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This thesis focuses on prejudice located at the intersections of sexuality and nationality. Drawing on mixed qualitative research sessions involving men who are ‘LGBTI migrants' from African countries, and who are living in South Africa, the thesis offers three overarching points of focus. Firstly, it contextualises and critiques historical state structures and attitudes which shape understandings of identity in South Africa. Secondly, it analyses everyday experiences of xenophobia and homophobia, as experienced by ‘LGBTI' people who have migrated to the country for a variety of reasons. Finally, it locates these experiences within the structures identified and, based on participant-led discussions, offers a framework for understanding and suggestions for meaningful intervention. Using an overarching critical perspective of intersectionality and queer necropolitics I argue that contemporary South Africa fosters an image of inclusivity and exceptionalism that is vastly at odds with reality. In everyday spaces ‘LGBTI migrants' are often forced to ‘switch' between being either African or LGBTI. However, I argue that through journey-derived questioning of both Africanness and Queerness these processes of switching foreground hope and action. These are rooted in values of solidarity and community which extend, for fleeting moments, beyond labels and beyond geographic boundaries. Through a reconciled merging of these seemingly opposed subjectivities I argue that insight is offered into life beyond, yet within, national structures. In this way the participants exhibit an ‘African Queerness/Queer Africanness' which shifts them beyond necropolitical death and towards transcontinental life. I ultimately argue that this may be harnessed as a tool to intellectually, and practically, render Africa as a site of (African) queer potentiality. I suggest that LGBTI migrants, through their embodiment of a specific transcontinental future, are pioneers in revealing this potentiality.

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This doctoral thesis is the first comprehensive, feminist, qualitative study to take a cross-class and cross-generational perspective in exploring women's experiences of gender, contraception and sexuality, as manifested in their narratives about real life and contraceptive advertisements, in post-independence Bangladesh. The existing scholarship on Bangladesh in the areas of gender, sexualities and contraception (see for instance, Caldwell et al., 1998; Cash et al., 2001; Karim, 2012; 2014; Khan et al., 2002; Rashid and Michaud, 2000; Rashid, 2000; 2006a; 2006b) remains largely restricted to providing a cross-class and cross-generational analysis. In fact there is no study that has focused on the experiences of sexuality in the upper class in Bangladesh. Despite their limited focus on the social classes and generations, the studies generalise and conclude that a highly gendered ‘sexually suppressed culture' (Karim, 2012:40) exists in Bangladesh. Moreover, feminist media studies in Bangladesh (Ahmed, 2002; Ahmed, 2009; Begum, 2008; Gayen, 2002; Guhathakurota, 2002; Nasreen, 2002:95; Parveen, 2002) have repeatedly questioned the gendered stereotypes re/produced by the media (including advertisements) but without considering the context of production and/or audience reception of such representations. In contrast, my thesis, studying forty years (from 1971 to 2011) analyses interviews with women (across three social classes and generations) and a corpus of 166 contraceptive advertisements; it also takes into account the production issues. Women's interpretations of these advertisements with regard to their ‘lived realities' in the heteronormative sexual structure of Bangladesh, provide nuanced insights to supplement the existing literatures on gender, media, contraception and sexuality studies. The thesis concludes: women are not entirely powerless in their sexual encounters, rather, the power balance shifts based on women's various identities and the multiple determinants which shape their everyday lives. However, the ‘representation' through contraceptive advertisements operates through a patriarchal ‘circuit of culture' (Du Gay et al., 1997), which only presents a circumscribed ‘reality' and offers a predominantly gendered construction of idealised femininity, masculinity and heteronormative sexuality.

This paper proposes a method to study the relationship between voters' attitudes towards immigration and the educational attainment of immigrants and their children, and applies it to Austrian data. We measure attitudes towards immigration using data on political parties' positions regarding immigration and the share of votes that each party received at the regional level. We then study the educational attainment and intergenerational educational mobility of immigrants who grew up in the regions whose political environment we observe. Preliminary results for Austria suggest that, surprisingly, better attitudes towards migration are associated with lower educational attainment for immigrants. However, immigrants are more likely than their native peers to obtain more education than their parents. Here, the returns to more positive attitudes towards immigration play a large role in explaining the mobility gap across migration background. / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

The thesis portrays various spaces in Mumbai where certain non-normative sexualities interact in relation to the consumption of cultural or material resources with which they build their gender, identity and sexuality. In relation to it, this piece of work interrogates the hijra or the popular transvestite population in Mumbai, and the ways in which they represent their bodies. It explores linkages between these processes, and the modern consumption of beauty practices, feminization of their bodies like the consumption of female hormone tablets, and surgical measures like silicone breast implants. Through these mechanisms, the hijras embody beauty and other facets of bodily modifications in constructing their identity. These embodied practices of beauty by the hijras further charts the new meaning of the hijra body in respect to the local identification of their identity in relation to the global transgender identities. Furthermore, with regards to the body modifications and construction of identities, the research also draws attention to the transsexual identified individuals in Mumbai and the clinical discourses that are related to transsexual experience in this context. Thus, the thesis as a whole negotiates the various strands of transgender identities in Mumbai and (dis) similarities in which hijras represent their identities to the society, and claim their gender.

