This thesis is based on research which aimed to describe and account for patients' experiences in eight unexceptional examples of predominantly long-stay geriatric wards, each in a different hospital. Observational methods were used to document the experiences of 86 patients. Other data on ward work processes were drawn from interviews with Ward Sisters and Consultants, written records and informal conversations with ward participants. Data analysis was based on the type and amount of inhumane treatment which patients suffered. In focussing on inhumane treatment and developing a systematic and non-emotive analysis of its origins, the research breaks new ground. Patients in all the wards experienced inhumane treatment, but this varied in kind and quantity. It is shown that poor staffing levels and heavy workload cannot by themselves account for the inhumane treatment of patients which was observed. Instead, the beliefs, work practices and interrelationships between Consultants and Ward Sisters emerged as important. Where the work of long-term care was viewed as a valuable and important task, there was evidence of attempts to offer personalised care to patients. Where long-term care was viewed as low-status work, an outcome of 'failure' of the medical cure system, there was scant evidence of personal attention to patients' needs. The nature of inhumane treatment which was observed enables a new perspective to be offered on what constitutes humane treatment and how this might be reliably secured in practice. Eight practical recommendations are made on the basis of research findings. Consideration is also given to ways in which the innovatory social research approach of documenting inhumane treatment might be further developed and applied in practice by professionals seeking to monitor and improve patients' experiences in geriatric wards.

Most women workers' education focuses on women's objective-material situation namely employment conditions and rights as workers. Hence, consciousness-raising on exploitation and the importance of workers unity are the usual agendas. Women's subjectivities, their individual personally lived experiences are rarely taken on board. Even in situations where gender agendas are covered, their unspoken thoughts, repressed feelings and pains, especially the personally felt emotional subordination tend to be overlooked. This thesis explores how silenced experiences of emotional subordination, powerlessness and inferiority can be taken on board in and as educational work with factory women. Guided by principles of participatory research and feminist research I used multiple methods to review current and past educational work with factory women in Malaysia, to explore a way of approaching and doing educational work that is empowering for factory women and that is based on their lived experiences. Specifically the research (i) undertook a historical and critical review of women workers education in Malaysia and identified the neglected dimensions 1 (ii) probed the lived gendered experiences of factory women, and (iii) evolved a pedagogy that can evoke and reconstitute silenced experiences of emotional subordination. Storying, as a narrative methodology for negotiating and constructing meaning from experience (and practice) frames the epistemological and methodological approach to this study. The study established that although emotional suffering is only one dimension of factory women's lived experiences and one dimension of women's subordination, it is however, a critical area to address in educational work concerned with factory women's empowerment, given the pervasiveness of debilitating emotional subjectivities amongst them. Story-telling-sharing in small groups was found to be effective in facilitating the constructive unfolding of differences and commonalities while also fostering an emotionally safe space in which women can rebuild self-esteem and confidence and discover solidarity. Indeed, story-telling-sharing that incorporates processes of reflective talking and making sense is the educational method par excellence. It commences with lived experiences and experienced feelings to reconstitute women's subjectivities. These findings bring significant insights to the pedagogy and content of educational work with women on the global assembly line, and for women and workers' education in general.

In this thesis, I use poetic texts by two German women Expressionist authors, Claire Gull and Paula Ludwig, to examine questions of selfhood, aesthetics and sexual difference within a Kantian philosophical frame. The thesis is structured in two parts. In Part One, I situate the project via a critical examination of Lyotard's reworking of the Kanlian sublime. I argue that Lyotard closes down the gaps within Kant's system that feminist philosophy could usefully exploit and explore. I then position German Expressionism as an alternative mode of post-Kantianism. I argue that although the male Expressionist poets break down the Kantian subject-object distinction, they continue to position woman as the "other". There follows a brief bridging section, in which I outline work by some of the key women Expressionists, and argue that the theoretical frameworks used in Expressionist scholarship are inherently gendered. In Part Two of the thesis, I explore texts by both Go!! and Ludwig in detail. I argue that whilst the male Expressionists are concerned with dissolving male subjecthood, these writers can be read as subverting Kantian space-time to produce alternative modes of female selfhood and of the sublime. In chapter 4,! examine Goll's disruptive exploration of a mode of embodied selfhood generated through productive play and movements of relationality. Chapters 5 and 6 extend the theme of relationally generated selfhood by tracing the subversive use of neoplatonic and Orphic elements in a short story by Goll. In chapter 7, I show how Ludwig radically reconfigures the limits of both body and self to produce identities no longer constructed via oppositional boundaries in the manner of the Kantian subject. I conclude by arguing that the work of these authors provides feminist philosophy with productive models for rethinking immanent transcendence and relationally generated selfhood which can incorporate both difference and change.

