Thesis (doctoral)--Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2000.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Texas Christian University, 2008. / Title from dissertation title page (viewed Feb. 26, 2009). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references.

This study examines the relationship between a television text and the women in the audience, using Carla Lane's situation comedy, The Mistress [BBC], broadcast in 1985, as a case study. The project is entirely directed by the audience point of view. An eclectic multi-disciplinary approach was taken to devise an 'open' conceptual model of the audience which located women as key actors in the viewing process. The concept of the Skilled Viewer was developed, incorporating elements from feminist film and television theory, reader response theory, and Uses and Gratifications theory. A feminist perspective, systematised by an ethnographic account and feminist sociological principles, guided the qualitative methods of data collection from 14 individual and nine groups of women viewers. Their discussions were recorded, transcribed, categorised, and analysed. Audience responses were classified into Uses and Gratifications categories. Viewers responded on emotional and/or intellectual levels, pointing up concerns relating to identification with stars/characters; aspects of realism; confirmation of personal values; and aesthetic criticism. Responses were defined within a framework of expectation, in terms of anticipations-expressed/fulfilled and/or hopes-expressed/ fulfilled. Viewers' 'interpretive strategies' and their source 'interpretive repertoires' via which they understood and enjoyed the text were explored. Reasons were posited for response. Major findings are as follows. A multi-disciplinary theoretical design supported by a reflexive, compatible methodological approach is effective. Application of the concept of the Skilled Viewer produces a number of findings not available via pre-existing theoretical models. Viewers are active, self-monitoring participants in the viewing process. The text/audience relationship is in constant negotiation. Viewers' enjoyment depends to a great extent on the priorities with which they approach it. Placing theoretical priority on the female viewer can prove methodologically effective. Legitimating their voice successfully empowers the women in the audience.

M.A. / This dissertation explores the possibility of an alternative notion of reason, one that draws on certain values articulated in feminist theory as well as on the opportunities opened up by the historically created relationship between women and reason. Employing certain writings, the initial aim of the argument is to render problematic the conventionally accepted conception of reason by demonstrating the existence of a powerful intellectual current that associates women with, among other things, the bodily and emotional, thereby placing them outside of reason. Because of the immense importance attached to the tenets of reason, this state of affairs profoundly affects the position of women and is, of course, something they have extensively commented on. Thus, following on the problematization of reason along gender lines, women are afforded the opportunity to set out their views on reason and the relationship between it and women. From this it emerges, broadly speaking, that some women want to be integrated into the prevailing standard of reason, while others hold that women have access to some distinct reasoning capability that it sometimes even regarded as being superior to the masculine standard. The points of view outlined above are then, in the penultimate chapter, brought into critical dialogue with postmodernism. This serves two main purposes: it illustrates the flaws in certain feminist views on reason and, very importantly, makes the point that reason cannot be meaningfully separated from questions concerning power, subjectivity and language. In conclusion, and drawing on a range of insights developed through the course of the dissertation, it is said that the conventional single standard of rationality is in large measure fictitious and that it should be abandoned in favour of a more multicentred way of looking at the world. Women are encouraged not to attempt to merely move from their positions at the margins of reason to the centre, but to explore the possibilities offered by the margins, possibilities that might enable them to lead the way in terms of being agents in creating more acceptable standards of knowledge and interaction.

