Public policies are often driven by a combination of factors, such as the elected government's political profile and the public opinion and pressure.  Media plays a vital role in documenting and educating public opinion on relevant issues, and that is not different for the feminist and LGBTQIA+ demands. This study analyses the Brazilian media representation of feminist movements through qualitative textual and visual analyses of selected news material from the two most prominent national newspapers ranging between 2010 and 2022. The study critically examines how the media has portrayed feminist movements in Brazil and therefore sheds light on the challenges faced by feminist activists in bringing these movements to the forefront of public discourse and driving public opinion in their favour. Overall, this thesis provides important insights into the role of the media in shaping public opinion and influencing policy outcomes. It also highlights the importance of media literacy in shaping public opinion and advancing social justice movements.

Public policies are often driven by a combination of factors, such as the elected government's political profile and the public opinion and pressure.  Media plays a vital role in documenting and educating public opinion on relevant issues, and that is not different for the feminist and LGBTQIA+ demands. This study analyses the Brazilian media representation of feminist movements through qualitative textual and visual analyses of selected news material from the two most prominent national newspapers ranging between 2010 and 2022. The study critically examines how the media has portrayed feminist movements in Brazil and therefore sheds light on the challenges faced by feminist activists in bringing these movements to the forefront of public discourse and driving public opinion in their favour. Overall, this thesis provides important insights into the role of the media in shaping public opinion and influencing policy outcomes. It also highlights the importance of media literacy in shaping public opinion and advancing social justice movements.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Sue Zschoche / Historians have often linked the route of the second wave of the women's movement on college campuses with the development of women's liberation as young women involved in the New Left came to feminist consciousness working in civil rights and anti-Vietnam protests. This dissertation considers a “longer, quieter” route to feminist consciousness on a college campus by considering the role of a dean of women, Dr. Emily Taylor, at the University of Kansas between 1956 and 1974. Through her office that centered on women’s affairs, Taylor used the student personnel and counseling profession to instigate the dissolution of parietals at KU, a project that has long been associated with New Left student protests. A liberal feminist committed to incremental change to benefit women’s equal status in society, Taylor structured her office to foster feminist consciousness in undergraduate students, and provided staff support to New Left and radical women’s groups as they emerged on the KU campus. As a result, the inter-generational exchange that occurred within the KU dean of women’s office illustrates one example of how liberal and radical feminists interacted to foster social change within an institution of higher learning. The projects undertaken within her office illustrate that these seemingly separate groups of women overlapped, collaborated, and sometimes clashed as they worked toward achieving feminist goals. Her career at KU also shows that the metaphor of a first and second wave of the women’s movement may not be an accurate picture of the growth of feminism on co-educational campuses. Little scholarly work exists on the role of deans of women in higher education, or regarding women college students in the years immediately following World War II. This dissertation adds to the literature in both areas, showing that in the case of KU the administration was not a monolithic obstacle to student protest, the New Left, civil rights, and feminism. Instead, Taylor as dean of women pushed initiatives that bore on all of these areas. While Taylor is one example, her career illustrates patterns in deans of women’s activities that deserve further study and consideration.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Sydney, 1996. / Inscribed by author. Includes glossary, bibliography, and appendices.

This dissertation analyzes the performance praxis of the Mexican poet Nahui Olin (1893-1978) and the Salvadoran guerrilla leader and author Nidia Díaz (1952-). Through their self-representation in images and texts, these two women subverted the discourse of power characteristic of their respective cultural and historical contexts. Whereas Olin carried out her “corporeal activism” through defiant eroticism; Díaz did so through her stoic stance in the face of incarceration and torture. The dissertation carries out visual analyses enriched by attention to literature, and literary analyses informed by visual culture. In their respective approaches to performance these two figures engage with their sociopolitical contexts as they relate to women’s condition and the quest for spiritual liberation. The first chapter presents the dissertation’s theoretical framework. Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Elaine Scarry’s theories are crucial to understanding the concepts of body, discourse of power, performance, and pain; Gillian Rose’s approach is essential to analyzing images; Lucia Guerra-Cunningham and Rita Felski are fundamental for addressing women’s writing. The second chapter focuses on Olin’s activism, evident in her role as a “flapper,” her transgressive nude photographs and her poems written during the Mexican post-revolutionary period and which were influenced by avant-garde movements. My analysis links the key photograph I call “Nahui Olin Andrógina” with her poetry, centering on the trope of androgyny as a mystic state. The third chapter examines the naïf self-portraits and testimonio found in Díaz’s Nunca estuve sola (in 1988), which she narrates her imprisonment during El Salvador’s civil war of the 1980’s. My analysis centers on the trope of stoicism manifested in her drawing I call “Una ‘mesías’ que deviene en la madre del pueblo” as well as in the prose of her testimonio. Olin’s erotic activism and Díaz’s armed rebellion both represent attempts to achieve human liberation, including their own as oppressed women, and suggested emancipatory paths that may serve as models for others.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Sydney, 1996.

