Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 1998. Graduate Programme in French. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL:http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pMQ27348.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, Dept. of History, August 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2003. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 254-273). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (M.Phil.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 72-81). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2002. Graduate Programme in Sociology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 339-352). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pMQ71566.

This dissertation refutes the notion that contemporary girls are uninterested in feminism by exploring how teenage girls are engaging in feminist activism as bloggers. Using a feminist cultural studies approach I analyze how girl bloggers produce feminist identities and practices that challenge hegemonic postfeminist and neoliberal cultural politics. I employ feminist ethnographic methods, including a series of in-depth interviews with U.S. -based girl feminist bloggers and an online collaborative focus group, as well as a discursive and ideological textual analysis of girl-produced feminist blogs. Using these methods, I privilege girls' voices while proposing a model for conducting feminist ethnography online. In doing so, I demonstrate how girls' feminist blogging functions as an activist practice through networked counterpublics, intervening in mainstream and sometimes even commercial public space. I position this activism within a lengthy tradition of American feminism, analyzing how my participants remain in conversation with feminist history while simultaneously responding to their unique cultural climate. Finally, I argue that we must recognize the political importance of girls' feminist blogging by theorizing it as an emergent citizenship practice that makes feminism an accessible discourse to contemporary teenage girls. / text

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

This study provides a critical inquiry into the textual (self-)representations of Chinese females’ perception and experience of “women’s liberation” in 1949-1966 Chinese women’s autobiographical and fictional writings. Through historical and textual analyses, it looks into Chinese women’s multiple textual/discursive practices and their subjectivities constituted in the process. These narrative practices are treated as salient sites of women’s struggle for self-understanding, self-liberating as well as self-inventing in their own specific social and cultural conditions. The study aims to disclose the complexity of the discursive field centering on the topic of socialist women’s liberation and the dynamic interplay between different female authors and the socialist political/gender discourses within 1949-1966 socialist cultural public sphere. The thesis first examines the autobiographical, first-person female narratives appeared on three Fulian(Women’s Federation)–sponsored national and local women’s magazines: Women of China (中国妇女), Beijing Women (北京妇女), and Modern Women (现代妇女). It probes into how female narrators, from different social backgrounds, understand and restructure in their writings their past and present lives in terms of (public) labor, female freedom and new social identification. Secondly, the thesis investigates fictions and plays by female writers, which provide historically-specific gendered perspectives to the issue of “women’s liberation” as well as women’s position in and their relationship with socialism. It explores women’s perception of public and domestic labor, their formation of collective identities in the process of socialist construction, their gender struggle with and contestation to the persistent ideology of patriarchy in the new social order, all of which are revealed in their literary practices. This thesis argues that in these different sorts of writings, the representations of experience of “women’s liberation” are intimately related, but not identical, to the state-sanctioned conceptual and discursive framework. Socialist political and gender discourses actually exert unpredictable, diffuse, locally and individually contingent effects on Chinese women who actively engage in different forms of writing. The self-perception and self-fashioning represented in these women’s cultural practices are enabled by, but may also go beyond, the revolutionary language or state-inflected discourses, indicating more complicated and specific meanings of Chinese socialist ideologies and practices for individual women. Different writers choose or abandon, appropriate or dis-employ, embrace or interrogate, be close to or keep at a distance certain socialist political and gender discourses, in order to forge and interpret women’s experience from their own specific contexts. They may be empowered by the revolutionary discourses and rhetoric, yet they do not identify themselves as mere passive beneficiaries of the socialist regime, but as active agents in their self-liberation and self-transformation. It is in this process that their different subjectivities are constituted, their agency created and asserted. / published_or_final_version / Comparative Literature / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This essay examines gender normative and patriarchal elements of the popular fairy            tale Sleeping Beauty in order to expose how patriarchal ideals are upheld. The reason for this is that children may internalize the values taught in these stories, which may lead to them perpetuating patriarchal ideals and gender normative behavior. The popular version of this fairy tale, made by Disney, follows many of the typical patriarchal ideals with a strong male hero, a wicked female witch and a weak and submissive young female, close to nature. This is contrasted by a modern retelling by Cameron Dokey that is, in many ways, gender subversive and challenges the traditional gender roles and attributes. This essay finds that the version made by Disney is a product of its time, and portrays ideals from that period that could affect children of today into internalizing archaic patriarchal ideals. Dokey’s version is better adapted to the current socio-cultural environment and succeeds in aligning the story with modern values and provides a better option to teach children the actual values and gender roles of our society. / Denna uppsats undersöker könsnormativa och patriarkala element i den populära sagan Törnrosa, för att blottlägga hur patriarkala ideal upprätthålls. Anledningen till detta är att barn kan internalisera de värderingar som lärs ut i dessa sagor, vilket kan leda till att de upprätthåller patriarkala ideal och könsnormativa beteenden. Disneys populära version av sagan följer många av de typiska patriarkala idealen, med en stark manlig hjälte, en ond kvinnlig häxa och en svag och undergiven ung kvinna, som är nära kopplad till naturen. Denna version kontrasteras av en modern återberättelse av sagan skriven av Cameron Dokey som på många sätt utmanar traditionella patriarkala könsnormer och sttribut. Disneys version är en produkt av sin tid, och porträtterar ideal från den tiden som kan påverka dagens barn att internalisera ålderdomliga könsideal. Dokeys version är bättre anpassad till den nuvarande socio-kulturella miljön och lyckas med att justera historian till att bättre passa moderna värderingar, och framstår som ett bättre alternativ för att lära barn vårat samhälles könsroller och värderingar.

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