Paid domestic work endures – with its oldest roots grounded in slavery and servitude, and newer ones in contemporary exploitative capitalism. Feminists the world over have analysed its occupational relations in depth to show how they reproduce race, class and gender inequalities, with many domestic workers experiencing inhumane treatment. But feminists also use domestic help. Should such feminists and paid domestic work be condemned, or can it be reconciled with the overarching feminist goals of equality and liberation that encompass all dimensions of discrimination? My thesis approaches this question through an interrogation of outsourced domestic cleaning in the UK and India. The primary data include 91 semi-structured interviews with White and Indian women working as cleaning service-providers and White and Indian female academics with an interest in feminism/gender and who were outsourcing domestic cleaning (or had outsourced previously), in the UK and India, respectively. My analytical approach, rooted in my particular varifocal diasporic gaze, draws on Mary Douglas’s anthropology-based cultural theory, which she used to show how comparative analysis enhances sociological understandings of the workings of the West’s own institutions and culture. My cross-cultural analysis thus takes into account similarities and differences between and within the four groups of participating women, as well as silences in the data. My findings reveal that in the modern urban context, outsourced domestic cleaning can be done as "work" (i.e. using mental and manual skills and effort and performed under decent, democratic work conditions) or as "labour" (requiring mainly manual labour, accompanied by exertion of "natural" emotional/affective labour and performed in undemocratic conditions). The issue at stake for feminism(s) is not just some women doing the demeaning work of other women but the classed evolution of the very meanings of work in contemporary societies.

This thesis focuses on the challenges faced by the contemporary women’s movement in Turkey, which are a result of Turkish political history. After the Turkish Republic was founded in 1923, many political, social, economic and cultural policy changes took place to establish a secular and modern nation-state that set westernisation and modernisation as their primary goals. The century-old women’s movement in Turkey, which can be traced back to the Ottoman era in the late nineteenth-century, was mainly under the influence of this Kemalist modernisation process from the 1920s until the 1980s, when feminism came to the fore. In the 1990s, however, a new phase in the women's movement emerged with the rise of religious and Kurdish women’s movements, both of which have challenged Kemalism and feminism. This thesis focuses on these fragmentations within the women’s movement in Turkey and discusses the possibilities and ways of doing politics together across political and identity differences among women by analysing the potential for solidarity and coalition building/alliance. I explore the differences and similarities among these varied ideological, political and identity positions through 35 in-depth interviews with activists and academics representing each of these different groups. I discuss activist women’ perceptions and their positions on gender, religion and ethnicity as well as their views of each other. I analyse the points of tension among them and the potential for working together based on their approach to women’s solidarity and coalition work. I argue that coalition building/alliance is a realistic and promising way to bring activists together in Turkey to solve problems related to all/many of them. It fosters an environment for women’s solidarity to grow and thus activists can transform their cooperation within alliances into solidarity. Finally, I suggest that coalition politics can pave the way to transversal politics, whereby activists can find a realm aside from the exclusionary structures of universalism and identity politics, which I argue to be one of the main problems of the women’s movement in Turkey. It could, then, potentially help activists to overcome the barriers to solidarity by increasing respect and understanding of their differences without becoming trapped by them.

This dissertation is presented in two related components. The first part is The Supreme Price, an award-winning, feature-length documentary film that I directed and produced about women and the pro-democracy movement in Nigeria. In 1993, Nigerians elected M.K.O. Abiola as president in a historic vote that promised to end years of military dictatorship. Shortly after the election, there was a military coup. General Sani Abacha seized power and had Abiola arrested and jailed. While Abiola was in prison, his wife, Kudirat Abiola, took over leadership of the pro-democracy movement. She was assassinated by agents of the military junta in 1996. M.K.O Abiola died in prison two years later under mysterious circumstances. The film interweaves past and present as this story is told through the eyes of their daughter, Hafsat Abiola, who was about to graduate from Harvard when her mother was murdered. Determined not to let her parents’ democratic ideals die with them, Hafsat returns to Nigeria after years in exile and is at the forefront of a progressive movement to empower women and dismantle the patriarchal structure of Nigerian society. The second part of my dissertation consists of written critical reflections on the theoretical, technical, artistic and pedagogical aspects of my feminist filmmaking practice, grounded in my historical research on the political culture in Nigeria. Taking an interdisciplinary, pluralist approach within a theoretical framework of transnational feminism, I incorporated analysis of both Western and African perspectives. I used biography, trauma studies, political science, geographical, economic and foreign policy analysis, extensive audio-visual archival research and photographs to provide a detailed historical backdrop and theoretical context for understanding the life and legacy of Yoruba, Muslim human rights activist, Kudirat Abiola. I explore her and her daughter’s usage of media platforms to amplify their voices across borders, strategically creating archived, historical multimedia records of their opposition to the military regime in Nigeria. Through discussion of my in-depth work with archival footage, and through describing the distribution, impact and outreach of the film, I aim to show how The Supreme Price functions to represent and preserve a key aspect of women’s history in Nigeria, filling a void in the Nigerian educational system where history as an academic subject has been eliminated from most primary and secondary school curriculums. In my roles as director, producer and cinematographer, my documentary filmmaking practice was itself an act of transnational, multicultural solidarity, collaboration and synthesis resulting in a final film that is a hybrid artefact – simultaneously feminist and African. This dissertation illuminates how The Supreme Price has broken new ground in Nigeria where Nollywood has been the dominant framework for film productions and the genre of independently-made, transnational, feminist, political, historical documentaries directed by women and focused on women’s lives and legacies is nascent.

