Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

"A Meruelous Thinge!": Elizabeth Of Spalbeek, Christina The Astonishing, And Performative Self-Abjection In Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms Douce 114, Murrielle Michaud

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Contributing to the spirited discussion regarding feminist and pro-feminine readings of Middle English hagiography, this dissertation challenges the tradition of grouping accounts of medieval holy women into a single genre that relies on stereotypes of meekness and obedience. I argue that fifteenth-century England saw a pro-feminine literary movement extolling the virtues of women who engaged in what I term “performative self-abjection,” a form of vicious self-renunciation and grotesque asceticism based on Julia Kristeva's model of the abject. The corollary of women's performative self-abjection is ex-gratia spiritual authority, public recognition, and independence, emphasized in the English corpus of fifteenth-century women’s hagiography. …

Narrative Pleasures And Feminist Politics: Popular Women’S Historical Fiction, 1990-2015, Victoria Kennedy

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation contributes to a developing body of work on women’s historical fiction and its significance to feminist discourse. Building from Diana Wallace’s 2005 study The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900-2000, I offer a modified definition of “the woman’s historical novel” and a transatlantic consideration of several of the most popular titles in the contemporary period, including The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), Outlander (1991), A Great and Terrible Beauty (2003), and Scarlett (1991). Several studies have followed Wallace’s, notably Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn’s Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women’s Writing (2007) and Katherine Cooper and Emma …

Canada’S Relationship With Women Migrant Sex Workers; Producing ‘Vulnerable Migrant Workers’ Through “Protecting Workers From Abuse And Exploitation”, Rachelle Daley

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Canada’s immigration regulations and policy instructions, collectively known as ‘Protecting Workers from Abuse and Exploitation’ (PWAE), instruct visa officials not to process temporary work permits when there is suspicion that migrants may be at risk of sexual abuse or exploitation in industries related to sex work. The regulations are part of Canada’s temporary foreign worker program, located within an anti-trafficking initiative.

Stretching across disciplines and focusing on critical migration scholarship, this research uses a communications studies lens to unpack the power of categorization, and the dividing practices that produce, maintain and normalize inclusion and exclusion, through the conceptualization of the …

And Still They Answered The Call: The Women Of Waterloo County, 1939-1947 (Ontario), Heather L. Moran

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The objective of this thesis is to examine aspects of the experience of women in Waterloo County during the Second World War. Waterloo County, with its strong industrial base and unique concentration of training centres for both the army and navy women’s corps, provides an ideal opportunity to study women’s experience of war and to relate it to the existing historiography, especially the dominant work, Ruth Roach Pierson’s They’re Still Women After All: The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood. The argument of this thesis is that evidence from Waterloo County suggests that Pierson has underestimated both qualitative and quantitative …

Manufacturing Concern: Worthy And Unworthy Victims. Headline Coverage Of Male And Female Victims Of Violence In Canadian Daily Newspapers, 1989 To 1992, James William Boyce

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This thesis examines the portrayal of male and female victims of violence in the headlines of seven Canadian daily newspapers between 1989 and 1992. Headlines were gathered from The Canadian Newspaper Index. Women's and men's victimization was found to receive different types and amounts of coverage. This coverage is inconsistent with known rates of violence against women and men, and I suggest three reasons for the disparities. I conclude by considering the possible consequences such coverage has for public perceptions and public policy.

The English Feminist Debate Over Protective Labour Legislation, 1880-1914, Leanne Baugh-Peterson

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

No abstract provided.