Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Department of Philosophy, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (D. Min.)--New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, 2000. / Includes abstract and vita. "July 2000." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 145-150).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 35-37).

In an analysis of literary and historical documents from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, Gender, Genre, and the Eroticization of Violence in Early Modern English Literature examines depictions of love, beauty, and desire and identifies within these discourses a rhetoric of violence. It explores how eroticized violence can be deployed to privilege male speakers and silence female voices. It also reveals, by pairing female- and male-authored works that make specific claims to represent gendered experience that early modern writers both recognized the mechanisms of violent representation as literary conventions and realized they could be deployed, exploited, resisted, fashioned to new ends. By integrating feminist psychoanalytic, film and architectural theories with literary analysis, this study demonstrates how spatial topographies in literary works can function as stimuli that provoke desire to turn violent. Gender, Genre, and the Eroticization of Violence ultimately identifies how this body of literature constructs and maintains genders and points to violence as a structural principle, bound by the hydraulics of subjectivity and cultural anxieties about gender, class, and literary production. Finally, this study identifies the residue of early modern ideas about desire and violence in the materials of our modern culture.

This qualitative inquiry uses a life history prospective approach to investigate the social context in which adolescent girls’ sexual feelings emerge and in which girls’ sexual experiences occur. Nine adolescent girls were interviewed at two points in time during their adolescence and themes from their narratives were analyzed with respect to their experiences with sexuality. It appears that peers, family members, and sexual/dating partners have a major effect on both, girls’ sexual experiences and their connection with their sexual feelings. Prospective analysis revealed that over time, the social contexts of adolescent girls became more complex and girls became exposed to increasingly contradictory messages about what they should do and feel and behave. Girls appeared to have internalized the social messages around sexuality, which was evident through how girls talked about sexuality and through girls’ direct reports that their decisions were affected by the social and familial implications of their decisions.

The Phaedra and Hippolytus myth is a frequently dramatized narrative of uncontrollable desire. This thesis examines two versions, Euripides' Hippolytus, first presented in 428 B.C. as part of the Athenian festival of Dionysus, and Sarah Kane's 1996 play, Phaedra's Love, first presented as part of the Gate Theatre of London's "new playwrights, ancient sources" series. In each play, Phaedra's desire is constructed according to sociohistorical conditions which are temporary in their cultural significance. Once the moment of creation has passed, so have the conditions in which each version of desire is originally understood. However, these constructions of Phaedra's desire also bear a simultaneously transhistorical quality as they complicate human notions of agency. In the West, therefore, Phaedra's desire is represented as a tragically constructed emotion. This thesis posits desire as transhistorically relevant in its ability to question modes of human subjectivity.

The following is an attempt to ground personal duty – duty which is both believed and felt by all agents. To do this, I look at two contrasting attempts. The first is a rationalist attempt, which tries to ground it in conceptual necessity, the second an empiricist one, which uses empirical fact as its basis. In particular, it uses contingent facts about the things which are agents (people, for example), and what makes them feel a sense of duty. I argue that, ultimately, it is this type of grounding of duty which can be successful. Throughout, I emphasize two crucial points. The first is the freedom of the individual; the second is that duty is not a "want" or "desire;" rather, it is quite often what one does against one's own wants or desires. I argue that a paradigmatic example of establishing duty is Harry Frankfurt's theory of autonomous love.

