Madame de Motteville et la duchesse de Montpensier sont deux aristocrates contemporaines. La première est dame de compagnie d’Anne d’Autriche ; la seconde est cousine germaine de Louis XIV. Témoins des bouleversements liés à la Régence et à la Fronde, elles sont conduites à des questionnements parallèles. Si elles se sont passionnément intéressées à l’histoire de leur époque, elles ont fait des choix de vie individuelle qui les distinguent du commun des femmes. Chacune a adopté une forme de célibat. Ces choix de vie ont forgé en elles le désir de liberté. Ce qui crée le plus intensément leur sororité littéraire reste l’écriture de Mémoires. L’histoire les a invitées à s’interroger sur l’identité nobiliaire. La Fronde va être l’occasion historique pour la Grande Mademoiselle de revendiquer les valeurs menacées par les évolutions politiques. En cela, elle ne partage pas les idées politiques de Madame de Motteville qui va s’employer à soutenir le pouvoir légitime dans ses Mémoires. Simultanément se pose aux deux auteures la question de leur identité féminine. Madame de Motteville et Mademoiselle mettent en scène, dans leurs Mémoires, l’oppression dont les femmes sont victimes et qui tient au fonctionnement patriarcal de la société. Une fois Louis XIV au pouvoir de manière effective, les rêves de libération féminine s’évanouissent. D’où la tendance des deux mémorialistes à formuler une expérience individuée de la liberté. Le statut de femme libre peine à exister sur le plan public. Mais il demeure possible de l’inventer dans le cadre de la sphère privée. Elles vont se frayer un chemin vers la liberté en réinventant à leur manière le destin féminin, sans pour autant déboucher sur un véritable féminisme, leurs valeurs demeurant sous certains angles empreintes de traditionalisme. À l’intérieur de cette sphère privée, l’écriture mémorialiste circonscrit un deuxième espace dans lequel leur quête de liberté prend corps et s’épanouit. / Madame de Motteville and the Duchess of Montpensier were two contemporary aristocrats. The former was a lady-in-waiting to Anne of Austria; the latter was a first cousin of Louis XIV. They witnessed the upheavals caused by the Regency and the Fronde and shared a passionate interest in the history of their times. It led them to explore similar issues. They each chose a form of spinsterhood and made life choices which distinguished them from the common run of women and contributed to their desire for liberty. The main reason why they can be regarded as litterary 'sisters' is the writing of Memoirs. History made them both question their aristocratic identity, though in different ways: La Grande Mademoiselle took the opportunity of the Fronde to fight for values threatened by political changes while Madame de Motteville supported the legitimate power of the Regency through her Memoirs. They also both questioned their feminine identity. Theydealt with the oppression women suffered as a result of a patriachal society. After Louis XIV took power in 1660, hopes of feminine liberation were dashed. Hence both memorialists' tendency to seek and write about a personal experience of freedom. They could not achieve the status of 'liberated' women in the public sphere but they could try to do so in the private one. They fought their way to freedom by reinventing women's destiny in their own ways, but without defending feminist views as such, as their values remained tinged withtraditionalism. The writing of Memoirs allowed them to define within the private sphere a space in which their quest for freedom couldflourish.

acase@tulane.edu / This dissertation examines the role of Roman antiquity in crafting civic identity in fourteenth-century Siena. Roman heritage was a point of pride for Italian communes and had political and cultural relevance by informing values and legitimizing republican governments for contemporary audiences. Without provable classical settlement, trecento Siena fabricated an elaborate origin myth that stressed ancient foundations—by the twin sons of Rome’s own Remus—and promoted the legend in a city-wide iconographical and philosophical program. This dissertation presents a series of case studies that analyze specific occurrences of the civic deployment of Siena’s invented classical identity and examines the socio-political value of this Romanitas, or “Roman-ness,” in a pivotal period of transformation where the combination of a state-crafted visual campaign rooted in classicism and the political shift from one republican regime to the next provides the opportunity to trace the invocation of Rome in various forms across the city’s landscape. I begin by examining the origin legend as a response to foreign challenges to Siena’s historicity. I then analyze Sienese political discourse, both local and in broader Guelph-Ghibelline debates, to argue that Roman republicanism provided necessary legitimacy to republics and a vocabulary to express communal virtues. Chapter three follows Sienese efforts to emphasize ancient material through the celebration of spolia—native and imported—and attention to Rome in original art. Chapters four and five examine the presence of Christian antiquity in Siena, demonstrated by the selection of ancient martyrs as their patron saints and the religious ideals of the Gesuati order, dedicated to Jerome. The final chapter identifies instances where pagan and Christian antiquity appeared in the same civic space and questions how both expressions of Romanitas functioned together to create a cultural identity in Siena dependent on classical influence. This dissertation expands scholarship’s definition of antiquity to include both pagan and Christian manifestations and recognizes the role of Sienese communal government in developing the rebirth of antiquity. I suggest that the Sienese state cultivated a self-image that stressed Siena as a Roman city physically and philosophically built upon classical origins and benefiting from Rome’s political and spiritual inheritance. / 1 / Samantha Perez

