In the ancient Homeric mother-daughter myth ‘Hymn to Demeter’ the goddess mother mourns the loss of her daughter Persephone. The bond between mother and daughter in the myth is presented so close that its forced separation endangers continuity of the human race. This thesis suggests that in our modern world the stories of mothers and the mother-daughter dyads are reversed. I argue that in contemporary Western cinema the patriarchal institution of motherhood still prevails with mothers lacking subjectivity and foregrounded voice, and daughters being deprived of positive role models, and regarding ‘idealised motherhood’ as the norm. Highlighting that the topic of this thesis is under-researched and in need of scholarly attention I aim to provide a pioneering critical examination of the representation of the mother-daughter relationship, motherhood, mothering, youthful femininities and daughterhood in contemporary cinema. All texts examined in this thesis are products of popular culture: they are topical, relatively commercially successful and influential Hollywood films. The dissertation consists of three interlocking parts according to the application of the generic approach and close textual analyses. Although each part is unified by the focus on a specific genre, such as the fairy-tale film, the horror film and the comedy, this thesis employs diverse methodologies in order to examine the genre texts. Moreover, recognising a new resurgence of interest in feminism in the media and among young women this thesis explores how feminism have informed the contemporary representations of youthful femininities, motherhood and generational relationships. Drawing upon recent studies of the fairy tale, genre studies, feminism, femininity and popular culture, I seek to advance the field of the representation of motherhood and daughterhood, aiming to make a scholarly contribution to the study of the representation of the mother-daughter dyad.

This thesis investigates the intersection of art, feminism and postwar memory in Japan through lens of artist Yoshiko Shimada. Coinciding with unprecedented geopolitical shifts occurring in the final thaw of the Cold War, the year 1989 marks a fraught moment in Japan when spectres of the nation's imperialist past and its historical entanglements acquired renewed potency in the wake of Emperor Hirohito's death. Born in 159, Shimada gained international prominence in the 1990s for her critique of the national body, in particular, the relationship between women and the imperial wartime state. Her work, which unapologetically confronts Japan's WWII aggressions in Asia, its wider histories of occupation, and issues such as the fiercely contested legacies of former 'comfort women' vitally reflects on the social role and agency of art and artist in a climate of political unease emergent at Showa's close. Based on extensive interviews with the artist and research into her primary archive, this is the first comprehensive survey chronicling Shimad;s twenty-five year oeuvre. It situates her practice between two vectors: feminism in Japan and its engagement with Western scholarship, and traces the 1990s 'feminist turn' led by art historians such as Chino Kaori, who began to champion the application of gender perspectives in the study of Japanese art. Within the wider Asian region, the concurrent development of transnational women's art' networks, exhibitions and publications dovetailed with the burgeoning of performance art was protest. As one of the most outspoken feminist art activists of her generation, Shimada has borne key witness to the changing cultural conditions informing women artists' organised activities and the writing of their social histories. This interdisciplinary study incorporates a range of perspectives drawn from art history and gender studies, film and performance theory, memory and trauma studies, Japanese studies and cross-cultural scholarship. It highlights the formal and conceptual interactions between printmaking, performance, installation and lens-based media in Shimada's practice, and demonstrates the plural ways in which her reflexive aesthetics and visual strategies express the tensions and complexities characterising processes of remembering, forgetting and representing the past. By interweaving arguments about the crucial role of feminism in challenging dominant narratives of nation, race, sex and ethnicity, with critical perspectives central to discourse on postmodern Japan, questions are raised concerning the implications of gender, tradition and popular culture for art produced in this age of anxiety. The recent proliferation of problem-oriented, politically engaged practices following the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami marks an ostensible 'return to the social' and departure from privileged tropes of 'Japaneseness' in artistic experimentation. Taking this into account, this thesis proposes that revisiting the recent history of feminist art interventions reveals valuable insights into the role of art in understanding and addressing trauma, and engaging marginalised histories and communities. This is exemplified by Shimada's work, which offers a powerful vantage point from which to contemplate art's political inflections, its social potential and the urgency of memory work both in Japan, and in our contemporary societies today.

