Thesis (M.A.) - Carleton University, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 133-142). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.) - Carleton University, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 136-142). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 423-450).

Thesis (M.A. in National Security Affairs)--Naval Postgraduate School, March 2005. / Thesis Advisor(s): Anne Marie Baylouny. Includes bibliographical references (p. 71-74). Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2000. / UMI number: 9996850. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 361-394).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Idaho, February 2006. / Major professor: Karen Guilfoyle. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 138-153). Also available online in PDF format.

The thesis investigates a diverse range of feminist postmodern philosophy, distinguished by its varying rearticulation of the relationship between modernism and postmodernism and feminism’s own position vis-à-vis that debate. Drawing on postmodernism’s primary tenet that substantive, binary identity categories comprise discursive, performative constructs, feminist postmodernism theorises a range of strategies for their subversive re-performance. This is realised in the mobilisation of parodic, “failed” repetitions and identities embodied, for instance, by transsexual, transgender, and transvestite personae. Hence the reformulation of postmodern versions of agency, resistance, and choice. In the second instance, the thesis examines the combination of feminist postmodern philosophy with the narrative techniques of postmodernism and its sister genre, the fantastic mode. As a heterogeneous, open-ended, self-reflexive form, the “postmodern fantastic” challenges conventional realism and its correlative sovereign subject. The postmodern fantastic is redeployed by feminist practitioners, whose inscription of both textual and topographical re-performance, such as is manifest in the cyborg and the grotesque, represent the literary counterparts of feminist postmodern agency. The above provide critical contexts for a reading of four late-twentieth-century women writers, focusing in particular on their intervention in the modernism/postmodemism debate and their deployment of the feminist postmodern fantastic as a means of destabilising sexed, gendered, and sexual identity. The selected authors Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig, Jeanette Winterson, and Angela Carter represent distinct and diverse, culturally specific, literary and feminist traditions, reformulating the relationship between modernism and postmodernism in different ways and with varying degrees of success. They coalesce, however, in their contribution to the feminist postmodern fantastic. It is the general purpose of the thesis to demonstrate how this particular mode embodies one of feminist postmodernism’s most powerful means of literary and ideological critique

This thesis examines the representation of disabled people in Western culture within the context of feminist theoretical analyses to compare images of disabled people with the representations of women's bodies that are found in cultural representations. The body of the thesis is comprised of six chapters which explore images of disability in six major cultural sites for such images: charitable advertising, popular women's magazines, literature for children, film, biblical narratives and pornography. My analysis of these sites suggests that there are parallels between the ways in which women's bodies and the bodies of disabled people are represented. In Chapter 1 I analyse the discourse of charity advertising and the ways in which it presents disabled people in feminised scenarios. In Chapter 2 I examine the ways in which disability is allied to gender in popular women's magazines where certain bodily specificities and disabilities are associated with female characters. I consider in Chapter 3 the ways in which disabled characters in literature for children are presented as morally inadequate and lacking in self-control, exactly as female characters are depicted in Western culture. In Chapter 4 I address the identity of disability in film as a construction and in some respects as an illusion, as well as the role of disabled characters in the Freudian narrative of psycho-sexual development, and equate this with the role of the female in cultural expressions. In Chapter 5 I examine the cures of the New Testament and the ritual purifications of the Old Testament as a means to eradicate difference from the ideal of the male body. I argue that biblical narrative establishes women and disabled people as a violation of the ideal male body through their categorisation as unclean. In Chapter 6 I analyse pornographic representations of disabled women to investigate the ways in which disabled characters are positioned, like female characters, as the object of the gaze and as such as castrated and fetishised figures. The Conclusion summarises the argument of the thesis and briefly analyses some of the issues that arise around general concerns about the representation of disability.

The thesis investigates contemporary sexual cultures through the lens of British women's experiences of buying and using sexual commodities. Sexual consumer culture offers women a comprehensive programme of what Foucault calls ‘technologies of the self': a language, set of knowledge, and field of expertise through which the sexual self learns to articulate itself in order to become intelligible. Consuming and using sexual products to achieve ‘better' sex and construct a knowledgeable and ‘confident' sexual identity form a key part of the neoliberal project of the sexual self. Sex shopping culture reproduces a ‘postfeminist sensibility' (Gill, 2007), representing a ‘double entanglement' (McRobbie, 2009) with feminism by inciting and requiring women to construct and perform their sexualities through a narrow depoliticised discourse of sexual ‘choice', ‘empowerment', and consumerism. The thesis draws upon data from 22 one-to-one semi-structured interviews and 7 accompanied shopping trips to sex shops. A central contention of the analysis is that women use a diverse range of discursive, embodied and everyday strategies in order to ‘make do' with the kinds of femininity and female sexuality that sex shop culture represents (de Certeau, 1998). The thesis investigates three key spheres of social and everyday life at which sexual consumer culture is negotiated: spaces (the location, layout and experience of sex shops); bodies (the forms of bodily ‘becoming' offered by wearing lingerie in sexual contexts); and objects (using sex toys and the enabling and disabling of possibilities for sexual pleasures and practices). Each section demonstrates the constraints, anxieties and potential pleasures of constructing sexual identities in and through neoliberal and postfeminist consumer culture, whilst at the same time exploring the potential for contradiction, negotiation and resistance evidenced in the multiple ways in which women take up the sexual identities and practices offered by sex shopping.

This thesis examines feminist and queer actors emerging in highly mediated environments and the forms of political organisation and critical knowledge production they engage in. It indicates that older debates around gender and sexuality are being reformulated in digital networks and identifies alternative understandings which are being developed. The study foregrounds a performative conceptualisation and argues that political realities are produced in dynamic configurations of communication media, discourses and bodies. It suggests that network technologies constitute sources of vulnerability and anxiety for feminists and stresses the significance of registering how embodied subjectivities emerge from these experiences. To achieve its aims and to map activity happening across different spaces and scales, the project attended to context-specific processes of mediation at the intersections of online and offline settings. It employed ethnographic methods, internet visualisation, in-depth interviewing and textual analysis to produce the following key outcomes: it registered changing understandings of the political in relation to new media amongst a network of women's organisations in London; it investigated the centrality of social media and global connections in the shaping of local queer political communities in Brighton; it complicated ideas of control, labour and affect to analyse emerging sexual identities in online spaces like nofauxx.com, and offline postporn events; finally, it traced feminist actors gathering around new reproductive technologies, at the crossing fields of grassroots activism and the academy. Today, women's groups and queer activists increasingly use networked communication for mobilisation and information-sharing. In a climate of widespread scepticism towards both representational politics and traditional media, questions about the role of digital networks in enabling or limiting political engagement are being raised. This thesis aims to contribute to these debates by accounting for the ways in which feminist and queer activists in digital networks reformulate the relationship between communication media and politics.