Under the ever-deepening transformations in contemporary China, traditional gender relations have been reshaped, but elements of patriarchy informed by the legacy of Confucianism still linger. These intricately interwoven forces have exerted a great impact on the gendered lives of the young generation. This research aims to examine young men’s views of Chinese manhood and how they construct and negotiate masculinities in their everyday lives. I conducted 30 semi-structured in-depth interviews with Chinese men aged between 22 and 32, who are mostly ordinary men in the middle social stratum in Shanghai and Shenyang. I regard Chinese men as actively negotiating their identities within particular stages of their life course. Overall, this thesis is informed by perspectives of relational selfhood and Confucian notions of the relational, reflexive, and embodied self that is an ongoing process of becoming. I bring indigenous concepts and cultural repertoires into critical dialogue with global and leading sociological theories of individualisation and reflexivity. Based on my analyses, I introduce and develop the concept of ‘elastic masculinity’. Specifically, I argue that the masculinity of ordinary young men is flexible, adaptable and accommodating. However, the term elastic masculinity also illustrates that it is limited by the availability of resources, structural constraints, cultural traditions and diverse personal relationships. Thus, elastic masculinity is an appropriate metaphor and an important concept to understand Chinese young men’s active engagement with China’s global modernity, increasing individualisation, shifting gender values and local realities.

The aim of this thesis is to apply feminist perspectives to explore the ‘boys’ love’ (BL) culture in China. I argue that women in China are challenging traditional patriarchy through this new culture. Drawing upon interviews with 30 young Chinese women, I explore the attitudes of an ambitious new generation who are questioning gender norms in three areas: sex, love and relationships, and self-identity. With regard to sex, these women are challenging their negative sexual status. Traditionally, women are considered innocent and passive objects that are defined, gazed at, and consumed. However, my participants express their own sexual aesthetic and sexual desires, and they understand sex positively through BL. With regard to love and relationships, young women are questioning women’s roles as expected by mainstream society. Unlike men, who are considered to be independent, women are traditionally considered to be dependants that have no choice but to invest their whole selves in love and relationships, and to become ‘good wives’ and ‘good mothers’. However, my data shows that young women now have different demands for love and happiness, and as a result they are questioning traditional family forms, the heterosexual norm, and patriarchy. With regard to self-identity, I explore how the young women question gender norms. The definition of femininity has restricted women’s achievements and their opportunities to access equal resources in past and current Chinese society. My participants demonstrate a rethinking of gender norms through the medium of BL. Ultimately, the contribution of this thesis is to explore a new awareness arising in a newly formed women’s social practice, one that questions the gender binary, the heterosexual norm, and the gender inequality that arises from them, in an era of social change in China.

This thesis examines depictions of change in the autobiographical works of three trans people: Raymond Thompson’s What Took You so Long? (1995), Claudine Griggs’s Journal of a Sex Change (1996/2004), and Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s Not There (2003) and I’m Looking Through You (2008). Typically, a trans autobiography follows the life course, depicting feelings of “wrongness” in one’s originally assigned gender and the process of beginning to live as the gender with which one identifies; and this shift often comprises social and body changes. My thesis asks, how might the autobiographies I concentrate on unsettle the key changes that underpin them? The subtitle of Thompson’s autobiography, A Girl’s Journey to Manhood, illuminates the central transformation that the narrative maps. However, Thompson portrays his childhood precisely as his boyhood, and depicts “a boy’s journey to manhood”, rather than a “girl’s”, undermining the thrust of the narrative proposed by the subtitle. Like Thompson, Griggs reworks the central transformation of her narrative: although she depicts a shift into female embodiment, she also recounts emerging into an emphasised state of transness, which Jay Prosser (1999) explores as a step backwards. Similarly, predicated on a spectral analogy, Boylan’s I’m Looking Through You plays with notions of change by establishing resonance between her transition and her transformation from “ghostly” to corporeal: “Against all odds, I had become solid” (249). Departing from the genealogy of trans autobiographies, Boylan’s spectral motif reworks conventional representations of change. Finally, the autobiographies both evoke and disrupt transformation from the incoherence of the body to embodied “wholeness”: my thesis concludes that portrayals of “coming home” to the body, and/or arriving at embodied “wholeness” as they emerge in the narratives are tempered by notions of ongoing unfamiliarity and struggles to overcome the rupture(s) between past and present modes of being.

