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published_or_final_version / Clinical Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

This is a case study to explore Korean girls' construction of girlhoods in a kindergarten class in order to answer the two research questions: 1) What are the constructions of girlhood that emerge in a Korean kindergarten classroom? 2) How do the girls in the classroom negotiate the constructions of girlhood? Employing the conceptual framework of gender as being a social construction (Blaise, 2005; Davies, 2003; MacNaughton, 1997 & 2000; Thorne, 1993), I reconceptualize aspects of young girls' lives and behavior that for a long time have been regarded as insignificant, natural, and/or non-existent by mainstream ECE. The findings of this study will help fill a void in the current body of knowledge in Korean and Western ECE fields. I completed data collection in one Korean kindergarten class of 5-year-olds, located in Seoul, Korea. I gathered data from five different sources: 1) field notes from observations of students' speech and behavior; 2) audiotapes of students' conversations; 3) interviews with the students; 4) interviews with the classroom teachers; and 5) my research journals. Data analysis proceeded by searching for categories and codes following Strauss and Corbin (1998) in order to find emergent themes in relation to Korean girls' construction of girlhood. By observing girls' talk and behaviors through a social constructionist perspective, I have uncovered three constructions of girlhood in one Korean kindergarten. They are appearance-based girlish girlhood, oppositional girlhood, and heteronormative girlhood. Before uncovering the girls' lived experiences that are constituted by and constitute the constructions of girlhood, I portray how these girlhoods came to take place in an institutional setting, emphasizing the institution's curriculum, guidelines, and teachers. I then go into detail about the three constructed girlhoods that emerged under these institutional conditions. The emerging girlhoods in the research setting were discursively constructed in relation to three pervasive and imperative ideas about being a girl. Although the three constructions are relevant to different aspects of life for a young Korean girl, they are not mutually exclusive or competitive. First, appearance-based girlish girlhood is constituted by and constitutes girls' bodies and bodily practices by correctly signifying their gender. Oppositional girlhood manifests itself in girls' everyday endeavors to maintain the legitimacy of the gender binary. Finally, heteronormative girlhood is a reflection of the pervasiveness of heteronormativity in Korean society at large.

In post-war Canada, married women’s labour force participation rose dramatically. Labour historians have studied this trend with a primary focus on married women’s disadvantaged position in the labour market. This thesis examines female factory workers as manual labourers and asks how their bodies affected and were affected by their jobs, and how specifically female embodiment shaped their experience of work. Using the framework of job-related, cultural, and reproductive body work developed by sociologist Chris Shilling, this case study examines the experiences of eleven women who worked at the Moir’s candy plant in Halifax between 1949 and 1970. Semi-structured interviews are the main source of research data for this study. This case study explores working conditions at Moir’s, such as work on conveyor belts, the gendered division of labour, piece-work, and breaks, and determines the ways the women responded to and also shaped these conditions. The women’s testimonies reveal that their embodied experience as labourers was based both in workplace conditions (such as company regulations) and in family responsibilities. There are three main findings. First, I argue that in the context of the Moir’s factory, women’s acts of sabotage (in the form of breaking the conveyor belts), use of make-work, and development of other coping strategies were intended to create needed leisure time in the workplace. Second, I challenge the common assumption in labour sociology that factory work does not require that employees carry out true emotional labour. I argue that feelings of pride and shame had a strong influence over the women’s workplace dress and behaviour; managing these feelings were an important part of the women’s occupation. Finally, I argue that in the post-war era, women’s reproductive body work was directly connected to their paid labour because of the lack of public childcare and other reproductive labour resources available to wives and working mothers.

This dissertation uses psychoanalytic theory to examine the similar portrayals of monstrous femininity in two Middle English poems, Robert Henryson’s the Testament of Cresseid and the Awntyrs off Arthure. In the Testament, Cresseid’s leprosy is interpreted through Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, suggesting that Cresseid experiences the abject to create a new identity as a leper. Rather than view Cresseid’s dream as an assembly of very real divinities who pass judgment over her sleeping body, I interpret the dream in a strictly physiological sense, arguing that Cresseid not only creates the judgment from her own conflicted psychology, but actively shapes her own destiny. Cresseid’s disease does not annihilate her identity, but gives her a significant position in society, because her status as a leper facilitates the economy of salvation. I continue with Kristeva’s theory to understand the characterization of the grotesque corpse of Gaynour’s mother in the Awntyrs off Arthure. Her rotting body is doubly abject, both as a corpse and a mother. While abjection provides a useful opening for discussing the portraits of Gaynour and her mother, Kristeva’s theory does not consider all women in the text, and only confirms misogynist stereotypes. To supplement Kristeva, I use Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation of Jacques Lacan’s theory of desire to illuminate the text as a whole, and explain the role of the corpse in shaping the narrative. / Thesis (Master, English) -- Queen's University, 2009-08-20 03:15:54.674

This dissertation discusses medieval and Renaissance clerical and cultural constructions of femininity and female masculinity, and it analyses the complex relationship between such conceptions and the literary representation of the transvestite woman. Medieval theology legitimated female masculinity as transcendence of temporal sexuality. A woman who contained her affective femininity and replaced it with rational and ascetic behaviour was frequently lauded for having become male in all but body. In the middle of the first millennium, hagiographic legends abounded in which women appear to have embodied the patristic equation between spiritual rationality and masculinity. This dissertation proposes a radically different interpretation: the saint exchanges a sexualised form of femininity--ironically imposed upon her by a male society--for a non sexual but nevertheless feminine self valuation. / Early modern culture perceived transvestism in a multiform manner. It signifies monstrosity in the polemical pamphlet, serves to indicate an estimable apex of humanity in Shakespearean comedy, and represents women in roles that range from monstrous disrupter to adept uniter in the works of such other playwrights as Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton. While the pamphlet's social commentary argues that masculinity rendered a woman monstrously unfeminine, the literature finds ways of interrogating definitions of the sex-gender system in a world which was constantly and fundamentally mutating. The drama employs elements such as inversion, monstrosity and transgressions of class to negotiate a society in flux.

Femininity and Dance at the Interface of Performance: An exploration of Femininity through Performance in Suit Up, a choreographic/performance dance thesis compiles the research behind Suit Up, a ten-minute dance for six women, which investigates the performance of femininity, and provides a deep analysis of the choreography of Suit Up. This thesis looks at all elements that went into the production of Suit Up and explores the relationship a woman has with her femininity and the performance of her femininity. This thesis focuses specifically on the gestures that the particular women in this piece associate with their femininity and what this means when femininity and dance are explored together as performance. This is by no means a comprehensive thesis about the concept of femininity, but it begins to investigate the idea that women perform femininity in different contexts. What are the various ways in which femininity can be performed, including for one’s own self? A video of Suit Up is available at Scripps Dance.

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Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-92).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 247-271).