Dissertations / Theses: 'Poststructuralist Feminism'

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Clarke, Helen. "Sexual harassment in higher education : a feminist poststructuralist approach." Thesis, University of Derby, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10545/311445.

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This study focuses upon the relatively unexplored area of sexual harassment in British universities. In sum, the thesis suggests that although MacKinnon's (2004) aim is to enable women to feel more powerful and less stigmatised, the contribution of feminist harassment discourses may, in part, generate in some women an understanding of powerlessness and vulnerability. In particular, it suggests seemingly prevailing discourses surrounding sexual harassment in higher education and considers if and how the women interviewed define themselves through these discourses. Thus, by exploring the power effects of and resistances to these suggested prevailing discourses, it is possible to infer the degree to which these discourses may have constituted the participants' subjectivities. Further, the thesis argues that feminist harassment discourses may have generated specific effects of power with regard to my participants. That is to say, many of my participants seem to understand sexual harassment as exploitative behaviours rooted in the unequal distribution of ascribed power in higher education. Feminism's understanding of power as a static and gendered appears to have generated for the participants, at least in part, the understanding that sex at work is used to humiliate and degrade women, maintaining and reproducing ascribed notions of power. For this research, twenty-four unstructured interviews were carried out with women who had identified themselves as having experienced sexual harassment within higher education, either as a student or a member of staff, or who had witnessed events they had defined as sexual harassment. This was a passionately interested form of inquiry, recognising the partial nature of knowledge and identifying my political positionings (Gill 1995; Aranda 2006). The analysis is Foucauldian oriented, understanding power as fluid - rather than possessed - and as generating particular ways of being. In addition, although it notes that the participants did resists specific effects of power, this resistance always takes place from a new point of power and does not, therefore, carry us beyond power into a power free space. The prevailing discourses suggested from my data are: the 'grades for sex' discourse; the 'all boys together' discourse; the 'trustworthy lecturer' discourse; the 'knickers in a twist' discourse; and the 'sexual harassment as unwanted sexual behaviour' discourse. Supervisors: Dr. Kristin Aune and Dr. Gordon Riches

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Leonard, Pauline. "Gender/organization/representation : a critical and poststructuralist approach to gender and organizational theory." Thesis, University of Southampton, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.295052.

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Hull, Carrie L. "The ontology of sex, a postfoundational realist reply to constructivist and poststructuralist feminism." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape11/PQDD_0011/NQ41442.pdf.

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Macdonald, Danielle. "Exploring Collaboration Between Midwives and Nurses in Nova Scotia: A Feminist Poststructuralist Case Study." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/39112.

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Background: In 2009, midwifery became a regulated profession and was integrated into the delivery of perinatal health care in Nova Scotia at three model sites. The integration process was challenging for health care providers, and particularly for midwives and nurses, who have different scopes of practice, yet similar roles and skills. Little is known about how midwives and nurses collaborate. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore collaboration between midwives and nurses in Nova Scotia, Canada. Methodology: This research was conducted as an instrumental case study, guided by Stake's approach for qualitative case study research. Intersectional feminist poststructuralism (IFPS) provided the theoretical perspective to explore concepts of; power, discourse, and gender, as they related to collaboration between midwives and nurses. Individual, one on one interviews with 17 participants were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Twenty-five documents were reviewed, and field notes were maintained. Feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis was used to analyze the data. Findings: Four main themes were identified; 1) Negotiating Roles and Practices: ‘Every Nurse is Different, Every Midwife is Different, Every Birth is Different’, 2) Sustaining relationships: ‘The more we can just build relationships with one another’, 3) Reconciling Systemic Tensions: The Medical Model and the Midwifery Model, 4) Moving forward: A Modern Model for Nurses and Midwives Working Together. Discussion and Implications: This study illustrated the potential for building more collaborative teams of midwives and nurses in Nova Scotia, and in Canada. Midwives and nurses in Nova Scotia are positioned to demonstrate leadership in a midwife and nurse led birthing model of care that works. More research, leadership, government funding and support is needed to implement this model of care. Conclusion: The findings of this study can be used to build sustainable, collaborative, equitably distributed midwifery (and birthing) services in Nova Scotia, and throughout Canada.

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Knehans, Greg. "Against the Manufacture of Washing Machines: Maoist Materialist Dialectics, Poststructuralist Feminism and the Liberation from Metaphysics." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/193699.

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This dissertation attempts to contribute to the literature on the transformation of gender relations and patriarchy by creating a discursive nexus between two seemingly incompatible paradigms: materialist dialectics as interpreted by Mao Tsetung and poststructuralist feminism. Despite the important differences between the two traditions, it argues that they have important ontological similarities. This creates the potential for a fecund cross-fertilization, a potential which has been largely unrecognized by scholars. This dissertation argues that Mao's ontology of ceaseless transformation arising from universal and concrete contradictions provides an essential foundation for any progressive praxis of social transformation. It examines aspects of how the maoist approach to materialist dialectics was put into practice in revolutionary China, along with a summary of some of the recent contributions to this paradigm by Bob Avakian. It examines the historical experience of transforming patriarchal relations and ideas under Mao and argues that, though there were real shortcomings, the historical experience of revolutionary China remains an essential foundation and contribution to transforming patriarchal gender relations and identities. Focusing on the writings of Judith Butler, it discusses the contributions of poststructuralist feminist, particularly its thorough critique of essentialism and the deconstruction of the categories and conceptual foundations of feminism. Butler's emphasis on the cultural production of gender and sex, along with the need to destabilize the regulatory functions and frameworks which police them, are invaluable in developing the ability of maoist materialist dialectics to transform gender relations. The dissertation includes a discussion of sexuality, violence and democracy as way of pointing towards a thoroughly materialist and dialectical method and approach which can move beyond the anchors of metaphysics while embracing thinking from a wide spectrum, including Queer theory. The dissertation concludes with a brief discussion on how such abstract theoretical concerns are relevant to current political realities.

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Khoddami, Fariba. "Being a female English teacher : narratives of identities in the Iranian academy." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10036/3004.

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Despite the growing interest in the issue of identity formation in the broader TESOL research field, few studies have been concerned with the question of female teachers’ identity formation from a feminist poststructuralist perspective. This study also seeks to further the feminist poststructuralist research within the Iranian TESOL and bridge the substantive gap within the existing literature, which is an almost untouched area of research regarding the teachers’ identity formation. This thesis attempts to explore the construction of identities of eight Iranian female teachers of English and the discourses that shape them through examining their narratives, using data gathered from interviews and email correspondences. In a two-year collaboration with the participants, I applied a feminist poststructuralist conceptual framework to examine the participants’ main subject positions and the prevailing discursive practices that construct them. The research data, collected by individual interviews and email correspondence, indicates the teachers’ identities as multiple, complex, and contradictory. I contend that multiple subject positions stem out of the clash of the multiple discourses that are available to them. Impacted by both gender and professional discourses that sometimes even collide, the findings show how these women struggle to conceive a sense of coherent self. The results of the analysis indicate that the gender and professional discourses are of normative, disciplinary, and individualizing nature. Negotiating identities within themselves and within the complex cultural context they live in, these female teachers are involved in an ongoing process of adjustment, adaptation and resistance.

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Runsö, Anna. "Sexuella trakasserier och identitetsskapande bland unga." Thesis, Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för pedagogik, didaktik och utbildningsstudier, 2013. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-218309.

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Sexual harassments have since long been an issue all over the world and schools have not been an exception. Reports from Swedish secondary schools show how 47% of the female pupils state that they have, sometime during their time in school, been the victim of sexual harassment. Other studies claim that pupils exposed to sexual harassments will develop low self-esteem and a decreased sense of self. The Swedish curriculum state that all children shall have the right to a harassment free school environment, but still many pupils claim to be exposed to sexual harassment in school. Several studies have theorized about why sexual harassment is so prevalent in schools but what do the pupils think? This study aims to reveal and analyze pupil opinions about sexual harassment; what do they think it is and why do they think it occurs? This will be done from a post-structural feminist point of view with focus on the shaping of identity among the respondents. The collected results of this study indicate that sexual harassment is mostly due to a dominant form of the heterosexual male ideal where sexual harassment against both men and women is used to secure ones position as a dominant male and to gain access to the hegemonic male group. According to the respondents, sexual harassment have little to do with the victims and in the discussion an alternative approach to handle sexual harassment in school is discussed.

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Swanpitak, Ruttapond. "Representations of Female Sexuality and Subjectivity in the Fiction of Wang Anyi, Tie Ning and Chi Li." Thesis, University of Sydney, 2020. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/24087.

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The literary works of Chinese women writers became an important component of literature in the 1980s and 1990s, developing new trends, techniques and perspectives, and revealing the multiplicity of women’s experiences and private lives. The thesis seeks to fill a gap in studies of Chinese literature by examining post-Mao fiction published from 1986 to 2000 by Wang Anyi, Tie Ning and Chi Li from a poststructuralist feminist perspective, and offering fresh insights into their treatment of sexuality, subjectivity and femininity. In doing so, it contributes to the feminist study of Chinese women’s writing and to a better understanding of contemporary Chinese culture in relation to patriarchy, misogyny, feminism and transgression. Specifically, this thesis investigates how these three prominent authors positively assert the notion of sexual difference and form an alternative subjectivity that destabilises traditional humanistic beliefs in the patriarchal system. It analyses their creations of different representations of female subjectivity. It analyses how they negotiate women’s identities and spaces among diverse historical forces in their writing, challenging dominant gender narratives. While all the textual analyses in this thesis are commonly informed by poststructuralist feminist notions of female subjectivity, differences, transgression and spatiality, they demonstrate the writers’ different treatment of feminist themes in social, political and economic aspects. Wang Anyi highlights sexual awakening, the tension between sexual desire and social morality, and women’s self-preservation. Tie Ning discloses the negative effects of political forces on women, including female victimisation and male violence, and valorises women’s self-realisation and self-transformation. With a particular focus on economic aspects, Chi Li pays attention to women’s self-sufficiency and self-affirmation, internationally inspired ideals of femininity, urban consumer culture and sisterhood.

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Hinson, Sandy, and n/a. "An ethnography of teacher perceptions of cultural and institutional practices relating to sexual harassment in ACT high schools." University of Canberra. Education, 1993. http://erl.canberra.edu.au./public/adt-AUC20060724.141946.

