In recent years, Canadian governments and courts have increasingly responded positively to the demands of lesbian and gay communities for legal rights. As a result, in several instances, such rights have been extended, at both statutory and constitutional levels. In this thesis, I consider the politics of struggles for lesbian and gay legal equality in Canada. Although I explore several developments in this area, I focus my analysis upon two key examples: the struggle, in 1986, to add a "sexual orientation" ground to Ontario's Human Rights Code; and a key legal rights case launched in the late 1980s, and still on-going as of this writing (Mossop). More specifically, I address three key questions: [1] how are lesbian and gay subjects and subjectivities constituted through human rights law and what forces produce these legal constructions? [2] how capable are liberal democracies of accommodating 'sexual pluralism', and what are the implications of this for other areas of social transformation? [3] what is the relationship between the lesbian and gay rights movement, its principal opponents the New Christian Right, and 'the state' - how do the struggles of social movements for interpretive authority shape the law-making process (and vice versa)? In responding to these questions, I draw upon diverse approaches in legal theory, sociology, feminism, and lesbian and gay studies. My analysis centres upon the role of law as a site of struggle. I explore the engagements between the lesbian and gay rights movement, and its key opponent the New Christian Right. I assess the effects of lesbian and gay rights campaigns in both the short and long terms, considering issues to do with social movement mobilisation, effective political communication, and the role of these struggles in shifting dominant frameworks of meaning. I offer a detailed discussion of the role of rights, as goal and rhetoric, within political action. And I consider the relationship between law, and other forms of knowledge. I argue that the effects of legal struggle are complex, contradictory, and unpredictable. Lesbian and gay rights reforms have both entrenched and undermined dominant paradigms of sexuality, and the effects of legal struggle in this and other areas must be assessed in the long-term. This thesis contributes to knowledge in four key areas: critical rights theory; theories of law and social change; the sociology of social movements and religions; and lesbian and gay politics. I use a combination of legal, sociological, feminist, and historical methodologies.

This dissertation examines sexual reputation in the county of Somerset between 1733 and 1850. Its purpose is to explore plebeian sexual culture by tracing changes in the way plebeian men and women defined and defended their sexual reputations in an era of social, economic and cultural transition. In this period Somerset evolved from a prosperous and rapidly growing county with an economy based on agriculture and manufactures to a more static and primarily agrarian county; its major city, Bath, went from being a thriving resort to a retirement town. At the same time, the breakdown of the Puritan sexual consensus left a hiatus before the triumph of Victorianism during which a multiplicity of sexual cultures thrived. The defamation causes heard in the ecclesiastical courts of the diocese of Bath and Wells constitute the basic source for the study of plebeian sexual reputation. By the eighteenth century, these causes were concerned solely with sexual insults and the courts' clients were predominantly and increasingly married women drawn from the ranks of artisans and small tradespeople in the county's market towns and the city of Bath. The survival of this jurisdiction reflects a continuing need on the part of plebeian litigants for a cheap and public mode of settling disputes over honour. Though plebeian men continued to use the church courts to restore their good names long after upper class men had ceased to do so, their eventual abandonment of the courts has necessitated the use of common law sources to construct a picture of male reputation. As the industrial and agricultural revolutions proceeded, and the personnel of the church courts adopted a sexual ideology emphasising privacy, decorum and the double standard, traditional plebeian sexual mores were challenged. Definitions of male and female reputation diverged and the egalitarianism of the early eighteenth century weakened. By the mid-nineteenth century, the dominant sexual culture had triumphed: the distinctive plebeian sexual culture had been absorbed by the more homogeneous sexual culture of the Victorian era; litigants had ceased to use the church courts; and, in 1854, the defamation jurisdiction was abolished.

