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Collection of poetry. / MFA

<p>This study aims to investigate the consequences for feminist sex therapy that it is promoted as an alternative to a mainstream approach. Analytically I focus on the relation between normativity, claims to knowledge and professional legitimacy. I study sex therapeutic academic texts, and the material is approached through a framework developed by combining Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledges with elements from Karen Barad’s agential realism</p><p>My analysis starts in feminist sex therapists’ criticism of how masculine norms in mainstream sex therapy lead to a flawed theory of sexual matters. Feminist sex therapists, however, allege that it is specifically feminist norms that grant a more complete theory of sex and sexual problems within feminist alternatives in sex therapy. To that effect, feminists discern sexual problems in relation to the impact a patriarchal society has on particularly women’s sexualities, and treatment is articulated as seeking to liberate women from constraints associated with gendered social positions.</p><p>In mainstream sex therapy, allegedly value-neutral insights into human physiology are called upon for the establishment of professional legitimacy. Nevertheless, normative investments are relied upon implicitly to discern sexual problems and sexual well-being with the consequence that sexual problems are understood as conditions that interfere with the ability to have sex, largely equated with coitus, and with the motivation to form coupled sexual relations. By alleviating sexual problems, these abilities and motivations are allegedly restored in the form of natural, already present, capacities for sexual functioning. Comparing my analysis to feminist critiques, I argue that the latter have not fully theorized the significance of normative investments, and have left unchallenged assumptions in mainstream therapy that enable a restorative and liberationist construal of sex therapy’s objective.</p><p>Although feminist alternatives contain a markedly different theorization of sexual problems, they have retained, from the mainstream approach, the notion that sex therapy seeks to liberate its clients. This notion stands in conflict with feminist theorizations of sexual problems, and in my conclusion I argue that feminist sex therapy would benefit from abandoning its liberationist element.</p>

The main objective of this study is to develop a feminist theoretical understanding of menstruation. I first explore Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist existentialist concept of woman as Other to establish a baseline from which all other sociocultural discourses on menstruation flow. I next expand Erving Goffman’s symbolic interactionist theory on stigma to discuss the social-psychological internalization process that girls encounter as they become enculturated into menstruation as a stigmatic condition. I then use a macro-discursive, Foucauldian analysis on power and discourse to understand how menstruation has been socially constructed from premodern superstitions, to the rise of modern medicine in the late 19th century. I follow this with a Marxian, macro-materialist understanding of capitalism to discuss how the femcare industry emerged and commodified feminine hygiene products. Finally, I investigate how second and third wave feminists have mobilized to resist patriarchal ideologies which devalue, subordinate, and subjugate menstruating bodies.

I am a poet. As an undergraduate, I explored the other genres of writing—I wrote short stories, attempted a novel-length piece, and crafted essays. While I found plays interesting, I could not write one satisfactorily. But poetry fit like an extension of myself. I could fuse my voice and my ideas in stanzas and images, and I found myself weighing words and sounds as I constructed the lines. It was only natural that I pursue mastery in poetry when I returned for my Masters of Fine Arts. The material presented in this document is the culmination of two years of specialized study in how to craft poetry. In those two years, I have maintained the idea that this collection be relatable, feminist, and emotionally powerful. While the poetry has certainly evolved over that two-year span, the ideas kept each piece connected to my envisioned whole. The poems revolve around different obsessions I harbored while writing. I meditate on various relationships, personal experiences, and striking images and feelings I felt deserved attention. Of course, this collection is intensely personal, but I believe that it is through the personal that we can reach the general, which is what makes these poems accessible. I also used this manuscript as a device for exploration and play. Some poems follow strict formal guidelines, and others meander to their destination. Some are short and concise, others long and nebulous. But each is refined and given exceptional thought. I believe that readers will clearly see how much study was necessary to write these poems; it is through reading the works of the great poets before me that I was able to come to them. My influences show, not only in allusions, but in the choices I’ve made and the structure of the poems themselves. I submit this manuscript as the culmination of my work, in partial fulfilment of a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing.