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This two year, topic-oriented ethnography documents teacher perceptions of cultural and institutional practices relating to sexual harassment in 12 co-educational, government ACT high schools. Participants include over one hundred and forty teachers, seventy eight of whom have contributed formal interviews. Through analysis and triangulation of ethnographic interviews, participant observation data and school and Departmental documents, the study identifies cultural and institutional practices which, according to teacher perceptions, contribute to: � encouraging sexual harassment; � discouraging reports of sexual harassment; and � discouraging implementation of sexual harassment policy. Emerging cultural and institutional practices include blame attribution, silencing and gender construction which contribute to the marginalisation of some female teachers (in terms of their career); some female students (in terms of their education) and some male students who are perceived to be "gay" (in terms of their friendship groups). The usefulness, limitations and capacity to explain sexual harassment of a range of theoretical approaches are discussed. These approaches include Attribution, Role, Reproduction and Feminist theories. It is argued that, although accounting for the majority of sexual harassment, these theories are limited in their ability to fully account for: a) all kinds of sexual harassment practised in ACT high schools; b) the relationship between sexual harassment and other kinds of harassment in ACT high schools; and c) the extent to which some women teachers appear to support the practice of sexual harassment. Emerging Poststructuralist Feminism is proposed as a potentially useful theoretical framework for explaining and responding to sexual harassment in ACT high schools. It is hoped that this study will contribute to informing the decision making of those responsible for developing and/or implementing sexual harassment policy in ACT high schools, including teachers, school counsellors, principals, and administrators.

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Lennie, June. "Troubling empowerment: An evaluation and critique of a feminist action research project involving rural women and interactive communication technologies." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2001. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/18365/1/June%20Lennie%20Thesis.pdf.

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Participatory research methodologies and the use of interactive communication technologies (ICTs) such as email are increasingly seen by many researchers, including feminists, as offering ways to enhance women's inclusion, participation and empowerment. However, from critical and poststructuralist perspectives, some researchers suggest the need for greater caution about claims that participatory methodologies and certain communication technologies automatically enhance inclusion and empowerment. These researchers argue that issues of power, agenda and voice in the research context require greater attention (LeCompte, 1995). The major argument made in this thesis is that feminist researchers need to adopt a more critical and rigorous yet pragmatic approach to evaluating women's empowerment, inclusion and participation, and that this approach needs to include an analysis of diversity and difference, macro and micro contexts, power-knowledge relations, and the contradictory effects of participation. The outcomes of this study suggest that this approach can create new knowledge and understanding that will enable the development of more effective strategies for women's empowerment and inclusion. To explore and support this argument, findings are presented from a detailed evaluation and critique of a major feminist action research project that involved women in rural, regional and remote Queensland, Australia and elsewhere, a university research team and several government and industry partners. The project made extensive use of ICTs, including email and the Internet, and aimed to be empowering and inclusive. Given the many contradictory discourses of empowerment that currently circulate, empowerment is seen as a problematic concept. The multiple meanings and discourses of empowerment are therefore identified and considered in the analysis. With the increasing importance of communication technologies in rural community development, this study also evaluates the effectiveness of ICTs as a medium for empowering rural women. The 'politics of difference' (Young, 1990) that underpins attempts to include a diversity of rural women in feminist research projects presents many challenges to feminist praxis. Chapters 1 and 2 propose that, in evaluating such projects, researchers need to take diversity and difference into account to avoid reproducing stereotyped images of rural women, and to identify those who are included and excluded. This is because of the complex nature of the identity 'rural woman', the multiple barriers to women's participation, and the diverse needs, agendas and ideologies of participants and stakeholders. The concept of seriality (Young, 1994) is used in this study to avoid reproducing 'rural women' and feminist researchers as women with a singular identity. Chapters 1 and 2 argue that a comprehensive and critical analysis of these complex issues requires an eclectic, transdisciplinary approach, and that this can be fruitfully achieved by using a combination of two feminist frameworks of theory and epistemology: praxis feminism and feminist poststructuralism. While there are commonalities between these frameworks, the feminist poststructuralist framework takes a much more cautious and critical approach to claims for empowerment than praxis feminism. The praxis feminist framework draws on feminist theories that view power as social, cooperative and enabling. Women's diverse needs, values, issues and experiences are taken into account, and the analysis aims to gives voice to women. The purpose of this is to better understand the processes that meet women's diverse needs and could be empowering and inclusive for women (or otherwise). In contrast, the feminist poststructuralist framework uses Foucault's (1980) analytic of power as positive and strategic, exercised in all our interactions, and intimately connected to knowledge. The power-knowledge relations, and the multiple and shifting discourses and subject positions that were taken up in various research contexts are identified and analysed. The purpose of this is to highlight the contradictions and dangers inherent in feminist practices of empowerment that often go unnoticed. To achieve its practical and critical aims, this study uses two different, but complementary, research methodologies: participatory feminist evaluation and feminist deconstructive ethnography, and multiple research methods, which are outlined in Chapter 3. This eclectic approach is argued to provide maximum flexibility and creativity in the research process, and to enable the complexity and richness of the data to be represented and understood from a diversity of perspectives. Triangulation of the multiple methods and sources of data is employed to increase the validity and rigour of the analysis. Assessing how well feminist projects that use ICTs have met the aim of including a diversity of women requires an analysis of a wide range of complex social, economic,cultural, technological, contextual and methodological issues related to women's participation. Analysing these issues also requires giving voice to a diversity of participants' and stakeholders' assessments and meanings of 'diversity' and 'inclusion'. The results of this analysis, set out in Chapter 4, suggest that differences in perceptions of diversity and inclusion are strongly related to participants' and stakeholders' political and ideological beliefs and values, and their degree of commitment to social justice issues. The evaluation found that a limited diversity of women participated in the project, and identified many barriers to their participation. Feminists argue that women-only activities are often more empowering than mixed gender activities. The evaluation findings detailed in Chapter 5 suggest that the project's women-centred activities, particularly the workshops and online groups, were very successful in meeting the multiple needs of most participants. However, contradictory or undesirable effects of the project's activities were also identified. This analysis demonstrates the need to consider the various groups of participants and their diverse needs in assessing how well feminist methods and activities have met women's needs or are empowering. Chapter 6 identifies various forms and features of empowerment and disempowerment and categorises them as social, technological, political and psychological. A model is developed that illustrates the interrelationships between these four forms of empowerment. Technological empowerment is identified as a new under-theorised form of empowerment that is seen as increasingly important as ICTs become more central to women's networking and participation. However, the findings suggest that the extent to which participants want to be empowered needs to be respected. While many participants were found to have experienced the four forms of empowerment, their participation was also shown to have had various disempowering effects. The project's online group welink (women's electronic link), which linked rural and urban women, including government policy-makers, was assessed as the most empowering project activity. The discourse analysis and deconstructions, undertaken in Chapter 6, identify competing and contradictory discourses of new communication technologies and feminist participatory action research. The various discourses taken up by the researchers and participants were shown to have both empowering and disempowering effects. The analysis demonstrates the intersection between empowerment and disempowerment and the shifting subject positions that were taken up, depending on the research context. It was argued that the discourses of feminist action research operated as a 'regime of truth' (Foucault, 1980) that regulated and constrained the discourses and practices of this form of research. An analysis of a highly contentious welink discussion challenges feminist assumptions that giving voice to women will lead to empowerment, and suggests that silence can, in some circumstances, be empowering. This analysis highlights the intersection of voice and silence, the limitations of the gendered discourse of care and connection, and how this discourse, and other factors, regulated the use of more critical discourses. Critical reflections on the study are made in Chapter 7. They include the suggestion that an 'impossible burden' was placed on the project's feminist researchers who used an egalitarian feminist discourse that produced expectations of 'equal relations' between participants and researchers. However, these relations had to be established in the context of a university-based project that involved senior academic, government and industry staff. Drawing on the new knowledge and understandings developed, this study proposes several principles and strategies for feminist participatory action research projects that seek the inclusion and empowerment of rural women and use ICTs. They include the suggestion that feminists need an awareness of the limits to the politics of difference discourse when power-knowledge relations are ignored. A further principle is that there is value in adopting a Foucauldian analytic of power, since this enables a better understanding of the complex, multifaceted and dynamic nature of power-knowledge relations in the research context. This approach also provides an awareness of how processes that attempt to empower will inevitably produce disempowerment at certain moments. Principles and strategies for undertaking participatory feminist evaluations are also suggested.

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11

Lennie, June. "Troubling empowerment: An evaluation and critique of a feminist action research project involving rural women and interactive communication technologies." Queensland University of Technology, 2001. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/18365/.

Full text

Abstract:

Participatory research methodologies and the use of interactive communication technologies (ICTs) such as email are increasingly seen by many researchers, including feminists, as offering ways to enhance women’s inclusion, participation and empowerment. However, from critical and poststructuralist perspectives, some researchers suggest the need for greater caution about claims that participatory methodologies and certain communication technologies automatically enhance inclusion and empowerment. These researchers argue that issues of power, agenda and voice in the research context require greater attention (LeCompte, 1995). The major argument made in this thesis is that feminist researchers need to adopt a more critical and rigorous yet pragmatic approach to evaluating women’s empowerment, inclusion and participation, and that this approach needs to include an analysis of diversity and difference, macro and micro contexts, power-knowledge relations, and the contradictory effects of participation. The outcomes of this study suggest that this approach can create new knowledge and understanding that will enable the development of more effective strategies for women’s empowerment and inclusion. To explore and support this argument, findings are presented from a detailed evaluation and critique of a major feminist action research project that involved women in rural, regional and remote Queensland, Australia and elsewhere, a university research team and several government and industry partners. The project made extensive use of ICTs, including email and the Internet, and aimed to be empowering and inclusive. Given the many contradictory discourses of empowerment that currently circulate, empowerment is seen as a problematic concept. The multiple meanings and discourses of empowerment are therefore identified and considered in the analysis. With the increasing importance of communication technologies in rural community development, this study also evaluates the effectiveness of ICTs as a medium for empowering rural women. The ‘politics of difference’ (Young, 1990) that underpins attempts to include a diversity of rural women in feminist research projects presents many challenges to feminist praxis. Chapters 1 and 2 propose that, in evaluating such projects, researchers need to take diversity and difference into account to avoid reproducing stereotyped images of rural women, and to identify those who are included and excluded. This is because of the complex nature of the identity ‘rural woman’, the multiple barriers to women’s participation, and the diverse needs, agendas and ideologies of participants and stakeholders. The concept of seriality (Young, 1994) is used in this study to avoid reproducing ‘rural women’ and feminist researchers as women with a singular identity. Chapters 1 and 2 argue that a comprehensive and critical analysis of these complex issues requires an eclectic, transdisciplinary approach, and that this can be fruitfully achieved by using a combination of two feminist frameworks of theory and epistemology: praxis feminism and feminist poststructuralism. While there are commonalities between these frameworks, the feminist poststructuralist framework takes a much more cautious and critical approach to claims for empowerment than praxis feminism. The praxis feminist framework draws on feminist theories that view power as social, cooperative and enabling. Women’s diverse needs, values, issues and experiences are taken into account, and the analysis aims to gives voice to women. The purpose of this is to better understand the processes that meet women’s diverse needs and could be empowering and inclusive for women (or otherwise). In contrast, the feminist poststructuralist framework uses Foucault’s (1980) analytic of power as positive and strategic, exercised in all our interactions, and intimately connected to knowledge. The power-knowledge relations, and the multiple and shifting discourses and subject positions that were taken up in various research contexts are identified and analysed. The purpose of this is to highlight the contradictions and dangers inherent in feminist practices of empowerment that often go unnoticed. To achieve its practical and critical aims, this study uses two different, but complementary, research methodologies: participatory feminist evaluation and feminist deconstructive ethnography, and multiple research methods, which are outlined in Chapter 3. This eclectic approach is argued to provide maximum flexibility and creativity in the research process, and to enable the complexity and richness of the data to be represented and understood from a diversity of perspectives. Triangulation of the multiple methods and sources of data is employed to increase the validity and rigour of the analysis. Assessing how well feminist projects that use ICTs have met the aim of including a diversity of women requires an analysis of a wide range of complex social, economic, cultural, technological, contextual and methodological issues related to women’s participation. Analysing these issues also requires giving voice to a diversity of participants’ and stakeholders’ assessments and meanings of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’. The results of this analysis, set out in Chapter 4, suggest that differences in perceptions of diversity and inclusion are strongly related to participants’ and stakeholders’ political and ideological beliefs and values, and their degree of commitment to social justice issues. The evaluation found that a limited diversity of women participated in the project, and identified many barriers to their participation. Feminists argue that women-only activities are often more empowering than mixed gender activities. The evaluation findings detailed in Chapter 5 suggest that the project’s women-centred activities, particularly the workshops and online groups, were very successful in meeting the multiple needs of most participants. However, contradictory or undesirable effects of the project’s activities were also identified. This analysis demonstrates the need to consider the various groups of participants and their diverse needs in assessing how well feminist methods and activities have met women’s needs or are empowering. Chapter 6 identifies various forms and features of empowerment and disempowerment and categorises them as social, technological, political and psychological. A model is developed that illustrates the interrelationships between these four forms of empowerment. Technological empowerment is identified as a new under-theorised form of empowerment that is seen as increasingly important as ICTs become more central to women’s networking and participation. However, the findings suggest that the extent to which participants want to be empowered needs to be respected. While many participants were found to have experienced the four forms of empowerment, their participation was also shown to have had various disempowering effects. The project’s online group welink (women’s electronic link), which linked rural and urban women, including government policy-makers, was assessed as the most empowering project activity. The discourse analysis and deconstructions, undertaken in Chapter 6, identify competing and contradictory discourses of new communication technologies and feminist participatory action research. The various discourses taken up by the researchers and participants were shown to have both empowering and disempowering effects. The analysis demonstrates the intersection between empowerment and disempowerment and the shifting subject positions that were taken up, depending on the research context. It was argued that the discourses of feminist action research operated as a ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault, 1980) that regulated and constrained the discourses and practices of this form of research. An analysis of a highly contentious welink discussion challenges feminist assumptions that giving voice to women will lead to empowerment, and suggests that silence can, in some circumstances, be empowering. This analysis highlights the intersection of voice and silence, the limitations of the gendered discourse of care and connection, and how this discourse, and other factors, regulated the use of more critical discourses. Critical reflections on the study are made in Chapter 7. They include the suggestion that an ‘impossible burden’ was placed on the project’s feminist researchers who used an egalitarian feminist discourse that produced expectations of ‘equal relations’ between participants and researchers. However, these relations had to be established in the context of a university-based project that involved senior academic, government and industry staff. Drawing on the new knowledge and understandings developed, this study proposes several principles and strategies for feminist participatory action research projects that seek the inclusion and empowerment of rural women and use ICTs. They include the suggestion that feminists need an awareness of the limits to the politics of difference discourse when power-knowledge relations are ignored. A further principle is that there is value in adopting a Foucauldian analytic of power, since this enables a better understanding of the complex, multifaceted and dynamic nature of power-knowledge relations in the research context. This approach also provides an awareness of how processes that attempt to empower will inevitably produce disempowerment at certain moments. Principles and strategies for undertaking participatory feminist evaluations are also suggested.

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12

Egeberg, Holmgren Linn. "IngenMansLand : om män som feminister, intervjuframträdanden och passerandets politik." Doctoral thesis, Uppsala universitet, Sociologiska institutionen, 2011. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-145853.

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This thesis explores constructions of gendered and gender political positions and practices of men identifying as ‘feminist’. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with 28 men aged 20-34. At issue is how seemingly contradictory positions for men as feminists are made comprehensible in theory and practice. An introduction showcase theoretical discussions on gendered experiences and the possibilities of men being feminist, mainly from standpoint, radical feminist and poststructuralist radical constructionist perspectives. Men doing feminism emerge as an unresolved complex matter. This is followed by a critical discussion of state feminism, double emancipation and research on men and masculinities in the welfare state. The support for men’s participation, predominantly as white heterosexual fathers, in the Swedish gender equality project has consequences for the construction of men as potentially ‘new’, ‘good’ gender equal feminist subjects. In the construction of profeminist positions in interview performances, interviewees are located in-between the radical feminist, poststructuralist and gender equality perspectives on men, masculinity and feminism. Two themes involve an implementation of the concept of passing and introduce the analytical concept of co-fielding. Passing consists of the microsociological process of making radical and deconstructive profeminist positions authentic and yet being able to manage masculinity in homosocial contexts. Co-fielding refers to the conjoint interlacing of experiences, knowledge and meaning-making in interview interaction where relations of researcher-researched are characterized by discursive closeness and overlapping positions. Co-fielding practices affect the outcomes of co-construction of interview performances, the negotiation of gender and power relations and the reflexive use of (in this case feminist) knowledge in qualitative interviews. In analyzing the presentations of self, ambiguous meanings of profeminist positions emerge and the doing, undoing and redoing of feminism and masculinity appear multi-faceted. Radical feminism and radical constructionism seem intersected in making men’s feminist positions comprehensible. Such rebellious positions emerge as oxymoronic and, when critically brought into the gender equality context, located in a no man’s land out of place. In all, the thesis seeks to bring together theoretical, national and empirical locations of profeminist men, and in a concluding chapter also explore issues of ethics in feminist research and cross-gender interviewing.

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Gough, Annette, and annette gough@deakin edu au. "Fathoming the fathers in environmental education : a feminist poststructuralist analysis." Deakin University, 1994. http://tux.lib.deakin.edu.au./adt-VDU/public/adt-VDU20070330.151753.

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The purpose of this study is to provide a feminist poststructuralist analysis of the dominant international discourses in environmental education, and how these have been realised in Australian national statements and in state policies over the past two decades, in terms of their implicit views about science, the environment, epistemology and education. The methodology of the study presents an argument for a 'politics of method' in the form of a research approach which reflects the ideology and intent of the study, i.e. an argument toward feminist poststructuralism as a methodology, but with elements of critical feminist research. Part of this methodology involves consideration of the gendered nature of language and discourses, particularly in the sciences. The argument is for the reconstituting of knowledge through feminist standpoint theory and the adoption of standards of 'strong objectivity'. In the spirit of its poststructuralist methodology the study presents three different stories (archaeologies) about environmental education: one told in terms of people, events and their outcomes; one told in terms of the changing views of education and how these were interpreted in environmental education; and the third told in terms of the emergence of ecofeminism as a parallel movement to environmental education and the emerging relationship between these two movements. These stories serve two purposes: to review the relevant literature in these three areas, and to provide the 'data' for later chapters. The discourses of environmental education, particularly those of the 'founders' and UNESCO documents, are then analysed from a poststructuralist perspective, followed by a feminist reconstruction of environmental education which argues for thinking from women's and other marginalized lives as a preferred strategy for environmental education, and develops research principles to explore this possibility. The conclusion reflects on the philosophical and theoretical issues engaged, and the methodological issues addressed, in the study.

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Dewar, Tammy. "Women and graduate adult education a feminist poststructuralist story of transformation." Ottawa : National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1996. http://www.calliopelearning.com/resources/diss/intro.html.

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Turner, Sarah Elizabeth. "A question of identity: Feminism, poststructuralism, and autobiographical writings by minority women." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 1995. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1057951233.

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Linstead, Alison Mary. ""No particular place to go" : a poststructuralist feminist reading of middle managers." Thesis, Sheffield Hallam University, 2003. http://shura.shu.ac.uk/16587/.

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This thesis examines the changes in managers’ construction of their identities during the last two decades of social and organizational change. It is based around a detailed interpretative study of middle managers in three companies, Carlux, Larts and Nylons. The three in-depth case studies were drawn from a wider sample and some additional data were also drawn from this wider sample. The thesis critically examines Gowler and Legge’s 1983/1996 model of managers’ construction of the meaning of management, and argues that the model is is need of extension - on the one hand, to add emphasis to dimensions of gender and power, and on the other, to take into account the changes in organising process which, it is often argued, are moving from modem to postmodern forms. A model, the Management in Three Movements Model, is generated from critical analysis of the relevant literature to suggest a move at three levels - at a structural level from the differentiation of hierarchy to the dedifferentiation of networking; at a representational level from the rationality of accountability to the enchantment of seduction; and at a behavioural level from the commodification of achievement to the consumption of commitment. Additionally a model of modes of production of managerial subjectivity is proposed, identifying five modes incorporation, of disciplined subjectivity, subjective identity, resistance and autonomy. The case study data are then used to interrogate the models and three key factors are observed to be influencing and interrupting the shift from modem to postmodern - managerial narcissism; gender, particularly masculinity; and forms of resistance. Through analysis of the data, four archetypal modes of narcissism are identified; Clegg et al’s power/resistance matrix is modified; and the model of modes of resistance is illustrated at work by mapping aspects of the data onto it. Overall, whilst the shift in conditions of organizational functioning has undoubtedly occurred since Gowler and Legge’s investigation, it is argued that this shift has not fully transformed managerial identities from modem to postmodern forms. Using poststructuralist feminist analysis, it is further argued that identity is never fixed into a form of being, but is always to some extent fluid and becoming, and that methodologies now need to be developed which both recognise and are sensitive to these qualities in data, and allow them to emerge in theoretical accounts.

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Barrie, Anne. "The new reproductive technologies and female infertility : liberal, radical and poststructuralist feminist approaches /." Title page, contents and abstract only, 1995. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09ARM/09armb275.pdf.

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18

Albinger, Dawn. "Diva Voce : reimagining the diva in contemporary feminist performance." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 2012. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/538.

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This practice-led contemporary performance study investigates and invigorates the diva icon’s usefulness to feminist theatre praxis. It traces the research journey from an unexamined belief in the diva as an icon of empowered, independent and expressive womanhood, to a more nuanced conception of the diva as boundless feminist performer and philosophical subject. Two major questions emerge from and drive the process. The primary research question asks: How can the diva icon (in all her fury and glory and wretchedness and perversity and mastery and mortality) usefully inform a feminist theatre praxis? Early investigations give rise to a subsequent social query: How do (some) women collude in their own oppression; participate in their voice and voicelessness? Critically engaging with these challenges leads me to conclude the diva icon is most useful to feminist performance praxis when understood as an icon for the richest possible expression of one’s multifaceted, contradictory, poetic and polyphonous self in dialogue with other internal selves, and with one’s community and world. The study is framed by poststructural feminism in an (at times, uneasy) alliance with psychoanalysis, Jungian psychology, structuralism, positive humanism, and eastern philosophies such as yoga and Buddhism. The process of knowledge-making is experienced as embodied and non-linear, with key insights resonating in the spaces between the questions, the methodology, the literature and the praxis. It has been composed of: the creation of a solo performance; a daily astanga yoga practice; interviews with three senior Australian women practitioners who have referenced the diva icon in their own work; and a contextual review mapping the cultural and aesthetic territory of divas and contemporary female solo performance (literature reviews, performance reviews, popular culture reviews). It also critically engages the provocations of feminist philosophers Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous (among others), and with those of philosopher, poet and performer Margaret Cameron. Throughout this study the diva is in dialogue: with western myth (romantic love, the handless maiden), with theory (voice, desire, the feminine divine), and with practice (the dramaturgy of breath). This critical dialogue reveals the diva’s capacity for agency, poetry, divinity and mastery that enable her to resist, embrace and receive in ways that offer new possibilities of Being/Isness. From this, I suggest the transcendent voice of reason is, for the female philosophical subject, the diva voce: simultaneously divine and corporeal, located [heard] in the infinite moment between an out-breath and the returning in-breath, inhalation, inspiration. In the final analysis, the feminist performer can be empowered by transforming the the diva’s traditional cry “Lascietemi morir,” (let me die) to “Lascietemi aprire”, (let me open).

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Ordman, Janine Joy. "The reproductive decision-making of lesbian women : a feminist poststructuralist analysis of gendered discourses." Diss., University of Pretoria, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/2263/60409.

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The study explores the reproductive decision-making of eight self-identified lesbian women in same-gendered relationships as it is interested in the ways in which they construct their reproductive decisions, particularly as it relates to their gender. Four open-ended, semi-structured, joint interviews were conducted with couples who have already made the decision to parent, thereby offering retrospective accounts. Interview transcriptions were analysed by employing thematic analysis underpinned by principles of Foucauldian discourse analysis and rooted in a feminist poststructuralist theory. Three discursive themes are identified in participants' accounts namely: 1) the discourse of heterosexual gender roles; 2) the discourse of heteronormative parenting; and 3) the counter-discourse of parental responsibility and the responsible parent. In a context where lesbian mothers' reproductive decisions are often called into question and where lesbian mothers' parental roles are constructed according to gender binaries, the study concludes that in exercising their limited agency within restrictive heteronormative discourse, participants made their reproductive decisions based on their ability to care for a child in terms of pragmatic factors, their capacity to meet the child's emotional needs and to protect them from potential "othering" by segments of the society. The findings of this study carry implications for addressing the marginalisation and stigmatisation of lesbian women who wish to become parents and raise their children without having to justify their decisions purely because of their sexual identity.
Mini Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2016.
Psychology
MA
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Lennie, June. "Gender and power in sustainable development planning : towards a feminist poststructuralist framework of participation." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 1996. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/36276/1/36276_Lennie_1996.pdf.

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While the topic of gender and power in participatory planning has been little researched, it is assuming greater importance both in Australia and overseas. This is occurring as governments seek new community-based solutions to the long-term viability of resources, and planning begins to adopt a more participative, holistic and inclusive perspective based on social justice principles. There are, however, many constraints and barriers to the equitable participation of women in planning. Important factors are male dominance in the underlying theories, ideologies and culture of planning, and gender differences in values, lived experiences and communication practices. Planning and consultation processes have tended to exclude women because they often lack the technical skills, and 'legitimate' knowledge and experience required to contribute equitably. More empowering ways of involving women in planning are seen as essential because of the urgent need to plan and create a more socially just and sustainable future, the fact that women are often most affected by poor planning decisions, take major responsibilities for everyday environmental decisions, and are making significant contributions to creating an ecologically sustainable future. A feminist poststructuralist research framework is developed in this thesis to analyse the constraints on women's participation in planning for sustainable development, and to suggest strategies for change. This framework is interdisciplinary, openly political, and takes a critical, praxis-oriented perspective. Feminist poststructuralism is argued to provide a better framework for understanding the complexity and ambiguity of social and cultural practices, and to be a more effective means of contesting gendered power relations than earlier feminist theories. This study includes a review of a range of relevant feminist theories, a critical analysis of the concepts 'citizenship', 'participation' and 'empowerment', discourse analysis of a consultation policy document and interviews related to the evaluation of a community consultation process, and triangulation of data and theories. The public/private dichotomy is identified as an important means by which women's exclusion from public participation has been maintained. Gilligan's (1982) research into gender differences in ethics and values is considered relevant to the design of participatory processes since it suggests that unless the 'feminine' values of care and connection are used to inform the design of these processes they could be rejected by women or limit their contributions. The concept of communit)r participation is seen as intimately bound to the notion of citizenship and the identity of the citizen within liberal discourse is exposed as masculine. Participation models based on friendship groups and feminist forms of democratic organisation are argued to offer greater solidarity and less hierarchical models, but may impose some negative restrictions. McClure's (1992) notion of political agency in everyday life offers a means of reconceptualising women's activities in community-building as political, thus more highly valued. Foucault's concept of the power/knowledge nexus is used to highlight the role of planning specialists in the production of knowledge and in potentially controlling the process. This validates a critical and empowering approach to community development, but also emphasises the limits to human agency by recognising the relationship between the subject and the social. However, critiques of the concept of empowerment suggests that there are possible contradictions and a hidden paternalism in its usage. Analysis of selected texts concerning the community consultation process demonstrates the gendered hierarchies and exclusions created by the discourses drawn on in these texts, and the disciplinary nature of the participation process. Discourse analysis and deconstruction were found to be powerful methods for exploring the gender and power relations in these texts. The 'ethic of care' discourse women more often access was argued to provide a better model for community decision-making than the 'ethic of judgement' discourse traditionally available to men. Using the 'ethic of care' as a site of resistance was a valuable means of questioning assumptions about power, knowledge, authority, gender and other differences. The effect of the dominance of the 'ethic of judgement' was that scientific knowledge and expertise, rules and procedures, objectivity, efficiency, rationality and rights, associated with 'the masculine', tended to be privileged over the local knowledge and abilities, ethics, subjectivities, community needs, equity considerations, solidarity and connection, associated with 'the feminine'. Several constraints on women's participation in a community consultation process were identified. These included the use of exercises which required 'bureaucratic' knowledge and specialist planning skills rather than local knowledge and experience, and the separation of issues into distinct categories rather than taking a holistic approach. The process worked to construct the participants in gendered ways. For example, it was mainly women who used an 'incompetent participant' discourse. The all-women focus group was considered a more fruitful strategy for exploring these issues compared with the mixed gender focus group. A tentative framework for participation is constructed which is informed by feminist poststructuralism and other feminisms, emancipatory and action-oriented models of education, planning and community development, and the outcomes of the analysis conducted in this study. Strategies for improving community participation processes and enabling the equitable participation of women are suggested. Using a range of creative communication processes and interactive communication technologies which meet women's diverse needs is recommended. A key argument put forward is that alternative concepts, epistemologies and methodologies for designing community participation processes are needed which would make gender differences, and the power relations inherent in gendered relations, central issues of concern. This framework would place greater value onthe 'ethic of care' and the decision-making and knowledge-construction processes which are currently constructed as 'feminine'. The need for such rethinking andredesigning is seen as essential to create a more democratic, socially just, sustainable future. As this study demonstrates, when issues of gender, power, knowledge and difference are ignored, existing inequalities and exclusions are often perpetuated.

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Lynch, Ingrid. "South African bisexual women’s accounts of their gendered and sexualized identities : a feminist poststructuralist analysis." Thesis, University of Pretoria, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/2263/25631.

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This feminist poststructuralist study explores discourses of gendered and sexualized subjectivity of South African women who self‐identify as bisexual. The discipline of psychology has typically upheld a monosexual binary, where heterosexuality and homosexuality are positioned as the only legitimate categories of sexual identification. Within such a structure bisexuality is not considered a viable sexual identity. In broader public discourses female bisexuality is generally constructed in delegitimising ways, such as through constructions that necessarily equate bisexuality with promiscuity or describe it as an eroticized male fantasy, as a threat to lesbian politics, or as a strategy to retain heterosexual privilege. Data collection entailed conducting individual interviews with thirteen bisexual women and the transcribed texts were analysed using discourse analysis. The analysis focused on how bisexuality is Constructed in the interview texts, how the various constructions of bisexuality function and how Gendered subjectivity intersects with participants’ identity as bisexual. The analysis identifies a number of discourses that impact on, in varied and contradictory ways, participants’ positioning as bisexual. In a post‐apartheid context, participants regard fixing their Identity along strictly defined lines of difference as oppressive and resist bisexuality as being primary To their identity. Participants challenge the traditional gender binary through unsettling the automatic Linking of sex, gender and sexuality in discourses of sexual desire. However, participants also demonstrate the coercive effects of dominant discourse in the gendered positioning of subjects, with Heterosexuality in particular functioning as a normative sexual category with implications for participants’ gendered subjectivity. It then appears that parallel to its ability to disrupt the gender binary, bisexual discourse also acts in ways to support it. The analysis further indicates that in claiming a bisexual identity, participants risk marginalization in The face of delegitimising discourses that construct them in negative terms of promiscuity, hypersexuality and decadence. Powerful silencing discourses further construct same‐sex attraction As un-African and as sinful. The analysis concludes with a discussion of participants’ strategies to Normalize bisexuality. This study contributes to research accounts that explore diversity in sexual identification and creates Greater visibility of bisexual women in South African discourses of sexuality. It also contributes to theories of female sexual identities and adds to theoretical debates around the challenge to dominant gender and sexuality binaries posed by bisexuality.
Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2012.
Psychology
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22

Skinner, Katharine Virginia. "The Castle/Nikki Heat Phenomenon: A Detailed Examination of Female Representation in Entertainment Media." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2016. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc955124/.