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This dissertation aims to contribute to the burgeoning field of Arab-American feminist critique through an exploration of the work of four contemporary Arab-American women poets: Etel Adnan (1925-), a poet and a visual artist and a writer, Naomi Shihab Nye (1952-), poet, a song writer, and a novelist, Mohja Kahf (1967-), a poet, an Islamic feminist critic and author, and Suheir Hammad (1973-), a hip-hop poet and political activist. The study traverses the intersections of stereotypical racial and Orientalist discourses with which these women contend, and which have been further complicated by being shaped against the backdrop of the “War on Terror” and hostility against Arabs, Muslims and Arab-Americans in the post-September 11 era. Hence, the study attempts to examine their poetry as a tool for resistance, and as a space for conciliating the complexities of their hyphenated identities. The last two decades of the twentieth-century saw the rise of a rich body of Arab-American women writing which has elicited increasing academic and critical interest. However, extensive scholarly and critical attention was mainly drawn to novels and non-fiction prose produced by Arab-American women writers as reflected in the huge array of anthologies, journal articles, book reviews and academic studies. Although such efforts aim to research and examine the racial politics that have impacted the community and how it relates to feminist discourses in the United States, they have rarely addressed or researched how the ramifications of these racialised politics and discourses are articulated in Arab-American women’s poetry per se. Informed by a wide range of postcolonial and United States ethnic theory and criticism, feminist discourses of women of colour such Gloria Anzaldúa's borderland theory, and Lisa Lowe's discussions of ethnic cultural formations in addition to transnational feminism, this study seeks to lay the groundwork for a complex analysis of Arab-American feminist poetics, based on both national and transnational literary approaches. The dissertation addresses the following questions: how does the genre of poetry negotiate identity politics and affiliations of belonging in the current polarized and historical moment? How do these women poets challenge the troubling oppressed/exoticised representations of Arab/Muslim women prevalent in the United States mainstream culture? How does each of these poets express their vision of social and political transformation? Emphasising the varying ethnic, religious, national, political, and cultural backgrounds and affiliations of these four poets, this dissertation attempts to defy any notion of the monolithic experience of Arab-American women, and argues for a nuanced understanding of specificity and diversity of Arab-American feminist experiences and articulations. To achieve its aim, the study depicts the historical evolution of Arab women’s poetry in the United States throughout four generations in order to examine the deriving issues and formative elements that contributed to the development of this genre, and also to pinpoint the defining characteristics marking Arab-American women poetry as a cultural production of American women of Arab descent. Through close readings and critical analyses of texts, the dissertation offers an investigation of some of the major themes and issues handled by these Arab-American women to highlight the most persistent tropes that mark this developing literary genre. Eventually, this study shows how literature, and specifically poetry becomes a conduit to investigate Arab-American cultural and sociopolitical conditions. It also offers productive explorations of identities and representations that transcend the rigid essential totalising categorisation of identity, while attempting to forge a new space for cultural translation and social transformation.

The thesis uses the case study of the experience of middle-class northern white women in America during the period 1800-1860 to explore several issues of wider significance. Firstly, the research focuses upon the dynamic relationships between the culturally-constructed categories of public/formal and private/informal power and participation at both the practical and symbolic levels, suggesting ways in which they intersected on the lives of women. Secondly, consideration is given to the validity of the stereotyped view that 'domestic' women were necessarily disadvantaged and dominated relative to those who aspired to public political and economic roles. Thirdly, the relationship of religious belief to these two areas is discussed, in order to discover its relevance to the way in which women both perceived themselves and were perceived by others. In seeking to explore these issues, the research has analysed the patterns of social and cultural change in the era under question, indicating how those changes influenced the perceptions and experiences of both women and men. Their reactions in terms of discourse and activity are located as strategies of negotiation in redefining both social role and participation for the sexes. The rhetoric of 'separate spheres', which was used by men and women to order their mental and physical surroundings, is reduced to its symbolic constituents in order to illustrate that the distinction between male and female arenas was more perceptual than actual. The motivating forces behind the activities and ideas of women themselves are investigated to determine the role of religion in the construction of both female self-images and wider negotiational strategies. The context of nineteenth-century social dynamics has been revealed by detailed analysis of extensive primary sources originated by both women and men for private as well as public consumption. Feminist tools of analysis which enable the conceptualisation of 'meaningful discourse' as including female contributions have further enhanced the specific focus on how women constructed their own world-views and approaches to reality. 'Traditional' approaches and tools are shown to have seriously skewed and misrepresented the reality and variety of both discourse and female experience in the era. Great efforts have been made to allow women to speak in their own words. This has produced an insight into a richness of female social participation and discourse which would otherwise be obscured. The research indicates that women were indeed actors and negotiators during the period. Those women who advocated as primary the duties of women in the domestic and social arenas were by no means setting narrow limitations on female participation in both society and discourse. The religious impulses and eschatological frameworks derived by women (varied as they were) served to order and renegotiate reality and meaning, whilst they produced female roles and influence of great significance. Women were not passive victims of male oppression. Religion can thus be perceived as a positive force which women were able to approach both for its own sake, and for their own particular ends.