This thesis is a comparative study of popularisation of feminism in Britain and Turkey in the 1990s. It focuses on selected British and Turkish women's magazines and examines the ways in which they engage with feminist concerns. The methodology is derived from feminist critical theory and cultural studies in order to address the dynamic interchange between feminist politics and mainstream or consumer women's interests and to examine the relationship between the concepts of feminism and femininity in contemporary women's magazines. The significance of the research lies in the identification of ways in which these texts incorporate and appropriate feminist discourses to the extent that the notion of femininity has increasingly come to be associated with feminist thought. The argument presented in this study is that the relationship between the producers of cultural texts and feminism, and producers and readers need to be taken into consideration to investigate how gendered subjectivities are reproduced in any given culture or crossculturally, by whom they are reproduced, in whose interests they work, and how they are constructed. This approach to popular culture will provide tools to articulate the political and cultural identities of women. The thesis is divided into three chapters. In the first, I discuss the evolution of feminist movements in the different historical and cultural contexts of Britain and Turkey by focusing on current feminist debates. The second chapter examines the women's magazine as a diverse form of popular culture with regard to its market and content. Contemporary women's magazine markets in these two countries and the ways in which these markets have been changed and expanded in conjunction with the development of feminist movements over the last two decades are discussed. This chapter also discusses the role of editors in defining a contemporary understanding of femininity for mass consumption and the editorial control of the magazine form as a commodity. The final chapter examines the dominant themes through which these texts have engaged with feminist issues. By comparing and contrasting the Turkish and British women's magazines I have found that specific conditions and politics engender a variety of diverse forms for the popularisation of feminism. Feminist themes and issues embedded in popular and commercial discourses are complex and various. However, I have found that the Turkish women's magazines primarily provide an outlet for women's voices and share a common goal with feminist politics of promoting female empowerment in the context of 1990s' Turkey. On the other hand, feminism is predominantly recognized as a cultural value by the British women's magazines in which feminism is often redefined through commodities and fetishized into a symbol of things. Their approach is defined as postfeminist which means the incorporation, revision and depoliticisation of feminist politics.

This thesis explores the relationship between local government and social change strategies. More specifically, it examines the series of highly contested attempts during the 1980s to deploy local government in order to challenge the discrimination and prejudice facing lesbians and gay men. Whilst, much of the effort was directed at making council services more responsive to lesbian and gay needs, a key aspect of the project concerned the transformation of dominant sexual meanings. Four questions provide a theoretical and empirical framework for this research. First, why did some local authorities address lesbian and gay issues? Second, how successful were they in doing so? Third, what factors constrained or limited their attempts? And fourth, why were lesbian and gay municipal initiatives so controversial? The first section of this thesis examines the reconstitution of lesbian and gay issues on the local government agenda, and the subsequent trajectory of their development within particular authorities. The thesis then goes on to examine the impact of bureaucratic processes and right-wing opposition on lesbian and gay municipal discourses. I argue that despite significant opposition to lesbian and gay policies, in general the right did not mobilise. The ideological steer within local government bureaucracy was usually sufficient to 'weed out' or dilute more progressive proposals. However, on occasions where this broke down, opposing forces intervened, both to obstruct lesbian and gay initiatives and to use the policies' existence to advance their own political agenda. The final part of this thesis draws together several key issues: the general absence of a more radical sexual politics; the crisis of implementation; the nature of opponents' attitudes towards homosexuality and local government; and the decline of lesbian and gay municipal politics post-1987. In the conclusion, I return to the question of local government's radical potential by proposing an alternative, decentred approach to municipal sexual politics. Methodologically, this thesis is eclectic drawing on several disciplinary areas in conjunction with a range of theoretical perspectives, particularly neo-marxism, feminism and poststructuralism. Field research comprises of interviews, mass media and local government documentation combined with my own experiences as an actor within the municipal lesbian and gay project. This thesis is intended to make a contribution to a theoretical understanding of municipal politics, especially to the relationship between local government, sexuality, ideology and social change. it also offers a detailed account and analysis of lesbian and gay municipal developments, one of the most controversial initiatives of the 1980s.

