Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Bodies Of Silence And Space: Victimhood, Complicity, And Resistance In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Sana H. Mufti

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

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 …

“In The End, It’S Your Pleasure That’S On The Line”: Postfeminist, Healthist, And Neoliberal Discourses In Online Sexual Health Information, Laura Cayen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation expands the critical literature on postfeminism, which is largely discussed in relationship to popular culture, to focus on how postfeminism permeates and shapes contemporary popular understandings of sexual health. A focus on women’s sexual health is particularly relevant considering the way in which postfeminist discourse is seen to simultaneously and contradictorily take up and reject the gains and methods of the ‘second wave’ feminist movement, within which feminist struggles relating to the women’s health movement and the sexual revolution were fought. Using a feminist critical discourse analysis methodology, I explore how female sexuality is discursively constructed in five …

In Pursuit Of Feminist Postfeminism And The Blessings Of Buttercup, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

Introduction:

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in thinking that the term “postfeminism” is often and perhaps most frequently used—by the mainstream media generally and by actual people—as a kind of casual dismissal of feminism that comes implicitly coupled with the suggestion that the cutting-edge place to be these days, with regard to women, is the one where the old victim mentality has been sloughed off and a new flying-free-of-those-chains approach to gender in all its diversity and in all its equal opportunity has been boldly embraced. Given the terms of this unstated argument, any criticism of this postfeminism automatically …