acase@tulane.edu / This dissertation research brings together disparate bodies of literature on environmental inequality, sociology of space, and feminist theories of intersectionality to bear on the location and distribution of environmental hazards in the form of landfills. Landfills pose a threat to both ecological sustainability as well as present risks to human health through contamination and pollution. While environmental inequality literatures have executed exceptional work into the dynamics of race and class with respect to the distribution of hazardous waste facilities, the literature is noticeably lacking with respect to identifying relationships between gender and environmental inequalities. Furthermore, many quantitative studies have exclusively focused on hazardous waste facilities as a singular measure of environmental inequality. This study advances the field in three major ways. First, through the inclusion of theorizations based on feminist intersectionality theories, this research empirically analyzes hypotheses derived from intersectionality theories to understand dynamics of gender-environment interactions. Second, this study extends analysis to all forms of waste containment—municipal, industrial, construction and demolition, and hazardous—to identify trends across the social fabric of the contiguous United States at the county level of analysis with respect to multiple forms of environmental hazards. Third, utilizing innovative analytic techniques, this research provides three unique and related strategies, geographic information systems, logistic binary regression, and structural equation modeling, to examine socio-environmental disparities. Findings from each analytic strategy inform the subsequent strategy. Findings suggest the importance of including gender indicators to account for the unique effect of gender and environmental inequality. Furthermore, results indicate the importance in applying intersectionality theories to environmental outcomes as well as empirically testing hypotheses derived from the largely theoretical and qualitatively backed field. Future research should focus on specific regional dynamics of identified socio-environmental interactions by including historical and qualitative data to triangulate quantitative findings. / 1 / Clare Cannon

This thesis examines theoretical and popular ways of knowing the prostitute and the client. Its purpose is to intervene in contemporary ways of knowing and articulate a more consistent feminist stance on prostitution. Currently, the prostitute is known predominantly through the discourse of psychology whilst the client is known through the discourse of sexology. She is deviant and he is normal. She is a victim and he is an agent. The issue of inconsistency in the feminist stance on prostitution is related to the recognition that these dualisms figure in the way in which all knowledge of the client and the prostitute is organised. Within feminist theory the prostitute is known through the dualism of victim and agent whilst the client is known through the sex/gender distinction. The former perpetuates certain ways of knowing the prostitute that cannot embrace the complexity and ambivalence of prostitution for women. If she is a victim she is only passive and exploited. If she is an agent she is both active and free. Utilising the latter allows the client to escape scrutiny. This thesis will argue that this is for two reasons. Firstly, because feminists have tended to support the idea of the prostitute as agent within the victim/agent dichotomy. Within such a way of knowing, any critique of the client became a critique of the livelihood of the prostitute, and is best avoided. Secondly, because feminists tend to work within the sex/gender distinction and its associated dualisms of mind and body, nature and culture. As such, they tend to perpetuate, rather than challenge, the sexological relationship between the sexual and the social. In both analyses, the sexual urge is ultimately natural, albeit modified by society. Analyses that argue for the social constitution of sexuality (rather than simply its social construction) still perpetuate the sex/gender distinction by claiming the validity of the mind/body dualism for their analyse. This thesis will argue that these dualisms structure an impossible choice for feminists and help to position them within the divisive prostitution debate. In a political climate that perpetuates only two ways of knowing prostitution, to critique prostitution is to be anti-sex, moralising, prudish and conservative. In contrast, to support prostitution is hailed as pro-sex, pro-women and pro-choice. Within this dichotomising of the political issue, feminists gain either conservative or libertarian allies. Within such a political climate, a consistent feminist position is lost. In order to counter this political and theoretical inconsistency, this thesis argues for a connection between the dualisms through the organisation of modern liberal democracies. To know the prostitute through the victim/agent dichotomy and the client through the sex/gender distinction (and associated dualisms of mind and body, nature and culture) is also to call upon the public/private split as their organising feature. The public/private split gives meaning to the dualisms of victim and agent, sex and gender, mind and body, through its role in the perpetuation of associations between victim, body, sex, private and women, and between agent, gender, mind, public and men. This thesis will argue that these dualisms are not useful for explaining the ambivalent and contradictory status of prostitution as both work and sex, public and private, rational and irrational, embodied and disembodied, sexual and social. However, not only does prostitution challenge the explanatory value of these dualisms, but the experience of prostitution for the prostitute and the client both subverts and inverts these dualisms. The usual configuration of the dualisms public/private, worker/consumer, male/female, mind/body, rationality/irrationality, are public, worker, male, mind, rationality, in contrast to private, consumer, female, body, irrationality. The prostitute is positioned in and through modern liberal democracies as embodied, but claims the status of worker through her experience of disembodiment. The client is positioned in and through modern liberal democracies as disembodied, and continues this proprietorial relationship with his body during the prostitution contract. She becomes the embodied worker and he becomes the disembodied sex partner. This further demonstrates the inability of a dualistic conception of prostitution to take into account the ambivalent and contradictory status of the prostitute and the client. Whilst this thesis will suggest that such an ambivalent status is to be found in all relations between men and women in modern liberal democracies, it will also propose the political implications of this theoretical reconfiguration for the feminist position on prostitution.

