In Jane Austen’s Emma, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey there is a central theme of finding a marriage partner from economic, social and love perspectives. The focus of this essay is to look from a materialist feminist perspective at how these factors influence the characters’ marital matches. I have also looked at how love as a sought after ideal in marriage conceals the social and economic factors’ influence. The novels all discuss how women’s marginalized economic position forces them to marry. Social factors such as women’s need to find a husband and their expected domestic role have also had an influence. Love works in the novels to support the oppression of women by justifying marriage and concealing women’s unequal role in society.

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<p>French Feminism has little to do with feminism in France. While in the U.S. this now canonical body of work designates almost exclusively the work of three theorists—Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva—in France, these same thinkers are actually associated with the rejection of feminism. If some scholars have on this basis passionately denounced French Feminism as an American invention, there exists to date no comprehensive analysis of that invention or of its effects. Why did theorists who were at best marginal to feminist thought and political practice in France galvanize feminist scholars working in the United States? Why does French Feminism provoke such an intense affective response in France to this date? Drawing on the fields of feminist and queer studies, literary studies, and history, “Inventing ‘French Feminism:’ A Critical History” offers a transnational account of the emergence and impact of one of U.S. academic feminism’s most influential bodies of work. The first half of the dissertation argues that, although French Feminism has now been dismissed for being biologically essentialist and falsely universal, feminists working in the U.S. academy of the 1980s, particularly feminist literary critics and postcolonial feminist critics, deployed the work of Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva to displace what they perceived as U.S. feminist literary criticism’s essentialist reliance on the biological sex of the author and to challenge U.S. academic feminism’s inattention to racial differences between women. French Feminism thus found traction among feminist scholars to the extent that it was perceived as addressing some of U.S. feminism’s most pressing political issues. The second half of the dissertation traces French feminist scholars’ vehement rejection of French Feminism to an affectively charged split in the French women’s liberation movement of the 1970s and shows that this split has resulted in an entrenched opposition between sexual difference and materialist feminism, an opposition that continues to structure French feminist debates to this day. “Inventing ‘French Feminism:’ A Critical History” ends by arguing that in so far as the U.S. invention of French Feminism has contributed to the emergence of U.S. queer theory, it has also impeded its uptake in France. Taken as a whole, this dissertation thus implicitly argues that the transnational circulation of ideas is simultaneously generative and disabling.</p> / Dissertation

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Die vorliegende Studie zum Thema „geschlechternormen–inkonforme Körperinszenierungen“ ist die theoretisch fundierte, empirische Überprüfung der These von Judith Butler, daß eine mögliche Verbindung zwischen queer Praxen und der Subversion der herrschenden Geschlechterordnung bestehe. Die Arbeit untersucht die Beziehung zwischen Körperpraxen und anderen Praxen, insbesondere Arbeit und politischer Praxis. Der Begriff „geschlechternormen-inkonforme Körperinszenierungen“ bezieht sich auf drei Praktiken bzw. drei Arten des Verhaltens von Personen in Bezug auf deren eigenen Körper: Er bezieht sich erstens auf Transsexuelle, die ihren Körper mit medizinischen Mitteln haben verändern lassen; zweitens auf transgender Personen, die zeitweise oder permanent cross dressing praktizieren ohne physische Veränderungen an ihrem Körper vorgenommen zu haben; und drittens auf drag kings und drag queens, die auf der Bühne ein anderes Geschlecht als im Alltag darstellen. Alle Personen inszenieren eine geschlechternormen-inkonforme Geschlechtlichkeit, d. h. eine Geschlechtlichkeit, die nach hegemonialen Kriterien nicht mit dem ‚wahren’ oder ‚ursprünglichen’ Geschlecht dieser Person übereinstimmt. Die Methode des empirischen Teils der Studie besteht aus der Datengewinnung durch das „Problemzentrierte Interview“ nach Witzel und der Datenanalyse durch die „Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse“ nach Mayring. Die Studie geht davon, daß die Überwindung der Herrschaft das Verschwinden der sozialen Gruppen (hier: Männer und Frauen), zwischen denen eine Herrschaftsbeziehung besteht, einschließt, denn diese Gruppen sind die Produkte der Praktizierung von Herrschaft. Die Studie zeigt, daß im interviewten sample – statt einer Subversion von Herrschaft – eine kontinuierliche Reproduktion von Geschlechtern und Geschlechterhierarchien stattfindet. Die .pdf-Datei mit der vollständigen Arbeit enthält Zusammenfassungen in englischer, französischer, kastilischer und deutscher Sprache, die länger als das vorliegende abstract sind. / The present study dealing with the topic ‘geschlechternormen-inkonforme Körperinszenierungen’ (approximately: body styling / body formation which is contrary to the hegemonic gender rules) is a theoretically based, empirical scrutiny of Judith Butler’s thesis, that there exists a possible connection between queer practices and the subversion of existing gender hierarchy. The thesis explores the relationship between body practices and other practices, especially labour and political practice. The term ‘geschlechternormen-inkonforme Körperinszenierungen’ refers to three practices or three different ways of a person’s behaviour towards his or her own body: it refers firstly to transsexuals, who changed their body physically; secondly it refers to transgender people, who occasionally or permanently do cross dressing in everyday life without having changed their bodies physically; and thirdly on drag kings and drag queens who show a different sex on stage than in everyday life. All people stage a ‘geschlechternormen-inkonforme Geschlechtlichkeit’, that means a gender that doesn’t coincides with their “true” or “natural” sex due to hegemonic criteria. The method of the empirical part of the study consists of obtaining data through the ‘Problemzentriertes Interview’ (problem-focussed interview) invented by Witzel, and the analysis of the data through the ‘Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse’ (qualitative content analysis) invented by Mayring. The study assumes that the deconstruction of domination includes the disappearance of the social groups (in the case at issue: men and women), between whom exists a relation of domination, because that groups are products of the practices of domination. The study shows, that – far from this – there happens within the interviewed sample a permanent reproduction of genders and gender hierarchies. The .pdf-file of the entire thesis consists summaries in English, French, Castilian, and German language longer than the present abstract.