Thesis (Ph.D.)--Duquesne University, 2007. / Title from document title page. Abstract included in electronic submission form. Includes bibliographical references (p. 112-115).

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2005. / Advisor: Dr. John Corrigan, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Religion. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 16, 2005). Document formatted into pages; contains v, 46 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2006. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 204-208). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

The present MA thesis explores the concept of a female body and voice and their transformations as presented by various American writers. The chosen male authored works include Washington Square by Henry James, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, and The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, for these writers delineate their heroines Catherine Sloper, Lady Brett Ashley, and Oedipa Maas in a turbulent period of their lives when they attempt to break with the obsolescent roles of passive and obedient daughters, partners, and wives. These fictional agents use different kinds of resistance, but as women, they are, nevertheless, mediated through the dominant male and masculine discourse that pervades the fictionalized societies in which these female agents appear. As for fictional work by female writers, without the assumption that the gender of the writer makes any literary work more or less "feminine", I have chosen The Awakening by Kate Chopin, The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, a short-story "Good Country People" by Flannery O'Connor, and Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker. The female heroines of the selected literary works bear a number of traumas women have had to endure under the patriarchal order and this thesis will address those traumas, their manifestation in the female psyche, and how...

This dissertation exposes the status of eros in the works of Levinas, Irigaray, and, Nancy. I begin by evaluating Levinas’s phenomenological analyses of eros in Time and the Other and Totality and Infinity. In order to fully appreciate this, however, I must necessarily also provide a summary overview of the central theme which guides Levinas’s work: ‘the Other.’ This leads Levinas to develop ethics as first philosophy, which in turn implies that the reduction of the Other to the same is the unethical gesture par excellence. Levinas formulates eros as the ‘equivocal par excellence’; a profane relation with the radical alterity of the feminine. Eros, for Levinas, inevitably lapses back to the economy of the same, and hence he looks to paternal fecundity to understand a relation with alterity untainted by erotic sensuality. Moreover, I identify the themes in Levinas’s work which guide this dissertation: the plurality of being, the tactility of erotic caressing, transcendence in eros, sexual difference, the affair between love and death, revisiting Plato’s Symposium, and, the erotic relationship with alterity. Having exposed these themes, and pre-empting a feminist critique of Levinas, I move on to the work of Luce Irigaray. After contextualising Irigaray’s feminist project, I expose and evaluate her critical reading of Levinas, particularly in her essay “The Fecundity of the Caress.” For Irigaray, Levinas mistakenly assumes a universal masculine subject, which in turn denies the feminine (and thus empirical women) a chance to be subjects. The fact that Levinas considers eros profane suggests, for Irigaray, that Levinas’s phenomenology of eros is haunted by a patriarchal bias evinced in the way he turns to paternity to salvage eros from a damnable carnality. Irigaray, in contrast, asserts eros as a relationship between the two real poles of sexual alterity. Eros thus holds potential as a just relation between the sexes. However, I find that Irigaray’s insistence on the biological markers of sexual difference becomes somewhat too idealistic. When compared with one another, Irigaray and Levinas arrive at an impasse which is solved by turning to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. Nancy insists that love (including eros) cannot be thought as anything but an indefinite multiplicity. Nancy’s thought on love reflects his formulation of ‘being-singular-plural,’ an ontology which asserts ‘being-with’ is axiomatic in all philosophical investigations. In Shattered Love, Nancy deconstructs dialectics in order to show that love does not operate in a dialectical fashion. Both Levinas’s and Irigaray’s accounts of eros are exposed as dialectical. Nancy, in contrast, formulates love and sex/gender as the exposure of a subject to the relation with the other. Moreover, by examining Nancy’s thought on the body, eros can be derived as subtending all relations between sexed bodies. Thus Nancy figures eros as neither ideal nor profane, nor does he restrict eros to an ideal relation between the masculine and the feminine. However, Nancy’s opaque philosophy is not without fault. Although Nancy offers an interesting way in which to think eros, certain avenues of thought remain unexplored. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Philosophy / unrestricted

