El desbarrancadero, published in 2001 by Colombian author Fernando Vallejo is foremost a moving story about brotherly love, but it is also a highly critical novel that lashes out on a number of phenomena such as the catholic church, the Pope and the very idea of religion. It also addresses the poverty of Colombia, its corrupt politicians, the drug trade, viral diseases and animal abuse to mention a few more subjects. This essay however, does not aim to explore any of the above mentioned matters but rather examine how women are portrayed in this novel. The objective of this investigation, based on feminist theories, is to establish the very clear presence of misogyny attitudes.

In Canada there are increasing numbers of girls and women playing sport (Ifedi, 2005). In part, these opportunities are the result of earlier feminist efforts in the 1970s and 1980s and yet feminism itself is very rarely a part of the experiences of girls and women once they are involved in sport. The purpose of this thesis is to explore how this might be different and to create feminist politics around women’s high performance sport in Canada. This consciousness-raising qualitative writing project features three narratives written from a first-person perspective based on my experiences playing interuniversity sport. Chapters on methodology, second- and third-wave feminism and Canadian sport history provide a context for the narratives chapter. I urge other athletes to take up feminisms so that they might gain a different perspective to understand their experiences and see greater connections between themselves and other women. This might inspire women to change what they expect from and how they evaluate their experiences in sport in ways that align with feminist ideas. The project concludes with some thoughts on doing a qualitative writing project that might be helpful to other graduate students who are considering doing this type of research. / Thesis (Master, Kinesiology & Health Studies) -- Queen's University, 2010-05-04 23:43:53.475

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This thesis will study the development of the Palestinian women's movement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from the Mandate period (1920) to the outbreak of the Al Aqsa Intifada (2000). This work will attempt to outline the evolution of this movement and the impact of two factors that have significantly affected the form and course of its development; the first of which and the principal force is Palestinian Nationalism; the second is Islamism. / Nationalism and Islamism are presented here as two formations that functioned separately and in conjunction to present impediments to the ability of an independent Palestinian women's movement to develop and implement a social feminist agenda aimed at establishing gender equality and ensuring women's legal and political rights within Palestinian society.

This dissertation offers the first full-length study of five feminist writing practices developed between May 1968 and the publication of Rachel Blau DuPlessis's The Pink Guitar in 1990: ecriture feminine (Helene Cixous), ecriture au feminin/writing in the feminine (Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Lola Lemire Tostevin), lesbian/political writing (Monique Wittig), innecriture (Trinh T. Minh-ha), and writing as feminist practice (DuPlessis). These share what I call a feminist poetics; I develop the concept of "sympathy" (the transmission of symptoms from one body to the next) to explain how they nourish one another. I recount their poststructuralist context, and outline key historical influences, such as the student protests of 1968, the nascent women's movements in France and North America, and feminist cultural production in the 1970s. I then describe their poetics---the textual, grammatical, and semantic strategies used to undermine the patriarchal symbolic. I focus on the status and function of the female body in this feminist poetics, and suggest the body provides it with a non-essentialist theoretical foundation. I conclude by evaluating two models that best describe these writing practices: the palimpsest and the matrix. While the palimpsest, with its textual allusions, is an attractive model, I suggest that the matrix offers two advantages: its corporeal connotations and its emphasis on writing as process.

This thesis explores how women's organizations are using communication technologies and strategies for global social change. In 2002, the combination of current feminist theory that highlights issues of cultural specificity and digital communications technology is enabling new possibilities for women's organizations to engage in global feminist practices. Based on feminist theory, communications theory and feminist media literature, this thesis formulates an evaluative framework for assessing the communicative potential of V-Day, a virtual women's organization. The analysis moves beyond this case study to inform the potential global feminist practices of other women's organizations.

This thesis traces the history and development of Ms. magazine, in its three incarnations, between 1972 and 1992. Since its inception as a distinctly feminist monthly, Ms. has drifted between two categories of popular cultural artifacts (mainstream consumer culture and feminist counterculture) while distingishing itself as the only national feminist monthly in the United States, a key economic and symbolic feminist institution. The author compares the economic bases, ideological orientations and readerships of Ms. three incarnations in order to examine and the ways in which an ideological vehicle negotiates a consumer setting like the women's magazine industry. While serving to highlight debates surrounding the limitations of liberal feminist ideology, the history and development of Ms. magazine also raises questions concerning the validity of categories like "mainstream consumer culture/feminist counterculture" where contemporary women's media are concerned.

This thesis is a discursive and historical analysis of the concept and usage of 'postfeminism' in contemporary feminist debates. The importance of the vocabulary used to frame these debates is demonstrated through a survey of popular feminist discourses in the 1920s, and the circulation of the term 'postfeminism' in 1980s and 1990s mainstream and feminist media, academic journals, and bestselling books. Foremost among these contexts are mainstream newspaper and magazine articles in which postfeminism is used as a descriptive term applied to trends in fashion, television and film. Through an investigation of the texts and contexts in which post feminism is used, associations to generational disparity, antifeminism, the 'death of feminism,' commercialism, and other 'post-' discourses such as postmodernism, will be illustrated. In the process, it will be demonstrated that feminism, as it is represented through discourses of postfeminism, resides in an area of cultural criticism which straddles the spheres of the academic and the popular.

The original impetus for this investigation into prostitution comes from an economic inquiry into one form of work performed largely by women. But as a feminist study, this investigation cannot look simply at the economics of prostitution. Prostitution is both work and sex and an analysis must therefore also explore the question of sexuality, and the nature of sexual relations between men and women. This study seeks to offer a conceptual understanding of prostitution, and in particular, to examine the structural determinants of the sex industry. The analysis is couched within a feminist framework, taking cognisance of the theoretical divisions within feminism itself. The study attempts further to examine the question of policies towards prostitution, an issue which has been brought to the fore by the AIDS pandemic. In so doing, it refers to historical examples of state control of the sex market and draws on feminist challenges to such regulation. These challenges have exposed a fundamental contradiction for feminist praxis between the need both to protect and empower women. In exploring the nature and implications of this contradiction, the investigation looks also at the feminist debate around the censorship of pornography, a debate which highlights the kinds of questions feminists must confront when considering the issue of control. An attempt is made to resolve this contradiction by drawing a distinction between short-term and long-term policies towards prostitution. Although the long-term feminist project is the creation of a society where the structural determinants of the sex market have been eliminated, it is argued that this vision ignores the reality of prostitution and the problems faced by those women who work in the sex industry. Prostitution must be legalised to ensure the rights and protection of prostitutes, but these measures must be complemented by policies that challenge the structural basis of prostitution, and the oppression of women in society in general. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1992.