This dissertation attempts to contribute to the literature on the transformation of gender relations and patriarchy by creating a discursive nexus between two seemingly incompatible paradigms: materialist dialectics as interpreted by Mao Tsetung and poststructuralist feminism. Despite the important differences between the two traditions, it argues that they have important ontological similarities. This creates the potential for a fecund cross-fertilization, a potential which has been largely unrecognized by scholars. This dissertation argues that Mao's ontology of ceaseless transformation arising from universal and concrete contradictions provides an essential foundation for any progressive praxis of social transformation. It examines aspects of how the maoist approach to materialist dialectics was put into practice in revolutionary China, along with a summary of some of the recent contributions to this paradigm by Bob Avakian. It examines the historical experience of transforming patriarchal relations and ideas under Mao and argues that, though there were real shortcomings, the historical experience of revolutionary China remains an essential foundation and contribution to transforming patriarchal gender relations and identities. Focusing on the writings of Judith Butler, it discusses the contributions of poststructuralist feminist, particularly its thorough critique of essentialism and the deconstruction of the categories and conceptual foundations of feminism. Butler's emphasis on the cultural production of gender and sex, along with the need to destabilize the regulatory functions and frameworks which police them, are invaluable in developing the ability of maoist materialist dialectics to transform gender relations. The dissertation includes a discussion of sexuality, violence and democracy as way of pointing towards a thoroughly materialist and dialectical method and approach which can move beyond the anchors of metaphysics while embracing thinking from a wide spectrum, including Queer theory. The dissertation concludes with a brief discussion on how such abstract theoretical concerns are relevant to current political realities.

Despite the growing interest in the issue of identity formation in the broader TESOL research field, few studies have been concerned with the question of female teachers’ identity formation from a feminist poststructuralist perspective. This study also seeks to further the feminist poststructuralist research within the Iranian TESOL and bridge the substantive gap within the existing literature, which is an almost untouched area of research regarding the teachers’ identity formation. This thesis attempts to explore the construction of identities of eight Iranian female teachers of English and the discourses that shape them through examining their narratives, using data gathered from interviews and email correspondences. In a two-year collaboration with the participants, I applied a feminist poststructuralist conceptual framework to examine the participants’ main subject positions and the prevailing discursive practices that construct them. The research data, collected by individual interviews and email correspondence, indicates the teachers’ identities as multiple, complex, and contradictory. I contend that multiple subject positions stem out of the clash of the multiple discourses that are available to them. Impacted by both gender and professional discourses that sometimes even collide, the findings show how these women struggle to conceive a sense of coherent self. The results of the analysis indicate that the gender and professional discourses are of normative, disciplinary, and individualizing nature. Negotiating identities within themselves and within the complex cultural context they live in, these female teachers are involved in an ongoing process of adjustment, adaptation and resistance.

Sexual harassments have since long been an issue all over the world and schools have not been an exception. Reports from Swedish secondary schools show how 47% of the female pupils state that they have, sometime during their time in school, been the victim of sexual harassment. Other studies claim that pupils exposed to sexual harassments will develop low self-esteem and a decreased sense of self. The Swedish curriculum state that all children shall have the right to a harassment free school environment, but still many pupils claim to be exposed to sexual harassment in school. Several studies have theorized about why sexual harassment is so prevalent in schools but what do the pupils think? This study aims to reveal and analyze pupil opinions about sexual harassment; what do they think it is and why do they think it occurs? This will be done from a post-structural feminist point of view with focus on the shaping of identity among the respondents.      The collected results of this study indicate that sexual harassment is mostly due to a dominant form of the heterosexual male ideal where sexual harassment against both men and women is used to secure ones position as a dominant male and to gain access to the hegemonic male group. According to the respondents, sexual harassment have little to do with the victims and in the discussion an alternative approach to handle sexual harassment in school is discussed.

This two year, topic-oriented ethnography documents teacher perceptions of cultural and institutional practices relating to sexual harassment in 12 co-educational, government ACT high schools. Participants include over one hundred and forty teachers, seventy eight of whom have contributed formal interviews. Through analysis and triangulation of ethnographic interviews, participant observation data and school and Departmental documents, the study identifies cultural and institutional practices which, according to teacher perceptions, contribute to: � encouraging sexual harassment; � discouraging reports of sexual harassment; and � discouraging implementation of sexual harassment policy. Emerging cultural and institutional practices include blame attribution, silencing and gender construction which contribute to the marginalisation of some female teachers (in terms of their career); some female students (in terms of their education) and some male students who are perceived to be "gay" (in terms of their friendship groups). The usefulness, limitations and capacity to explain sexual harassment of a range of theoretical approaches are discussed. These approaches include Attribution, Role, Reproduction and Feminist theories. It is argued that, although accounting for the majority of sexual harassment, these theories are limited in their ability to fully account for: a) all kinds of sexual harassment practised in ACT high schools; b) the relationship between sexual harassment and other kinds of harassment in ACT high schools; and c) the extent to which some women teachers appear to support the practice of sexual harassment. Emerging Poststructuralist Feminism is proposed as a potentially useful theoretical framework for explaining and responding to sexual harassment in ACT high schools. It is hoped that this study will contribute to informing the decision making of those responsible for developing and/or implementing sexual harassment policy in ACT high schools, including teachers, school counsellors, principals, and administrators.

