La presente tesis aborda el tema de la identidad femenina y las relaciones de poder que la determinan en los relatos de Luisa Valenzuela. Se analizan dos grupos de relatos de la autora que subvierten los modelos dominantes y opresivos de la feminidad. El primer grupo abarca las reescrituras de los cuentos de hadas, mientras el segundo trata la construcción de la feminidad en el ambiente de la última dictadura militar argentina. Los dos grupos de relatos presentan una suerte de crítica respecto a la formación discursiva de la mujer como sujeto. La tesis presenta en los capítulos introductorios varios problemas teóricos que se reflejan en la obra ensayística y narrativa de Valenzuela. Se analizan las relaciones entre el posmodernismo, el posestructuralismo y el feminismo, especialmente en lo que concierne al problema del sujeto femenino. También se presentan las teorías de Luce Irigaray y Hélène Cixous sobre la escritura femenina que guardan muchas similitudes con las de Valenzuela. Estas autoras realizan ante todo el análisis deconstructivo del discurso psicoanalítico sobre la sexualidad femenina y la señalan como el lugar de la represión discursiva falocéntrica, pero también como el instrumento de la conquista de la libertad. Las dos teorizan sobre un lenguaje femenino, a veces fundándose en ciertas ideas esencialistas sobre la identidad femenina. El concepto clave en la poética de Valenzuela es el de “escribir con el cuerpo”. Valenzuela se reafirma en la existencia de una escritura específicamente femenina, que tiene su origen en una sexualidad y experiencia históricas únicas de la mujer. Escribir con el cuerpo significa oponerse a la unión del logos con la cultura falocéntrica, hablar desde una posición de marginalización de las mujeres en la cultura y la sociedad patriarcales. Los cuentos de hadas de Perrault y de los hermanos Grimm representan un tipo de discurso marcadamente falocéntrico y las reescrituras de la autora sirven para deconstruir la arbitrariedad sociocultural que está en base de los textos que pretenden presentarse como transcendentales y cercanos a la mitología, el folklore y los contenidos universales de la psique humana. Se trata de la crítica de los modos más sutiles de la normativización del sujeto femenino a través de las ideas de la belleza, la virtud, la humildad y la pasividad de las heroínas, en contraste con las brujas y las madrastras. Las rescrituras de Valenzuela devuelven la voz narrativa a las heroínas y subvierten las dicotomías entre las construcciones normativas y estigmatizadas de la feminidad. Los relatos que tratan la vida de las mujeres bajo la dictadura militar argentina comparten algunas características importantes con las reescrituras de los cuentos de hadas, pero también presentan diferencias importantes que exigen otro tipo de análisis y una contextualización sociohistórica adicional. El libro de Diane Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War”, analiza las estrategias discursivas y performativas de la propaganda oficial del régimen dictatorial a partir de las ideas posestructuralistas y proporciona instrumentos críticos muy importantes para acercarse a este grupo de relatos. Taylor demuestra de qué manera los discursos y las prácticas autoritarias militares participaron en la construcción simbólica de la feminidad. El “relato maestro” de la dictadura argentina exhibe características más siniestras que los cuentos de hadas, puesto que presenta a las mujeres no sumisas como un Otro deshumanizado, lo que justifica los castigos más brutales. Los dos grupos de relatos analizados en la tesis expanden la idea de la identidad femenina más allá de su construcción dominante. La liberación femenina se persigue principalmente a través de la reapropiación del lenguaje; las heroínas toman la voz narrativa para oponerse a las narraciones canónicas que crean y oprimen a los sujetos femeninos. Valenzuela no propone ningún modelo hegemónico de la feminidad, más bien quiere ampliar el horizonte de las posibilidades para la mujer a través de la subversión de los discursos y las estructuras sociales dominantes. / This thesis attempts to analyze from a feminist perspective the concept of female identity and the depiction of power relations in selected stories of the Argentinian writer Luisa Valenzuela. The study aims to show in which ways the author subverts oppressive models of femininity created in canonical fairy tales which she is rewriting, as well as the manner in which some of her stories denounce the construction of femininity during the last Argentinian dictatorship. In her essays, Luisa Valenzuela has developed a theory about the specificity of women’s writing and the role of a woman in subversion of existing social, cultural and political orders. I tried to establish a theoretical framework about female identity with regard to poststructuralist theories of the subject and their relations to feminism. I also presented the ideas of French feminists, Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous, about women’s writing and female desire which bear a strong resemblance to the ideas developed by Valenzuela. Moving