This study explores women’s experiences of sex with men. It is based on qualitative data collected from eighteen life history interviews. Such an approach provides means for examining women’s sexual experiences over time. The study finds that women give meaning to their sexual experiences through two main discursive representations: the passive, “proper” and sexually obliging girlfriend or wife, and the active and “sexually equal” woman. However, these representations do not capture the entirety of women’s sexual experiences. The life history analysis demonstrates that women are not simply inscribed by discourse. Rather, they are embodied beings actively engaged in pursuing sexual identities. Central to the process is a relationship between the practice of sex and self-reflexivity over time. Finally, the study demonstrates how the process of gaining sexual subjectivity is shaped by the material conditions of women’s lives. For instance, the praxeological circumstances of women’s class or race are powerful in recasting discourses of feminine sexuality, the meanings women ascribe to them, their access to broader sexual experiences, and the kinds of relationships they have with their male partners.

This research paper examines the implications of a feminist appropriation of the fetish and the use of the theory of abjection, as a disruption of phallocentric binary labelling and its notion of idealised femininity. The paper is divided into two sections. The first section includes an analysis of Emily Apter's articles 'Fetishism and Visual Seduction in Mary Kelly's Interim' and an analysis of Janine Antoni's installation 'Gnaw' which form a contextualisation of the issues on which my own visual research is based. These issues revolve around the creation of multiple subject positions for women as both artist and spectator, the recuperation of the seductive image without creating the same power relations apparent in the male gaze and the deployment of an abstract visual femininity to scopically seduce the viewer. In section two, part one, Praveen Adams' article 'The art of analysis: Mary Kelly's Interim and the discourse of the analyst is examined. In this article Adams uses Lacan's theory of discourse to hypothesise that the space of production in Interim is an analogue to the space of production in pyschoanalysis. Part two consists of an examination of the application of the same structural analysis to Antoni's 'Gnaw' and my own 'Compulsive Beauty,' and explores the possibility of a new contextual analysis of feminist art / Master of Arts (Hons)

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Divinity School, Aug. 2005. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Lovesickness is a common malady in British literature, but it is also an illness that has been perceived and diagnosed differently in different eras. The nineteenthcentury British novel incorporates a lovesickness that primarily affects women with physical symptoms, including fever, that may end in a female character's death. The fever of female lovesickness includes a delirium that allows a female character to play out the identity crisis she must feel at the loss of a significant relationship and possibly of her social status. Commonly conflated with a type of female madness, the nineteenthcentury novelists often focus less on the delirium and more on the physical symptoms of illness that affect a female character at the loss of love. These physical symptoms require physical care from other characters and often grant the heroine status and comfort. Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens all use subtle variations in lovesickness to identify the presence or absence of a female character's virtue. Jane Austen established lovesickness as a necessary experience for female characters, who choose only if they reveal or conceal their symptoms to a watchful public. Elizabeth Gaskell established both a comic socially constructed lovesickness in which a female character can participate if she is aware of popular culture and a spontaneous lovesickness that affects socially unaware female characters and leads to death. Charles Dickens establishes lovesickness as culturally pervasive by writing a female character who stages lovesickness for the purpose of causing pain to others and a female character who is immune to lovesickness and the rhetoric of love, yet is consistently spoken into others' love stories. Lovesickness becomes a barometer of the soul in several nineteenthcentury novels by which we read a heroine's virtue or lack of virtue and the depth of her loss.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Bowling Green State University, 2009. / Document formatted into pages; contains viii, 231, [13] p. : 1 col. ill. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 2001. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 365-371).

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2002. Graduate Programme in Sociology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 339-352). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pMQ71566.

Thesis (M.A.)--West Virginia University, 2003. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 58 p. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 52-55).

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy