An evolutionary model of long-term romantic relationship termination is proposed. According to the model, relationship termination is the functional output of psychological mechanisms evolved to solve adaptive problems faced by humans over evolutionary history. To the extent that men and women have faced similar adaptive problems in romantic relationships, their psychologies of romantic relationship termination are expected to be similar. To the extent that these adaptive problems have differed, their psychologies of relationship termination are expected to differ. Consequently, men and women are hypothesized to have evolved similar, but distinct psychological mechanisms that underlie the decision rules in the termination of long-term romantic relationships. Specific hypotheses and predictions about the contexts and tactics of relationship termination have been derived from this perspective, including: 1) a greater sensitivity in men than in women to declines in their long-term mate's physical attractiveness; 2) a greater sensitivity in women than in men to declines in their long-term mate's investment of resources in them. To test these and other hypotheses about functional design in the psychological mechanisms underlying mating relationship termination several studies were conducted to investigate: 1) perceptions regarding the contexts in which men and women are likely to terminate romantic relationships; 2) perceptions regarding the tactics men and women employ to terminate romantic relationships; 3) thoughts of relationship termination; and 4) personal accounts of relationship termination. Men were judged more sensitive than women to decreases in their long-term mate's physical attractiveness, but did not differ from women in reporting decreased physical attractiveness as a cause of relationship termination. Women were judged more sensitive than men to a partner the decreasing investment of resources in them and reported decreased investment more frequently as a cause of relationship termination. Because several tests of the hypotheses described in this dissertation were disconfirmed, the results should be interpreted with caution. / text

This is a thesis about the relationship between gender policy and practice in South Africa, and its effects. Gender is a concept widely used in development policy, but little attention has been paid to precisely how development agents use gender policy in their practice. As a result, we know little about the significance or meanings practitioners attribute to gender policy, or how development actors adapt, transform or manipulate gender policy in their everyday work. Gaps in knowledge about how gender policy is put into practice in specific contexts have led to gaps in knowledge about what effects gender policy has on the politics of gender. This brings about two aims for this study: (1) to map the relationship between gender and development policy and practice in South Africa, and (2) to explore the effects of gender policy on gender politics. Following a multisite approach, this study looks at gender policy as a collection of ‘contested narratives’ (Shore & Wright 1997) about gender. The findings point to a conflict between three different policy frames being drawn on by policy actors as they try to assert their own understanding of gender, define the ‘problem’ that exists and the policies that are needed to solve it. This conflict may diminish the potential for a collective social movement for gender issues in South Africa. However, practitioners are not powerless implementers of policy, but rather use gender policy strategically in their practice by adopting, transforming and manipulating policy frames in a range of different tactical manoeuvres to suit their own objectives. Identifying the tactical manoeuvres being used by development practitioners in South Africa contributes new understandings of the fragmented ways that an alternative gender politics is currently being advanced by practitioners in this context.

This thesis aims to explain why there is a high level of unmet need for contraception in Cambodia - a country where effective methods of birth control are cheaply available and morally acceptable. The research design takes a mixed methods approach, initially using data from the Cambodian Demographic and Health Surveys of 2000 and 2005 to assess trends in contraceptive use. Multivariate logistic regression is used to analyse factors associated with, firstly, unmet need, and secondly, use of traditional contraceptive methods. The likelihood of having an unmet need for contraception increased as education and wealth levels decreased; urban or rural residence had no significant effect. However, the likelihood of using traditional methods, rather than modern methods, increased as education and wealth increased. Taking these findings and the questions they raise as a departure point, 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in one urban and one rural site in Northwest Cambodia between 2008 and 2010. The study looks at women’s and men’s reproductive decision making with a focus on their experiences of and meanings given to contraception, situating these understandings within the broader social context. Fear of side effects, stemming from both contraceptive experiences and notions of health and the body, was found to be the greatest obstacle to use of modern contraceptives. This related more broadly to the pluralistic medical systems operating simultaneously and the varying levels of medicalization and trust in both biomedicine and the Cambodian health system. Behaviour that seemed counter-intuitive at the outset - not wanting to become pregnant but not using contraception, and wealthy educated women choosing traditional over modern methods – becomes understandable in light of the context and meanings highlighted by the ethnographic data. This thesis provides a unique empirical study which contributes to the emerging field of anthropological demography. By bringing approaches and methods from medical anthropology to the typically demographic phenomenon of unmet need, the study provides a new insight for social policies regarding reproductive health as well as contributing to the body of ethnographic literature on Cambodia.

