Haiti has long been characterized as a fragile state. Particularly since 2004, responses from the international community have focused on Haiti’s stabilization and reconstruction. Post-colonial critiques highlight the constraints imposed by these approaches, but fail to sufficiently explore forms of agency which, by resisting and redirecting external impositions, could promote political, social and economic transformation. The adoption of the National Policy for Equality between Women and Men in Haiti in 2014/15 seems to represent such potentially transformative agency. The primary aim of this research is to understand how national agency and international actors (sometimes neo-colonial) interacted, through particular institutions, to shape the adoption and initial implementation of the National Policy. The second aim is to draw on selected feminist theories (institutional and more critical) to explain these processes and assess the extent to which they represent the emergence of transformative alternatives in the Haitian context.

This thesis explores the relationship between 1970s lesbian-feminist theory and praxis through analysis of the cultural production and lived experiences of Jean and Ruth Mountaingrove, two members of a loose-knit community of back-to-the-land lesbian-feminist separatists in southern Oregon. The Mountaingroves published several successful lesbian-feminist publications from the 1970s until the mid-1980s, as well as incorporating lesbian feminism into all aspects of their personal lives, in essence politicizing their whole lives. The interconnection between the Mountaingroves' personal, public, and professional lives illustrates some of the overarching changes lesbian-feminist theory initiated through the politicization of identity and isolation from men, as well as the boundary-making and contradictions that occurred when lesbian feminists attempted to integrate theory into their personal lives. Through the Mountaingroves' story we can see the fruitful unifying nature of lesbian-feminist theory and culture and the many paradoxes inherent in the politics of identity on public and private levels.

This dissertation analyzes the person and work of Christ in feminist theology, with particular attention to feminist critiques of traditional Christology. Chapter 1 is a brief introduction of the dissertation's thesis and the methodological commitments from which the dissertation proceeds. Chapter 2 provides an investigation and analysis of feminist theological method. Special attention is given to the influential work of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Rosemary Radford Ruether. The sources and norms of feminist theology are considered also. Chapter 2 concludes with a discussion of the importance of feminist theological methodology for feminist Christology. Chapter 3 analyzes the person of Christ in feminist theology. Particular consideration is given to feminist arguments against the maleness of Jesus, as well as their alternative proposals to make Christology more inclusive of women. The chapter also offers a sustained evangelical response to the feminist ideas regarding Christ's person. Chapter 4 examines the work of Christ in feminist theology. The feminist contention that the cross is "divine child abuse" is addressed. Feminist assessment of classical atonement theories and alternative perspectives for understanding atonement are discussed. The chapter also challenges and answers the feminist allegation that traditional atonement theology grounds the perpetuation of violence and abuse. Chapter 5 assesses the influence of feminist criticisms within evangelicalism, especially among egalitarians. The chapter demonstrates egalitarian doctrinal revisions on the basis of an acceptance of feminist criticisms in the theological loci of theology proper, bibliology, and ecclesiology. Finally, emerging Christological revisions are considered, specifically related to the egalitarian resistance to the maleness of Jesus and also to a penal substitutionary understanding of atonement. Chapter 5 concludes that feminist criticisms are unacceptable for evangelical Christological formulation. Chapter 6 concludes the dissertation with a brief summary of feminist Christology and evangelical responses, and offers recommendations for further study in this and related areas. / This item is only available to students and faculty of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. If you are not associated with SBTS, this dissertation may be purchased from <a href="http://disexpress.umi.com/dxweb">http://disexpress.umi.com/dxweb</a> or downloaded through ProQuest's Dissertation and Theses database if your institution subscribes to that service.

This thesis examines the issue of environmentalism through a study of the construction of the environment or the 'natural world' in contemporary society. It tackles the issue through a close analysis of a selection of material which engages with the environment in different ways. This material has been selected in order to identify methods of organisation and strategies of argument which are present across a range of texts and also to investigate the way in which environmentalism is entwined with other issues in society, such as science, feminism and consumerism. After exploring theories of discourse in the work of Raymond Williams, Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes and Judith Williamson, a framework of analysis is worked out. This is then used and modified in an examination of how representations of the environment feature in advertisements, eco-feminist texts and popular scientific discourse, and the way in which they become the focus of various discursive practices and techniques.

