Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Biopolitics, Risk, And Reproductive Justice: The Governing Of Maternal Health In Canada's Muskoka Initiative, Jacqueline Potvin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation, I examine how Canada’s Muskoka Initiative discursively constructs and addresses maternal, newborn and child health (MNCH) as a global development problem. I evaluate how the Muskoka Initiative aligns with, and departs from feminist articulations of sexual and reproductive health, rights and justice. I do this by analyzing how the Muskoka Initiative drew on and reinforced dominant norms of motherhood, and aligned with neoliberal development frameworks. I also examine how the reproductive bodies and lives of women in the Global South were configured as sites of both development intervention and biopolitical governance. My findings are based on a …

The Differentiation Of Smallholder Farming And Household Food Responsibilities In Northern Ghana, Siera Vercillo

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

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 …

Searching For Wisdom: A Phenomenological Investigation Of Women's Perspectives Following Participation In An Ovarian Cancer Supportive Care Group, Helen Butlin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study used a novel methodology of hermeneutic-poetic-phenomenology to explore perspectives of women living with ovarian cancer. Each had participated in a supportive care group process Soul-Medicine prior to volunteering. Three women, Beth, Carrie, and Denise contributed to this study. The methodology was grounded in Gaston Bachelard’s philosophy of poetic-phenomenology. Data was analyzed with attention to image-centred knowledge; material imagination; reverie; and horizons of hope to elucidate their implicated aspects of wisdom and the ways participant’s formed their personal wisdom integrating feminist theories of embodiment and bioethics.

Findings are framed through three images of a uniquely formed inner ‘wisdom-compass’, an …

Un/Dead Animal Art: Ethical Encounters Through Rogue Taxidermy Sculpture, Miranda Niittynen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

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 …

The Politics Of Wounds, Jonathan Nash

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What configuration of strategies and discourses enable the white male and settler body politic to render itself as simultaneously wounded and invulnerable? I contextualize this question by reading the discursive continuities between Euro-America’s War on Terror post-9/11 and Algeria’s War for Independence. By interrogating political-philosophical responses to September 11, 2001 beside American rhetoric of a wounded nation, I argue that white nationalism, as a mode of settler colonialism, appropriates the discourses of political wounding to imagine and legitimize a narrative of white hurt and white victimhood; in effect, reproducing and hardening the borders of the nation-state. Additionally, by turning to …

“And, Needless To Say, I Was Athletic, Too:” Southern Ontario Black Women And Sport (1920s – 1940s), Ornella Nzindukiyimana

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation presents a two-part study of sporting practices of Southern Ontario Black women, between the 1920s and the 1940s, aimed at developing a socio-cultural history of sport that includes narratives from marginalized groups. Given sport’s traditional position as a masculine domain, as well as Canada’s status as a patriarchal White supremacy, the accounts presented in this work centre Black women’s sport experiences through an intersectional perspective. It is argued that, by virtue of their simultaneously racialized and gendered identities, Black women had distinct sporting experiences from those of White women and men and Black men.

The first study used …