‘Tenshillingland’: Community and Commerce, Myth and Madness in the Modern Scottish Novel.

While ‘community’ as a concept has come under increasing attack in a neoliberal era, it has remained in Scotland a mythic, though not unexamined, signifier of resistance to perceived threats to national identity. Community, central to the Scottish novel since the Kailyard, continues to be a prevalent theme in the many important novels of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries explored here. Yet, while often disturbingly oppressive in tenor, many of these representations of community actually attack the myth of Scottish communalism to critique, and often expose as forms of madness, the conventional values of social class, capitalism, patriarchy, and religion.

Reproducing Women: Female Bodily Narratives and English Patriarchies, 1600-1660

During the early Stuart period, England’s return to male monarchal rule resulted in the emergence of a political analogy that understood the authority of the monarch to be rooted in the “natural” authority of the father; consequently, the mother’s authoritative role within the family was repressed. As the literature of the period recognized, however, there would be no family unit for the father to lead without the words and bodies of women to make narratives of dynasty and legitimacy possible. Early modern discourse reveals that the reproductive roles of men and women, and the social hierarchies that grow out of them, are as much a matter of human design as of divine or natural law. Moreover, despite the attempts of James I and Charles I to strengthen royal patriarchal authority, the role of the monarch was repeatedly challenged on stage and in print even prior to the British Civil Wars and the 1649 beheading of Charles I. Texts produced at moments of political crisis reveal how women could uphold the legitimacy of familial and political hierarchies, but they also disclose patriarchy’s limits by representing “natural” male authority as depending in part on women’s discursive control over their bodies. Due to the epistemological instability of the female reproductive body, women play a privileged interpretive role in constructing patriarchal identities. The dearth of definitive knowledge about the female body during this period, and the consequent inability to fix or stabilize somatic meaning, led to the proliferation of differing, and frequently contradictory, depictions of women’s bodies. The female body became a site of contested meaning in early modern discourse, with men and women struggling for dominance, and competitors so diverse as to include kings, midwives, scholars of anatomy, and female religious sectarians. Essentially, this competition came down to a question of where to locate somatic meaning: In the opaque, uncertain bodies of women? In women’s equally uncertain and unreliable words? In the often contradictory claims of various male-authored medical treatises? In the whispered conversations that took place between women behind the closed doors of birthing rooms? My dissertation traces this representational instability through plays by William Shakespeare, John Ford, Thomas Middleton, and William Rowley, as well as in monstrous birth pamphlets, medical treatises, legal documents, histories, satires, and ballads. In these texts, the stories women tell about and through their bodies challenge and often supersede male epistemological control. These stories, which I term female bodily narratives, allow women to participate in defining patriarchal authority at the levels of both the family and the state. After laying out these controversies and instabilities surrounding early modern women’s bodies in my first chapter, my remaining chapters analyze the impact of women’s words on four distinct but overlapping reproductive issues: virginity, pregnancy, birthing room rituals, and paternity. In chapters 2 and 3, I reveal how women construct the inner, unseen “truths” of their reproductive bodies through speech and performance, and in doing so challenge the traditional forms of male authority that depend on these very constructions for coherence. Chapter 2 analyzes virginity in Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s play The Changeling (1622) and in texts documenting the 1613 Essex divorce, during which Frances Howard, like Beatrice-Joanna in the play, was required to undergo a virginity test. These texts demonstrate that a woman’s ability to feign virginity could allow her to undermine patriarchal authority within the family and the state, even as they reveal how men relied on women to represent their reproductive bodies in socially stabilizing ways. During the British Civil Wars and Interregnum (1642-1660), Parliamentary writers used Howard as an example of how the unruly words and bodies of women could disrupt and transform state politics by influencing court faction; in doing so, they also revealed how female bodily narratives could help recast political historiography. In chapter 3, I investigate depictions of pregnancy in John Ford’s tragedy, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1633) and in early modern medical treatises from 1604 to 1651. Although medical texts claim to convey definitive knowledge about the female reproductive body, in actuality male knowledge frequently hinged on the ways women chose to interpret the unstable physical indicators of pregnancy. In Ford’s play, Annabella and Putana take advantage of male ignorance in order to conceal Annabella’s incestuous, illegitimate pregnancy from her father and husband, thus raising fears about women’s ability to misrepresent their bodies. Since medical treatises often frame the conception of healthy, legitimate offspring as a matter of national importance, women’s ability to conceal or even terminate their pregnancies could weaken both the patriarchal family and the patriarchal state that the family helped found. Chapters 4 and 5 broaden the socio-political ramifications of women’s words and bodies by demonstrating how female bodily narratives are required to establish paternity and legitimacy, and thus help shape patriarchal authority at multiple social levels. In chapter 4, I study representations of birthing room gossip in Thomas Middleton’s play, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613), and in three Mistris Parliament pamphlets (1648) that satirize parliamentary power. Across these texts, women’s birthing room “gossip” comments on and critiques such issues as men’s behavior towards their wives and children, the proper use of household funds, the finer points of religious ritual, and even the limits of the authority of the monarch. The collective speech of the female-dominated birthing room thus proves central not only to attributing paternity to particular men, but also to the consequent definition and establishment of the political, socio-economic, and domestic roles of patriarchy. Chapter 5 examines anxieties about paternity in William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1611) and in early modern monstrous birth pamphlets from 1600 to 1647, in which children born with congenital deformities are explained as God’s punishment for the sexual, religious, and/or political transgressions of their parents or communities. Both the play and the pamphlets explore the formative/deformative power of women’s words and bodies over their offspring, a power that could obscure a father’s connection to his children. However, although the pamphlets attempt to contain and discipline women’s unruly words and bodies with the force of male authority, the play reveals the dangers of male tyranny and the crucial role of maternal authority in reproducing and authenticating dynastic continuity and royal legitimacy. My emphasis on the socio-political impact of women’s self-representation distinguishes my work from that of scholars such as Mary Fissell and Julie Crawford, who claim that early modern beliefs about the female reproductive body influenced textual depictions of major religious and political events, but give little sustained attention to the role female speech plays in these representations. In contrast, my dissertation reveals that in such texts, patriarchal society relies precisely on the words women speak about their own and other women’s bodies. Ultimately, I argue that female bodily narratives were crucial in shaping early modern culture, and they are equally crucial to our critical understanding of sexual and state politics in the literature of the period.