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As entertainment reflects a culture's ideology, it is important for researchers to study its messages and subsequently its potential meanings. Entertainment has the power to inform and persuade, creating models for behavior with which the public interacts. The entertainment texts for the purpose of this study are the Castle television series and the Nikki Heat novels. Together, they create a unique multi-layer fictional world. By using postmodern, feminist, communication, and entertainment theories, the results of this study provide a tightly focused lens which views a narrow aspect of entertainment media. Each text was thoroughly examined using textual analysis, Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis, and conversation analysis. Contrary to expectations, the results indicated that the Castle and Nikki Heat texts support hegemonic ideology, particularly through the use of exaggerated stereotypes, strict gender roles, imagery, and narrative choices that help perpetuate rape culture. The discussion outlines how these results can be interpreted through the dominant messages presented in the texts. This research is intended to serve as a foundation for future research regarding entertainment media.

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Levin, Julia Sullivan Shannon. "Bodies and subjects in merleau-ponty and foucault towards a phenomenological/poststructuralist feminist theory of embodied subjectivity." [University Park, Pa.] : Pennsylvania State University, 2008. http://etda.libraries.psu.edu/theses/approved/WorldWideIndex/ETD-2511/index.html.

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Rossi, Aparecido Donizete. "Segredos do sotão : feminismo e escritura na obra de Kate Chopin /." Araraquara : [s.n.], 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/11449/102372.

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Resumo: A presente tese de doutorado tem por objetivo investigar as questões do Feminismo e da escritura (écriture) na obra Kate Chopin (1850 - 1904), importante nome do Realismo norteamericano, com especial ênfase em seus contos. Em prévia pesquisa de mestrado [A desarticulação do universo patriarcal em The Awakening, de Kate Chopin (2006)] observou-se que o multiverso literário da autora se articula a partir de uma simultânea construção e desarticulação de significações, as quais vão além e ao mesmo tempo se utilizam das estruturas narrativas presentes em cada texto. Assim, Kate Chopin joga com a competência linguística, cultural e ideológica de seu leitor; joga com suas convicções mais profundas, instaurando uma textualidade que transborda as estruturas narrativas, chega ao leitor e o ultrapassa abarcando também o universo social e político. Há nas obras de Chopin, portanto, um trabalho textual que engloba instâncias textuais e sócio-políticas, em um movimento de significação que se encaminha em direção ao que teóricos e filósofos pósestruturalistas chamarão, sobretudo a partir da década de 1960, de escritura (écriture), processo aberto e infinito, ao mesmo tempo gerador e subversor de significados. Recorrendo ao Feminismo anglo-americano, brasileiro e francês, bem como aos pensamentos de Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes e de demais teóricos da escritura como interfaces teóricas, a proposta fundamental desta tese é demonstrar a ilimitada produtividade significativa desse trabalho escritural presente na obra da autora, trabalho este pouco estudado pela crítica especializada em suas obras. Dentro desta perspectiva, o corpus que será objeto de investigação limita-se à contística da autora
Abstract: This doctorate thesis intends to investigate Feminism and the concept of writing (écriture) in the works of Kate Chopin (1850 - 1904), an important American Realist writer, with especial attention to her short stories. In a previous Master degree research [A desarticulação do universo patriarcal em The Awakening, de Kate Chopin (2006)] it was concluded that the writer's literary multiverse is carefully crafted in order to simultaneously build and disarticulate significations which go beyond and at the same time make use of the narrative structures in each text. Thus, Kate Chopin plays with the reader's linguistic, cultural, and ideological competences as well as with his deepest convictions to establish a textuality that overflows the narrative structures, reaches the reader and oversteps him also affecting the social and political universes. In doing so, Chopin's works present a textual fabric that weaves textual and sociopolitical instances in a meaning production process that can be understood as what poststructuralist theoreticians and philosophers call, mainly from the 1960s on, writing (écriture), an open and infinite process both meaning-generating and meaning-subverting. Having the Anglo-American, Brazilian, and French Feminisms and the thoughts of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes and others writing theoreticians as analysis interface, this thesis aims to demonstrate the unlimited signifying productivity of Chopin's fictional work, an aspect mostly unstudied by her critics. Under this perspective, the research corpus that will be investigated is composed especifically by the writer's short stories
Orientador: Alcides Cardoso dos Santos
Coorientador: Nadilza Martins de Barros Moreira
Banca: Rita Terezinha Scmidt
Banca: Maria Conceição Monteiro
Banca: Ana Maria Domingues de Oliveira
Banca: Maria Clara Bonetti Paro
Doutor

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Bonetti, Vivijana. "Shifting identities of Bengali female learners in ESOL : a poststructuralist feminist exploration of classed, 'raced' and gender identities." Thesis, London Metropolitan University, 2016. http://repository.londonmet.ac.uk/1164/.

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This thesis explores the social construction of classed, ‘raced’ and gendered identities of Bengali female learners of ESOL (English for Speakers of other languages) from a post-structuralist feminist position. My research is conducted within the post-compulsory educational context, exploring how Bengali women construct identities in relation to educational experiences of learning English as a second language, and considering how Bengali women are positioned, in turn, by contemporary popular, academic and political discourses. This study is intended to contribute to creating ‘a third space’, within which shifts in cultural meanings that occur through colonialisation and diaspora, offer possibilities for reworking and resisting notions of passivity, inactivity and docility assigned to women within popular and some white academic discourses (Hall, 1992; Khan, 1998; Gilroy, 1992; Spivak, 1999). To open up spaces for non-hegemonic readings of Bengali femininities I identified discursive strategies actively employed by Bengali women to trouble/unsettle dominant discourses that reduce Bengali women to ‘docile bodies’ (Foucault, 1979). Applying a feminist post-structuralist framework has illuminated differences and similarities between, and within, Bengali women’s accounts of ESOL education, to substantiate the view that there is no one truth and no unitary subject. I also draw upon post-colonial, black feminist perspectives to argue that the voices from the margins that have traditionally been excluded from the knowledge making processes can bring into dispute the current discourses about ’race’, class, gender, culture, religion, patriarchy and femininity. The research was undertaken at two educational sites in East and central London over five years. In total, 20 Bengali female learners of ESOL participated in life history interviews over the period of 2 years. The sample was diverse in terms of age, class, education, employment, marital and maternal status. In addition, I also conducted one-to-one interviews with two members of teaching staff per institution. I do not present my interpretations of Bengali female accounts of employment and education as ‘truth’ since post-structuralist approaches challenge the notion of singular truth for all South Asian women. Rather I present these accounts as alternative truths which expand and challenge deep-seated inequalities that position South Asian women as passive victims within existing, dominant oppressive discourses.

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HARRISON, LYN MARGARET, and edu au jillj@deakin edu au mikewood@deakin edu au wildol@deakin edu au kimg@deakin. "(RE)PRODUCING POWER-KNOWLEDGE-DESIRE: YOUNG WOMEN AND DISCOURSES OF IDENTITY." Deakin University. School of Education, 1995. http://tux.lib.deakin.edu.au./adt-VDU/public/adt-VDU20041214.103936.

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This study focuses on three young women in their final year of school using data gathered during a year-long process of individual conversational interviews, the contents of which were largely determined by their interests. Three themes arise from critical incidents during this year - the debutante ball, teenage pregnancy and dieting. These themes are used to focus wide ranging explorations of what it is to be a young woman at this particular time. The broader cultural production of discursive positions available to, and developed by, these young women as part of their identity formation is discussed. Methodological issues concerning power relationships between research participants are also the focus of critical attention. It is considered that young women's bodies and bodily practices are central to understanding the processes involved in their identity formation. It is in this context that the focus turns to bodies that matter. In contemporary Western cultures 'adolescent bodies' could be said to matter 'too much' in the sense that they are increasingly the focus for disciplinary practices in institutions such as schooling, the church, the family, health care, health promotion and the media. This disciplining is legitimised because adolescence is socially constructed as a 'becoming'. In this case it is a matter of 'becoming woman'; a sort of apprenticeship which allows for knowledgeable others to provide not only guidance and nurturance, but discipline. Using insights gained from feminist poststructuralist theory and cultural feminism this thesis argues that the discourses and practices generated within and across institutions, which are normalised by their institutional base, are gender differentiated. The focus is on young women's embodied subjectivity and how the discourses and practices they engage with and in work to construct an ideal feminine body-subject. The discursive production of a gendered identity has a considerable impact on young women's health and their health-related behaviours. This is explored specifically in the thesis in relation to sexuality and the cultural production of the 'ideal' female body. It is argued that health education and health promotion strategies which are designed to influence young women's health related behaviours, need to consider the forms of power, knowledge and desire produced through young women's active engagement with institutionalised discourses of identity if they are to have an ongoing impact

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Rhoades, Melinda J. "Addressing The Computing Gender Gap: A Case Study Using Feminist Pedagogy and Visual Culture Art Education." The Ohio State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1217107478.

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28

Andersson, Lorraine. "Which witch is which? A feminist analysis of Terry Pratchett's Discworld witches." Thesis, Halmstad University, School of Humanities (HUM), 2006. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-543.

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Terry Pratchett, writer of humorous, satirical fantasy, is very popular in Britain. His Discworld series, which encompasses over 30 novels, has witches as protagonists in one of the major sub-series, currently covering eight novels. His first “witch” novel, Equal Rites, in which he pits organised, misogynist wizards against disorganised witches, led him to being accused of feminist writing. This work investigates this claim by first outlining the development of the historical witch stereotype or discourse and how that relates to the modern, feminist views of witches. Then Pratchett’s treatment of his major witch characters is examined and analysed in terms of feminist and poststructuralist literary theory. It appears that, while giving the impression of supporting feminism and the feminist views of witches,

Pratchett’s witches actually reinforce the patriarchal view of women.

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Morrison, Carey-Ann. "Intimate Geographies: Bodies, Underwear and Space in Hamilton, New Zealand." The University of Waikato, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10289/2503.