Taking as a starting point the assumption that justice is the first virtue of the family, my main aim in this dissertation is to offer an account of what justice requires of parents. Grappling with this issue, however, sheds some light on related questions that are wider in scope: How should we think about justice in general? What is the distinctive value of the family? What would a society of just families look like? In answering these questions, the following thesis is advanced: Demands of justice are best understood contextually. They arise from the characteristics of the specific relationship in the context within which they are meant to apply. An account of justice in the family should thus appeal to the parent–child relationship itself. This is an intimate fiduciary relationship that normally constitutes the primary site of upbringing. Yet what makes it distinctively valuable is its element of identity, i.e., a sense of interconnectedness and continuity generated through the transmission of beliefs, practices and more idiosyncratic attributes from parent to child. Corresponding to this understanding of the parent–child relationship, justice requires parents to provide their children with the conditions to achieve a set of functionings up to the level that allows them to lead a decent life in terms of the parents’ social and cultural context. As this account of justice in the family is not strictly political, it gives rise to a complex interplay along the axis of citizens–parents–children, displaying formulae of both integration and separation of family and state. A society of perfectly just families might not be perfectly just as a whole. Yet it may be interpreted as particularly liberal; characterized by multiplication and separation of authorities, reflecting rather than resolving the tensions between the individual and society and between different individuals and groups within society.

This thesis sets out to investigate the techniques and strategies used by members of the seduction community to perform masculinity, using as its primary sources material produced by the community ranging from published texts to online commentary. The research is interdisciplinary and incorporates theoretical frameworks drawn from performance studies, semiotics and cultural studies, sociology, literary theory and gender studies. The first chapter explains the origins and operations of the seduction community, positioning it as a force that regulates performances of masculinity and depends upon teamwork and co-operation in order to function. The second chapter discusses the community's dual understanding of masculinity as a construct open to adaptation and change, and also as an innate and natural category. This tension is addressed through an analysis of power relations evident through narcissism and self-display, and a reliance on the suppression of non-masculine elements through homosociality, and performances of leadership based upon embodied expertise. This leads me to conclude that the seduction community may be a heterosexual pretext for building fulfilling homosocial relations. The final chapter addresses how women and femininity are imagined in the community, specifically as inferior and in many ways incomplete without masculine intervention, an attitude which reflects broader social trends. Of particular importance here are the devaluation of female speech and sexuality and the imagining of sex as a commodity. The thesis argues that where women themselves appropriate the language and techniques of the seduction community, this is presented as complicity with conventional gender norms, but also a potential route to individual empowerment through learning to manage relationships more effectively.

This study investigated Gollwitzer's mindset theory in the context of romantic relationships. One-hundred and sixty-eight students involved in a dating relationship were asked either to deliberate about or to think of implementing a goal not related to their relationship (e.g., finding a summer job) or a goal related to their relationship (e.g., moving in with their romantic partner). All participants subsequently completed assessments of current affect, perceptions of partner and of optimism for the future of the relationship. In line with Taylor and Gollwitzer (1995), thinking about implementing a decided goal not related to the relationship was found to increase positive affect and relationship illusions compared to non-relationship goal deliberation. In contrast, among those in the relationship mindset conditions, deliberation was found to elicit greater relationship illusions compared to goal implementation. These results help to delineate between effects of relationship specific and non relationship specific mindsets on relationship appraisals.

The shift in paradigm which gave rise to relativism has brought about a number of reconsiderations of the critical act--reconsiderations which question in a fundamental way the objectivity of the subject, the autonomy of the object of study, and the neutrality of language. Recent advances in the field of translatology participate in this shift in paradigm, insofar as they dismantle the discourse of transparency and restore to translators their primary role in the reception/re-enunciation of the source text. / A study of the production and reception of Anne Cameron's Daughters of Copper Woman (1981) demonstrates the extent to which the translator, in choosing to take on the stakes arising from the source text, becomes responsible for her/his performed act of mediating. / Furthermore, the translator must be prepared to accept the subjectivity of her/his own reading and ideological convictions, and to contest the value of invisibility traditionally attached to the translator' s role. Analysis of the translations of the first ten short stories of Daughters of Copper Woman illustrates how the translator's ideological stance orients her translation choices. In this thesis, the translator's process of textual intervention is examined from two distinct but complementary perspectives--the feminist and the Bermanian.

