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This thesis examines the complexity of resistance and the conditions of power for women in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Using feminist theory, theories of neoliberalism, and Dominionism, this thesis works to understand the ways in which victimhood and complicity influence resistance in totalitarian regimes. I argue that neoliberal ideologies skew understandings of freedom, agency, and power in a way that ensures individuals, specifically women, remain trapped in the system. Focusing on reproduction, I examine how Gilead controls women’s bodies and reproductive abilities to ensure a future for itself. The Eve-Complex is one way that the state integrates itself into the identity of motherhood; by making reproduction a state-controlled affair, Gilead effectively separates women from the identity of motherhood and uses this identity to ensure the production of a future generation of Gileadeans. Analyzing Offred, Serena Joy, and Moira, I determine the value of their respective attempts at resistance, and the implications of their role in propagating the system. Ultimately, I connect my analysis to the current events in the United States, such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade to demonstrate the importance of reading the novel in a modern context.

This dissertation is a philosophical examination of women’s masochism from several different viewpoints. Beginning from a centre of Western psychoanalytic thought, I analyse what Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Slavoj Žižek say about women and masochistic practices, and then continue the discussion by looking at the work of several women theorists and writers, including Angela Carter, Judith Butler, Kathy Acker, and Luce Irigaray. This analysis centres around Lacan’s theorization of the death drive through the figure of Antigone, and while he does not describe her as the original woman masochist, I believe she is a central figure in understanding women’s masochism and how engaging in masochistic acts is a radical action. In Chapter Two, the concepts of masochism and feminine jouissance are re-examined through the figure of Mohawk Saint Káteri Tekahkwí:tha, a figure whose masochistic jouissance has undergone revision and overwriting by the Roman Catholic Church, but who nevertheless illustrates a form of feminine jouissance which I demystify through an understanding of Haudenosaunee culture. The third Chapter examines the stories which are told about Indigenous people by Canadian settlers such as Duncan Campbell Scott so that the settler reader can enjoy the suffering of Indigenous peoples “masochistically” via the racist fantasy. These fantasies depend on the actual suffering of Indigenous people at the hands of the sadistic settler colonial state, and amount to literary political warfare in the formation of the nation state. The fourth and final Chapter theorizes what masochism means for Indigenous women writers, including E. Pauline Johnson, Marie Clements, and Tenille K. Campbell, and through methods such as Indigenous futurism, Indigenous moral sadomasochism, and Indigenous erotica. To theorize Indigenous women’s masochism means to reject it as a fantasy of men and look to our own culture for guidance.

In this dissertation, I use a mixed methodological (qualitative and quantitative) approach to examine how climate change and multilateral investment (MLI) simultaneously influence the experiences of migrants, non-migrants and return-migrants in rural sending and receiving communities within sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), using data collected from three regions of Ghana. I explore the gendered, historical, geopolitical, environmental, economic and sociocultural factors shaping the experiences of these groups, and the opportunities and constraints that they face in their communities of origin and destination. My study findings are based on two years of data collection (2019 - 2021), involving in-depth interviews (IDIs), focus group discussions (FGDs) and contextual observations. Study participants include female and male non-migrants and return-migrants in the migration origin (Upper West Region-UWR), migrants in middle-belt destination areas (Bono Region-BR), and key informants working with governmental and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) – on gender/women’s issues, climate change/environment, MLIs, migration, rural development, among others – in the migration origin and destination areas, as well as in Ghana’s national capital (Greater Accra Region-GAR). A total of 766 participants were recruited for this study. These include 30 and 12 participants for migrant and key informant IDIs, respectively, 55 participants for FGDs, and 669 participants for quantitative surveys. I use inductive theme-identification and explanation-building techniques to analyse my qualitative data, and descriptive and chi-square inferential statistical analyses for my quantitative data. My analyses and study findings are situated within feminist political ecology, complemented by insights from other theoretical/conceptual frameworks such as feminist postcolonial theories, feminist political economy, (livelihood) vulnerability, and intersectionality. Study findings are segregated by the migration context (i.e., origin and destination), with the findings from each context comprising a chapter of this dissertation. The findings based on the migration origin are presented in chapter four and those of the destination in chapter five. Key informant perspectives are interspersed with those of migrant groups in both chapters. In the UWR, I found an increasing outmigration of people to middle-belt destination areas of Ghana, mostly resulting from climate change effects such as reduced/erratic rains and deteriorating soil fertility, combined with the colonial and neocolonial legacies of extreme poverty and deprivation, lack of economic opportunities and livelihoods, food insecurity, and poor educational opportunities in UWR. These migration dynamics tend to be gendered, and are further influenced by factors such as age, (dis)ability status, health status, sociocultural norms, and family/household type and size. Although many migrations out of the UWR tend to be permanent, semi-permanent or cyclical/temporary, a few participants report migrating just once in their lifetime. For non-migrants and return-migrants in the UWR, gendered and sociocultural norms regarding family and communal continuity, care for older adults and gendered notions of the impropriety of migration are cited as the main reasons why they never migrated, or migrated but returned to UWR. A few participants mention unmet environmental and economic expectations as the reasons why they returned. Participants in the migration origin add that remaining in or returning to the UWR did not result in significant improvement to their lives, and in some cases, worsened their agricultural, economic and health outcomes. Further, the majority of non-migrants and return-migrants report having no knowledge of MLI (activities) in the migration origin, and consequently, few people in the UWR report working in/with MLIs. Participants in the migration origin also mention climate change effects (such as poor and unpredictable rainfall patterns, degraded lands, heat waves, and water and food scarcity), as well as economic deprivation, poor infrastructural development and lack of social amenities as the main challenges facing them in the UWR. Several participants report that these conditions are causing or exacerbating physical and mental health ailments and distress for them. These return-migrant and non-migrant perspectives are supported by key informants, who report that despite their best intentions to help improve the lives of people in the migration origin, policy neglect of the UWR and substandard working conditions – mostly resulting from poor political/governmental will and resulting lack of resources needed to work effectively – are impeding their work and institutional/organisational goals. In the middle-belt destination areas, mainly the BR of Ghana, my findings reveal substantial in-migrations from the UWR to these areas, as evidenced by the national census surveys and predominant UWR migrant enclaves within the region. Migrants in the middle belt cite climate change effects such as poor rainfall and declining soil fertility, as well as the same economic challenges facing return-migrants and non-migrants in the UWR, as their main reasons for relocating to the middle belt. In addition, migrants report land unavailability and the imperative to send remittances to families in UWR as added motivations for relocating to the middle belt. Similar to their counterparts in the UWR, very few migrants report working in/with MLIs in the middle belt. In fact, some migrants report relocating from their original settlements due to the activities of some MLIs. Although migrants in middle-belt destination areas report relatively better rainfall, land access and soil fertility, food and water security, and educational, economic and livelihood options, as compared with return-migrants and non-migrants in UWR, they also indicate that they experience isolation, discrimination, precarity and unmet expectations (from themselves and family/community back in UWR) as trade-offs for enjoying some of these benefits. Consequently, migrants in the middle belt report high levels of physical and mental distress, similar to those in the migration origin. In both origin and destination areas, these vulnerabilities are more pronounced for women, older adults (particularly the elderly), people with disabilities, those living with chronic health ailments, and those who have even more limited access to resources. Based on these findings, I suggest some macro-level policy recommendations such as improving infrastructural development of rural migrant sending and receiving communities, providing better economic/livelihood options for migrant communities, and instituting urgent climate change mitigation strategies to address the rapidly deteriorating climatic conditions in these regions, particularly in the migration origin (UWR). I also propose better monitoring and evaluation of MLI, NGO and governmental initiatives in rural sending and receiving communities of Ghana, more equitable, targeted and stringent conditions associated with domestic/foreign investment in the country, increased responsibility, accountability and political will of Ghanaian governments, and better gender equality, climate change, MLI and migration programming to meet the informational, environmental, economic, health and other specific needs of people living in vulnerable conditions in the UWR and middle belt. Importantly, as my study findings show, it is crucial to involve people living in rural migrant sending and receiving communities in the design and implementation of any interventions and policies at both the local and national levels, to avoid implementing interventions and policies that are disconnected from the everyday lived experiences and needs of the individuals and groups most disadvantaged by ongoing climate change, MLI, migration and development activities. I conclude my dissertation with some directions for future research.