Dans cette thèse, on examine la manière dont l'œuvre littéraire de David Hume (1711-1776) propose une réflexion sur les notions de subjectivité et d'identité personnelle et collective. On s'interroge sur la cohérence de la réponse de Hume au défi que pose l'enquête sur ces notions et sur la pertinence de sa pensée dans le contexte de l'Écosse des Lumières. On montre également dans quelle mesure sa pensée a influencé des auteurs ultérieurs et ce qu'il reste aujourd'hui des méthodes, des outils et des idées que l'auteur a contribué à développer. On se demande enfin si cette pensée peut nous être utile, à nous, lecteurs du XXIe siècle, pour interroger le monde qui nous est contemporain. Au terme de l'analyse, on est convaincu du bénéfice bien réel qu'il y a à lire les textes humiens au prisme d'un questionnement sur ces notions. Hume a eu l’idée originale que le fond du problème de l’identité est réductible à des principes naturels liés au fonctionnement de l’esprit et que l’idée que l’on en a est l’effet de constructions historiques et de croyances : l'identité est une « fiction ». / This dissertation explores the notions of personal and collective identity as well as subjectivity in the literary works of David Hume (1711-1776). It focuses on the coherence and relevance of Hume's response to the challenge of defining these notions within the context of the Scottish Enlightenment. It looks into the extent to which Hume's thought impacted future generations of thinkers and it demonstrates that some intellectual tools, methods and ideas that the author developed in his time are still relevant today. It finally examines whether his thought may help 21st century readers understand today's society better. Upon completing the inquiry, we may conclude that reading Hume's texts helps us clarify many difficulties related to the aforementioned notions. Hume's conclusions regarding identity and subjectivity are quite remarkable in that the author believed that they emerge from the regular operation of natural principles in the human mind. Our very idea of these notions amounts to a belief that is the result of historical construction : ultimately, identity and subjectivity are 'fictions' of the mind.

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This thesis examines the role of civil society in addressing human security in the Indian state of Meghalaya. Civil society has been revived over the last two decades and is now one of the key concepts in the study of politics. Yet there are few detailed empirical studies of civil society at a local level examining the constraints on participation and the ways this affects what is contested. Human security has also gained prominence in the past decade as both a challenge to state-centric conceptions of security and as an alternative approach to development by focussing on the security and insecurity of groups and individuals. In order for those experiencing insecurity to identify and contest the causes of insecurity, participation in civil society is necessary. Yet there is very limited analysis on the ability of civil society actors to contest the causes of insecurity in particular local contexts. Meghalaya is part of the region know as Northeast India, one of the least researched regions in South Asia. Identity politics dominate civil society in Meghalaya, empowering particular actors and particular causes of insecurity and marginalising others. Furthermore the construction of Meghalaya in the Indian national context leaves it isolated from civil society actors in other parts of India, intensifying the impact of local circumstances. This thesis examines the responses of civil society actors to environmental insecurity and gender-based insecurity in Meghalaya and finds that participation is constrained by the dominance of identity politics, the power differentials between civil society actors, and existing inequalities within the local context. This thesis reaches three conclusions. First, civil society is constrained by both the state and the power of particular actors and ideas in civil society itself. Secondly, the relationship between civil society and human security is constitutive. Constraints on civil society affect which insecurities can be contested and the prevalence of particular forms of insecurity, especially identity insecurity, empower particular civil society actors and marginalise others. Thirdly, context is vital for understanding the constraints on civil society and the conditions under which these constraints may be transcended. This requires a deeper understanding of Meghalaya that goes beyond the reproduction of homogenous and unchanging ethnic categories.

In this thesis I investigate the influence of mentoring on the formation of the identities of women academics in Australian universities. Many Australian and New Zealand universities have introduced some form of mentoring initiative for women academics over the last decade. The aim of these initiatives is usually expressed in terms of supporting women's career development in order to increase the representation of women in senior positions in universities. I take up Foucault's theory of governmentality together with feminist theories of subjectivity, to examine the ways in which mentoring contributes to 'producing' the women as academic subjects of the times. My analysis of the formation of the subjectivities of the women concerned is set in the context of a political economy of contemporary higher education accompanied by the changing nature of academic work. I argue that mentoring has found support in recent years because it responds to the concerns of 'the enterprise university' with improving performance while also being seen to respond to the problem of gender inequality. The thesis is based on interviews conducted with 17 women academics who have participated in a formal mentoring program or who have been mentored informally by a colleague in their universities, six of which are discussed in detail. I use a feminist interpretive framework to analyse the discourses through which the women and I construct their accounts at interview. I also highlight the parallels between the confessional aspects of feminist research interviewing and the confessional space of the mentoring relationship itself, particularly mentoring of women by women. On the basis of this analysis, I argue that mentoring has a number of productive effects, producing particular sorts of self-regulating subjects, together with new knowledges and discourses of work and of the self. In their engagement in mentoring, the women take up a project of self-review and self-regulation. This can be understood as a biographical project of the self. It is a project that is iterative and ongoing, as the women navigate the discourses of academic work, career, gender, mothering, sexuality, social class and ethnicity, amongst others. This process is frequently fragmented and contested as the women confront the contradictions within the combined positioning of themselves and their positioning by others. Rather than try to resolve the tensions and contradictions that characterise this process, these tensions might be better explored in terms of their productive potential for disrupting the gendered work order of universities.

This research study explores the relationship between cultural representations of heterosexual male sexuality and heterosexual men’s sexuality. A critical realist framework is adopted to facilitate the examination of this topic with qualitative and quantitative methods; an analysis of representation in men’s magazines, an analysis of men’s accounts produced in individual and group interviews, and an analysis of a large-scale survey are undertaken. The findings of this study demonstrate that across age and relationship context, there is considerable variation in men’s experience of sexuality, negotiation of representations and in the consequences they experience. The findings of the study are significant for understanding heterosexual men’s subjectivity and sexual practices; the implications for sexual relationships , sexual coercion and violence, and for sexual health and education are considered throughout. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) (Psychology)

Dissertation (Ph.D.) -- The Institute for Clinical Social Work, 1995. / A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the Institute of Clinical Social Work in partial fulfillment for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.