Flora Tristan was one of the earliest activists for feminism and socialism and campaigned under the July Monarchy in France. This thesis aims to highlight the relationship between feminism and socialism through the medium of Flora Tristan's life and work. It is based on a chronological study of her writings to illustrate how her egalitarian feminism developed from her personal circumstances and flourished into literature. It focuses mainly on the evolution of her ideas as she rejected both egalitarian and messianic feminism in favour of socialist militancy among the French working class. Her /- effort to insert feminism, as a high priority, into the nascent socialist movement, is closely scrutinised. In the light of more recent developments in France, the conclusion suggests that her life's work was a microcosm of the relationship between feminism and socialism as it was to develop after her death in 1844.

Stemming from the dialectical concepts of critical epistemology developed by feminism and Critical Theory (specifically, the Frankfurt School), this thesis attempts to articulate the political dimension of knowledge and to demonstrate how this dimension is incorporated into the liberatory pedagogical theory of Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux and various feminist authors. Hence the epistemological significance of domination and oppression is explored in relation to the concepts of subjectivity and objectivity held by critical epistemology. / In ultimately aiming at liberation from social oppression, both Critical Theory and feminist epistemology provide theoretical insights into the social construction of knowledge, the intersubjective character of knowledge and the depth psychological dimension of the knower. It is maintained that a synthesis of these insights can provide the groundwork for a liberatory educational theory based on the interrelation between experience and knowledge. Also, in dialectical interaction, a liberatory educational theory provides a means for actualizing the liberatory aim of critical epistemology.

This thesis tries trough qualitative analyzes to illuminate advertising and its didactic aspects, how menstruation and menstruating women are portrayed over time. The method underlying the survey is didactic, diachronic comparative and hermeneutic. There will also be a feminist point of view on the material. The issue is about how the advertisement presents sanitary products and menstruation and how a menstruating woman is portrayed.The conclusion is that the image of a menstruating woman changes slightly while consolidating the ethos that menstruation should not be visible. The menstruating woman is in constant motion, always fresh and fragrant.

Thesis (MA)--University of South Australia, 1998

This thesis presents a series of feminist counter-readings of the two women in Proverbs 1-9: Woman Wisdom and the Strange-and-Foolish Woman. It therefore seeks to both discern and challenge the traditional male scholarship's understandings of both women, and, more importantly, to read both as women rather than as stereotypes. Most readings of the text construe Woman Wisdom as a personification or a hypostasis, and the Strange-and-Foolish Woman as a stereotype or series of stereotypes of promiscuous and assertively sexual women. Few scholars focus on the significance of these representations of women as women. My feminist counter-reading methodology involves a triple hermeneutic-suspicion, resistance, rereading and representation. This hermeneutic is also informed by an insistently embodied reading practice. My methodology draws on various fields of feminist scholarship, including feminist literary theory and film theory, feminist hermeneutics and feminist biblical criticism, feminist theories of embodiment, and feminist epistemology. In addition, I use contemporary ideas relating to translation to re-translate key terms integral to the focus of my thesis. Each chapter of the thesis focuses on a site of contestation-both within biblical scholarship and within the text. As a piece of feminist scholarship, this thesis both works within the constraints of the traditional understanding of a thesis and contemporary 'malestream' scholarship, and pushes gently at the boundaries, seeking to make spaces for different ways to approach, and write, theses. The first four chapters focusing on the textual analysis are presented as being in a constellation relationship with each other and the later textual analyses. Using a variety of strategies, originating in a variety of feminist disciplines, I have demonstrated that both Woman Wisdom and the Strange-and-Foolish Woman can be read as representations of real women. In each case, their representations-in-the-text are partial, designed to categorise them in the interests of the male system (malestream), and to keep them separate from each other. I also demonstrate, however, that both women resist these attempts at patriarchal and androcentric colonisation. Woman Wisdom, in assertively building her own house within the malestream, claims her own space for her alternative way of wisdom in the male-dominated world of the text. Using her location 'inside' the system to gain access to the young future leaders-both men and women-she disseminates her alternative way with the apparent approval of the system. Contrary to the view of most scholars, she does not speak with the voice of the patriarchal system-she has her own style, and her own message, which she shares freely with all who accept her invitation to her feast of wisdom. The Strange-and-Foolish Woman more openly resists malestream attempts to control and confine her. Like Woman Wisdom, she resorts to resistance strategies to access her audience: she masquerades as a vamp to attract her audience and poke fun at the foibles of the 'wise' old men who denigrate her sexuality but secretly lust after her body. She, too, is a woman who defines herself, and her way of being sexual, and seeks to make a space for an alternative way of being woman, and celebrating her sexuality, in the world of the text. / thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 1999

