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Right-Wing movements have gained political momentum in the last few decades, drawing within their ranks women who not only embody their exclusionary and violent politics but who also simultaneously contest everyday patriarchies. This thesis examines the everyday politics of women in two right-wing movements, the cultural nationalist Hindu right-wing project in India and the settler-colonial Zionist project in Israel-Palestine. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic, narrative, and visual 'fieldwork' conducted with women in both these movements, I argue that through a politics of the everyday, right-wing women bargain and negotiate with patriarchal communities/homes, male-formulated ideologies and discourses, and male-dominated right-wing projects and spaces. These mediations replicate and affirm as well as subvert and challenge patriarchal structures and power hierarchies, troubling the binaries of home/world, private/public, personal/political, and victim/agent. I assert that dominant literature on right-wing women focuses on motherhood and family, ignoring various other crucial subject positions that are constituted and occupied by right-wing women and neglecting the agential and empowering potential of right-wing women's subjectivities. I use four themes/lenses to examine the everyday politics of right-wing women. These are: pedagogy and education; charity and humanitarian work; intimacy, friendship, sociability and leisure; and political violence. By interrogating the practices that are contained in and enabled by these four locations of Hindu right-wing and Zionist settler women's everyday politics, this thesis highlights the multiple narratives, contradictions, pluralities, hierarchies, power structures, languages, and discourses that encompass right-wing women's projects. By capturing the processes of subject formation of right-wing women, I encapsulate how my interlocutors shape the subjectivities of those in their communities, transforming the local and international landscapes of the Hindu right-wing and the Zionist settler project. Drawing together ethnographic narratives, 'story-telling', visuals, methodological and ethical reflections, and inter-disciplinary theoretical engagement, this thesis also asks what the many-layered textures of everyday politics of right-wing women might mean for feminist scholarship in gender studies, politics, and international relations, for feminist methodologies, for feminist ethics, and for feminist activism.

The leadership literature, although very well established, has paid limited attention to the differences between people, even when it has examined the different ways in which women and men may lead. In particular, any attention to those differences has been as if sex and gender are the same, while sexuality has been ignored. The conceptual framework for my thesis comes from Butler’s (1990) work on the performativity of gender and her discussion of the heterosexual framework. Therefore, in this thesis I attempt to address the deficiencies above by answering the following questions: How do/can people construct identities that transcend the heterosexual matrix? As people construct their identities as leaders, do they seek to reconcile all their other identities into a coherent whole with their identity as a leader? To what extent are leadership, sex, gender and sexual identities ‘fixed’ or ‘static’? How do queer or borderline identities intersect with leadership? I explore these questions by interviewing 34 leaders of varying sexes, genders and sexual orientations. These respondents were active and retired members of the military and nursing in the UK, Canada or the US. Perhaps the most significant finding was that for these respondents, their body trumped the other two aspects of identity, i.e., their gender and their sexuality, when developing and enacting their leadership within these hypergendered organizations.

In this thesis, I aim to investigate and challenge cisgenderism- the ideology that delegitimises people's own designations of their genders and bodies. In Chapter 1, I discuss the epistemological concell1S that infoll11ed my decision to apply a bricolage approach, explain how I applied bricolage tec1miques in my research, and introduce the cisgenderism framework. In Chapter 2, I conduct a bibliometric analysis to identify the four most widely cited empirical papers in the field of sexist language research in English. I then discursively analyse these four empirical papers for the cisgenderist assumptions that can lead to misgendering and explore the implications of this misgendering. In Chapter 3, I shift my disciplinary focus from feminist research to psychology with a quantitative content analysis of pathologising and misgendering forms of cisgenderism in psychological literature on children's genders and gender-associated expression from 1999-2008. In Chapter 4, I conduct two experiments that that use Prader's (1954) diagram of infant genital 'virilisation' to explore whether framing effects in ostensibly 'neutral' and 'value-free' medical communication about infant genitals can affect laypeople's decisions to recommend or reject 'normalising' infant genital surgery. In Chapter 5, I conduct two studies of people's self-reported experiences of being misgendered and misgendering others. I explore whether perceptions of the adverse effects of misgendering differ between targets and sources of misgendering, between people who report being perceived as 'trans' and people who report that they are not, and between people who report having matching and mismatched identity documents. I complement the quantitative empirical findings with an analysis of qualitative participant narratives of having been misgendered and having misgendered others. Chapter 6 concludes this thesis with a restatement of the aims of this research, a synthesis of how the six bricolage tec1miques I employed contributed to my findings in Chapters 2-5, and a discussion of how these findings can inform interventions to reduce cisgenderism.