Western mission justified a mission to the Global South that was ingrained with the dominance of its culture and values. Women’s mission, as a tool of this mission, patronized themselves as the ‘care-taker’ of the ‘subjugated’ women of the Global South. This mission promulgated new ways of thinking and prescribed new gender roles and values to the Global South. In doing so, it framed the traditional roles and cultural values of the non-Western world as oppressive and replaceable. Subsequently, Women’s mission along with Western feminism and Feminist theology as a broad idea has been challenged by feminists from the Global South. This research examines the impact of Western missions from the early to the modern period among the Khasi and Garo tribal communities in Northeast India. It will examine how the Western context influenced and shaped the later women missionaries’ outlook on these tribal people and analyze the impact of modern missions.

Unmade and Unmanned Men: Reading Traumatized Masculinity in Late Nineteenth-Century British Adventure Fiction through the Lens of the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857 examines the selected adventure fiction of George Alfred Henty, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad through the historico-political context of India’s First War of Independence, known in Victorian Britain as the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857. Examining masculine trauma in adventure fiction reveals how British men, who were themselves colonized by the Empire’s expectations of them, sought not only to recover from the scars inflicted by imperialism, but also to expose the Empire for inflicting the psychologically damaging expectations that produced their masculine trauma. The Introduction explains the historical significance of the “Mutiny” and the gap in the scholarship on masculine trauma in relation to this event. Chapter one summarizes the history of masculinity and adventure fiction scholarship and argues that the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857 was responsible for the traumatization of British masculine identities. Chapter two analyses the use of shock in Henty’s Rujub, the Juggler (1893) to argue how inherited historical remembrances of the violent “Mutiny” gripped Henty, prompting his depiction of re-imagined imperial masculinity. Chapter three analyzes the use of psychic splitting in Kipling’s The Jungle Books (1894, 1895) to argue how internalized, racially fraught remembrances of the repressed “Mutiny” haunted Kipling, prompting his depiction of destabilized imperial masculinity. Chapter four analyzes the use of post-traumatic stress disorder in Conrad’s Lord Jim (1899-1900) to argue how psychologically damaging remembrances of the unspeakable “Mutiny” unsettled Conrad, prompting his depiction of shattered imperial masculinity.