There have been substantial changes in the way that families interact with schooling at the point of school choice. These shifts have been brought about by market orientated educational policy changes, and by altered forms and experiences of ‘family’. This study explores this changed dynamic by researching how a group of mothers in one urban setting engaged in school choice over a period of fourteen months. The research set out to investigate the processes, behaviours and influences that mothers took to the task of choosing secondary schooling for their children. In particular it aimed to explore the personal, familial, cultural and social dimensions of this engagement. These objectives were pursued using feminist and phenomenological frames because these theoretical approaches allowed for a gendered and contextualised analysis of experience. Data was gathered longitudinally through return interviews with 20 women from one socially and culturally diverse local government area in Sydney, Australia. The analysis of data is informed by perspectives on markets and consumerism from the field of cultural studies. Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘capital’, ‘habitus’ and ‘field’ were also used along with the feminist concepts of ‘emotional labour’ and ‘emotional capital’ to analyse the way that neoliberal market orientated educational policies impacted on this group of middle Australians. This research shows that the Australian experience of school choice is an emotionally rich, highly context-specific, complex, gendered and cooperative process that contests the prevailing public rhetoric about the operations of markets and of choice. School choice, while not always welcomed by this group of middle Australians, is an overtly gendered activity mostly overseen and undertaken by mothers in gender-specific ways. For these women school choice was an activity that demanded considerable physical and emotional labouring adding significantly to mothers’ work in support of their children’s education. Further, the research showed how within this new marketised context, the family became the site for the contestation of taste via the negotiation of differing economic, social, cultural and emotional capitals vis a vis the structural imperatives imposed by the market. It showed that for these women and their families in this location, at this time, the promise of ‘choice’ was a hollow promise indeed.

‘Bitch: the Politics of Angry Women’ investigates the scholarly challenges and strengths in re theorising popular culture and feminism. It traces the connections and schisms between academic feminism and the feminism that punctuates popular culture. By tracing a series of specific bitch trajectories, this thesis accesses an archaeology of women’s battle to gain power. Feminism is a large and brawling paradigm that struggles to incorporate a diversity of feminist voices. This thesis joins the fight. It argues that feminism is partly constituted through popular cultural representations. The separation between the academy and popular culture is damaging theoretically and politically. Academic feminism needs to work with the popular, as opposed to undermining or dismissing its relevancy. Cultural studies provides the tools necessary to interpret popular modes of feminism. It allows a consideration of the discourses of race, gender, age and class that plait their way through any construction of feminism. I do not present an easy identity politics. These bitches refuse simple narratives. The chapters clash and interrogate one another, allowing difference its own space. I mine a series of sites for feminist meanings and potential, ranging across television, popular music, governmental politics, feminist books and journals, magazines and the popular press. The original contribution to knowledge that this thesis proffers is the refusal to demarcate between popular feminism and academic feminism. A new space is established in which to dialogue between the two.

Thesis (M.T.S)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 1988. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-90).

Thesis (M.S. in Information Operations)--Naval Postgraduate School, December 2007. / Thesis Advisor(s): Robinson, Glenn E. "December 2007." Description based on title screen as viewed on January 24, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 83-88). Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, August 2002. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.