The collapse of socialism has generated enormous social, economic and political upheaval in central and eastern Europe. The impact of these transformations on constructions of gender and daily gendered practices have been hugely diverse. Nevertheless, an emerging, recurrent theme has been the prominence of competing and contested ideas about motherhood, reproduction, femininity and women's work. This thesis addresses how these tensions emerge and unfold within an institution in Prague comprising of a convent, a women's prison and a nursing home. It traces how constructions of motherhood and nurture and particular idioms of 'public' and 'private' moralities, all characteristic of the socialist era in Czechoslovakia, are being reformulated within new ideologies of 'work', patient care and prisoner rehabilitation within this institution. It explores how these processes echo with the experience of different people in a variety of ways. 5 A key concern is how social relationships and daily practices in this institution constitute 'home' as an imagined domain of gendered 'authenticity'. It is proposed that 'home' operates as a key imaginary that is perpetually reified and transformed, invoked as a justification for processes of categorisation and discipline, but also powerfully used to refuse and transcend them. The thesis focuses on how 'home' is performed in ways which constitute it as an authentic 'reality' outside the institution. Accompanying the written thesis is a documentary film, Domov, the making of which was an integral part of the research project. Ethnographically, the thesis focuses on three main areas of investigation. Firstly there is a discussion of eating and drinking practices as arenas for competing ideas about emotional labour and the simulation of 'home' in the institution. Secondly the different scopic regimes in the nursing home and prison are explored. Here the use of a video camera as a research method is central to the theoretical consideration of different modalities of surveillance. Finally, the narrative of the accompanying film is theoretically elaborated, through a consideration of how the imaginaries of 'home' maintained by three women (a patient, a prisoner and a nurse) were fundamentally challenged on their departure from the institution

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Humans are social animals. Human societies emerge from vast networks of cooperative interactions between many different individuals. In this respect, humans are similar to most other primates. However, human societies are unusual among primates in the number of different types of cooperative relationships that are involved. In humans, males and females form strong pair bonds within large multimale, multi-female societies in which many other cooperative relationships are also important. How and when did human social systems arise? Do males and females use different types of cooperative strategies? Under what conditions does paternal care evolve? Do males and females have different constraints, and how do these affect the types of social strategies they employ? How do factors such as environment quality and seasonality modify these strategies? This thesis seeks answers to these questions using computer simulations based on the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. The hypotheses generated by these models are tested using data from living primates. They are then used to investigate the kinds of societies that our hominid ancestors may have lived in. The theoretical and empirical evidence presented in this thesis suggests that sex differences in the energetic cost of reproduction determine the cooperative strategies, and ultimately the types of social groups, that evolve. It is proposed that during hominid evolution female energetic costs increased greatly, in comparison to male energetic costs, due to changes in body size dimorphism, diet and brain size. A two-stage model of hominid social structure is developed. The first stage, at the transition from the australopithecines to Homo erectus, would have involved an increase in female cooperation, especially food sharing. The second stage, occurring between 500,000 and 100,000 years ago, would have involved male care giving, the formation of pair bonds and the sexual division of labour within the context of a wider cooperative network.

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Over the last decade, studies of trans people have somewhat shifted away from essentialising and pathologising narratives, whilst recognition of gender plurality has grown. However to date, gender identities outside of the binary of male/female have received little specific sociological attention. This thesis considers negotiation of non-binary gender identities, in a UK context. Examining how non-binary individuals are involved with and integrated into LGBTQ communities exposes important nuances. This is also true regarding the negotiation of medical practice by non-binary people in relation to gender transitions, and more generally. Eighteen participants with non-binary gender identities were recruited to record ‘mixed media diaries’ for a four month period. These diaries allowed participants to use any methods they wished to express themselves. Follow-up semi-structured interviews were then conducted with the same participants in order to discuss their experiences and views, relating to broad conceptions of queer communities and medical practice. The objectives were to understand how non-binary people are integrated into queer communities and negotiate medical practice, as well as what the emergence of non-binary gender identities implies for these contexts. Symbolic interactionism provided the project’s theoretical framework, as this effectively allowed space for a multiplicity of participant interpretations resulting from interactions with the social world. The findings of this study illustrate both commonalities and difference between binary and non-binary trans experiences. Non-binary identities can present in static or fluidic forms, which may be associated with differential needs. Access to gender affirming medical services is varied, and not always pursued. Non-binary identities may be associated with discourses and practices of reduced legitimisation in both medical contexts and some queer communities. The study concludes that the improvement of a wide range of medical policies and practice is needed, together with community support initiatives to better recognise and serve non-binary people.