A evasão no Curso Técnico Subsequente em Secretaria Escolar no campus São Sebastião do Instituto Federal de Brasília : uma questão de género?

Dissertação apresentada para obtenção do grau de mestre no âmbito do Mestrado em Educação Social e Intervenção Comunitária da Escola Superior de Educação do Instituto Politécnico de Santarém

Forensic Injustice: Human Rights, Archival Science and Racialized Feminicide in Guatemala

The call to access and preserve the state records that document crimes committed by the state during Guatemala’s civil war has become an archival imperative entangled with neoliberal human rights discourses of “truth, justice, and memory.” 200,000 people were killed and disappeared in Guatemala’s civil war including acts of genocide in which 85% of massacres involved sexual violence committed against Mayan women. This dissertation argues that in an attempt to tell the official story of the civil war, American Human Rights organizations and academic institutions have constructed a normative identity whose humanity is attached to a scientific and evidentiary value as well as an archival status representing the materiality and institutionality of the record. Consequently, Human Rights discourses grounded in Western knowledges, in particular archival science and law, which prioritize the appearance of truth erase the material and epistemological experience of indigenous women during wartimes. As a result, the subjectivity that has surfaced on the record as most legible has mostly pertained to non-indigenous, middle class, urban, leftist men who were victims of enforced disappearance not genocide. This dissertation investigates this conflicting narrative that remembers a non-indigenous revolutionary masculine hero and grants him justice in human rights courtrooms simply because of a document attesting to his death. A main research question addressed in this project is why the promise of "truth and justice" under the name of human rights becomes a contentious site for gendered indigenous bodies? I conduct a discursive and rhetorical analysis of documentary film, declassified Guatemalan police and military records such as Operation Sofia, a military log known for “documenting the genocide” during rural counterinsurgencies executed by the military. I interrogate the ways in which racialized feminicides or the hyper-sexualized racial violence that has historically dehumanized indigenous women falls outside of discourses of vision constructed by Western positivist knowledges to reinscribe the ideal human right subject. I argue for alternative epistemological frames that recognize genocide as sexualized and gendered structures that have simultaneously produced racialized feminicides in order to disrupt the colonial structures of capitalism, patriarchy and heterosexuality. Ironically, these structures of power remain untouched by the dominant human rights discourse and its academic, NGO, and state collaborators that seek "truth and justice" in post-conflict Guatemala.

