Global ETD Search

1	The machineries of uncivilization: technology and the gendered body in the fiction of Margaret Atwood and William Gibson Lapointe, Annette 10 January 2011 (has links) My dissertation examines some of the ways in which new technologies alter traditional readings of the female body and of feminine subjectivity in contemporary fiction. To illustrate these alterations, I have selected two short stories, one by William Gibson and the other by Margaret Atwood, published in the speculative fiction Tesseracts2 anthology in 1987, both of which deal with disease and women's technological access. Within this context, I examine how feminine sexuality and embodiment are deconstructed and re-written. While historically women have been represented as victims of technology and/or intimately connected with the natural world, I propose that women's increased access to both bio-technologies and communications technologies offers an unprecedented route to self-definition and cultural power. I explore ways in which analogue technology mimics women's reproductive enslavement in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and in which the emergence of digital technology offers some emancipation in The Blind Assassin. Subsequently, I discuss the intersections of sex work and virtual reality in William Gibson's Cyberpunk Trilogy and associated short fiction, demonstrating that digitality is not a panacea for gendered oppression. However, digitized women may have unexpected opportunities for self-definition. In comparing Gibson's Idoru and Atwood's Oryx and Crake, I discuss how women “created” for the male gaze (either virtually or by cloning) may evade that gaze and both assert their individuality and create communities among women with similar origins. Subsequently, I examine the interconnections among women, animals, and food that emerge within technologized cultures. Self-protective anorexia provides a link among Atwood's earliest writing (The Edible Woman) and her most recent (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood), and suggests that the same technological facility which provides access to power also induces profound bodily anxieties in female characters. Building on those anxieties, I conclude with a discussion of the ways in which disability disrupts expectations of feminine embodiment. The constant abjection of women with disabilities is counter-balanced by those women's ability to create radical innovations of technology that transform the larger culture. feminist criticism science fiction Canadian literature body studies disability anorexia technology Margaret Atwood William Gibson
2	The machineries of uncivilization: technology and the gendered body in the fiction of Margaret Atwood and William Gibson Lapointe, Annette 10 January 2011 (has links) My dissertation examines some of the ways in which new technologies alter traditional readings of the female body and of feminine subjectivity in contemporary fiction. To illustrate these alterations, I have selected two short stories, one by William Gibson and the other by Margaret Atwood, published in the speculative fiction Tesseracts2 anthology in 1987, both of which deal with disease and women's technological access. Within this context, I examine how feminine sexuality and embodiment are deconstructed and re-written. While historically women have been represented as victims of technology and/or intimately connected with the natural world, I propose that women's increased access to both bio-technologies and communications technologies offers an unprecedented route to self-definition and cultural power. I explore ways in which analogue technology mimics women's reproductive enslavement in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and in which the emergence of digital technology offers some emancipation in The Blind Assassin. Subsequently, I discuss the intersections of sex work and virtual reality in William Gibson's Cyberpunk Trilogy and associated short fiction, demonstrating that digitality is not a panacea for gendered oppression. However, digitized women may have unexpected opportunities for self-definition. In comparing Gibson's Idoru and Atwood's Oryx and Crake, I discuss how women “created” for the male gaze (either virtually or by cloning) may evade that gaze and both assert their individuality and create communities among women with similar origins. Subsequently, I examine the interconnections among women, animals, and food that emerge within technologized cultures. Self-protective anorexia provides a link among Atwood's earliest writing (The Edible Woman) and her most recent (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood), and suggests that the same technological facility which provides access to power also induces profound bodily anxieties in female characters. Building on those anxieties, I conclude with a discussion of the ways in which disability disrupts expectations of feminine embodiment. The constant abjection of women with disabilities is counter-balanced by those women's ability to create radical innovations of technology that transform the larger culture. feminist criticicm science fiction Canadian literature body studies disability anorexia technology Margaret Atwood Willaim Gibson
