In this thesis, Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman and Michel Faber’s Under the Skin are analysed from the perspective of feminist-vegetarian critical theory. Both texts deal with the idea of feeling like or being meat, but approach this idea from different angles. In The Edible Woman, the connection to feeling like meat is metaphorical and rooted in gender relations, while in Under the Skin, it is literal, related to the idea of being animal. What becomes clear through an analysis of these two texts is that they both deal with the interlocking oppressions of women and animals. In The Edible Woman, protagonist Marian loses her subjectivity and stops eating meat when, as a result of the dynamics of her relationship with her boyfriend (later fiancé), she starts identifying with animals that are hunted or eaten. In Under the Skin, the alien protagonist Isserley, as female, non-human and in her natural form looking like a kind of mammal, represents both women and animals in her objectifying returned gaze on human men. Examining these two texts together highlights the interlocking nature of patriarchy and speciesism, and shows how these oppressions are better understood in relation to each other.

Introdução: A síndrome ou seqüência malformativa de Rokitansky-Mayer-Küster-Hauser (SR), de caráter geralmente esporádico, caracteriza-se por aplasia útero-vaginal, freqüentemente associada a anomalias esqueléticas e do trato urinário e a caracteres sexuais secundários, hormônios esteróides e cariótipo normais. A condição é claramente heterogênea, podendo fazer parte de outras seqüências e complexos mais abrangentes. Sua freqüência ao nascimento foi estimada em cerca de 1/5.000 meninas. O banco de dados OMIM (McKusick, 2005) classifica-a como autossômica recessiva e apenas um caso atípico, portador de virilização, foi atribuído a mutação descrita no gene WNT4 (Biason-Laubert e col.., 2004). A vitamina A e seus derivados ativos (ácidos retinóicos ou AR) desempenham papel importante nos processos de diferenciação, proliferação e apoptose celular. Mendelsohn e col. (1994) e Kastner e col. (1997) descreveram malformações congênitas semelhantes afins às da SR em camundongos portadores de mutações nos genes RAR-G e RXR-A dos receptores de AR. A região homóloga em humanos de um desses receptores corresponde exatamente à região descrita por Kucheria e col. (1988) em duas mulheres não aparentadas com agenesia mülleriana e portadoras de translocação (12;14)(q14;q31). Os fatores etiológicos responsáveis pelas anomalias müllerianas são ainda pouco conhecidos, mas o achado freqüente de afetadas com outros defeitos associados (renais, esqueléticos, cardíacos e auditivos) sugere o envolvimento de genes primordiais do desenvolvimento. Materiais e métodos: No total, 43 pacientes (todas com cariótipo 46,XX) e 21 familiares foram todos submetidos a exame clínico e ginecológico e de imagem (ultra-sonografia urogenital e raios-X de coluna) padronizados e à coleta de sangue para estudo cromossômico e molecular. O DNA foi extraído e amplificado por PCR Touch-Down; a triagem das mutações foi realizada em cinco genes (RARG, RXR-A, WNT-4, LHX-1 e KLHL-4) por eletroforese SSCP, dHPLC e de seqüenciamento (MegaBace). Quinze pacientes do total apresentando fenótipo mais grave foram triadas quanto a variações no número de cópias de DNA pela técnica de ~1 Mb array-CGH. As alterações detectadas foram validadas por FISH e MLPA. Foram excluídas alterações no número de cópias previamente descritas em indivíduos normais (DGV). Dois novos genes (LHX-1 e KLHL-4) surgiram como possíveis candidatos após a triagem com array- CGH e foram incluídos aos