This thesis considers the construction and circulation of the image-text 'Audrey Hepburn', and its reception by young British women across two moments: the 1950s and 1960s, and the 1990s. The project uses a tripartite methodology: close analysis of film texts, press and publicity relating to Hepburn; archival research using sources including women's and film fan magazines, and interviews with women who admire and have admired Audrey Hepburn. The thesis argues that Hepburn can be understood as a star who offers an address to a feminine audience, and goes on to explore the taking up of that address through analysis of the data gathered in the interviews, paying particular attention to questions of class, generation and socio-historical moment. The research presents a number of different kinds of material: it considers Hepburn as a star and the reasons for her enduring popularity; it suggests the flexibility of her image as key in understanding this longevity and in enabling her to appeal to women across lines of class and generation. The thesis argues that it is this flexibility, and the ways in which Hepburn's image manages social contradictions, which have been key to the way consent has been secured from women around her as a star. It investigates the nature of the relationship between Hepburn and the women who admire her, and also, through their detailed talk, offers insight into the social history of femininity. In attending to both text and audience, the thesis attempts to think the relationship between them outside psychoanalytically informed theories of identification which have been hegemonic in film theory, offering instead the terms resonance and recognition as ways of understanding that relationship. An interdisciplinary project, the thesis represents a 'cultural studies of film' which extends existing work on stars such as Dyer (1979,1982,1986, 1991) and Stacey (1994).

This thesis examines the appropriateness of the use of rights based strategies in meeting children's needs. In an era of proliferating international conventions this is an issue that demands further debate. The starting point of the thesis is the way that rights talk about children. It is suggested that ideas of difference are integral to child rights. Needs and rights are attributed on the basis of difference. The difference between children and adults is defined and informed by the scientifically based discourse of child development, on which a prescriptive model of childhood is built. Difference also structures the relationship between child rights and other cultural norms of childhood. Rights make claims to a universal application. Other constructions of childhood are redefined as local, and required to fit into the rights framework, or delegitimised. Developing these points it is asked whether rights, as an internationally dominant discourse, can succeed in accommodating rather than excluding difference, since the process of exclusion involves an operation of power which serves to reinforce the status quo. This is a problem that is recognised in some theoretical perspectives (although only rarely applied to child rights). The response is usually in terms of restating universal claims, or advocating some form of cultural relativism. This thesis leans in favour of the latter. However, it also departs somewhat from this dichotomy, and argues, relying on ideas of chaos and complexity, that child rights need to be reworked. Two distinct approaches are suggested: either the recognition of radical, incommensurable difference, in which there can at best be convergence under a limited overarching framework of values; or the removal of difference as a structuring concept. The argument is elaborated through a detailed analysis, structured by theories of globalisation, of the interaction between the dominant rights discourse of childhood, and alternative conceptions of childhood in Sri Lanka. The analysis is based on field research, in which the response of the child care authorities to the practice of child placement was investigated, as was the impact on children and families of their responses. This investigation involved one of the only pieces of empirical research yet done in Sri Lanka, on either the juvenile courts, or on child placement and domestic service. The findings supported the conclusion that in order to be able to embrace complexity, and empower children, child rights need to be rethought.