This thesis is an attempt to explain the historical origins and the cultural location of the hippie counterculture in Britain in the late 1960s. Part One contains two intentions. It depicts and assesses existing theoretical attempts to account for the counter-culture; but it also works through dominant contemporary modes of cultural theory and the sociology of youth culture, in particular the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. The overall aim of this section is to present a revision; a fresh cultural studies 'theoretical overview' to historically relocate the emergence of forms of bohemian counter-culture. Part Two considers and charts such forms of bohemian ideology. The initial premise is that the hippie countercultural form was a modernised instance of bohemianism: an attempt to formulate the ground rules of anesthetic revolution and present a cultural critique according to the 'problems' and 'solutions' of artistic practice. It reveals the historical development of the institutions of artistic practice which have kept the Romantic, bohemian ideology of cultural criticism alive and pertinent. More specifically I concentrate on the development of art education. I conclude that existing accounts of the hippie counterculture which attempt to locate its emergence in either the language of youth-cultural expression or the 'spirit of the age' are superficial and misleading. The counter-culture, like other forms of cultural ideology, must be related to its institutional setting: hence I stress the significance of art education, as a 'carrier' of conflicting cultural and artistic ideologies, through to the 1960s. The thesis is primarily focussed on hippie ideology; therefore my methodology essentially presents problems of historical research - into the dominant influences on the formation of a modernised aesthetic counter-cultural form, and the attempts offered by the hippies themselves, specifically in the written media and music, to redefine the rules of cultural discourse.

The emphasis in this thesis is on women's popular attitudes towards the two processes of industrial mobilisation and demobilisation which took place between 1940 and 1946. Although the work includes a survey of the national picture of those two processes, it concentrates on case studies in two towns which exhibited different characteristics of women's employment, Coventry and Bolton. This is done in an attempt to see if the tradition of women's employment affected their attitudes towards war work. In Coventry, the best sources of women's employment were for single women. During the nineteen-thirties it was obvious that the motor industry employed increasing numbers of women, but, again, the unmarried. The economic participation rate in Coventry was slightly lower than the national average. On the other hand, the cotton industry in Bolton customarily had engaged married women as well as single women, therefore, the women's economic participation rate was about 10 per cent. higher than the national average. Local custom with regard to married women's employment appears to have affected women's ideas About their domestic responsibilities. Coventry women were more reserved and more conscious of their domestic role. However, the comparison between the two towns also brought out similarities as well as differences in women's attitudes to industrial mobilisation. During demobilisation, the similarities between Coventry and Bolton were more strongly marked. The majority of women war workers had no intention of staying on in the factory, in jobs which were still largely thought of as 'men's work'. Most women thought that their well-being was dependent on men's secure employment and high wages. They did not want to do anything to threaten it. There seems to have been little antagonism between men and women during the mobilisation and demobilisation period.

This study addresses the following research question: what are the implications of African- Caribbean and White working class men's experiences within social connections (within families, friendships, communities and workplaces), for fathering and health experiences? The purposes of this study were to undertake a primary piece of intensive qualitative research, and also to analyse, critically, the study's findings, in order to identify implications for theory, policy, practice and research. This investigation was critical, interpretative and exploratory, informed by the principles of phenomenology and ethnography. Six African-Caribbean and seven White working class men were recruited, using purposive sampling, for two semi-structured individual interviews. This enabled the exploration of the interactive effects and processes of structure and agency, in relation to social class, gender, and ethnicity. The study did not find major differences between the experiences of these two groups of men, although the assets and constraints related to African-Caribbean men's experiences of ethnicity and racism within social connections were evident. Study findings, for both groups of men, indicated that social connectedness within families, communities and workplaces was highly valued, but social connections, material and structural factors also influenced the health of the men interviewed. Furthermore, findings indicated that men's experiences of social connectedness have limitations. Specifically, men's limited insights into the links between social connectedness and health, men's perceived limitations with their communication skills, their solitary methods of dealing with perceived vulnerability, but also the uncertainty associated with their identities as men were significant findings. Indeed, men's experiences of both solitary discourses and practices and social connectedness, regarding fathering and health, were associated with discourses about masculinities. Implications for existing theory, for example Connell's (1995) work regarding masculinities, and Putnam's (1995) work regarding `social capital', are identified. In addition, implications for research, policy and practice are examined, with specific reference to the opportunities for mental health promotion with working class men who are fathers.