3	The Man Made World: The Social Production of Health and Disablement in Construction Workers Sorensen, Amy 14 September 2011 (has links) This study focuses on the mechanisms through which systems of inequality operate in relationship to health and disablement processes. Using quantitative data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 and qualitative data from in-depth interviews with twelve construction workers in the southeastern United States, this study evaluates the relationships among race, class, gender, and occupation in the health of male construction workers. More specifically, this research examines white working-class masculinity in the context of working within the construction industry, and in relationship to health and disability processes. Each chapter in this dissertation focuses on one of three primary research questions. First, how do race, class, gender, and occupation shape the health of construction workers? Second, how does working-class masculinity and occupation affect patterns of disablement among construction workers, and how do they experience these processes? And finally, how do social inequalities shape bodies? This study finds that race, class, gender, and occupation all play multiple roles in the health and disablement processes of workers. These findings also suggest that a re-conceptualization of disability as a process is necessary to best reflect the experiences associated with occupational disability. Finally, these findings point to the body as a social process, with direct ties to the larger social structure and systems of inequality. This study extends our conceptualizations of health, disablement, and the body as processes. In addition, it illuminates the mechanisms through which systems of complex inequalities operate to create health disparities. / Ph. D. Social Production of Health/Illness Disability Social Theory Construction Workers Occupational Health Body Studies
4	Identification Through Movement: Dance as the Embodied Archive of Memory, History, and Cultural Identity Romaguera, Lauren D 27 March 2018 (has links) No description available. archive history dance body studies rumba cuba cultural identity memory collective memory cultural studies performance studies celia cruz
5	(Re)presenting Human Population Database Projects: virtually designing and siting biomedical informatics ventures Koay, Pei P. 27 May 2003 (has links) This dissertation examines the politics of representation in biotechnosciences. Through web representations, I examine three emerging endeavors that propose to create large-scale human population genomic databases to study complex, common diseases and conditions. These projects were initiated in different nations (US, UK, and Iceland), created under different institutional configurations, and are at various stages of development. The websites, which are media technologies do not simply reflect and promote these endeavors. Rather, they help shape these database projects in which the science is uncertain and the technologies not yet built. Thus, they are constitutive technologies that affect the construction of these database projects. More needs to be done to explore how to interpret the 'virtual' realm and how it relates to the 'real' world and specific situations. By bringing hypertextuality into the analysis, I explore how knowledges, practices, and subjectivities are created. By adapting the methods of a number of science and technology (STS) authors, I develop a more dynamic lens in which to investigate web representations and 'emerging' biomedical projects. My concern however, is not only in what represents what, but how representations are constructed. The power of the latter derives from its invisibility. In re-conceptualizing representation and new media technologies, I show that these sites are techno-social spaces for creating knowledge, specific ways of seeing, and practicing biomedicine today. The narrowing time/space between generating data, releasing information, and incorporating publics into their endeavors raises crucial issues as to how biomedicine is represented and how broader audiences are engaged. In the dominant discourses, these projects are all situated within biomedical, (post)genomic, and information revolutions. Here, they hang on the technological object, the database, with the ability to contain what we are coming to understand as life/genetic/bio information. Through the moves of both treating these databases as part of a complex system and investigating them through a lens of representation, I begin to include potential participants and broader audiences into the analysis. Informatic bodies, populations, and subjects are co-created at, by, and through these sites as the developing database projects and information are (re)presented. / Ph. D. body studies politics of information representations of science cyberspace studies
6	'My brain will be your occult convolutions' : toward a critical theory of the biological body Van Ommen, Clifford 11 1900 (has links) This project forms part of a growing engagement with biology by critical psychology and, more broadly, body studies. The specific focus is on the neurological body whose dogmatic exclusion from critical endeavours is challenged by arguing that neuroscience offers a vital resource for emancipatory agendas. Rather than conversely treating biology as a site for the factual supplementation of social theory the aim is to engage (negotiate) with neuroscience more directly and critically. In this process a discursive reductionism and attempted escape from complicity associated with critical psychology are addressed. Similarly a naïve and apolitical empiricism claimed by neuroscience is disrupted. The primary objective is however to demonstrate the utility of neuroscience in developing critical theory. These objectives are pursued through the ‘method’ of deconstruction, (mis)reading several highly regarded neuroscience texts written by prominent neuroscientists, working within the convolutions of these texts so as develop openings for critical conceptualisations of (neural) corporeality. In this manner the various spectres associated with neurology, including essentialism, determinism, individualism, reductionism and dualism, are displaced. This includes, amongst others, the omnipresent mind/body and body/society binaries. The (mis)readings address a number of prominent themes associated with contemporary neuroscience: Attempts at specifying an identity for (part of) the brain are shown to rely on a necessary relationship with the excluded other (such as the body, the socio-cultural, and the environment). Similarly, attempts at articulating a centre, a point from which agency can proceed, which finds existing identity in the functions of the prefrontal cortices, are also undone by the (multiple, affective, and unconscious) other which decentres the centre by being the essential supplement for any such claims. The causal metaphysic must likewise proceed within the play of différance, a logic of difference and deferral that undermines causal routes, innate origins and autocratic centres. Finally, reductionism must advance as a necessary strategy through which to engage with complexity, its ambitions always impossible as the aneconomic is forever in excess of any economy. The emancipatory viability of such (mis)readings is discussed within a context where the open and malleable body has been co-opted by contemporary neo-liberal geoculture. / Psychology / D.Litt. et Phil. (Psychology) Biology Body studies Cognitive science Connectionism Corporeality Deconstruction Embodiment theory Neurology Neuroscience Social constructionism Post-structuralism Body Critical psychology 616.8 Cognitive science Connectionism Critical psychology Deconstruction Poststructuralism Social constructionism
