My dissertation examines some of the ways in which new technologies alter traditional readings of the female body and of feminine subjectivity in contemporary fiction. To illustrate these alterations, I have selected two short stories, one by William Gibson and the other by Margaret Atwood, published in the speculative fiction Tesseracts2 anthology in 1987, both of which deal with disease and women's technological access. Within this context, I examine how feminine sexuality and embodiment are deconstructed and re-written. While historically women have been represented as victims of technology and/or intimately connected with the natural world, I propose that women's increased access to both bio-technologies and communications technologies offers an unprecedented route to self-definition and cultural power. I explore ways in which analogue technology mimics women's reproductive enslavement in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and in which the emergence of digital technology offers some emancipation in The Blind Assassin. Subsequently, I discuss the intersections of sex work and virtual reality in William Gibson's Cyberpunk Trilogy and associated short fiction, demonstrating that digitality is not a panacea for gendered oppression. However, digitized women may have unexpected opportunities for self-definition. In comparing Gibson's Idoru and Atwood's Oryx and Crake, I discuss how women “created” for the male gaze (either virtually or by cloning) may evade that gaze and both assert their individuality and create communities among women with similar origins. Subsequently, I examine the interconnections among women, animals, and food that emerge within technologized cultures. Self-protective anorexia provides a link among Atwood's earliest writing (The Edible Woman) and her most recent (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood), and suggests that the same technological facility which provides access to power also induces profound bodily anxieties in female characters. Building on those anxieties, I conclude with a discussion of the ways in which disability disrupts expectations of feminine embodiment. The constant abjection of women with disabilities is counter-balanced by those women's ability to create radical innovations of technology that transform the larger culture.

The church and monastery of Brou, Bourg-en-Bresse were built under the attentive patronage of Margaret of Austria (1480--1530), Duchess of Savoy, Regent of the Netherlands and daughter of Maximilian I and Mary of Burgundy. Brou was intended to symbolically and economically secure the region for the Habsburgs as well as memorialize the glory of its patron. Located in Savoy, a strategic territory in the battle for Italy between the Habsburg Empire and France, Brou's secular and religious references, chosen by the patron herself, reflect her and her family's political needs. This paper explores Margaret of Austria's role as patron and creator of Brou, her political and propagandistic agenda, her pivotal role in its planning and construction, her architectural and stylistic choices and the results of her efforts and their reception.

The establishment of effective relationships is fundamental to good nursing practice and the fulfillment of nurses’ moral responsibilities. While intrapartum nurses are uniquely placed to establish relationships that can directly influence the woman’s experience of childbirth, there has been limited investigation of the relationships, identities and values that underlie nurses’ varied approaches and responses to labouring women. The purpose of this study was to explore intrapartum nurses’ understanding of their moral responsibilities from a social-moral perspective, using Margaret Urban Walker’s “expressive-collaborative” model of morality. Interviews were conducted with fourteen registered nurses working in a birthing unit of a Canadian teaching hospital. Four themes were identified that captured nurses’ moral responsibilities, including: organizing and coordinating care, responding to the unpredictable, recognizing limits of responsibilities to others, and negotiating care with women and families. Nurses enacted their moral responsibilities to labouring women in a variety of ways depending on their personal and professional experience, the circumstances, the people involved and the context of care. A key factor influencing responses to women was the degree to which understandings and expectations related to birth were deemed to be reasonable and mutually agreed upon among nurses, physicians, women and their families. Nurses also described limits on their responsibilities to others. Their choice of response to circumstances in which practice was constrained departed from the idealized expectations and ‘expert’ practices often reflected in professional guidelines. While nurses were able to identify contextual influences that constrained their ability to maintain effective relationships with women, the influence of their own values on the care they provided was less apparent. This suggests a need to challenge normative assumptions related to care of women in childbirth, including the provision of choice and family centred care, in order to create environments that can support and sustain practices that build understanding, mutuality and trust between nurses and birthing woman. In addition, given the contested nature of childbirth and the lack of shared understandings of what constitutes ‘best’ care, there is a need to develop collaborative models of inter-professional maternity care that include the voices of women as a central component.

Speculative fiction is a genre that is gaining urgency in the contemporary Canadian literary scene as authors and readers become increasingly concerned with what it means to live in a nation implicated in globalization. This genre is useful because with it, authors can extrapolate from the present to explore what some of the long-term effects of globalization might be. This thesis specifically considers the long-term effects of globalization on communities, a theme that speculative fictions return to frequently. The selected speculative fictions engage with current theory on globalization and community in their explorations of how globalization might affect the types of communities that can be enacted. This thesis argues that these texts demonstrate how Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s notion of “cooperative autonomy” can be uniquely cultivated in the conditions of globalization – despite the fact that those conditions are characterized by the fragmentation of traditional forms of community (Empire 392).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2001. / Adviser: Elizabeth Ammons. Submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 268-289). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Zugl.: Köln, Univ., Diss., 2004

Thesis (S.T.M.)--Yale University Divinity School, 1990. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 78-83).

Thesis (Ph.D) -- University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 2001. / Bibliography: leaves 466-497.

Thesis (D.A.)--St. John's University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 118 -122).

Zugl.: München, Univ., Diss., 2006