This dissertation examines the experience of former collegiate football hostesses and presents an autoethnographic narrative from my viewpoint as a female researcher enmeshed in the culture of athletics. The exploration reveals the experience of gender, race, and power as told through my own stories as well as those of former hostesses. My exploratory study reveals the contradiction and conflict between and amongst women’s experiences as well as brings to light the aspects of hostess experience that the media rarely highlights. I wrote this for readers to witness and understand the complexity of the hostess experience, its privileges and challenges.

Welcome to the Branch is a two-act play that investigates issues of cultural differences in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (or LDS church), more commonly known as the Mormon Church. Set in modern-day, downtown Richmond, Welcome to the Branch follows two very different members of the LDS church as they examine and try to understand both their religion, in the context of its cultural and social history, and their place in it. One is Molly, a Caucasian, middle-class young woman from Utah, in Richmond temporarily for her husband's graduate school; the other is Aina, an African American, single mother living in Mosby Court who has recently joined the LDS church. While Aina struggles for survival and looks for meaning in a church where, historically, she would not have felt welcome, Molly slowly comes to terms with the limitations of her own sheltered background.

This thesis is a study of female authorship that examines the feature films of Jane Campion in order to determine how her preoccupation with the cinematic articulation of 'female experience' is expressed in her films-whether female experience can be aestheticised, and to discover whether her gender can be discerned through the films of a woman director. The exploration of these ideas entails a review of the feminist thinking, methodologies and epistemologies that are relevant to cinema, and that examine relevant theoretical positions within feminism and theories of cinematic authorship. The key lens employed here for theorising Campion's cinema is that of postmodern-feminism. As an approach, this allows an understanding of difference rather than 'Otherness', and an enquiry into gender that is neither essentialist nor constructionist, but facilitates critical thinking about both positions. The central argument of this thesis is that Campion's film practice functions as an investigation into gender difference, how women and men live together in the world-experience that world, and are engendered as female through historic, psychological and cultural experiences. This thesis therefore argues that Campion's aesthetic and perspective is not only feminist, but also, female, and feminine, and her work a cinematic articulation of female experience.

The Diploma Thesis, Body under supervision. Corporeality and Sexuality in the novel Lovely green eyes, focuses on gender analysis of the literary work, which itself deals with gender relations and emphasizes a women's experience. The Lustig's novels setting is full of "feminine" themes and seems to be feminist at first glance. With a closer look you can find an intruder in the form of a "masculine" narrator, depicting the woman mainly as a body and a "thing to look at." The key concept of the thesis is a feminist literary criticism, using the resisting reader method by Judith Fetterley, that draws attention to the existence of a universal male perspective. As every text analysis is discours analysis as well, the other method I will apply will be the discours analysis method. For the analysis of narrator's point of view, I will apply Laura Mulvey's theory of voyeurism, to find out if the text does portray the female experience as erotic. Because of the strong textual interpellation, requiring readers to identify with the narrator's view, it is important to pay attention to the narrator's point of view and find the possibilities of refusing the interpellation of the text. As a starting point for the analysis of the female Holocaust experience, the thesis will focus on Gender aspects of the Holocaust...

This thesis is concerned with the world of The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and The Testaments (2019), works of Margaret Atwood. The dystopian theocratic totalitarian regime featured in these novels invites a socio-historical and anthropological analysis and interpretation from the perspective of the subjugated female characters. The theoretical part, introduced by an overview of Atwood's work, provides the reader with crucial information regarding the historical parallels which inspired the narrative, as well as a delimitation of relevant anthropological concepts, such as liminality or status reversal. Subsequently, using both the knowledge gathered in the theoretical and in Atwood's works, the rise of the fundamentalist cult of the Sons of Jacob and their project, the Republic of Gilead, is explained, and their ideology is uncovered in the first section of the practical part. Second part of the interpretation focuses on the position of women within the system that subjugates and oppresses them. The analysis is performed by the means of comparing and contrasting the ideal models of the positions of women as designed by the architects of the system with the actual application on the example of selected characters. The ultimate aims of this thesis are to prove the innate sexism and misogyny of the...

The diploma thesis is concerned with the portrayal of the female experience with the Second World War in The Night Watch (2006) by contemporary British writer Sarah Waters. The theoretical part outlines the socio-historical background of the novel with particular attention to the female experience of the Second World War in various fields, such as their family lives, job opportunities, and everyday life during the Blitz. Special attention is also given to the description of the female experience with abortion during the war and the lifestyles of female homosexuals in that historical period. The thesis further presents the theoretical delimitation of the neo-historical genre, of which the novel is a representative, and briefly introduces the novel in the context of Sarah Waters's other works in order to establish the basis for the analysis. The practical part of the thesis relies on the theoretical part and examines how the fictional portrayal of the female experience corresponds with the outlined reality. Simultaneously, the work considers how Waters uses the Second World War in her fictional story and which elements she chooses to highlight. Moreover, it discusses the reasons behind emphasising these elements in the novel and how it corresponds to the neo-historical genre. KEYWORDS Sarah Waters;...