In English the personal pronouns are morphologically marked for grammatical number, whilst the third-person singular pronouns are also obligatorily marked for gender. As a result, the use of any singular animate antecedent coindexed with a third-person pronoun forces a choice between he and she, whether or not the biological sex of the intended referent is known. This forced choice of gender, and the corresponding lack of a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun where gender is not formally marked, is the primary focus of this thesis. I compare and contrast the use of the two main candidates for epicene status, singular they and generic he, which are found consistently opposed in the wider literature. Using corpus-based methods I analyse current epicene usage in written British English, and investigate which epicene pronouns are given to language-acquiring children in their L1 input. I also consider current prescriptions on epicene usage in grammar texts published post-2000 and investigate whether there is any evidence that language-external factors impact upon epicene choice. The synthesis of my findings with the wider literature on epicene pronouns leads me to the conclusion that, despite the restrictions imposed on the written pronoun paradigm evident in grammatical prescriptivism, singular they is the epicene pronoun of British English.

This study is a feminist reading of Jane Smiley's novel A Thousand Acres. It focuses on the Cook sisters and their lives in a farming community at a time that coincides with the end of second wave feminism. In particular, it pays attention to the absence of sisterhood among the three sisters in the novel. It analyses first each individual sister including their different approaches to sisterhood and then their failure to unite in the type of strategic, politically motivated notion of sisterhood that was promoted by second wave feminism.          By looking at different reasons why the sisters cannot establish a strong sisterhood my essay aims to demonstrate that A Thousand Acres not only criticises patriarchal society in its portrayal of the Cook family but also, and more importantly, that it criticises second wave feminism by pointing out its failure in terms of promoting a sense of sisterhood.

Drawing on my own process of entry into local queer, lesbian and feminist public cultures, I argue that a powerful relationship between feminist and lesbian existence can be felt and that this sensibility bears influence on the way queer erotic and politicized identities emerge in relation to one another. These affective links remain frequently unacknowledged and/or are actively repudiated due to popular accounts of feminist genealogy whereby second wave lesbian-feminist positions are rendered fundamentally incompatible with contemporary queer/third wave feminist ones. I challenge this narrative by building on select early articulations of radical lesbian feminism to show that when affirmed consciously, the sense that lesbianism and feminism are interconnected constitutes a “woman-identified experience” and an opportunity to bear witness to the unrealized possibilities of second-wave radical feminism in the present. I conclude that politicized “lesbian” and/or “woman” identification remain indispensable strategic sites from which to observe and confront heteropatriarchy.

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This thesis explores the concepts of “voice” and “influence” through the case studies of two famous English-speaking Canadian women writers, Margaret Atwood and Carol Shields. The “voice” is multiple, ambiguous and influenced, but it is also apparently unique. How, therefore, is it constructed and where does it come from? I examine, work with and adapt Harold Bloom’s paradigmatic study of influence to a feminist context, exploring the idea that a literary voice can be developed and influenced by Atwood and Shields. I discuss how these writers searched for an appropriate literary role model, exemplified by nineteenth-century English-Canadian writer Susanna Moodie, at the moment when Canadian nationalism and feminism coincided. Atwood and Shields are now canonical writers themselves and important in both the nationalist and women’s tradition, but have they gone on to influence new Canadian women writers? I test the pleasures and the anxieties of Shields’ influence with regard to her creative writing students and her own daughter, Anne Giardini, who has published her first novel. I compare Shields with Atwood, who has achieved a high level of fame, and examine what kind of influence each exerts. I discuss whether literary influence is politically different for women than men and whether there is any jealousy or power struggles between the sexes. Rivalry and competition between writers are not purely caused by the aesthetic issues that Bloom discusses, therefore I contextualise his concept of influence using literary celebrity studies to consider the economic basis of cultural production. This is in order to show that tensions are determined by market conditions, just as much as the new poet’s desire to overthrow a literary precursor. Finally, I examine fan letters to Atwood and Shields as another important source of literary influence. I discuss how fans are constructed through a commercial relationship and how they can also provide an amateur literary voice. Atwood and Shields have helped to create a network of writers across the globe. I explore whether both authors can be role models who will inspire the next literary generation.

The success of three Louisiana feminists in the 1970s, Fran Bussie, Clarence Marie Collier, and Pat Evans stemmed from their professional expertise in labor rights, education, and politics, respectively. By joining and maintaining memberships in a variety of social, civic, and activists groups, these feminist leaders via the 1976 Louisiana Governor’s Conference on Women created a unique network that allowed for the formation of a new women’s platform. This conference advanced women’s rights, established a working platform for reform, and helped usher in second-wave feminism in Louisiana. Using conference booklets, archived video and audio interviews, and newspaper articles, this thesis argues that when women came together in their professional positions to advocate for women’s rights, the results were clearly positive.

