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My thesis examines the question of alienation and belonging in Iran and in exile as it arises in the representation of cultural memory in literary texts by exiled Iranian Jewish women. I establish a contestation between the textual protagonists' Jewish, Iranian and female identities and exile as a mnemonic site for negotiating a fusion of identities. My work thus seeks to contribute to a heterogeneous nature of the relationship between Jews and gender since the narrative of Iranian Jewish women is barely acknowledged in scholarship on Iranian Jews or in studies of Iranian women. My thesis contributes to the growing, but still insufficiently disseminated, body of literature on Mizrahi Jewish identity. I challenge the dominant scholarly representations of the relationship between Iranian Jews and broader Muslim Shi'a society as straightforwardly polarised and complicate Jewish notions of exile which hitherto have focused on a more Zionist narrative where the object of yearning is Israel. My research is based on six novels and memoirs created in American and Belgian exile and represents Iranian Jewish women in the context of shifting state and religious ideologies during the Shah's reign and the subsequent Islamic regime. All the literary texts are sites of resistance and denial and represent the innate desire of the Iranian Jewish women to be seen as belonging to Iran whilst resisting their rejection as Jews. Exile offers the protagonists the opportunity to define their identities rather than accepting definitions by others in which Iranian and Jewish identities are invariably polarised. To achieve belonging to the Iranian nation, exiled Iranian Jews uphold the importance of Iranian Jewish history and memory. The re-instatement and glorification of Iranian Jews in the Iranian narrative of nation is crucial for some yet an ambiguous space results from the coexistence of imagined belonging with victimisation and exclusion.

My PhD thesis draws from feminist and post-structuralist approaches to examine the construction of gender and Islam in Indonesian Islamic cinema between 1977 to 2011. This thesis asks: how, when, and where do Indonesian femininity and masculinity in film become Muslim? Previous studies on representations of gender in Islam have shown that clothes are immediate markers of Islamic identity. This thesis, however, seeks to transcend clothing as an obvious visual marker of Islamic identity and the fixation on the Islamic veil and turban and focus instead on the dynamic relationship between modernity and (trans)-nationalism in the construction of Muslim femininity and masculinity in Indonesian cinema. The Islamic film genre produces various mechanisms to isolate Muslim characters from their non-Muslim counterparts while at the same time marking distinctions between the 'good' and 'bad' Muslim. This thesis demonstrates that such mechanisms behind the binaries of the Muslim/non- Muslim and 'good' Muslim/'bad' Muslim are shifting concepts rather than fixed and selfevident. Furthermore, these shifting distinctions are achieved through narrative device, audio-visual tropes, and political discourse and governed by economic and cultural imperatives in the Islamic film genre. Ultimately, this thesis aims to make a contribution to the study of gender in Indonesian cinema more generally and to the definition of Islamic cinema as a film genre.

In this thesis, I have questioned the influence of whiteness in the assessment of female subordination in an increasingly neoliberal Caribbean setting. Indeed, due the rigidity of the gendered role attribution on their commune, Bobo Shanti Rastafarians have universally been accused of institutionalising female subordination by most scholars of Rastafari. In Jamaica, where women have traditionally been key agents of their communities, a passive acceptance of a subordinated status can be puzzling. Is androgyny the only means to gender equality? With the caution of strategic gender universalism against cultural relativism, I have endeavoured to analyse gender construction through the standards of this atypical community. It was the first time that a female researcher was immersed in the Bull' Bay community. It was therefore possible to analyse the EABIC livity from a female perspective, a point lacking in most academic publications about Rastafari, the EABIC and gender equality. From this qualitative study, I have suggested that the EABIC can be regarded as a radical social movement where the potential of its members needs to be federated towards the fulfilment of its objectives; creating a system where equal value is placed on defined gendered roles. I have explored three main areas: the EABIC epistemology; the public; then the private spheres of the commune. I have found that nothing in EABIC theology, the EABIC's foundation for knowledge creation, neither justified nor encouraged female subordination. Men and women are considered to be divine. The Universal supports both men and women. If the EABIC does not promote gender equality 'male style', it enforces the paramount importance of male and female agency for the survival of its purpose: Repatriation with Reparation. EABIC empresses' habitus may not fit the western notion of female empowerment; yet their chosen means to exercise agency in their community cannot be diminished.

