In this project I explore the creation of female community in the novels of four contemporary feminist writers: Nicole Brossard, Michelle Cliff, Maryse Condé, and Gisèle Pineau. I contend that in their diverse representations of female community, these women writers provide collaborative feminist models of resistance, creative transformation, and renewal. Building on Judith Butler's articulation of agency as variation on repetition, I argue that these writers transform the space of the novel in order to tell these stories of community, revitalizing this form as a potential site of collaborative performance of identity. They offer an alternative vision that is not only feminist and collective, but also transnational, translinguistic, historical, and epistemological - challenging and reconfiguring the way in which we understand our world. I develop the project thematically in terms of coming-of-age through and into female community (what the communities in these novels look like and the relationship between individuals and communities, seen through the process of individual maturity). I then consider the formal construction of female community through the collective narrative voice (both within the novels and outside them, in the form of each writer's collective body of engaged feminist dialogue in interviews and theory). Finally, I explore female community through alternative genealogies and quests for origin (demonstrating the implications of these novels' vision for transforming a more traditional worldview, with transnational communities and the transmission of historical knowledge across generations of women).

Kintzer’s (1972) The President’s Wife: A Handbook for Wives of New Community College Presidents was the first publication that provided insight into the world of the community college president’s spouse. Written for female spouses, when community colleges were growing at a rate of one new college a week, this timely and relevant “how to guide” outlined in detail the do’s and don’ts to being a successful community college presidential spouse. Forty years later, women have transitioned from the spousal role to leading the college. Today women represent nearly 30% of all community college presidents. Research regarding the female president and her pathway to the presidency continues to emerge, but little attention has been focused on the president’s husband and his role as a presidential spouse. Understanding and investigating the role of the male spouse is significant as more women continue their pathway to the presidency, and there is anecdotal evidence that the spouse of a community college president can be influential, albeit the college does not employ the spouse. ix This qualitative study examined the role of the female community college president’s spouse. Utilizing Vaughan (1987) and Smith’s (2001) studies regarding the role of the community college spouse as a framework, this study posed the following research questions: 1. How do male spouses describe their roles? 2. How do female community college presidents describe their spouse’s roles? 3. How do members of the boards of trustees describe the roles of male spouses? Fifteen participants, including five female college presidents, five male spouses, and five trustees were interviewed for this study. Participants reside throughout the Southeast, Southwest, and Northwest regions of the United States, representing rural and suburban community colleges at both single and multi-campus institutions. Findings suggest the male spouse plays an important role in his wife’s pathway presidency and supporting her throughout the entire presidency. The male spouse also has a public life role and a private life role. Ultimately, the role of the male spouse is to support his wife so she can be a successful community college leader. / text

The creative work, Black-Winged Angels, is a collection of nine re-written fairytales. The collection is divided into three sections: Maiden, Mother, Crone and the three stories in each section explore various aspects of these traditional periods in a woman's life. The tales are re-written, or 're-loaded', to offer alternative views of the tales of childhood, to examine other forces that may be at work inside the stories themselves, and the possible consequences of 'living' those tales differently. The exegesis examines the colonisation and reclamation of a range of fairy tales. It traces the historical shift from oral to literary fairy tale traditions, and the ensuing patriarchal rewriting of those fairytales. The exegesis then considers the writing of Angela Carter and Emma Donoghue (specifically The Bloody Chamber and Kissing the Witch, respectively), in terms of how their work in the fairytale genre has both succeeded in, and failed to, avoid a simple inversion of gender with their revisions of the colonised literary fairytales. The exegetical work has grown, in large part, out of the process of critical reflexivity to which I have subjected my creative work. I chose Angela Carter's and Emma Donoghue's works of revisionist fairytales to act as 'bookends' for my own work; Carter as a starting point for fairytale reclamation and Donoghue as a more recent incarnation of the fairytale revisionist. In reflecting on my own work, I often looked back at what these two authors had done, to guide me in the eternal writers' struggle of what to leave in, what to leave out, and where to take the tale.