published_or_final_version / abstract / Politics and Public Administration / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation explores the ways that specific constructions of "masculinity" and related "gendered" discourses of political power helped shape the foreign policy decisions of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. I argue that both prescriptive and proscriptive aspects of an elite "ideology of masculinity" played an important role in Kennedy administration innovations like counterinsurgency programs or the Peace Corps. The U.S. intervention in Vietnam under both Presidents was shaped in significant ways by a decision-making process embedded in a gendered discourse that equated negotiation with "appeasement," "softness," feminized weakness, and the collapse of boundaries; the use of force was construed as "tough-minded," a pragmatic "hardness" to buttress vital imperial and domestic political boundaries. This dissertation places analytical and interpretive emphasis on the heretofore largely unexamined role of gender and culture in American foreign policy of the Cold War. The study has two aspects. The first focuses on the creation of elite masculine "identity-narratives"; I examine the patterns of masculine socialization common to Kennedy and the elite "establishment" figures he recruited to staff his national security bureaucracy. I discuss patterns of experience in sex-segregated educational, fraternal, and military institutions, and the ritual ordeals employed by those institutions to create overlapping brotherhoods of privilege and power. I examine their experience of the gendered and sexualized political discourse of the nineteen-fifties, and the lessons they learned from the government purges which equated "subversion" and "sex perversion" when targeting victims. The second aspect of the study examines the "real world" consequences of the prescriptive and proscriptive ideology of masculinity shared by the national security staff of Kennedy and Johnson. I look at the ways that programs like counterinsurgency or the Peace Corps were shaped by ideals of masculine strenuousness and heroism, and in turn used as a political theater of masculinity for domestic political purposes. Decision-making about Vietnam was inextricably bound up with "private" identity-narratives of masculine power, and a public political discourse revolving around questions of "strength" or "weakness" in leaders. The politics of masculinity shaped the cost-benefit reason of U.S. policy-makers.

The appropriate relationship between political authority and education/schools as it relates to jurisdictional, procedural and substantive considerations, is highly contested. Several political theorists, including Amy Gutmann, Brian Barry, Chandran Kukathas and Iris Marion Young, have contributed to the debate, each prioritizing one of these considerations over the others. Attempts by other scholars to reconcile the considerations often fail to adequately accept the implications of the theoretical underpinnings of each. A political theoretical orientation that combines a recognition of institutional specificity with an awareness of the multifaceted nature of contested phenomena will enable theorists to address the heretofore intractable points of contention amongst political theorists surrounding issues of jurisdictional/procedural propriety and substantive goodness as they relate to educational practices and institutions. This orientation clarifies the dialogue between the most prominent theoretical approaches to analysis of political authority's just relation to education within modern liberal democracies.

With the case of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, this thesis intervenes into the contemporary discourse of "politics of space". It argues that the two theoretical perspectives provided by the contemporary spatial theorists---the structuralist approach and the phenomenological approach, have obvious inadequacy in understanding the phenomena of space in human society. For this regard, this thesis suggests to build up a political theory of space, which has its solid foundations in the spatial ideas in the classical political theories. The political perspective of space emphasizes the politics of space in the ideal-praxis processes. The perspective affirms the existence of the "autonomous sphere of political action", which is in contrary to the social theory, in which "the political" is subsumed under the macro social processes. The case of Tiananmen Square will demonstrate how space is related to human's collective action in pursuing the political and social utopia. / Lee Ka Kiu. / 論文(哲學博士)--香港中文大學, 2006. / 參考文獻(p. 232-263). / Adviser: Shu Yun Ma. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-03, Section: A, page: 1144. / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in Chinese and English. / School code: 1307. / Lun wen (zhe xue bo shi)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue, 2006. / Can kao wen xian (p. 232-263). / Lee Ka Kiu.

Pleasure Consuming Medicine investigates the significance of the classification of drugs for conceptions of personhood in the context of consumer citizenship. It examines how drug discourses operate politically to sustain particular notions of personhood and organise bodies. As the normative conception of social life shifts to a discourse of consumer agency and active citizenship, it is argued, drugs come to describe the moral boundaries of a freedom configured around personal consumption. The thesis tracks the parallel rise of two discourses of drug mis/use from the 1970s - a discourse of 'drug abuse' and a discourse of 'patient compliance' - illustrating how these discourses bind personal agency to medical authority through a vocabulary of self-administration. It describes how illicit drugs are constructed as a sign and instance of excessive conformity to consumer culture, and how this excess is opportunistically scooped off and spectacularised to stage an intense but superficial battle between the amoral market and the moral state. Pleasure Consuming Medicine uses a theoretical frame developed from queer theory, corporeal feminism, governmentality studies and cultural studies to explore the political character of drug regimes, tracing some of the ramifications for sex, race, class, and citizenship. Then it turns to the field of gay men's HIV education to conceive some alternative and provisional vocabularies of safety. The thesis develops an argument on the exercise of power in consumer society, with the aim of contributing to cultural and critical understandings of consumption, embodiment, sex, health, and citizenship.

