This AHRC-funded research addresses previously neglected issues of womanhood and gender in the Botswana context. According to Connell and Pearse (2015: 83) ‘the study of cultural representations of gender, gendered attitudes, value systems and related problems has been probably the most active area of gender studies in the past two decades ¬¬– in the rich countries of the global metropole. It is not so central in the developing world, where questions of poverty, power and economic change have higher priority.’ This is the case in Botswana, where there has been little scholarly research into the social and cultural aspects of gender beyond its economic and health impacts over the last 20 years. Prior to that, Schapera’s seminal works (1938, 1940) recorded numerous aspects of gender relations, and Suggs’ 1987 study provided an updated perspective on female status and life stages. This thesis builds on these texts, investigating aspects of the social and cultural construction of womanhood in Botswana today. Drawing on semi-structured qualitative interviews with 30 Batswana women, I thematically analyse the participants’ accounts to understand how womanhood is defined and experienced in Tswana culture. I consider how the rapidly changing economic, political, social and material environment that has characterised Botswana since independence in 1966 shapes attitudes to gender roles, and to what extent traditional expectations persist in this context.

Queer and feminist scholars frequently claim that non-heteronormative sexualities, like asexuality, challenge heteronormative practices within intimate relationships. They argue that these sexualities lead to the emergence of new intimate practice and have the potential to revolutionise what is understood as the sexual “public story”—one in which a sexual assumption is repeatedly performed and an absence is culturally denied, sometimes to the point of pathologisation (Carrigan, 2011; Przybylo, 2011; Jamieson, 1998). A more recent analysis of asexuality suggests that there is very little evidence of specific asexual practices and that many asexuals are in fact not challenging heteronormative practices (see Dawson et al., 2016). Neither of these contradicting arguments fully details the nuances of how asexuality operates within intimate relationships, straddling both of these positions in practice. This thesis investigates the complexity of an asexual identity to capture the way it sometimes does and does not engage with and/or challenge heteronormativity within intimate relationships. Drawing on 68 online surveys and 29 online interviews, I thematically analysed participants’ stories to (1) understand how asexuality functions as a meaningful label, including the adoption of an asexual identity and (2) investigate patterns of intimate practices—partner selection, relationship types and forms of intimacy—and their connection to heteronormativity, an asexual identity or both. I demonstrate the presence of asexual-specific preferences, and how these preferences are often compromised for largely heteronormative practices. However, among asexual intimate practices I found a potential for the creation of more varied understandings that, while not fully challenging heteronormativity, offer more complex intimate relationship practices and understanding(s).

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This thesis examines how feminist memories are publicly created, mobilised and secured within a UK context. By addressing gaps in the existing literature with regard to the production of feminist memory in digital times, this thesis draws on assemblage paradigms to propose a theoretical and methodological framework that is sufficiently nuanced to attend to the production, use and contestation of feminist memories in new networked media conditions. As part of its unique theoretical framework, this thesis proposes four inter-meshing dynamics of feminist memory. Re-mediation considers how feminist memories move across different media forms. Re-embodiment examines how feminist pasts are performed through embodied actions. Re-attachment highlights how present day circumstances are discursively and affectively constructed through recourse to historical events. And re-apprehension foregrounds how identity claims and modes of belonging accompany appeals to collective memory. Combined, these dynamics provide a wide-ranging framework for understanding the production, mobilisation and securitisation of feminist cultural memories across a range of sites: governmental, activist and commercial. A multi-modal, qualitative case study approach was deployed in this study to analyse two prominent feminist memory assemblages currently unfolding: intensified appeals to the British women’s suffrage movement as an authorised protest past, and the ubiquitous presence of adapted World War Two Rosie the Riveter iconographies as a suitable symbol for contemporary feminisms today. Digital methods such as database searches, research blogging and digital curation sites were used to map how these feminist assemblages are mobilised across diverse sites, and targeted, semi-structured interviews with writers, heritage professionals, academics, activists and artists tracked the uses and meanings attached to these dominant memory figures. A discourse analytical approach presents the workings of these memory assemblages as specific, invested forms of political and cultural work in the present. This study contributes to contemporary debates around the transmission and use of radical imaginaries by providing an empirical examination of how feminist memories come to travel affirmatively within a post-feminist context. Issues such as copyright practices, re-enactment, competitive memory claims and nostalgic whiteness were brought to the fore in this study’s findings, as well as the location of dominant feminist memory assemblages within current anti-austerity protest cultures. The memory assemblage framework proposed in this thesis offers the researcher a critical and creative toolkit: capable of traversing entrenched communicative binaries of body/machine, analogue/digital, grassroots/governmental and alternative/mainstream in the study of cultural memory, and flexible enough for understanding diverse entanglements of nationing, activist and commercial stories in the transmission and activation of political memories as usable pasts.

This research considers the impact of young women's Protestant church involvement on their sexual identities. It focuses on the powerful message that Protestant church culture gives about sex and sexuality - sex is only for the context of heterosexual marriage - given that young women live amidst mainstream cultures that simultaneously normalise and encourage sexual exploration. It is around the ages of 18 to 25 that young women are developing their selves in a variety of ways. They are transitioning into adulthood and independence, entering into new living arrangements apart from their parents, into various modes of employment, higher education, travelling and acquiring new relationships that offer them opportunities to develop relationally and sexually. Young women are developing alongside their peers and church is one place that at provides an opportunity to build close-knit communities and relationships that impact on personal experience and identity formation.

