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This thesis analyses the welfare arrangements of the Portuguese elderly from an historical and a sociological perspective. Two goals form the focus of the thesis. First, it attempts to enrich the discussion on familialism as a model of welfare provision in old age in Portugal. Starting with the historical analysis of the process of consolidation of a model of welfare provision that is based on a set of assumptions about the existence of intergenerational ties and kin solidarity throughout the life course, the thesis moves on to the sociological analysis of family dynamics and normative propositions related to welfare arrangements in old age. The broad question underlying the analysis is to know how resilient and operative is familialism as a logics of welfare provision for the Portuguese elderly. The thesis shows that the resilience of familialism in the lives of the elderly is related to a complex set of social, economic and normative intricacies that still provide for a support network in old age but that show signs of being under accelerated erosion. Second, the thesis aims to make a contribution to the analysis of welfare states and social policies in familialist countries by demonstrating the explanatory power of family arrangements for understanding welfare arrangements in old age. This involves introducing in the analysis of welfare arrangements a focus on intergenerational and kin relationships, demonstrating how the familialist model is intertwined with a complex network of exchanges of support that goes beyond the needs of the elderly and that is in fact structured around the functional roles of each member of the household and/or family for the welfare of the whole. The thesis draws on review of literature and secondary data analysis. The data used came from three main sources: the European Community Household Panel (1998), the Portuguese Family Budget Survey (2000) and the Eurobarometer Survey Series (1992, 1995 and 1998-99). The analysis of data has privileged a descriptive approach, using some multivariate analysis to make meaningful synthesis. It combines crossnational comparative analysis with a case-study focus. The goal of the empirical analysis was to come up with a holistic synthesis of welfare arrangements of the Portuguese elderly linking them to three main dimensions: institutional, familial and normative.

Family support is the central pillar of old-age income security in Hong Kong and Singapore. But demographic ageing, among the fastest internationally, implies fewer adult children to provide support, while the public pension systems remain lean even by East Asian standards. Future elderly cohorts therefore face growing risks of financial hardship. This study examines the current extent of this problem, its prospects in the coming decades, and the possibilities of pension reform. It is unique in combining historical and prospective approaches towards policy causes and effects within a comparative framework. First, it analyses work, incomes, and living arrangements among elderly persons in 1995/1996 and 2005/2006 using microdata from national surveys. Next, it models possible living arrangements, income sources, and pension outcomes for future elderly cohorts using a macrosimulation model and illustrative cases. Finally, it examines the historical factors affecting pension policy development and assesses the potential for reform. Elderly poverty is more serious than often acknowledged—three quarters of elderly persons have incomes below 40% of the median wage, including a quarter of those in work in Singapore. Children‘s transfers are prevalent and large, while co-residence boosts elderly incomes on a household basis. But co-residence is already falling. By 2030, half of elderly persons may not live with their children. Almost a third may have access to neither market income nor children‘s contributions. Pensions are estimated to replace less than a third of men‘s final wage and are equivalent to a quarter or less of the median wage for women. Although developmental policy paradigms disfavour generous public pension systems in both places, explicit policy demands by the public keep up the pressure on policymakers in Hong Kong. In Singapore, reform prospects may depend on the growth of ideational competition and the availability of policy proposals to focus public concerns and rejuvenate policy thinking.

Modern western understandings of citizenship are closely tied to the nation state. This is the political community where members are expected to exercise their freedoms and practice solidarity. When individuals claim rights across borders and move in and out of different polities the state-centric citizenship model is disturbed. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the European Union where borders are transformed by transnational migration and internal mobility. This has led some scholars to welcome the emergence of a ‘postnational citizenship’ of human rights. Others argue for the need to protect a comprehensive state membership based on shared identity and active participation. The dichotomy of ‘thick and thin’ citizenship warrants critical attention, however. It risks romanticizing national or postnational membership, overlooking historical and contemporary power struggles and change. Agonistic democratic theory offers a particularly promising way of moving beyond the binary. It constructs a dynamic relationship between citizenship rights, participation and identification. Political conflicts over liberties and membership are seen as practices that re-constitute civic actors. By claiming and contesting rights migrants and citizens take part in the ongoing re-founding of polities and develop, reinforce or change their democratic subjectivity. But agonism like its intellectual counterpart deliberative democracy focuses exclusively on public ‘voice’. It neglects to explore the civic potential of exit, entry and re-entry so integral to migration and EU citizenship. In the thesis I address this problem and develop an agonistic conception of citizenship and cross-border movement. I do so through a heuristic empirical case study of transnational immigration and EU mobility in the Danish family unification dispute. In response to restrictive national policy many have used the freedom of movement in the EU to sidestep or contest domestic rules. Based on 30 narrative interviews with Danish-international couples I draw out and conceptualize practices of contestatory transnational citizenship.

