The popularity of cosmetic surgery in the U.S. has increased dramatically over the last ten years - particularly for women, who make up the largest group of cosmetic surgery consumers. Cosmetic surgery can include relatively simple procedures such as permanent hair removal or Botox to more complicated procedures like breast augmentations and face-lifts. The rise in popularity of cosmetic surgery exalts only one kind of beauty and excludes many women from ever attaining this ideal, so while women may feel empowered, surgery acts as a form of assimilation, because the act of cosmetic surgery reifies an exclusionary beauty norm. With cosmetic surgery, this hegemonic ideal is becoming more attainable, and in the process, some women modify their individual identities, which I argue are shaped by such things as ethnicity, age, body shape, wrinkles, etc., and instead tend to become one homogenized group. I also argue that cosmetic surgery is a form of colonization of the body because most people who do fit with what is perceived as normal and beautiful experience pressure to assimilate. The body becomes colonized (via surgery) much as a country does in the sense that the colonizing group otherizes the colonized, and deems their way of life, or culture, as abhorrent and in need of assimilation to the dominant groups way of life. The colonizers (creators of the beauty myth) seek to modify womens identities in order to suit the beauty ideal. The modification of identity is a possibility because some of the most common procedures such as rhinoplasty, eyelid surgery, and Botox, seek to eliminate, or downplay, ethnic, or age associated traits in exchange for traits that adhere to the beauty ideal. External markers such as an ethnic nose, or even wrinkles, help define women and link them to their cultural origins or individual identity. Society has deemed such markers, particularly for women, as unacceptable because they are not in line with the U.S.'s beauty ideal, therefore, cosmetic surgery, and the inevitable the move towards monoculturalism threatens women's identities.

As with other forms of animal rights activism, animal foster care also appears to be dominated by women. In this paper I explore the role of animal foster care in, and its implications for, a Patriarchal society based on hierarchical dualisms. I argue that through their work as animal foster care workers and adoption facilitators these women do create positions of power for themselves, but that those positions remain subordinated to, and in some ways embrace, existing structural power relations--Patriarchy. More specifically, I argue that by constructing and assuming a social role that includes a culturally accepted power differential--the human-animal dichotomy--these women challenge individual level powerlessness, yet reinforce the very structural system that oppresses them and the animals in their care. I highlight how, by organizing around ideas about feral, abandoned, and surrendered animals as innocent and in need of human help and intervention and thus a social problem, these women simultaneously construct themselves as experts on human-animal relations, and the family. As adoption experts, these women exercise authority in deciding what constitutes a "good" match between animals and their adoptive human families. Constructing and maintaining "a" meaning of pets as family members, furthermore, enables women to maintain their traditional sphere of power--the private realm of home and family. I argue that through such constructions and practices animal foster care workers help alleviate the current "social problem" of animal homelessness,yet perpetuate hierarchical relations and the idea that animals need human help.

La présente recherche développe une double démarche : l’analyse des effets de la globalisation du genre par des politiques qui se veulent universelles en s’imposant à différent-e-s acteurs/actrices et les réactions de ceux/celles-ci, particulièrement celles des organisations féminines locales, dans la façon d’adapter ou de se réapproprier ces prescriptions internationales. Il s’agit de rendre compte de la manière dont le genre en tant que catégorie d’intervention publique parvient à se déployer d’une part dans les programmes d’aide au développement des pays financeurs et d’autre part dans les pays du Sud. Une analyse multi-niveaux est donc menée, tant au niveau des politiques et programmes de la coopération allemande, que de l’état tchadien puis du PRODALKA. Des projets et politiques visant à l’empowerment économique et politique, mais aussi la lutte contre les violences faites aux femmes ou des réformes du code du statut personnel, sont-ils vraiment mis en oeuvre ? Peut-on repérer des effets du PRODALKA sur les conditions de vie des femmes mais aussi concernant leur reconnaissance par les hommes ? Pour répondre à ces questions, la recherche, à la fois qualitative et quantitative, s’appuie sur une enquête auprès de 310 femmes et sur une vingtaine d’entretiens formels et de plusieurs autres non formels auprès des personnes intéressées par cette thématique dans le cadre d’un programme bilatéral de développement économique tchado-allemand. La thèse montre que peu de progrès ont été rendus possibles par l’intervention du PRODALKA, bien que certaines femmes aient vu leurs conditions améliorées. En effet, les projets menés ont peu tenu compte des besoins des femmes ou des relations de genre à cause d’une posture de neutralité postulant que toute action menée dans la société profite à tous les groupes sociaux sans exclusive. Ils relevaient plutôt des actions de type « intégration des femmes dans le développement telles que celles qui étaient menées dans les années 1960 et ont été critiquées par l’approche « genre et développement » qui a proposé des outils théoriques et méthodologiques qui auraient pu éviter les erreurs commises. / This research offers a dual approach: it offers firstly an analysis of the consequences of gender globalization, through the application of policies meant to be universal, which are imposed to different participants. This research also looks at the reactions of these participants, particularly local women’s organizations, and the ways in which they adapt or appropriate these international prescriptions. We mean to uncover how gender, as a specific category in the field of public intervention, spreads out, on the one hand, in development aid programs coming from funding countries, and, on the other hand, in developing countries. A multi-level analysis has thus been conducted, which looked at cooperation policies and programs supervised by Germany, at the application in chad and at the PRODALKA project. Are policies and projects aiming at economic and political empowerment or reforms of the code of personal status really being implemented? Can the impact of the PRODALKA project on the living conditions of women and their recognition by men really be measured? In order to answer these questions, this research, which is both qualitative and quantitative, relies on a survey conducted with 310 women and on a several formal interviews and several non-formal interviews with individuals involved with this topic, within the context of a bilateral program of economic development between Germany and chad. The thesis will show that not a lot of progress has been made by the PRODALKA project, although some women have witnessed an improvement of their conditions. Indeed, the projects carried out have not really taken into consideration women’s needs or gender relations because of a posture of neutrality which implies that any type of action carried out in society benefits all groups, without exceptions. Those projects consisted more in actions aimed at integrated women in development, such as those that were conducted in the 1960s. Those types of actions were criticized by the « gender and development » approach, which offer theoretical and methodological tools that could have been used to prevent some of the mistakes that were made.