The gap between hope and happening refers to the experiences of four academic women who work at Milton University (MU), the pseudonym for a regional Australian university. This thesis is concerned with the ways in which discourses circulating within MU shape the performances and discursive positionings of the four women - Alice, Madonna, Veronica and Tamaly (all pseudonyms) - and how, in turn, these women negotiate these discourses. Data are drawn from the women’s narratives, university policy documents and selected institutional texts. A feminist poststructuralist lens interrogates both policies, reflecting different approaches towards gender equity at MU, and discursive practices, constructing the ‘good academic’ at MU. Instead of acts of resistance, what is revealed in this workplace is the continuing covert strategies of marginalization that reproduce women’s positioning on the margins of mainstream academia, indicating the presence of a kind of ‘phallocentnc smog’ emerging from a dominant masculine culture. This thesis finds a gap between the transformative potential of the four women at the micro-social (subjectivity) level and the lack of transformation at the macro-social (workplace) level. This suggests that the women’s abilities to resist and transform phallocentric discourses at the personal/private level are not sustainable at the public level because of the enduring power of normative institutional discourses or the ‘phallocentric smog’. This thesis signals the need for ongoing interrogation of the gap between the hope that feminists have (theory) and the happening for women (practice) in the quest for sustainable equity.

<p>The purpose of the study is to  examine women and men’s perspective on the informal and traditional way for women to organize themselves in relation to formalization. To meet the aims of the thesis qualitative studies through interviews concerning a <em>protest march</em> that took place in 2003 Dareda village were performed, and a literature study to supplement the empirical data. Thereafter the purpose was analyzed through both feminist theory and empowerment theory. A majority of both the men and the women were positive opinions towards the traditional way for women to be organized. This might go against the feminist theory and verify that only negative statements are brought up within the feminist discourse. Through this tradition women collectively claim specific rights, because they are more powerful together then individually, but also under the banner of motherhood or as women. In relation to the process of development the women are being hindered from protesting more frequently and urged to act within the formal framework. Their major obstacles with the formalization concerns to the judicial system and some of them claim that corruption will prevent justice for them as women.</p><p> </p>

The purpose of the study is to  examine women and men’s perspective on the informal and traditional way for women to organize themselves in relation to formalization. To meet the aims of the thesis qualitative studies through interviews concerning a protest march that took place in 2003 Dareda village were performed, and a literature study to supplement the empirical data. Thereafter the purpose was analyzed through both feminist theory and empowerment theory. A majority of both the men and the women were positive opinions towards the traditional way for women to be organized. This might go against the feminist theory and verify that only negative statements are brought up within the feminist discourse. Through this tradition women collectively claim specific rights, because they are more powerful together then individually, but also under the banner of motherhood or as women. In relation to the process of development the women are being hindered from protesting more frequently and urged to act within the formal framework. Their major obstacles with the formalization concerns to the judicial system and some of them claim that corruption will prevent justice for them as women.

Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides tells the story of adolescent boys gazing at the five Lisbon sisters, who captivate the entire neighborhood with their blond hair and youthful beauty. The young women are positioned as objects, merely to be gazed upon by the male narrators, who by watching them seek to gain knowledge of life and death. Therefore, the novel risks adhering to a traditional, patriarchal theme, where men are the active subjects and women are the passive objects. By reading against the grain and focusing on the sisters' stories told in glimpses through the narrators' voices, however, it emerges that The Virgin Suicides carries a feminist message that runs counter to the objectification and silencing of the young women.

Thesis (M.Ed.)--York University, 2006. Graduate Programme in Education. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 128-133). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR29564

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2007. Graduate Programme in Psychology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 125-139). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR38745

Thesis (doctoral)--Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2000. / DatabaseEbrary.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of History, Aug. 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.