This dissertation provides a feminist restorative model of environmental justice that addresses the injustices found within UNICOR’s e-waste recycling operations. A feminist restorative environmental justice challenges the presupposition that grassroots efforts, law and policy, medical and scientific research, and theoretical pursuits (alone or in conjunction) are sufficient to address the emotional and relational harm of environmental injustices. To eliminate environmental harms, this model uses collaborative dialogue for interested parties to prevent environmental harm. To encourage participation, a feminist restorative model accepts many forms of knowledge and truth as ‘legitimate’ and offers an opportunity for women to share how their personal experiences of love, violence, and caring differ from men and other women and connect to larger social practices. This method of environmental justice offers opportunities for repair, reparation and reintegration that can transform perspectives on criminality, dangerous practices and structures in the PIC, and all persons who share in a restorative encounter.

This project examines rape culture in American literature and society, exploring factors of rape culture through the narratives of literary protagonists and current women alike. Each chapter is grounded in a work of literature, which serves as a lens through which to analyze a factor of rape culture, and is then broadened in scope to incorporate recent court cases that have had significant sociocultural impacts. The introduction includes a critical review of rape in feminist theory, from Susan Brownmiller to Ann J. Cahill. The first chapter treats the rape of Dolores Haze and victim blaming in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 Lolita, and the 2010 Cleveland, Texas gang rapes of an eleven-year-old girl, who was cast as a “Lolita” by her community and the media. The second chapter discusses the rape of women with disabilities in Elmer Harris’s 1940 Johnny Belinda, and two 2012 cases in California and Connecticut involving the rapes of women with disabilities and the issue of consent, both of which influenced legislation. The third chapter focuses on the use of mass rape as a weapon of war in Lynn Nottage’s 2009 Ruined, and the narratives and testimonies of rape survivors in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where nearly 2 million women have been raped since 1998. As the literature illustrates, when rape functions as an instrument of power and control certain similarities arise, such as victim blaming, consent, and the use of rape to demoralize and subjugate women, all of which are primary features of rape culture.

Assignment (MA)--University of Stellenbosch, 2005. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The transition to motherhood represents a critical period in a woman's life. It presents the mother with the opportunity for personal development, while simultaneously rendering her vulnerable to psychological problems. The South African low-income mother faces additional challenges in having to contend with a host of poverty-related stressors. The mother's at-risk status extends to her infant, who depends on her for the fulfilment of its needs. Current mental health policy does not consider the special needs of mother-infant dyads, despite its orientation to prevention. The current paper seeks to explore the potential of group therapy with low-income mother-infant dyads. It outlines the possible theoretical underpinnings for psychotherapeutic group work with low-income mothers and infants, by making use of attachment theory, feminist theory and community psychology. It reviews the theories' individual contributions and explores their compatibility in considering group therapy with low-income mother-infant dyads. Further, it reviews empirical studies and interventions with mother-infant dyads, with a particular emphasis on group therapy interventions. It argues that group therapy may be a viable and effective approach to psychological work with low-income mother-infant dyads. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die oorgang tot moederskap verteenwoordig 'n kritiese periode in 'n vrou se lewe. Dit bied die moeder die kans vir persoonlike ontwikkeling, terwyl dit haar gelykertyd kwesbaar maak vir sielkundige probleme. Die Suid-Afrikaanse lae-inkomste moeder moet boonop bykomstige uitdagings, in die vorm van 'n menigdom armoed-verwante stressors, die hoof bied. Die moeder se kwesbare status sluit ook haar baba in, wat op haar aangewese is vir die vervulling van sy/haar behoeftes. Huidige geestesgesondheids-beleid neem, ten spyte van 'n voorkomende oriëntasie, nie die spesiale behoeftes van moeder-kind pare in ag nie. Hierdie werksopdrag beoog om die potensiaal van groepsterapie met lae-inkomste moederkind pare te ondersoek. Dit beskryf kortliks die moontlike teoretiese begrondings van psigoterapeutiese groepswerk met lae-inkomste moeder-kind pare deur gebruik te maak van bindings-teorie, feministiese teorie sowel as gemeenskaps sielkunde. Dit hersien die teorieë se onderskeidelike bydraes en ondersoek hulle aanpasbaarheid met betrekking tot die ondersoek van groepsterapie met lae-inkomste moeder-kind pare. Hierdie werksopdrag hersien dan ook verder empiriese studies en intervensies gemik op moeder-kind pare, met 'n spesifieke fokus op groepsterapie intervensies. Daar word geargumenteer dat groepsterapie 'n geskikte en effektiewe benadering tot sielkundige werk met lae-inkomste moeder-kind pare is.

