In recent years, there have been many debates about fat female bodies in the media. Fat women are often associated with moral failure, laziness and stupidity. Women’s fat bodies are loaded with negative meanings because of dominant negative attitudes. These attitudes tells fat women that they need to change their bodies, in order to fit in a society where beauty standards are characterized with certain ideals around skinnyness. In this study, i will show how fat female bodies are being discussed on Flashback forum. I’m using a gender and intersectionalitative perspective. Anti-feminists uses Flashback forum to express sexist, homophobic and racist comments about different authors of feminist and body-positive blogs. These feminist bloggers are questioning the oppression that fat women faces in their everyday lives, and they wan’t to make all bodies visable by countering prejudice about fat female bodies. When does Flashback take threats against female feminist bloggers seriously?

Tremendously popular in American society, the breast cancer movement functions through a rhetoric of risk to persuade women to monitor their breasts and thus medicalize their bodies. The vast majority of breast cancer literature available is specifically aimed at women with breast cancer, while the research here examines the way the breast cancer literature actually includes women without breast cancer in its audience, expecting these women to see breast cancer as an eventual experience. The rhetoric of risk focuses on lifestyle choices, the body, genes, and the environment in order to encourage women to engage in body projects to prevent breast cancer. The attention to risk factors without reliable facts produces fear of the body. Prevention of breast cancer, really impossible, becomes synonymous with early detection, thus displacing responsibility for the disease from society to the individual. Through the rhetoric of risk, the breast cancer movement promotes the ideology of femininity by manipulating women to become complicit subjects in their subordination. Furthermore, the directives, as yet unproven, to prevent breast cancer are the same directives to attain the white heterosexist ideal of beauty. The woman is thus reinscribed into the traditional feminine role of caretaker (of her body) and femininity is not only preserved but produced despite a disease that physically threatens a woman's most visible marker of her femininity, the breast. / Master of Arts

Denna studie, skriven av Natalia Sener och Linnéa Johnson, ämnar undersöka hur unga kvinnor upplever att deras kroppar blir sexualiserade och hur de uppfattar att fenomenet avspeglas i sociala medier. Empirin är insamlad genom sex stycken semistrukturerade intervjuer med unga kvinnor som delar med sig av egna tankar och erfarenheter kring sexualisering och sociala medier och hur dessa aspekter påverkar varandra. Studien utgår från en teori gällande objektifiering av Fredrickson och Roberts, Youngs modell för förtryck samt West och Zimmermans teori om könspraktiker. Studiens resultat visar att unga kvinnor påverkas av ideal och sexualiserade kroppar på sociala medier i stor omfattning. Respondenterna anser att kvinnors kroppar granskas och bedöms av utomstående personer. Sociala medier blir här en arena för att upprätthålla de rådande strukturerna men samtidigt synliggöra dem för att kunna motverka dem. En del av respondenterna har till och med tagit aktiva val för att undvika att exponeras för sexualiserat material. Vidare belyser resultatet hur kvinnor idag, i ett motsatsförhållande, använder sociala medier för att med hjälp av sina kroppar motverka ideal och normativa trender vad gäller utseende. / This study, written by Natalia Sener and Linnéa Johnson, aims to investigate how young women experience their bodies being sexualized and how the phenomenon is reflected in social media. The empirics are collected through six semi structured interviews with young women who share their own thoughts and experiences about sexualization and social media and how these affect each other. The study is based on a theory of objectification by Fredrickson and Roberts, Young's model for oppression, and West and Zimmerman's theory of gender practices. The study results show that young women are widely influenced by ideals and sexualized bodies on social media. Respondents consider that women's bodies are examined and judged by third parties. Social media becomes an arena for maintaining existing structures, but at the same time visualizing them in order to counteract them. Some respondents have even taken active choices to avoid being exposed to sexualized material. Furthermore, the result illustrates how women today, in opposition, use social media to counteract ideals and normative trends regarding their appearance.

My thesis focuses on reproductive politics of (un)democratic Czechoslovakia, namely on the discursive construction of abortion as presented in the scientific and political discourses in the 20's and 50's. The aim is to compare the discourses and track the genealogy of control and regulation of women's bodies as biopolitical spaces within the Czechoslovakian nation. The text uses theories of G. Agamben, M. Foucault and R. Miller which deprive from the classical/juridical model of sovereignty and rights and offer a biopolitical one instead. Using this perspective the text tries to answer whether there is a difference between scientific and political discourses of so-called democracy and communism. That is, whether by putting the abortion into the center it is possible to speak about democracy and communism as if they were two different and mutually exclusive systems. Through the lenses of poststructuralist feminist analysis the thesis tries to doubt the binaries of "communism" - "democracy", "East" - "West", in which democracy always signals the good and communism evil. Analysing the discourses surrounding the enactment of 1957 law the text also ponders whether it is possible to read the law as a typical communist product, implanted by someone from the outside.