This feminist study of younger and older mothers in the UK analyses the way both groups present and practice moral selves in the context of dominant discourses of good motherhood. Qualitative data were generated during a year of fieldwork, involving repeated in-depth interviews, focus groups and participant observation, with mothers who had their first child when particularly younger or older than average. This methodology allowed me to investigate how the mothers present their moral selves through personal accounts and good mothering practices, as well as how they negotiate discourses of a ‘right’ time for motherhood. The overall contribution of the thesis lies in developing a feminist critique of intensive mothering which also recognizes the significance of mothering as a key site for the construction of gendered and classed moral selves. My thesis demonstrates that the categories of age, social class and gender intersect to powerfully shape mothers’ constructions and performances of their moral maternal selves. For example, I argue that the normalization of the child-focused mother gives the older mothers, all middle-class, greater scope to achieve moral superiority than the younger mothers, almost all working-class. Indeed, throughout the thesis my analysis points to the ways in which mothers engage in practices of ‘othering’ to claim good motherhood. The thesis also develops a multi-dimensional conceptualization of time, which allows me to convey the complex connections between biological, social, biographical and generational times in mothers’ accounts. I conclude by suggesting that the moral script of ‘child’s needs first’ needs to be contested for new alternative meanings of good mothering to emerge which go beyond the autonomy-dependency model.

This thesis is about the meanings that children aged 8-10 years old attribute to family and close relationships. The thesis focuses on how children’s normative expectations about family relate to their lived experiences of family life and relationships. It is based on data from a school-based field study, combining participant observation, interviews, children’s drawings, visits to children’s family homes, and the children’s production of books about their families. The research took place over nineteen months. Its contribution to knowledge lies in a new theoretical framework, combining insights from family and childhood sociology, for the purpose of examining children’s constitution of family. The thesis demonstrates that children conceive of family as a meaningful and highly valued set of relationships, challenging the notion that the concept of ‘family’ has lost its sociological and analytical significance. This thesis illustrates that children consider the family as those people with whom they feel a sense of belonging; a feeling that was achieved across a range of family forms. This conceptualisation of belonging departs from traditional conceptualisations in encompassing face-to-face contact as an important element of belonging to a family. The thesis concludes that an emphasis on children feeling part of a family is more productive than the present policy focus on maintaining nuclear family forms. Particular attention is given to how children identify visible forms of relatedness, through surname, cohabitation and through family members ‘displaying’ family-like relationships and family photographs.

This thesis offers insight into the lives and lived (sporting) experiences of 20 British born Muslim women of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage. [In the interests of anonymity, pseudonyms have been used throughout this thesis.] They comprise working professionals and students who live in the urban diaspora community of Stratley, UK, and have been playing basketball in their local community since April 2007. Adopting a post-colonial feminist philosophical consciousness, this qualitative ethnographic study centralises the voices of subjects who are both pathologised in media-hyped discourses pertaining to the ‘Islamic peril’, and truncated by the affront of fundamentalist Islam. It does this by addressing four inter-related research questions. The first asks how membership of urban diasporic communities contributes to British Muslim women’s self-identifications and whether living in such spaces shapes the nature and context of women’s (social) lives and their entry to sport. The second question explores the extents to which British Muslim women are able to activate a ‘politics of difference’ to (re)-negotiate their access to sport. The third question centralises the complex identity politics of being ‘British Muslims’ and assesses, in particular, whether my respondents’ sporting ambitions have any impact on their identity work as ‘British born’ Muslim women who are of a migrant heritage. The fourth question also addresses British Muslim women’s sense of self, but investigates, in particular, whether playing basketball has any impact on the ‘self/bodywork’ of single, heterosexual ‘British-born’ Muslim women of a migrant heritage. Drawing upon critical literatures rooted in post-colonial, Asian and Islamic feminism the study contextualises the conditions of post-colonialism for Muslim individuals in Britain, especially Muslim women. It also focuses upon debates pertaining to Muslim women and sport. By privileging marginal epistemologies that have often been silenced or distorted through essentialist, uncritical and simplistic understandings of ‘Muslim women’, findings advance arguments about the lives, lifestyles and identities of subjects whose social, gendered, cultural and religious authenticities beneath the (body) veil evoke both sensitive questions and global concerns (especially in the aftermath of 9/11). The overall discussion brings into sharp focus the collective and subjective struggles of respondents in terms of their identity re/construction. I allude to the agentic capacity which my respondents had to re-constitute and re-negotiate aspects of their day-to-day lives, their engagement with sport, their identities and their bodies. I exemplify the myriad ways and extents to which my participants struggle against multiple material constraints that impose a particular ‘identity’ upon Muslim women and enforce a way of life upon them that restricts their access to sports. The thesis concludes that those frequently depicted as being oppressed and voiceless do indeed have the power to relationally make, unmake and/or remake their selfhoods.