The main purpose of this research is to explore the interconnections between reproduction and production, and women's roles in a wide range of social and economic process in the Caribbean in general, and in Antigua specifically. The focus on Antigua allows for an examination of women's integration into the social, political and economic development of a small Caribbean territory. Using gender theory as an analytical tool, I analyze the results of a large social survey of Antiguan women (504), together with data obtained from my own interviews and from a wide range of previously unavailable and unpublished secondary data. These have enabled me to demonstrate both the contributions Antiguan women have made to development, and the constraints which they have confronted over the period 1834- 1990. The thesis is organized into eight chapters. Divided into two parts, it begins by examining a wide range of sociological and anthropological theories which purport to explain the nature of Caribbean family organization, and relations between men and women, namely the concepts of matrifocality and male marginality. It also looks at the utility of gender theory for analyzing Caribbean social reality. Chapter Two moves on to look at the contemporary situation of Caribbean women, particularly with respect to national development policy. Chapter Three then turns to the situation confronting Antiguan women from Emancipation in 1834 up to the present. Part Two moves away from the general Caribbean situation to an analysis of data gathered in 1980/81 on Antiguan women by the Women in the Caribbean Project, University of the West Indies. Chapter Four sets this data in perspective, while Chapters Five through Seven examine in detail the impact of education, work, and the family on women's lives. One of the major purposes of this section is to listen to what the women themselves have to say from their own experience. This section is then followed by a concluding chapter. In conclusion, we see that despite new opportunities and different behavioral patterns of women and men, Antigua is still very much a patriarchal society with power concentrated in the hands of a few men. Women's self-perception and social interaction continues to be mediated by their ascribed gender roles, and both young and old women conform to traditional gender stereotypes. It is hoped that the data generated by and included in this thesis will contribute to a cross-cultural perspective on women in development as well as offer a critical contribution to current and future research on Antigua.

Contraception is often a taken-for-granted element of actively heterosexual women’s lives. Yet while modern contraceptives have technically enhanced women’s ability to control their fertility, the history of women’s struggles to achieve this control shows the importance of understanding the social context within which women’s contraceptive decisions are situated. Previous feminist studies of contraception in the UK have tended to concentrate either on aspects of medicine or on heterosexuality. Whilst both areas have highlighted the need to understand how power relationships structure women’s contraceptive experiences, these two aspects have not been integrated adequately. There has also been a tendency to focus research on younger women, and mature women’s ongoing use of contraception has generally been overlooked. This thesis is based on qualitative interviews with twenty-two mid-life British women aged between 30 and 40, as well as observations at a family planning clinic. It demonstrates that only by giving full consideration to the extent and complexity of the power relationships surrounding contraception can an understanding of women’s decisions and everyday practices be achieved. The concept of ‘subjective power’ is developed to explore how these women make strategic and creative use of circulating discourses, interact with disciplinary regimes, and situate themselves within multi-faceted webs of power relationships, such as in relation to the institutions of medicine, the media, and heterosexuality. The embodied nature of both the risk of pregnancy and the use of contraceptive technologies is argued to lead the women to assert a right of bodily autonomy. Yet this assertion conflicts with their expectation of equitable coupledom within heterosexuality and their routine consideration of men’s preferences. In addition, this thesis will show that taking ‘proper’ responsibility for preventing pregnancy constructs women as respectable, yet may increase their risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections.

This thesis explores early modem perceptions of menstrual bleeding, demonstrating that attempts to understand menstrual bleeding extended beyond the early modem medical world and captured the imagination of an entire cross-section of French society revealing culturally- embedded concerns about marriage, progeny, the family, patrilineage and state formation. The thesis draws on diverse sources including medical, casuistic and judicial texts, court records and private documents. Chapter One outlines the database of medical texts which forms a cornerstone of the thesis. The database includes texts printed between 1495, with the French edition of a medieval Latin work by Bernard de Gordon, and 1761, with Montpellier physician Jean Astruc's treatise on women's diseases which introduced the term 'menstruation' into French medical vocabulary. Chapter Two examines medical notions of menstrual bleeding within the context of attitudes to blood, blood-related fluids and the humoral and mechanical bodies. Sixteenth-century casuistic interpretations of Biblical taboos surrounding sex during menstrual bleeding and notions of menses as polluting are cross-referenced with medical notions of the relationship of menses to conception demonstrating the overriding concern for healthy progeny. Chapter Three explores the significance of concepts of time and periodicity, in the context of the merging of blood-related fluids in the humoral body, as a key to early modem perceptions of menstrual bleeding. Chapter Four examines early modern debates on the length of gestation and the calculation of a woman's time on the basis of the monthly menstrual cycle relating these to Sarah Hanley's model of the 'marital regime'. In Chapter Five, the ambivalent nature of menstrual bleeding in the medico-legal arena is investigated and the different cultural meanings ascribed to various bloody discharges emanating from the living female body are analysed. In the sixth and final chapter the role of menstrual bleeding in issues of sexual difference and hermaphroditism is discussed.