Increasingly since the 1990s those of us who are interested in gender issues in education have heard the question: What about the boys? A discourse has emerged in New Zealand, as in other countries including Australia, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, that attention spent on addressing issues related to the educational needs of girls has resulted in the neglect of boys and problems related to their schooling. Positioned within this discourse, boys are depicted as disadvantaged, victims of feminism, underachieving or failing within the alienating feminised schooling environment and their struggles at school are seen as a symptom of a wider ‘crisis of masculinity'. This anxiety about boys has generated much debate and a number of explanations for the school performance of boys. One concern, that has remained largely unexamined in the Aotearoa New Zealand context, is that the dominant discourse of masculinity is characterised by a restless physicality, anti-intellectualism, misbehaviour and opposition to authority all of which are construed as antithetical to success at school. This thesis explores how masculinities are played out in the schooling experiences of a small group of 5, 6 and 7 year old boys in two New Zealand primary schools as they construct, embody and enact their gendered subjectivities both as boys and as pupils. This study of how the lived realities of schooling for these boys are discursively constituted is informed by feminist poststructuralism, aspects of queer theory and, in particular, draws on the works of Michel Foucault. The research design involved employing an innovative mix of data generating strategies. The discursive analysis of the data generated in focus group discussions, classroom and playground observations, children’s drawings and video and audio recording of the normal classroom literacy programmes is initially organised around these sites of learning in order to explore how gender is produced discursively, embodied and enacted as children go about their work and their play. The research shows that although considerable diversity was apparent as the boys fashioned their masculinities in these different sites, ‘doing boy’ is not inimical to ‘doing schoolboy’ as all the boys, when required to, were able to constitute themselves as ‘intelligible’ pupils (Youdell, 2006). The research findings challenge the notion of school as a feminised and alienating environment for them. In particular, instances of some of the boys disrupting the established classroom norms, as recorded by feminist researchers more than two decades ago, are documented. Concerns then, that “classroom practices reinforced a notion of male importance and superiority while diminishing the interests and status of girls” (Allen, 2009, p. 124) appear to still be relevant, and the postfeminist discourse “that gender equity has now been achieved for girls and women in education” (Ringrose, 2013, p. 1) is called into question. Amid the greater emphasis on measuring easily quantifiable aspects of pupils’ educational achievement, what this analysis does is to recognize the processes of schooling as highly complex and to offer a more nuanced response to the question of boys and their schooling than that offered by, for example, men’s rights advocates. It suggests that if we are committed to improving education for all children, the question needs to be re/framed so as not to lose sight of educational issues related to girls and needs to ask just which particular groups of boys and which particular groups of girls are currently being disadvantaged in our schools.

Through a layered account format combining theory, performative autoethnographic vignettes, and dialogical exchanges, the author explores the performances of Supermotherhood as they materialize within her life and potentially within the lives of, and through interactions with, other mothers inside and outside of her immediate peer group. The author analyses the ways the pervasive ideology of perfect mothering manifests itself within motherhood culture, and how it ultimately impacts maternal agency, self worth, and by extension, the family unit, and the culture of motherhood-mothering in general. Guided by a feminist poststructuralist approach, the author argues that the Supermom, or rather, Super Mom meta-identity offers all subjective labels and ideologies of mothering a place to become and celebrate possibility, individuality, transition, and maternal empowerment. Keywords: mothering; feminism; performative identity; autoethnography; poststructuralist feminism; maternal empowerment; layered account

