Abstract not available

This thesis investigates a current debate within feminist theory, and specifically within feminist legal theory, about how to challenge the liberal construction of women's subjectivity. It contends that positioning women as either equal to or different from the universalised liberal subject (based on male experience) fails to recognise women's experience as diverse, and differentiated. This thesis explores this issue through the empirical area of the treatment in the public sphere (constituted by the state and the law) of domestic violence, and of domestic violence survivors who kill their abusive spouses. It argues that the current feminist jurisprudential responses to the battered woman who kills, articulated through criticisms of the Battered Woman Syndrome, identify the need to challenge the binary oppositional framework in which these cases are decided and discussed by liberal legalism. However, it suggests that these responses do not ground their discussion in the historical preconditions which gave rise to the debate and the feminist framework in which that debate is conducted. This thesis argues that an historical re-examination of the ways in which women's experience of domestic violence, as well as the law's reading of it, was constructed is an important contribution to feminist legal theory. It undertakes this historical re-examination by situating the Battered Woman Syndrome and domestic violence within the struggles and campaigns of feminism in the past, especially feminism as it developed through the Women's Liberation Movement of the 1970s. It argues that the understanding of women and women's experience as diversely constituted through this period is essential for an understanding of current debates. This thesis represents an interdisciplinary feminist legal history. It uses both the method and evidence of history to challenge the legal understandings of battered women who kill. It posits that an interdisciplinary engagement between postmodern legal and historical theories, which contest objective assessments of subjects' experience, allows for a more complex and comprehensive assessment of how to approach, and critique, the Battered Woman Syndrome. It suggests that this can be accomplished by applying the techniques of narrative developed in historical theory to feminist legal theory. It therefore posits that a postmodern methodological approach, realised through a genealogical investigation of the subjectivity of battered women, is of value in the current debate about how to deal with the paradox presented by feminism's engagement with liberalism, and evidenced through the law's assessment of the battered woman who kills.

This thesis investigates a current debate within feminist theory, and specifically within feminist legal theory, about how to challenge the liberal construction of women's subjectivity. It contends that positioning women as either equal to or different from the universalised liberal subject (based on male experience) fails to recognise women's experience as diverse, and differentiated. This thesis explores this issue through the empirical area of the treatment in the public sphere (constituted by the state and the law) of domestic violence, and of domestic violence survivors who kill their abusive spouses. It argues that the current feminist jurisprudential responses to the battered woman who kills, articulated through criticisms of the Battered Woman Syndrome, identify the need to challenge the binary oppositional framework in which these cases are decided and discussed by liberal legalism. However, it suggests that these responses do not ground their discussion in the historical preconditions which gave rise to the debate and the feminist framework in which that debate is conducted. This thesis argues that an historical re-examination of the ways in which women's experience of domestic violence, as well as the law's reading of it, was constructed is an important contribution to feminist legal theory. It undertakes this historical re-examination by situating the Battered Woman Syndrome and domestic violence within the struggles and campaigns of feminism in the past, especially feminism as it developed through the Women's Liberation Movement of the 1970s. It argues that the understanding of women and women's experience as diversely constituted through this period is essential for an understanding of current debates. This thesis represents an interdisciplinary feminist legal history. It uses both the method and evidence of history to challenge the legal understandings of battered women who kill. It posits that an interdisciplinary engagement between postmodern legal and historical theories, which contest objective assessments of subjects' experience, allows for a more complex and comprehensive assessment of how to approach, and critique, the Battered Woman Syndrome. It suggests that this can be accomplished by applying the techniques of narrative developed in historical theory to feminist legal theory. It therefore posits that a postmodern methodological approach, realised through a genealogical investigation of the subjectivity of battered women, is of value in the current debate about how to deal with the paradox presented by feminism's engagement with liberalism, and evidenced through the law's assessment of the battered woman who kills.

This research examined definitions of feminists and the relationship between self-identification as a feminist and willingness to engage in action to reduce inequality between men and women. Two focus groups were held to discuss these issues with undergraduate women. All but one of the members self-identified as feminists. Group members aligned themselves with one of two definitions of feminist. Some women defined feminists as those who desire equality for women. This group distanced themselves from radical feminists. The other women asserted that feminists were concerned with human rights for both men and women. The women emphasized that men as well as women could be feminists. Consistent with social identity theory that posits that important identities are associated with action, the women participated in two types of activities that were related to reducing gender inequality. One type of action was individualist, such as responding to sexist remarks. The other type was involvement with groups and organizations that collectively worked to reduce inequality. The one group member who rejected the label of feminist held views and engaged in behavior consistent with a cultural definition of feminist. / Master of Science