This dissertation examines how migrant caregivers ascribe meaning to the (re)productive labour that they provide within Canada’s Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP). Introduced in 1992, the LCP was a temporary foreign worker program that recruited women, primarily from the Philippines, to care for children, elderly people, and people with disabilities in the homes of their employers. Numerous studies have shown how the stipulations of the LCP produce precarious working conditions that render caregivers vulnerable to exploitation and abuse and that result in their deskilling and de-professionalization. The conditions engendered by the LCP reflect and reinforce the devalued status of care and domestic work; however, little attention has been paid to how people employed in the program make meaning about this work. Informed by feminist standpoint theory, this study centers the voices of live-in caregivers to examine the discursive strategies they utilize to make sense of, (re)frame, negotiate and/or challenge the problematic tropes attributed to care and domestic work. The findings of this study contribute to a growing body of scholarship that examines the experiences of those employed in “dirty” occupations that have the potential to “taint” or stigmatize workers. Utilizing narrative inquiry, a total of three focus group interviews were conducted with eleven women employed in the LCP in the last fifteen years. The interviews took place between December 2016 and January 2017 at a community organization in Toronto that provides services to migrant caregivers. Drawing on excerpts from these interviews, I explore four major themes that emerged from the research. The first theme focuses on participants’ common experiences of stigma and exploitation that stem in part from the devalued status of reproductive labour. The second theme highlights one of the central ways that participants brought dignity and meaning to their job by refocusing attention on the relational dimensions of care. The third theme centers on participants experiences of transnational motherhood, including the painful experience of family separation. Lastly, the fourth theme explores discourses of sacrifice and spiritual faith, which were central to how participants made sense of their experiences of family separation, exploitation, and stigma. For several of the women in this study, their identities as workers were inextricably tied to their maternal identities, and sacrifice, as well as spiritual faith, informed how they assigned meaning to care and domestic work.

This project considers the representation of consent in young adult (YA) novels. Consent is broadly defined as giving permission, approval, or agreement. While most often in analyses of YA literature consent focuses on romantic and/or sexual consent, consent also includes an individual’s willing participation in any activity. For example, within the genre of dystopian YA, characters must often perform acts of violence without their explicit consent in order to survive their dystopian worlds. This project then considers how consent is represented within YA novels and what messages about consent the genre imparts to YA readers. What we have learned over the course of our reading and research is consent is defined almost exclusively in terms of sex, romance, and sexual/romantic relationships. Whereas we define consent more broadly in terms of an individual’s ability to agree to participate in an activity, for example, in terms of YA literature, consent focuses on sex and one’s ability to consent to sex or to a physical aspect of a romantic relationship. Because we defined consent more broadly, we focused our reading primarily on YA fantasy and urban fantasy. We hypothesized that novels in this genre would conceive of consent in broad terms. We learned, however, that YA fantasy and urban fantasy novels feature choice and interrogate protagonists’ ability to make choices freely, but few of these novels engage with the concept of consent as we define it.

In this dissertation, I examine creative methods of peacebuilding that are both community-driven and embodied in their approach. I evaluate how these methods can simultaneously challenge the confines of conventional peacebuilding mechanisms in transitional and post-conflict contexts, while also offering a unique complement to existing programs and structures. I look at the multifaceted socio-cultural expressions of yoga globally, inquiring as to how this mind-body practice can offer opportunities in peacebuilding on both individual and collective levels. My project is rooted in the principles of community-engaged research and feminist research ethics. More specifically, this dissertation closely engages with the work of the Colombian non-profit organization, Corporación Dunna. Dunna works to address deeply rooted cyclical and intergenerational violence embedded in Colombian society through building capacity for coexistence and trust within communities. As such, their programming focuses on individual mental wellbeing as well as on addressing the manifestations of trauma in families, communities, and whole nations. The data collection process followed a snowball and community-driven approach to data collection. This process took place during a three-month research fellowship based in Bogotá and included 75 semi-structured brief and in-depth interviews, with 73 participants across Colombia. Interviewees included Dunna’s staff and program participants, citizens-at-large, and various members of the non-profit and peacebuilding sector in Colombia. The research period took place in the months following the signing of the 2016 peace accord between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC); my findings are situated within this context and fragment in history. My analysis of these interviews is informed by postcolonial feminist theories, transrational peace philosophy, and the principles of elicitive peace work. My findings aim to expand on existing research within the field of peacebuilding and build the case for a deeper understanding of embodied approaches to peacebuilding in post-conflict and transitional contexts. Moreover, I argue for the need for a holistic approach to peace work that necessarily integrates the various layers of societal conflict including national, community, interpersonal, and individual aspects of human life.

This thesis project re-evaluates Laura Mulvey’s film theories regarding psychoanalysis and the “male gaze,” first found in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). By re-evaluating the limitations of Mulvey’s use of the Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic model this project seeks to understand the desires and processes of identification of cinematic spectators who reject the ideological imperative of the “male gaze”. As many critics have noted, Mulvey’s initial examination of cinema does not account for LGBTQ+ spectators and/or black spectators who occupy looking relations that reject cis-normative and heteronormative white Hollywood cinematic conventions. From this standpoint, we begin the first chapter by critiquing Mulvey’s gendering of cinematic conventions found in her theory of the “male gaze,” which does not address male masochistic desire, female desire or queer desire. In the second chapter, we continue to critique the rigid heterosexual binary of Mulvey’s work by articulating a new other-critical form of looking relations that derives from bell hooks’ term “the oppositional gaze”. Finally, in the third chapter we investigate the importance of fluidity in the cinematic gaze that can be found in LGBTQ+ spectatorship. In this final chapter, we address the “lesbian look” as a form of oppositional gaze that works against Mulvey’s “masculinized” female spectator. The overall objective of this project is to prioritize theoretical models that investigate cinematic spectatorship and desire as fluid rather than returning to rigid classifications of the gaze theory that limit sexuality, gender and/or race.

