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<p>My dissertation explores the counter-histories of trans-Atlantic modernity that surface in contemporary apocalyptic visuality. Framing twenty-first-century apocalypse films and televisual narratives as “new world” fantasies, I argue that British and American visions of The End re-stage the exploitative “contracts” that underwrite capitalist modernity. While contemporary visions of apocalypse predominantly valorize a survivalist ethos premised on claiming territory, annihilating threatening others, and securing reproductive labour, they can also be read for the ethical, affective, and political alternatives that they inadvertently expose. With this in mind, I bring together the fields of transatlantic studies and biopolitical theory in order to accomplish two complementary objectives. The first aim is to critique the gendered, racial, and generational politics of survivalist fantasies, which I read as conducting a neoliberal pedagogy that reanimates histories of racial terror and sexual exploitation. The second is to develop a biopolitical analysis premised on Hannah Arendt’s principle of natality in order to foreground the reproductive and youthful bodies that have been too long marginalized in theories of biopower. Though they are typically relegated to the background of apocalyptic visual culture, women and children figure the unrealized possibilities that haunt survivalist fantasies—possibilities that, I argue, are embedded in the ruined landscapes that they negotiate. Apocalyptic visions of crumbling metropolises, wasted landscapes, and abandoned border sites invite genealogical excavations of the lingering counter-histories embedded in their ruins. Such critical excavations reveal the “now” as a space-time of contestation in which suppressed pasts open onto a multiplicity of possible futures.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

It is often left unquestioned that women in the Hebrew Bible desired children. Though this is highly probable, many scholars make the assumption that all women necessarily wanted children. Universalizing the desire for children reduces complex characters to stand-ins for a supposed motif. This also essentializes the role of a female character to that of child-bearer, when actually these women have many different roles. Furthermore, many scholars make the claim that having children is the only way for a woman to improve her status in ancient Near Eastern societies. Yet women did not always receive a change in status because of childbirth. Therefore, the reasons why women desire children are quite varied. / Religion

In this study, I use social constructionist feminist and queer theory and narrative analysis to identify messages about gender, sexuality, and sexual violence in both the book versions and film adaptations of The Hunger Games trilogy, the Divergent trilogy, and the Vampire Academy series. These three series are representative of a major pop culture trend in which young adult novels are not only popular and financially successful, but in which these types of novels are being adapted into major films. In this study, I demonstrate that the book and film series all generally privilege whiteness, able-bodiedness, and heterosexuality, and in doing so, these texts reproduce a narrow worldview and privilege normative ways of knowing and being. However, while the films strictly reinforce normative understandings of gender, sexuality, and sexual violence, each book series reimagines gender in important ways, disrupts normative scripts that denigrate women’s ownership over their sexuality, and represents sexual violence in graphic but not exploitative ways that portray the real life consequences and complexity of sexual violence. My analysis of these texts reveals that the book series employ a variety of mechanisms that empower the women protagonists including establishing their narrative agency and representing them as gender fluid, while the film series utilize a variety of mechanisms that both objectify and superficially empower women including an emphasis on women’s sexualized physical bodies especially in times of vulnerability, the pronunciation of “natural” sexual differences, and the strict regulation of women’s bodies by dominantly masculine men. I argue that the significant alteration of the books’ original messages are a product of logistical, historical, cultural, and economic elements of the film industry, which has continually constructed women’s roles in terms of their sexual availability, victimization, and need to be rescued by heroic men. In this study, I address the institutional imperatives of the film industry that dictate specific representations of gender, sexuality, and sexual violence, and I address what these representations might mean for audiences. / Media & Communication

Emerging anti-violence work has focused on the importance of engaging men in primary prevention efforts, especially on postsecondary campuses, due to the statistical reality that men are overrepresented as perpetrators of sexual violence (Black et al, 2011; Piccigallo, Lilley, & Miller, 2012; Flood, 2019). This study sought to build upon this existing body of literature by inviting male university students into discussions around their perspectives of sexual violence prevention efforts on campus to better understand how prevention programming can be improved to elicit male student engagement. Six participants were recruited from McMaster University to participate in focus groups. Focus groups begun with the facilitation of a common activity used in anti-violence programming, titled “the gender boxes,” to contextualize the discussion around exploring the social construction of gender as it intersects with violence against women. The ensuing discussion revealed the following themes: (1) cisheteropatriarchal masculinity demands men perform gender in ways that recreate sexual scripts and traditional gender roles, as evidenced by their reflections on “the gender boxes” activity, (2) traditional masculinity intentionally obscures the dynamics of negotiating sex and consent, which subsequently create the potential for sexual violence to occur, (3) participants described feeling disengaged from existing prevention efforts, and (4) participants imagined potential improvements to engage men in sexual violence prevention, which largely reflected existing literature on the subject. This project contributes to anti-violence efforts through revealing the continued need to engage men in every stage of the process to then facilitate their investment in ending violence against women. / Thesis / Master of Social Work (MSW)