The purpose of the study is to: (1) examine the degree to which women borrowers of the Grameen Bank are being empowered to participate in familial decision-making around the management of income and expenditures like food, children’s education, dowry and teenage marriages; and (2) to examine women borrowers’ engagement in community activities such as the degree of freedom women are granted to visit public places like schools, local councils, banks and markets. In particular, the study explores the role of the Grameen Bank (GB) in women’s empowerment through the Sixteen Decisions, an educational program designed to empower women in the family and community. This study used a mixed-methods research design that included 61 GB women borrowers selected through purposive sampling. The data suggest that the participants have assumed leadership roles within their families: more than 80% of the study’s participants led decision making within their family; more than 90% supported their children’s education financially; 91% reported that they worked together with family members to manage day-to-day expenses; 80% reported that they manage their family incomes; 98% reported they do not like dowry marriages and teenage marriages; and 33% view male-dominant values as a hindrance to women’s development. The findings indicated that 98% of GB women borrower participants are engaged in community organizations and 94% do not face problems with this engagement. In the 2009 UpZilla (Municipal Sub-district) Election, out of 481 seats, 114 Female Chairs (25% of the total) were elected from the GB women borrowers and their families (Grameen Bank, 2009). In addition, the number of women borrowers serving as councilors has increased from 1,572 in 1997 to 1,950 in 2003; these data indicate that the number of women borrowers acting in formal leadership roles is increasing (Grameen Bank, 2009). The study finds the GB program has had a positive impact upon the borrowers’ relations in the family and community. In spite of these developments, one-fifth of GB women borrowers’ husbands control their wives’ loan money, an indication of the strength of patriarchy in Bangladesh. Although GB’s Sixteen Decisions have included economic issues and other social issues, none directly discusses gender inequality, which the study findings suggest is important. Hence a revision of the Sixteen Decisions is suggested.

The purpose of the study is to: (1) examine the degree to which women borrowers of the Grameen Bank are being empowered to participate in familial decision-making around the management of income and expenditures like food, children’s education, dowry and teenage marriages; and (2) to examine women borrowers’ engagement in community activities such as the degree of freedom women are granted to visit public places like schools, local councils, banks and markets. In particular, the study explores the role of the Grameen Bank (GB) in women’s empowerment through the Sixteen Decisions, an educational program designed to empower women in the family and community. This study used a mixed-methods research design that included 61 GB women borrowers selected through purposive sampling. The data suggest that the participants have assumed leadership roles within their families: more than 80% of the study’s participants led decision making within their family; more than 90% supported their children’s education financially; 91% reported that they worked together with family members to manage day-to-day expenses; 80% reported that they manage their family incomes; 98% reported they do not like dowry marriages and teenage marriages; and 33% view male-dominant values as a hindrance to women’s development. The findings indicated that 98% of GB women borrower participants are engaged in community organizations and 94% do not face problems with this engagement. In the 2009 UpZilla (Municipal Sub-district) Election, out of 481 seats, 114 Female Chairs (25% of the total) were elected from the GB women borrowers and their families (Grameen Bank, 2009). In addition, the number of women borrowers serving as councilors has increased from 1,572 in 1997 to 1,950 in 2003; these data indicate that the number of women borrowers acting in formal leadership roles is increasing (Grameen Bank, 2009). The study finds the GB program has had a positive impact upon the borrowers’ relations in the family and community. In spite of these developments, one-fifth of GB women borrowers’ husbands control their wives’ loan money, an indication of the strength of patriarchy in Bangladesh. Although GB’s Sixteen Decisions have included economic issues and other social issues, none directly discusses gender inequality, which the study findings suggest is important. Hence a revision of the Sixteen Decisions is suggested.

This study investigated the cinematic representations of women in ‘Climates’ ‘Three Monkeys’ and ‘Once upon a time in Anatolia’ created by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. It explored the image of women and the ideologies that affects them in the aforementioned films. For the analysis, semiotics is used and feminist film theory is applied. The findings indicated that the women images are affected by patriarchal ideology. Female characters were portrayed as weak or weakened by men regardless of their representative social group. The results showed similarities to Mulvey’s argument and to Friedan’s definition of feminine mystique. Male gaze dominates the visual pleasures and the female characters showed similar features as described by Mulvey and Friedan.