While examining a selection of plays centred on the phenomenon of mothering, my thesis also investigates the interaction between theatre and feminism in post-war Britain, aiming to highlight mutual correspondences between women's theatre making and feminist agendas. I focus mainly on the period of second-wave feminism, but I also discuss the decade preceding the appearance of the Women's Liberation Movement, as well as its aftermath up to the mid-nineties. Scrutinising proto-feminist, feminist and post-feminist stances, I argue that several fifties women dramatists anticipated key concerns of the late sixties and seventies; and equally, that many playwrights active after the heyday of second-wave feminism revisited the climate of the seventies in an attempt to evaluate the transformations that have since occurred in women's lives. In this manner, I not only contextualise some of the major achievements and shortcomings of successive feminist interventions, but also elaborate on key changes that have taken place in the negotiation of dramatic form and content. Rather than privileging one dominant theoretical position and adopting its perspective for the purposes of my analysis, I connect the work of playwrights informed by different artistic positions and political convictions, in order to pinpoint the principle of co-existence and multiplicity. This aesthetic and ideological diversity in women's writing for the stage, characteristic of the past five decades, has been confirmed not only by the primary and secondary sources that I drew upon but also by the playwrights themselves, whom I interviewed. For most present-day female dramatists, as this thesis argues, contemporary British women's theatre is a space of experimentation and of confluence - in which the broad range of individual voices can situate themselves next to one another, without the urge to replicate an ultimate direction imposed by hegemonic political constraints or artistic platforms.

This study explores lay perceptions of embodiment and health through the narratives ofa group of 'everyday' women and men in a Canadian community. Gender, class and cultural influences on individual and collective experiences of embodiment are examined along with the ways in which these concepts evolve over the life course. The research is based on in depth interviews with a sample of forty working- and middle-class white women and men between the ages of30 and 65. I argue that notions of embodiment and health are multiple, fluid and contextual. They are shaped and reshaped over time in relation to individual biographies and social and cultural influences, and negotiated in relation to the prescribed values of the larger body politic. I suggest that research must attend to the spatial and temporal dimension of ideas about embodiment and health. In the context of this case study, I argue that everyday ideas about regional identity are enmeshed with the cultural codes which signify racial, class and gender identity. These frame peoples' understandings and representations of 'healthy selves' and 'unhealthy others' and are central to their notions of embodiment. Based on these findings, I propose a more nuanced approach to theorizing 'the body' and health in feminist and sociological theory. I argue for a closer engagement between theoretical frameworks and empirical studies with the aim of developing a more fully embodied social theory.

This thesis seeks to foreground and analyse black female subjectivity by recourse to dramatic texts by twentieth-century African-American women playwrights, African- American historical narratives, and black and post-structuralist feminist theories. An attempt is made at the outset to re-assess African-American historico-political conditions in the 1920s and 1960s in order to explore the relationship between black political activism and cultural production. Although African-American social upheavals of the 1960s have come to be characterised as "revolutionary", it is necessary to critically re-evaluate the organisational hierarchy and ideological impetus that underpinned the black civil rights organisations, in order to interrogate the intractable relationship between mainstream white institutions and black civil rights organisations. Within this critical framework, the absence of African-American women from historical narratives is particularly marked, despite the fact that black women were also working at the interstices between cultural production and political activism. In contrast, historical narratives of the 1920s and the Harlem renaissance situate the contributions of African-American women alongside those of African-American men. The dramatic works of Georgia Douglas Johnson and Mary Burrill, two prominent figures of the Harlem renaissance,d emonstrateb lack women's efforts to articulate and dramatise the prevailing conditions of racism and sexism at a time when African- Americans' lives continued to be blighted by Jim Crowism. These "maverick" women playwrights are a part of a continuum of black women who seek to challenge mainstream and white patriarchal hegemony. The second half of the thesis attempts to create a link between the plays of the "mother playwrights" and contemporary black women writers who continue the tradition of fusing cultural production and political activism. It's Morning by Shirley Graham and Beloved by Toni Morrison both foreground infanticide as an act of counter-insurgency, under white supremacist ideology. This raises the issue of the ways in which the contemporary black female writer perceives black female subjectivity. On this subject, black feminist scholars write of the multifarious nature of black female subjectivity and as a consequence of this, black feminist epistemologists seek to reflect the multiple dilemmas inherent in black female materiality within white mainstream society. Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf is a seminal example of a black feminist dramatic text (choreopoem) that offers representations of black female subjectivity as multiple, and in process. The final chapter offers a detailed analysis of Shange's choreopoem and this leads me to define the black female subject (referred to as the Coloured body after Shange's "colored girls"/women) as a "shifting subject", (in contradistinction to a unitary subjecthood), that embodies radical possibilities for change. In conclusion, attempts are made to examine the way in which I myself attempt to resist homologisation into a mainstream and white academic institution, offering my own background, as theatre academic as material(ity) for the hypothesis of the "shifting subject".

