This report investigates the conventional female silhouette through common assumptions of the body. Moreover, different perspectives of the body and the dressed body is analysed and considere. Conventional pattern construction is based upon these assumptions of the female body. To expand the perspective, an experimental approach is implemented to display new expressions of the female silhouette and define and explore these characteristics through form. The work is conducted by rethinking the conventional female silhouette in terms of volume and composition extracted from traditional cuts in womenswear. Furthermore, to challenge expectations on female silhouette using seams and darts to create concave and convex volumes, to correspond with bodily shapes which then are rearranged in a non traditional composition.

This study sets out to investigate Sahrawi women’s understanding of maternities as bodily and embodied experiences of collective and individual resistance within the Sahrawi liberation struggle against the occupation of Western Sahara. By using the Sahrawi liberation front’s pronatalist politics as a starting point to explore Sahrawi women’s positioning in the liminal space between reproductive health and biological reproduction as a socio-political action, I draw on a decolonial understanding of agency to analyse the relationship between individual health and collective resistance – especially in correlation with the increase of humanitarian projects targeting sexual and reproductive health. As a result of semi-structured interviews, focus groups and desk review, I argue that the change in the social landscape of the camps with the arrival of humanitarian aid provided Sahrawi women with new perspectives on biological reproduction that, in turn, affected the way they contribute to the revolutionary cause, confirming their role as socio-political agents implementing new strategies of survival as acts of individual resistance.

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This thesis, consisting of four chapters, explores female alienation and subjectivity as described by post-war French women writers. The first chapter will focus on critical and theoretical approaches to female alienation. Through feminist and Marxist criticism, I explore the condition of women as a dominated class. The second chapter examines literary strategies such as irony, humor, parody and satire used by the authors of my corpus to undermine and question gender stereotypes which they inherited from the tradition of the French novel. The third chapter is devoted to the issue of women novelists' uses of the figure of the naive female narrator. Through their reworking of this stereotype, they perform a political act of providing agency to a figure who was traditionally deprived of all agency. The fourth chapter analyzes the question of the female body. By playing with the concept of the grotesque female body and its representation, the novelists whom I study, attempt to liberate their female narrators from the status of an object and the influence of the beauty myth. What interests me most is the potential of feminist literature to create alternative representations of women in French literature. In the novels studied here, narrators move from a position of naivety and alienation to an unexpected sense of agency and subjectivity. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis examines the evolution of the representation of female alienation and female identity in the postwar French novel, as well as the textual strategies of resistance used by three postwar French women novelists to subvert and rework the trope of the naive female narrator. My research project highlights the emergence of female agency in the French novel in recent decades through the examples of novels by Christiane Rochefort, Marie Redonnet and Marie Darrieussecq. The novels studied in this dissertation feature the point of view of female narrators who move beyond their initial naivety and passivity to discover unexpected forms of agency.

Matryoshka is a poetry collection that inhabits the space between danger and desire. The poems are largely voice-driven and confessional, sprouting from a speaker who is somehow ruthlessly honest and deceptively evasive at the same time. She covets the domestic only to set it on fire. She runs for comfort and greets the comfortable with a knife. In the beginning of the collection, we see a speaker navigating her relationships with others. The poems in section one are seeped with intense longing and physical desire. In section two, we see the speaker turn her gaze inward and are met with a raw exploration of the self; a revelry of bad decision making, self-deception, and complicated sexuality. The collection leaves the reader curious and comfort-seeking. / Master of Fine Arts

This thesis intends to answers these questions: What did “curiosity” mean in the nineteenth century, and how do Charlotte Brontë's four major works represent such curiosity? How were women looked at, formulated, and situated under the nineteenth-century curious gaze? In order to answer these questions, this thesis examines Brontë's works by juxtaposing them with nineteenth-century exhibitions. Four chapters are thus dedicated to this study: in each a type of exhibition is contemplated, and in each the definition of “curiosity” is defined through the discussions of boundary-breaking. The first chapter discusses the metaphors of “cabinets of curiosities” throughout Brontë's texts. The most intimate and enclosed spaces occupied by women and / or their objects—attics, desks, drawers, lockets—are searched in order to reveal the secret relationship between Brontë's heroines and the objects they have hidden away, especially the souvenirs. From cabinets of curiosities the thesis moves to another space in which the mechanism of curiosity and display takes place—the garden. The second chapter thus discusses the supposed antithesis between the innocent and the experienced, between the Power of Nature and the Power of Man, by reading the garden imagery in Brontë's works along with nineteenth-century pleasure gardens and the Wardian case. The imagery of Eve is also taken into consideration to discuss the concept of innocence. In the third chapter, metaphors of waxworks and the Pygmalion myth are applied to discuss the image of women's bodies in Brontë's texts, and the boundary between the living body and the non-living statue is seen as blurred. In the final chapter, dolls' houses and their metaphors in Brontë's works are examined in order to explicate Brontë's concept of “home,” and the dolls' house thus poses a question on the relationships between the interior and the exterior, the gigantic and the miniature, and the domestic and the public spaces.

The Hibiscus Snake is a collection of poetry investigating the female experience encountering danger. She explores psychic landscapes descended in the unconscious uncanny, the feminine body within the context of horror, and lyrical poems about living in working class communities in San Bernardino. The collection attempts to subvert the presentation of the female body in Horror genres, moving it from a position of victimization to empowerment. In other poems, the speaker ventures into horror-like psychic landscapes filled with images representing the anxiety experienced growing up in a city where danger is quite real. The protagonist risks these journeys to overcome her fear and achieve a transformation. The collection also contains elegies written in lyrical, free-verse form. I also explicate how I employ line breaks to exaggerate the multiplicity of lines, words and connotations. This collection works toward understanding and redefining the female experience and identity within a range of male dominated contexts and dangerous environments.

This thesis project is centered on the female body, specifically body image, in relation to Western, cultural images of women. This is a problem that has been around, essentially, since the beginning of Western art. While different scholars argue whether or not this problem has become worse, it is nonetheless problematic that we are still, in 2018, fighting patriarchy’s control of our bodies via body image. Grounding my project in Susan Bordo’s 1993 text Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, this thesis explores Bordo’s argument that the female body is culturally produced through the lens of Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation and simulacra. Reading Bordo via Baudrillard allows us to explore this age-old problem at a new angle, giving us new reasons that explain why we are still stuck in patriarchy’s chains. Through this lens, I demonstrate how and why Third-wave feminist activism (I focus specifically on the Body Positive Movement) is failing in their attempts to reclaim the female body: the issue lies within Third-wave activism’s desire to portray othered bodies as beautiful and desirable. This becomes problematic in the era of simulacra: abject bodies do not resemble the (un)real ideal so they become “unreal” in the eyes of society. This attempt to represent abject bodies (obese, racialized, trans, disabled) as beautiful results in stigmatization and disgust towards said bodies, and thus the Body Positive Movement leaves out abject bodies because these abject bodies cannot be seen as beautiful in a society that deems them unreal. I argue that in order to reclaim the female body, we must first reclaim the mind side of the mind/body dualism before we can successfully reclaim our bodies. To demonstrate how this is possible, I use Margaret Atwood’s novel Lady Oracle as a case study that not only shows how the female body is culturally produced in the era of simulacra, but also allows us to see how reclaiming the mind side of the binary does allow the protagonist, Joan, to reclaim her past and body as her own, without shame. It is through fiction that reality is represented, and I conclude my thesis with my own personal anecdotes, showing how resistance via fiction can transcend into real life and point to a new, hopeful future.