Duration and Depravity identifies a temporality of “sinful feeling” operating in the archive of Puritan writings of personal piety, such as diaries, autobiographies, conversion narratives, and sermons, and persisting into early American gothic literature. This temporality of sinful feeling is an attempt to discipline the self through temporal projection oriented towards the theological fact and religiously experienced feeling of sinfulness. Duration and Depravity engages with the proliferation of postsecular criticism in American literature studies generally, and Puritan studies more specifically. Postsecular criticism in literary studies is a style of historicism that reconsiders its primary archive’s position in newly complicated narratives of secularization provided by such thinkers as Talal Asad and Charles Taylor. This project’s identification of a temporality of sinful feeling in the Puritan archive and in the early American gothic both builds on and complicates Charles Taylor’s proposition that secular modernity is defined by the assumption of Walter Benjamin’s “homogenous, empty time” as the primary source of modern disciplinary culture. Charles Taylor believes that Puritanism is paradoxically responsible for producing this modern secular phenomenological condition. In contrast, I argue that, while the Puritans did indeed assume time as a homogenous empty medium and “precious resource, not to be wasted” in the quest for personal self-discipline and religious industry, they also defined themselves according to a temporality of sacramentalism, repetition, and queerness that resisted this homogenous disciplinary time and oriented itself around recurrent experiences of personal depravity—or sinful feeling. This temporality of sinful feeling persists in the early American gothic not as something which the “secular” novel form critiques, but which it proposes as a morally desirable component of citizenship in the early American republic. Among other theoretical approaches, Duration and Depravity engages the Puritan archive with postsecular theory (Talal Asad, Charles Taylor), queer temporality theory (Elizabeth Freeman, Lee Edelman), phenomenology of time and affect (Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Charles Altieri), and pain studies (Elaine Scarry). The first seven chapters examine the formation of a New England Puritan tradition of a temporality of sinful feeling in Puritan authors (Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, Michael Wigglesworth, and Jonathan Edwards). Through a reading of Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 gothic novel Wieland, chapter eight contends that the gothic tragedy of the novel transmits a Puritan lesson about the need for responsible American citizens to embrace rather than repudiate a temporality of sinful feeling as a method of judgement and self-discipline. Duration and Depravity concludes by suggesting that the early American gothic style portrays a depraved temporality which it inherits from Puritanism and transmits in “secular-religious” form as an important source of responsible republican selfhood. The early American gothic is not so much a secular critique of Puritan origins as it is a carrying forward of Puritanism as itself a necessary form of self-critique and democratic citizenship.

Throughout the first half of twentieth century, the act of smoking transitioned from being an exclusively male to a predominantly female practice. Indeed, by the end of the twentieth century merely being female was considered a serious risk to developing a smoking habit. This cultural shift is reflected in contemporary cigarette advertising, in which women begin as attractive accessories to male smokers and gradually become depicted as smoking independently. These advertisements were actively engaged with the social worlds of the women they targeted, drawing upon their contemporary concerns and values, namely those of women’s liberation and an increased attention placed upon body image. This paper argues that the majority of this male to female advertising shift took place between 1920 and 1940, during which advertisements adapted their imagery to accommodate smoking as paradoxically both a powerful symbol of liberated femininity and as a means of conforming to the image of the attractive modern woman.

This case study research (Patton, 2002, 2014; Flyvberg, 2006) has grown out of an awareness of deep resistance from the psy disciplines to trans-informed epistemologies as a source of legitimate knowledge (Tosh, 2015, 2016; Winters, 2008). It focuses on examining how the closure of The Gender Identity Clinic (GIC) for Children and Youth at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, signaled a paradigm shift from the ‘treatment model’ to the ‘affirmative model’ with respect to clinical approaches for supporting trans and gender diverse children and youth. As such the case study involved tracing the significance of the clinic, including key figures and the clinical literature that flowed from it, and interviewing activists and academics who worked to challenge the pathologizing literature and praxes. Grounded in a critical approach to research known as bricolage (Kincheloe 201, 2005; Kincheloe & Berry, 2004) this case study was concerned to ensure that “lived experience was allowed to sit at the table of official meaning-making” (Kincheloe & Berry, 2004, p. 11), drawing “paradigmatic and textual analyses” into dialogue to examine “the various dynamics that shape what is called empirical knowledge” (Kincheloe & Barry, 2004, pp. 22, 7). This research applied multiple theoretical lenses including Foucault’s (1977, 1980, 1984, 2003) theorizations on power-knowledge and the clinical ‘gaze’, Stryker’s (2006) theorizations on (de)subjugated knowledges, and theorizations on epistemic injustice and violence (Fricker, 2007; Namaste, 2000, 2009; McKinnon, 2017; Teo, 2010, 2011). The conduct of the research entailed employing both ethnographic (Patton, 2002, 2014) and genealogical methods (Foucault, 1980, 1984); emerging as two case studies; one a micro-genealogical case study, and the other, a genealogically informed ethnographic case study. Though focused on the psy disciplines, this study raises important questions for educational research, which has privileged a ‘psychologized’ view of childhood (Teo, 2015), methodologism (Teo, 2017), and which has disciplined and erased gender and sexual diversity in schools (Martino & Cumming-Potvin, 2018). Ultimately, this research illuminates a legacy of harm while also documenting an epistemic insurrection required to trans-inform the clinical gaze.

Working-class masculinity has lost its steam. Since 2008, a sub-genre of Hollywood films has emerged that depicts the current crisis, and imminent demise, of working-class masculinity in the United States. The 2008 financial crisis has had devastating effects on the American economy, and particularly the working-class, whose precarious economic position has only been exacerbated under neoliberalism. These effects have become the thematic focus of a fringe genre of films, which show how the destabilization of the American economy has incited greater instability in gender relations, and has had an acute impact on working-class men. This thesis proceeds by analyzing how these films articulate the current crisis of working-class masculinity in America. Using the framework outlined by R.W. Connell, I explore how working-class masculinity has become marginalized in relation to neoliberal hegemonic masculinity, and how its marginalization has become an excitatory factor for inter-masculine violence, constituting a social problem.

