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No description available.

Focussing on the 'long 1970s' (1968-1980), this thesis offers a new account of the emergence of performance forms, including Happenings, participatory art, performance art, and performances for the camera, in visual art and related contexts at the ICA. The research is driven by two central aims: firstly, to create space for discourse about women artists and feminist concerns in art in the UK, and secondly, to build a feminist methodology and historiography that allows for a re-thinking of performance events and approaches to interpreting them. My research involves methods drawn from performance studies, history of art and visual studies, cultural history, and feminist theory. Chapters are organised around works by important UK-based artists including Carlyle Reedy, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Cosey Fanni Tutti, and David Medalla, as well as international visitors Carolee Schneemann and Charlotte Moorman. Initially focussing on historical 'recovery' of performances by women artists in order to challenge received or dominant histories of performance, I then shift over the course of the thesis towards reflecting on feminist implications and effects of my historiographical approach. Here the ICA functions as an organising principle rather than a central subject, and so while research begins with the ICA Collection held at Tate Archive, the scope of the study is also broadened to include other sites and archival repositories. As a methodological counterpoint to this, I also question and critique the limits of institutional and archival representation, and conduct interviews with artists and arts professionals. Considered through the lens of each case study, I argue that the 1970s, as a period which saw new performance forms emerge dialogically alongside feminist practice, is a rich area of research for thinking about pre-histories of live art in the UK, as well as questions of identity, identification, and diversity which resonate into the present.

Abstract not available

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.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 1998. Graduate Programme in Interdisciplinary Studies. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 328-340). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pMQ39183.

Miranda Fricker argues that powerless social groups may be subject to a unique form of injustice: hermeneutical injustice. On her account, deficiencies in the shared tools of interpretation may render the experiences of powerless social groups (for instance, women prior to the era of second wave feminism) both incomprehensible and incommunicable. In this thesis, I argue that Fricker has mischaracterized hermeneutical injustice and the silence of marginalized social groups: rather than lacking understanding, powerless groups are often denied rational authority with respect to their own social experiences or choose to self-silence. For this reason, I argue that many of the cases of hermeneutical injustice offered by Fricker collapse into cases of testimonial injustice. This mischaracterization has led Fricker to propose solutions to hermeneutical injustice that are inadequate; in response, I offer a solution that prescribes self-reflexive awareness of the ways that power and privilege shape our interpretive frameworks.

The thesis argues that psychoanalysis is a necessary component of cultural analysis. It is argued that existing syntheses of psychoanalysis and political theories tend to limit the recognition of the relative autonomy of psychic reality by offering accounts of the social determination of subjectivity. The contemporary reappropriation of psychoanalysis by feminist theorists has formulated new explanations of the social position of women as the 'second sex'. The challenge of feminism to traditional theories of culture and society includes questions of how sexual difference informs the transformation of thought into language, how language determines theory, and how theory conceptualises the difference between subjectivity and objectivity. The contradictions within existing syntheses of structuralism, Marxism and feminism are described, and the differences between psychoanalysis and sociology are traced through the the critical reception of Freud's Totem and Taboo by anthropologists. The validity of Freud's concept of the Oedipus complex is explored, and it is suggested that despite the limited acceptance by anthropologists, Totem and Taboo contains a valid theory of the relation of the subject to society. Freud's work is relocated within the paradigm of evolutionary biology to provide a materialist analysis of psychic structure that is not based on linguistics. A study of the origins of language reveals the complexity of the historical factors determining the co-evolution of representation, the maternal function, and the structuration of psychic reality. New discoveries about the pre-Oedipal dyad that underlies the Oedipus complex have shown the effects of infantile dependence and maternal care on adult subjectivity, and it is argued that factors such as the unconscious fear of dependency and of women are of particular significance for feminist thought. It is argued that the theory of pre-Oedipal and prelinguistic subjectivity can make intelligible aspects of ideologies of racism and sexism that are not fully explained by sociological or political theory. The mechanism of projection or projective identification, it is argued, provides a specifically psychoanalytic contribution to existing theories of culture.