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This thesis examines the ways in which a small group of young Pākehā women use underwear to construct a range of complex gendered subjectivities. I explore how these subjectivities are influenced by both material and discursive spaces. Three underwear shops in Hamilton, New Zealand - Bendon Lingerie Outlet, Bras N Things and Farmers, and various visual representations depicting contemporary notions of normative femininity, are under investigation Feminist poststructuralist theories and methodologies provide the framework for this research. One focus group and three semi-structured interviews were conducted with young women who purchase and wear underwear. Participant observations of shoppers in Bendon Lingerie Outlet, Hamilton and autobiographical journal entries of my experiences as a retailer and consumer of underwear continued throughout the research. Advertising and promotional material in underwear shops and a DVD of a Victoria's Secret lingerie show are also examined. Three points frame the analysis. First, I argue that underwear consumption spaces are discursively constructed as feminine. The socio-political structures governing these spaces construct particular types of bodies. These bodies are positioned as either 'in' place or 'out' of place. Second, underwear shops can be understood as feminised, young and thin embodied spaces. Bodies that fit this description are hence positioned as 'in' place. However, female bodies that are 'fat' and/or old and male bodies are marginalised within the space and thus positioned as 'out' of place. Third, I consider particular forms of normative femininity by examining the ways in which underwear disciplines and contains the body. Women's underwear moulds and shapes flesh to fit contemporary feminine norms. Examining the specific relationship between the body, underwear and space provides a means to re-theorise geography and makes new ground for understanding how clothed bodies are constituted in and through space.

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Engle, Folchert Kristine Joy. "The role of institutional discourses in the perpetuation and propagation of rape culture on an American campus." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/1449.

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Rape cultures in the United States facilitate acts of rape by influencing perpetrators’, community members’, and women who survive rapes’ beliefs about sexual assault and its consequences. While much of the previous research on rape in university settings has focused on individual attitudes and behaviors, as well as developing education and prevention campaigns, this research examined institutional influences on rape culture in the context of football teams. Using a feminist poststructuralist theoretical lens, an examination of newspaper articles, press releases, reports, and court documents from December 2001 to December 2007 was conducted to reveal prominent and counter discourses following a series of rapes and civil lawsuits at the University of Colorado. The research findings illustrated how community members’ adoption of institutional discourses discrediting the women who survived rape and denying the existence of and responsibility for rape culture could be facilitated by specific promotional strategies. Strategies of continually qualifying the women who survived rapes’ reports, administrators claiming ‘victimhood,’ and denying that actions by individual members of the athletic department could be linked to a rape culture made the University’s discourse more palatable to some community members who included residents of Boulder, Colorado and CU students, staff, faculty, and administrators. According to feminist poststructuralist theory, subjects continually construct their identities and belief systems by accepting and rejecting the discourses surrounding them. When community members incorporate rape-supportive discourses from the University into their subjectivities, rape culture has been propagated.

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Happel, Alison A. "Practicing Gender: A Feminist Ethnography of an All Girls' After-School Club." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2012. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/eps_diss/91.

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The institution of schooling is one of the most formative spaces in which young people learn about gender norms and expectations. Rather than being a biological given, gender identity is achieved through gender practices and gender achievements (Butler, 1990/1999; Nayak & Kehily, 2008). This study was a year-long ethnography during which I observed an all girls’ after-school club. The club included 15 girls who were in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. The majority of the club’s participants were African American girls. This ethnography utilized participant observation and interviews. Club documents were also analyzed during data analysis. My primary research question was: How was girlness conceptualized, perpetuated, and performed in an after-school club for middle school girls? Using critical theory and feminist poststructuralism, I investigated the work that goes into creating and maintaining current binary gender formations, and how this is related to race, class, and sexuality.

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Rossi, Alexandre [UNESP]. "Segredos do sotão: feminismo e escritura na obra de Kate Chopin." Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP), 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/11449/102372.

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A presente tese de doutorado tem por objetivo investigar as questões do Feminismo e da escritura (écriture) na obra Kate Chopin (1850 – 1904), importante nome do Realismo norteamericano, com especial ênfase em seus contos. Em prévia pesquisa de mestrado [A desarticulação do universo patriarcal em The Awakening, de Kate Chopin (2006)] observou-se que o multiverso literário da autora se articula a partir de uma simultânea construção e desarticulação de significações, as quais vão além e ao mesmo tempo se utilizam das estruturas narrativas presentes em cada texto. Assim, Kate Chopin joga com a competência linguística, cultural e ideológica de seu leitor; joga com suas convicções mais profundas, instaurando uma textualidade que transborda as estruturas narrativas, chega ao leitor e o ultrapassa abarcando também o universo social e político. Há nas obras de Chopin, portanto, um trabalho textual que engloba instâncias textuais e sócio-políticas, em um movimento de significação que se encaminha em direção ao que teóricos e filósofos pósestruturalistas chamarão, sobretudo a partir da década de 1960, de escritura (écriture), processo aberto e infinito, ao mesmo tempo gerador e subversor de significados. Recorrendo ao Feminismo anglo-americano, brasileiro e francês, bem como aos pensamentos de Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes e de demais teóricos da escritura como interfaces teóricas, a proposta fundamental desta tese é demonstrar a ilimitada produtividade significativa desse trabalho escritural presente na obra da autora, trabalho este pouco estudado pela crítica especializada em suas obras. Dentro desta perspectiva, o corpus que será objeto de investigação limita-se à contística da autora
This doctorate thesis intends to investigate Feminism and the concept of writing (écriture) in the works of Kate Chopin (1850 – 1904), an important American Realist writer, with especial attention to her short stories. In a previous Master degree research [A desarticulação do universo patriarcal em The Awakening, de Kate Chopin (2006)] it was concluded that the writer’s literary multiverse is carefully crafted in order to simultaneously build and disarticulate significations which go beyond and at the same time make use of the narrative structures in each text. Thus, Kate Chopin plays with the reader’s linguistic, cultural, and ideological competences as well as with his deepest convictions to establish a textuality that overflows the narrative structures, reaches the reader and oversteps him also affecting the social and political universes. In doing so, Chopin’s works present a textual fabric that weaves textual and sociopolitical instances in a meaning production process that can be understood as what poststructuralist theoreticians and philosophers call, mainly from the 1960s on, writing (écriture), an open and infinite process both meaning-generating and meaning-subverting. Having the Anglo-American, Brazilian, and French Feminisms and the thoughts of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes and others writing theoreticians as analysis interface, this thesis aims to demonstrate the unlimited signifying productivity of Chopin’s fictional work, an aspect mostly unstudied by her critics. Under this perspective, the research corpus that will be investigated is composed especifically by the writer’s short stories

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Yamada, Yoshiko. "The Discursive Construction of Japanese Identity and its Haunting Others." FIU Digital Commons, 2013. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/853.

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This dissertation examined the formation of Japanese identity politics after World War II. Since World War II, Japan has had to deal with a contradictory image of its national self. On the one hand, as a nation responsible for colonizing fellow Asian countries in the 1930s and 1940s, Japan has struggled with an image/identity as a regional aggressor. On the other hand, having faced the harsh realities of defeat after the war, Japan has seen itself depicted as a victim. By employing the technique of discourse analysis as a way to study identity formation through official foreign policy documents and news media narratives, this study reconceptualized Japanese foreign policy as a set of discursive practices that attempt to produce renewed images of Japan’s national self. The dissertation employed case studies to analyze two key sites of Japanese postwar identity formation: (1) the case of Okinawa, an island/territory integral to postwar relations between Japan and the United States and marked by a series of US military rapes of native Okinawan girls; and (2) the case of comfort women in Japan and East Asia, which has led to Japan being blamed for its wartime sexual enslavement of Asian women. These case studies found that it was through coping with the haunting ghost of its wartime past that Japan sought to produce “postwar Japan” as an identity distinct from “wartime imperial Japan” or from “defeated, emasculated Japan” and, thus, hoped to emerge as a “reborn” moral and pacifist nation. The research showed that Japan struggled to invent a new self in a way that mobilized gendered dichotomies and, furthermore, created “others” who were not just spatially located (the United States, Asian neighboring nations) but also temporally marked (“old Japan”). The dissertation concluded that Japanese foreign policy is an ongoing struggle to define the Japanese national self vis-à-vis both spatial and historical “others,” and that, consequently, postwar Japan has always been haunted by its past self, no matter how much Japan’s foreign policy discourses were trying to make this past self into a distant or forgotten other.

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Sears, Linda R. (Linda Roseanne). "Women and Improvisation: Transgression, Transformation and Transcendence." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1998. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc935798/.

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This feminist study examines women's use of improvisation in discovering, creating, and articulating various self-identities. To create a theory of identity formation, two feminist theoretical position, essentialism and poststructuralism, are analyzed and merged. This hybrid theory addresses the interplay between the self and society that women must recognize in order to form satisfying identities. Improvisational practices, involving bodily awareness and movement, are demonstrated to have the potential for helping women to actualize themselves in these various identities. For this study, the writer uses her experience as an improviser and interviews three women who use improvisation in their choreographic processes. She also discusses performers whom she has seen and performers about whom feminist performance critics have written. This study examines improvisation in dance and performance art from a feminist perspective. I clarify what improvisation entails and, by doing so, illustrate how improvisational movement in dance and performance art can enhance the lives of women as viewers and performers. Through exploring improvisation from this feminist perspective, I demonstrate the psychological insights I have gained from practicing improvisation and document performances that have been improvisationally inspired by women who feel dissatisfied with the manner in which this society shapes and limits their identities.

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Gomersall, Catherine. "On fate and fatalism : photography and fatal theories." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 2011. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/425.

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This PhD thesis, On Fate and Fatalism: Photography and Fatal Theories, is a twopart practice-led enquiry comprising a book of photographs and an exegesis. This exegesis, entitled Photography and Fatal Theories, is my written interpretation and response to two bodies of artwork presented in my book, On Fate and Fatalism, in which I examine the notion of fate and fatalism through a photographic practice. This project proceeds by posing the question: how can notions of fate and fatalism be explored, articulated and interpreted in a photographic practice? In my series, Femme Fatalist: Woman With Taxidermy, which comprises Part One of my book On Fate and Fatalism, I examine the notion of fate with pertinence to postfeminism and argue that the discourse of postfeminism is enclosed in a discourse of how women relate to popular culture and consumption. My femme fatalist is a parody of the postmodern femme fatale trope, and through conceptualizing popular postfeminism as a form of fatalism, I present a critique of conspicuous consumption as being an insufficient form of postfeminist empowerment. I suggest that the notion of the abject offers a perspective on the importance of the fatal to subjectivity in postmodernity, and my interest in the fatal follows through to my series, Body Bags: “I am a Trash Bag”, which comprises Part Two of my book of photographs. In this second series, in which I conceptualize the plastic bag as the quintessential icon of postmodern consumption, I move toward a consideration of waste as a means to explore the notions of fate and fatalism. Through this investigation I find that to be a fatalist, and to believe in fate, has lost much of its meaning in postmodernity, and I suggest that practice-led research offers opportunities for a meaningful reconsideration of fate and fatalism’s relevance to discussions of postmodern subjectivity and discourses of consumption.