Guided by the feminist intention of reasserting the importance of neglected female writers, I have used this work to re-examine the lives and texts of eighteenth-century diarists Hester Thrale-Piozzi and Frances Burney. Adopting an interdisciplinary methodology, I draw on both literary and non-literary material to examine the effect of familial and social patriarchy in eighteenth-century England. Using the diaries, journals and letters of Hester and Frances, I ask why female conformity to masculine domination was expected, and how violence was used to extract subserviant behaviour from women. Beginning with gossip, and encompassing social, editorial and physical abuse, I use the medical profession's manipulation of female vulnerability to exemplify the way society legitimates violence to ensure female ductility. Moving beyond this physical aspect, I then examine the psychical, and question the existence of a ‘self’ which is vulnerable to external manipulation. By diverging from the influence of Freudian psychology, and developing a form of Jungian feminism, I propose the existence of an essential female Self which transcends the constraints of societal expectations and physical violence. In this work, both Hester and Frances emerge as physically and psychically strong entities who were forced to adopt socially conformist personae to survive.

<p>The aim of this study is to investigate how the female author, Charlotte Brontë, describes the development of her female protagonist in Jane Eyre and to compare this to how the male author, Fyodor Dostoevsky, describes the development of his male protagonist in Crime and Punishment, inside the patriarchal 19th century.</p><p>My basic idea is that both characters in these two books have to reach their own unknown to find satisfaction and a new existence, and I want to investigate what the characters have to go through to find that existence. To help me in my exploration of Jane Eyre I make use of Gilbert and Gubars’ book The Madwoman in the Attic and in the case of Crime and Punishment, I make use of Pelikan Straus’ article ”“Why did I say ’Women!’?” Raskolnikov Reimagined”. Both authors discuss literature from a gender perspective, but without comparing female and male characters or authors with each other, which I believe is important for a more holistic understanding of gender issue.</p><p>The conclusion of this essay is that these books are describing the main characters’ evolution towards their personal unknown with the same tools, a double self, an important symbol, and in the end a love partner that embodies that unknown. Furthermore, I conclude that this development moves in opposing directions, whereby the female character gets in touch with a more traditional male disposition and the male character gets in touch with a more traditional female disposition. This mirrors the different position men and women are assigned in the patriarchal society. In conclusion, I suggest that all social roles are ultimately confining (irrespective of sex), and are attracted to the opposite pole, in order to discover what the individual does not have access to in the social sphere.</p>

<p> <p>&nbsp / </p> </p> <p align="left">The aim of this research project was to seek a reinterpretation of the Christian motif of' bearing one's cross'. This motif has been widely criticized by feminist theologians as an instrument that exacerbates the oppression of women, since it encourages self-sacrifice and in this way legitimizes abusive relationships.</p>

This thesis aims to analyse the construction of female identity from the beginning of the feminist activism in Victorian era whose rationale was formed during the eighteenth century, to the contemporary times in terms of patriarchy and motherhood in Timberlake Wertenbaker&rsquo / s The Grace of Mary Traverse and The Break of Day. This study is conducted with the historical development of the feminist movement that has had different agendas at different periods of history being taken into account. Fighting for women&rsquo / s emancipation and equality, feminism has helped women attain certain rights / however certain roles imposed on women that have been designed to define fema le identity cannot be said to have been eliminated. Rather, as this study shows, the oppression women have faced has just changed direction / but its nature is still the same. To this end, Wertenbaker presents the situation of women in different contexts of time and circumstances in her plays. Women&rsquo / s quest for identity has been interrupted and diverted by various oppressive mechanisms and institutions which are patriarchy and motherhood as the major focus of analysis throughout this thesis in Wertenbaker&rsquo / s plays.