The aim of this monograph is to demonstrate the probable transgressions of Eliza Sommers who is the protagonist of The fortunes daughter (1999) written by the Chilean writer Isabel Allende. This novel is the base for our work and it was written in the postboom framework there we can evidently observe the strength of the feminist’s characters. Through investigating the model of conducts that was current by the chronological time the novel is based and by using the adequate theoretical model for this analysis we will either demonstrate or refuse our hypothesis. With this goal in mind and this theoretical framework we will try to explain the diversity of terms but principally patriarchy, feminism and stereotypes. Raising a few different questions helped us to come to the conclusion that all the transgressions the protagonist has been going through just helped her to get a better life as a woman, without hinders and in freedom.

This thesis explores the oppression of women within the gender institution of patriarchy in Margaret Atwood¡¦s dystopian novel The Handmaid¡¦s Tale, and their resistance to this male-dominated society. As a feminist writer, Atwood is very much concerned about the issue of gender, which she foregrounds in The Handmaid¡¦s Tale. In my analysis, I apply some theories of radical feminists and the French feminist who devote themselves to the study of gender--Kate Millett, Adrienne Rich, Catherine MacKinnon, and Hélène Cixous. Millett focuses on women¡¦s subordinated position that leads to women¡¦s oppression in patriarchy. Rich and MacKinnon focus on how women are controlled and oppressed in maternity and sexuality within the patriarchal society of gender inequality. Cixous challenges the validity of gender by pointing out its characteristic fluidity through creating woman¡¦s own writing in order to redefine female selfhood for women¡¦s resistance. The thesis is composed of five chapters. The Introduction presents the background materials about Atwood and The Handmaid¡¦s Tale, the motivation of the thesis, and the resonance between The Handmaid¡¦s Tale and certain feminists¡¦ theories. The first chapter analyzes the formation of the unbalanced power relations between the sexes in which women are subordinated to men through the socialization. Moreover, because of women¡¦s subordination, women are modulated as mothers through socially institutionalized motherhood such as the Wives and the Handmaids in Gilead. The second chapter further analyzes how women are formulated as sexual objects through the experience of sexual objectification within the institution of heterosexuality, such as the mistresses and the prostitutes of Gilead. The third chapter discusses how female orality empowers women to resist their patriarchal society in The Handmaid¡¦s Tale. The protagonist Offred, by ¡§writing her voice¡¨ through storytelling, resists patriarchal oppression, restores her body and self, and transforms herself from a victim in a claustrophobic world of male domination to a heroine of femininity. Moreover, her act of writing by her voice also reflects women¡¦s histories of repression, which should be reconstructed in a culture in which only males are literate. Offred¡¦s oral act of storytelling, to the reader, may also signify her resistance to reconstruct women¡¦s repressed histories. The concluding chapter reiterates the research of The Handmaid¡¦s Tale with a synthesis of Atwood¡¦s and some of the prominent feminists¡¦ points of view, namely Millett¡¦s, Rich¡¦s, MacKinnon¡¦s and Cixous¡¦s, toward the oppression and resistance of women within the institution of gender. This study hopes to explore and thus illuminate the nature, the functioning, the operation of socially constructed male domination, and then proceed to search the possible solution, or the ¡§voice;¡¨ however feeble it is, the author, or the protagonist conceives to defy the oppression imposed on women.

The main aim in this study is to understand how gendered subjectivities are constructed in political thought in early republican Turkey. In this respect, problematizations on gender, the main themes utilized in these problematizations and the operation of patriarchy in these intellectual activities are analyzed in the study. In doing so, the texts published in eight journals between 1929-1946 are examined employing a post-structuralist feminist theoretical framework, to which clarifications are proposed drawing on the works of Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt to make it befit the particular aims of the study. It is argued in the study that the political discourses prevalent in early republican era utilized gender in producing utility and docility from individuals and in advancing the population quantitatively and qualitatively. At the heart of the problematizations and discourses on gender differences was the aim of structuring the public and private lives of the individual men and women in such a way that they become politically, socially, economically, culturally and, most importantly, biologically productive. This led to a transformation in the models governing theforms of patriarchal production of and control on gendered individuals and patriarchal power relations began to be modeled after disciplinary power, instead of sovereign power, that is (re)public(an) patriarchy began to become the dominant form, instead of private patriarchy. As a result, new forms of social control and new frameworks for organizing the roles of individual women and men in public, social and private realms emerged.

This disseration is a case study of reproductive practice among Kurdish rural-urban migrant women in Van, Turkey. Van is one of the eastern provinces where high fertility persists despite the rapid fertility decline in the country. In Van and some other provinces where Kurdish population concentrates, however, fertility levels not only continue to be high but also increased in the period between 1980 and 2000. In order to explore the social dynamics behind the divergent fertility trend, this dissertation conducted interviewing with women in a Kurdish migrant neighbourhood and examined their reproductive experiences from the feminist political economic perspective that pays particular attention to reproduction&rsquo / s embeddededness in patriarchal social relations which are contingent upon political economic contexts. This dissertation argues that Kurdish migrants in the studied neighbourhood experienced, and still experience, considerable socioeconomic insecurities resulted from the neoliberal economic policy since the 1980s and the destructive mass displacement in the 1990s. Migration to the city could offer women empowering opportunities. Yet, while the traditional rural form of patriarchal practices lingered until recently, a new form of patriarchy seeks to restore masculine confidence in the context of insecurities by tightly controlling the woman&rsquo / s movement and considerably hinders her access to public spaces and hence reproductive healthcare. This dissertation proposes that enduring high fertility among the recent Kurdish migrants can be closely related to the form of patriarchy reconfigured in a way to work against the woman&rsquo / s autonomy which is essential for the exercise of reproductive rights.

This dissertation is a qualitative case study of women&rsquo / s political participation in local government in District Hyderabad, Pakistan from a feminist perspective. There is a longstanding patriarchal trend of elite women&rsquo / s selective political participation in Pakistan. But recently introduced local government system with increased quota (33%) for women brought a large mass of non-elite women in local politics. This research explores the social dynamics behind this changing pattern through semi-structured interviews with 53 elected women local councilors in the district. It argues that there is a dialectical relationship between patriarchy and women&rsquo / s political participation. It shows how patriarchal structures have reconfigured to enhance their interest by bringing non-elite women into politics for their power interest. The women, who entered politics, do not challenge the patriarchal structures / rather they use them as resources to facilitate their entry and survival in politics. This process has rendered somewhat of a compatible co-existence between these two antagonistic forces. Patriarchy has gained more modernized outlook while still retaining male domination. The non-elite women, although still controlled by and submissive to male domination, have gained ever broader legitimate space for their autonomous action. The research contributes to the debates concerning patriarchal transformation, arguing that certain features of patriarchy, when responding to accommodate new socio-political developments, gives rise to its own contradictions, thus potentially creating the conditions for overall societal change.

This study approaches myths as patriarchal narratives and ideological tools and it argues that representations of women from an androcentric perspective in Greek mythology are also observed in the Bible. This study argues that patriarchy as a universal ideology has produced the same gender stereotypes beginning from Ancient Greece. Consequently, Western literature, which has the Classical and Biblical tradition as its main source, has reinforced the same female images throughout its history. Besides, it is suggested that, the Western canon failed to create alternative female models for the binary opposition of submissive wives versus the female evil figure and the main stereotypical characteristics had not been challenged until the emergence of feminist criticism. This study thus aims to discuss myths as one of the foremost sites of the construction of ideological subjects and it analyses the rewritings of Greek, Old Testament and New Testament myths by contemporary women writers in fiction / namely Margaret Atwood&rsquo / s The Penelopiad, Marion Zimmer Bradley&rsquo / s The Firebrand, Anita Diamant&rsquo / s The Red Tent, India Edghill&rsquo / s Queenmaker, Gail Sidonie Sobat&rsquo / s The Book of Mary and Mich&eacute / le Roberts&rsquo / The Wild Girl and it explores the textual strategies that are employed by women writers in order to subvert and revise the patriarchal ideology in myths, to come up with alternative definitions of female identity and to weave gynocentric myths.

This thesis analyzes and compares Angela Carter&rsquo / s Nights at the Circus and Elif Safak&rsquo / s Mahrem (The Gaze) from the perspective of theories of the patriarchal gaze. The study argues that the female protagonists in Nights at the Circus and Mahrem (The Gaze) have a dilemma in relation to the gaze. On the one hand, the gaze makes these characters passive spectacles in front of the audience and objectifies them. On the other hand, the gaze appears to be a necessity for a sense of identity and order. The theoretical framework used to analyze the novels from the perspective of the patriarchal gaze includes John Berger&rsquo / s Ways of Seeing, which is about visual representations in Western art and Laura Mulvey&rsquo / s article &ldquo / Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema&rdquo / , which analyzes women&rsquo / s position in Hollywood movies. In order to explore the dilemma the protagonists find themselves in, on the other hand, Sigmund Freud&rsquo / s theory of scopophilia, Jacques Lacan&rsquo / s discussion of the role of the gaze in psychosexual development and identity formation and Mich&eacute / l Foucault&rsquo / s evaluation of the gaze as a tool for discipline have been made use of. The comparative analysis of the two novels within this theoretical framework aims to demonstrate the complexity and universality of the issue and provide further food for thought for feminist thinking on this topic.