Research project (Th. M.)--Dallas Theological Seminary, 1983. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 108-109).

This dissertation is an investigation into the representation of mourning and melancholia in the work of Elizabeth Smart, Evelyn Lau, Siri Hustvedt, Sarah Sheard and Kathryn Harrison. The thesis addresses women's historic exclusion from the discourse of melancholia from a feminist perspective. It will consider the political and theoretical implications of women's absence from this discursive field by focusing on the cultural legacy of their devalorised status. Freud's essay, 'Mourning and Melancholia', first published in 1917, is cited as an important conceptual model exercising considerable influence over subsequent theoreticians working within this area. My thesis builds on Freud's attempt to establish a clear-cut binary division between the twinned states of mourning and melancholia. The thesis reveals how Freud's construction of melancholia as a pathological condition, shadowing the normative state of mourning, has been linked with psychoanalytic constructions of femininity by leading feminist theorists such as Irigaray, Silverman and Kristeva. The first chapter provides an overview of melancholia as a gendered discourse privileging male practitioners; the subsequent chapters provide symptomatic readings of five novels written by five contemporary North American women. The psychoanalytic interpretation of these readings, ranging from blocked or postponed mourning to the ideological loss of a father through incest, illustrate the close epistemological relationship between the construction of femininity and melancholia within Western historical and philosophical traditions. This thesis is not concerned with merely re-interpreting Western cultural prejudices related to the discourse of melancholia from a late twentieth century postfeminist perspective. Instead, the thesis demonstrates how contemporary women writers are engaged in a revisionary approach to the representation of loss within their work, by insistently inscribing their active, desiring bodies on the discourses of heterosexual femininity and melancholia. By refusing to disappear from the margins of the melancholic text, I show how the resisting melancholic daughter produces a counter-discourse that destroys the conventional dynamics of the family romance within Western literary traditions. The 'writing cure' replaces the 'talking cure' in this context. By removing the patriarchal figurehead from the text, and the psychoanalytic confessional discourse surrounding it, women writers challenge misogynist constructions of femininity within contemporary literature.

This thesis explores the complexities of an emergent feminist consciousness among Maharashtrian women in the context of the socio-religious reform movements in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century India. It analyses how self- assertion was articulated through a gendered critique of Hindu religion and society. In constant interaction and at times in tension with the text-based colonial and indigenous discourses, their ideology it is argued was informed by experience. Critical of Eurocentric models of feminism, this study adopts alternative methods of reading and defining colonial women's perceptions and protests. Thus, the study takes as its starting- point the view of the Maharashtrian woman herself as she engages with the state and Indian men. In the first chapter the attempts of female converts to Christianity in negotiating with the changing world around them is studied. Christian women's pioneering welfare schemes are studied in detail showing how their feminist critiques and alternative lifestyles provided inspiration to women of their time. It is argued that their feminism was a result of their analysis of Hinduism and ultimate rejection of it. How Hindu women gained partial autonomy is studied through their separate female institution building programmes. However, it is argued that Hindu women's critique of Indian society and Hinduism and their action was constrained by their decision to stay within the Hindu structures. In the third and fourth chapters on women's resistance various individual and collective forms of dissent by women against the state and Indian males are outlined which primarily point to survival issues being the core of resistance. A case-study of infanticide in chapter four shows women resisting cultural practices like the ban on widow-remarriage. In the last two chapters, a study of the movement for higher education of females, legislation on restitution of conjugal rights, divorce and the age of consent is undertaken. While it demonstrates the participation of women in popular protest movements of the nineteenth century it also reveals a great divergence in the precepts and practices of the state and Indian men highlighting their unwillingness to hand over decision-making processes to women over gender-related issues. The thesis concludes by attributing the fruition in feminist consciousness of women to a selective appropriation of dominant discourses of the time, namely those of the missionary, religious revivalist, orientalist and reformist. Finally, it is suggested that women themselves chose to join the nationalist politics of early twentieth century rather than being led into it by influential leaders like Gandhi.

