This study examines discourse on youth health embedded in the current Ontario Health and Physical Education curriculum in an attempt to unveil any discrepancies between students’ beliefs regarding physical activity and body image and the curriculum they receive in physical education classes. This study will explore how students who participate in this curriculum narrate and experience their bodies to explore any contradictory or complimentary relationships that exist between the curriculum and the students it serves. Recent academic work in the area of health and physical activity has placed undue emphasis on obesity and on an individuating view of the inactive, unhealthy individual to be remediated by a corrective physical education program. This is not only damaging to the self-esteem of youth, but unrealistic as a program aligned with middle-class access to resources associated with ‘active living’ in the ways advocated for by proponents of this version of health promotion.

The Lacy Hotel was a part of the "Great Locomotive Chase", a significant historical event in Kennesaw, Georgia during the Civil War (AD 1861-1864), yet little is known of this site. The Lacy Hotel was a boardinghouse that operated for roughly six years until General William Tecumseh Sherman burned it in 1864. This research utilizes historical records along with archaeological fieldwork in order to provide a more detailed analysis of daily life within the Lacy household. Dominant ideologies influence the roles of women concerning their activities and choices of consumption within the household. Although the results show that the boardinghouse is not a typical household, the social dynamics and consumption are still constrained by the culture and ideology of the time period. In conclusion, this research offers a case study about the role of women on the eve of turmoil and contends that the boardinghouse is emblematic of broader changes within the rural South during the 19th century.

Dana, the Black female protagonist in Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred (1979), finds herself literally and figuratively in medias res as she sporadically travels between her present day life in 1976 and her ancestral plantation of 1815 – two time periods that represent two converse concepts of her identity as a Black woman. As a result, her time travel experiences cause her to revise her racial and gendered identity from a historically fragmented Black woman, who defines herself solely on her contemporary experiences, to a Black woman who defines herself based on her present life and her personal and ancestral history of experiencing and overcoming racial and gendered oppression. Using Black feminist theory scholarship, this thesis examines Dana’s movement out of in medias res, through temporal double-consciousness, into a historically integrated identity or interstitial consciousness.

The purpose of this thesis was to study some women's participation in two different kinds of computerised further education organised as distance edu­cation. Both groups used the FirstClass conference system as a tool for bridging distances. One was a university program for teachers in special education and the other was a computerised Network for professional special education teachers, run by the members. The dissertation was grounded in feminist theory and in a socio-cultural perspective on learning. The empirical material consists of questionnaires, interviews and analysis of the communi­cation in both computer conferences. The result showed that the women appreciated the opportunity to study at a distance. They enjoyed the flexibil­ity in time and space and the opportunity to be a part of a fellowship. There were great differences in the pattern of communication and the contents in the two settings. In the Special Education Programme the communication was regular and the inputs were usually related to the literature and examina­tion issues. In the Network the communication was more sporadic. The in­puts were usually short and consisted mostly of information. The contribu­tions in both settings were generally univocal and usually they did not show that the individual participants developed new pedagogical perspectives or views related to the actual question. This investigation showed that it was difficult to establish discussions and co-operation via the computer, espe­cially in the Network. However the women were satisfied with the continu­ing education and felt that the written communication via the computer con­ferences developed their knowledge in special pedagogy and helped them to reflect upon their work as special education teachers. Distance education could however become a gender-trap as it was found to allow the women to combine unpaid work in the family with both paid work and studies. / digitalisering@umu

The purpose of this research was to determine if there is a model of ideal femininity communicated through advertising in girls’ and women’s magazines. To assess the representations of women in magazine advertisements, a content analysis of advertisements appearing in three top-selling, demographically-defined women’s magazines (Girls’ Life, Seventeen, and Cosmopolitan) was conducted. Using feminist theory and hegemony theory as critical lenses, advertisements were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Each advertisement was assessed using five criteria: physical characteristics, social context, personality and attitude, and subtext. Using this data to establish the dominant representations of women, it was determined that there is a model of ideal femininity which is developed through establishing common ideals shared by all three magazines and by gradually introducing new ideals which correspond to shifts in real-world interests and experiences of women. It was concluded that a model of ideal femininity is developed through advertising in girls’ and women’s magazines, this model is used as a guide to direct girls and women towards specific ideal preferences, attitudes and behaviours, and this model continues to emphasise traditional cultural values and gender ideals which are not necessarily reflective of the range of roles women assume in today’s society.

General social stereotypes characterize people with disabilities as asexual, invisible, and stigmatized. Therefore, sexualizing people with disabilities becomes taboo. The goal of this study is to explore how Internet pornography depicts a female wheelchair user. Using qualitative, inductive content analysis and a case study approach, I analyze 24 images from a specific, relevant website for a theme that appears most prevalent in sexuality and disability literature, the sexuality/disability split, wherein individuals’ sexualities are not pictured, felt, or acknowledged in concomitance with their disabilities. My results indicate that a sexuality/disability split does occur to some degree, but that the subject also challenges the sexuality/disability split. Finally, I show how these results apply to an emerging interactionist paradigm of feminist and disability theories.