Participatory research methodologies and the use of interactive communication technologies (ICTs) such as email are increasingly seen by many researchers, including feminists, as offering ways to enhance women’s inclusion, participation and empowerment. However, from critical and poststructuralist perspectives, some researchers suggest the need for greater caution about claims that participatory methodologies and certain communication technologies automatically enhance inclusion and empowerment. These researchers argue that issues of power, agenda and voice in the research context require greater attention (LeCompte, 1995). The major argument made in this thesis is that feminist researchers need to adopt a more critical and rigorous yet pragmatic approach to evaluating women’s empowerment, inclusion and participation, and that this approach needs to include an analysis of diversity and difference, macro and micro contexts, power-knowledge relations, and the contradictory effects of participation. The outcomes of this study suggest that this approach can create new knowledge and understanding that will enable the development of more effective strategies for women’s empowerment and inclusion. To explore and support this argument, findings are presented from a detailed evaluation and critique of a major feminist action research project that involved women in rural, regional and remote Queensland, Australia and elsewhere, a university research team and several government and industry partners. The project made extensive use of ICTs, including email and the Internet, and aimed to be empowering and inclusive. Given the many contradictory discourses of empowerment that currently circulate, empowerment is seen as a problematic concept. The multiple meanings and discourses of empowerment are therefore identified and considered in the analysis. With the increasing importance of communication technologies in rural community development, this study also evaluates the effectiveness of ICTs as a medium for empowering rural women. The ‘politics of difference’ (Young, 1990) that underpins attempts to include a diversity of rural women in feminist research projects presents many challenges to feminist praxis. Chapters 1 and 2 propose that, in evaluating such projects, researchers need to take diversity and difference into account to avoid reproducing stereotyped images of rural women, and to identify those who are included and excluded. This is because of the complex nature of the identity ‘rural woman’, the multiple barriers to women’s participation, and the diverse needs, agendas and ideologies of participants and stakeholders. The concept of seriality (Young, 1994) is used in this study to avoid reproducing ‘rural women’ and feminist researchers as women with a singular identity. Chapters 1 and 2 argue that a comprehensive and critical analysis of these complex issues requires an eclectic, transdisciplinary approach, and that this can be fruitfully achieved by using a combination of two feminist frameworks of theory and epistemology: praxis feminism and feminist poststructuralism. While there are commonalities between these frameworks, the feminist poststructuralist framework takes a much more cautious and critical approach to claims for empowerment than praxis feminism. The praxis feminist framework draws on feminist theories that view power as social, cooperative and enabling. Women’s diverse needs, values, issues and experiences are taken into account, and the analysis aims to gives voice to women. The purpose of this is to better understand the processes that meet women’s diverse needs and could be empowering and inclusive for women (or otherwise). In contrast, the feminist poststructuralist framework uses Foucault’s (1980) analytic of power as positive and strategic, exercised in all our interactions, and intimately connected to knowledge. The power-knowledge relations, and the multiple and shifting discourses and subject positions that were taken up in various research contexts are identified and analysed. The purpose of this is to highlight the contradictions and dangers inherent in feminist practices of empowerment that often go unnoticed. To achieve its practical and critical aims, this study uses two different, but complementary, research methodologies: participatory feminist evaluation and feminist deconstructive ethnography, and multiple research methods, which are outlined in Chapter 3. This eclectic approach is argued to provide maximum flexibility and creativity in the research process, and to enable the complexity and richness of the data to be represented and understood from a diversity of perspectives. Triangulation of the multiple methods and sources of data is employed to increase the validity and rigour of the analysis. Assessing how well feminist projects that use ICTs have met the aim of including a diversity of women requires an analysis of a wide range of complex social, economic, cultural, technological, contextual and methodological issues related to women’s participation. Analysing these issues also requires giving voice to a diversity of participants’ and stakeholders’ assessments and meanings of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’. The results of this analysis, set out in Chapter 4, suggest that differences in perceptions of diversity and inclusion are strongly related to participants’ and stakeholders’ political and ideological beliefs and values, and their degree of commitment to social justice issues. The evaluation found that a limited diversity of women participated in the project, and identified many barriers to their participation. Feminists argue that women-only activities are often more empowering than mixed gender activities. The evaluation findings detailed in Chapter 5 suggest that the project’s women-centred activities, particularly the workshops and online groups, were very successful in meeting the multiple needs of most participants. However, contradictory or undesirable effects of the project’s activities were also identified. This analysis demonstrates the need to consider the various groups of participants and their diverse needs in assessing how well feminist methods and activities have met women’s needs or are empowering. Chapter 6 identifies various forms and features of empowerment and disempowerment and categorises them as social, technological, political and psychological. A model is developed that illustrates the interrelationships between these four forms of empowerment. Technological empowerment is identified as a new under-theorised form of empowerment that is seen as increasingly important as ICTs become more central to women’s networking and participation. However, the findings suggest that the extent to which participants want to be empowered needs to be respected. While many participants were found to have experienced the four forms of empowerment, their participation was also shown to have had various disempowering effects. The project’s online group welink (women’s electronic link), which linked rural and urban women, including government policy-makers, was assessed as the most empowering project activity. The discourse analysis and deconstructions, undertaken in Chapter 6, identify competing and contradictory discourses of new communication technologies and feminist participatory action research. The various discourses taken up by the researchers and participants were shown to have both empowering and disempowering effects. The analysis demonstrates the intersection between empowerment and disempowerment and the shifting subject positions that were taken up, depending on the research context. It was argued that the discourses of feminist action research operated as a ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault, 1980) that regulated and constrained the discourses and practices of this form of research. An analysis of a highly contentious welink discussion challenges feminist assumptions that giving voice to women will lead to empowerment, and suggests that silence can, in some circumstances, be empowering. This analysis highlights the intersection of voice and silence, the limitations of the gendered discourse of care and connection, and how this discourse, and other factors, regulated the use of more critical discourses. Critical reflections on the study are made in Chapter 7. They include the suggestion that an ‘impossible burden’ was placed on the project’s feminist researchers who used an egalitarian feminist discourse that produced expectations of ‘equal relations’ between participants and researchers. However, these relations had to be established in the context of a university-based project that involved senior academic, government and industry staff. Drawing on the new knowledge and understandings developed, this study proposes several principles and strategies for feminist participatory action research projects that seek the inclusion and empowerment of rural women and use ICTs. They include the suggestion that feminists need an awareness of the limits to the politics of difference discourse when power-knowledge relations are ignored. A further principle is that there is value in adopting a Foucauldian analytic of power, since this enables a better understanding of the complex, multifaceted and dynamic nature of power-knowledge relations in the research context. This approach also provides an awareness of how processes that attempt to empower will inevitably produce disempowerment at certain moments. Principles and strategies for undertaking participatory feminist evaluations are also suggested.