This thesis is an account of an ethnographic study of the meanings and practices around what has come to be known as 'special educational needs' (SEN) in a girls' comprehensive school in London. Using a feminist post-structuralist approach, I look at how specific students, formally identified as having SEN, use these meanings and practices in the process of making sense of themselves as school students: a process I call 'identity work' . I discuss how this complex process is nuanced by multiple axes of difference, including gender/sexuality, social class, ethnicity, religion and physical appearance. I argue that the identity work of the girls and young women takes place within a policy, micropolitical and microcultural context that positions them as 'intellectually subordinated'. Current educational policy and school micropolitics work together to construct a micro/political contradiction. On the one hand, the competitive standards agenda privileges a dominant discourse of normative success based on examination results that are largely inaccessible to the participants of this research. On the other hand, the drive towards 'inclusion' appears to require other kinds of values, producing what I argue is a consolation, or deficit, discourse of success. Student microcultures, and student identity work, are produced in relation to this contradiction. This thesis suggests that current rhetoric and reforms associated with 'inclusive education' have acted to complexify, but not necessarily to ameliorate, the intellectual subordination of the 'special needs student'. I use participant observation and interviews, augmented by reflexive and interactive methods, to think with the girls and young women about their experiences of schooling, and about their understandings of themselves as school students. I also use this data, and my analysis of it, to examine the current limits of a feminist poststructural approach, and to suggest possible directions for further theoretical work.

Bibliography: pages 205-231. / This dissertation locates Christina Stead as a woman writer, who interrogates, both mimetically and poetically, the ideology of the dominant literary tradition. Because the formal narrative strategies, subtexts, and repressed discourses reveal inscriptions of Christina Stead's gender, the issues of language and power are central. A humanist feminist who anticipates a close bond between reader and text fails to overcome the problem of those narrative modes which alienate the readers of Stead's novels. Only a textual feminist who foregrounds the ideology of form recognizes that Stead's methods are dislocating in order to produce a reader who participates in the narrative process itself. For Stead, both women and men are entrapped within the prison-house of language, which becomes the locus of power struggles. The embedded artworks of four women artists, speak and write against the realism of the dominant discourse in the women's desires to assert their own sexuality, to postpone death, to connect with maternal figures, and to undermine androcentrism. These women, and others in Stead's canon, speak their difference. Male genderlects, however, attest to their dominance, endorsing an ideology of oppression in their competitiveness, their narcissism, and their theorizing. Christina Stead, herself, like the women artists she depicts, uses metaphor variously. She has metaphor convey the sexuality of the female characters and subvert the metaphorical commonplaces of the dominant tradition. Other metaphors reveal transcendent impulses, seemingly at odds with the narratives' usual deterministic ethos. In the plots and their endings Christina Stead also negotiates with the norms of the dominant literature. The formal structures correlate with the patterns of the characters' lives either in Bildungsromanen or in novels of repetition which metonymize deathly compulsions. Thus a reading which foregrounds narrative and gender, particularly in the embedded artworks, genderlects, metaphor, plot and closure, depicts a Christina Stead who has never been comprehended by masculist critics who fail to take cognizance of the woman writer's desires to combat the dominant literary tradition.

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The past three decades have seen a significant increase in the engagement of men and boys in both policies and programs that seek to promote gender equality. This response is driven in part by the realization of men's central roles in determining women's well-being, and the wider acknowledgment that earlier gender equality initiatives achieved limited success due to the exclusion of men and boys. This study builds on a growing body of scholarship that calls for increased attention to men and masculinities in gender studies, policies and programs. Even though there have been interventions aimed at engaging men and boys, the number of evaluation studies documenting the effectiveness of these interventions is inadequate. This study therefore attempts to show the significance of men's participation in gender equality programs with regards to participant perspectives and project outcomes. Central to this dissertation is the imperative for feminist policies and programs to broaden their scope to reflect the fundamental principles of social and economic justice. Programs and policies must be geared towards enacting a truly transformative vision for development that recognizes and addresses structural constraints and unequal power relations between distinct groups. The gender and development discourse since the 1970s has been premised on the fact that men occupy positions of power in many cultures and institutions of governance, and that the way in which men exercise power over women results in inequities, inequalities, discrimination, and the subordination of women. The themes emerging from the findings of this study illustrate three broad points. Firstly, resistance is significant in gender equality work in Ghana and in many parts of Africa. Secondly, change is taking place, particularly for educated men, those working in the development sector, and those who see opportunities for alternative masculinities. In the spirit of leveraging the current momentum for change, gender equality programs must be context-specific, and linked to strategies of negotiation that are culturally relevant. In other words, gender equality does not have to always mean the same thing in all places.

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