The incorporation of violence by women video artists

This paper examines the way in which women video artists embodied violence in their video pieces as a strategy of critique of the patriarchal regime. Since the 1960s several generations of women artists used different strategies of self-harm or explored the physical and mental limits of their bodies to express the anguish of those who are excluded from the patriarchal society on sexist and/or racist grounds. Considering the guiding line that covers three fields – art, gender, and feminist social movements – as well as their key thinkers and scholars in Sociology, Fine Arts and the Humanities, we have built the object of study of this essay, namely, the relationship between women's video art focused on the body, violence and gender along with feminist social movements in the period ranging from 1967 to 2007, in a Western context. The methodology used had as its primary goal to create a link between the micro-sociological level of expressions, body gestures and behaviours in the videos and the macro-sociological level of broader, institutionalized social forces that are at the origin of inequalities, such as dimensions of gender and «race». This study concluded that at least since the 1960s there is the denunciation by women video artists of the general circumstances women live under, while enduring violence of various kinds, such as socio-cultural, psychological and sexual violence against women.

Barcelona: Espacio Literario, Espacio Urbano en la Novela Catalana Femenina del Siglo XX

This dissertation analyses, through a rhetorical framework and a literary approach, texts written in Catalan and Castilian by four Catalan female writers (Dolors Monserdà, Maria Aurèlia Capmany, Esther Tusquets, Monserrat Roig ), whose works cover from 1900 to the 1980. Utilizing this urban feminine literature, it discusses the historical-geographical vision about the changes in Catalan society during the twentieth century with its consequences for the urban space, especially the space occupied by women. It is also established that Barcelona’s recovery and literary vindication by women has been done through the written text, as literary affirmation and as a matter of conscience in which the city could not be summed up as a backdrop, but rather as an active part of a literary creation, active in the double sense, as a socio-historical space in the novel and as characteristic of their works. The primary purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate that the use of the city as a setting for the novels determines and characterizes those female writers’ texts. Consequently, these writings are literary material relevant and essential to the understanding of the Barcelonian women’s space. However their use of space is not arbitrary, on the contrary it corresponds to a social order established by the patriarchy where the relation of women to the world is embodied in the intentional and socially restricted space and movements of their bodies. The theoretical perspectives of this study are based on Montserrat Roig’s feminist urban space theories. Her theory advocates the right to individuality, denouncing the patriarchal and hierarchical social system present in gendered space from the outside male world to the domestic feminized space. I also turn to the writings of Maria Aurèlia Capmany, who addresses cultural aspects of women’s roles revealing a purposive controlled patriarchal society according to a historical-geographical analysis. This study of texts permits a new reading of the Catalan capital and demonstrates that Catalan women writers have consciously willed to give birth to a new history of the city: the history of women as protagonist citizens, producers, reproducers, and consumers of the space represented by the Catalan capital