between poststructuralism and essentialism, Valenzuela’s poetics and politics propose the idea of a woman as a privileged subject of social change, deriving the strength from her historical oppression. She is thus able to reinvent her identity in a freer manner than a man, and even able to access the obscure knowledge, suppressed by the dominant, falogocentric culture. In her rewritings of fairy tales, Valenzuela tries to subvert the traditional discourse about femininity. The tales of Perrault and Grimm created the normative model of femininity, in accordance with the social conception of appropriate women’s behavior of their time. As such, this literary tradition is reflecting and further establishing the patriarchal oppression of women. The traditional heroines of fairy tales have no voice of their own, are submissive, passive and obedient, their primary ambition being to get married. The narrative voice is omniscient, and the very specific, falocentric view is presented as a universal, objective truth. Valenzuela’s rewritings give voice back to women, subvert the dichotomies between normative and stigmatized constructions of femininity, and give agency and autonomy to the heroines who take charge of their destinies. Valenzuela also subverts dominant discourses of femininity in her stories about the ultimate Argentinian dictatorship. The grand narrative of the dictatorial regime constructs femininity as fragile and submissive. These stories describe physical abuse in conjunction with symbolic acts of gendered oppression and as such exhibit more obvious modes of control of women and their bodies and identities, but also denounce the more subtle, discursive and performative ways by which the regime enforces femininity to their political enemies as a means of degrading them. The question of female sexuality and of writing with the body obtains special meaning in this sociohistorical context. The bodies that write are to be interpreted as tortured, abused and stigmatized bodies and are conceptualized as parts of discursive and performative reality rather than natural bodies who try to subvert the system by their connection with mythical or ahistorical essence. The two groups of stories analyzed in the thesis subvert the dominant, falogocentric discourses of femininity and expand the idea of a female identity beyond its canonical production. The main proposition of Valenzuela’s stories is reappropriation of female language, primarily by giving the narrative voice to the heroines who challenge the traditional and dominant narratives by which the female subjects are constructed and subjugated. She does not aim to create any hegemonic model of femininity but rather to question the existing social structures and discourses which stand on a woman’s way to liberation.

This thesis aims to contribute to the developments of wireless communication systems. The work generally consists of three parts: the first part is a discussion on general digital communication systems, the second part focuses on wireless channel modelling and fading mitigation techniques, and in the third part we discuss the possible application of advanced digital signal processing, especially time-frequency representation and blind source separation, to wireless communication systems. The first part considers general digital communication systems which will be incorporated in later parts. Today's wireless communication system is a subbranch of a general digital communication system that employs various techniques of A/D (Analog to Digital) conversion, source coding, error correction, coding, modulation, and synchronization, signal detection in noise, channel estimation, and equalization. We study and develop the digital communication algorithms to enhance the performance of wireless communication systems. In the Second Part we focus on wireless channel modelling and fading mitigation techniques. A modified Jakes' method is developed for Rayleigh fading channels. We investigate the level-crossing rate (LCR), the average duration of fades (ADF), the probability density function (PDF), the cumulative distribution function (CDF) and the autocorrelation functions (ACF) of this model. The simulated results are verified against the analytical Clarke's channel model. We also construct frequency-selective geometrical-based hyperbolically distributed scatterers (GBHDS) for a macro-cell mobile environment with the proper statistical characteristics. The modified Clarke's model and the GBHDS model may be readily expanded to a MIMO channel model thus we study the MIMO fading channel, specifically we model the MIMO channel in the angular domain. A detailed analysis of Gauss-Markov approximation of the fading channel is also given. Two fading mitigation techniques are investigated: Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and spatial diversity. In the Third Part, we devote ourselves to the exciting fields of Time-Frequency Analysis and Blind Source Separation and investigate the application of these powerful Digital Signal Processing (DSP) tools to improve the performance of wireless communication systems.