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This thesis will explore representations of female rivalry in novels by women between 1914 and 1939. It will focus especially on women writers' reversal of the 'erotic triangle' paradigm theorised by Rem\ Girard (1961) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1985). By using a female-male-female triangle these women novelists are able to examine the conflict between women's primary bonds to other women and their desire for the sexual fulfilment and social/economic status offered by a relationship with a man. The first chapter will offer an historical overview and reasons for a particular interest in this theme during this period. Chapter Two will compare the models of female rivalry which can be drawn from the work of Freud (of key importance in the inter-war period) and Luce Irigaray, from studies of blood sister relationships, and from a Bakhtinian model of subjectivity constructed through dialogue. Both chapters will include brief analyses of novels. The central chapters will use these models of female rivalry to offer detailed analyses of texts by five women writers: May Sinclair, Rebecca West, Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby and Rosamond Lehmann. The chapter on May Sinclair explores her use of psychoanalysis to problematise the motif of self-sacrifice in Victorian women's novels - the woman who sacrifices her own desires in order to cede the man she loves to her friend or sister. The chapter on Rebecca West looks at her use of her sisters as models for her female characters, and at her exploration of relations between women who are brought together only by their relation to the man they both love. The following two chapters will offer an extended analysis of the friendship between Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby and their intertextual rivalry over the meaning of their friendship and female friendship in general. The chapter on Rosamond Lehmann explores her valorisation of sister relationships and her examination Of the romance plot and the way that it constructs women as rivals. Finally, the conclusion will focus on a reading of Lehmann's retrospective The Echoing Grove (1953), which fuses the figures of the rival and the sister. It will argue for the need for a model of female rivalry which can encompass the tension generated by the simultaneous and competing positions occupied by women as rival commodities within a 'male economy' and as 'sisters' within a 'female economy'. I will suggest that we need new plots and narratives which can encompass rivalry between women which is not over a man. We also need to consider the possibility that some kinds of rivalry between women can, ironically, be both positive and energising.

This thesis will argue that feminism is at the edge of a new wave brought about by the fragmentation of the feminist political movement and the rise of postmodern theory. It contends that postmodern theories have been used by feminists as a 'critical strategy' to understand why the movement fragmented and to move towards the acceptance of more strategic and conventional politics. Thus many feminists are now prepared to leave behind the utopian and separatist legacies of the second wave. These feminists are willing to consider how a future feminist movement can be built that will account for the differences between women, and realise that there will thus need to be a painful and precarious process of alliance-building. It is argued that given the precarious nature of the alliance, feminists in a new wave must also re-conceive democratic models of citizenship to ensure that women and feminists' concerns are met in the wider political sphere. This second concern also makes sure that they have institutional and procedural support should fragmentation recur. The thesis considers three such models of citizenship: Seyla Benhabib's deliberative model, Iris Young's communicative model and Chantal Mouffe's agonal one. It contends that these models only partly address the concerns of new wave feminism, because they are based on transformative and participatory models of politics. These models undermine the importance of feminists finding legitimate political relationships that respect the multiplicity of their demands as feminists, as women and as citizens. This thesis concludes that representative models of democracy are more suited to feminist concerns in a new wave. Such models have distinctive characteristics that allow women to be politically included in terms of a range of political concerns and identities. Representative models of democracy, moreover, make it clear that the political relationship is one of formal authorisation and not one of personal identity recognition and transformation.

acase@tulane.edu / This dissertation research brings together disparate bodies of literature on environmental inequality, sociology of space, and feminist theories of intersectionality to bear on the location and distribution of environmental hazards in the form of landfills. Landfills pose a threat to both ecological sustainability as well as present risks to human health through contamination and pollution. While environmental inequality literatures have executed exceptional work into the dynamics of race and class with respect to the distribution of hazardous waste facilities, the literature is noticeably lacking with respect to identifying relationships between gender and environmental inequalities. Furthermore, many quantitative studies have exclusively focused on hazardous waste facilities as a singular measure of environmental inequality. This study advances the field in three major ways. First, through the inclusion of theorizations based on feminist intersectionality theories, this research empirically analyzes hypotheses derived from intersectionality theories to understand dynamics of gender-environment interactions. Second, this study extends analysis to all forms of waste containment—municipal, industrial, construction and demolition, and hazardous—to identify trends across the social fabric of the contiguous United States at the county level of analysis with respect to multiple forms of environmental hazards. Third, utilizing innovative analytic techniques, this research provides three unique and related strategies, geographic information systems, logistic binary regression, and structural equation modeling, to examine socio-environmental disparities. Findings from each analytic strategy inform the subsequent strategy. Findings suggest the importance of including gender indicators to account for the unique effect of gender and environmental inequality. Furthermore, results indicate the importance in applying intersectionality theories to environmental outcomes as well as empirically testing hypotheses derived from the largely theoretical and qualitatively backed field. Future research should focus on specific regional dynamics of identified socio-environmental interactions by including historical and qualitative data to triangulate quantitative findings. / 1 / Clare Cannon