This thesis is concerned with exploring to what extent gendered behaviors in interaction are situated and constrained by the situation and the context in the Omani workplace. One of the most important aims of this research was to study the influence of the context on the communication process, and why some rules of interaction are reproduced and others resisted. Therefore, I used social constructionist epistemology that assumes that social categories such as gender and power are constructed through the talk and not taken for granted or independent variables as was previously assumed by the essentialist approaches ( Burr, 1995 ). Within the social constructionist epistemology I used two different frameworks to analyze the data: critical discourse analysis of Fairclough ( 1992 ) and the discursive psychology approach. The two frameworks both served to answer my research question as the ( CDA ) framework provided me with a research tool that combined linguistically oriented discourse analysis with relevant social and political aspects ( Fairclough, 1992) while the ( DP ) is a discourse analysis approach that is concerned with analyzing the talk in interactions (Fitch and Sanders, 2005). The analysis of a meeting between male and female librarians revealed that the participants did not enact gender and they did not interact according to their gender category but according to their group membership as they talked as one group: “the librarians group”. The second conclusion drawn is that in every interaction participants try to achieve particular goals and to achieve their goals they may use more interactional control features, identify themselves with specific identities and reject others, they may take up a specific social position in the discourse and they may reject others, and they may join a specific group or distance themselves from the group.

Purpose: To provide women in the wider Bahraini society and in the Bahraini banking sector in particular a language with which they can challenge traditional Arab patriarchal practices and other forms of sexism they encounter—especially in the workplace—while remaining true to Islam. Methodology/Design: Semistructured interviews designed to collect in-depth findings were conducted with 21 women and nine men working in the Bahraini banking sector, along with a review of governmental and organisational documents that, in the Global North, usually incorporate gender-equality clauses. Findings: Findings demonstrate the prevalence of gender bias in the Bahraini banking sector. Barriers that impede women’s efforts to climb the corporate ladder were found to be similar to those reported in other Global North contexts. The major difference was the impact of the Muslim patriarchal culture in Bahrain, which has greatly influenced expectations about women’s roles in society and the workplace and women’s behaviours. I also found that labour regulations and policies in Bahrain are gendered and are designed to restrict women’s role to the private sphere. There are no explicit laws at the governmental level or policies at the organisational level that ban gender discrimination in the workplace or mandate equal rights for both genders. This is made worse by the lack of any type of positive action to help women navigate their way to the top and juggle family and work responsibilities, as well as by a lack of decision makers willing to commit to gender equality. Practical implications: The study contributes to our understanding of the hurdles in the Bahraini banking sector that impede women’s career progression and contribute to a glass ceiling. The study also contributes to our understanding of the lack of gender regulations and policies in Bahrain in general and in the Bahraini banking sector in particular. This knowledge will be valuable for organisational leaders who seek to bring more diversity to the executive levels of the banking system. The findings will also be valuable for governmental and organisational leaders interested in improving existing labour regulations and policies in Bahrain and elevating them to the level seen in the Global North. Originality/value: This study, to the best of my knowledge, is the first to investigate the glass-ceiling phenomenon in an underresearched context—namely, the Bahraini banking sector —and to examine the effectiveness of existing gender regulations and policies at governmental and organisational levels in the sector.

The objectives of this thesis are: 1. To contribute to the contemporary agenda on research into fatherhood by focusing on the successes and difficulties of fathers being more involved in the intimate care of their children. 2. To contribute to the understanding of how traditional discourses on fatherhood and masculinity may affect involved fathers' ability to nurture children. 3. To consider how involved fathers manage predominant discourses on fatherhood, masculinity and anger within the home.