No description available.

This dissertation explores an emerging transition of reproductive choice in rural Northeast China where a significant number of peasant couples have chosen to have a singleton-daughter (one child, a daughter) rather than take advantage of the modified birth-planning policy that allows them to have a second child if their first birth has produced a girl. This dissertation reveals that, notwithstanding the persistence of patriarchal biases in reproductive choices, since the late 1980s a significant number of peasant couples have willingly embraced a singleton-daughter. Further exploration suggests that this transition of reproductive choice is a result of the transformations of the traditional big family ideal and preference for sons in the Han Chinese society. Firstly, the majority of peasant couples have pursued a new ideal of happiness defined by material consumption and leisure enjoyment, which contradicts the big family ideal. They have also preferred fewer children, in most cases, only one child, in order to concentrate limited family resources on only one child to secure the best upbringing of the child. Secondly, the transformation of the belief and the practice of filial piety which has now designated daughters as more filial and reliable for old-age support, and a weakened dedication to the ancestors and a decline of the belief to have a son to continue the patrilineage, have significantly challenged the long-standing tradition of son preference. Finally, women's empowerment in marriage and family relations due to a sex-ratio imbalance has undermined the necessity for a woman to have a son to secure her status in her husband's family. This dissertation suggests that studies on the reactions of the Chinese population toward China's birth-planning policy need to be shifted from a focus on strong resistance to an inclusion of varying degrees of reactions, including general acceptance of the policy in some rural regions. Meanwhile, studies on the childbearing practice of peasants in China need to include the changing value of sons and daughters and its implications on reproductive choices / acase@tulane.edu

No description available.

In this dissertation I explore how North Korea's anti-American state power has operated in individuals' everyday practices by focusing on its militant nationalism. The Western image of "Stalinist" North Korea has been of an autocratic, all-powerful totalitarian state inexorably imposing its harsh will upon its subjects. However, existing studies have neglected an aspect of North Korea's nationalist power that has been neither necessarily top-down nor violent, but rather productive and diffusive in people's everyday lives. While the regime's anti-American mobilization has come from above, people's politics of hatred, patriotism, and emotion have been reproduced from below. Along this line, I examine how the state's militant nationalism was legitimated by people's solid micro-fascism from the 1950s through the 1980s, and how it has been contested and recreated through both change and persistence in people's micro-fascism from the 1990s through the present.

Between 2001 and 2010, there were three periods in Kyrgyz-Russian relations during which the Kremlin used a distinct strategy to bring Kyrgyzstan, a Russian ally that has been hosting a U.S. airbase since December 2001, more fully into the Russian orbit of influence and end the country's multi-vector diplomacy. In the first period (2001--2004), Russia relied on a benign strategy. This strategy entailed the involvement of the Kyrgyz government in Russia-led economic structures and promotion of Russian culture, education and the media in Kyrgyzstan. In the second period (2005--2006), the Kremlin openly pressured the Kyrgyz leadership, albeit unsuccessfully, to evict the U.S. airbase and thus end its multi-vector diplomacy. In the third period (2007--2009), the Kremlin relied on a financial reward to win Kyrgyzstan's loyalty. Despite receiving a lavish financial package from Russia, Kyrgyzstan continued its multi-vector diplomacy and its collaboration with the U.S. base. Disgruntled with Bishkek's duplicitous behavior, Moscow adopted a series of economic and political sanctions that eventually led to the violent ouster of the Kyrgyz government in April 2010. / Two questions emerge from the observation of Kyrgyz-Russian relations between 2001 and 2010. First, what explains changes in diplomatic strategies by Russia and Kyrgyzstan in these three periods? Why did Russia rely on benign cooperation in the first stage, resort to pressure in the second stage and offer a financial reward to Bishkek in the third stage? Second, why did Bishkek's attempt at a multi-vector foreign policy appear to work in the beginning and then lead to disastrous results for Kyrgyzstan in the end? / The research project seeks to answer these questions by relying on a bargaining model. It hypothesizes that the shifts in the Russian and Kyrgyz strategies in the three periods were caused by changes in the perceptions of leaders about their bargaining powers. In the first period, bargaining power, as perceived by leaders, shifted away from both Russia and Kyrgyzstan, thus resulting in benign cooperation. In the second period, bargaining power shifted from Kyrgyzstan to Russia, prompting Moscow to rely on public pressure to achieve an outcome that it favored at a least cost for the Kremlin. In the third period, bargaining power shifted from Russia to Kyrgyzstan, enabling Bishkek to extract a lavish financial package from Moscow in return for an outcome that the Kremlin favored. When Bishkek, confident of its bargaining power, relied on political chicanery and attempted to circumvent terms of the agreement with Russia, Moscow resorted to punishment. / The research project argues that three variables shaped perceptions of leaders about their bargaining powers: (a) the degree of tension between dominant large powers such as Russia, the U.S. and China (the international level); (b) the level of elite contestation of ruling regimes (the domestic level); (c) the degree of economic resources of rule available to the ruling regimes (the domestic level).