This thesis considers how desire might be theorised in the twenty first century against the backdrop of New Zealand society, culture and film. Methodologically, this exploration is addressed with reference to Žižek’s return to a critique of ideology, whose conceptual basis is drawn from Marx, Althusser and Lacan, and which is significant in its analysis of contemporary desire as emanating from social conditions and constellations of power. Žižek’s challenge to call for a new Master is one that this thesis responds to enthusiastically. Such a response is posited from a location which intersects Lacanian psychoanalysis and sociological theories. The method this exploration employed focus groups and individual interviews from which talk of desire is constructed and critically explored. Focus groups and individual interviews were conducted following a viewing of the New Zealand film, Heavenly Creatures, which enabled an exploration of how participants offer competing ideological locations which can reveal the hidden and not so hidden mechanisms regulating social relations and ambiguities. The participant profiles of the focus groups were designed around key themes relating to the film: fathers of teenage daughters; those working or heavily involved within the creative industries; young women aged between 18-25; and those who grew up in Christchurch during the 1950’s. Heavenly Creatures is a film interpretation of the actual murder of Christchurch resident Honora Rieper in 1954 by her teenage daughter and this daughter’s friend. In exploring both the themes of friendship and the figure of the mother, Heavenly Creatures deliberately conflates fantasy with ideology, so that it is from this intersection that possibilities of subjective desire are confronted. When addressing desire set against this particular film, participants confront deadlocks and misrecognitions, in particular the disintegration of those ideological conditions with which they are identifying. These include the limitations of modern capitalism, concerns about the ‘environment’, the pervasive engagement with cynicism, and frustrations with the inability to intimately and socially self-express. In order to understand and articulate desire various locations are posited in the guise of subjective truth. These points of fixation are structured by the conditions of dominant social and cultural ideologies, which the participant seeks to symbolise in returning to the ambiguity of the promise of the Master’s discourse as proposed by Lacan. This thesis critically explores three of the modalities through which Lacan’s construct of the Master is revealed in participants’ talk about desire: these are the precarious position of belief, the fragmented body, and love as an ideological act. It is argued that these modalities work within discourse in such a way as to offer participants ideological personification as well as a complexity of circumstances from which they can designate the objet a (the truth of one’s desire in psychoanalytic terms) insisted by the superego. In this way these three modalities are configured as enabling a speaking, or a saying, from a position of knowledge. This position in turn insists that the subject does not have to abandon the problem of desire but rather engage with knowledge attained through confronting and developing a literacy of desire. Desire read alongside the modalities of belief, the body and love posit a contemporary ontology in which the gaze commands an ethical and somewhat moral dimension from which the subject can construct a Master which not only seeks to recognise and speak about desire, but also manage it within daily life.

Sexual representations in Seba al-Herz’s Saudi Arabian novel The Others span various kinds of sexual identification and experience. Surface level readings of the novel find examples of lesbian identities and encounters, but a deeper, more nuanced examination of the novel unearths a complex set of queer desires, practices, sexual encounters, and relationships that do not fit neatly in to regulated sexual identity categories. Through literary analysis, I argue that through ambiguities in the novel’s construction and narration, and through the Narrator’s sexual experiences, The Others offers a kind of sexual expression that opens up possibilities of de-territorializing and re-territorializing sexual experience beyond static identity labels.

How did Late Antiquity’s societies articulate their identities? This dissertation is a study of the construction of textual identities, as revealed by an analysis of Origen’s Paulinism which aimed to construct Christian identity in the third century CE. I have chosen extracts from Origen’s exegesis of Paul, found primarily in one text, his Commentary on Romans, as resources for my examination of identity issues. This text is an extremely helpful example of a deliberate fashioning of Christian identity through Origen’s joint use of Hellenistic paideia and the Bible. Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus provides a helpful lens in decoding Origen’s and Hellenistic texts. Using habitus, the focus is on the rhetoric of identity formation through the fabric of the cultural, social, political, ideological, and literary contexts of Origen’s world. The study is more descriptive than polemical. The Greek paideia provides an immediate background to Late Antiquity’s concept of identity formation. The extant literature of the period comprised the fundamental vehicles of self–definition. This concept of fashioning identity through the construction of texts presents numerous difficulties for the contemporary reader. I will show that Origen used Greco–Roman moral philosophy and rhetoric in interpreting Paul. In seeking Origen’s notion of Christian identity, Origen’s reading of Romans is shaped by strategies of self–scrutiny and self–formation. Although Origen modifies the Greco–Roman moral philosophies—such as the notion of self–control, transformational narratives, and rhetoric deployment in his exegesis—much of the shared cultural and literary background remains. Using the Hellenistic nuances of self–control and rhetoric, Origen shows his audience a distinct picture of what a transformed, mature believer should look like, the humanitas. The transformation that a believer underwent resulted in a new or intensified form of piety with consequent changes in social affiliations, relations and loyalties. He also uses different descriptions —“new man,” “inner man” and “perfect”—to identify the mature transformed believers. This believer is the humanitas, the much sought after identity, with the milieu of the third century C.E. He attempted to create a body of knowledge and to utilize it for the preparation of a strong Christian identity in the midst of the pressures and temptations of the hegemonic Roman Empire and the pervasive Greco–Roman culture. Along with the paideia, the Roman Empire nurtured and challenged Origen’s Paulinism. The Roman Empire did not require individuals, or even communities, to adopt for themselves a distinctly Roman identity to the exclusion of all others. Yet, everyone was required to worship the genus of the Emperor. The Roman identity transformed the Greek–barbarian dichotomy into an imperial ideology which claimed Roman supremacy over all other cultures and people. This usurpation of other societies by the Romans is an inverted mirror image of Origen’s usurpation of Rome’s Romanitas or humanitas through his Paulinism. Thus, he is to be seen constructing identity through shared forms of symbolic and linguistic construction which were readily available within his socio–political reality. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Church and Dogma History))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012.