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This research is a curiosity for the spaces outside the gender binary, the spaces where an “I” and a “we” could manifest unencumbered by this hierarchical binary[1]. The binary is often in gender research considered a system of understanding sexed peoples in this world based on their differential position in relation to one another. Gender as a “social category imposed on a sexed body”[2] arose in academic usage by feminists in the 1980s, it was introduced to dismantle the idea of separate spheres, and yet it “does not have the power to address existing historical paradigms”[3] and has therefore remained anchored in the idea of two, the male and female identity, and even whilst the idea of male and female social identities has been expanded to contain other sexed and gendered bodies, , the idea of an agendered subject is sparsely addressed. In essence this work seeks to address the binary of existence and non-existence in the bio-social-psychological world that is gender studies, to attempt to find the alchemical magic that creates a new cartography of gender, or at least a sliver of new territory.                Gender is currently one of the base categories of identification in a world built on: §  religious narratives in which “God/s” made only man and woman.  §  biological determination which posits a dependent binary relationship based on gametes.  §  and systemic thinking grounded in Patriarchal thinking.  Whilst the spaces outside the gender binary have become more thinkable in recent decades with the advent of Transgender studies[4] as an academic field, Irigaray[5] offers that the space outside the binary structure offers only “social and psychological damage”[6] to anyone seeking to inhabit it. This thesis thus explores a particular identity cartography which I here call the alchemy of agender, in reference to the potentially mythical, potentially magical space outside of the “norm”.    This research does not claim to cover all theories of power, subjectivity, sexual difference, or the growing body of knowledge within gender studies, pertinently transgender studies, queer studies, and intersectional studies. Conversely, I start from lived experience, both my own; in encountering questions and concerns from the students I teach; and the lived experience of others which manifests in a desire of a community to speak themselves into existence.                In my 8 years of teaching variations of gender studies I have observed that the language and space young people have for imagining and queering their gender has steadily increased. Yet, agender is still very unexplored as a concept, with a constant question of “why do we need gender?” accompanying my student’s reflections. Throughout human history we have examples of agender/non-binary/queer/non-conforming individuals, creating an “I” and a “we” that is outside, beyond or uninhibited by the gender binary, or at the very least the infamous, and equally at times unwelcome, “third wheel” to the binary.    With this research I would like to follow two intertwined threads; a short and questionable diachronic journey of agender; secondly to posit what an “I” and a “we” without and beyond gender might constitute, succinctly to explore how agender/ non-binary identities are formed. Our thought system allows for feminine males and masculine females, or a patchwork of gender traits blended in what is recognized as non-conforming or gender queer, yet I am curious if agendered experiences offer merely another blend or an entire alternative.   In my quest to draw a cartography of agender, I am motivated by the concept of eidetic reduction, this being the Husserlian approach that argues that we can determine the limitations of a phenomena through exploration of lived experiences of that phenomena. For this research, it means gathering experiences from self-identified agender individuals online to determine the essences of this experience. Namely eidetic reduction is when one moves from lived experience, to a more abstract essence, through to a kind of collective categorization of a concept. This is achieved through identifying experiences that are unique to the group in question. In this I am excited to see how exploring agendered experiences can create gender magic, and consequently a possibility to re-imagine who you or I might be.   Succinctly an online ethnographic study of agender discussions will be used to ascertain if there is something unique about the agender experience, how it might differentiate from a trans* experience or a gendered experience.  [1] Scott, J.W. (1986) Gender: A Useful category of Historical Analysis. The American Historical Review, Vol 91, No. 5, pp.[2] Scott, J.W. (1986) Gender: A Useful category of Historical Analysis. The American Historical Review, Vol 91, No. 5, pp.1056[3] Scott, J.W. (1986) Gender: A Useful category of Historical Analysis. The American Historical Review, Vol 91, No. 5, pp.1057[4] In the western world the advent of this field is associated with an article written by Sandy Stone published in 1987 entitled, “The Empire strikes back: A posttranssexual manifesto” (first presented at a UCSC conference entitled "Other Voices, Other Worlds: Questioning Gender and Ethnicity"). [5] Braidotti, R (2003) Becoming Woman: or sexual difference revisited. Theory, Culture and Society, Vol.20, Issue 3, pp. 43-64[6] Braidotti, R (2003) Becoming Woman: or sexual difference revisited. Theory, Culture and Society, Vol.20, Issue 3, pp. 43-64

I trace Jacques Derrida's notions of self and truth in Circumfession. This text paints a gruesome self-portrait depicting the inescapable violence of subjectivity. The self is born in blood. Derrida courageously confesses to being a casualty of this lovelessness. Similarly, exploring the depth of patriarchy's inscriptions requires facing the painful truth of my bleeding self. Investigating these wounds seems to reopen them, making me complicit in my own oppression. Drawing from the rich narrative of Ingeborg Bachmann's novel Malina, I allow feminists such as Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Drucilla Cornell and bell hooks to engage Derrida's notions of the wounded and wounding self. Beginning in this bloody place, they attempt to write a way-out of the disempowering systems of subjectivity to which the female self seems confined. They write in order that love will bleed some light on the struggle for empowered female subjectivity, re-writing the self as a space of love rather than violence.

En genusteoretisk stickprovskontroll. Uppsatsen genomlyser Camilla Grebes Älskaren från huvudkontoret ur ett genusteoretiskt perspektiv med focus på Luce Irigaray teorier. Inledningsvis presenteras Luce Irigaray övergripande och hennes arbete ställs i relation till Simone de Beauvoirs. Irigarays teorier om maskulint och feminint subjekt gås igenom och teoridelen avslutas med ett destillat av teorierna här kallat; typiska drag. Utifrån dessa typiska drag analyseras delar, utvalda med heuristisk metod, av Camilla Grebes roman Älskaren från huvudkontoret från 2015. I analysen diskuteras utöver undersökningen och de presenterade teorierna även paralleller till Janice Radways Kvinnor läser romantik: om samspelet mellan text och kontext. Resultaten av undersökningen och slutsatsen diskuteras och ifrågasätts. / <p>--</p>

This dissertation proposes to examine the work of scholars Christine de Pizan and Luce Irigaray in order to develop the possibilities of fiction in philosophy for the purposes of social transformation. Using four of her major narrative texts (The Mutacion of Fortune, the City of Ladies, the Path of Long Study and the Vision) I show how Christine employs the complex array of hermeneutical tools available to her in fictionalized ways as a means of training her readers into re-writing their understanding of themselves and their contexts. Alongside such re-writings, I show that she understands herself to have a particular vocation for educating the powers of France towards ethical action in their governance, and that she does so in these works in the form of philosophically oriented fictionalizations. I use the work of Luce Irigaray to explore a philosopher from the twentieth and twenty-first century who uses narrative and hermeneutical tools that bear a family resemblance to Christine's. Tracing Irigaray's formulations on the necessity of sexual difference I show how she re-tells stories from myth and history in such a way as to develop the sexual difference she desires. Finally, having engaged with these two philosophers, I use the hermeneutical work of Hans-Georg Gadamer to present my own work on how well-crafted fiction can be used to build philosophical concepts and understandings that are not yet available in our world, but which become available to us through our participation in the new fictionalized contexts and fictional worlds we create. I show how it is through understanding the possibilities this kind of philosophical and fictionalized utopic thinking holds that social transformation rooted in the world-building capabilities of individual persons can occur.