Spiritual Violence: Queer People and the Sacrament of Communion

This thesis addresses spiritual violence done to queer people in the sacrament of Communion, or Eucharist, in both Protestant and Roman Catholic churches in the U.S. Rooted in the sexual dimorphic interpretation of Genesis, theologians engendered Christianity with sexism and patriarchy, both of which have since developed into intricate intersections of oppressions. Religious abuse is founded on the tradition of exclusionary practices and is validated through narrow interpretations of Scripture that work to reassert the authority of the experiences of the dominant culture. The resultant culture of oppression manifests itself in ritualized spiritual violence. Queer people are deemed “unworthy” to take ‘the body and blood of the Christ’ and, in fact, are excluded altogether. This “unworthiness” is expressed as spiritual violence against queer people who are shunned and humiliated, internalize hateful messages, and are denied spiritual guidance or life-affirming messages. By “queering” Scripture, or reading the Bible anew through a framework of justice, queer people have begun to sacramentalize their experiences and reclaim their place at the table.

The Ultimate Secrecy: Feminist Readings of Masculine Trauma in Vietnam War Literature

It is a widely acknowledged and often unquestioned fact that patriarchy and its modes of behaviour and social organization favour the appearance of trauma on the weakest (and defenceless) members of society: women. In the last decades, trauma seems to have taken the baton of typically female maladies such as 19th c. hysteria or 20th c. madness. Feminists in the 20th c. have long worked to prove the connection between the latter affections (and their reflection in literary texts) and patriarchal oppression or expectations of feminine behaviour and accordance to roles and rules. With Trauma Studies on the rise, the approach to the idea of the untold as related to femininity is manifold: on the one hand, is not trauma, which precludes telling about one’s own experience and keeps it locked not only from the others, but also from ourselves, the ultimate secrecy? On the other hand, when analyzing works that reflect trauma, one is astounded by the high number of them with a female protagonist and an almost all-female cast: in this sense, a ‘feminist’ reading is almost compulsory, in the sense that it is usually the author’s assumption that patriarchal systems of exploitation and expectations favour traumatic events and their outcome (silence and secrets) on the powerless, usually women. Often, traumatic texts combine feminism with other analytical discourses (one of the topics proposed for this panel): Toni Morrison’s study of traumatic responses in The Bluest Eye and Beloved cannot be untangled from her critique of slavery; just as much of Chicana feminism and its representations of rape and abuse (two main agents of trauma) analyze the nexus of patriarchy, new forms of post-colonialism, and the dynamics of power and powerlessness in ethnic contexts. Within this tradition that establishes the secrecies of trauma as an almost exclusively feminine characteristic, one is however faced with texts which have traumatized males as protagonists: curiously enough, most of these characters have suffered trauma through a typically masculine experience: that of war and its aftermath. By analyzing novels dealing with war veterans from Vietnam or the Second World War, the astounding findings are the frequent mixture of masculine or even ‘macho’ values and the denial of any kind of ‘feminine’ characteristics, combined with a very strict set of rules of power and hierarchy that clearly establish who is empowered and who is powerless. It is our argument that this replication of patriarchal modes of domination, which place the lowest ranks of the army in a ‘feminine’ situation, blended with the compulsory ‘macho’ stance soldiers are forced to adopt as army men (as seen, for example, in Philip Caputo’s Indian Country, Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story or Ed Dodge’s DAU: A Novel of Vietnam) furthers the onset and seriousness of ulterior trauma. In this sense, we can also analyze this kind of writing from a ‘feminist’ point of view, since the dynamics of über-patriarchal power established at the front at war-time deny any display of elements traditionally viewed as ‘feminine’ (such as grief, guilt or emotions) in soldiers. If trauma is the result of a game of patriarchal empowerment, how can feminist works, not only theoretical, but also fictional, overthrow it? Are ‘feminine’ characteristics necessary to escape trauma, even in male victims? How can feminist readings of trauma enhance our understanding of its dynamics and help produce new modes of interaction that transcend power and gender division as the basis for the organization of society?

