Judith Butler’s writings on gender ostensibly changed the way gender is considered with regard to an individual’s subjectivity. Her writings expressed a discursive parameter that changed the theoretical standpoint of gender from that of performance, to that of performativity. In short, the notion of gender became understood as a power mechanism operating within society that compels individuals along the heteronormal binary tracts of male or female, man or woman. Within the strata of popular culture, this binarism is seemingly ritualized and repeated, incessantly. This treatise examines how rock music, as a popular and widespread mode of popular music, exemplifies gender binarism through a notable ndrocentrism. The research will examine how gender performativity operates within the taxonomy of rock music, and how the message communicated by rock music becomes translated into a listener’s subjectivity.

In the 1990s, Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women (1992) was arguably of signal importance in the thematization of the limits imposed by the media on the negotiation of gender identity. However, the utilization of Faludi’s various analyses, in the interest of rendering social critique, has become progressively more problematic during the first decade of the 21st century. This is because her analyses engage neither with the development of media technologies subsequent to the early 1990s, nor with the way in which such technological developments now engage audiences on a greater multiplicity of levels than before, in a manner that consequently stands to inform their subjectivity to a degree hitherto unimagined. (A good example of the latter would, of course, be the proliferation of interactive exchanges on the World Wide Web). As such, in the light of such technological developments, this treatise is orientated around an investigation of the continued relevance of Faludi’s Backlash (1992) for the negotiation of gender identity in the contemporary era. In particular, its focus falls on West’s film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), which is considered against the backdrop of the Lara Croft: Tomb Raider phenomenon, which encompasses sequels to the film, online interactive sites, graphic novels, figurines, and video games, among other products. This investigation draws on the reception theory of, on the one hand, Adorno and Horkheimer, and, on the other hand, Stuart Hall.

Formed in Toronto in 1969, the trio of artists known as General Idea developed a body of work focused on the construction of Active identities and elaborate mythologies parodying the popular myths of art and the artist: the artist as genius, celebrity and avant-garde rebel. It is often said that General Idea's work is at its core an inquiry into art's methods of production, dissemination and reception - an example of the tendency in Western art of the 1960s and '70s towards the dematerialization of the art object and the critique of art's institutions. In this thesis, I argue that General Idea's work also demands to be seen on a broader level, as an exploration of artifice and the manipulation of conventional codes in everyday life. I maintain that, above and beyond their critical interest in art and pop culture, G.I.'s project was to reveal and question the most fundamental social conventions of all: gender and identity. Through their use of pseudonyms, Active identities, pageants and performances, General Idea invite us to consider the masks we wear, the poses we assume and the identities we perform even in our most banal moments, through bodily gestures, speech acts and the manipulation of surfaces. A project like The 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant - staged at a time when normative gender roles and sexual identities were being called into question by the Gay Liberation Movement and the feminist movement - suggests an awareness on the part of General Idea of the constructed nature of identity and gender (a notion later popularized in academic discourse and cultural practice of the 1980s and '90s). General Idea's artistic collaboration spanned more than twenty-five years, but it is the period from the early 1970s to the mid-'80s that constitutes the focus of this thesis. I argue that the boundaries separating masculine and feminine, straight and gay, fact and fiction, are complicated and challenged most effectively in the first two phases of their collaboration. The first phase is typically described as General Idea's "conceptual" phase because of the ephemeral, idea-based nature of the work. It can be said to begin with The 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant and end with the symbolic arson of The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion in 1977. The second phase, marked by a proliferation of poodle imagery in a variety of media, followed hot on the heels of the torching of the Pavillion and continued until the mid-1980s. Although the shift from "conceptual" art to a more material art object necessarily entails a shift in strategies of representation, I argue that both phases of artistic production rely on visual and verbal signifying practices broadly defined as Camp. At a time when it had fallen out of favour as a viable form of self-expression in politicized gay communities, Camp was taken up by General Idea as both a critical tool and a key to attaining visibility - a ticket to ride and a strategic kick in the ass of the dominant order. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

The central assumption of this study is that the awareness of a historically constructed, culturally sanctioned condition of subalternity is at the heart of the fictional production of Francophone African women writers. Subalternity here is viewed as a narrative and spatial continuum inside which African women have to negotiate issues relating to subjecthood and identity, both marked by gender and colonialism. Various definitions of 'the subaltern' are relevant, ranging from Antonio Gramsci's to those of the South Asian Subaltern Studies group, and to John Beverley's and Fredric Jameson's discussions. Jameson's emphasis on subalternity as "the feelings of mental inferiority nad habits of subservience and obedience which... develop in situations of domination - most dramatically in the experience of colonized peoples" (Jameson, 1981) is crucial, because it demonstrates the constructedness of that ontological condition. The approach adopted here aims to include gender as a category in a discourse that often excludes it, and to bring social science-oriented concepts into dialogue with literary theory and criticism. Combined with a discussion of Africa-influenced versions of feminist theory (stiwanism, negofeminism, motherism), Subaltern studies provides a space for the emergence of a south-south postcolonial debate that can throw new light on writing by African women. Fictional works by Therese Kuoh-Moukoury, Mariama Ba, Aminata Maiga Ka, Angele Rawiri, Philomene Bassek, Evelyne Mpoudi-Ngolle, Regina Yaou, Fatou Keita, and Abibatou Traore are read as conveying the various stages of consciousness on the part of the subaltern. Kuoh-Moukoury's Rencontres essentielles (1969), Maiga Ka's La voie du salut (1985), and Bassek's La tache de sang (1990) exemplify a first stage of consciousness in which the subaltern woman submits passively to oppressive patriarchal, cultural and religious prescriptions. Ba's Une si longue lettre (1979), Mpoudi Ngolle's Sous La cendre le feu (1990) and Rawiri's Fureurs et cris de femmes (1989) present a more assertive, rebellious heroine whose efforts are undermined by a resilient social context. Finally, Traore's Sidagamie (1998), Kei'ta's Rebelle (1998) and Yaou's Le prix de la revoke (1997) address the possibility of a sustained African women's struggle resulting not only in transient personal and isolated victories but also in an enduring social transformation governed by the ethos of gender equality. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation explores the nature and ontogeny of infants' ability to match phonetic information in comparison to non-speech information in the face and voice. Previous research shows that infants' ability to match phonetic information in face and voice is robust at 4.5 months of age (e.g., Kuhl & Meltzoff, 1982; 1984; 1988; Patterson & Werker, 1999). These findings support claims that young infants can perceive structural correspondences between audio and visual aspects of phonetic input and that speech is represented amodally. It remains unclear, however, specifically what factors allow speech to be perceived amodally and whether the intermodal perception of other aspects of face and voice is like that of speech. Gender is another biologically significant cue that is available in both the face and voice. In this dissertation, nine experiments examine infants' ability to match phonetic and gender information with dynamic faces and voices. Infants were seated in front of two side-by-side video monitors which displayed filmed images of a female or male face, each articulating a vowel sound ( / a / or / i / ) in synchrony. The sound was played through a central speaker and corresponded with one of the displays but was synchronous with both. In Experiment 1,4.5-month-old infants did not look preferentially at the face that matched the gender of the heard voice when presented with the same stimuli that produced a robust phonetic matching effect. In Experiments 2 through 4, vowel and gender information were placed in conflict to determine the relative contribution of each in infants' ability to match bimodal information in the face and voice. The age at which infants do match gender information with my stimuli was determined in Experiments 5 and 6. In order to explore whether matching phonetic information in face and voice is based on featural or configural information, two experiments examined infants' ability to match phonetic information using inverted faces (Experiment 7) and upright faces with inverted mouths (Experiment 8). Finally, Experiment 9 extended the phonetic matching effect to 2-month-old infants. The experiments in this dissertation provide evidence that, at 4.5 months of age, infants are more likely to attend to phonetic information in the face and voice than to gender information. Phonetic information may have a special salience and/or unity that is not apparent in similar but non-phonetic events. The findings are discussed in relation to key theories of perceptual development. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