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Increased participation rates and significant performances of girls and women in sport over the last three decades would have many believing that the barriers and discrimination experienced in the past have been overcome and that continued participation and success into the future is unproblematic. Feminist research has problematized what now seems like acceptance of women’s participation in sport in this postmodern era by considering the location of the female athlete at the intersecting of discourses of femininity, masculinist sport, heterosexuality and homophobia. Situated among these powerful regulating forces, female athletes become subjects attached to often contradictory identities. For instance, the paradox of femininity and athleticism can result in a troubling experience that requires complex negotiation and time-consuming management of gender boundaries and behaviour expectations. Although sport has been considered a liberatory space for women, that view fails to consider that sport continues to maintain the status quo through workings of power politics that sustain oppressive social structures and relations. In this study, the review of literature in Chapter Two illuminates that sport, as it currently exists, perpetuates gender inequality and builds and maintains socio-cultural boundaries of normative femininity and heterosexuality. Unpacking women’s sport experience, therefore, involves exploring the discursive force fields that structure their everyday lives. Immersed in the dynamics of power and resistance, women performing so-called “masculine” activities such as skilled sport performance create a contradictory and precarious location for themselves. This location could be perceived as transgressive and liberating or as one that must negotiate, and possibly resolve, the tension between discursive expectancies and non-normative performances. My study examined the sport experiences of eight female athletes. Each was interviewed three times using a semi-structured interview process. During the initial interview, the participants were asked to provide the history and priority of sport in their lives and speak about the repetitive act of “becoming” an athlete as they make the transitions from other subjectivities. Chapter Four summarizes this conversation with each of the participants. Through a photo-elicitation process, one of the interviews was dedicated to revealing each of the participants’ movements through the social spaces of their daily lives. Another of the interviews was supported by video footage of the athlete as she trained and/or competed in her sport(s). This data collection process allowed for the participants’ multiple subject positions or locations to be spoken by them throughout the conversations. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed using discourse analysis. In order to critique the various discourses that dis/advantage female athletes, the theoretical framework provided by feminist poststructuralism was chosen for this project. Through this perspective, detailed in Chapter Three, an understanding of how social power is exercised over and experienced by women is helpful in knowledge production that supports women’s on-going efforts of contestation and change. For example, continued improvement and achievement in sport performance vi could be the result of new versions of femininity fostered by my critique of the privileged female identity that allows for less docile and more athletic female bodies. Discourse analysis, as described in Chapter Three, allowed for surveying the discursive terrain of the lives of the participants. This method also illuminated the ways of speaking, descriptions and specific images that the athletes used to speak about their sport experiences. The women spoke sport into their lives and created a positive space that featured personal achievement, escape or freedom from the “rest of life”; an activity that supported a healthy body and a positive body image; a place of family support; and a social, fun and accepting environment. In contrast to this, the participants’ sport space was troubled by the management and negotiation that was required by them to continue participation. Even though, as described in Chapter Five, they could speak sport into their lives in a positive way, they also spoke sport out of their lives (or at least further down the priority list) because of the effort that was required to juggle it or balance it within their multiple subjectivities. The sometimes simultaneous and always sequential contradictory gendered discursive force fields of motherhood, the ideal feminine body image, intimate relationships, compulsory heterosexuality, and physical activity required constant strategies of negotiation and management that are described in Chapter Six. A brief concluding chapter summarizes how the participants in this study found themselves frustrated by their “in-between-ness”. They are not athletes in the dominant heteronormative discursive space of male sport (they are “othered”), and they do not fit in the dominant discursive space of privileged femininity. The results of this study reveal that while sport presents itself as a site of empowerment for women, it also perpetuates and maintains traditional patriarchal values. The participants, however, creatively negotiated and renovated that patriarchal space to create a location in which they could evade the strength of dominant discourses and experience the benefits of sport engagement.

Increased participation rates and significant performances of girls and women in sport over the last three decades would have many believing that the barriers and discrimination experienced in the past have been overcome and that continued participation and success into the future is unproblematic. Feminist research has problematized what now seems like acceptance of women’s participation in sport in this postmodern era by considering the location of the female athlete at the intersecting of discourses of femininity, masculinist sport, heterosexuality and homophobia. Situated among these powerful regulating forces, female athletes become subjects attached to often contradictory identities. For instance, the paradox of femininity and athleticism can result in a troubling experience that requires complex negotiation and time-consuming management of gender boundaries and behaviour expectations. Although sport has been considered a liberatory space for women, that view fails to consider that sport continues to maintain the status quo through workings of power politics that sustain oppressive social structures and relations. In this study, the review of literature in Chapter Two illuminates that sport, as it currently exists, perpetuates gender inequality and builds and maintains socio-cultural boundaries of normative femininity and heterosexuality. Unpacking women’s sport experience, therefore, involves exploring the discursive force fields that structure their everyday lives. Immersed in the dynamics of power and resistance, women performing so-called “masculine” activities such as skilled sport performance create a contradictory and precarious location for themselves. This location could be perceived as transgressive and liberating or as one that must negotiate, and possibly resolve, the tension between discursive expectancies and non-normative performances. My study examined the sport experiences of eight female athletes. Each was interviewed three times using a semi-structured interview process. During the initial interview, the participants were asked to provide the history and priority of sport in their lives and speak about the repetitive act of “becoming” an athlete as they make the transitions from other subjectivities. Chapter Four summarizes this conversation with each of the participants. Through a photo-elicitation process, one of the interviews was dedicated to revealing each of the participants’ movements through the social spaces of their daily lives. Another of the interviews was supported by video footage of the athlete as she trained and/or competed in her sport(s). This data collection process allowed for the participants’ multiple subject positions or locations to be spoken by them throughout the conversations. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed using discourse analysis. In order to critique the various discourses that dis/advantage female athletes, the theoretical framework provided by feminist poststructuralism was chosen for this project. Through this perspective, detailed in Chapter Three, an understanding of how social power is exercised over and experienced by women is helpful in knowledge production that supports women’s on-going efforts of contestation and change. For example, continued improvement and achievement in sport performance vi could be the result of new versions of femininity fostered by my critique of the privileged female identity that allows for less docile and more athletic female bodies. Discourse analysis, as described in Chapter Three, allowed for surveying the discursive terrain of the lives of the participants. This method also illuminated the ways of speaking, descriptions and specific images that the athletes used to speak about their sport experiences. The women spoke sport into their lives and created a positive space that featured personal achievement, escape or freedom from the “rest of life”; an activity that supported a healthy body and a positive body image; a place of family support; and a social, fun and accepting environment. In contrast to this, the participants’ sport space was troubled by the management and negotiation that was required by them to continue participation. Even though, as described in Chapter Five, they could speak sport into their lives in a positive way, they also spoke sport out of their lives (or at least further down the priority list) because of the effort that was required to juggle it or balance it within their multiple subjectivities. The sometimes simultaneous and always sequential contradictory gendered discursive force fields of motherhood, the ideal feminine body image, intimate relationships, compulsory heterosexuality, and physical activity required constant strategies of negotiation and management that are described in Chapter Six. A brief concluding chapter summarizes how the participants in this study found themselves frustrated by their “in-between-ness”. They are not athletes in the dominant heteronormative discursive space of male sport (they are “othered”), and they do not fit in the dominant discursive space of privileged femininity. The results of this study reveal that while sport presents itself as a site of empowerment for women, it also perpetuates and maintains traditional patriarchal values. The participants, however, creatively negotiated and renovated that patriarchal space to create a location in which they could evade the strength of dominant discourses and experience the benefits of sport engagement.