There has been growing interest among both academics and the public in the issue of work-family balance. The emergence of this issue is related to married women’s employment rates and the greater diversity of families and workplaces in the 21st century. In this thesis, I explore young Chinese women’s views on and experiences of balancing working life and family life in northern China. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 34 young mothers conducted in Jilin Province, I focus on three main questions: 1) How do young-generation women manage childcare, paid work and filial obligation on a daily basis in China? 2) What are young-generation women’s attitudes to and practices of domestic labour and filial piety in China? 3) What factors facilitate or hinder a balance between working life and family life? My data is analysed in three chapters, focusing on: the domestic division of labour in China: meanings and practices; daily journeys while coordinating work, care and education; practising and displaying xiao – young mothers’ negotiations of obligations to elders. I argue that, despite past Maoist rhetoric on gender equality, women retain the primary responsibility for housework, childcare and filial obligation, which reveals the persistent gender inequality within families, although adaptation and greater gender equality was reflected in some cases. By bringing Western and Chinese concepts into dialogue with each other, this study contributes to the understanding of the continuing family changes and distinctive context of work and family in China.

This Thesis examines lives of urban well-educated Chinese women who were born under the One Child Policy in the 1980s. It looks into how gender affects their lives when they come to the age to marry and establish a career.

Of the increasing number of initiatives setting out in recent years to challenge heteronormativity in education, the 2006-2009 No Outsiders project has arguably been one of the most influential. Conducted across 15 primary schools in England, No Outsiders was an action research project that sought to disrupt heteronormativity through critical pedagogy, gaining widespread academic and media attention in the process. In spite of its prominence, though, there has been a lack of research exploring the ways in which children have incorporated this work into their everyday understandings and doings of gender and sexuality. This thesis draws on data from a year-long ethnography conducted across two primary schools in the North East of England – one that was and one that was not involved in No Outsiders – to explore the extent to which children’s negotiations of gender and sexuality differed across these sites. Informed by feminist poststructuralist, queer and symbolic interactionist theory, alongside Francis’ (2012) concepts of ‘gender monoglossia and heteroglossia’, it reveals doings of gender across both schools to be broadly similar, with almost all children working to maintain an impression of gender’s ‘fixity’ in the face of evident transgression. Regarding ‘sexualities’, however, attitudes are revealed as differing markedly across these sites, with the perceived conceivability of non-heterosexualities informed profoundly by the presence, or otherwise, of a formal school ethos on ‘equalities’.

This thesis is about the longest-lived (1972-1993) women's liberation magazine in the UK: Spare Rib (SR). Surprisingly, to date there has been no extended research on this magazine. Only a small number of academic articles and book chapters make fleeting reference to it. Whilst maintaining a close connection to the Women's Liberation Movement, SR proclaimed itself a magazine for all women. It was produced collectively. SRs collective endured many internal identity-based conflicts, made public on the pages of the magazine. In particular, the SR collective became deeply divided over three issues: anti-lesbianism, racism and anti-Semitism/Zionism. It is these three debates specifically, and the processes of how the magazine engaged with them, which this thesis focuses on. Using textual analysis, I investigate readers' letters, magazine editorials, and articles to analyse the shape of these debates, in terms of content and process. Thus, in the first substantive chapter I analyse how the debate about anti-lesbianism in SR developed. I also examine how the first discussions about 'the nature' of lesbianism - focusing in particular on whether it was primarily biological or emotional - and their follow-up established the pattern through which the SR collective engaged in contentious debates. Chapter 3 focuses on the issue of race and racism as it unfolded in SR. Here I analyse how an initial concern with Asian women workers' experiences in Britain was quickly superseded by a focus on the exclusion of black women from the WLM and their experiences of racism, and how this in turn developed into one of the most searing conflicts within SR. Chapter 4 demonstrates how the race issue overwhelmed questions of anti-Semitism/Zionism, dividing the collective along racial lines. My Conclusion suggests that ultimately the debates in SR magazine proved intractable because of irresolvable differences among diverse identity-based positions.