This thesis examines the development of Italian political theatre between 1968 and 2010. It analyses the relationship between political theatre during the 1970s and politically engaged practice in the following decades in terms of continuity rather than rupture, thereby challenging recent theatre historiography and criticism which interpreted the two periods as diametrically opposite: one characterised by profound political engagement and the other by a widespread retreat from the political (riflusso). The analysis of the case studies is grounded on a rigorous contextual approach which places theatre practice in relation to its social and cultural context. Chapter One reviews the current debate on theatre and politics, reassessing the terms of its discourse and evaluating their potential and shortcomings. Chapter Two introduces two examples of engagement before 1968, namely the birth of teatri stabili and the linguistic research of the theatrical neo-avant-garde. Chapters Three, Four, and Five are dedicated to the analysis of the case studies. They are structured as a comparative analysis of significant examples of politically engaged theatre practice between 1968 and 2010 and include the work of Dario Fo, Marco Baliani, Marco Paolini, Giuliano Scabia, Franca Rame, Laura Curino, and Compagnia della Fortezza. The analysis highlights how Italian practitioners moved beyond modernist forms of political performance and restructured their political and aesthetic strategies in response to changing political, economic, and cultural contexts. The findings point to an original approach to political engagement on stage which articulates itself around two main elements: on the one hand the interconnectedness of the ethical and the political, and on the other an understanding of political resistance no longer as the fight for a working-class cultural hegemony but rather at the creation of a post-hegemonic cultural landscape open to multiplicity and difference.

Recognising art’s crucial function for reproducing economic and sexual differences, feminist political interventions - alongside a range of ‘new’ critical perspectives including Marxism, psychoanalysis and poststructuralism - have wrought historic changes upon the production, circulation and consumption of art. This is widely acknowledged in art historical scholarship. However, understanding that ‘art history’ (as a historically conditioned discipline) is concurrently reproductive of these ideological and material inequalities, feminist scholars have significantly and continually sought to intervene at the point of production – the writing of art’s history – to expose its social role and remake the fundamental terms of the discipline. This is a truth less widely acknowledged or, at least, less well-understood within contemporary scholarship. This thesis, therefore, seeks to examine the discipline of art history in Anglo- American contexts to assess the impact that feminist models of scholarship have had upon its knowledges and practices. This is attained through extensive literature overviews, archival research and, to a lesser extent, email interviews with key contributors to the discourse. Ultimately, this examination endeavours to address the production and regulation of feminist knowledge across a number of expanded (and interconnected) institutional sites. Case studies track the impact of feminist strategies upon the authoring of art history in the classroom, within scholarly professional organisations, academic publishing, the museum sector, and upon art-making itself. The research evaluates the mutable power structures of the discipline, how feminist interventions have had success in rethinking the limits of institutional knowledge, and how it may be possible to articulate critique under twenty-first-century conditions of institutional complicity and the hegemonic recuperation (or indeed ‘disciplining’) of radical practices. To date – and despite its prominence within much feminist writing - the importance of art historiography for the feminist political project has not been properly examined; the aim of this thesis is therefore to redress this omission and provide a timely and comprehensive critical reading of feminist knowledge production since around 1970.

Rape cultures in the United States facilitate acts of rape by influencing perpetrators’, community members’, and women who survive rapes’ beliefs about sexual assault and its consequences. While much of the previous research on rape in university settings has focused on individual attitudes and behaviors, as well as developing education and prevention campaigns, this research examined institutional influences on rape culture in the context of football teams. Using a feminist poststructuralist theoretical lens, an examination of newspaper articles, press releases, reports, and court documents from December 2001 to December 2007 was conducted to reveal prominent and counter discourses following a series of rapes and civil lawsuits at the University of Colorado. The research findings illustrated how community members’ adoption of institutional discourses discrediting the women who survived rape and denying the existence of and responsibility for rape culture could be facilitated by specific promotional strategies. Strategies of continually qualifying the women who survived rapes’ reports, administrators claiming ‘victimhood,’ and denying that actions by individual members of the athletic department could be linked to a rape culture made the University’s discourse more palatable to some community members who included residents of Boulder, Colorado and CU students, staff, faculty, and administrators. According to feminist poststructuralist theory, subjects continually construct their identities and belief systems by accepting and rejecting the discourses surrounding them. When community members incorporate rape-supportive discourses from the University into their subjectivities, rape culture has been propagated. / Arts, Faculty of / Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, Institute for / Graduate