três genes candidatos previamente existentes. Resultados e conclusão: Trinta e nove pacientes possuíam quadro bastante típico de SR com agenesia útero-vaginal, em 27 delas acompanhado de manifestações extra-genitais como defeitos renais, ósseos, agenesia de ovários e surdez. Quatro pacientes apresentaram defeitos müllerianos isolados (agenesia de vagina) e uma outra era portadora da associação MURCS. A analise molecular por meio das técnicas de SSCP, dHPLC e seqüenciamentode todas as regiões codificados dos cinco genes candidatos permitiu identificar 95 alterações. A comparação com os bancos de dados (http://www.ensembl.org/) determinou que as alterações identificadas correspondem a variações populacionais polimórficas previamente descritas e sem efeito patogênico, uma vez que nenhuma delas altera a seqüência de aminoácidos das proteínas por elas codificadas. Mediante array-CGH foram identificadas, em 5 pacientes, um total de 7 alterações submicroscópicas (deleções e duplicações) comprometendo as regiões 1q21.1, 17q12, 22q11.21, 22q11.22, e Xq21.31. Alguns familiares das afetadas, também portadores dessas alterações, apresentavam manifestações leves, indicando que as alterações apresentam penetrância incompleta e expressividade variável. Nossos resultados afastam a RAR-G, RXR-A, WNT-4 como diretamente envolvidos na patogênese da síndrome de Rokitansky e sugerem a existência de variações no numero de copias de novas regiões cromossômicas como relevantes durante o desenvolvimento mülleriano, indicando especificamente os genes LHX1 e KLHL4 como candidatos. / Background: Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, comprising utero-vaginal atresia in otherwise phenotypically normal women with a normal karyotype (46,XX), has an incidence of about 1/5,000 among newborn girls. Anomalies of the genital tract range from upper vaginal atresia to total Müllerian agenesis (congenital absence of the Fallopian tubes, uterus, and upper vagina). Patients with müllerian aplasia (MA) often exhibit additional clinical features such as renal, vertebral and cardiac defects. A number of different syndromes have been associated with MA, and in most cases its aetiology remains poorly understood. We studied 43 women with the MRKH defect and 21 relatives presenting associated anomalies. The study included clinical and ultrasonographic examination of the urogenital system, radiographs of the vertebral column and sequencing of three candidate genes named RAR gama, RXR alpha and WNT-4. Fifteen of our patients, with more complex phenotypes (genital, renal, cardiac, and skeletal defects), were screened for DNA copy number changes by 1 Mb whole genome bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) array based comparative genomic hybridization (CGH). The detected alterations were validated by an independent method and further mapped by high resolution oligo-arrays. Results: All patients had a normal 46,XX karyotype and were also normal to the RAR gama, RXR alpha and WNT-4 genes. Submicroscopic genomic imbalances affecting the 1q21.1, 17q12, 22q11.21, and Xq21.31 chromosome regions were detected in five probands. Presence of the alterations in the normal mother of one patient suggests incomplete penetrance and/or variable expressivity. Conclusion: 5 of the 15 patients were found to have cryptic genomic alterations. The imbalances on 22q11.21 support recent findings by us and others that alterations in this chromosome region may result in impairment of müllerian duct development. The remaining imbalances indicate involvement of previously unknown chromosome regions in MA, and point specifically to LHX1 and KLHL4 as candidate genes.