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Hewitt, Kimberly Kappler. "How evangelical Christian women negotiate discourses in the construction of self a poststructural feminist analysis /." Oxford, Ohio : Miami University, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=miami1259981731.

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Berggren, Kalle. "Reading Rap : Feminist Interventions in Men and Masculinity Research." Doctoral thesis, Uppsala universitet, Sociologiska institutionen, 2014. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-229518.

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The present thesis explores how masculinity is constructed and negotiated in relation to race, class and sexuality in hip hop in Sweden. Theoretically, the study contributes to the increasing use of contemporary feminist theory in men and masculinity research. In so doing, it brings into dialogue poststructuralist feminism, feminist phenomenology, intersectionality and queer theory. These theoretical perspectives are put to use in a discourse analysis of rap lyrics by 38 rap artists in Sweden from the period 1991-2011. The thesis is based on the following four articles: Sticky masculinity: Post-structuralism, phenomenology and subjectivity in critical studies on men explores how poststructuralist feminism and feminist phenomenology can advance the understanding of subjectivity within men and masculinity research. Drawing on Sara Ahmed, and offering re-readings of John Stoltenberg and Victor Seidler, the article develops the notion of “sticky masculinity”. Degrees of intersectionality: Male rap artists in Sweden negotiating class, race and gender analyzes how class, race, gender, and to some extent sexuality, intersect in rap lyrics by male artists. It shows how critiques of class and race inequalities in these lyrics intersect with normative notions of gender and sexuality. Drawing on this empirical analysis, the article suggests that the notion of “degrees of intersectionality” can be helpful in thinking about masculinity from an intersectional perspective. ‘No homo’: Straight inoculations and the queering of masculinity in Swedish hip hop explores the boundary work performed by male artists regarding sexuality categories. In particular, it analyzes how heterosexuality is sustained, given the affection expressed among male peers. To this end, the article develops the notion of “straight inoculations” to account for the rhetorical means by which heterosexual identities are sustained in a contested terrain. Hip hop feminism in Sweden: Intersectionality, feminist critique and female masculinity investigates lyrics by female artists in the male-dominated hip hop genre. The analysis shows how critique of gender inequality is a central theme in these lyrics, ranging from the hip hop scene to politics and men’s violence against women. The article also analyzes how female rappers both critique and perform masculinity.

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Odhiambo, Seonagh. "A Conversation With Dance History: Movement and Meaning in the Cultural Body." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2008. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/25258.

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Dance
Ph.D.
This study regards the problem of a binary in dance discursive practices, seen in how "world dance" is separated from European concert dance. A close look at 1930s Kenya Luo women's dance in the context of "dance history" raises questions about which dances matter, who counts as a dancer, and how dance is defined. When discursive practices are considered in light of multicultural demographic trends and globalisation the problem points toward a crisis of reason in western discourse about how historical origins and "the body" have been theorised. Within a western philosophical tradition the body and experience are negated as a basis for theorising. Historical models and theories about race and gender often relate binary thinking whereby the body is theorised as text. An alternative theoretical model is established wherein dancers' processes of embodying historical meaning provide one of five bases through which to theorise. The central research questions this study poses and attempts to answer are: how can I illuminate a view of dance that is transhistorical and transnational? How can I write about 1930s Luo women in a way that does not create a case study to exist outside of dance history? Research methods challenge historical materialist frameworks for discussions of the body and suggest insight can be gained into how historical narratives operate with coercive power--both in past and present--by examining how meaning is conceptualised and experienced. The problem is situated inside a hermeneutic circle that connects past and present discourses, so tensions are explored between a binary model of past/present and new ways of thinking about dance and history through embodiment. Archives, elder interviews, and oral histories are a means to approach 1930s Luo Kenya. A choreography model is another method of inquiry where meanings about history and dance that subvert categories and binary assumptions are understood and experienced by dancers through somatic processes. A reflective narrative provides the means to untangle influences of disciplines like dance and history on the phenomenon of personal understanding.
Temple University--Theses

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Rhoades, Melinda Justine. "Addressing the computing gender gap a case study using feminist pedagogy and visual culture art education /." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1217107478.

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Teitle, Jennifer Rebecca. "Theorizing hang out: unstructured youth programs and the politics of representation." Diss., University of Iowa, 2012. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2998.

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While many adolescents list unstructured "hangout" spaces as central to their social lives and activities, the availability of such spaces has dramatically declined in the last two decades, and attendance at afterschool programs has increased. Concurrently, these programs have drawn new scrutiny: from researchers eager to show their educational value, and from funders and policy makers seeking measureable evidence of that value. Even youth centers that were deliberately designed to give young people a space to "hang out" have been forced to reorganize due to the pressure to demonstrate program results. In this dissertation, through participant-observation, archival documents, and interviews with youth workers and young people, the author investigates and critiques the complex politics of representation in the funding, research, and day-to-day existence of one unstructured youth program, the Youth Action Alliance's offering known simply as Hang Out. Rather than producing a unified picture of Hang Out, the author takes a non-dialectic approach, using poststructuralist and posthuman theory to propose multiple plausible and powerful perspectives, and to explore their productive tensions with one another.

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Lepone, Mayo Nicole K. "An analysis of student affairs professionals' management of role conflict and multiple roles in relation to work/life balance." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1368012963.

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Quinlan, Margaret M. "Narrating Lives and Raising Consciousness Through Dance: The Performance of (Dis)Ability at Dancing Wheels." View abstract, 2009. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3371581.

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Minge, Jeanine Marie. "Cob Building: Movements and Moments of Survival." Scholar Commons, 2008. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/409.

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Cob, as an arts-based research process, creates movements and moments of survival. Survival is an ideological construction and an actual, local practice. Survival is also about desiring and fulfilling arts-based desires to work with the land through academic and material scavenging. Cob creates strategies for surviving, for working with our respective environments wisely. Cob building teaches people how to negotiate the natural economy and their relationships to labor and each other through an artistic and intimate practice. From a feminist poststructural lens, survival happens on the local level, between and with people. Cob building creates knowledge through creative, kinesthetic, and collaborative engagement. As a feminist poststructuralist, arts-based research allows me to examine local action and interaction among people, positionalities, and competing differences. Rather than appeasing the modern impulse to objectify and rationalize an end-point or an object- oriented view of the production of art, feminist poststructural theory works to problematize the end-point. Through cob building, a rich, arts-based process, I call into question the modern impulse to find Truth and ask that we be aware of developing new oppressions when working toward equity and justice. Cob building teaches people how to engage together within the form of artistic creation. Cob is an arts-based research process that includes the land as an integral part of its canvas. In order to articulate, uncover, and engage the claim that, as an arts-based process, cob creates movements and moments of survival, I use the arts-based process, a/r/tography. This a/r/tographical text does not offer an end point but works to recreate moments and movements of cob building as an arts-based research project. A/r/tography helps to layer the movements of arts-based survival within cob building and this text. Throughout this work, the arts-based process of cob building is the overlying metaphor for the construction of the structure of this text. As the chapters move forward, the structure builds up.

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Shardlow, Teri. "Problematising Conceptualisations of Gender in Feminist Studies : The Place of Age and Children in the Concept of Gender." Thesis, Linköpings universitet, Tema Genus, 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-154807.

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Using a feminist poststructuralist approach as a guide, I begin this thesis with the workinghypothesis that gender may be an adult-centred concept in feminist studies. This leads me toask: If the concept of gender in feminist studies is adult-centred, how is this centring formedand maintained? To answer this question, I begin by splitting my analysis into three analyticalsections: age, children, and gender. Although I include age, children, and gender into eachsectional analysis, my main priority in the first two sections is to look at how feminist scholarsdiscuss and use the terms age and child(ren). In the gender section, I use three canonical gendertheory texts as the basis of my analysis, where I see how gender is discussed and conceptualisedand how both children and age figure in these conceptualisations.One of the main concerns of feminist poststructuralist theory is tackling binaries. However,with the category of age having been often taken for granted in feminist studies, and thereforeunder-theorised, the adult/child binary in the category of age remains largely unchallenged.Instead, where age has been investigated in terms of tackling binaries, the young/old binary hasdominated but has remained centred around the adult; leaving children underacknowledgedand under-theorised in feminist studies age discourse. This under-theorisation of childrenmeans that “child” remains a master status with seemingly unshakeable connotations ofinnocence, vulnerability, and incompetence. Children are those who are not adults and not-yetsubjects. They are understood as being in constant need of care from the competent andcomplete adult. In this thesis, I show how these points, among others, contribute to both theformation and maintenance of the concept of gender as adult-centred.

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DeShong, Halimah. "Gendered negotiations : interrogating discourses of intimate partner violence (IPV)." Thesis, University of Manchester, 2010. https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/gendered-negotiations-interrogating-discourses-of-intimate-partner-violence-ipv(eb60fd69-73db-4fb5-a434-fc67dd62cc65).html.

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In this thesis I investigate intimate partner violence (IPV) against women in heterosexual relationships by analysing the accounts of women and men in the Anglophone Caribbean country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Since IPV occurs in the context of a range of abusive practices (Dobash and Dobash 2004) participants' talk on the use and experiences of violent acts, violent threats, as well as other controlling and coercive tactics are examined as part of this study. Analytically, I focus on the points at which discourses of gender converge with narratives of violence. In other words, the current work examines the ways in which participants construct, (re)produce, disturb and/or negotiate gender in their accounts of IPV, and the kinds of power dynamics that are implicated in these verbal performances. I apply a feminist poststructuralist framework to the study of IPV against women. Synthesising feminist theories of gender and power, and poststructuralist insights on language, subjectivity, social processes and institutions, feminist poststructuralism holds that hegemonic discourses of gender are used to subjugate women (Weedon 1997; Gavey 1990). The points at which individuals complicate dominant discursive practices will also be assessed as part of this approach. In-depth interviews conducted with 34 participants - 19 women and 15 men - between 2007 and 2008 are analysed by using a version of discourse analysis (DA) compatible with the feminist poststructuralist framework outlined in the thesis. My analysis begins by highlighting the ways in which narratives of gender inscribe asymmetrical relations of power. The focus then shifts to a comparison of women's and men's accounts on a range of abusive acts. Traditional scripts on gender are often used to police the boundaries of femininities and masculinities, tying these to female and male bodies respectively. This is the context in which control, coercion, violence and violent threats are discussed in these accounts. Understandings of manhood and womanhood also emerge in the analysis of the strategies used to explain violence. I conclude with a summary and discussion of the analysis, and I suggest possible areas for further research on IPV in the Anglophone Caribbean.