Touring the state in the early 1980s, the “Texas Women: A Celebration of History” exhibit was the first attempt to create a comprehensive, public Texas women’s history narrative. Surprisingly, the exhibit was organized not by academics or museum professionals, but rather by the Texas Foundation for Women’s Resources—a nascent second-wave feminist non-profit organization composed of up-and-coming political activists such as Ann Richards, Sarah Weddington, Jane Hickie, and Martha Smiley. Through an analysis of the exhibit, as well as archival research and oral histories with many of the participants, this thesis explores the reasons that a feminist organization with finite resources would choose to focus on the production of women’s history as a tool of feminist activism. The “Texas Women” exhibit was a uniquely effective way for the members of the Texas Foundation for Women’s Resources to express their feminist values in a culturally palatable way and to create embodied moments of feminist consciousness for their audience. Furthermore, it paved the way for the organization’s future successful feminist projects, fed the production of Texas women’s history initiatives around the state, and served as a springboard that helped launch Ann Richards’ successful political career. / text

Prior to the 1960s and 1970s most studies of time undertaken in the West treated it as an objective phenomenon, devoid of ideological inscriptions. Second Wave feminists challenged this view, arguing that time is not neutral but one of the mechanisms used by patriarchal cultures to subjugate women. The argument was that temporal modes, like everything else in patriarchal reality, had been gendered. Linear time was masculine because it was associated with the male-dominated public domain in which science, commerce and production took place. The natural world, mysticism, the private domain, domesticity and women were relegated to a cyclical temporality that was gendered feminine. In her paper “Women’s Time” Julia Kristeva suggests that three generations of feminism can be identified according to the attitude each takes to time. I use her hypothesis as a framework in order to examine the positions regarding time taken up by various feminist groups during the Second Wave. I identify liberal and socialist feminisms with Kristeva’s first generation because they criticised the fact that women had been left out of linear time and the public domain and demanded that women be reinserted into linear time. I argue that Kristeva’s second generation is represented by cultural feminists of the Second Wave who recognised an alternative women’s time and suggested that women celebrate their connection with it, defying the authority of patrilinear time to dismiss “women’s experiences”. I then propose that the perspective of Kristeva’s third generation may be identified in the work of six authors of feminist speculative fiction who were writing during the Second Wave; this perspective entails a synthesis of the two previous opposing viewpoints. This can be identified in these novels because the female protagonists are first empowered through their access to an alternative (“feminine”) temporal space that subverts the authority of patriarchal culture embedded in linear time and then they move back into patrilinear time, claiming active roles and challenging patriarchal ideology. In this thesis I thus focus on the feminist examination of time during the Second Wave and consider how it was reflected in selected works of feminist speculative fiction written at the time. The authors discussed are Octavia Butler, Marge Piercy, Joanna Russ, Ursula Le Guin, Tanith Lee and Sheri Tepper. / Thesis (DLitt)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / English / unrestricted

Vilka erfarenheter har enskilda medlemmar av den svenska separatistiska facebookgruppen Heja Livet? Ur ett feministiskt perspektiv har vi genomfört kvalitativa personliga intervjuer vilket gav ett resultat som visar att gruppen bidrar med något betydelsefullt. Det personliga är politiskt och genom att ta del av andras berättelser kan enskilda kvinnor få ett högre feministiskt medvetande som kan bidra till feministiska handlingar. Det visar sig också att gruppen kan fungera som ett stöd i olika frågor för enskilda kvinnor i deras vardag. Vi presenterar ett teoretiskt resultat, omdefinierar innebörden av ett högre feministisk medvetande och argumenterar för att Heja Livet kan ses som en medvetenhetshöjande grupp. Faktumet att de flesta av våra intervjupersoner inte delar med sig av sina erfarenheter i facebookgruppen hotar dock konstruktionen av Heja Livet som en subalternativ offentlighet som utmanar dominerande offentligheter. Den vita medelklass cis-kvinnan är idealet i gruppen och det bristande intersektionella perspektivet gör att vi kritiserar Heja Livet som ett ett lyckat feministiskt projekt. / What experiences do individual members have of the Swedish separatist Facebook group Heja Livet? We have conducted qualitative personal interviews from a feminist perspective and have come to the conclusion that the group is contributing with something meaningful. The personal is political and by reading other women’s stories, individual women can achieve a higher feminist consciousness which can contribute to feminist actions. Another finding is that the group can also function as a support in different matters for individual women in their everyday lives. We are presenting a theoretical result, we redefine the meaning of a higher feminist consciousness and argue that Heja Livet can be seen as a consciousness raising group. The fact that most of the interviewed did not share their own experiences in Heja Livet, threatens the construction of the group as a subaltern counterpublic that challenges dominant publics. The white middle class cis-woman is the norm in Heja Livet and we criticize it for not being a successful feminist project because of the lack of an intersectional perspective.