La tension politique qui se développait en Colombie depuis les années 40 contre les idéologies conservatrices et les libéraux officieux et dissidents après les élections de 1946, a déclenché un sentiment de mécontentement qui a éclaté le 9 avril 1948 avec l’assassinat de Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, dirigeant libéral à Bogota. Cet événement, connu sous le nom El Bogotazo, provoqua des manifestations violentes, des meurtres, des agressions, de l’harcèlement, de la terreur et des troubles dans tout le pays. Comme conséquence, au cours des années suivantes, les guérillas libérales se sont organisées et pendant une décennie ont laissé plus de 200.000 morts dans le pays et ont provoqué des milliers de migrations rurales vers les grandes villes. Plus tard, certains dirigeants ont formé les guérillas communistes, après l'assassinat de plusieurs ex commandants démobilisés, qui perpétuaient le conflit armé dans le pays, dont certains survivent aujourd'hui. Les FARC, Forces Armées Révolutionnaires de Colombie-Armée Populaire, les plus anciennes du monde, puissantes et nombreuses en Colombie, sont actuellement en pourparlers de paix avec le gouvernement national à La Havane, Cuba. Ces pourparlers de paix sont dans leurs phases finales. L'ELN, l’Armée de Libération Nationale, le deuxième groupe de guérilla en importance et du nombre de combattants en Colombie, est en approchements préliminaires, tendant à entamer des pourparlers de paix avec le gouvernement. Ce conflit a produit un nombre immense de victimes (¡Basta ya!: 2013) et dans ce contexte, les dramaturges et activistes Patricia Ariza et Nohora Ayala proposent un projet artistique qui interroge les actions violentes du pays à partir de la perspective de la femme dans les conflits armés. Leurs productions s’inscrivent dans la création collective du Teatro La Candelaria, où la recherche s’infitre dans l’art de la scène, en déconstruisant la réalité socio-politique et en faisant parler les témoignages. Ainsi, ce travail se prendre sur six œuvres qui explorent les liminalités politico-corporelles qui se déconstruisent dans la mise en scène en tenant compte des réseaux complexes qui sont tissés à partir des femmes et les multiples Antigones créés dans le contexte historique du pays. En outre, l’analyse examine la notion de la corporalité à partir des corps non-absents (victimes de disparition forcée) qui montrent la déterritorialisation des corps dépossédés. Le premier chapitre de la thèse traitée propose une approche théorique centrée sur les concepts de la représentation, du théâtre, de la performance et de la théâtralité politique. Le chapitre mobilise également les notions de corps sans organes et corps dépossédés pour éclairer la coupure épistémologique entre le corps matériel et le corps des disparus dépossédés. Le deuxième chapitre analyse trois œuvres de Patricia Ariza: Antigone (2006), Mujeres en la Plaza (2009) et Somma Mnémosyne (2013), lesquelles montrent un exercice d’artivisme et d'engagement politique par rapport à l'histoire moderne de la Colombie. Le troisième chapitre présente trois œuvres de Nohora Ayala: Fémina ludens (1995), Piel (2010) et Rosas secas (2012) , où l’exploration du corps met en évidence les traces de la mémoire historique du pays. Finalement, le dernier chapitre propose un questionnement face à la réception du spectateur et la théâtralité du pays. / The political tension that developed in Colombia since the 40s, between conservative ideologies and, the divergency in the official liberal party and dissident liberal party, brought out a feeling of disagreement that collapsed when Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, leader of dissident party, was killed in Bogota on 9 April 1948. This event, well known as The Bogotazo, unchained violent protests, murders, assaults, harassment, terror and unrest throughout the country. As a result, in the subsequent years the liberal guerrillas were formed and over a decade the conflict ensued in more than 200,000 murders in the country and thousands of rural migrants in the cities. Later, some leaders formed the communist guerrillas who perpetuated the armed conflict in the country, some of them are known today as FARC, the oldest group of guerillas in the world and the most powerful in Colombia, and ELN. Actually, the FARC are in the final negotiation for peace in Havana, Cuba. This violent historical context has produced a staggering statistics of victims (Basta ya!, 2013), in which the artists and activist dramatists, Patricia Ariza and Nohora Ayala propose a new aesthetic that questions the violent actions of the country from women’s perspective. Their theatrical productions are part of the Collective Creation in the Teatro La Candelaria, where the research is faced with the aesthetics of the scene and confronted with the deconstruction of reality counted, telling or testimonials. This dissertation examines six plays by Ariza and Ayala whose political and bodily liminalities deconstruct dominant ideas of history, while illuminating the complex networks surrounding the women and the Antigones produced by the country. I explore the materiality of non-absent bodies (victims of forced disappearance) which exposes the deterritorialization of dispossessed bodies. The first chapter of the thesis discerns recent theoretical approaches to the concepts of representation, theater, performance and political theatricality which I have found pertinent for my examination of the work by Ariza and Ayala. At the same time, I elaborate on the notions of the body without organs and of dispossessed bodies in order to shed light on the epistemological break between the material present body and dispossessed bodies of the disappeared. In the second chapter, I analyze three plays by Patricia Ariza: Antigone (2006), Mujeres en la Plaza (2009) and Somma Mnemosyne (2013), which evince an exercise in artivism and engagement with the political history of Colombia. The third chapter presents three plays of Nohora Ayala: Fémina Ludens (1995), Piel (2010) and Rosas Secas (2012), where the body is part of a radical practice of questioning colombian historical memory. Finally, the concluding chapter examines the role of political and corporeal theatricality in engaging spectators’ critical participation in the work of Ariza and Ayala.