2017 marked the year in which hip-hop officially became the most listened-to genre in the United States. This thesis explores hip-hop music’s rise to its now-hegemonic position within the music industry, seeking to provide insight into the increasingly popular sentiment that hip-hop is “the new rock & roll”. The “new-school” hip-hop artists of the last six years or so have also been the subject of widespread critical disdain, especially for their heightened degree of emphasis on conspicuous consumption. This study will track hip-hop’s ascent from the mid-1980s through to its current position as both a political vehicle and a commercial product. This will result in a historically informed discussion of Migos’ 2013 hit “Versace,” a song that can be read as a signpost pointing towards many of new-school hip-hop’s most prominent characteristics. Analysis of “Versace” will then inform a broader examination of new-school hip-hop as “the new rock & roll”. This discussion will seek to better understand hip-hop’s new-school artists not necessarily as the harbingers of hip-hop’s death, as has been claimed by so many, but rather as agents of social reorganization, which, I argue, has always been one of hip-hop’s most valued characteristics.

One of the most urgent problems facing sub-Saharan Africa is that many people lack access to safe, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food, particularly in semi-arid regions such as northern Ghana. An important indication of this problem within Ghana is that stunting rates due to prolonged undernourishment are significantly higher in the northern regions than in other parts of the country, despite claims of an overall increase in the availability of food. Broadly, this dissertation employs qualitative case study research in the Northern Region (interviews N=109 and 12 focus groups) to describe the changes in access to resources, roles and responsibilities in food production and consumption within households and explains how these changes are shaped by the culture, politics and ecologies of the region. It is informed by a range of literatures, theories and conceptual approaches, but predominantly from agrarian change and feminist political ecology. This research finds that the majority of farmers are adopting the development supported high-yielding seed varieties, tractors, fertilizer and agrochemicals in order to respond to erratic rainfall, shortened growing seasons, and drier soil with diminished fertility. However, there are clear socioeconomic differences affecting who can access the technology, credit and land used to cope with these environmental changes. Meanwhile, those farmers who adopted the intensification technology commonly described this decision as a short-term trade-off to meet subsistence needs at the expense of degrading soil health and increasing debt. This research also finds that environmental change, the commodification of food production more generally, and development support for women’s food provisions are causing confusion, tension and conflict in the typical intra-household gender division of food production and provisioning responsibilities. Consequently, farmers defy development efforts, and this research finds that this resistance is based on their historical experiences of decades of development projects that have failed to meaningfully include them and consider their diverse needs, alongside elite corruption and mismanagement, degrading ecologies and donor hegemony. Ultimately, this dissertation makes important contributions to understanding different types of smallholders’ perceptions of changing agrarian political ecologies in an African context, which is needed to inform development policy and practice.

This dissertation reads the unpublished texts of Romanticism not as fragments on the road to publication but as psychoanalytic “partial objects” that re-figure our understanding of the relationship between Romantic authors and publication. Against positivist interpretations of literary production that limit writing to the professionalization of the author and to a sociology of texts, Unread develops the concept of the (un)published whose parenthetical bracketing signals an unstable suspension of textual instability that is at once prior to and yet persistently remains a part of the writing of the published text. I argue that non-publication also arises from the author’s relation to the act of writing itself, which reached its own point of crisis in the writing of Romantic authors. Drawing especially on Jacques Lacan’s re-imagining of object-relations, and the method of textual studies known as la critique génétique, the (un)published simultaneously promises unity and completion as well as disintegration and instability. In Chapter 1, I analyze the three versions of Friedrich Schelling’s unfinished The Ages of the World (1811, 1813, 1815) to develop the different valences of the Romantic author’s relationship with the (un)published, which can be summarized as an encounter with the crisis (1811), the negation of crisis (1813), and the involuntary affirmation of crisis (1815). In Chapter 2, Wordsworth’s negation of the crisis of writing in the different versions of the Salisbury Plain poems (1790, 1795-98, 1842) and The Prelude (1798, 1805, 1850) result in an incorporation of that crisis that unworks his poetic project of self-constitution. In Chapter 3, I argue that Coleridge’s revisions to “Christabel” (1798-1834) before and after publication represent a relation to the text as a textual abject, which traumatically confronts Coleridge with the Real of his desire and transforms revision into a function of the psychoanalytic drive, whose end is to have no end. In Chapter 4, John Clare’s (un)published writing reveals a dissatisfaction with both personal and impersonal perspectives and leaves no place for a stable subjectivity. Finally, in Chapter 5, Mary Shelley’s Mathilda represents an affirmation of the (un)published as a partial object, because it rejects the Symbolic of literary community while it still includes itself within the Symbolic as both that which exceeds it and as that which it lacks.

Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxidermied animal sculptures that challenged conventional forms of taxidermied objects massively produced and displayed on an international scale. In contrast to taxidermied ‘specimens’ found in museums, taxidermied ‘exotic’ wildlife decapitated and mounted on hunters' walls, or synthetic taxidermied heads bought in department stores, rogue taxidermy artists create unconventional sculptures that are arguably antithetical to the ideologies shaped by previous generations: realism, colonialism, masculinity. As a pop-surrealist art movement chiefly practiced among women artists, rogue taxidermy artists follow an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the purposes of art and often display their sculptures in ways that are self-reflexive of speciesism and express criticisms of anthropocentrism. Through an intersectional feminist lens and alongside critical insights from (and debates within) postcolonialism, deconstruction, and affect theory, I analyze the art pieces created by Sarina Brewer, Angela Singer, Polly Morgan, Scott Bibus, and Robert Marbury. In doing so, I explore the ethical ambiguities of using postmortem animal bodies in an art movement that is informed by animal rights, and also discuss the complexity of animal-human relationships in the face of human conceptualized impressions of life and death. Brushing up against the history of public autopsies and other forms of body preservation, I look to the ways in which bodies are made ‘taxidermic’ through violence, trauma, objectification, commodification, bio-engineered artificiality, extinction, and the discriminatory practices that represented certain (animal and human) bodies as ‘unruly.’ Tackling the frames that produce ‘taxidermic’ bodies (as exposable and exploitable skins), I challenge the anthropocentrism foundational to human thought and highlight the ways that humans produce and perpetuate hollowed out crypts of meaning as it applies to animality. Essentially, this project attempts to undermine anthropocentric worldviews that construct humans as separate and unique from what is understood and described as the ‘nonhuman,’ and, also, invites readers to confront and acknowledge how vulnerability and mortality are shared among humans (animals) and other nonhuman beings.

This paper investigates the role of Fyfe Dangerfield’s cover of “She’s Always a Woman” by Billy Joel, within the presentation of heteronormative gender roles in John Lewis’ 2010 advertising campaign. After outlining the narrative of the advertisement and the ways in which the female protagonist is gendered from girlhood to womanhood, this paper draws upon the work of feminist scholar Judith Butler to problematize John Lewis’s portrayal of gender to show how it perpetuates heteronormative stereotypes. Then, drawing on theories of popular music surrounding identity and the importance of lyrics, John Lewis’ use of Fyfe Dangerfield’s cover is analyzed, outlining the way in which the music strengthens a simplistic narrative of ideal girlhood and womanhood, as well as how it encourages potential customers to identify with the brand. The paper then questions whether John Lewis is able to challenge heteronormativity due to their established brand identity or whether the responsibility falls upon the society, and concludes that it is essential to challenge the function of gender and music within advertisements.

Many women enter graduate and undergraduate sport management degree programs to prepare for leadership positions in sport (Brassie, 1989). However, in professional sport in North America, the proportion of women advancing to senior roles is comparatively small. Previous research (Berry & Franks, 2010; Dreher, 2003; Lough & Grappendorf, 2007; Sartore & Cunningham, 2007) and a review of the company directories all confirm that a relatively small proportion of women hold senior leadership roles at either the league or team levels. In fact many teams do not have a single woman in a senior leadership role in spite of the fact that our top universities have been producing graduates in the area for decades. A number of researchers (Burton, 2015; Hardin, 2004; Hums & Grappendorf, 2007; Inglis, Danylchuk & Pastore, 2000; Masteralexis, Barr & Hums, 2011; Moore, Parkhouse & Konrad, 2010; Shaw & Frisby, 2006) have investigated the experience of female leaders in sport, but to date, researchers have not focused on the experiences of women holding senior leadership roles within professional sport in Canada. The researcher conducted a descriptive research study designed to explore and describe the career experiences of women holding senior leadership positions in professional sport in Canada. Data were gathered through a qualitative data collection process designed to uncover the experiences of women holding these roles. In addition, the researcher sought to secure expert opinion on future activities, policies and practices that may help alleviate the underrepresentation in the future. All of the women (N=7) holding these senior leadership roles were invited to participate in the study. Each woman was interviewed and asked pre-tested, semi-structured and open-ended questions designed to uncover their leadership development, career experiences, and advancement strategies. A pilot study was conducted in advance of the research study to pre-test all of the research procedures and research instruments. The findings of this research were compared to the growing literature bases in both the leadership development and women in leadership areas.[G1] [G2] The results of this study confirm that although there have been many advances for women in sport leadership, there are still limitations for those seeking to advance to senior leadership levels. Each participant experienced obstacles and varying degrees of discrimination throughout their career. However they persevered to advance their professional careers. Most of all, the results of this study confirmed the perception that a “leaky pipeline” exists in professional sport as it does in other industries (Hancock & Hums, 2016). These women believe that some of their female colleagues prematurely defect from their careers in sport, and as a result women are not proportionately represented in senior leadership candidate pools. According to these women, others may not secure diverse enough experiences and/or don’t develop professional networks and advocates. The study participants unanimously believe that change is necessary, and consequently, they offer a helpful suggestion based on their experience. These women also believe that modified human resource procedures might keep women in the candidate pools and help women better prepare for senior-level leadership positions in sport. The findings of this research study will help sport management academicians; sport policy makers and sports leaders better understand and address the situation. A number of empirically-based recommendations to facilitate improved leadership development and placement of women in senior leadership roles in professional sport in Canada is also proposed.

This study focuses on gender represented in the literary context of fairy tales. It explores the adjectives used to describe the female and male gender diachronically and cross-sectionally over the span of the 19th century. By analyzing English translations of the Grimm Brothers’ “Ashputtel” (“Cinderella”), and “Hans In Luck,” I make observations about variations of adjective use within each text while comparatively looking at a female-centric narrative to a male-centric one. This provides a look into the relatively understudied subject of adjectives as a linguistic means of describing gender within cultural mores and norms. Nineteenth century data shows that adjectives in a female-centric text remain heavily centered around appearance, and negative adjectives are only used during female-to-female dialogue, with the exception of the protagonist’s father’s negative description of her in the final scene. In the male-centric text adjectives focus on describing characters’ mental states and emotions rather than appearance, where negative adjectives rarely appear and adjectives that denote emotion are far more frequent. The male-centric text is also the only environment where adjective phrases were found to describe characters. The twentieth century data demonstrates that in the female-centric text adjectives continue to focus on characters’ appearances and the use of negative adjectives remain isolated to female-to-female dialogue. While the total number of adjectives vary greatly in the first century’s data between “Ashputtel” and “Hans in Luck,” the second century reveals an increase in adjectives in the male-centric story; becoming more consistent with the numbers found in the female-centric text. The final significant trend is the increase of female presence in “Hans in Luck” from 0.6 percent in the nineteenth century to 3.8 percent in the twentieth century, a 3.2 percent increase in adjectives for females. In comparison to the male presence in “Ashputtel” increase by 2.2 percent (from 4.7 to 6.9), the “Hans in Luck” trend proves to be big increase in the direction of better gender representation in the story. This diachronic study provides a quantitative and qualitative look into how adjectival use relates to gender norms and introduces data from 1823 to 2005 in order to track trends and changes in human adjectives found in these two fairy tale stories.