The general purpose of this thesis is to provide a gendered analysis of the ways in which States use their power to facilitate and promote accumulation, specifically primitive accumulation. I will seek to demonstrate in this study that women, classed and racialised, and especially those migrating within the neo-liberal global political economy are exploited not only through the classical alienation of their labour, but from the application of the additional extra-economic power of patriarchy and the tools that provides to states, and typically male owning classes. Women&rsquo / s position in patriarchal society and patriarchal capitalism may transform their experiences with capital and the state into a relationship of accumulation by dispossession rather than having their labour alienated and exploited under typical expanded reproduction. States use the constructions of women as subordinate under patriarchy, as well as others about migrant labour, or about the &lsquo / aberrant&rsquo / nature of sex work, to justify the use of women&rsquo / s bodies in the sex trade in a way that promotes the primitive accumulation, or accumulation by dispossession of surplus value from their labour and bodies. This study will use the Turkish Republic of northern Cyprus as an example to highlight the arguments made about the ability of a patriarchal state in collusion with capital, to use the extra controls afforded by patriarchy to primitively accumulate wealth from women, and to reproduce that ability on a continuous scale.

The aim of this study is to investigate how the female author, Charlotte Brontë, describes the development of her female protagonist in Jane Eyre and to compare this to how the male author, Fyodor Dostoevsky, describes the development of his male protagonist in Crime and Punishment, inside the patriarchal 19th century. My basic idea is that both characters in these two books have to reach their own unknown to find satisfaction and a new existence, and I want to investigate what the characters have to go through to find that existence. To help me in my exploration of Jane Eyre I make use of Gilbert and Gubars’ book The Madwoman in the Attic and in the case of Crime and Punishment, I make use of Pelikan Straus’ article ”“Why did I say ’Women!’?” Raskolnikov Reimagined”. Both authors discuss literature from a gender perspective, but without comparing female and male characters or authors with each other, which I believe is important for a more holistic understanding of gender issue. The conclusion of this essay is that these books are describing the main characters’ evolution towards their personal unknown with the same tools, a double self, an important symbol, and in the end a love partner that embodies that unknown. Furthermore, I conclude that this development moves in opposing directions, whereby the female character gets in touch with a more traditional male disposition and the male character gets in touch with a more traditional female disposition. This mirrors the different position men and women are assigned in the patriarchal society. In conclusion, I suggest that all social roles are ultimately confining (irrespective of sex), and are attracted to the opposite pole, in order to discover what the individual does not have access to in the social sphere.

The study was conducted in northern Ghana to determine the scope of male partner violence (MPV) against women, identify the factors associated with this problem as well as point out the health implications of MPV. In a sample of 443 married women drawn from outpatient populations across six district health centers we found that nearly 7 out of 10 women have experienced some MPV: 62% have experienced psychological violence; 29% have experienced physical violence; and 34% have experienced sexual violence. A multiple regression analysis showed that male controlling behavior, number of children, presence of concubines, partner appreciation, and very good health significantly predicted Total Violence. The results showed that the more controlling a husband is the more likely his wife is to experience severe violence and that more children in the marriage is associated with more violence for the women. Marriage duration was significantly positively correlated with violence, indicating that the longer the time since a woman got married, the more likely she experiences violence. Husband’s education was significantly negatively correlated with violence, indicating that husband education has a decreased effect on violence. Logistic regression and ANOVA models identified a number of socio-demographic factors as significant correlates of MPV. These include couple’s unemployment, particularly husband unemployment, being young – under 30 years and being younger than the husband, presence of concubines, being Muslim or Traditional, living in a rural setting, husband alcohol use, being a healthy woman, and not being appreciated by the husband. We found that MPV is associated with physical and mental health difficulties among women. Some 47 women reported having sustained multiple injuries, including sprains, broken bones and teeth, cuts, and burns. Mental health difficulties among these women included partner phobia, sleep deprivation, and thoughts of suicide. We make recommendations that call on government and other stakeholders to initiate policy that provides services to women experiencing MPV and that implements education and campaign programs to eventually eliminate MPV in Ghana generally.