As participants, we agreed that women's silenced voices need to be heard, more specific to this participatory action research, the voices of women with new babies. Through wellness pastoral care, we co-laboured in finding ways of standing up to prescribed religious and cultural ideas regarding womaness and motherhood. Pastoral care in partnership with feminist theology and mutuality in community opened a safe place to renegotiate our own preferred ways of seeing our bodies, selves, sexuality, and womaness. The pastoral care, counselling, and mutuality experienced as a research group became the prevalent characteristic of our wellness that we wished to extend beyond the group and into families, churches, community cohorts, and the planet. This research is one platform on which the participating women shared hurts, found a place to be heard, and having come to know our Self more deeply, offer this Self as a gift to the reader. / Practical Theology / M.Th.

NOTE FROM THE LIBRARY: PLEASE CONTACT THE AUTHOR AT indisunflower@yahoo.com OR CONSULT THE LIBRARY FOR THE FULL TEXT OF THIS THESIS.... This thesis investigates the trajectory traced from Sarah Baartman, a Khoisan woman exploited in Europe during the nineteenth century, to a contemporary writing workshop with circumcised, immigrant West African women in Harlem New York by way of a selection of African women's memoirs. The selected African women's texts used in this work create a new testimony of speech, fragmenting a historically dominant Euro-American gaze on African women's bodies. The excerpts form a discursive space for reclaiming self and as well as a defiant challenge to Western porno-erotic voyeurism. The central premise of this thesis is that while investigating Eurocentric (a)historical narratives of Baartman, one finds an implicitly racist and sexist development of European language employed not solely with Baartman, but contemporaneously upon the bodies of Black women of Africa and its Diaspora, focusing predominantly on the "anomaly of their hypersexual" genitals. This particular language applied to the bodies of Black women extends into the discourse of Western feminist movements against African female circumcision in the 21st century. Nawal el Saadawi, Egyptian writer and activist and Aman, a Somali exile, write autobiographical texts which implode a western "silent/uninformed circumcised African woman" stereotype. It is through their documented life stories that these African women claim their bodies and articulate nationalist and cultural solidarity. This work shows that Western perceptions of Female Circumcision and African women will be juxtaposed with African women's perceptions of themselves. Ultimately, with the Nitiandika Writers Workshop in Harlem New York, the politicized outcome of the women who not only write their memoirs but claim a vibrant sexual (not mutilated or deficient) identity in partnership with their husbands, ask why Westerners are more interested in their genitals than how they are able to provide food, shelter and education for the their families, as immigrants to New York. The works of Saadawi, Aman and the Nitandika writers disrupt and ultimately destroy this trajectory of dehumanization through a direct movement from an assumed silence (about their bodies, their circumcisions and their status as women in Africa) to a directed, historically and culturally grounded "alter" speech of celebration and liberation. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil.(English)

As participants, we agreed that women's silenced voices need to be heard, more specific to this participatory action research, the voices of women with new babies. Through wellness pastoral care, we co-laboured in finding ways of standing up to prescribed religious and cultural ideas regarding womaness and motherhood. Pastoral care in partnership with feminist theology and mutuality in community opened a safe place to renegotiate our own preferred ways of seeing our bodies, selves, sexuality, and womaness. The pastoral care, counselling, and mutuality experienced as a research group became the prevalent characteristic of our wellness that we wished to extend beyond the group and into families, churches, community cohorts, and the planet. This research is one platform on which the participating women shared hurts, found a place to be heard, and having come to know our Self more deeply, offer this Self as a gift to the reader. / Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology / M.Th.

NOTE FROM THE LIBRARY: PLEASE CONTACT THE AUTHOR AT indisunflower@yahoo.com OR CONSULT THE LIBRARY FOR THE FULL TEXT OF THIS THESIS.... This thesis investigates the trajectory traced from Sarah Baartman, a Khoisan woman exploited in Europe during the nineteenth century, to a contemporary writing workshop with circumcised, immigrant West African women in Harlem New York by way of a selection of African women's memoirs. The selected African women's texts used in this work create a new testimony of speech, fragmenting a historically dominant Euro-American gaze on African women's bodies. The excerpts form a discursive space for reclaiming self and as well as a defiant challenge to Western porno-erotic voyeurism. The central premise of this thesis is that while investigating Eurocentric (a)historical narratives of Baartman, one finds an implicitly racist and sexist development of European language employed not solely with Baartman, but contemporaneously upon the bodies of Black women of Africa and its Diaspora, focusing predominantly on the "anomaly of their hypersexual" genitals. This particular language applied to the bodies of Black women extends into the discourse of Western feminist movements against African female circumcision in the 21st century. Nawal el Saadawi, Egyptian writer and activist and Aman, a Somali exile, write autobiographical texts which implode a western "silent/uninformed circumcised African woman" stereotype. It is through their documented life stories that these African women claim their bodies and articulate nationalist and cultural solidarity. This work shows that Western perceptions of Female Circumcision and African women will be juxtaposed with African women's perceptions of themselves. Ultimately, with the Nitiandika Writers Workshop in Harlem New York, the politicized outcome of the women who not only write their memoirs but claim a vibrant sexual (not mutilated or deficient) identity in partnership with their husbands, ask why Westerners are more interested in their genitals than how they are able to provide food, shelter and education for the their families, as immigrants to New York. The works of Saadawi, Aman and the Nitandika writers disrupt and ultimately destroy this trajectory of dehumanization through a direct movement from an assumed silence (about their bodies, their circumcisions and their status as women in Africa) to a directed, historically and culturally grounded "alter" speech of celebration and liberation. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil.(English)