Fringe Types and KOS Systematics: Examining the Limits of the Population Perspective of Knowledge Organization Systems

We find ourselves, after the close of the twentieth century, looking back at a mass of responses to the knowledge organization problem. Many institutions, such as the Dewey Decimal Classification (Furner, 2007), have grown up to address it. Increasingly, many diverse discourses are appropriating the problem and crafting a wide variety of responses. This includes many artistic interpretations of the act and products of knowledge organization. These surface as responses to the expressive power or limits of the Library and Information Studies institutions (e.g., DDC) and their often primarily utilitarian gaze.One way to make sense of this diversity is to approach the study from a descriptive stance, inventorying the population of types of KOS. This population perspective approaches the phenomenon of types and boundaries of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) as one that develops out of particular discourses, for particular purposes. For example, both DDC and Martianus Capella, a 5th Century encyclopedist, are KOS in this worldview. Both are part of the population of KOS. Approaching the study of KOS from the population perspective allows the researcher a systematic look at the diversity emergent at the constellation of different factors of design and implementation. However, it is not enough to render a model of core types, but we have to also consider the borders of KOS. Fringe types of KOS inform research, specifically to the basic principles of design and implementation used by others outside of the scholarly and professional discourse of Library and Information Studies.Four examples of fringe types of KOS are presented in this paper. Applying a rubric developed in previous papers, our aim here is to show how the conceptual anatomy of these fringe types relates to more established KOS, thereby laying bare the definitions of domain, purpose, structure, and practice. Fringe types, like Beghtol’s examples (2003), are drawn from areas outside of Library and Information Studies proper, and reflect the reinvention of structures to fit particular purposes in particular domains. The four fringe types discussed in this paper are (1) Roland Barthes’ text S/Z which “indexes” a text of an essay with particular “codes” that are meant to expose the literary rhythm of the work; (2) Mary Daly’s Wickedary, a reference work crafted for radical liberation theology – and specifically designed to remove patriarchy from the language used by what the author calls “wild women”; (3) Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus a work of book art that plays on the trope of universal encyclopedia and back-of- the book index; and (4) Martinaus Capella – and his Marriage of Mercury and Philology, a fifth century encyclopedia. We compared these using previous analytic taxonomies (Wright, 2008; Tennis, 2006; Tudhope, 2006, Soergel, 2001, Hodge, 2000).

Deindustrialisation and industrial communities: the Lanarkshire coalfields c.1947-1983

This thesis examines deindustrialisation, the declining contribution of industrial activities to economic output and employment, in Lanarkshire, Scotland’s largest coalfield between the early nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. It focuses on contraction between the National Coal Board’s (NCB) vesting in 1947 and the closure of Lanarkshire’s last colliery, Cardowan, in 1983. Deindustrialisation was not the natural outcome of either market forces or geological exhaustion. Colliery closures and falling coal employment were the result of policy-makers’ decisions. The thesis consists of four thematic chapters: political economy, moral economy, class and community, and generation and gender. The analysis is based on archival sources including Scottish Office reports and correspondence relating to regional policy, and NCB records. These are supported by National Union of Mineworkers Scottish Area and STUC meeting minutes, and oral history testimonies from over 30 men and women with Lanarkshire coalfield backgrounds, as well as two focus groups. The first two chapters analyse the process of deindustrialisation, with the first offering a top-down perspective and the second a bottom-up viewpoint. In chapter one deindustrialisation is analysed through changes in political economy. Shifts in labour market structure are examined through the development of regional policy and its administration by the Scottish Office. The analysis centres upon a policy network of Scottish business elites and civil servants who shaped a vision of modernisation via industrial diversification through attracting inward investment. In chapter two the perspective shifts to community and workforce. It analyses responses to coalfield contraction through a moral economy of customary rights to colliery employment. A detailed investigation of Lanarkshire colliery closures between the 1940s and 1980s emphasises the protracted nature of deindustrialisation. Chapters three and four consider the social and cultural structures which shaped the moral economy but were heavily altered by deindustrialisation. Chapter three focuses on the dense networks that linked occupation, community, and class consciousness. Increasing coalfield centralisation and remote control of pits from NCB headquarters in London, and mounting hostility to coal closures, contributed to an accentuated sense of Scottish-ness. Chapter four illuminates gender and generational dimensions. The differing experiences of cohorts of men who faced either early retirement, redundancy or transfer to alternative sectors, or those who never attained anticipated industrial employment due to final closures, are analysed in terms of constructions of masculinity and the endurance of cultural as well as material losses. This is counterpoised to women who gained industrial work in assembly plants and the perceived gradual attainment of an improved economic and social position whilst continuing to navigate structures of patriarchy.