This study investigates the long-neglected cultural engagement of the court of Anne of Denmark, consort of James VI and I, revising her historiographical representation in the light of current gender theory. Focusing upon the masque performances of the English Jacobean court, I examine the genre's anomalous staging of Renaissance female performance and its contribution to the emergence of a more general female performance. Through detailed analysis of masque performances, I assess contemporary courtly attitudes towards female masquing and the performative representation of the courtly woman. This study is firmly interdisciplinary in its approach to female cultural production, investigating the texts of performance, embroidery, dance, patronage and commissioning, and religious and political engagement. This thesis breaks new ground in the detailed examination of the aesthetics of masque performance as tools of social and political engagement. This study decentres the anglocentricism prevalent in recent cultural criticism of the Jacobean court. My first: chapter traces Anne's life and performance in both the Danish and Scottish Renaissance courts, assessing the impact of these alternative models upon her cultural engagement. Chapters two and three continue the analysis of performance. The former discusses the danced performance of aristocratic identity and the way in which this facilitates female masque performance; the latter relates the performance of the female body in the major English Jacobean masques to performance space, costume and scenery. Tracing the line of female performance through the second decade of the seventeenth century, I analyse Robert White's Cupid's Banishment, the final masque of Anne's career. This reading encapsulates my discussion of female cultural agency through the autonomy of the Queen's court. Recycling memories of earlier performances, Cupid's Banishment stages disparate texts of female expressivity in a masque which contains perhaps the unique Jacobean staging of the female masquing voice.

A growing number of lesbian women are choosing to have children within the context of an openly lesbian lifestyle. This dissertation research represents a departure from much previous work in this area, with a shift in focus from children of lesbian and gay parents in the UK or North America, to an exploration of the perspectives and experiences of lesbian parents themselves within two particular European contexts. Interviews were carried out with 68 lesbian women in Sweden and Ireland. The role of social and institutional contexts in shaping these women's parenting possibilities, choices and experiences were explored. An important finding of the study concerns cross-national differences in discourses of fatherhood and parenting. Swedish women were far more likely to choose an involved donor than Irish women. The differing possibilities and strategies available to lesbian women illustrate wider assumptions about gender and 'the family'. An examination of the significance of the genetic 'tie' found that heteronormative constructions of biology were both displaced and retained in families with co-parents. The lack of legal recognition of co-parents amounted to a difference in social validation as a parent that was negotiated in diverse ways. The study also explored the concept of gender flexibility among lesbian parents. Participants in this research demonstrated a relative absence of dichotomous gender roles, resulting in a division of labour largely characterised by equality between partners. The reinscription of discourses of gender and kinship by lesbian parents highlights the centrality of symbols such as biology, at the same time that lesbian parents may reconstruct such discourses, creating points of rupture in heteronormative relations. Finally, the study reveals the heteronormative assumptions of the Swedish and Irish welfare states, which lead to these families' efforts to resist socially exclusionary practices in contexts where they are perceived as outside the norm.

This thesis is a case study of the relationship between gender and sexuality at the empirical sites of asexuality and sexual abstinence. Whilst this relationship has been theorised in a number of ways, there has been limited empirical research on how this relationship ‘works’ in practice, with extant studies focusing largely on transgender. I suggest that asexuality and abstinence represent an interesting site to explore this relationship since they represent, for want of a better term, a lack, absence, or negative sexuality (in that there is a lack of sexual attraction to others, or there is an abstention from sexual activity). The study is also warranted due to the insufficient sociological research on abstinence, as well as the limitations of the literature and research in the nascent interdisciplinary field of asexuality studies. Through conducting qualitative research (using interviews and notebooks) with 33 participants who identified as asexual or abstinent, I found that gender and sexuality were experienced as entangled in the lives of participants. With reference to the socio-structural context of hetero-patriarchy, I trace how ideas about sexual desire, sexual activity and sexual agency are (still) gendered, and how this impacts on both the construction of abstinence and asexuality as concepts, as well as in the experiences participants had as asexual people or as people who were practising abstinence. I also explore how sexuality was central to participants’ understandings of gender, and how this affected their gender identities, gendered appearances, and experiences of gendered embodiment. Ultimately, this thesis argues for the importance in theorising and researching gender and sexuality together, and in particular, for the importance of ‘gendering’ sexualities research.

