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Contestations around religion and secularism in the UK continue to unfold. These debates converge most polemically around women’s religiosity, as evidenced by proposed bans on the hijab, and the criminalisation of female circumcision. Research on religious women creates a binary juxtaposition between religion as an oppressive force, on the one hand, and religion as a means of emancipation for women, on the other. These accounts fail to address how religious women experience their religious communities as oppressive and choose to stay. In this doctoral thesis, I introduce a new analytic approach to the study of religious women by investigating how women stay in a restrictive religious context and the strategies they employ, in order to theoretically expand understandings of agency. This research examines how British evangelical Christian women negotiate their religious and gendered identities in London. My findings are based on a 12-month ethnography and 33 semi-structured interviews with unmarried evangelical women (aged 22 – 40) living in London. Recognising the unique challenges that single religious women face, including dating and sexual abstinence, I focussed on unmarried women. My research asks: How is the female evangelical subject formed through religious practices such as observing sexual purity, attending Bible study groups and fellowship with like-minded believers? Taking a lived religion approach leads me to theoretically analyse how women practice their religion in everyday, ordinary ways. I then examine how these practices shape women’s identities. Evangelical women are assumed to be either empowered by submission, or frustrated and leaving the church, but an exploration of the everyday, ordinary ways that women live their religion reveals the nuanced and important identity negotiations that women make. My key finding is that evangelical women confront a double bind in their identity formation; the attachment to a Christian identity liberates and supports women, but also ensnares them in a constraining network of norms. Through this discovery, I emphasise the salience of gender in the study of religious practice. By analysing how identities require exclusion for consolidation, I also explore women’s responses to marginality, and re-conceptualise agency. Despite important theoretical contributions to understanding religious women’s agency, scholars continue to ground their approach to agency solely in piety and submission, obscuring alternative modalities. By refusing to align with one side of the emancipation/oppression binary, my research brings a renewed attention to the benefits and the costs of religious belonging.

Through empirical, qualitative research and theorisation of the associated findings, this thesis investigates how certain children's homes may operate, making specific reference to sexuality and sexual abuse issues. Two children's homes in two different local authorities were researched via ethnographic research over a two year period. This involved utilising participant observation techniques in conjunction with formal interviews and documentary analysis. The documentary analysis entailed analysing logbooks, care plans and policy or practice documents around residential care and sexuality. The number of interviews conducted as part of the ethnographic fieldwork totalled 39 and the interviewees were comprised of residential workers, managers, social workers and children. This fieldwork was supplemented by 64 non-ethnographic interviews with residential staff, ex residents and other relevant personnel such as HIV workers. Both contemporaneous and historical practices and perspectives were evaluated, information about historical practices being drawn from interviews with some workers and ex-residents and from analysis of past documents in the ethnographic studies. Overall information was gained about over 100 different settings and 14 different local authorities. The empirical work commenced in 1994 and was concluded in 1997. Additionally media documents relating to scandals surrounding the sexual abuse of children in these settings were analysed. Children's homes are 'last resort' residential settings that children, predominantly abused teenagers, or those with behavioural problems are placed in by local authorities. Although the monolithic Victorian poorhouses and asylums were their historical predecessors, contemporary children's homes are now becoming increasingly smaller and many are intra community located. Despite assumptions by some commentators that these settings are no longer institutionalised this research showed the converse; many typically incorporating most of the characteristics delineated by Goffman (1961) as defining 'total institutions'. These features included isolation, uniform treatment of residents, rigid regimes, an emphasis on surveillance and control, and divisive child and staff cultures. These institutionalised settings intensified both the potential for, and the actual occurrence of, sexual and other forms of abuse of children by peers, staff and outsiders. Local authorities perpetuated the abuse not only by inadequate training, policies and support but often by failing to investigate allegations or follow them through thorough! y. The social construction of childhood induding child and adolescent, gendered sexuality, affected how children were perceived both generally and with regard to sexuality in these settings. This led to a protectionist, paternalist stance towards children in care which allowed them little voice and few rights. 11 The sexual beliefs, behaviour and responses of both children and staff were also examined in a deconstructionist manner which revealed the impossibility of separating sexuality from notions of either sex or gender. Sexed, sexualised and gendered behaviour was therefore shown to be performative and also subject to interiorisation, although simultaneously incorporating massive anomalies and instabilities. Both the notions of performative gender and institutionalisation were then broadened and evaluated in terms of a wider analysis of power. The institutionalisation and stigmatisation of children in children's homes was shown to be linked at micro, meza and macro levels with concepts of class, dangerousness and deviance. The sexual beliefs and behaviour of staff, children and the organisations they are embedded within was also found not only to be influenced by the settings and organisations themselves but by wider, gendered, legal, social and psychological structures, laws and discourses.

This ethnographic dissertation research project examines HIV prevention programs in Warsaw, Poland to explore the concurrent processes of democratization and privatization as Poland begins European Union accession. As inherently political public health interventions, HIV prevention programs provoke discussions of risk and responsibility, and visions of the moral social order. Therefore, they can be used to understand the ways in which politically and socially marginalized populations invoke claims to citizenship status through attention to health issues. From an epidemiological perspective, HIV/AIDS arrived in Poland relatively late (1985) and never reached the anticipated epidemic levels. In the 1980s, drawing attention to the potential threat of AIDS served as a forum through which the perceived failures of the socialist government could be publicly addressed. In the 1990s calls for improved access to AIDS information suggested that to be democratic meant to have open and easy access to scientific information, and debate surrounding the establishment of AIDS care facilities suggested that to be European was to be tolerant. However, issues of information and tolerance were problematic in reference to homosexuality. Prior to the advent of AIDS in Poland, socialist gender and sexual ideologies converged with Catholic notions of proper morality to marginalize and pathologize homosexuality. Nascent gay organizations saw the potential of HIV prevention as a way to justify the value of such organizations for the greater good of society. The possibility of controlling and participating in the task of HIV prevention presented an alternative to statesponsored surveillance under the guise of HIV prevention and encouraged public dialogue about the issues gays face in their daily lives. Whereas the national HIV prevention agenda focuses on risks as equally distributed across Polish society, a central component of the HIV prevention programs within Polish gay rights and drug abuse prevention organizations is harm reduction. As practiced by Polish gay organizations, a harm reduction philosophy draws attention to heterogeneity within gays and challenges the construction of them as a coherent risk group. These programs deemphasize sexuality in favor of a wider constellation of factors that contribute to finding oneself in situations that can lead to risky behavior.

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