Doctor of Philosophy / In this thesis I discuss feminist science fiction as a literature that explores a variety of alternative social realities. This provides the site to explore alternative notions of the heroic inspired by feminist critiques of the traditional heroic, which come from feminist philosophical, as well as literary critical sources. Alternative notions of the heroic offer a shift in perspective from a specific heroic identity to the events the characters are involved in. The shift to events is made precisely because that is where the temporal is located and dynamic change occurs. Events are where 'becoming' alternatively heroic occurs: in the interaction between a character and the environment.

This study aims to investigate the consequences for feminist sex therapy that it is promoted as an alternative to a mainstream approach. Analytically I focus on the relation between normativity, claims to knowledge and professional legitimacy. I study sex therapeutic academic texts, and the material is approached through a framework developed by combining Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledges with elements from Karen Barad’s agential realism My analysis starts in feminist sex therapists’ criticism of how masculine norms in mainstream sex therapy lead to a flawed theory of sexual matters. Feminist sex therapists, however, allege that it is specifically feminist norms that grant a more complete theory of sex and sexual problems within feminist alternatives in sex therapy. To that effect, feminists discern sexual problems in relation to the impact a patriarchal society has on particularly women’s sexualities, and treatment is articulated as seeking to liberate women from constraints associated with gendered social positions. In mainstream sex therapy, allegedly value-neutral insights into human physiology are called upon for the establishment of professional legitimacy. Nevertheless, normative investments are relied upon implicitly to discern sexual problems and sexual well-being with the consequence that sexual problems are understood as conditions that interfere with the ability to have sex, largely equated with coitus, and with the motivation to form coupled sexual relations. By alleviating sexual problems, these abilities and motivations are allegedly restored in the form of natural, already present, capacities for sexual functioning. Comparing my analysis to feminist critiques, I argue that the latter have not fully theorized the significance of normative investments, and have left unchallenged assumptions in mainstream therapy that enable a restorative and liberationist construal of sex therapy’s objective. Although feminist alternatives contain a markedly different theorization of sexual problems, they have retained, from the mainstream approach, the notion that sex therapy seeks to liberate its clients. This notion stands in conflict with feminist theorizations of sexual problems, and in my conclusion I argue that feminist sex therapy would benefit from abandoning its liberationist element.

This snapshot ethnographic research was conducted in Kihande Village in Uganda with the Agabagaya Women’s Group for a period of five weeks in 2004. Using a feminist ethnographic methodology, the researcher explores how women value, share and pursue knowledge informally among themselves to support themselves, their families and their communities. The analysis indicates that the women of Agabagaya are knowers in their worlds, that they actively pursue educational opportunities and development opportunities, and that they do so from a grassroots level. This particular group does not rely on and may actually be hindered by external development organizations and outside educational influences with top-down models. However, the group does use external development agencies when there is opportunity for the group to benefit. The researcher further explores the positions and implications of a white, Western researcher conducting research in a developing, non-white country and discovers that positive and respectful relationships are at the heart of the research process and that the participants control many aspects of the research itself. / May 2005

Ursula K. Le Guin is often called a feminist science fiction author. Drawing on such theorists as bell hooks and R. W. Connell, I analyze three novels by Le Guin from a social constructivist feminist perspective. I discuss The Dispossessed as it relates to gender and the family in utopian writing, The Lathe of Heaven with respect to gender and race, and Lavinia and gender within the context of the overall trajectory of Le Guin’s writing. I conclude that these novels depict gender in ways that often essentialize identity, whether the novels’ presentations of gender align with liberal or radical feminist ideas, and sometimes represent characters more conservatively than the label “feminist author” might imply. I propose that Le Guin’s status as a feminist writer requires more specific qualification that accounts for the variety of beliefs in existence in contemporary feminist discourse.

Abstract not available. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Durban-Westville, 2002.