Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Philosophy of gender'

This quantitative research study examined differences in women’s giving motivation in a large membership based nonprofit across 3 types of women. The theoretical framework was based on the identification theory that postulates an individual‘s personal motivation to give was directly correlated to self-identification with an organization. The findings of this study indicated that overall 89% of the 855 respondents donated to another nonprofit with only 14% donating to the selected membership based nonprofit. As boundaries between nonprofit revenue sources and philanthropy are increasingly fluid, our theoretical understanding as well as our empirical research on fund development must expand to encompass these new fundraising strategies. The study summarizes the extant empirical literature on nonprofit financial development programs and compares this research to emerging work on women’s motivation for giving. Drawing on this literature, the study specifically calls for research on nonprofit fundraising that (a) gives greater attention to the links between volunteerism, identification and women’s giving motivation, (b) target marketing efforts of volunteerism and philanthropy to members with a bachelor’s or higher educational level, and (c) the data suggests the nonprofit sector should focus their efforts on approaches that deepen identification with the female donor base through programs that allow; service on boards, ongoing volunteer activities that change lives and more frequently asking for giving of financial resources.

This study argues that the veneration, romanticization and projection of the feminine in depth psychology is problematic. Depth psychology claims that the masculine and feminine principles exist as archetypes in the collective unconscious. It also claims that these principles are not attached to men and women, yet it coopts imagery that represents the principles in ways that identify them as such, as well as describing certain modes of thinking or acting as definitively masculine or feminine. Specifically, the claim that the masculine principle dominates conscious life results in positing the feminine as a powerful unconscious force, leading to an interpretation of it as transcendent or numinous, revered as a principle needed to heal psychic damage from the overreach of the masculine in patriarchy. This veneration leads to the feminine being romanticized as a panacea for sociocultural ills and projected onto women as carriers of this healing potential.

This dissertation employs philosophical and depth psychological theories highlighting the relationship between truth, history, myth and fiction to challenge mythopoetic narratives of the feminine and their effect on perceptions of women. Specifically, it uses James Hillman’s concept of healing fiction to demonstrate how narratives that result from mythopoetic collusion between psychological fictions are believed as true, and when applied retroactively, are used to reframe historical personal and cultural experiences. The study critiques the comingling of women and the feminine and the resultant essentializing of women by analyzing depth psychology’s anima theory, matriarchal and Goddess mythology popularized in the twentieth century, the conflation of women, nature and the feminine in the ecology movement, and narratives implying women’s obligation to use the feminine to heal the world.

The findings of this study call for the lived experience and potential of women to be recognized and valued above fantasies about the feminine. They also suggest that depth psychology’s insistence on the masculine/feminine polarization contributes to patriarchal ideology. Finally, they identify the feminine as a psychological fiction that helps the psyche navigate through the sociocultural complexity of patriarchal culture. Keywords: the feminine, healing fiction, women, patriarchy

Sovereignty, a mechanism of power around which a state is organized, has emerged as a way to understand the twenty-first-century biopolitical moment. Thinkers including Michel Foucault, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Roberto Esposito find sovereignty essential to understanding modern regimes of bodily domination and control. These thinkers look back to early modern England as an originary moment when older theories of sovereign power became attached to emerging modern political systems. Despite the sophistication of these arguments, however, no recent biopolitical theory accounts for the situation of women in historical or current system of power, nor do they discuss the role gender has played in the development of sovereignty.

My project addresses this ideological and historical gap by examining how sovereignty was being discussed, challenged, and appropriated by literary figures from 1588-1688. In the years leading up to and spanning the Interregnum, sovereignty splintered and became available to formerly disenfranchised individuals, especially women writers. Such women not only appropriated and challenged traditional sovereignty in their texts, but also influenced contemporary and future understandings of power, politics, and gender. Each of my four chapters serves as a test cases of a woman writer engaging with and transforming sovereignty.

I first examine Elizabeth Cary’s closet drama The Tragedy of Mariam, Faire Queen of Jewry (1612); I then move on to Mary Wroth’s epic romance The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, Part 1 (1621) and Part 2 (completed and circulated in manuscript 1629). In the third chapter, I examine Katherine Philips’ Poems, circulated in manuscript during the Interregnum, and published posthumously in 1667; my final chapter then moves to Margaret Cavendish’s utopian fiction and work of natural philosophy, The Blazing World. These women challenged traditional notions of body and power, offering their own new understandings of sovereign agency; they enable us to more fully the genealogical progression of sovereignty and to incorporate the category of gender into twenty-first century understandings of biopolitics.

To say that the masculinities are woven into the fabric of a pre-existing culture is not enough. One must go further and explore how culture itself is constituted by, or more precisely, constituted through the masculinities. As William Doty notes in his Myths of Masculinity (1993), culture not only produces but also is produced by stories. Ancient legends and sagas, like myths, are, to a large degree, perpetuated by the modern male dancer and athlete. However, as contemporary iterations of the masculinities, male athletes and dancers have evolved beyond the scope of myths and into new cultural forms. Their emergent story threads through this dissertation.

The masculinities represent a diverse array of possibilities and pluralities. What, then, holds them together as a coherent cultural force? This dissertation is, in large part, devoted to answering that question by way of a perspicuous inquiry conducted into a) the binarisms of gender, such as hetero-normativity and homophobia, b) the existential and archetypal nature of being, c) Cartesian mind-body dualities, and d) paradigms and practices of male athletes and dancers themselves.

In his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Thomas Kuhn used "paradigm" to explain historical shifts in the practice of the hard sciences. Subsequently, Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things (1966), appropriated the word in a hermeneutical analysis of the human sciences. It is his unique exegesis of the history of knowledge that is used to track the historical arc of the masculinities.

This dissertation ultimately moves beyond the perspectives of Kuhn and Foucault to the work of feminist Judith Butler. In Bodies That Matter (1993), Butler maintains that one's gender is a cultural construct and that the process of gendering, though performative, is largely unconscious. If gender and sex are mere social constructs, where does that leave the nascent logos of an athlete or dancer's body? A counter-argument is made that in order to be coherent, the masculinities must possess, at minimum, a mindful body in addition to an embodied mind.

Keywords: Masculinities; Dancer; Athlete; Body; Discipline; Gender; Hero; Archetype; Dasein.

This project is an investigation into the extent to which popular fantasy fictions entice their audiences to imaginatively reconsider their ethical commitments, relationships, and world views. Building upon the work of Richard Rorty and Martha C. Nussbaum's ethical criticism, I argue that the popular fantasy fictions by C. L. Wilson, George R. R. Martin, and Jim Butcher can assist audiences to understand the constructed nature of individual identity and the social construction of reality, allowing them to participate in discursive communities that empower them to see beyond stereotypes and to consider other people, no matter their differences, as humans equally capable of and entitled to their own decision-making. C. L. Wilson's Tairen Soul series provides a lesson on the importance of inclusion and communication, as it demonstrates that the differences people perceive in cultural groups are constructed and not actual. George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire demonstrates that buying into others' notions of identity, particularly in terms of gender, can be debilitating and restricting, and Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files shows that people with differing religious identities and beliefs can cooperate to solve problems even when they cannot agree upon their constructions of reality. Fantasy as a genre is valuable for cultural criticism, as it can function allegorically to allow audiences to experience emotions genuinely in an arena outside of their assumptions, engaging in experience-taking and learning how constructed realities are dependent upon their own interpretative, but not infallible, frameworks. Fantasy, in other words, can be used to engage people in discussions about values independent of real life that can then be applied to real life, allowing more people into the discussion about how to increase human happiness, a project that Rorty sees as the goal of human progress.