The overall aim of my research is to understand the impact of women's agency on their own subjective wellbeing and the welfare of their households. To do this, I analyse secondary data in the form of the Indonesia Family Life Surveys. The questions I ask are: How does women's agency affect their subjective wellbeing? How does women's agency affect their household and their family? This research posits that agency, which enables a person to make choices and to pursue goals that he or she views as important, has both intrinsic and instrumental value. Agency in my research is measured through household decision-making, focusing on a range of household decisions and the extent to which women participate in type of decision. Social and gender norms can act as constraints on the extent to which women can exercise their agency so agency should not be assumed to have the same meaning for men and women. But why does empowering women and increasing women's agency matter? Agency is argued to have a direct, intrinsic value because having agency gives a person the freedom to self-determine. While this does increase subjective wellbeing, my results show that this is not a simple relationship as there is also a 'burden of responsibility' effect. This can offset the benefits to subjective wellbeing from agency under certain circumstances as not all decisions in a household carry the same weight. My results indicate that for decisions seen as more important (such savings), cooperation and shared responsibility is better for men's and women's subjective wellbeing. Women's agency is also hypothesised to have an impact on the welfare of their families. In this thesis, household welfare is captured using the proxy of household expenditure on education. My results show that women's agency can have a positive impact on education expenditure but also that cooperation between spouses is very important. When ethnicity is disaggregated I find that women's sole control over particular decisions can reduce household education expenditure. This emphasizes the importance of considering the intersection of gender and ethnicity. The on-going debate on women's empowerment and economic development has so far been focused on the instrumental value of women's agency but this can be a tenuous link. My research moves this debate forward by showing that agency has intrinsic value and a direct impact on women's wellbeing thereby providing an alternative justification for policy actions aimed at empowering women.

'Refocusing Gender Equality on Gender Justice: A Critique of the Politics of Gender Equality Interpretation in the Field of International Development Assistance' is a critical analysis of the interpretation of gender equality in the field of IDA. The various interpretations examined are extracted from key spheres composing the field of IDA, such as the theory, international legislation and international policy, donor and national policy and the programme sphere at field level.

Feminist scholars have suggested that women's subordinate position in society is entrenched by their fear of crime. Consistent with their analysis, research findings show that women experience more fear of crime than men, largely stemming from the fear of rape. Further, women's experience of fear has been shown to have socialpsychological consequences that debilitate women and limit their freedom. The present thesis introduces a new model of social control that builds on this research. According to this model, fear of crime controls women not j ust because of its consequences as a lived experience, but also because of its role as a judgement norm within a system of secondary social control. Specifically, women are expected to be fearful, and their thoughts, emotions and actions are judged accordingly. This thesis ____ p.l~sents five experiments that test aspects of this model. Experiments 1 and 2 establish that women's thoughts, feelings and actions, but not men's, are evaluated more favourably when they appear fearful rather than fearless, and explore moderators and mediators of this novel effect. Experiment 3 establishes that the effect is not driven by concerns with fearful emotions per se but with precautionary behaviour. Experiment 4 shows that altruistic fear for heterosexual partners is gender-typed and explores whether judgement norms also surround this fear on behalf of one's partner. Experiment 5 explores the intended effects of exposure to a police anti-rape campaign, but also examines whether the campaign may have unintended effects associated with the role of rape in primary and secondary mechanisms of social control. The present results offer partial support for the proposed model of secondary social control. Quali fications to the model and its implications for research and practice are discussed. vii

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Since 2010, androgyny has entered the mainstream to become one of the most widespread trends in Western fashion. Contemporary androgynous fashion is generally regarded as giving a new positive visibility to alternative identities, and signalling their wider acceptance. But what is its significance for our understanding of gender relations and living configurations of gender and sexuality? And how does it affect ordinary people's relationship with style in everyday life? Combining feminist theory and an aesthetics that contrasts Kantian notions of beauty to bridge matters of ideology and affect, my research investigates the sociological implications of this phenomenon. My thesis explores in what ways the new androgyny, apparently harmless and even radical, paradoxically reinforces traditional gender roles, and legitimatises particular kinds of femininity over others also in terms of class, sexuality and ethnicity. It interrogates whether this trend, and by extension contemporary mainstream fashion in general, can oppose traditional values, and investigates the relationship between the aesthetic sphere and socio-cultural inequality. In response to classical theories of fashion, and filling a gap in contemporary ones, my study also focuses on social class, now often overlooked, in the analysis of style. These questions are examined from a twofold perspective: first I investigate representation to identify ideological patterns of legitimation and de-legitimation arising from fashion intermediaries' portrayal of the trend. I then look at how this visual material becomes an object of affective engagement, and analyse emotional responses to the aesthetics. To do this, I employ a mixture of traditional methods, such as semiotics and discourse analysis, and experimental ones, like the collection of creative ethnographic data. I explore the particular aesthetics associated with the androgyny trend and consider how it is configured by the different fashion intermediaries, what its presence online entails, and what is its relationship with the wider public and their everyday negotiations of identity.