This thesis takes its onset in a growing debate about globalization and its possible consequences for the Weberian-state monopoly on the use of force. It concerns the discursive legitimizing and construction of Swedish military peace operations. It studies how the official, Governmental discourse is structured, which arguments are used and how these in turn motivate and legitimize operations. Theoretically it is situated within a poststructuralist understanding but drawing on wider international relations theories to relate the empirical findings to existing research. Methodologically it uses a discourse analytical framework developed by Lene Hansen, supplemented with analytical concepts stemming from the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Empirically the thesis analyses Governmental Bills, a Governmental Communication and one op-ed written by the minister of Defence in regards of peace operations. The empirical analysis show that the official Swedish discourse of peace operations is structured by three basic discourses; internationalism, stateism and humanitarianism. These are analysed and interpreted in the light of different IR theoretical understandings. The thesis argues that the basic discourses are involved in a reciprocal process in which the state legitimizes peace operations and reproduces the idea of states and foremost the notion of an international state system. The humanitarian factor is less elaborated on in the material, which can be interpreted in different ways, one being that the humanitarian situation is not so important in the eyes of states, another that it is regarded as so self-evident that the situation of flesh and blood individuals is the legitimating reason for Swedish engagement in peace operations that it does not need to be said. The thesis ends with a critical discussion where its findings are related both to the globalization debate and critical peace operations literature.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:32:07Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2011-05-31Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:02:24Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 rossi_ad_dr_arafcl.pdf: 1612665 bytes, checksum: 053b9c4cd5ce5c33933f4a76fcbed737 (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / A presente tese de doutorado tem por objetivo investigar as questões do Feminismo e da escritura (écriture) na obra Kate Chopin (1850 – 1904), importante nome do Realismo norteamericano, com especial ênfase em seus contos. Em prévia pesquisa de mestrado [A desarticulação do universo patriarcal em The Awakening, de Kate Chopin (2006)] observou-se que o multiverso literário da autora se articula a partir de uma simultânea construção e desarticulação de significações, as quais vão além e ao mesmo tempo se utilizam das estruturas narrativas presentes em cada texto. Assim, Kate Chopin joga com a competência linguística, cultural e ideológica de seu leitor; joga com suas convicções mais profundas, instaurando uma textualidade que transborda as estruturas narrativas, chega ao leitor e o ultrapassa abarcando também o universo social e político. Há nas obras de Chopin, portanto, um trabalho textual que engloba instâncias textuais e sócio-políticas, em um movimento de significação que se encaminha em direção ao que teóricos e filósofos pósestruturalistas chamarão, sobretudo a partir da década de 1960, de escritura (écriture), processo aberto e infinito, ao mesmo tempo gerador e subversor de significados. Recorrendo ao Feminismo anglo-americano, brasileiro e francês, bem como aos pensamentos de Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes e de demais teóricos da escritura como interfaces teóricas, a proposta fundamental desta tese é demonstrar a ilimitada produtividade significativa desse trabalho escritural presente na obra da autora, trabalho este pouco estudado pela crítica especializada em suas obras. Dentro desta perspectiva, o corpus que será objeto de investigação limita-se à contística da autora / This doctorate thesis intends to investigate Feminism and the concept of writing (écriture) in the works of Kate Chopin (1850 – 1904), an important American Realist writer, with especial attention to her short stories. In a previous Master degree research [A desarticulação do universo patriarcal em The Awakening, de Kate Chopin (2006)] it was concluded that the writer’s literary multiverse is carefully crafted in order to simultaneously build and disarticulate significations which go beyond and at the same time make use of the narrative structures in each text. Thus, Kate Chopin plays with the reader’s linguistic, cultural, and ideological competences as well as with his deepest convictions to establish a textuality that overflows the narrative structures, reaches the reader and oversteps him also affecting the social and political universes. In doing so, Chopin’s works present a textual fabric that weaves textual and sociopolitical instances in a meaning production process that can be understood as what poststructuralist theoreticians and philosophers call, mainly from the 1960s on, writing (écriture), an open and infinite process both meaning-generating and meaning-subverting. Having the Anglo-American, Brazilian, and French Feminisms and the thoughts of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes and others writing theoreticians as analysis interface, this thesis aims to demonstrate the unlimited signifying productivity of Chopin’s fictional work, an aspect mostly unstudied by her critics. Under this perspective, the research corpus that will be investigated is composed especifically by the writer’s short stories

