Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1998. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 235-254).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2008. / Includes .doc file (355 KB) of a translation of Marie Vieux-Chauvet's novel Les Rapaces (1984) by Carolyn Shread. Includes bibliographical references (p. 70-82).

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This dissertation examines five dramatic comedies by Canadian women and the female subject positions they provide. Through these analyses, it examines how constructions of female subjectivity are both constrained and enabled by comedic discourse. The Introduction argues that traditional patterns and formalist conceptions of comedy have not made a place for female subjects and that, while feminist critics have begun to examine women's comedies and the female subjects they construct, those studies need to be complicated in order to make space for the variety and complexity of female subject positions elicited by the plays under consideration. In dialogue with contemporary theories regarding gender performance, language, and subjectivity (with particular reference to theorists Judith Butler and Catherine Belsey), this study goes on to examine the entangled and indeterminate qualities of female subjects in a selection of Canadian women's comedies. Chapter One discusses the didactic and hidden subject positions within Sarah Anne Curzon's The Sweet Girl Graduate, a nineteenth-century revision of the comedy of manners. Chapter Two discusses the gender anxiety inscribed in Erika Ritter's Automatic Pilot, a comedy about a female stand-up comic. Chapter Three considers the Jungian feminist conception of subjectivity dramatized in Ann-Marie MacDonald's Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet). Chapter Four proposes that Margaret Hollingsworth's The House that Jack Built constructs a feminist and absurdist subject position. Chapter Five examines gender parody and play in Karen Hines' Pochsy's Lips, and argues that this bouffon performance piece conceives of female subjectivity as a playful and critical realm. Chapter analyses focus on variances in how these comedies represent and understand women's capacities to intervene in genre and gender formations, and in social and psychic realms, which in turn reflect their different conceptions of female subjectivity. In conclusion, this study advocates the benefits of reading women's comedies not only in terms of patterns of genre or gender revisions, but also as destabilizing forms of linguistic, psychic, and bodily performance. Its feminist appeal lies in the assertion that change is effected not only by overt alterations of comedic or social patterns, but also by the issue of multiple and potentially new subject positions, which are produced by different forms of comedic and comic practice. / Graduate

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According to Lewis Seifert, “Fairy tales are obsessed with femininity … These narratives are concerned above all else with defining what makes women different from men and, more precisely, what is and is not acceptable feminine behaviour” (1996: 175). This study, then, will demonstrate how certain patriarchal ideas associated with fairy tales are disseminated when fairy tale elements are reworked in film, visual art and the novel. The aim of this project, more specifically, is to show how certain stereotypical representations of women endure in works that could be read as feminist appropriations of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’. Stereotypical representations of women are numerous and may include: depicting females as fitting neatly into what is often called the virgin/whore or Madonna/whore binary opposition; depicting women as being caring and kind, but also passive, submissive and weak; and depicting older women as being sexually unattractive and evil (Goodwin and Fiske 2001:358; Sullivan 2010: 4). It must be said that the list of stereotypes relating to women given here is far from exhaustive.

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No abstract available. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Durban-Westville, 2004.