This research involves a discourse analysis of several alternative video works produced by Paul Wong, an alternative video artist based in Vancouver, BC. Utilizing Judith Butler's "Subjects of sex/gender/desire," (1999) to comment and expand on Michel Foucault's four 'rules' for conducting discourse analysis, as laid out in The history of sexuality volume I: An introduction, Part Four, Chapter 2, "Method," (1978, 1990) I analyse Wong's 60 unit: Bruise (1976), Confused: Sexual views (1984) and So are you (1994). By focusing on discourses addressing the intersections of gender, race and sexuality in Wong's work, this analysis focuses on how alternative video art can be examined as activist work from a sociological perspective. Wong's video works reflect his engagements with intersecting queer and racialised identities and, through discourse analysis, can be shown to reflect, question and challenge mainstream queer and Chinese histories in Canada. Exploring Wong's contribution to discourses on gender, race and sexuality acts to underscore the contributions of alternative media artists to changing understandings of historical relations and to mainstream historical constructions of identity. Postmodern perspectives inform much alternative video practice and have worked to break down the distinctions between disciplines, recognize previously ignored mediums as legitimate and important forms and also to recognize a multiplicity of narratives and engage with marginalized perspectives. Utilizing postmodern perspectives, then, this research challenges notions of historical 'truths,' in mainstream narratives and histories. / Arts, Faculty of / Sociology, Department of / Graduate

Drawing on insights from feminist scholarship and gender studies, this thesis offers a new reading of selected medieval German texts with a special emphasis on the negotiation of gender and power. All three parts of the thesis demonstrate how the use of modern theories helps us to re-examine a medieval text's implications and ethical values, and to reconsider traditional views of the text. Part One focuses on the discussion of gender boundaries. Didactic and fictional texts, such as Thomasin von Zerclaere's Der welsche Gast and Ulrich von Liechtenstein's Frauendienst, show that violations of gender boundaries and the questioning of the traditional power relationship between the genders are crucial to the textual negotiation of masculinity and femininity. As I demonstrate in Part Two, the unequal relationship between men and women is especially important for the system of male homosocial bonding underlying medieval society. Examples of the physical and symbolic exchange of women and their favours are offered by didactic texts, such as Marquard vom Stein's Der Ritter vom Turn, and fictional texts, such as the Nibelungenlied. Aspects of this exchange are not solely related to medieval marriage practices, but are also reflected in courtly rituals, such as "frouwen schouwen" (watching the ladies). The importance of the conventionally beautiful female body as an object of exchange becomes obvious in Part Three, where I examine encounters between Christian knights and women defying the norms of feminine beauty. Here I focus on female figures that are defined as "doubly Other": both in their relationship to the masculine Self, and in their relationship to the ideal of medieval Christian femininity. Texts such as Wolfdietrich B and Der Strieker's Die Konigin vom Mohrenland show how the negotiation of gender and power assumes a new dimension in light male encounters with Wild Women, heathen women, "supernatural" women and old women, where the male partner often has to struggle to uphold his privileged masculine position. / Arts, Faculty of / Central Eastern Northern European Studies, Department of / Graduate

This thesis identifies and analyzes gendering in the art writing devoted to Lee Bontecou's metal and canvas sculptures made from the 1959 - 1964. Through a careful reading of reviews and articles written about Bontecou's constructions, this thesis reconstructs the context of the art world in the United States at mid-century and investigates how cultural expectations regarding gender directed the reception of Bontecou's art, beginning in 1959 and continuing through mid-1960s. Incorporating a description of the contemporaneous cultural context with description of the constructions and an analysis of examples of primary writing, the thesis chronologically follows the evolution of a tendency in art writing to associate gender-specific motivation and interpretation to one recurring feature of Bontecou's works.

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