7	'My brain will be your occult convolutions' : toward a critical theory of the biological body Van Ommen, Clifford 11 1900 (has links) This project forms part of a growing engagement with biology by critical psychology and, more broadly, body studies. The specific focus is on the neurological body whose dogmatic exclusion from critical endeavours is challenged by arguing that neuroscience offers a vital resource for emancipatory agendas. Rather than conversely treating biology as a site for the factual supplementation of social theory the aim is to engage (negotiate) with neuroscience more directly and critically. In this process a discursive reductionism and attempted escape from complicity associated with critical psychology are addressed. Similarly a naïve and apolitical empiricism claimed by neuroscience is disrupted. The primary objective is however to demonstrate the utility of neuroscience in developing critical theory. These objectives are pursued through the ‘method’ of deconstruction, (mis)reading several highly regarded neuroscience texts written by prominent neuroscientists, working within the convolutions of these texts so as develop openings for critical conceptualisations of (neural) corporeality. In this manner the various spectres associated with neurology, including essentialism, determinism, individualism, reductionism and dualism, are displaced. This includes, amongst others, the omnipresent mind/body and body/society binaries. The (mis)readings address a number of prominent themes associated with contemporary neuroscience: Attempts at specifying an identity for (part of) the brain are shown to rely on a necessary relationship with the excluded other (such as the body, the socio-cultural, and the environment). Similarly, attempts at articulating a centre, a point from which agency can proceed, which finds existing identity in the functions of the prefrontal cortices, are also undone by the (multiple, affective, and unconscious) other which decentres the centre by being the essential supplement for any such claims. The causal metaphysic must likewise proceed within the play of différance, a logic of difference and deferral that undermines causal routes, innate origins and autocratic centres. Finally, reductionism must advance as a necessary strategy through which to engage with complexity, its ambitions always impossible as the aneconomic is forever in excess of any economy. The emancipatory viability of such (mis)readings is discussed within a context where the open and malleable body has been co-opted by contemporary neo-liberal geoculture. / Psychology / D.Litt. et Phil. (Psychology) Biology Body studies Cognitive science Connectionism Corporeality Deconstruction Embodiment theory Neurology Neuroscience Social constructionism Post-structuralism Body Critical psychology 616.8 Cognitive science Connectionism Critical psychology Deconstruction Poststructuralism Social constructionism
8	Height, Power, and Gender: Politicizing the Measured Body Butera, Laura E. 19 September 2008 (has links) No description available. Cultural Anthropology Social Research Social Structure gender power China height body politics body studies feminism foucault feminist studies body tall women short men social construction oppression heightism privilege limb-lengthening surgery Orientalism carnivalesque
9	Overeating, Obesity, and Weakness of the Will Sommers, Jennifer Heidrun 28 August 2015 (has links) The philosophical literature on akrasia and/or weakness of the will tends to focus on individual actions, removed from their wider socio-political context. This is problematic because actions, when removed from their wider context, can seem absurd or irrational when they may, in fact, be completely rational or, at least, coherent. Much of akrasia's apparent mystery or absurdity is eliminated when people's behaviours are considered within their cultural and political context. I apply theories from the social and behavioural sciences to a particular behaviour in order to show where the philosophical literature on akrasia and/or weakness of the will is insightful and where it is lacking. The problem used as the basis for my analysis is obesity caused by overeating. On the whole, I conclude that our intuitions about agency are unreliable, that we may have good reasons to overeat and/or neglect our health, and that willpower is, to some degree, a matter of luck. / Graduate / 0630 / 0573 / 0422 / felshereeno@aol.com akrasia action theory addiction agency Alison McIntyre applied ethics Bernard Williams body studies Bourdieu Cartesian dualism Christine Korsgaard compulsion continence deviance diet Distinction Donald Davidson dualism externalism incontinence inequality internalism intuition Irving K. Zola Marx medicalization morality Nichomachean Ethics Nomy Arpaly obesity epidemic orthorexia overeating overweight personal identity Petr Skrabanek Philip Kitcher philosophical intuition picoeconomics Pierre Bourdieu fat free will Gary Watson George Ainslie habitus healthism rat park rational choice rationality Richard Holton Robert Crawford social class stigma taste for luxury temperance utility maximization virtue weakness of the will willpower

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