This thesis explores constructions of gendered and gender political positions and practices of men identifying as ‘feminist’. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with 28 men aged 20-34. At issue is how seemingly contradictory positions for men as feminists are made comprehensible in theory and practice. An introduction showcase theoretical discussions on gendered experiences and the possibilities of men being feminist, mainly from standpoint, radical feminist and poststructuralist radical constructionist perspectives. Men doing feminism emerge as an unresolved complex matter. This is followed by a critical discussion of state feminism, double emancipation and research on men and masculinities in the welfare state. The support for men’s participation, predominantly as white heterosexual fathers, in the Swedish gender equality project has consequences for the construction of men as potentially ‘new’, ‘good’ gender equal feminist subjects. In the construction of profeminist positions in interview performances, interviewees are located in-between the radical feminist, poststructuralist and gender equality perspectives on men, masculinity and feminism. Two themes involve an implementation of the concept of passing and introduce the analytical concept of co-fielding. Passing consists of the microsociological process of making radical and deconstructive profeminist positions authentic and yet being able to manage masculinity in homosocial contexts. Co-fielding refers to the conjoint interlacing of experiences, knowledge and meaning-making in interview interaction where relations of researcher-researched are characterized by discursive closeness and overlapping positions. Co-fielding practices affect the outcomes of co-construction of interview performances, the negotiation of gender and power relations and the reflexive use of (in this case feminist) knowledge in qualitative interviews. In analyzing the presentations of self, ambiguous meanings of profeminist positions emerge and the doing, undoing and redoing of feminism and masculinity appear multi-faceted. Radical feminism and radical constructionism seem intersected in making men’s feminist positions comprehensible. Such rebellious positions emerge as oxymoronic and, when critically brought into the gender equality context, located in a no man’s land out of place. In all, the thesis seeks to bring together theoretical, national and empirical locations of profeminist men, and in a concluding chapter also explore issues of ethics in feminist research and cross-gender interviewing.