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Brännlund, Angelika. "Bildskapande i relation till genus i förskolans verksamhet : Att skapa sig själv och genus." Thesis, Karlstads universitet, Institutionen för pedagogiska studier, 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-66388.

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Studiens syfte är att bidra till ökad medvetenhet för verksamma inom förskolans område kring frågor som rör pedagogers förhållningssätt kring relationen mellan bildskapande och genus, men även hur dessa förhållningssätt kan påverka barnens möjligheter i deras bildskapande. En viktig fråga som burits med från starten av arbetet och som lyser igenom i resultatdelen har varit: Vilka möjligheter att förhålla sig till bildskapande och genus kan uppstå om ett kritiskt sätt att tänka kring könsstereotypa mönster tas tillvara inom bildskapande? Metoden har utgått från en intervjustudie vilket inneburit intervjuer av sju pedagoger som arbetar inom förskolan. Halvstrukturerade intervjuer har varit av stort värde för mig som intervjuare för frågeformuleringens skull under intervjuerna, men även för informanterna för att kunna formulera sitt förhållningssätt till relationen mellan bildskapande och genus. Resultat som framkommit har visat på olika och ambivalenta förhållningssätt till bildskapande i relation till genus. Analys av resultaten visar på vikten av ett medvetet förhållningssätt i bildskapande sett till barnens möjligheter i bildskapande.
The purpose of the study is to contribute to increased awareness for those active in pre-school setting regarding the pre-school teachers’ approach to the relationship between art and creation and gender, but also how these attitudes can affect children's art and creation possibilities. An important issue right from the very beginning of this study, which is prevalent in the discussion of the results, has been: What kind of attitudes regarding art and creation and gender can occur if a critical way of thinking about gender and stereotypes is used in art and creation? The method was based on an interview study, which involved interviews of seven educators working in a pre-school environment. Semi-structured interviews have been of great value personally as an interviewer asking questions, but also for the sake of the interviewees abilities to express their attitudes concerning the relation between art and creation and gender. Emerged results have shown different and ambivalent approaches to the relation between art and creation and gender. Analysis of the results shows the importance of the use of a conscious approach in art and creation as seen in the children’s approach to art and creation.

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Ferguson, Graeme William. "'I don't want to be a freak!' An Interrogation of the Negotiation of Masculinities in Two Aotearoa New Zealand Primary Schools." Thesis, University of Canterbury. School of Educational Studies and Leadership, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/9650.

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Increasingly since the 1990s those of us who are interested in gender issues in education have heard the question: What about the boys? A discourse has emerged in New Zealand, as in other countries including Australia, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, that attention spent on addressing issues related to the educational needs of girls has resulted in the neglect of boys and problems related to their schooling. Positioned within this discourse, boys are depicted as disadvantaged, victims of feminism, underachieving or failing within the alienating feminised schooling environment and their struggles at school are seen as a symptom of a wider ‘crisis of masculinity'. This anxiety about boys has generated much debate and a number of explanations for the school performance of boys. One concern, that has remained largely unexamined in the Aotearoa New Zealand context, is that the dominant discourse of masculinity is characterised by a restless physicality, anti-intellectualism, misbehaviour and opposition to authority all of which are construed as antithetical to success at school. This thesis explores how masculinities are played out in the schooling experiences of a small group of 5, 6 and 7 year old boys in two New Zealand primary schools as they construct, embody and enact their gendered subjectivities both as boys and as pupils. This study of how the lived realities of schooling for these boys are discursively constituted is informed by feminist poststructuralism, aspects of queer theory and, in particular, draws on the works of Michel Foucault. The research design involved employing an innovative mix of data generating strategies. The discursive analysis of the data generated in focus group discussions, classroom and playground observations, children’s drawings and video and audio recording of the normal classroom literacy programmes is initially organised around these sites of learning in order to explore how gender is produced discursively, embodied and enacted as children go about their work and their play. The research shows that although considerable diversity was apparent as the boys fashioned their masculinities in these different sites, ‘doing boy’ is not inimical to ‘doing schoolboy’ as all the boys, when required to, were able to constitute themselves as ‘intelligible’ pupils (Youdell, 2006). The research findings challenge the notion of school as a feminised and alienating environment for them. In particular, instances of some of the boys disrupting the established classroom norms, as recorded by feminist researchers more than two decades ago, are documented. Concerns then, that “classroom practices reinforced a notion of male importance and superiority while diminishing the interests and status of girls” (Allen, 2009, p. 124) appear to still be relevant, and the postfeminist discourse “that gender equity has now been achieved for girls and women in education” (Ringrose, 2013, p. 1) is called into question. Amid the greater emphasis on measuring easily quantifiable aspects of pupils’ educational achievement, what this analysis does is to recognize the processes of schooling as highly complex and to offer a more nuanced response to the question of boys and their schooling than that offered by, for example, men’s rights advocates. It suggests that if we are committed to improving education for all children, the question needs to be re/framed so as not to lose sight of educational issues related to girls and needs to ask just which particular groups of boys and which particular groups of girls are currently being disadvantaged in our schools.

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Betzer-Tayar, Moran. "The role of women in decision-making positions : the case of Israeli sport organisations." Thesis, Loughborough University, 2013. https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/12089.

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This thesis analyses discourses about the roles and barriers to access for women to decision-making positions in Israeli sport organisations. In particular it focuses on the exploration of discourses of masculinity and femininity that underpin the relatively recent construction of Israel society and the institutions of sport within it. It is observed that for the most part, Israeli sport organisations are governed by men and have served the interests of forms of hegemonic masculinity. In order to understand and explore the social construction of these gendered discourses in Israeli sport, two innovative and significant policy initiatives toward gender equity in sport were explored through the perceptions and discourses of key actors. These include the establishment of a Volleyball Academy for Young Talented Girls (VAYTG) and the creation of the National Project for Women and Sport (NPWS). The theoretical framework for this thesis is informed by poststructuralist feminism, which provided an alternative way to understand and analyse voices of the (predominantly female) 'other' and thus to explore the historical contextual construction of current discourses of masculinity within Israeli sport organisations and society as a whole. The process of narrative revisions and production of gendered knowledge revealed how discourses produce and reinforce gender inequities in Israeli society, such as the discourse of militarisation or the unique political affiliation system in the sporting arena which continue to implicitly exclude women (and some men) from gaining access to leadership positions in sport organisations. Within this theoretical frame, Critical Discourse Analysis was employed as a methodological approach to analyse how female and male interviewees, all considered to be 'insiders' within their organisations, explained the process of the construction of gendered roles and barriers. Included in the interview data was also the auto-ethnographical accounts of the author, who was a primary actor in the process of developing policy in the two case study initiatives addressed. Dominant discourses of femininity (such as the discourse of sisterhood and of the processes of mentoring), and of masculinity (and how these promote uniformity) were identified as mechanisms for reproducing the gendered reality of sport leadership in Israel. The implication of a critical theoretical approach is that it should be emancipatory in its ambitions and impact, and the study is intended to contribute to enhancing the understanding of how discourse not only reflects but also creates barriers and opportunities so that the construction of such barriers can be challenged in progressive policy discourses.

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Elander, Astrid. "Att tala utan språk : Om kön och trauma i Ingeborg Bachmanns roman Malina." Thesis, Mittuniversitetet, Institutionen för humaniora och samhällsvetenskap, 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:miun:diva-42587.

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This essay analyzes the Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina (1971) from two theoretical perspectives: Freudian trauma theory and poststructuralist feminism, as formulated by Julia Kristeva in Revolution in Poetic Language (1974). Both of these standpoints manages to explain one of the main issues in Malina, that is, how to give voice to that which escapes language. By arguing that the nameless narrator, Ich (I), has been traumatized by patriarchal structures, I show how these perspectives complement rather than exclude each other. Together they manage to give a new and more complete picture of the struggle for language depicted in the novel.

Godkänt datum 2021-06-01

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Guerin, Bernadette M. "Leaving a lot to be desired? Sex therapy and the discourses of heterosex." Thesis, University of Auckland, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2292/3454.

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In this thesis I explore the social construction of sexuality and sexual dysfunction. Interviews were undertaken with 20 sex therapists practising in Aotearoa/New Zealand in order to elicit accounts of contemporary sex therapy practice in the local context. Using a feminist poststructuralist lens, I explicate and critically examine the dominant discourses informing the construction of sex therapy, and heterosexual sexual relations, and what these discourses enable and constrain. I draw attention to some of the assumptions embedded in the construction of the sexual dysfunctions in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR, APA, 2000), and in accounts of sex therapy practice, examining the ways in which these are based on taken-for-granted norms of (hetero)sexuality and highlighting the differently enabled gendered sexual subjectivities they (re)produce. Although there are nine sexual dysfunctions identified in the DSM-IV-TR, all of which I briefly outline in Chapter Four, I restrict my focus in the analytical chapters to the conceptualisation and treatment of vaginismus, orgasm difficulties in women, discrepancies in desire and, relatedly, the gendering of desire through powerful sociocultural discourses and representations. I pay particular attention to the implications of these for heterosexual women’s sexuality. I also explore some of the generic concepts that dominate the construction of therapy at a broader level than that of sex therapy alone, arguing that while these offer some useful ways of framing therapy they also constrain therapy practice in important ways. Through a critical review of the sex therapy literature and accounts of practice from those interviewed, I contend that contemporary sex therapy tends to reify dominant cultural and sexological norms rather than challenge them. My analyses show that the dominant discourses informing constructions of sex therapy and heterosexual sexual relations produce particular types of sex as normal whilst marginalizing sexual acts or practices that fall outside of such restrictive parameters. In particular, I argue that the genital-coital-orgasm construct that is hegemonic within sex therapy restricts possibilities for alternative erotic pleasures and possibilities amongst heterosexuals whilst contributing to the invisibilization of sexual identities other than heterosexual. Accounts of sex therapy practice that were able to contest such framings are also highlighted. Because these came from sex therapists drawing on radical feminist or feminist poststructuralist discourses, I suggest that these discourses offer important possibilities for a deconstructive (sex) therapy practice that is able to challenge an often inequitable sexual status quo. Attention is also drawn to the significant constraints which act to restrict clients’ choices and possibilities for sex therapists to practise in more critically questioning ways. I conclude this thesis with an ‘invitation to reflection’ where I briefly discuss some deconstructive approaches that I have found useful for developing ongoing reflexive analysis of my own taken-for-granted assumptions in the area of sexuality, and for aiding my thinking about therapeutic practices that support my political and theoretical commitments and that attend to some of the issues outlined in this thesis.
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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Poststructuralist Feminism'

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