This thesis explores the status of a specific subset of absent characters within twentieth century American drama. By borrowing the term “proximate cause” from tort law and illuminating its intricacies through David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, this thesis re-appropriates proximate cause for literary studies. Rather than focus on characters whose existence remains the subject of critical debate, this set of absent characters presumably exists but never appear onstage. Despite their non-appearance onstage, however, these absent characters nonetheless have a profound effect upon the action that occurs during their respective plays. Highlighting the various ways in which these characters serve as the proximate cause for the onstage action of a given play will expand the realm of drama and literary studies in myriad ways.

This study looks at human movement in order to formulate a principle that can potentially enrich the understanding of interior design and spatial awareness within it. It considers the spatial identity of the dis/abled body by looking at the importance of the embodied experience in relation to environment. The body has dynamic abilities; therefore it is an instrument for creating form. This tangible form in context with interior design can inform our understanding of spatial needs and be used as a design-informing tool. Specifically this project uses spatial identity as a theory to guide the conceptual ideas and as a practical tool to design a work environment and showroom for a client with Thrombocytopenia Absent Radius (TAR) syndrome. / October 2007

Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) is a new technology that has revolutionized the way we study living organisms. Where previously only a few genes could be studied at a time through targeted direct probing, NGS offers the possibility to perform measurements for a whole genome at once. The drawback is that the amount of data generated in the process is large and extracting useful information from it requires new methods to process and analyze it. The main contribution of this thesis is the development of a novel experimental method coined tagRNA-seq, combining 5’tagRACE, a previously developed technique, with RNA-sequencing technology. Briefly, tagRNA-seq makes it possible to identify the 5’ ends of RNAs in bacteria and directly probe for their type, primary or processed, by ligating short RNA sequences, the tags, to the beginnings of RNA molecules. We used the method to directly probe for transcription start and processing sites in two bacterial species, Escherichiacoli and Enterococcus faecalis. It was also used to study polyadenylation in E. coli, where the ability to identify processed RNA molecules proved to be useful to separate direct and indirect regulatory effects of this mechanism. We also demonstrate how data from tagRNA-seq experiments can be used to increase confidence on the discovery of anti-sense transcripts in bacteria. Analyses of RNA-seq data obtained in the context of these experiments revealed subtle artifacts in the coverage signal towards gene ends, that we were able to explain and quantify based Kolmogorov’s broken stick model. We also discovered evidences for circularization of a few RNA transcripts, both in our own data sets and publicly available data. Designing the tags used in tagRNA-seq led us to the problem of words absent from a text. We focus on a particular subset of these, the minimal absent words (MAWs), and develop a theory providing a complete description of their size distribution in random text. We also show that MAWs in genomes from viruses and living organisms almost always exhibit a behavior different from random texts in the tail of the distribution, and that MAWs from this tail are closely related to sequences present in the genome that preferentially appear in regions with important regulatory functions. Finally, and independently from tagRNA-seq, we propose a new approach to the problem of bacterial community reconstruction in metagenomic, based on techniques from compressed sensing. We provide a novel algorithm competing with state-of-the-art techniques in the field. / <p>QC 20150930</p>

This study looks at human movement in order to formulate a principle that can potentially enrich the understanding of interior design and spatial awareness within it. It considers the spatial identity of the dis/abled body by looking at the importance of the embodied experience in relation to environment. The body has dynamic abilities; therefore it is an instrument for creating form. This tangible form in context with interior design can inform our understanding of spatial needs and be used as a design-informing tool. Specifically this project uses spatial identity as a theory to guide the conceptual ideas and as a practical tool to design a work environment and showroom for a client with Thrombocytopenia Absent Radius (TAR) syndrome.

This study looks at human movement in order to formulate a principle that can potentially enrich the understanding of interior design and spatial awareness within it. It considers the spatial identity of the dis/abled body by looking at the importance of the embodied experience in relation to environment. The body has dynamic abilities; therefore it is an instrument for creating form. This tangible form in context with interior design can inform our understanding of spatial needs and be used as a design-informing tool. Specifically this project uses spatial identity as a theory to guide the conceptual ideas and as a practical tool to design a work environment and showroom for a client with Thrombocytopenia Absent Radius (TAR) syndrome.