This thesis comprises three inter-related studies that have in common a focus on the nature of the behaviours of non-handicapped (NH) six and seven year olds in interactions with peers with severe learning difficulties (SLD). Research into children’s cross-age dyadic interactions is discussed and NH-SLD interaction is examined as a particular type of cross-(developmental) age Interaction. This work provides the background to Study 1 in which each of ten NH children was paired with a child with SLD during fortnightly integration sessions over one school year. NH-SLD interaction increased over the first two terms and decreased slightly after this, a pattern which can be explained in terms of features which promote or diminish child-child interaction. Study 2 focussed on changes in young NH children’s attitudes towards children with SLD over a year of fortnightly NH-SLD Integration sessions. These attitudes are considered in relation to work examining the development of attitudes towards other social groups. In particular, Katz' (19S2) model of the development of racial attitudes is applied to attitudes towards children with SLD. Year-end interviews indicated that knowledge about SLD encompassed four different physical explanations of SLD: sensory-motor difficulties, sickness, young age or "bad brains". Although the NH children became more realistic about probable futures of children with SLD, the NH children remained, in general, confused about the nature of SLD. It is concluded that Katz' (19B2) model provides a useful base for examining the development of attitudes towards children with SLD. Concepts held about the listener will Influence the nature of speech addressed to that listener and verbal NH-SLD interaction was the focus of the third study reported here. This study is set in the context of research on how young children address younger children, including tutees. Study 3 involved nine NH-SLD pairs of children whose verbal interactions were monitored over a school year of structured integration sessions. Study 3 found that, as in Study 1, NH children dominated NH-SLD interaction. This was evident in NH children's frequent use of requests and closed questions as well as in features such as speaking for SLD children. These characteristics were more frequent in the NH children's talk to SLD partners than in the NH children's talk to younger mainstream children. The issue of NH children's sensitivity, linguistically, to SLD partners is explored. It is suggested that while the types of reformulation of utterances by NH children to SLD partners were appropriate for SLD listeners, NH children often failed to recognise the need to reformulate utterances. This leads back to questions about young NH children's understanding of the nature of SLD.

This thesis seeks to provide a deeper understanding of public attitudes to inheritance in contemporary Scottish society, with particular regard to perceptions of parental obligation in an era of increased family diversity. The cornerstone of the thesis is an empirical study conducted in 2014 against the backdrop of the Scottish Law Commission’s (SLC) 2009 succession law reform proposals that would seriously curtail children’s inheritance rights. The thesis begins by contextualising the empirical study. It explains the current law of succession as it relates to provision for adult partners and children and examines the SLC’s proposed reforms. It argues that the SLC’s proposals to further bolster the spouse’s position at the expense of the deceased’s children are not supported by public opinion. Through analysis of a range of other empirical studies it demonstrates that public opinion supports continued recognition of children in succession law, particularly in reconstituted families. The second part of the thesis explains how the empirical study was planned and executed before detailing the methodological approach used to analyse the data. Having established the methodological framework, the thesis then discusses the key research findings, focusing primarily on the parent-child relationship. Firstly, it explores the obligations parents are considered to owe their children, addressing how these obligations can be reconciled with conceptions of testamentary freedom. Secondly, it examines whether parental duty is viewed differently when the deceased’s surviving spouse is not his children’s other parent and, thirdly, it asks what duty, if any, the deceased owes his stepchildren. While the parent-child relationship is the main focus of this thesis, the SLC also proposed reforms to the inheritance entitlements of half-siblings and these proposals are examined in the context of broader discussion on reconstituted families. The thesis concludes by arguing that, while the SLC rightly identifies social change as a ground for law reform, its proposed reforms fail to adequately reflect social norms in the context of the parent-child relationship. This is because the proposed reforms do not correspond to the societal changes identified: whereas the SLC acknowledges the rise in the number of reconstituted families, the reforms do not adequately consider how these families can be better served by succession law. Instead, confronted with increased family diversity, the SLC opts for simplicity, privileging the spouse ahead of all others regardless of the effect this will have on children in reconstituted families.