In recent decades, international feminist activism and research has had significant success in pushing gender issues onto the international agenda and into global governance institutions and processes. The goal of gender equality is now widely accepted and codified in international legal instruments. While this appears to be a remarkable global success for feminism, widespread gender inequalities persist around the globe. This paradox has led scholars to question the extent to which feminist concepts and goals can retain their transformative potential when they are institutionalized in global governance institutions and processes. This thesis examines the institutionalization of feminist ideas in global governance through an analysis of how, and with what effects, gender equality norms are constructed, interpreted and applied in the global governance of refugees: a field that has thus far received little attention in the growing literature on feminism, gender and global governance. This aim is pursued through a case study of humanitarian aid practices in refugee camps in Bangladesh and Thailand. The study is based on interviews with humanitarian workers in these two contexts, and its theoretical framework is informed by postcolonial feminist theory and Foucauldian thought on power and governing. These analytical perspectives allows the thesis to capture how gender equality norms operate as governing tools, and situate the politics of gender equality in refugee camps in the context of global relations of power and marginalization. The findings of this thesis show that in the global governance of refugees, gender equality is rarely treated as a goal in its own right. The construction, interpretation and application of gender equality norms is mediated and shaped by the dominant governing projects in this field. Gender equality norms are either advocated on the basis of their usefulness as means for the efficient management of refugee situations, or as necessary components of a process of modernization and development of the regions from which refugees originate. These governing projects significantly limit the forms of social change and the forms of agency that are enabled. Nevertheless, gender equality norms do contribute to opening up new opportunities for refugee women and destabilizing local gendered relations of power, and they are appropriated and used by refugees in ways that challenge and go beyond humanitarian agendas.

Contemporary Western feminist scholarship fails to explore the backdrop to the naturalization of feminine subjugation. By analyzing the structures, histories, and theories of gender relations, this study dislocates femininity from its ascribed Otherness and, in doing so, demonstrates how empowered femininities have been overlooked or rendered invisible within gender studies. Femme, as the failure or refusal to approximate the patriarchal norms of femininity, serves as the conceptual anchor of this study and is used to examine how femmephobic sentiments are constructed and perpetuated in contemporary Western feminist theory. In part, this perpetuation is achieved through the pedagogical and theoretical exclusions from the texts chosen for gender studies courses, revealing a normative feminist body constructed through the privileging of identities and expressions. Privileging of identities is demonstrated through the designation of literary space and in an overview of dominant theories, such as how the feminine subject is maintained as the object of critique and as not able to be “properly” feminist. This assessment of gender studies course texts reveals a limited understanding of femme and femininity that maintains these identities as white, middle-class, normatively bodied, and without agency. Feminist theory demonstrates an embedded normative feminist subject, one marked by whiteness and body privileges. By deconstructing the privileging of theories of the normative feminist subject, this study argues that gender studies has replicated feminist histories in which the politics and concerns of the white socially privileged subject are the first to be addressed. While white femininity is present in hir Otherness and in critiques of hir femininity, the racially marked femme does not exist, even in absence. The femme—as a queer potentiality—offers a way of thinking and re-thinking through the limitations of contemporary Western feminist theory and the paradoxical preoccupations with the absented femme. / Thesis (Master, Gender Studies) -- Queen's University, 2013-09-09 19:36:29.903

No description available.