Retos en la implementación de las normas internacionales al interior de los estados. estudio de caso: la región del Mekong y el protocolo de Palermo contra la trata de personas. (2007-2014)

El presente estudio de caso tiene como principal objetivo el de analizar la manera como las características sociopolíticas de los Estados del Mekong, específicamente en el caso de Camboya y Myanmar, dificultan la implementación de las normas enunciadas en el Protocolo de las Naciones Unidas para Prevenir, Reprimir y Sancionar la Trata de Personas, Especialmente Mujeres y Niños, también conocido como el Protocolo de Palermo. En este sentido, se parte de las características principales del Protocolo y de la manera como el tráfico de personas se presenta en el Mekong para posteriormente analizar la forma como la corrupción, la impunidad y la desigualdad de género representan retos sociopolíticos que obstruyen la implementación de los mandatos internacionales enmarcados en este instrumento

Masculinidad y feminidad: ¿De qué estamos hablando?

Recibido 15 de marzo de 2012 • Corregido 04 de octubre de 2012 • Aceptado 07 de noviembre de 2012A continuación se presentan diversas ideas creadas alrededor del tema de la masculinidad y feminidad. El objetivo es esclarecer dichos conceptos desde un punto de vista crítico y de género sensitivo, en un lenguaje sencillo. El fin es que la información sea accesible a una mayor cantidad de personas; eso, sin menoscabar la importancia de transmitir las ideas desde un carácter académico y científico. Por tanto, se busca aclarar el carácter de ambos conceptos en la construcción de su identidad, principalmente para el hombre que cimienta su identidad a partir del rechazo de lo que es femenino. Se trata de mostrar cómo dichas construcciones son atravesadas por diversos mandatos sociales que se expresan según la cultura en la que se desarrollen; además, se plantea el reto de la educación para deconstruir estereotipos ligados a los géneros.

Feminist environmental humanities: intertwining theory and speculative fiction

This dissertation explores the entanglement between the visionary capacity of feminist theory to shape sustainable futures and the active contribution of feminist speculative fiction to the conceptual debate about the climate crisis. Over the last few years, increasing critical attention has been paid to ecofeminist perspectives on climate change, that see as a core cause of the climate crisis the patriarchal domination of nature, considered to go hand in hand with the oppression of women. What remains to be thoroughly scrutinised is the linkage between ecofeminist theories and other ethical stances capable of countering colonising epistemologies of mastery and dominion over nature. This dissertation intervenes in the debate about the master narrative of the Anthropocene, and about the one-dimensional perspective that often characterises its literary representations, from a feminist perspective that also aims at decolonising the imagination; it looks at literary texts that consider patriarchal domination of nature in its intersections with other injustices that play out within the Anthropocene, with a particular focus on race, colonialism, and capitalism. After an overview of the linkages between gender and climate change and between feminism and environmental humanities, it introduces the genre of climate fiction examining its main tropes. In an attempt to find alternatives to the mainstream narrative of the Anthropocene (namely to its gender-neutrality, colour-blindness, and anthropocentrism), it focuses on contemporary works of speculative fiction by four Anglophone women authors that particularly address the inequitable impacts of climate change experienced not only by women, but also by sexualised, racialised, and naturalised Others. These texts were chosen because of their specific engagement with the relationship between climate change, global capitalism, and a flat trust in techno-fixes on the one hand, and structural inequalities generated by patriarchy, racism, and intersecting systems of oppression on the other.