Interrogating Virginia Woolf and the British Suffrage Movement Gwen Trowbridge Anderson ABSTRACT Much has been written about Virginia Woolf's involvement with feminism and women's rights, but there has been far less exploration about her ties to suffrage. Many of her friends and family are involved in this exploration: Vanessa Stephen Bell, Ethel Smyth, and the Pankhursts (Emmeline, Sylvia, and Cristobel). Other important figures who are relevant to Woolf's work are Sonia Delaunay, Lewis Carroll, and Edmund Spenser. Important concepts like the New Woman, the suffrage movement, feminism, and women's rights are vital to understanding Woolf's involvement with suffrage. This dissertation examines how Woolf used certain descriptive imagery, specifically, suffrage tricolors, rooms, bridges, pillar-boxes, and water as signposts, which subversively point to suffrage and women's rights. Her literary techniques are foregrounded to reveal how involved Woolf was in the suffrage movement and that she showed this involvement in obvious and subtle ways. I uncover suffrage and feminist clues in three of her early novels Night and Day, Jacob's Room, and The Years and compare her use of women's rights in her nonfiction works, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. A close analysis of her early writing clearly proves that Virginia Woolf had a plan from the beginning and a prescient view to her thinking about the suffrage movement.

This thesis examines trans women's contemporary writing in relation to a theory of the excessive object, sublimity, transmisogyny and minor literature. In doing so, this text is influenced by Susan Stryker's work on monstrosity, abjection and transgender rage in the article “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” (1994). The excessive object refers to a concept coined in this thesis to describe sublimity from another perspective than that of the tradition following from Immanuel Kant's A Critique of Judgment, building on feminist scholarship on the aesthetic of the sublime. Of particular relevance are critiques of the patriarchal dynamics of sublimity and the idea of the feminine sublime as it is explored with reference to literature by Barbara Freeman in The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women's Fiction (1995). Following from the feminist critique of sublimity, trans women's writing is explored as minor literature through a re-reading of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's work on Franz Kafka in Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature (1986), with attention to the importance that conditions of impossibility, marginality and unintelligibility holds for the political possibilities of minor literature. These readings form the basis for an analysis of four literary texts by two contemporary authors, Elena Rose, also known as little light, and Sybil Lamb, in addition to a deeper re-engagement with Stryker's work. In so doing, this thesis also touches on topics of power, erasure, trauma, self-sacrifice, appropriation and unrepresentability.

As humanity grapples with its significant global footprint in this era, there is a growing fascination with delving into the experiences and viewpoints of other animal species. This juncture offers an opportune moment to delve into the aesthetics of non-human animals by using diverse interdisciplinary methods and viewpoints. Insights of feminist aesthetics demonstrate how traditional understanding of aesthetics and aesthetic experience are heavily influenced by cultural assumptions about gender. Aesthetics as a humanistic discipline has determined the portrayal of non-human animals as beings with no capacity for aesthetic sensibility. In this thesis, I aim to bring to emergence the connection between human exceptionalist assumptions about aesthetics and the production of scientific knowledge about non-human animals. I defend the necessity of recognizing birds as beings with surprising and complex aesthetic sensibilities. Currently most scientists favor the adaptationist idea that the perception of beauty is influential in non-human animal lives only insofar as it serves to advertise fitness, and favor the reproduction and survival of the species. By weaving together insights from feminist philosophy of science and post-humanist studies of the human-animal bond, I present a framework capable of challenging human exceptionalist accounts of aesthetics. Particularly, I promote a methodology sensitive to the construction of gender in scientific portrayals of birds and their aesthetic preferences. I intertwine feminist critiques to pinpoint and challenge adumbrations of androcentrism in both animal sciences and aesthetics. Finally I examine, through an ungendered framework, instances of bowerbird behavior, and pinpoint aesthetic agency as an ability that we share in orchestration with other non-human animals. I conclude by proposing new avenues for research of non-human animal aesthetics.