Oração sem sujeito é toda e qualquer oração destituída de SN sujeito, exceto nos casos em que tal SN encontra-se em elipse. Sua manifestação na língua pode se dar tanto em termos pessoais quanto impessoais. Estas incluem ocorrências essenciais, aqui chamadas de fenomenológicas e acidentais, denominadas impessoalizadas. Já aquelas se apresentam nos casos de indeterminação de agente por omissão do SN sujeito, tradicionalmente alcunhados casos de sujeito indeterminado e por meio do processo de ergativização em sua versão secundária, aquele que atua sobre verbos não causativos e tem sido porta de entrada à concretização de orações destituídas de SN sujeito no português brasileiro. Objetivamos neste trabalho a descrição de todas as estruturas apontadas, em termos de seus comportamentos morfossintáticos na língua, pois compreendemos que descrever a oração sem sujeito portuguesa é identificar contextos morfossintáticos de dispensa, em distintos graus, do SN sujeito. Para tanto, valemo-nos de um enfoque prototípico da língua, através do qual dialogamos com a natureza escalar de nosso objeto de estudo / Subject-absent sentences are all and every sentence devoid of subject Nominal Phrase (NP), except in cases when NP is in ellipse. They occur in the language on personal or impersonal terms. On impersonal terms, they include essential occurrences, here called phenomenological occurrences and accidental occurrences, here called a-personalized occurrences. While on personal terms, they appear in cases of indetermination of the agent by ommission of subject NP, also known as indeterminate subject cases, and through the ergativization process in their secondary version. This kind of ergativization process acts on non-causative verbs, and has been the basis for the construction of most sentences devoid of subject NP in Brazilian Portuguese. In this thesis, we describe all structures indicated above, in terms of their morphosyntactic behavior in the language, as we argue that to describe subject-absence sentence means to identify morphosyntactic contexts for exemption of the subject NP, in different degrees. For this goal, we make use of a prototypical approach to the language, through which we engage with the gradual nature of our object of study

Oração sem sujeito é toda e qualquer oração destituída de SN sujeito, exceto nos casos em que tal SN encontra-se em elipse. Sua manifestação na língua pode se dar tanto em termos pessoais quanto impessoais. Estas incluem ocorrências essenciais, aqui chamadas de fenomenológicas e acidentais, denominadas impessoalizadas. Já aquelas se apresentam nos casos de indeterminação de agente por omissão do SN sujeito, tradicionalmente alcunhados casos de sujeito indeterminado e por meio do processo de ergativização em sua versão secundária, aquele que atua sobre verbos não causativos e tem sido porta de entrada à concretização de orações destituídas de SN sujeito no português brasileiro. Objetivamos neste trabalho a descrição de todas as estruturas apontadas, em termos de seus comportamentos morfossintáticos na língua, pois compreendemos que descrever a oração sem sujeito portuguesa é identificar contextos morfossintáticos de dispensa, em distintos graus, do SN sujeito. Para tanto, valemo-nos de um enfoque prototípico da língua, através do qual dialogamos com a natureza escalar de nosso objeto de estudo / Subject-absent sentences are all and every sentence devoid of subject Nominal Phrase (NP), except in cases when NP is in ellipse. They occur in the language on personal or impersonal terms. On impersonal terms, they include essential occurrences, here called phenomenological occurrences and accidental occurrences, here called a-personalized occurrences. While on personal terms, they appear in cases of indetermination of the agent by ommission of subject NP, also known as indeterminate subject cases, and through the ergativization process in their secondary version. This kind of ergativization process acts on non-causative verbs, and has been the basis for the construction of most sentences devoid of subject NP in Brazilian Portuguese. In this thesis, we describe all structures indicated above, in terms of their morphosyntactic behavior in the language, as we argue that to describe subject-absence sentence means to identify morphosyntactic contexts for exemption of the subject NP, in different degrees. For this goal, we make use of a prototypical approach to the language, through which we engage with the gradual nature of our object of study