The titular themes of "regulation" and "resistance" provide a conceptual and theoretical framework for this research, which examines health visiting work in relation to women experiencing domestic violence. These themes, which are threaded throughout the study, arise from the feminist poststructuralist analysis underpinning this research. This draws attention towards the issues of power and knowledge, which are key sites for this analysis of the practices of health visitors and women experiencing domestic violence. Understanding health visiting in terms of the social regulation of mothers enables the analysis to focus upon the ambiguities and contradictions that arise from the double bind of welfare and surveillance inherent within health visiting work with women. These tensions are particularly visible in the context of domestic violence, where different understandings about male violence and abuse against women are associated with different practices. In particular, the feminist discourses about domestic violence that underpin this research and which are represented as "resistance", have made little impact upon the professional health visiting knowledge-base. The study draws upon qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with 24 health visitors, and 16 women with young children who have experienced domestic violence. It examines the practices through which health visitors "get to know" about women's experiences of domestic violence, and the extent that they were able to offer support or protection. The women who participated in this research all faced a number of difficulties in seeking help about domestic violence. These included dilemmas about disclosing their experiences to health visitors, as well as inadequate responses once they had broken their silence. The findings suggest that an urgent response, at the policy and practice level, is required to enable health visitors to improve their practices with women experiencing domestic violence.

This thesis is an exploration into the nature and the prevalence of child abuse. It incorporates in this investigation how children understand abuse, and how the child may reject or oppose it. Its origins lie in the experiences and observations I made as a local authority social worker where children were silent, where child abuse was seen as an event, a distinct moment within family life, and with apparently little recognition of its relationship with the social order. Arising from this observation, I consider how the care of children may be a manifestation of the social order. This thesis is therefore also a critique of the present theory and practice of working within the field of childcare. The premise taken here is that in order to understand abuse, there must be an account of the individual's sense of being, as this relates to wider issues of the political economy. Thus this investigation uses the perspective of critical theory, since critical theory can incorporate an analysis of both structure and the experiential. It enables the researcher to shift perspective and to focus on different levels and aspects of being. Therefore, since child abuse is situated within the family, an analysis based on the perspectives of critical theory is used to examine family relationships. This includes an examination of the relationships between parents, as well as of those between them and the child. Three different facets of family life are explored: that of gender construction from the viewpoint of feminist psychoanalysis; the relationship between the social order and interpersonal behaviour from the perspective of Marx and radical feminism; and parental authority, drawing on the work of Laing. Derived from this exploration, the key concepts of patriarchy, alienation and mystification inform the direction of the empirical investigation. The empirical investigation, using firstly autobiographies of childhood and then direct interviews with children, explores further these concepts'. The autobiographies are used as a way of sensitising oneself to the issues for the child, and as a means of categorising experiences for the subsequent interviews with children. From this reading, an alternative understanding of child abuse is developed, one which differs from the narrow definition used by organisations. Hence abuse can be seen as the experience of hurt and pain, either emotional or physical, and which takes place in a relationship based on the parental domination, control and exploitation of the child. This understanding of abuse situates the subjective experience within an interpersonal dynamic of power and subordination. Using this definition in analysing the interviews with children, it was apparent that all children expedrience a form of abuse to some degree. Abuse is not, therefore, the property of a small number of deviant families. Additionally it is argued that children are silenced and rendered powerless within the family by three mechanisms: firstly by the 'privacy control mechanism', secondly by the 'ideology of paternalism', and thirdly by mystification. These can be interpreted as also reinforcing the social order, since this also depends for its maintenance on domination, powerlessness, and mystification of the mechanisms of control. The thesis concludes with a number of proposals for further exploring these concepts in terms of developing sociological theory and social work practice. The report on the death of Jasmine Beckford is subjected to an alternative analysis, and derived from this critique, ways of confronting violence, mystification and privacy are discussed. Finally the thesis stresses the importance of understanding child abuse as a personal as well as a social phenomenon, and that it has ultimately, a political significance.

This thesis explores the relationship between class, gender and feminist identity through an examination of women's involvement in philanthropy and social reform in London from 1870 to 1906. Middle-class women's engagement in such work — termed collectively here as 'social action' — has long been claimed as the nursery of first-wave feminist political identity. Numerous historians have framed social action as the means by which women moved from the 'private' to the 'public' sphere and the ground where women developed their claim to a place in national political life in the three decades prior to the upsurge of suffrage campaigning in 1906. Whilst agreeing with this broad narrative of the relationship between social action and feminism, the thesis addresses the lack of discussion of class differences between women in the existing literature on the subject. The forms of social action examined in detail in this thesis were predicated upon this very difference between women: on the belief in the power of the lady to reshape the bodies, characters, homes and workplaces of poor women. Women social activists themselves had a central role in making identities of class, through the dissemination of their expert opinions on the domestic life of the urban poor. In the context of the changing understanding of duty in the later nineteenth century the thesis argues that the agency of femininity in effecting social change came to be seen as of less significance as the century progressed. Women social activists instead drew upon codes of class to justify their work, constructing themselves as authoritative professionals, licenced to speak and act for working-class women. The thesis brings to the fore the (often strained and contested) encounters between lady social activists and the women and men who were their objects of reform using detailed case studies of philanthropic rent-collecting schemes, the London Charity Organisation Society and the women's factory inspectorate. It concludes that social action was indeed the material from which modern feminist identity made itself, but that this identity was founded on middle-class women's differentiation of themselves from working-class women.