This thesis explores of how American and British television mediated the crisis that started with the 4 April 2017 alleged chemical attack in Syria and culminated with the subsequent attack on Syria by the United States 7 April 2017. It builds upon a rich literature and focuses on the politics of pity in the mediated representation of distant suffering as set out by Luc Boltanski. The thesis utilizes a methodological approach which merges Lilie Chouliaraki’s ‘analytics of mediation’ with Roxanne Lynn Doty’s view of discourse analysis. The results find that CNNW mediated the distant suffering based on ostensibly a priori knowledge, whereas BBC News was more inclined to guide the spectators along a line of investigative reasoning.

The thesis called Qualitative Analysis of Media Discourse of the Far-right Blog cz.altermedia.info deals with the discourse analysis of the Czech version of an international project Altermedia.info. Discourse analysis aims at differences between the discourse of the founding editor and the current one and analyses the neo-fascist nature of the blog. The theoretical framework of the analysis is based on the postmarxist theory of discourse introduced by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The theoretical part of the thesis summarizes the findings of researchers who are engaged in discourse analysis (structuralism, poststructuralism, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Norman Fairclough, Teun van Dijk). The thesis also examines how specific meaning is constructed within the nationalist discourse of Altermedia and to what extent a new team of authors contributed to the change of discourse. The analysis identifies the main nodal points, which are involved in the construction of discourse, and examines the antagonistic processes within the two different editors. Discursive analysis reveals particular inclination of the current discourse of Altermedia for the neo-Nazi ideology, and thus indicates the fundamental antagonism between the founding editors and current one.

This paper utilizes poststructuralist theory to investigate the polysemic nature of the eponymous character Beloved in Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved. The ghostly, anachronistic presence of Beloved renders the text open to multiple interpretations and this essay sets out to explore the ways in which meaning is created and communicated. From a poststructuralist perspective, considering that the meaning is in a state of flux, a text weaves its system of meaning around an assumed center in order to provide so-called stability. Peripheral meanings are repressed by the center to secure the meaning system. However, the periphery, which has a constructive function in the organization of the text, also has the deconstructive potential. Hence, the deconstructive dynamics are already inherent in the text. In Beloved, Toni Morrison addresses, among other things, the act of speaking the unspeakable and the process of constructing a new subjectivity out of the ghost of the past. Her text deconstructs the dominant narratives that have marginalized the black motherhood experience, explores the horrors of slavery through horror elements, and eventually exposes the inadequacy of language to depict such horrors. While the textual periphery is enabled to speak louder than the center, the textual subconscious flows freely. The reader is forced to participate actively in meaning-making in order to make sense of the fragmented narrative imbued with deliberate ambiguity. Beloved, as the abject other, defies the phallogocentric symbolic order. A counter-discourse emerges from the maternal, semiotic chora and empowers the otherized heroine Sethe to construct her subjectivity. Delving into the interrelationship between traumatic memory and the act of creating one’s own narrative, the text finds reparative elements in ancestral connection and thereby blends the psychological with the historical and the micro-level with the macro-level of meaning. This paper employs deconstructive key concepts from Jacques Derrida, psychoanalytic key concepts from Julia Kristeva, and seeks to unravel the dynamics in Morrison’s text that enable Beloved to be read polysemically.