Why has the significant expansion of a certain social category‘s population and influences– largely resulting from the development of national economy and free market system – NOT frequently caused political instability and unrest to the authoritarian regime during the reform era? How has the regime upgraded its strategies of sociopolitical control by combining the market logics into the conventional approaches? And what strategies has the Party-state adopted so as to preempt and prevent this social category‘s potential challenges from occurring in this ever-changing period? This study undertakes the task of understanding these theoretical questions by looking at the Chinese Communist Party-state‘s sociopolitical control mechanisms over intellectuals during the reform era. Particularly, it primarily seeks to tackle the following empirical issues: How has the state-intellectual relationship in 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century been shaped differently comparing with that in the previous period? Why has it been shaped in that particular pattern? In the face of what kinds of institutional and intellectual challenges has the CCP inherited and created a number of different forms of sociopolitical control mechanisms over intellectuals for the persistence of its authoritarian rule in China? And to what extent could this particular pattern of state-intellectual relationship drawn upon the case of China be extended to other transitional countries? The author seeks to solve these questions by developing a theoretical framework of Politicized Academic Capitalism. The core of such a framework is a kind of hybrid institutional arrangement designed by the Chinese Communist Party-state with the employment of the market logics as the important means of interest-sharing with and hence the sociopolitical control mechanism over intellectuals who serve in higher education institutions. By highlighting the scarcity and competition as the primary logics of the market, the author further holds that scarcity is the natural and logical prerequisite for the competition, and the competition is manipulated by the Party-state to keep intellectuals being in a constantly busy situation and working along the line drawn by the state. Moreover, shaping scarcity is an effective way to show the significance of key resources and the related interests that could be shared with the Party-state, and then manipulating competition becomes the only manifested way to enjoy this interest-sharing privilege. This study is conducted on a basis of a variety of data sources, including historical documents, media accounts and reports on currently related events, organizational charts and regulations, university archives, interviews with key persons, and a set of biographies and memoirs of renowned intellectuals. These intensive empirical probes into the complex relations among the Chinese Communist Party-state, institutions of higher learning, and the intellectual community have revealed that economic reforms have strengthened the state capacity and facilitated the state‘s means of social control. And the Politicized Academic Capitalism can be viewed as a hybrid institutional arrangement designed by the Party-state to employ the logic of the market to impose sociopolitical control over university intellectuals during the reform era. / published_or_final_version / Politics and Public Administration / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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An investigation of Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, and Time's content emphasis in articles focusing on the 1980 presidential primary season was conducted in this study. The content emphasis was broken down into four categories: "horserace," "issues," "candidates' personal qualifications," and "other." The categories of "issues" and "candidates' personal qualifications" were combined to form the "substantive" category for the purpose of learning whether the content emphasis of the articles fell into either the "horserace" or "substantive" category.The unit of analysis for this study was the paragraph and a panel of coders was used to determine paragraph classifications. If a paragraph was classified "horserace" its emphasis was entertainment, portraying the campaign as a contest. If a paragraph was classified "substantive" its emphasis was information, concentrating on the issues of the campaign and the qualifications of the candidates.The researcher totaled the raw scores and the percentages of the categories to learn which type of content emphasis was being practiced by the magazines. To substantiate the level of significance in the differences of the raw scores the chi-square test was employed.Findings of the raw score totals in the four categories indicated that 61 percent of the 327 randomly selected paragraphs were classified as having "horserace" content emphasis, 10 percent were classified "issues," 19.3 percent were classified "candidates' personal qualifications," and 9.5 percent were classified "other." The "issues" and "candidates' personal qualifications" categories were combined and represented 29.3 percent.Chi-square tests showed that there were significantly less "substantive" paragraphs than "horserace" paragraphs overall, and Time magazine's coverage was the closest in balance between the two categories.The time period of this study was January 7, 1980 through June 16, 1980. This study also found that Newsweek had the largest amount of campaign coverage with 52 stories in 24 issues; next was Time with 41 stories in 19 issues; followed by U.S. News and World Report with 24 stories about the primary campaign and candidates in 18 issues.