Staging Sleep: Labor, Care, and Rest in Contemporary Performance examines an archive of plays and performances from the past forty years—which I term sleep theatre—including dramatic literature that foregrounds sleep and sleeplessness and performance art in which the artist sleeps in front of an audience. Contemporary theatre about sleep exposes the roots of sleep loss in overwork, healthcare disparities, and housing insecurity and imagines alternative social possibilities for sustainable rest. I understand the concerns and possibilities raised by sleep theatre through the framework of social reproduction theory, a feminist analysis of the vital forms of labor antecedent to commodity production, including housework and dependent care, that keep us all alive. I reorient theatre scholarship on sleep away from psychoanalytic readings of staged dreams and toward an understanding of sleep as a political act shaped by social and material contexts. In Staging Sleep, I argue that studying sleep in theatre and performance art offers new insights into social relations of care and interdependence among performers and spectators, and that sleep onstage not only critiques inhumane economic arrangements but also imagines myriad new social configurations that value rest over work. Staging Sleep begins in 1980, in the immediate aftermath of two decades of international Marxist feminist organizing that saw politicized housewives agitating for recognition of the value of both their work and their leisure. I demonstrate how sleep theatre expands and complicates this political legacy, beginning with the continuing global assault on welfare and unions in the 1980s. In my first chapter, I track how pioneering socialist feminist playwright Caryl Churchill develops the sleepless housewife as a character type, bringing sleep to the stage in a new way as a linchpin of her critique of the family. I then track sleep in theatre as a site of experimentation informed by feminist, queer, and disability studies through the 2010s. Chapter 2 explores sleep in plays by Sarah Kane, Maria Irene Fornes, and Peggy Shaw at the nexus of illness, friendship, and a fraying welfare state. Chapter 3 examines how directors stage homeless sleep in four recent adaptations of Cymbeline from the UK and South Sudan. My final chapter asks how performance itself creates the care and attention necessary to sustain sleep in the globe-touring, iterative performance artworks Best Place to Sleep and Black Power Naps. Sleep performances imagine, enact, and test the limits of very different configurations of labor and rest: ways of life in which caretaking labor is redistributed, and resilience and health become collective concerns rather than individual responsibilities. I suggest that sleep performance is a nascent theatrical phenomenon that will continue to reappear as politically-minded artists work through the theatrical possibilities of spectatorship, site, and immersion in the context of deep questions of everyday justice and equity. Staging Sleep shows how theatre can exploit and transform the weirdness of watching someone sleep, or of falling asleep in the audience, into a restructuring of our practices of work and rest, space and shelter, toward ensuring safe and restorative sleep as a universal right.

This study aims to look at the challenges faced by women of low socio-economic status in exiting sex work, in a South African context where gender-based violence is normalized and widespread. In doing so, this research applies principles of feminist theory to create a contextualized understanding of the process of exit. Two focus groups, with a total of 18 non-transgendered women were conducted in an informal setting, resulting in an open-ended discussion around these challenges. These interviews were recorded, transcribed and analyzed using thematic analysis. The categories and themes emerging from this analysis were past trauma, motherhood, partnerships, social support, economic necessity, employment and gossip. These themes are permeated by a pattern of escapism. This pattern exemplifies their disempowerment and lack of agency, which is symptomatic of the gender oppression pervading their lives. The results of this research will be used to draw up a policy in collaboration with the NGO Embrace Dignity, for parliament, to initiate legal reform relating to sex work.