This thesis examines theoretical and popular ways of knowing the prostitute and the client. Its purpose is to intervene in contemporary ways of knowing and articulate a more consistent feminist stance on prostitution. Currently, the prostitute is known predominantly through the discourse of psychology whilst the client is known through the discourse of sexology. She is deviant and he is normal. She is a victim and he is an agent. The issue of inconsistency in the feminist stance on prostitution is related to the recognition that these dualisms figure in the way in which all knowledge of the client and the prostitute is organised. Within feminist theory the prostitute is known through the dualism of victim and agent whilst the client is known through the sex/gender distinction. The former perpetuates certain ways of knowing the prostitute that cannot embrace the complexity and ambivalence of prostitution for women. If she is a victim she is only passive and exploited. If she is an agent she is both active and free. Utilising the latter allows the client to escape scrutiny. This thesis will argue that this is for two reasons. Firstly, because feminists have tended to support the idea of the prostitute as agent within the victim/agent dichotomy. Within such a way of knowing, any critique of the client became a critique of the livelihood of the prostitute, and is best avoided. Secondly, because feminists tend to work within the sex/gender distinction and its associated dualisms of mind and body, nature and culture. As such, they tend to perpetuate, rather than challenge, the sexological relationship between the sexual and the social. In both analyses, the sexual urge is ultimately natural, albeit modified by society. Analyses that argue for the social constitution of sexuality (rather than simply its social construction) still perpetuate the sex/gender distinction by claiming the validity of the mind/body dualism for their analyse. This thesis will argue that these dualisms structure an impossible choice for feminists and help to position them within the divisive prostitution debate. In a political climate that perpetuates only two ways of knowing prostitution, to critique prostitution is to be anti-sex, moralising, prudish and conservative. In contrast, to support prostitution is hailed as pro-sex, pro-women and pro-choice. Within this dichotomising of the political issue, feminists gain either conservative or libertarian allies. Within such a political climate, a consistent feminist position is lost. In order to counter this political and theoretical inconsistency, this thesis argues for a connection between the dualisms through the organisation of modern liberal democracies. To know the prostitute through the victim/agent dichotomy and the client through the sex/gender distinction (and associated dualisms of mind and body, nature and culture) is also to call upon the public/private split as their organising feature. The public/private split gives meaning to the dualisms of victim and agent, sex and gender, mind and body, through its role in the perpetuation of associations between victim, body, sex, private and women, and between agent, gender, mind, public and men. This thesis will argue that these dualisms are not useful for explaining the ambivalent and contradictory status of prostitution as both work and sex, public and private, rational and irrational, embodied and disembodied, sexual and social. However, not only does prostitution challenge the explanatory value of these dualisms, but the experience of prostitution for the prostitute and the client both subverts and inverts these dualisms. The usual configuration of the dualisms public/private, worker/consumer, male/female, mind/body, rationality/irrationality, are public, worker, male, mind, rationality, in contrast to private, consumer, female, body, irrationality. The prostitute is positioned in and through modern liberal democracies as embodied, but claims the status of worker through her experience of disembodiment. The client is positioned in and through modern liberal democracies as disembodied, and continues this proprietorial relationship with his body during the prostitution contract. She becomes the embodied worker and he becomes the disembodied sex partner. This further demonstrates the inability of a dualistic conception of prostitution to take into account the ambivalent and contradictory status of the prostitute and the client. Whilst this thesis will suggest that such an ambivalent status is to be found in all relations between men and women in modern liberal democracies, it will also propose the political implications of this theoretical reconfiguration for the feminist position on prostitution.

<p>The purpose of the study is to  examine women and men’s perspective on the informal and traditional way for women to organize themselves in relation to formalization. To meet the aims of the thesis qualitative studies through interviews concerning a <em>protest march</em> that took place in 2003 Dareda village were performed, and a literature study to supplement the empirical data. Thereafter the purpose was analyzed through both feminist theory and empowerment theory. A majority of both the men and the women were positive opinions towards the traditional way for women to be organized. This might go against the feminist theory and verify that only negative statements are brought up within the feminist discourse. Through this tradition women collectively claim specific rights, because they are more powerful together then individually, but also under the banner of motherhood or as women. In relation to the process of development the women are being hindered from protesting more frequently and urged to act within the formal framework. Their major obstacles with the formalization concerns to the judicial system and some of them claim that corruption will prevent justice for them as women.</p><p> </p>

The purpose of the study is to  examine women and men’s perspective on the informal and traditional way for women to organize themselves in relation to formalization. To meet the aims of the thesis qualitative studies through interviews concerning a protest march that took place in 2003 Dareda village were performed, and a literature study to supplement the empirical data. Thereafter the purpose was analyzed through both feminist theory and empowerment theory. A majority of both the men and the women were positive opinions towards the traditional way for women to be organized. This might go against the feminist theory and verify that only negative statements are brought up within the feminist discourse. Through this tradition women collectively claim specific rights, because they are more powerful together then individually, but also under the banner of motherhood or as women. In relation to the process of development the women are being hindered from protesting more frequently and urged to act within the formal framework. Their major obstacles with the formalization concerns to the judicial system and some of them claim that corruption will prevent justice for them as women.

Thesis (M.Ed.)--York University, 2006. Graduate Programme in Education. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 128-133). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: 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:MR29564

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2007. Graduate Programme in Psychology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 125-139). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: 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:MR38745