This thesis presents The Jesus: a project about the representation of the Crucifixion in Renaissance art. After determining the cultural codes for depicting women, it is established that Renaissance representations of the Crucifixion portray Christ in an extraordinarily feminine and sensual light. The development of the project is documented in terms of the creative process and the conceptual and darkroom experiments involved in the creation of the artwork. Finally, contemporary artworks similar to The Jesus are discussed in the context of religious imagery.

This thesis presents The Jesus: a project about the representation of the Crucifixion in Renaissance art. After determining the cultural codes for depicting women, it is established that Renaissance representations of the Crucifixion portray Christ in an extraordinarily feminine and sensual light. The development of the project is documented in terms of the creative process and the conceptual and darkroom experiments involved in the creation of the artwork. Finally, contemporary artworks similar to The Jesus are discussed in the context of religious imagery.

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The purpose of this research study was to determine whether the semantic differential could measure in the college population the variation in meaning of selected masculine and feminine concepts as a function of sex difference.

This thesis explores the use of modified Schenkerian analysis and how it relates to a feminine narrative in a piece of music. In music theory literature about music by women, Schenkerian analysis is a tool that is often ignored; some scholars claim that the goal-oriented nature of Schenkerian analysis prevents it from being an effective tool to analyze music that doesn’t adhere to traditional tonal models, including modern works by women composers. In this study, it was found that modifying the Urlinie and Bassbrechung to reflect salience rather than a traditional harmonic structure allowed for the tool to actually reveal a lot about the underlying narratives in the music. The case studies include Genesis II (Janika Vandervelde), Missa Gaia; Mass for the Earth (Libby Larsen), and “Music Box” (Cynthia Folio).

This dissertation explores Virginia Woolf¡¦s concept of ¡§a woman¡¦s sentence¡¨ and the significance and possibility of ¡§a woman¡¦s language.¡¨ It demonstrates how Woolf finds a new way to write fiction that expresses women¡¦s values and her resistance and disruption of a traditional discourse.

Since the naming of the Chinese Fifth Generation in the 1980s, generational study became an important methodology in Chinese film studies. The Chinese directors up to the mid-1980s are categorised into five generations. However, the directors emerging after the Fifth Generation do not so far have a certain generational name. Thus, the identification of this “nameless” group, which is called the post-fifth generation in this thesis, is an interesting issue reflecting the political, economical and cultural discourse in contemporary China. This thesis focuses on these directors’ films narrated with female protagonists, probes the reason why they chose female-centred narratives, and examines how they portrayed women and women’s stories in their filmic representation. In the light of Foucault’s theories of discourse and power, I examine the films as a kind of representation which is generated within discursive formation, and through which the directors identify themselves. The conclusion reached by the discussion is that both the female and the male directors studied in this thesis present very feminine discourse in their films. While the female directors are emphasising, even advertising their identity as women, their male counterparts are trying very hard to simulate and perform a feminine identification. This finding exactly answers the question in the thesis title. Since femininity is something that can be chosen, simulated, used, and played, the word “feminist” can also become a cultural brand from which the directors can benefit.

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This thesis project analyzes the influence of the built environment on subjectivity in late twentieth-century American fiction. Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, I contend, uses domestic architecture to inform the concept of female-as-subject, specifically through additive and subtractive construction techniques. These techniques influence public and private definitions of female, as they are present at the level of the individual house as well as the level of the town of Fingerbone as a cohesive unit. Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides interrogates ethnic subjectivity in a suburban setting. A strict grid orders the suburban landscape which, although visually unifying a group of ethnically diverse individuals, ultimately isolates the subjects--down to the scale of the single-family home--as it encourages collective memory, ethnic repression, and the standardization of perspective. In these novels, architecture is an agent which negotiates subjectivity and the vehicle that communicates ideology through and with the material reality of these homes. Reading architecture helps us understand who these characters are and how the built environment shapes the way they have come to define themselves and others as individuals, which ultimately allows for the subversion of such definitions.