D. Litt. et Phil / My dissertation represents an attempt to relate the phenomenon of rape with a feminist philosophical discourse concerning women’s or ‘feminine’ subjectivity and selfhood, which in turn is contextualised within the history of western philosophical metaphysics. Rape as a phenomenon is analysed through various lenses, including a power-political lens, a historicaletymological lens, and a phenomenological-existentialist lens. This is done in order to philosophically illuminate the phenomenon that is rape – a phenomenon, moreover, which in general tends to evade meaningful analysis – and to provide a background and context that can facilitate the convincing integration of the themes of rape and women’s subjectivity. I show in particular that there exists a dominant symbolic order and frame for the interpretation of rape, based on a hierarchical dichotomy of male active versus female passive sexuality, which obscures the true nature of rape. This hierarchical dichotomy is moreover embedded in the dominant western symbolic frame which is also responsible for the suppression of full female subjectivity, and of the sexual differentiation of the public-political and sociosymbolic domains themselves. Having made this claim, I try, through a Hegelian and phenomenological reading of first-person accounts by rape victims, to unearth or excavate a contestatory understanding of rape, and in particular one that may do justice to the sense of a total annihilation of the self reported by rape victims. In order to start opening up a way out of the denial and destruction of female sexual subjectivity which I detect in rape as well as in the order of western metaphysics, I look with particular interest at the strategies employed by rape victims to re-assemble or create a female self after the experience of rape. In the second part of the dissertation I consider the recent ‘feminine turn’ in continental philosophy as a possible ‘way out’ of the impasse in which the philosophical tradition has placed female subjectivity. Although this movement contains some promising moves, I finally draw the conclusion that it does not really provide much of an answer to the specific question about the status or possibility of women’s subjectivity within western symbolic and political constellations. I then turn to attempts by feminist philosophers to write and otherwise labour a ‘way out’ of this impasse, and in particular do I find Luce Irigaray’s work helpful for the ways in which she proposes that we work to restore the silenced maternal voice. Much of what she says is shown to resonate with the practical strategies of rape victims to rediscover or remake themselves after rape, which on my interpretation is the paradigm case of the type of unmaking or undoing of the female self of which women experience many examples on an everyday level. I show also that, since the female and the male derive their identities from each other, a (new) relationship between the sexes is as much called for as the emergence of full female subjectivity. Finally, I look at some concrete ideas about creating the material conditions for the emergence of female subjectivity, including the idea of the mother as goddess and the idea of loving solidarity amongst women. I return in the very last section of the dissertation to the issue of rape in the light of this provisional, utopian vision, and suggest that in a situation where women are empowered to live in a women’s world, rape would become a pathetic act which would shame only the man who attempts it. / Prof. J.J. Snyman

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This thesis brings together two important aspects of Feminist Theory, the problem of reconceptualising community in terms of difference, and the role of temporality and futurity within feminist visions of the political. I argue that rethinking community directly entails a rethinking of temporality. This is initially suggested in my examination of the work of anthropologists Carol Greenhouse and Johannes Fabian, who argue that conceptions of time play an important role in social methods of ??managing?? difference. I then turn to an analysis of a number of different feminist accounts of community in order to show that, in each case, the attempt to rethink community in terms of an openness to diversity is invariably accompanied by a contestation of dominant linear temporal concepts. I suggest that these accounts represent a shift to an understanding of time as fractured, dislocated or out of joint. While this shift is explicit in some of the work I examine, specifically in Linnell Secomb and Rosalyn Diprose??s work, for the most part, the problem of temporality is not explicitly thematised. I therefore seek to uncover an emerging critique of linear temporality within feminist accounts of community, while also arguing for a greater recognition of the way time systems shape the way we understand and relate to difference. In order to extend the contestation of linear temporality developed in the first section, I turn to the work of Jacques Derrida. I extend the gesture towards a dislocated time by examining Derrida??s deconstruction of Aristotle??s account of time and his quasi-concept, diff??rance. Both of these accounts challenge the self-presence of the now. What proves to be particularly important for the problem of community is the way this fundamental dislocation suggests a reworking of social understandings of the heritage, transformation and political action. This suggestion is developed through an analysis of two of Derrida??s later essays ??The Other Heading?? and ??Psyche: Inventions of the other??, where I draw out his claim that an openness to the coming of the other involves both the active disruption of convention and tradition as well as a passive relation to an open and incalculable future. I conclude this thesis by arguing that Derrida??s account of time, as a disruptive exposure to alterity, is a provocative candidate for a model of temporality congenial to feminist projects of reconceptualising community. Accordingly, this thesis makes a unique contribution to feminist theory by connecting two significant but often separate concerns, in the process providing new avenues for feminist theorisations of community.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--York University, 1997. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 592-630). Preview (1st 24 pages) available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ27295.

Thesis (M.S.)--West Virginia University, 2004. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 44 p. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 37-38).