This paper applies theories from gerontology to analyze the music and text from Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Der Rosenkavalier (1911) in order to examine the Marschallin’s attitude towards her aging female body. After illustrating the signifiers that code the Marschallin’s body as feminine, this paper incorporates Chris Gilleard’s idea from gerontology, that embracing feminine sexuality prevents the desexualizing process of aging, to examine the Marschallin’s sexual escapism. Then, with the incorporation of biographical accounts discussing reflection on past experiences and Marja Saarenheimo’s gerontological theory that memories are embodied processes, the paper analyzes how aspects of nostalgia relate to the Marschallin’s process of remembering her younger body through musical and textual repetition. The paper concludes with a brief examination of the extra-musical connotations of the waltz and an investigation of the Marschallin and waltz tempi through the lens of gerontology, which revisits the topics of sexual escapism and nostalgia. At the end of the opera, this analysis of the Marschallin shows that she accepts her aging body and exerts control over her own life.

Academic conferences are events geared to disciplinary specialization, and much of the SoTL literature regarding scholarly gatherings addresses their benefits for graduate student apprenticeship. In our organization of the 22nd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, we explored other forms of pedagogy to augment an academic professionalization approach. In particular, we created opportunities for cross-disciplinary teaching and learning, which have particular potential for Humanities students who may end up applying their discipline-specific training in non-academic contexts and in unexpected ways. This paper explores the possibilities and limitations of the cross-disciplinary initiatives that we developed for Interdisciplinary / Multidisciplinary Woolf. Inspired by the interdisciplinarity of the early 20th century British author Virginia Woolf and the current critical movement known as the New Modernist Studies, we outline the theories behind our approach to conference pedagogy and reflect upon our intentions and methods. We also assess learning outcomes in relation to both apprenticeship and non-traditional models of conference-based instructional design, and consider the institutional structures and practices that both enable and limit the scope of cross-disciplinary research and its dissemination at the undergraduate, graduate, and faculty levels. By moving away from the field of literary studies and sharing our scholarly teaching perspective in the context of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, we attempt to put into motion the potentially transformative disciplinary boundary-crossings that motivated the 2012 Woolf Conference. Les colloques universitaires sont des événements axés sur la spécialisation des disciplines et une grande partie des publications en ACEA concernant les rencontres savantes traitent de leurs avantages pour l’apprentissage des étudiants de cycles supérieurs. Lors de la préparation de notre XXe Colloque international annuel sur Virginia Woolf, nous avons exploré d’autres formes de pédagogie afin d’élargir l’approche de professionnalisation académique. En particulier, nous avons créé des opportunités d’enseignement et d’apprentissage pluridisciplinaire qui présentent un potentiel particulier pour les étudiants des humanités qui vont peut-être finir par mettre en application leur formation spécifique à leur discipline à des contextes non-académiques et de manières inattendues. Cet article explore les possibilités et les limites des initiatives pluridisciplinaires que nous avons développées pour notre colloque intitulé Woolf Interdisciplinaire / Pluridisciplinaire. Inspirés par l’interdisciplinarité de l’auteure britannique du début du XXe siècle, Virginia Woolf, et par le mouvement critique actuel qu’on appelle Études du nouveau modernisme, nous présentons les théories sous-jacentes à notre approche de la pédagogie des colloques et proposons une réflexion sur nos intentions et nos méthodes. Nous évaluons également les résultats d’apprentissage par rapport à l’apprentissage lui-même et par rapport aux modèles non traditionnels de conception de l’enseignement basé sur les cours magistraux et prenons en considération les structures et les pratiques institutionnelles qui favorisent mais qui limitent également l’étendue de la recherche pluridisciplinaire et sa diffusion aux niveaux du premier cycle, des cycles supérieurs et des professeurs. En nous éloignant du domaine des études littéraires et en partageant notre perspective d’enseignement intellectuel dans le contexte de l’Avancement des connaissances en enseignement et en apprentissage, nous tentons de mettre en mouvement les possibilités de franchissement des limites disciplinaires transformateur qui ont motivé le colloque sur Virginia Woolf de 2012.