The Republic of Tatarstan, a Muslim-majority region of the Russian Federation, is home to a post-Soviet Islamic revival now entering its third decade. Throughout the 1990s, the Tatars of Tatarstan were recognized as practicing a liberal form of Islam, reported more as an attribute of ethno-national culture than as a code of religious conduct. In recent years, however, the republic's reputation as a bastion of religious liberalism has been challenged, first, by a counter-revival of conservative Islamic traditions considered indigenous to the region and, second, by increasing evidence that Islamic fundamentalism, generally attributed in Russia to Wahhabism or Salafism, has taken hold and is growing in influence among the region's Muslims. / This dissertation explores how changing political-territorial circumstances are implicated in this transformation. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, and a variety of qualitative research methods, including textual analysis, semi-structured interviews, and ethnographic study, the dissertation demonstrates that the transformation in Islamic identity relates to changing understandings of this region as a political space. An examination of practices and representations of the Muslim Spiritual Board of Tatarstan and conflicting perspectives on landscape elements in the Kazan Kremlin shows that the meaning of Islam is being driven by political-geographic change. / Analysis of these matters reveals that, as part of Tatarstan's quest for wide-ranging territorial autonomy in the 1990s, government-supported institutions cultivated a preferred understanding of Islam that corresponded to visions of the region as the Tatars' sovereign historic homeland. Over the past decade, amid a rapid recentralization of the federation, support has shifted to Islamic practices deemed "traditional to Russia" as part of a broader multinational Russian identity crafted to fit visions of the country as a powerful, unified state. Thus, the meaning of Islam in this particular place is mediated by competing visions of Tatarstan as a homeland.

Analyzing the current state of the United States' alliances with both Japan and South Korea underscores the failure of the traditional alliance theory concepts, realism, liberalism, and constructivism, to adequately describe their continuation. Introducing a concept termed the stability theory to alliance theory explains the current trajectories of the US-Japan and US-South Korea alliances. Stability theory is an extension of the conception of the three aforementioned theories and hedging, and is based in part upon the inherent inertia resisting change, in a long-standing alliance. In setting the stage for the introduction of stability theory, the past, present, and future of the alliances come into play, illustrating how this new theory picks up where others fall off.

This thesis attempts to explain the continuities and changes in United States policy in relation to the Taiwan-China conflict. The paper examines this in the context of the presidential administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. This explanation is done by applying the three level-analysis approach of international relations to the policies of each president. The paper examines how individual-level, state-level, and systemic variances between the presidents affect the changes in policy towards Taiwan and China. After looking at all the different factors, the state-level factors mostly influence the continuities in policy while the individual and systemic factors most often lead to changes.