns playing on sexual, aggressive and/or ironic themes, such as 'Storm in a D-Cup' or 'Lawrence of a Labia'. In addition, the standards of dress and presentation within the roller derby space- both bouting and training spaces, those in which participants are on skates- embrace an aesthetic which draws on punk, vintage, pinup, rockabilly, camp, and sexual subcultures. While this is partly a function of wearing protective gear including knee and elbow pads, wrist guards, helmets and mouthguards, it is also a conscious and public engagement with gendered identities and the creation of what Finley deems an "alternative femininity"8 , one which takes elements of marginalized femininities and reappropriates them as sources of empowerment. These outward signifiers of resistance are an important element in the self-promotion of leagues as well as the interpretation of roller derby by the mainstream media and the wider community. Despite elements of empowerment and collective action, roller derby is not immune to the discourses and cultural values of the wider socio-political landscape in which it exists. Internal political differences and personal disagreements certainly occur within the community and in extreme cases cause members to leave the subculture or split leagues. The internal dynamics of roller derby leagues highlight the tensions between a mainstream culture in which women are not often offered routes to collective action and diverse support networks, and a subculture that encourages agency, participatory democracy, and collaborative decision-making. Many, if not all leagues, struggle with balancing off-track politics in a tight-knit community and a competitive on-track sport which has to fight to maintain its credibility; however, the continued exponential growth . of the sport stands testament to the abilities of participants to overcome such obstacles through their passion and dedication to the subculture, the athletics, the 'revolution'.
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Perez, Jeannina. "Three Waves of Underground Feminism in "Soft" Conscious' Raising Novels." Master's thesis, University of Central Florida, 2010. http://digital.library.ucf.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ETD/id/2257.
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In the chapters of my thesis, I explore how "soft" consciousness-raising novels of the first, second and third-waves of feminism practice underground feminism by covertly exposing women's socio-political issues outside of the confines of feminist rhetoric. In moving away from the negative connotations of political language, the authors enable the education of female audiences otherwise out of reach. Working from and extending on various theorists, I construct a theoretical model for what I term underground feminism. Running on the principal of conducting feminist activism without using feminist rhetoric, underground feminism challenges the notion that "subtle" feminism means weak feminism. In illustrating how underground feminism works in novels and in physical activism, I hope to encourage the recognition of the political utility of women's writings that do not fit the strict archetypes of feminist authorship. Analyzing the effectiveness of covert feminist conversion narratives, I discuss one soft consciousness-raising novel for each wave. The novels - Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins (1893), Dorothy Bryant's Ella Price's Journal (1972), and Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) - accused by scholars of employing weak feminist politics, are investigated as feminist literature that disidentifies with the feminist label with the possibility of facilitating a wide spread conversion process in "would be" feminists. After analyzing how the novels place women's issues at the center of discourse by discussing female education, women's voice, and narrative control, I consider how the underground feminism implicit in the texts extends to activism outside of literature. I also end by arguing that these novels enable a more intricate conversation about women's issues in which the voices of both self-identified and non-identified feminists are recognized.M.A.
Department of English
Arts and Humanities
English MA
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Steenbergen, Candis. "Talking the post off of feminism, history, sexuality, and the women's movement's third wave." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2000. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp03/MQ52370.pdf.
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Steenbergen, Candis Carleton University Dissertation Canadian Studies. "Talking the "Post" off of feminism: history, sexuality, and the women's movement's third wave." Ottawa, 1999.
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Ziegler, Kathryn A. ""Formidable-femininity" : performing gender and third wave feminism in a women's self defense class /." Available to subscribers only, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1594479911&sid=12&Fmt=2&clientId=1509&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Pruchniewska, Urszula Maria. "Everyday feminism in the digital era: Gender, the fourth wave, and social media affordances." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2019. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/602916.
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Media & CommunicationPh.D.
The last decade has seen a pronounced increase in feminist activism and sentiment in the public sphere, which scholars, activists, and journalists have dubbed the “fourth wave” of feminism. A key feature of the fourth wave is the use of digital technologies and the internet for feminist activism and discussion. This dissertation aims to broadly understand what is “new” about fourth wave feminism and specifically to understand how social media intersect with everyday feminist practices in the digital era. This project is made up of three case studies –Bumble the “feminist” dating app, private Facebook groups for women professionals, and the #MeToo movement on Twitter— and uses an affordance theory lens, examining the possibilities for (and constraints of) use embedded in the materiality of each digital platform. Through in-depth interviews and focus groups with users, alongside a structural discourse analysis of each platform, the findings show how social media are used strategically as tools for feminist purposes during mundane online activities such as dating and connecting with colleagues. Overall, this research highlights the feminist potential of everyday social media use, while considering the limits of digital technologies for everyday feminism. This work also reasserts the continued need for feminist activism in the fourth wave, by showing that the material realities of gender inequality persist, often obscured by an illusion of empowerment.
Temple University--Theses