This thesis examines how gender operates in food theory, and reads across three contemporary North American writers to understand how they take up or divert gendered culinary configurations. Food is deeply embedded in cultural practices, and is therefore inflected by gender and gendered roles of a particular culture. In North America, for example, meat is commonly understood as symbolic of masculinity and eaten by men, and vegetables are symbolic of femininity and eaten by women. Sallie Tisdale’s The Best Thing l Ever Tasted (2000), Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998), and Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms (1994) and The Kappa Child (2004), can be read as investigations into how a gendered subjectivity can be established or destabilised through food. By offering a close reading of moments of food consumption in these texts, I argue that Tisdale, Ozeki, and Goto offer a complicated and implicated gendering of food that moves beyond the binary model. The thesis is divided into three chapters that discuss how each writer approaches food and gender, and reformulates eating practices as a complex conversation rather than as a direct result of gender. The first chapter offers an introduction to how gender operates in food theory, an in-depth analysis of contemporary gendered food practices and commercials, and gives an outline for how Tisdale, Ozeki, and Goto write oppositionally from within a gendered culinary structure. Chapter two investigates how the implementation of gender roles through food practises, and cultural figures such as Betty Crocker inform how women cook and eat in Tisdale and Ozeki’s texts. Chapter three is devoted to how Hiromi Goto challenges received notions of gender and food by not gendering her protagonists and refusing to make her female characters readily consumable by the reader. In my conclusion I theorise how seeing food practices as an extension of a character’s subjectivity can root theories of food in the materiality of the food itself. I conclude that, rather than abiding by gendered stereotypes, Tisdale, Ozeki, and Goto promote awareness, creativity and joy as more sustainable ways of knowing and eating our food.

This thesis examines how gender operates in food theory, and reads across three contemporary North American writers to understand how they take up or divert gendered culinary configurations. Food is deeply embedded in cultural practices, and is therefore inflected by gender and gendered roles of a particular culture. In North America, for example, meat is commonly understood as symbolic of masculinity and eaten by men, and vegetables are symbolic of femininity and eaten by women. Sallie Tisdale’s The Best Thing l Ever Tasted (2000), Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998), and Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms (1994) and The Kappa Child (2004), can be read as investigations into how a gendered subjectivity can be established or destabilised through food. By offering a close reading of moments of food consumption in these texts, I argue that Tisdale, Ozeki, and Goto offer a complicated and implicated gendering of food that moves beyond the binary model. The thesis is divided into three chapters that discuss how each writer approaches food and gender, and reformulates eating practices as a complex conversation rather than as a direct result of gender. The first chapter offers an introduction to how gender operates in food theory, an in-depth analysis of contemporary gendered food practices and commercials, and gives an outline for how Tisdale, Ozeki, and Goto write oppositionally from within a gendered culinary structure. Chapter two investigates how the implementation of gender roles through food practises, and cultural figures such as Betty Crocker inform how women cook and eat in Tisdale and Ozeki’s texts. Chapter three is devoted to how Hiromi Goto challenges received notions of gender and food by not gendering her protagonists and refusing to make her female characters readily consumable by the reader. In my conclusion I theorise how seeing food practices as an extension of a character’s subjectivity can root theories of food in the materiality of the food itself. I conclude that, rather than abiding by gendered stereotypes, Tisdale, Ozeki, and Goto promote awareness, creativity and joy as more sustainable ways of knowing and eating our food.

