Although Rapunzel criticism habitually concerns literary fairytales, this thesis contributes to the field a sustained examination of the feminist and patriarchal uses to which Rapunzel has been put, with close attention to the range of media, forms, and styles into which ‗Rapunzel‘ has been adapted, from 1970 onwards. It argues that each adaptation appropriates ‗Rapunzel‘ to repeat or disturb gender ideologies, and also extends or contracts the scope of the fairytale and its feminism. Underpinned by memetics, selective adaptation and fairytale theories, and Adrienne Rich‘s concept of ‗re-vision‘, individual chapters focus upon redrawing the boundaries of what makes a (feminist) Rapunzel adaptation a (feminist) Rapunzel adaptation. The thesis also examines the difficult question of why Rapunzel motifs or ‗memes‘ have persisted and whether this is due to the power of cultural ideologies or to certain universal human urges to which ‗Rapunzel‘ ostensibly appeals. As what is meant by feminism changes from the 1970s through to the present day, the selected works are considered in terms of terms of second- and third-wave feminism and postfeminism. Chapter 1 (the Introduction) establishes the approach and rationale. Chapter 2 examines the Grimm ‗Rapunzel‘ variants of 1812 and 1857 as a prelude to examining the ideological uses to which Rapunzel is put post-1970. Chapter 3 focuses on how four feminist poets subject the memes and morals of ‗Rapunzel‘ to different feminist revisions, and thereby challenge the patriarchal meanings invested by the Grimms. Chapter 4 extends this work by examining a feminist moral fable, two complex short stories, a psychological novella, and a graphic novel, in order to draw contrasts between celebratory and darker, more disturbing ‗post-fairytale‘ feminist Rapunzels. Demonstrating the many genres and media into which feminist Rapunzels have been translated, several adapters use the tale on behalf of various kinds of individualism and subjectivisation, and suggest a movement toward greater psychological complexity and interiority in their treatment of Rapunzel memes. Chapter 5 focuses on how Rapunzel memes translate to screen in the feminist reworking Rapunzel Let Down Your Hair (1978) and the postfeminist adaptations Barbie as Rapunzel (2002), Shrek the Third (2007), and Disney‘s Tangled (2010) and Into the Woods (2014). Chapter 6, the final chapter, further extends the analysis by examining Rapunzel‘s general prevalence in the cultural imagination, namely in adverts and on television. By assembling and giving fresh analyses of rare and well-known Rapunzel tales, the chapters critique the gender essentialism in fairytales and reinstate Rapunzel as key to fairytale debate. This research has led to the conclusion that post-1970s Rapunzels exemplify how fairytales appropriate or discard memes in accordance with the possibilities of genre and medium, as well as with the changing face of feminism over the last four decades.

The research presents a practice-based examination of the politics and poetics of the manifesto form, drawing on feminist theoretical writing and activism alongside contemporary iterations of socially engaged art. It offers feminist manifestos as a lens through which to reconsider the form and intentions of socially engaged art, which is reframed in the light of these feminist insights as social art practice (Ross, 2000). To draw feminism alongside social art practice the research occupies the metaphorical territory of the manifesto in order to open up a dialogue with, and directly experience, unfolding forms of social art practice. The thesis is structured in the form of an archive, consisting of three distinct but interrelated concepts – the manifesto, hospitality and archives. This structure sets out to highlight the relational and political nature of archives suggesting their potential to be reimagined as manifesto forms. In addition the structure reveals how both manifesto and archive function as explicit, politically radical forms of hospitality. These topics are discretely contained in physical form within three archival boxes, one for each concept, and in an online audio archive ‘giving voice’ to each of the concepts. Taken as a whole the thesis articulates a missing feminist history within current critical discourse around social art practice -­ despite the early presence of important feminist artists like Lacy and Ukeles. This research explores the implications of this absence, seeking to acknowledge the effects it could have not only on feminism as a political and intellectual practice but on the criticality and depth of social art practice. It is possible to encounter the archive as a cartography that can be laid out, navigated and read in any order. This movement between forms of knowledge mirrors the subjects it approaches which are conceived as interstitial forms, negotiating multiple perspectives to produce active subjectivity. Each section juxtaposes knowledge about practice, engaging with history to search for precedents, and knowledge with practice as a generative method, curating events and producing written contributions. Moving between these two methodologies the research sets out to find an appropriate voice to articulate the complexities of social art practice and its feminist histories.

This thesis uncovers and analyses the relationship between forms of talk on British television between 1970-1990, and the uneven transformations in gender politics that occurred in this period, which encompasses both the second wave feminist movement and the rise of neoliberal politics. It presents five historical case studies of talk-based television programmes from across this time period: No Man’s Land (Associated Television/ITV, 1973), Good Afternoon! (Thames Television/ITV, 1971-1984), Pictures of Women: Sexuality (Channel 4, 1984), Watch the Woman (Channel 4, 1985), and Question Time (BBC One, 1979-present). These case studies offer a deliberate selection of television texts that differ according to their institutional contexts; their position in the schedules; their status in existing broadcasting histories; their discursive arrangements; and their modes of address. The thesis seeks to consider how the communicative ethos of television talk has been gendered in three key ways: at the level of production - in the sense of when, how, and why television spaces have been opened up for gendered forms of talk in relationship to wider shifts in gender politics; at the level of the text - in terms of how the discursive arrangements of talk-based programmes have worked to include, exclude, legitimise or disavow women’s voices; and at the level of critical reception - in the sense of how television talk has been evaluated in profoundly gendered terms. The thesis is methodologically innovative because it theorises gendered forms of television talk in relationship to histories of television production, as well as to broader political, cultural and gender histories. It carries out important empirical ‘recovery work’ of hidden women’s television histories through the presentation of original archival research. It also presents theoretical work, which re-evaluates the distinctive communicative ethos of television – or its “sociability” in light of feminist theories of language, gender and power. Moreover, it sheds some historical light on why the institutional parameters of television still delimit the available spaces for women's speech.