This dissertation attempts to make advances in two debates in political theory: the first debate is about the nature of dignity and its demands and the second debate is about how feminists should address key issues of concern to them that involve sexuality. I show that the widespread use of the term "dignity" is accompanied by several objections regarding its nature and demands. Objections to dignity highlight its context-dependent, subjective, empty, and indeterminate nature. I reply to these objections and argue that dignity is a useful concept. My proposal is that in order to give dignity a more determinate nature we should focus on what dignity demands. More specifically, I suggest that dignity demands expressive affirmation, or at least the absence of expressive disaffirmation. By expressive affirmation I mean acts or expressions, verbal or non-verbal, which affirm the equal value of human beings. Bearing this understanding of dignity in mind I consider the second debate addressed in the dissertation regarding how feminists should respond to certain issues of central concern to them. These issues are rape, prostitution, arid pornography. I argue that what is wrong with rape and what might be wrong with some kinds of prostitution and pornography can be better understood in light of the idea that dignity demands expressive affirmation. The strategy I follow in order to support this claim relies significantly on my discussion of rape. I use the case of rape as a basis for insights about the status of prostitution and pornography because rape is a case in which our moral convictions are most certain. I argue that rape helps us to see how the demand for expressive affirmation is a demand to respect a person's sexual integrity. This provides a point of departure for justifying further conclusions about some instances of prostitution and · pornography where our convictions about the demands of dignity are initially less certain. In particular, I argue that · prostitution and some forms of pornography are morally problematic and may require legal regulation even under conditions of background equality.

This thesis explores young women's embodied experiences in everyday life. Three empirical studies utilising different methods were conducted exploring specific topics relating to women's everyday embodiment. Firstly, life history interviewing and participants' own pre-existing photographs from different time periods were used to explore specific, meaningful experiences in relation to women's embodiment over time. Secondly, diary writing and photo-production was used to explore heterosexual women's experiences of embodying pleasure in everyday life. And lastly, a memory work group method was used to explore heterosexual feminists' experiences of embodying anger in specific interactions with sexual partners. The accounts produced were analysed using a poststructuralist hermeneutic phenomenological narrative method of analysis, exploring simultaneously the embodied and phenomenological detail of specific experiences and the grounding of such experiences in wider sociopolitical processes and contexts. Women's accounts of their everyday embodiment suggested that experiences of being treated as object-like and experiences of movement were central. As such, incidents of being treated as object-like were experienced as disempowering and contrasted with experiences of movement felt as positive and liberating. Furthermore, aspects of time and space were central to women's explorations of their embodied experiences in everyday life. This thesis enjoins poststructuralist and phenomenological principles in proposing a critical feminist social psychological approach to women's embodiment, which theorises embodied experience as sensuous process lived through the spatial, material and socio-political world. This approach allows explicit embodied focus on how persons negotiate, accept or resist power dynamics, and thus live through and embody social practices and action.

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Introduction: What is this thesis about? Alain Touraine (2000) has asked the question `Can We Live Together? ' His book is just one recent example of a wide debate on how political community can be built and reconciled with differences among its members, what Buber called mutuality, what Linklater has discussed as `community', or what is sometimes understood as `social solidarity' in European Union debates (Buber, 1961; Linklater, 1998). Touraine, unlike some others in this debate, emphasises the importance of building community on the basis of a broad recognition of difference amongst its members rather than through the assertion of single claims of universal validity enforced (whether through one form of social power or another) across differences, eclipsing or oppressing them. The recognition of difference, or, more specifically, the realisation of the ideal of a community which is capable at the same time of constituting an effective collectivity while recognising rather than submerging or oppressing difference, is key to Touraine's work. So it is too in that of many other writers and activists in the post communist, post-liberal, arguably fragmented and allegedly `postmodern' world in which we have found ourselves since 1989. Feminist theory and feminist practice have their own distinctive ways of approaching these questions. This thesis is concerned to develop a critique of particular arguments in French feminism which revolve around these problems. But the arguments which the thesis takes up have a significance not merely for a set of internal debates within feminist scholarship, important though those may be in themselves, but also in the context of a wider set of conversations about the nature of political community. They relate directly to political action, to resistance and community building, as well as to theoretical argument. What all the writers in this broad field have in common, including feminist scholars, is the view that such a community can only be formed by what Hannah Arendt (1973,1993) identified as self-aware, active citizens who take their differences seriously and who act as well as think democratically. But the specifically feminist arguments, from the relatively liberal Pateman (1989,1994) to the radical feminism of Irigaray (1994,2000), see this debate as flawed unless it can recognise both the specific disadvantages experienced and the specific contributions offered by women

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The thesis explores the second English translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe, with the objective to contribute to bridging the gap between Gender Studies and Translation Studies. My contention is that foreignization, often presented in the literature as a more ethical approach to translation (see Venuti for instance), is not necessarily the most adequate translation strategy to render texts of feminist philosophy. Therefore, the main research question which the thesis investigates is the extent to which translation can help or otherwise impede on the reception of feminist philosophy. The study is specifically based on the case study of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe, which was first translated into English in 1953, then retranslated in 2009. De Beauvoir’s magnum opus is a model of feminist philosophy and widely influenced the field, so that having an accurate English translation of her work is critical. The case study analyses the translation of some key features of the text, such as core Existential terminology, along with gender-related terms, as well as the treatment of intertextuality in the latest English translation. It also describes the overall translators’ project as presented through paratext, arguing that a domestication approach can be a beneficial approach to translate feminist philosophy. Chapter One will present introductory background information on Simone de Beauvoir’s work in Le Deuxième Sexe, namely the main ideas developed in the book, as well as an overview of the story of the first English translation, and its reception. Dealing with reception will lead us to question the notion of reception in Literary Studies and Translation Studies and the central role of the translator in Chapter Two, which will be narrowed down to faithfulness, a prevalent if somewhat contested notion in translation criticism, in Chapter Three. Chapter Four will examine the latest English translation, before sketching the frameworks of Contrastive Linguistics and Intertextuality in Chapter Five. Finally, Chapter Six will concentrate on the data analysis through a systematic comparison of relevant categories. This chapter findings will lead us to put forward comments and proposed strategies to deal with feminist and philosophical translation.

This is a reflective, questioning, subjective, self-indulgent and often moving narrative and poetic exploration of the experiences of women growing older and not disappearing. Questions posed - and not necessarily answered - include: What is behind the stories of older women becoming invisible and disregarded? How true are they? Where do they come from? What do they mean - to women and 'society'? How might they be challenged? What other stories can be told? Starting with a search for the anecdotal and mythical 'invisible woman', the writer's own story is woven into, and becomes part of, the journey. This initially takes us through the landscape of feminist and poststructuralist theory, existentialism, autobiography, journalism, fictional writing, art, films, poetry, the internet and much more. In examining the bones of the tales of invisibility, the writer is motivated by indignation as much as curiosity. The major part of this work is the poetic representation of the thoughts and lives of eight older women (between 50 and 70) drawn from the lengthy individual and group email correspondence between the writer and her co-researchers. Each of us is named and pictured. Our conclusion is to call ourselves `The Visibles'.