This thesis examines the powerful appeals to psychology that are made in contemporary popular debate in Britain about parents. It focuses on the political implications of psychological discourse and the knowledge claims on which it rests. Using feminist and discourse theory, it critically examines psychological discourse, psychology as a knowledge practice, and considers the dilemmas of feminist knowledge production given the practices and relations it bolsters. Constructions of mothers and fathers in parenting magazines and news-media images of lone mothers, lesbian mothers and `absent fathers' are found to be profoundly gendered and conservative (hetero-gender normative) in spite of the rhetorical shift towards the genderneutral discourse of `parents'. Gender essentialist and identity/status-bound understandings are most striking where people's `fitness to parent' is questioned, often implicitly, which suggests that such understandings are naturalised in representations of parents who are not problematised. It is argued that the notion of `fitness to parent', rather than contributing to discussion of parent-child relationships, obscures how impoverished popular debate is, because it has little ideological coherence despite its mobilisation of judgemental scrutiny and powerful condemnation. Ideas about `unfit' parents do not, by exclusion, define a culturally ideal parent, but their implicit nature paves the way for common-sense appeals which deny their value-bases, reducing opportunities to challenge normative assumptions or superficial identity categories. `Second wave' feminist analyses of family ideology are employed, but are criticised from a feminist post-structuralist perspective which highlights the limitations of `identity' (for prematurely foreclosing understandings of subjectivity and desire), and of `social influence' as a model of individual-society relation. A critique of identity politics is employed to highlight how parental identities deployed in popular debate are imbued with psychological presumptions, without necessarily referring to psychologically/emotionally meaningful qualities of relationships between parents and children. Instead, a relational, performative approach to thinking about parents, and a psychosocial approach for considering the politics of cultural discourses are advocated. An examination of recent social policy debates suggests that the former may be gaining in persuasive value and impact on policy. Examining the authority of contemporary childrearing expertise suggests that arguments about parents are persuasive when they refer to psychological issues, whether or not they make explicit claims to expert knowledge. Paradoxically, as pop psychology becomes ubiquitous in Western cultures, the rising status attributed to the emotional realm can provide a means of contesting expert psychology, by undermining the valorisation of objectivity. However, the `psychologisation' of contemporary social life reinforces psychology's conceptual framework, which can, in turn, naturalise its conventional epistemology. This dilemma is explored in two spheres: feminist research and research with child participants. It is argued that feminists, and those critical of psychology's modernist foundations, might employ their `expert' warrant strategically in public debates about parents, but should also expose the politics of psychological knowledge. Similarly, despite theoretical limitations, identity politics might be put to good effect, such as to help children's voices be heard today. Finally, it is argued that, today, psychology is powerful, not only through experts or professionals, but as expertise, such that people draw on psychological discourses in their own reflexive projects of the self. Thus, psychological discourses, including implicit notions of fitness to parent, are implicated in the construction of contemporary parental subjectivities.

The aim of the study is to examine characters in books for children through a gender perspective. Partly I want to examine how female and male gender are constructed, partly how gender norms reproduce and/or challenges. This study proceeds from the following questions: ● How are female and male characters described in the books? ● What actions do female and male characters perform? ● How do the characters act towards characters of the opposite gender? The investigation is based on text analysis and the material consists of seven books for children. The theoretical basis is based on Butlers theory “gender performativity”, Hirdmans gender theory and Nikolajevas scheme of qualities of gender stereotypes. The result showed that the characters often seem to have gender stereotypical qualities. Female characters are more likely to behave as both male and female gender performativity and the male gender performativity and qualities of gender stereotypes are considered more valuable than female. To challenge gender norms we need to study and discuss literature, otherwise the gender norms will be maintained.

This artistic, practice-based thesis has been developed based on the idea that design creates social and ideological change. From this perspective, Body Acts Queer — Clothing as a performative challenge to heteronormativity introduces an artistic way of working with and exploring the performative and ideological functions of clothing with regard to gender, feminism, and queer. The thesis presents this program for experimental fashion design—exemplified through a series of artistic projects—while also discussing the foundations of such an approach and the different perspectives that have affected the program and its artistic examples. Working with clothing and fashion design through artistic projects using text and bodies, this thesis transforms queer and feminist theory into a creative process and, by looking into bodily experiences of clothing, Body Acts Queer investigates its performative and ideological functions, with a focus on cultural, social, and heteronormative structures. Body Acts Queer suggests a change in the ways in which bodies act, are perceived, and are produced within the fashion field, giving examples of—and alternatives to—how queer design practice can be performed. In this thesis, queer design is explored as an inclusive term, containing ideas about clothing and language, the meeting point between fiction and reality, and the ability to perform interpretation and bodily transformations—where pleasure, bodily experiences, and interaction create a change.

Internet technologies are increasingly advocated as a means for transforming health care and improving people’s health. In the field of e-health questions on the health implications of internet use are typically approached through attempts at measuring the effect of internet use on health outcomes. In this, information is usually conceptualised as a form of knowledge/power and online information practices are enrolled in discourses on patient empowerment. Taking the different meanings ascribed to information in these approaches as my point of departure, in this thesis I rethink the implications of internet use on health through an empirical exploration of alternative conceptualisations of the relationship between information and health in the context of contemporary HIV treatment and care. I do this through two analytical moves. First, drawing on the concept of performativity, a concern with what effect internet use has on health is turned into one of how internet use enacts health. Second, rather than treating information as knowledge/power, through an analysis of how a specific group of women ‘living with HIV’ in the UK use the internet, I reconfigure the connections between internet use and health through a conceptualisation of information as care. Drawing on a range of empirical materials – including forty-seven in-depth interviews with patients and internet content providers, non-participant observations, document and website analysis – three areas of health-related internet use are analysed in detail: the seeking out of health-related and specifically biomedical information; the seeking out and sharing of experiential knowledge and narratives about living with HIV; meeting prospective partners and dating. However, rather than studying these areas of internet use in order to interrogate what they can tell us about the internet, I analyse them as part of the ethical regime of ‘living with HIV’, in which the virus, previously thought of as ‘terminal’, becomes, through info and bio technologies, normalised as ‘chronic’. From this perspective, enacting health not only entails working on and with one’s body, but also always invokes its distribution across bodies, to other areas and relations, including internet technologies and the networks of relations established via these technologies.

Speaking through the voice of another is a practice-based PhD that employs art practice to interrogate translation (as a textual and verbal practice). It uses linguistic translation as both the subject and the method to make multimedia artworks (text, sound, performance and events) that examine and analyse the translation process itself. The research has been conducted from my own subjective position, as an artist and monolingual speaker (a translation user rather than translation professional), investigating translation as a dialogic, subjective, embodied and performative phenomena. It adopts a self-reflexive methodology that places equal value in theoretical and experiential knowledge and proposes that an artist-led inquiry challenges assumptions, translation protocols, conventions and normative behaviour. The artists and artworks discussed in the thesis examine the translators /translation s agency and its linguistic performativity; exploiting it s creative potential as an artistic process/medium and amplifying its pivotal role within the expanding global art world. This transdisciplinary approach has resulted in the creation of translation zones - works and events devised to engage monolingual and multilingual individuals, professional translators, practitioners and public(s) in the process of translation - that offer an alternative perspective on translation (to research carried out within Translation Studies). Consequently, generating new knowledge that contributes to our understanding of translation and art and beyond both disciplines, creating a new transdisciplinary genre of art-and-translation. The artworks are an integral part of the thesis submission; samples and documentation of these are accessible within the full interactive PDF ersion. The layout of the thesis has been specifically designed to ease communication of the research, it uses various visual cues to distinguish between different types of information and to demonstrate my research praxis; the continual movement between theory and practice.

The aim of this thesis is to analyze and interpret the hypermasculine elements of African American performance in rap music. It shall examine the ways in which the performance works as well as its possible influence on the public; therefore, it shall also react to the widespread criticism of the genre. In order to understand the complexity of the issue, it sketches the history of African American men struggling to attain their manhood and it points out the damage done to African American masculinity during the era of slavery and the following period of Reconstruction. Moreover, it is necessary to trace back the inspiration that helped to constitute the hypermasculine images. To do that, we shall look into the folkloric tradition of figures such as the "bad nigger" and "badman" or "bad nigga;" and we shall see how these personas transformed into the modern figures of "gangstas," pimps and hip hop revolutionaries. In the next two chapters, the thesis discusses the relation of rap music authenticity and the performativity of gender, which is based on Judith Butler's gender theory as described in her book Gender Trouble. Regarding authenticity, we shall dissect the term itself and its potential meaning for a work of art. In the last few chapters, the thesis attempts to categorize hip hop masculinity...

In Romantic studies, Romanticism is regarded as a reaction against modernity, or more accurately, a self-critique of modernity. There have been critical debates over the nature of the preoccupation of the Romantics with the past and the natural world, whether such concern is an illustration of the reactionary tendency of Romanticism, or an aesthetic innovation of the Romantics. This study tries to approach this problem from the perspective of space. It draws from the spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre, discussed in the Production of Space, in which Lefebvre conceives a spatial history of modernity, and sees Romanticism as the cultural movement that took place at the threshold of the formation of abstract space. The poetry of three British Romantic writers, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge and Joanna Baillie, is examined. This study analyses how the writers’ thinking and poetry writing are interactive with the formation of social space during the Romantic period. Their poetry embodies the lived experience of the time. The writers show an awareness of the performative aspect of poetry, that poetry is a kind of linguistic creation instead of mere representation, which can be used to appropriate the lived space of reality. This awareness is particular to these Romantic writers because their poetic tactics are socially contextualized. Poetry is their method, as well as manner of life, for confronting the unprecedented social changes brought by modernity. By using Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, an examination of the significance of the body and perception in Romantic poetry is also employed to show how, through the use of performative poetic language, the writers re-create their lived space so as to counter the dominance of abstract space.

O presente trabalho é um giro performativo que decompõe as histórias de vida de um corpo-sujeito marcado pelo movimento de luta pela terra, as experiências nos campos de manifestações populares brasileiras, em especial Folias de Reis, Congadas e Umbandas e a reverberação desse jogo de saberes em cena. Buscou-se amparo numa investigação autoetnográfica em que se permitiu à experiência, uma pesquisa-experiência-processo, andante, dançante, errante tal qual as metáforas que se instituíram com base no próprio movimento da práxis mnemônica na criação performativa. A partir das memórias de um corpo decolonial, num movimento de revolver-se, enveredamo-nos num contexto de formação artística que perpassa decisivamente uma relação individual e coletiva. O caminho esteve repleto de lembranças e de esquecimentos e se propôs provisório, uma vez que este é um ponto de vista sobre o corpo, momentâneo e transitório. A escrita é uma textura que se envolve, entre voos e raízes, na própria ação de desenhar essas palavras-corpos. Enredamos em caminhos que se entroncaram em encruzilhadas - espaços do acontecimento -, nas quais os diálogos entre perspectivas e pensadores diversos estiveram em destaque. O que se desvela é um Corpo Mnemônico, atravessado por uma paisagem sociocultural e nas geografias de um lugar povoado por um imaginário festivo. Dessas geografias, a terra emergiu como imagem perene, tal qual a festa e o sentido de festividade agarrado nas memórias de festas performativas da cultura popular e da elaboração desses diálogos em obras artísticas, nas suas dimensões corporais, visuais e cênico-coreográficas. Tais produções vieram urdir a rede dessa poesia acadêmica, evidenciado o caráter da criação, enquanto produção de conhecimento, dos processos, enquanto lugares de profusão de saberes e da reverberação de um diálogo poético-ético-político que nos faz voltar os olhos para nosso território, dançar em nossos terreiros amparados pela terra que se impregna na sola de nossos pés. Por fim, alçamos voo numa prática performativa intitulada Guyrá Apó - Ave Raiz que expõe rastros da experiência artística como a própria epistemologia da cena. / The present work is a performative turn that decomposes the life stories of a body-subject marked by the movement of fighting for land, the experiences in the fields of Brazilian popular manifestations, especially Folias de Reis, Congadas and Umbandas, and the reverberation of this dynamic of knowledge on stage. The support of an auto-ethnographic investigation was sought, one that allowed an experience, a research-experience-process, wandering, errant as the metaphors that were instituted based on the movement itself of the mnemonic praxis in the performative creation. From the memories of a decolonial body, in a movement to revolve itself, we embark on a context of artistic formation that pervades decisively an individual and collective relationship. The path has been filled with memories and oblivion, and proposed as transient, since this is a point of view about the body; temporary and transitory. Writing is weaving that wraps itself, from flying to rooting, in the very act of designing these bodies-words. We entangle in pathways connected through crossroads - spaces of the events - in which dialogues between the different perspectives and thinkers have been on the spotlight. A Mnemonic Body, crossed by a socio-cultural landscape in the geographies of a place populated by a festive imaginary is unveiled. From such geographies, land emerged as a perennial image, exactly as the celebration and the sense of festivity clung to memories of performative festivals of the popular culture and the elaboration of these dialogues in artistic works, in their corporeal, visual and scenic-choreographic dimensions. Such productions came to weave the net of this academic poetry, emphasizing creation as means of producing knowledge, considering processes as places for its profusion, and also for the reverberation of a poetic-ethical-political dialogue that makes us look at our own territory, dance in our terreiros sheltered by the dirt that engrains to the soles of our feet. Finally, we begin flying in a performative practice entitled Guyrá Apó - Root Bird that exposes traces of the artistic experience as the epistemology of the scene itself.

Avec l’essor du développement durable, des instruments de gestion ont été déployés dans les entreprises afin d’aborder cette problématique. Sur le climat en particulier, où le but est de réduire les émissions de gaz à effet de serre, les marchés du carbone, la fiscalité carbone et les normes d’interdiction constituent les instruments classiques de politique publique. A leurs côtés, la comptabilité carbone, plus confidentielle, a été développée pour rendre visible et estimer ces émissions afin de permettre d’enclencher des actions de réduction. Toutefois ses effets sont actuellement largement méconnus : comment les acteurs en entreprise se sont-ils saisis de cet instrument ? Nous adoptons dans cette thèse une perspective gestionnaire pour nous intéresser aux enjeux d’action collective qui entourent cet objet. Nous questionnons alors la performativité de la comptabilité carbone en proposant d’une part d’analyser le modèle implicite qu’elle véhicule et en étudiant d’autre part ses implications managériales. Pour cela, notre méthodologie repose sur une démarche qualitative et propose notamment des études de cas. En déconstruisant l’objet comptabilité carbone, nous montrons que les différents outils développés sous ce terme générique présentent en réalité des identités différentes, relevant ainsi soit d’une logique ingénierique, soit financière. Les implications managériales qui en découlent sont diverses : si la comptabilité carbone s’inscrit parfois dans une stratégie orientée vers la réduction d’émissions (sous certaines conditions dont nous proposons un modèle explicatif), d’autres effets induits existent (développement d’une bureaucratie, exhortation à la transparence, etc.). Cette thèse présente finalement des contributions théoriques (performativité), empiriques (réflexivité pour les entreprises et l’ADEME), et méthodologiques (analyse de la performativité par les instruments de gestion). / Since sustainable development has spread, management tools have been developed in companies in order to tackle this problem. For climate change, the goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. To do that, carbon markets, carbon taxation and limits of emissions are traditional policy tools. Less known, carbon accounting has been developed in order to assess greenhouse gas emissions, make it visible and therefore to make it possible to reduce them. However carbon accounting’s effects remain mostly unknown. In this thesis, I address collective action problem around this tool in a managerial perspective. Therefore I tackle carbon accounting's performativity by analyzing hidden model which is embedded in it and by studying its managerial effects. My methodology rests upon a qualitative research by using case studies specifically. I explain first that there are different logics behind the common term “carbon accounting”: an engineering and a financial one. Managerial effects are also varied: a strategy oriented toward the emission reduction is sometimes settled but mostly other effects are created (claim for more and more transparency, etc.). Finally I propose theoretical contributions (performativity), empirical ones (ADEME and companies’ reflections) and methodological ones (performativity analysis through managerial tools).

Coraline by Neil Gaiman has several characters who in many ways break gender norms. The main protagonist of the novel, Coraline, acts more in accordance with masculine gender norms, and the mother figures are mothers who do not fully conform to the traditional mother role. The purpose of this study is to look at how Coraline and the mother figures perform their gender, and in which ways this breaks with or aligns with traditional gender norms. The analytical approach is based on Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, and on masculine and feminine gender schemas defined by John Stephens. For the analysis of motherhood, gender performativity has also been used, and works by Adrienne Rich and Einat Natalie Palkovich. This study shows that the protagonists challenge traditional gender role norms of masculinity and femininity, whereof motherhood is part. The study also shows that there is a lack of female role models for the young protagonist, and that acting according to masculine gender norms is desirable and necessary in the novel. But for the mothers, breaking gender norms is undesirable, dangerous, and even punished. A conclusion of the study is that even though Coraline appears to be a feminist novel, the underlying message is not entirely so.