Focusing on the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson, the poetry and paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the early poetry of William Morris and the poetry and prose of Christina Rossetti, this thesis examines how boredom emerges in Victorian aesthetic culture. Drawing from writings in visual culture, gender studies, social history, and recent returns to new formalism in Victorian studies, this thesis attends to how renderings of boredom open up our understanding of the relationship between poetry, art, temporality, embodiment, and explorations of everyday life and living in Victorian England. Chapter One of my thesis is an introductory explanation of boredom and the term an aesthetic of boredom—a concept that I use to explore the connections between poetry, art, the psycho-somatic phenomenon of being bored, and poetic developments in Victorian socio-political and artistic contexts. It also outlines the connections between boredom and various affects of discontent (such as acedia, melancholy, and idleness). Chapter Two considers how Tennyson’s understanding of boredom is shaped by complicated attitudes towards gender, sexuality, and work—as seen in his poems “Mariana,” “Mariana in the South,” “The Lady of Shalott,” “The Lotos Eaters,” and “Ulysses.” Chapter Three concentrates on how repetition and thwarted desire influence the multiple versions of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Blessed Damozel,” his paintings of women from the later 1850s, onwards and aspects of The House of Life. Chapter Four considers how William Morris’s The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems fleshes out an aesthetic of thwarted desire that links to his developing views on art, gender, and everyday life. Chapter Five discusses the ways in which Christina Rossetti understands boredom in an expressly moral, albeit paradoxically ambivalent, light: it is either a form of affective purgation or else a symptom of spiritual lukewarmness, as shown in Maude, “The Prince’s Progress,” and Commonplace. My thesis concludes with a Postscript that comments on how both Victorian art and poetry—and its ways of encoding time, playing with rhythm and rhyme, and exploring the dynamics of desire—provide us with a profound sense of the embodied nature of boredom, in its various forms, in Victorian England.

Roach proposes an inventive reconsideration of the film’s two stars, John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart that is premised fervently on post-structural deconstructions of masculinity and the politics of the body. Through gestural analyses and close attention to the ways in which both men occupy the filmic space, the article establishes a rigorous interpretation of Richard Dyer’s theories of stardom that is premised upon relational aesthetics: of not only its leads’ interactions with each other, but also an ethic of genre-based intertextuality

Weight training and fitness competitions are increasingly popular activities for many women seeking an aesthetically fit body. This thesis entails a critical reflection of the various factors surrounding my personal decision to partake in body sculpting, examining how these factors parallel the experience of other women in the fitness industry. Using a feminist theoretical framework and autoethnography, a history of feminist theory is incorporated to demonstrate some of the various perspectives surrounding women bodies. Two challenges for women are discussed in this paper: i) the fear of fat, and how it is connected to a woman’s initial decision to attend the gym; and ii) the fear of masculinization, which is often experienced by women once they are in weight training environments. A discussion of women’s fitness and health magazines is included to expand the discussion on body image. These magazines are also analyzed for their positive and negative influences on women’s fitness. Performance-based activities are proposed as an alternative to fitness competitions for their objectivity. Finally, a personal perspective is offered on the meaning of femininity, within the context of North American culture.

This thesis explores the controversial subject of online breast milk sharing through the lens of Social Positioning Theory and interpretative repertoire analysis. I examine medical statements, Facebook wall posts on the Human Milk 4 Human Babies Global group and selected Canadian provincial groups, as well as a selection of Canadian print news media coverage pertaining to milk sharing to discover how this practice is discussed. I argue that the medical literature discusses milk sharing as unsafe, informal, and a generally unacceptable means of obtaining breast milk, whereas the HM4HB group members discuss it as a safe, intimate experience between donor and recipient, and more meaningful and accessible than obtaining milk from anonymous donors at a milk bank. I also argue that in a selection of news stories and columns, Canadian print journalists privilege the maternal discourse and offer a sympathetic outlook on milk sharing to their audience.

Tewa man Gregory Cajete describes the concept of Pathway as it relates to Indigenous learning and education: The concept of Pathway, revealed in numerous ways in Indigenous education, is associated with mountains, winds, and orientation. Learning involves a transformation that unfolds through time and space. Pathway, a structural metaphor, combines with the process of journeying to form an active context for learning about spirit. Pathway is an appropriate metaphor since, in every learning process, we metaphorically travel an internal, and many times external, landscape. In travelling a Pathway, we make stops, encounter and overcome obstacles, recognise and interpret signs, seek answers, and follow the tracks of those entities that have something to teach us. We create ourselves anew. Path denotes a structure; Way implies a process (Cajete 1994, 55). I drew on the work of Cajete to develop a framework for my PhD research exploring ‘how the relationship between health services and Aboriginal women can be more empowering from the viewpoints of Aboriginal women’. The assumption underpinning this thesis was that empowering and re-empowering practices for Aboriginal women can lead to improved health outcomes. The research methodology can be understood as laying out the Path, as a well developed structure or the plan for the research. It relates as an external landscape not just in terms of the Path itself, but also the research process within the landscape of the site of the research, Rockhampton. The Way, being the process, involved enabling a clear, stepped out process for me to follow and also one for me within my Self. In undertaking my thesis research I, travelled an internal landscape in the journey of the Self and came to terms with myself as an Indigenous woman researcher. I came to learn that I needed to make stops, that I would encounter and need to overcome obstacles, recognise and interpret signs, seek answers and follow the tracks of others that had been before me and who had something to teach me. I also understand that, within the Pathway of the research, I have created new ways for others to see Aboriginal women, new ways for Aboriginal women to have voices, share voices and more fully comprehend themselves and each other within a research process that they participated in developing. I know that I have come to understand myself more clearly as an Indigenous woman researcher, and that I have come to view myself in new ways. This paper will firstly provide a brief overview of issues pertaining to Aboriginal research, issues that I needed to consider when contemplating and undertaking research with Aboriginal women within the community of Rockhampton. This is the broader landscape in which the research was based and which I believe may be used to inform research with Aboriginal women in other areas. Secondly, I explore issues specific to myself as a researcher and, more importantly, as an Indigenous woman researcher. It shows the issues connected with being an Indigenous researcher, that is, as a new traveller within the broader landscape of research. Thirdly, I give a brief overview of how the research process was developed, how supervisors were selected for this research, and some of research methodologies as they relate to this research project with Aboriginal women.