Unethical behaviour is a concern in the workplace, because of the possible consequences for all stakeholders. This issue is particularly salient in the financial services sector, a highly regulated environment, where breaches of the regulations can result in large fines and reputational damage to the organisation concerned. Unethical behaviour can also have severe effects on customers, such as when inappropriate advice leads to customers losing all or a large part of their savings. Empirical studies have tended to focus mostly on organisational antecedents of unethical intentions and behaviour, with individual factors not being given that much attention. Research on the antecedents of unethical intentions and behaviour has produced inconsistent findings, suggesting that context might play a role. Consequently, my research has attempted to study the individual antecedents of unethical intentions and behaviour in the financial services industry, a specific context where it is salient. Malta presents a particularly pertinent context for this study, as its profile on Hofstede's cultural dimensions scale has been empirically linked to a higher potential for engaging in unethical behaviour.

The thesis investigates contemporary sexual cultures through the lens of British women's experiences of buying and using sexual commodities. Sexual consumer culture offers women a comprehensive programme of what Foucault calls ‘technologies of the self': a language, set of knowledge, and field of expertise through which the sexual self learns to articulate itself in order to become intelligible. Consuming and using sexual products to achieve ‘better' sex and construct a knowledgeable and ‘confident' sexual identity form a key part of the neoliberal project of the sexual self. Sex shopping culture reproduces a ‘postfeminist sensibility' (Gill, 2007), representing a ‘double entanglement' (McRobbie, 2009) with feminism by inciting and requiring women to construct and perform their sexualities through a narrow depoliticised discourse of sexual ‘choice', ‘empowerment', and consumerism. The thesis draws upon data from 22 one-to-one semi-structured interviews and 7 accompanied shopping trips to sex shops. A central contention of the analysis is that women use a diverse range of discursive, embodied and everyday strategies in order to ‘make do' with the kinds of femininity and female sexuality that sex shop culture represents (de Certeau, 1998). The thesis investigates three key spheres of social and everyday life at which sexual consumer culture is negotiated: spaces (the location, layout and experience of sex shops); bodies (the forms of bodily ‘becoming' offered by wearing lingerie in sexual contexts); and objects (using sex toys and the enabling and disabling of possibilities for sexual pleasures and practices). Each section demonstrates the constraints, anxieties and potential pleasures of constructing sexual identities in and through neoliberal and postfeminist consumer culture, whilst at the same time exploring the potential for contradiction, negotiation and resistance evidenced in the multiple ways in which women take up the sexual identities and practices offered by sex shopping.

This thesis offers an insight into a section of the lesbian, gay bisexual and transgender community that has been consistently under-represented in research. Based on data gathered from some 400 lesbians over 60, this study presents the findings of the first comprehensive survey of older lesbian life to be undertaken in the UK. It complements existing LGBT ageing research (Heaphy, Yip and Thompson, 2003; Cronin and King, 2010; Archibald, 2010; Stonewall, 2011), which has focussed more on men than women; and provides substantial data about a population which has frequently been referred to as ‘invisible' and ‘hard to reach' (Berger, 1982; Kehoe, 1986; Deevey, 1990; Heaphy et al., 2003. etc.). As well as providing a detailed picture of older lesbian life in the UK at the beginning of the 21st century, the thesis specifically addresses the following questions:  just how ‘invisible' are older lesbians? To what extent do they feel able to respond to the more liberal legal and social climate of the early 21st century by ‘coming out of the closet,' even if they have not done so before? What might be their reasons for staying hidden?  do older lesbians conform to the ‘old, sad and alone' stereotype of the ageing homosexual (Dorfman et al., 1995), or to the contrasting view that older non-heterosexuals have built strong support networks (Kehoe, 1988) and offer positive alternative models for ageing (Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan, 2001)?  considering that most LGBT ageing research is based on samples containing more men than women, are there aspects of personal history and ontology specific to older lesbians, which have been obscured by research with a more general ‘LGBT' focus?  given the wide social, political and economic diversity of the research sample and the variety of their life experiences as revealed by the data, do older lesbians really have anything in common other than their sexual orientation? How useful is the term ‘older lesbian' as an identity category?