This study contributes to the discourse of the body and the voice in feminist psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic film theory by exploring the currently under-theorised notion of the singing body in particular, as this notion finds manifestation in Disney's Singing Princess. Analyses of musical coding and other filmic tropes follow the trajectory of the Singing Princess across thirteen Disney Princess films - from her first appearance in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) through to her most recent manifestation as Elsa in Frozen (2013) - to reveal deeper insight into what she sings, how she sings and why she sings.

The patriarchal legal system and the socio-cultural institutions of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) relegate Iranian women to second-class citizens. Yet, Canadian feminist texts such as Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and Carol Shields's Unless (2002) have been translated into Persian, in 2003 and 2005 respectively. Moreover, they circulate freely and are found in Iran’s National Library. This seeming discrepancy needs a systemic and contextually-based explanation. Four questions guide my dissertation: What happens to the texts as they cross the cultural boundaries into the receiving society? Specifically, which features of feminist texts are most vulnerable to censorial interventions and what does that reveal about the interplay of the hegemonic theocratic-patriarchy and translation? Finally, how is the Persian translation of feminist texts even possible, given Iran’s legal, political and socio-cultural antagonism toward women’s autonomy? In other words, what factors mitigate such translations? To answer these questions, I outline the legal representation of women in the legal discourse and the socio-cultural attitudes towards women’s rights in Iran subsequent to the (1906-1911) Constitutional Revolution and the 1979 Revolution, which led to an Islamist government. I examine the impacts of the IRI’s androcentric legislations on women’s rights, and the censorship mechanisms on Persian and imported feminist literature. I explore the types and extent of resistance to censorship, and I study the representation of women in school textbooks, cinema and Persian literature to analyze the impact that the interaction between the legal discourse, censorship and resistance has on cultural products. I conduct a comparative text analysis using theories of feminist linguistics and descriptive translation studies (Toury 1995; Cameron 1985, 1995) to investigate the extent to which patriarchal mechanisms influence the translation of the two novels. The goal is to determine how the legal and socio-cultural discourses of the target society affect the form and meaning of the translation, and to identify translation strategies that undermine the very features that make a novel female-centric. I demonstrate how these translation strategies consistently produce target texts that conform to the state-sponsored patriarchal agenda, and synchronize with the gender values and norms of the IRI.

This thesis explores the capacity of a state feminist institution in a non-Western setting in implementing gender empowerment initiatives. This study adopts a cross-cutting approach using state feminism and a feminist institutional analytical lens especially the idea of formal and informal rules, to develop a dynamic analysis of the factors that shape the capacity of a state feminist institution in a post-colonial context. This research uses a holistic single case study to analyse the institutional capacity of the Ministry of Women, Family, and Community Development in Malaysia by examining four key determinants: 1) institutional structure, 2) resources, 3) relationship/network and 4) the WPA’s policies implementation (as shaped by the institutional structure, resources, and relationship) to assess the Ministry’s capacity. This research highlights the variance of capacity level of the Women’s Policy Agency in Malaysia has in the implementation of gender empowerment initiatives within its institutional environment. The WPA demonstrates competency in specific areas of gender empowerment programmes especially economic empowerment but is often constrained in their ability to navigate through a gendered state institution which is highly centralised and strongly hierarchical. Masculinised political culture and institutional socio-religious perspective on gender roles also play a part in weakening the Ministry’s capacity in pushing for gender empowerment initiatives that challenge the conservative outlook of gender roles in society. .This study explores the strengths and constraints of state feminism in Malaysia using feminist institutionalism analytical tools of formal and informal rules as the dynamic interaction between the formal and informal rules in a diverse, developing and semi-democratic context characterise the WPA’s capacity within its institutional setting. This thesis provides important insights on the conditions that shape the WPA’s capacity and alternative understanding of state feminism in a non-Western context, and thereby, provides guidance for gender policy advocates and future practices.