<p>This dissertation explores how the contemporary Anglophone novel asks its readers to imagine and respond to disposable life as it emerges in our present-day biopolitical landscape. As the project frames it, disposable life is not just life that is disposed of; it is life whose disposal is routine and unremarkable, even socially and legally sanctioned for such purposes as human consumption, scientific knowledge-production, and economic and political gain. In the novels considered, disposability is tied to excess--to the "too many" who cannot be counted, much less individuated on a case-by-case basis. </p><p>This project argues that the contemporary novel forces a global readership to confront the mechanisms of devaluing life that are part of everyday existence. And while the factory-farmed animal serves as the example of disposable life par excellence, this project frames disposability as a form of normalized violence that has the power to operate across species lines to affect the human as well. Accordingly, each chapter examines the contemporary condition of disposability via a different figure of disposable life: the nonhuman (the animal in J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals and Disgrace), the replicated human (the clone in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go), the woman (in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy), and the postcolonial subject (the victim of industrial disaster in Indra Sinha's Animal's People and political violence in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost). Chapter by chapter, the dissertation demonstrates how the contemporary novel both exposes the logic and operations of disposability, and, by mobilizing literary techniques like intertextual play and uncanny narration, offers up a set of distinctively literary solutions to it. </p><p>The dissertation argues that the contemporary novel disrupts the workings of disposability by teaching its audience to read differently--whether, for instance, by destabilizing the reader's sense of mastery over the text or by effecting paradigm shifts in the ethical frameworks the reader brings to bear on the encounter with the literary work. Taken together, the novels discussed in this dissertation move their readership away from a sympathetic imagination based on the potential substitutability of the self for the other and toward a form of readerly engagement that insists on preserving the other's irreducible difference. Ultimately, this project argues, these modes of reading bring those so-called disposable lives, which are abjected by dominant social, economic, and political frameworks, squarely back into the realm of ethical consideration.</p> / Dissertation

Feminist art historians reassessed French Impressionist Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, a period in which her work coincidentally received steady exposure in major museum exhibitions. This thesis examines how the feminist art historical project intersects with exhibitions that give prominence to Morisot’s work. Critical reviews by Morisot scholars argue that more frequent display of the artist’s work has not correlated to nuanced interpretation. Moreover, prominent feminist scholars and museum theorists maintain that curators virtually exclude their contributions. Attending to these recurrent concerns, this thesis charts shifts in emphases and inquiry in writing centered on Morisot to survey the extent to which curators convey new constructions of her artistic, social, and historical identities. This analysis will observe how distinct exhibition forms—the retrospective, the Impressionism blockbuster, and the gendered “women Impressionists” show—may frame Morisot’s work differently according to their organizing principles.

<p>Confronting the rapidly increasing, worldwide reliance on biometric technologies to surveil, manage, and police human beings, my dissertation <italic>Informatic Opacity: Biometric Facial Recognition and the Aesthetics and Politics of Defacement</italic> charts a series of queer, feminist, and anti-racist concepts and artworks that favor opacity as a means of political struggle against surveillance and capture technologies in the 21st century. Utilizing biometric facial recognition as a paradigmatic example, I argue that today's surveillance requires persons to be informatically visible in order to control them, and such visibility relies upon the production of technical standardizations of identification to operate globally, which most vehemently impact non- normative, minoritarian populations. Thus, as biometric technologies turn exposures of the face into sites of governance, activists and artists strive to make the face biometrically illegible and refuse the political recognition biometrics promises through acts of masking, escape, and imperceptibility. Although I specifically describe tactics of making the face unrecognizable as "defacement," I broadly theorize refusals to visually cohere to digital surveillance and capture technologies' gaze as "informatic opacity," an aesthetic-political theory and practice of anti- normativity at a global, technical scale whose goal is maintaining the autonomous determination of alterity and difference by evading the quantification, standardization, and regulation of identity imposed by biometrics and the state. My dissertation also features two artworks: <italic>Facial Weaponization Suite</italic>, a series of masks and public actions, and <italic>Face Cages</italic>, a critical, dystopic installation that investigates the abstract violence of biometric facial diagramming and analysis. I develop an interdisciplinary, practice-based method that pulls from contemporary art and aesthetic theory, media theory and surveillance studies, political and continental philosophy, queer and feminist theory, transgender studies, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies.</p> / Dissertation

The Middle English lyric, “Sir John Doth Play,” narrated in the female voice clearly depicts rape by a male authority figure and the narrator’s distress over her unplanned pregnancy, yet has been repeatedly interpreted and introduced by critics as a love song portraying the interaction of a seductive village priest and a gullible maiden. As such, the lyric provides a unique perspective on the patriarchal nature of the twentieth century and the value of critically re-examining literature rather than canonizing accepted interpretations of literary work.