This dissertation explores postcolonial fiction that reflects the structural situation of a genocidal number of third-world women who are being trafficked for sexual purposes from postcolonial countries into the global north—invariably, gender, class and race play a crucial role in their exploitation. Above all, these women share a systemic disposability and invisibility, as the business relies on the victim’s illegality and criminality to generate maximum revenues. My research suggests that the presence of these abject women is not only recognized by ideological and repressive state apparatuses on every side of the trafficking scheme (in the form of governments, military establishments, juridical systems, transnational corporations, etc.) but is also understood as necessary for the current neoliberal model to thrive undisturbed by ethical imperatives. Beginning with the turn of the twentieth century, then, I analyze sexual slavery transnationally by looking at James Joyce’s “Eveline,” Therese Park’s A Gift of the Emperor, Mahasweta Devi’s “Douloti the Bountiful,” Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon, Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, concentrating on the political, economic, and social discourses in which the narratives are immersed through the lens of Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial theory. By interrogating these postcolonial narratives, my project reexamines the sex slave-trafficker-consumer triad in order to determine the effect of each party’s presence or absence from the text and the implications in terms of the discourses their representations may tacitly legitimize. At the same time, this work investigates the type of postcolonial stories the West privileges and the reasons, and the subjective role postcolonial theory plays in overcoming subaltern women’s exploitation within the current neocolonial context. Overall, I interrogate the role postcolonial literature plays as a means of achieving (or not) social change, analyze the purpose of artists in representing exploitative situations, identify the type of engagement readers have with these characters, and seek to understand audiences’ response to such literature. I look at authors who have attempted to discover fruitful avenues of expression for third-world women, who, despite increasingly constituting the bulk of the work force worldwide, continue to be exploited and, in the case of sex trafficking, brutally violated.

Departing from the statement of the Swedish member of the European Parliament Eva-Britt Svensson that the EU could threat the Swedish development in gender politics this essay aims to investigate if this is possible and probable. In order to acquire a view of the actual differences between European and Swedish gender politics in the domain of family- and employment policies and how they affect one another I have conducted interviews with Swedish members of the European Parliament, civil servants and a lobbyist. By subjecting the answers to critical feminist theory the essay tries to explain the difference in the view of women and gender between the EU and Sweden and what it implicates. It seems that the basic ambition of equality between women and men is to be found at both the European level and at Swedish level. But the view of the family and the role of the women as responsible for care work differ. Swedish gender politics don’t seem to have been affected in any negative way by EU rulings so far. The risk of Sweden to compare itself with other European countries could, however, lead to stagnation in the struggle for equality between women and men as an effect of Sweden considering itself to be far ahead.

The aim of this thesis study is to understand the significance of today&rsquo / s feminist politics in Turkey for post-identity politics. When it is considered that identity politics is being widely practiced today, whereas there is still much vagueness regarding the ways of doing post-identity politics, in order to achieve the aim of this study it becomes necessary to make a critique of identity politics and to reveal post-identitarian tendencies through this critique of identity-based political mobilization. In this study, feminist identity politics is analyzed and criticized from the perspective of Judith Butler, who is a poststructuralist feminist questioning identity and its relation to gender politics. These issues are questioned through qualitative research method and semi-structured in-depth interviews are used as the data gathering technique. Five in-depth interviews were conducted with women who consider themselves feminist. The interviews aim at providing individual narrations of the participants to be exposed to deconstruction later on through the analysis process. Therefore, participants are not asked direct and categorical questions about their ideas on specific issues / instead, they are encouraged to talk about how they perceive the gendered world around them and how they respond to it and how these ideas are transferred to the political arena. It was found that the participants perceived sex, gender and sexuality in a dualistic framework to a certain extent and this relative fluidity enables them to realize the importance of doing post-identity politics, but they do not have a tendency to transfer this to the political arena in the near future.

This case study focuses on the influence of certain sociocultural factors on the ability of adolescent girls to fulfill their potentials. Specifically, the purpose of this research is to advance an alternative perspective on the relationship between the sociocultural influences of friendship, mother/daughter relationship, school experience, and body image and a loss of potential among adolescent girls from a historical, poststructural, postmodern-feminist perspective. The dissertation is presented in the form of narrative from both the author’s and girls’ and women’s perspectives in order to seek a rich and thick description. Throughout the study, the author integrates moments from her own journey during adolescence with the young girls and their mothers or grandmothers encountering the oftentimes overwhelming negative sociocultural challenges existing today. The data consist of interviews with four girls and four women; interviews with two school personnel; and observations covering 7 weeks of guided discussion groups. Personal stories are closely examined with current and in-depth research to produce valuable insight and recommendations linking sociocultural factors and potentiality among adolescent girls. In general, these data contribute to an existing body of knowledge as well as advance educational theory regarding adolescent girls and potentiality. Moreover, these findings bolster the argument that, although realistic approaches to create necessary change require a certain resignation to the forces that exist within our culture, educational psychologists will increase the discipline’s impact on students by conducting comprehensive research that creates and supports genuine efforts to teach girls effective strategies on ways to not relinquish control to relentless, disingenuous sociocultural pressures. The case study indicates that, although many positive gains have been made to support young girls, there remain many obstacles as well.