The thesis investigates the extent to which acting as a male provider remains an open avenue for coming of age and displaying gender belonging for the shabāb (lads) of the Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon. The literature on Palestinians prior to 1948 suggests that a man would come of age by marrying at the appropriate age and bearing a son. For the Palestinian diaspora in Lebanon, and throughout the 1970s, acting as a fidāʾī (fighter) worked as an alternative mechanism for coming of age and displaying gender belonging. Accordingly, the central question of this thesis is how the shabāb today come of age and display their gender belonging, when on the one hand, Lebanese legislation, through forms of institutional violence, bars their free access to the labour market, forcing them to postpone marriage plans, and on the other hand, participation in the Palestinian Resistance Movement, at least in its military version, is not an option anymore. Through a plethora of investigative techniques – participant observation, questionnaires, focus groups, and open-ended interviews – I have registered the differences between the fidāʾiyyīn and their offspring in their coming of age and gender display. While the fidāʾiyyīn bore pure agency – understood as resistance to domination – and displayed their maturity through the fight to return to their homeland, their offspring have a far more nuanced relation to Palestine and articulate their coming of age and gender belonging in different ways, such as building a house and getting married. Effectively, by observing how the shabāb do their gender, it is not only the full historicity and changeability in time and space of masculinity that come to the fore, but also the scholarly concepts of agency and gender that can be transformed and undone. The tendency in studies of the Middle East to define gender strictly in terms of power and relations of domination fails to grasp the experiences of those, like the Shatila shabāb, with very limited access to power. It is not that the shabāb are emasculated, but rather that defining agency only in terms of resistance to domination and gender in terms of relations of power alone is rather restrictive. Throughout my fieldwork, I have also become acutely aware of anti-state forces at play in Shatila. Accordingly, this study portrays the (dangerous) liaisons between gender and agency as concepts and state machines. Thus, I reflect on what happens to gender (and agency) when state effects organizing and attempting to solidify a sex-gender system at the local level are of limited purchase. Ultimately, this ethnography points to an economics, a politics, a citizenship and sexes-and-genders of another kind, beyond the state.

Research shows that very little is known about the experience of ‘gender disappointment’ amongst parents in Western cultures, where there is not an explicit cultural bias that favours one sex of child over another as occurs in parts of Africa and Asia. This study explores the lived experience of nine White British women, residing in the UK, who profess to having struggled with ‘gender disappointment’; feelings of sadness about the sex of their children. The participants were mothers of sons only, who would have liked daughters. The transcripts from semi-structured interviews were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Four superordinate themes emerged: Alienation, Loss, Control and Commodification. The results indicate that ‘gender disappointment’ is a pervasive and multi-faceted phenomenon which left the participants feeling isolated from their families and society, grieving for something they could not have, and feeling out of control of their bodies, thoughts and emotions. These experiences were underpinned by a wider socially constructed phenomenon of the commodification and objectification of children, and the ethics of reproductive autonomy. Results are discussed in light of the cultural context, drawing on previous discourse on maternal ambivalence and gender stereotyping. It is proposed that the research will be of significance in improving the therapeutic services offered to mothers, and recommendations for future research are made.

This thesis explores how gender and sexuality are conceptualised in human spaceflight. The culture of outer space has received relatively little critical attention, and even less on the subjects of gender and sexuality. In this thesis I aim to expand upon this limited field and to investigate how the cultural dimensions of outer space can be used to productive critical ends. The history of gender in human spaceflight is a troubled one. For decades, women were systematically excluded from most spaceflight endeavours. I argue that in addition to this, more insidious forms of exclusion have continued despite increasing representation of women in the global astronaut corps. Representations of gender in space culture are drawn from a long history of traditional conceptualisation of masculine and feminine bodies, particularly in spatial theory. Additionally, using the particular spatiality of extra-terrestrial spaces, I argue that traditional notions of gendered bodies and spaces can be uniquely destabilised by human spaceflight experience. The gendering of outer space is often entangled with sexual culture in space discourse,as discussions of women in space are often conflated with discussions of sexuality, reproduction, and human futures in space. I analyse these ideological connections alongside feminist and queer theory to argue that while space culture is primarily heteronormative, it also holds great potential for destabilising narratives of heteronormativity. Discussions of the future, in particular, often revolve around heteronormative ideas of family and procreation, however the temporality of space culture is not as straightforward as these narratives would suggest. It is my contention that the critical potential of outer space both necessitates and facilitates a radical shift in understandings of spatiality and temporality. Ultimately, I argue that the extremity associated with extra-terrestrial exploration can inform broader theoretical discussions of gender, sexuality, cultural space, time and the future.