This dissertation traces the literary and cultural phenomenon of “bad readers” across a range of Greek and Latin texts from the late first to late second centuries CE. By jointly engaging the framework of book history with the insights of feminist, queer, critical theory, it offers a methodology for understanding why certain readerly embodiments and modes are stigmatized for deviating from the hegemonic norm, and how the contested space of reading intersects with negotiations of power, embodiment, and identity. I argue that “bad readers” are not “bad” in any inherent or universal sense, but rather that “bad readers” intersect with particular literary, cultural, and ideological agendas. I also show how “bad readers” help illuminate the broader material, social networks that are adumbrated by books as objects in antiquity, thus contributing to recent work that has emphasized the importance of situating “reading” within its ancient, sociocultural context. At the same time, this study lays bare how such work has also tended to leave the question of modern readerly poses and politics to the side. Ultimately, this study shows how literary representations of “bad readers” offer a powerful locus for telling a different story about books and reading in the ancient Mediterranean, as well as a lens for theorizing how certain hermeneutic modes in the discipline today participate in and reproduce hierarchies of power.

This study addresses the extent to which feminist jurisprudence literature has developed the potential to initiate a legal paradigm shift leading to legal and consequent social change that would alleviate gender inequality. Drawing upon Kuhn's (1970) and Stacey and Thorne's (1985) arguments, I theorized that for a paradigm shift centered upon women and women's experiences to occur, feminist jurisprudence, particularly second- and third-phase feminist jurisprudence, needs to be incorporated into, and accepted by the mainstream. Through quantitative analysis I evaluated, first, the publication and citation patterns and the diffusion of feminist jurisprudence litearature as evidenced in articles published between the years 1983 and 1994 in legal journals assigned impact factors by the Social Science Citation Index. Second, using content analysis, I classified feminist jurisprudence articles published in the subfields of family and penal law --theorized to differ in degree of androcentrism-- according to the three phases of feminist jurisprudence theory. My quantitative analysis showed that the number of feminist jurisprudence articles published in mainstream legal journals is increasing over time. Further, feminist jurisprudence articles published in legal journals with higher impact factors tend to receive larger numbers of citations than articles published in journals with lower impact factors. Finally, although the overall impact factor of journals publishing feminist jurisprudence articles is declining, feminist jurisprudence literature is present among a wide spectrum of legal specializations. My qualitative analysis showed that there was an equivalent number of family and penal law articles which exhibited second- and third-phase characteristics. However, family law articles tended to cover a wider range of topics than penal law articles. Furthermore, family law scholars were more likely than penal law scholars to address issues of differences among women and feminists, thus, exhibiting third-phase characteristics. In constrast, penal law scholars tended to focus upon differences between feminists and non-feminists and the practical difficulties resulting from the structure, organization and practitioners of the criminal justice. Overall, my analysis showed that feminist jurisprudence appears to have developed the potential to initiate a paradigm shift within the legal discipline. However, in addition to feminist theorizing, feminist activism is important for the realization of legal and social changes that will alleviate gender inequality. / Ph. D.

Historically, women all over the world have been subjected to several kinds of discriminatory behaviour, attitudes and stereotypes. This results from long-held patriarchal values and male dominance. In the workplace, women suffer prejudice against their role in society, which often limits their chances of reaching top leadership positions. Women are faced with many challenges in the workplace, including, inter alia: the glass ceiling , work/life demands, workplace inequality, sexual harassment, poor career development and tokenism. The goal of this study is to explore the leadership challenges facing female managers in the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality. Fifteen operational managers were purposively selected by means of the non-probability sampling method. The research approach to this study is the qualitative approach. For the purpose of this study, the collective case study design was used. Qualitative researchers are interested primarily in the meaning subjects give to their life experiences. The researcher made use of the collective case study design to gain insight into the experiences by the female managers in the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality. Semi-structured one-on-one interviews were conducted as the primary data collection method. The findings of this study reveal that female managers are experiencing leadership challenges, including reaching the `glass ceiling´, work/life demands, workplace inequality, workplace discrimination and lack of promotional prospects. The findings call for a concerted effort by senior management to ensure equal opportunities for women in the workplace. The City of Johannesburg should take the lead in addressing these challenges in order to champion the course of women’s emancipation. / Dissertation (MSW (EAP))--University of Pretoria, 2014. / Social Work and Criminology / MSW (EAP) / Unrestricted

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