University of Technology, Sydney. / The purpose of my research for this thesis has been to investigate the psychic and emotional history of the milieu of independent, feminist filmmaking that began to form within the Women's Liberation Movement in Sydney in 1969. My interest in the psyche of the milieu has been twofold: to explore the possibility of writing an interior or subjective history, not of an individual but of a political milieu; and to grapple with the trajectory of the utopian, activist politics of the 1970s into the 1980s. I began my research by reading over five hundred funding applications from the files of the Women's Film Fund - an extensive archival record of the interaction between the funding femocracy and aspiring filmmakers. The building blocks of the thesis derived from interviews with founding members of the Sydney Women's Film Group (SWFG) and the Feminist Film Workers (FFW), and with former managers and Advisory Panel members of the Women's Film Fund. I consulted the SWFG and FFW records held (uncatalogued) by the National Film and Sound Archive, and I was given access to papers from the personal files of some of the filmmakers. I also viewed the body of films associated with the women's collections at the former Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative and the Women's Film Fund. From 1969-89 there were three major reconfigurations in the psyche of the milieu. The 1960s liberationist ethos - characterised by energy, excitement and eros - was transformed into an ethic of duty, discipline and sacrifice in the late 1970s. In the 1980s, feminist activism reached a limit point which turned the milieu's attention to the psychic foundations of its own origins and to the question of what had been sacrificed in the formation of the feminist activist. This question haunts the films of the 1980s through the insistent figure of the maternal. The ties that bound this milieu to a luminous vision of the future had their origins in a deeply shadowed image of the immediate past. This psychic reality is a point of origin and return as the milieu continues to remake itself through the cinema, into the 1990s.

University of Technology, Sydney. / The purpose of my research for this thesis has been to investigate the psychic and emotional history of the milieu of independent, feminist filmmaking that began to form within the Women's Liberation Movement in Sydney in 1969. My interest in the psyche of the milieu has been twofold: to explore the possibility of writing an interior or subjective history, not of an individual but of a political milieu; and to grapple with the trajectory of the utopian, activist politics of the 1970s into the 1980s. I began my research by reading over five hundred funding applications from the files of the Women's Film Fund - an extensive archival record of the interaction between the funding femocracy and aspiring filmmakers. The building blocks of the thesis derived from interviews with founding members of the Sydney Women's Film Group (SWFG) and the Feminist Film Workers (FFW), and with former managers and Advisory Panel members of the Women's Film Fund. I consulted the SWFG and FFW records held (uncatalogued) by the National Film and Sound Archive, and I was given access to papers from the personal files of some of the filmmakers. I also viewed the body of films associated with the women's collections at the former Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative and the Women's Film Fund. From 1969-89 there were three major reconfigurations in the psyche of the milieu. The 1960s liberationist ethos - characterised by energy, excitement and eros - was transformed into an ethic of duty, discipline and sacrifice in the late 1970s. In the 1980s, feminist activism reached a limit point which turned the milieu's attention to the psychic foundations of its own origins and to the question of what had been sacrificed in the formation of the feminist activist. This question haunts the films of the 1980s through the insistent figure of the maternal. The ties that bound this milieu to a luminous vision of the future had their origins in a deeply shadowed image of the immediate past. This psychic reality is a point of origin and return as the milieu continues to remake itself through the cinema, into the 1990s.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--West Virginia University, 2003. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 48 p. Includes abstract.

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University of Technology, Sydney. / The purpose of my research for this thesis has been to investigate the psychic and emotional history of the milieu of independent, feminist filmmaking that began to form within the Women's Liberation Movement in Sydney in 1969. My interest in the psyche of the milieu has been twofold: to explore the possibility of writing an interior or subjective history, not of an individual but of a political milieu; and to grapple with the trajectory of the utopian, activist politics of the 1970s into the 1980s. I began my research by reading over five hundred funding applications from the files of the Women's Film Fund - an extensive archival record of the interaction between the funding femocracy and aspiring filmmakers. The building blocks of the thesis derived from interviews with founding members of the Sydney Women's Film Group (SWFG) and the Feminist Film Workers (FFW), and with former managers and Advisory Panel members of the Women's Film Fund. I consulted the SWFG and FFW records held (uncatalogued) by the National Film and Sound Archive, and I was given access to papers from the personal files of some of the filmmakers. I also viewed the body of films associated with the women's collections at the former Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative and the Women's Film Fund. From 1969-89 there were three major reconfigurations in the psyche of the milieu. The 1960s liberationist ethos - characterised by energy, excitement and eros - was transformed into an ethic of duty, discipline and sacrifice in the late 1970s. In the 1980s, feminist activism reached a limit point which turned the milieu's attention to the psychic foundations of its own origins and to the question of what had been sacrificed in the formation of the feminist activist. This question haunts the films of the 1980s through the insistent figure of the maternal. The ties that bound this milieu to a luminous vision of the future had their origins in a deeply shadowed image of the immediate past. This psychic reality is a point of origin and return as the milieu continues to remake itself through the cinema, into the 1990s.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2003. / Supervisor: Lucia A. Gilbert. Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.