This thesis studies Italian journalists' perceptions and experiences of the use of gendered language in the representation of women in the Italian press. Previous research has shown that Italian media misrepresent women by producing gender stereotypes. This is, to a certain extent, related to language: Italian is considered to be a gender language, meaning that every noun, pronoun and adjective have a gender. The research questions that guide this study are: what are the Italian journalists' perceptions and experiences of gender in the articles they write?  What is the place and role of language in the journalists' evaluation of gender equality in news? What are the reasons behind the journalists' use of language when they write a piece about a woman? Using an ethnographic approach, 9 semi-structured interviews were conducted and analysed following the journalistic culture perspective proposed by Hanitzsch (2007). The results show that there are many different approaches to gender, from the one suggesting to neglect gender as a category at all in the news production, to the one that sees gender as a category that is newsworthy as such and a starting point for an article. Also the role of language is interpreted in very different ways. On one side there is the idea that, compared to the gender gap being a broader social problem, language is secondary; on the other, language is considered to be able to drive a change in the society. Finally, also the reasons behind the journalists' use of language are diverse: the ethical codes do not apply to all the journalists or reveal a lack of guidelines that oblige journalists to rely on their morality, gender sensitivity, or interest to the topic of gender equality; or on the newspaper's own guidelines. The readers' assumed expectations, as well as the kind of journalism (with its requests in terms of time and space) influence the use of language with regard to gender equality. The results show also that, beside some context-dependent elements, which make Italy a specific case, there are some universal considerations that can be made. In particular, basing on these universal elements, the addition of a linguistic dimension to journalistic cultures (Hanitzsch, 2007) is suggested. In this dimension, it will be proposed to include two levels: the influence of language on social reality and the influence of journalism on language.

The purpose of this study was to analyze how different authors from 1920 to 2011 described the Swedish temperance movement. The study wanted to highlight a gender perspective through a description of women´s and men´s relationship to alcohol habits and their different positions, assignments, and influences in the Swedish temperance movement. To further aid in the research of this study, it was decided to use the gender system that Yvonne Hirdman had presented in her work. The study showed that there existed a difference in the description between women’s and men’s alcohol habits and position of influence. Women were bound to have an idealized image of sobriety and their biological reproductive nature as women. Men had more liberty and freedom compared to women. However, this affected the middle-class and not the working class. The study showed that social standing influenced what type of position and influence both women and men had in the temperance movement. It also showed a separation between female and male in the description and that the authors were following a male norm in their description.

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Ancient gynecology is a field with a large number of contradictions. Women were expected to have full awareness of their bodily functions but were not trusted as authoritative experts on the subject. In Rome, the majority of midwives were uneducated slave women, yet the expectations held for a proper midwife required formal education. The ability to give birth made women powerful in the eyes of the Greeks but was also used by Greek men (chiefly Athenians) as an excuse to oppress women. Studying ancient gynecology is a necessity for truly understanding the day-to-day lives of ancient women. In works such as the Odyssey or The Iliad, the women featured are typically upper-class nobles who are in unrealistic settings and have similar abilities, expectations, and lives. By reading through medical texts written by respected physicians such as Soranus and Hippocrates, scholars are provided an in-depth look at how ancient doctors truly saw the female body.

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Suzanne Lacy, Leslie Labowitz-Starus and Sharon Hayes have created public performances that respond to the socio-political conditions of their time and place, and extend the boundaries of the traditional public sphere to include feminist concerns. In their collaborative performance In Mourning and In Rage (1977), Lacy and Labowitz-Starus utilized the private, feminist practice of consciousness-raising to bring widespread visibility to the politics of the female body. Hayes' works In the Near Future (2007-09) and Everything Else Has Failed! Don't You Think It's Time for Love? (2007), draw attention to issues concerning counterpublics through obliquely referential personal and political narratives. These works all mobilize a performing, protesting body whose corporeality mediates the audience's political realizations, past memories and current subjecthood. / Art History

In this study I advance the thesis that Simone de Beauvoir's account of the development of subjectivity is based in a consideration of the Hegelian description of the development of subjectivity in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Like Hegel, Beauvoir argues that an aspect of the development of subjectivity is the ability to discover oneself as related to the collective world. Additionally, she shows through her various works that individual identity and freedom are conditioned by the possibility for intersubjective recognition, and development of a project within an ambiguous relationship between the self, others, and the shared social world. Nevertheless, throughout history this foundation for the possibility of freedom has often been lacking and more so for some groups than others, which points us to an important difference in focus in Hegel and Beauvoir's work. For one, the subject in the idealized Hegelian account comes to recognize its power and freedom as it progresses in its connections and influence within the world. But, for those who have historically lacked options (women, those who happen to be black, the poor, etc.) transcendence in terms of the actualization of one's identity and recognized participation in the collective is at best often co-opted or concealed and at worst impossible. Thus, one of the central differences between Hegel's narrative in the Phenomenology and Beauvoir's in The Second Sex is that for women the cycle is a building up of deception, not a progression to clarity and understanding. This progression as Beauvoir shows is neither natural nor perfect, rather it depends upon the possibilities historically granted to specific social groups and denied to others. The central focus of this study is Beauvoir's analysis of the process of becoming (a) woman, but it is not limited to this. Rather, I argue that through engaging with Beauvoir's philosophy, including her appeal to Hegel, we (1) come to understand the ambiguity of the human condition, desire, intention, and identity, (2) the bad faith that often manifests in our relations with others, and (3) the existence of the spectrums of oppression and privilege. There are, of course, several ways to approach the study of historical figures in philosophy. We can treat them as though they are our contemporaries, analyzing their arguments and clarifying their ideas with the intention of showing their relevance to our contemporary concerns. Or, we can study them in their historical contexts with an eye toward tracing the development of their doctrines, attempting as we go to restructure them within their historical situations and as individuals. Both of these approaches have their benefits and drawbacks. In the former, we succeed in making Beauvoir and Hegel relevant as participants in our contemporary dialogues; but we may be making them relevant through reading our own contemporary views and concerns into their texts. In taking the latter approach, we do not use these historical figures as mere mouths, but through reifying them in their historical context we may find them to be less relevant. In what follows I seek to strike a balance between these approaches, especially in that I am engaging a philosophical predecessor (Beauvoir) who is engaging a philosophical predecessor (Hegel). In order to do this I look at the context in which Beauvoir is using Hegel, the influence of her closest philosophical companions on her use of Hegel, and how feminists have since used Beauvoir's philosophy to address contemporary problems. And while I understand the purpose of philosophy to be in fact engagement, rather than a process of historical excavation, I believe that through examining these various relations we can use historical figures to analyze and resolve the urgent social, political, and theoretical issues of our time, while simultaneously understanding that the times in which they originally philosophized may be vastly different from our own. / Philosophy

Several studies have shown that women tend to use more personal pronouns and therefore show more involvement with the reader. This paper examines the differences between male and female editors’ letters in magazines. The study applied the method of corpus linguistics in order to examine forty editor’s letters twenty from the male-targeted magazine Gentlemen’s Quarterly and twenty from the female-targeted magazine Harper’s Bazaar. First person singular and second person singular pronouns were examined to determine whether the female editor showed more involvement with the reader than the male editor. The result shows that the male editor from the Gentlemen’s Quarterly shows more involvement with the reader than the female editor from Harper’s Bazaar, which clashes the findings of previous studies.

‘Sexuality, Identity and the Clothed Male Body’ is a PhD by Published Work that draws together a collective body of work that deals specifically and significantly with the dressed male body. This thesis presents a case for the collection of publications included in the submission to be viewed as a coherent body of work which makes a contribution to knowledge in the fields of fashion studies and cultural studies, in which the works are situated. The body of work consists of two monographs - Don We Now Our Gay Apparel: Gay Men’s Dress in the Twentieth Century (Berg, 2000), and The Story of Men’s Underwear (Parkstone International Press, 2010) - and two chapters in edited books - ‘Butch Queens in Macho Drag: Gay Men, Dress and Subcultural Identity’ (2008) and ‘Hair and Male (Homo)Sexuality: Up-Top and Down Below’ (2008). Through an examination of the major themes addressed throughout the submitted body of work – sexuality, identity, subcultural formation, men’s dress and masculinities and clothes and the body - this thesis demonstrates that the published work contributes to knowledge through its two major foci. Firstly, the means by which gay men have utilised their dressed bodies as a situated and embodying practice to articulate identity, masculinity, and social and sexual interaction, and secondly an examination of men’s underwear’s specific function in the covering, exposing and representation of men’s bodies. These were, until recently, relatively neglected areas of fashion studies and dress history, and by explicitly bringing together these areas to present a comprehensive investigation this thesis serves to provide a new contribution to knowledge in these areas. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, that is common in both fashion studies and cultural studies, the specific combination of research methods that is employed throughout the body of work, has provided a unifying element that further enhances this contribution to knowledge.