This thesis examines how gender operates in food theory, and reads across three contemporary North American writers to understand how they take up or divert gendered culinary configurations. Food is deeply embedded in cultural practices, and is therefore inflected by gender and gendered roles of a particular culture. In North America, for example, meat is commonly understood as symbolic of masculinity and eaten by men, and vegetables are symbolic of femininity and eaten by women. Sallie Tisdale’s The Best Thing l Ever Tasted (2000), Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998), and Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms (1994) and The Kappa Child (2004), can be read as investigations into how a gendered subjectivity can be established or destabilised through food. By offering a close reading of moments of food consumption in these texts, I argue that Tisdale, Ozeki, and Goto offer a complicated and implicated gendering of food that moves beyond the binary model. The thesis is divided into three chapters that discuss how each writer approaches food and gender, and reformulates eating practices as a complex conversation rather than as a direct result of gender. The first chapter offers an introduction to how gender operates in food theory, an in-depth analysis of contemporary gendered food practices and commercials, and gives an outline for how Tisdale, Ozeki, and Goto write oppositionally from within a gendered culinary structure. Chapter two investigates how the implementation of gender roles through food practises, and cultural figures such as Betty Crocker inform how women cook and eat in Tisdale and Ozeki’s texts. Chapter three is devoted to how Hiromi Goto challenges received notions of gender and food by not gendering her protagonists and refusing to make her female characters readily consumable by the reader. In my conclusion I theorise how seeing food practices as an extension of a character’s subjectivity can root theories of food in the materiality of the food itself. I conclude that, rather than abiding by gendered stereotypes, Tisdale, Ozeki, and Goto promote awareness, creativity and joy as more sustainable ways of knowing and eating our food. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This degree project was made in collaboration with Nordicstation. The project task was to develop a testing application for a self-developed telephone survey service, which uses third party software. This third party software showed to be unreliable at higher loads. The purpose of the application is to analyse the speech quality of clients connected to the service. This report gives an introduction to the speech quality algorithms Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) and Single Sided Speech Quality Measure (3SQM). It also gives descriptions of the methods used to develop the application. The final chapters in this report are about the testing of the telephone service. The primary result of the testing was that the telephone service is unable to acceptably handle 80+ clients and recommendations to Nordicstation is to set a maximum of parallel connected clients to 80 or find an alternative to the third party software currently in use. / Detta examensarbete har gjorts i samarbete med Nordicstation. Projektets uppgift var att utveckla ett test program för at testa en egenutvecklad telefonundersökning-tjänst, baserad på tredjeparts mjukvara. Denna tredjeparts mjukvara visade sig vara opålitlig vid högre belastning. Syftet med programmet är att analysera samtals kvalitéten på de klienter som är anslutna till tjänsten. Denna rapport ger en introduktion till ljudkvalitetsalgoritmer så som Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) och Single Sided Speech Quality Measure (3SQM). Rapporten går även igenom de metoder som använts för att utvecklat programmet. De sista kapitlen i denna rapport är om själva testningen av telefonitjänsten. Det primära resultatet av testningen var att telefontjänsten inte kan hantera 80+ klienter acceptabelt och rekommendationer till Nordicstation är att sätta ett tak på maximalt parallellt anslutna klienter till 80 eller hitta ett alternativ till den tredjeparts mjukvara som nu används.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Washington State University, May 2010. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on June 17, 2010). "Department of English." Includes bibliographical references (p. 151-162).

In this thesis the subject of grief and healing are examined in three novels by the Japanese writers Hiromi Kawakami, Ruth Ozeki and Banana Yoshimoto. The method for the analysis is based on psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief theory, but in the analysis of these novels, it became clear that the grief/healing-stages for the protagonists are not expressed in the exact same manner as the non-fictional patients of Kübler-Ross’ study. The analysis shows that this is partly due to the fact that the narratives take place in Japan and that there is a clear intervention where the writers have used magical interruptions in their realistic portrayal of bereavement, to help the protagonists begin to recover. These magical interruptions, this thesis states, are the use of magical realism, especially connected to the long history of Japanese folklore and myth. As a result, this thesis presents a modified model of analysis, which also reflects how the protagonists filled with bereavement and sorrow can be helped to heal and recover by the interruption of fantastic and magical events. Through this study it has become clear that not only is the need for healing significant but the need for family, relationships and a sense of belonging are just as important. To re-connect with their lost loved ones, whomever they may be, these characters must cross through the magical interventions within the narratives and dare to reach out to the people around them, strengthened by their loss and trauma, rather than fearing relationships with others due to previous trauma and grief.

This thesis investigates three contemporary Canadian texts— Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and Rita Wong’s forage—that treat information as an object that can be wasted and recuperated. Using information theory and a new sub-field of critical waste theory called “Discard Studies,” I explore how the authors studied in this thesis place these two lines of thought alongside one another to examine how the concept of recycling information challenges the material, cultural, and ideological structures that distance humans from their waste. Specifically, I read the event of recycling as an interruptive act that triggers a reassessment of the (im)material connections that tether humans to their waste, vast (inter)national networks of exchange, and environmental crises related to our garbage.

<p>The term magical realism traces back to the German art critic Franz Roh, who in the early twentieth century applied it to (visual) art expressing the wondrousness of life. However, this definition has been eclipsed over time. Reorienting critical attention back to magical realism as the art of portraying wonder and wondering, I explore the magical realist novels of contemporary African American and Asian American women writers. Specifically, I examine Toni Morrison’s <em>Paradise</em> (1997), Jesmyn Ward’s <em>Sing, Unburied, Sing</em> (2017), Karen Tei Yamashita’s <em>Through the Arc of the Rain Forest</em> (1990), and Ruth Ozeki’s <em>A Tale for the Time Being</em> (2013). In wonder, all frames of reference at hand suddenly become inadequate. Simultaneously, the subject’s interest is heightened. As such, the act/experience of wondering may lead to humility and respect, the two attitudes at the base of any ethically flourishing life—a life that flourishes <em>with</em> others. For this reason, the Asian American woman writer and peace activist Maxine Hong Kingston espoused wondering. Affiliated with groups marginalized within the US, like Kingston my writers also promote wonder. I examine how these writers, through compelling use of both content and form, guide their readers toward a particular kind of wondering: wondering with an awareness of how the act/experience might lead to ethical flourishing.</p>