http://hdl.handle.net/1974/786 Sun, 19 May 2013 07:27:58 GMT 2013-05-19T07:27:58Z http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7813 Title: Gender, Nation and the African PostColony: Women’s Rights and Empowerment Discourses in Ghana Authors: BAWA, SYLVIA Abstract: This dissertation examines the ways in which socio-cultural, economic and religious ideologies shape discourses on women’s rights, higher education and empowerment in Ghana. The study starts from the premise that female identity in Ghana is constructed through discourses of reproduction that produce and reproduce unequal gender relations that negatively impact women’s higher socio-economic and educational attainments. Consequently, discourses of women’s rights and empowerment are inextricably linked to normative reproductive labour expectations. Using a postcolonial feminist theoretical framework, I argue that women’s rights and empowerment issues must be located within particular historical, local and global socio-cultural and political discourses in postcolonial societies. Subsequently, this study situates women’s rights concerns within the larger framework of global systemic inequalities that reinforce the local socio-cultural, political and economic disadvantages of women in Ghana. I interviewed women’s rights activists, conducted focus group discussions with male and mostly female participants during an intensive six-month field study. In line with postcolonial feminist epistemologies, I consider participants as knowledgeable subjects in the production of knowledge about their lived realities, by centering their voices and experiences in my analyses. The experiences of research participants (heterogeneous as they are) provide excellent insights into transnational feminisms, gendered postcolonial landscapes, and global cultural patriarchal hegemonies. These experiences also illustrate how global discourses of rights provide leverage to simultaneously challenge and politicize colonial discourses of race and gender in the global south. Description: Thesis (Ph.D, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2013-02-08 16:23:06.155 Mon, 11 Feb 2013 05:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7813 2013-02-11T05:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7805 Title: Materiality, Becoming, and Time: The Existential Phenomenology of Sexuality Authors: HOUGHTALING, MELISSA Abstract: As much of the scholarly literature shows, gender has served as a central organizing force for knowing and theorizing about sexuality. The governmentality of sexuality in Western societies over the last 200 years has led to sex being discursively implicated with reproduction, and this has had a profound effect on the ways sexuality has been theorized and understood in terms of gendered desire. The aim of this dissertation is to theorize an alternative approach to sexuality that decenters gender and gives attention to the materiality of sex and the body. Using existentialism and phenomenology, this dissertation offers a particular challenge to heteronormative conceptions of “sexual orientation” and “sexual identity” for their ostensibly timeless and enduring quality, or being. The research presented herein theorizes sexuality through an ontology of becoming that takes into account the diverse, multi-faceted nature of sexuality as a series of temporal experiences, attractions, desires, sensations, practices, and identities – that is, as a phenomenon. A genealogical methodology is used to trace the discursive history of sexuality and demonstrate how modernist discourses of sexuality have influenced how sexuality is known and experienced. This research emphasizes the discursive constraints on knowledge about sexuality. In considering an alternative framework, the principles of existentialism and phenomenology are critically examined through the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Attention is then turned toward a non-classical paradigm of science to elaborate on an ontology of becoming and its significance for understanding the development of sex and sexuality. In conjunction, contemporary biological research is introduced to expand upon de Beauvoir’s (1996) analysis of “the data of biology” on sexual difference and to help situate the sexed body as dynamic and developmental. An existential phenomenological approach theorizes sexuality as a self-project and the dialectical becoming between the sexed body and the sexual self. Because both the body and the self are contingent becomings that are open to instability and change, so too is sexuality. This alternative approach offers particular attention to the body in sexuality and considers the materialities of sexual desire. Description: Thesis (Ph.D, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2013-02-04 00:33:41.993 Tue, 05 Feb 2013 05:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7805 2013-02-05T05:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7629 Title: What Is Obesity?: Complementary Discourses Authors: Kuyvenhoven, CASSANDRA Abstract: “What Is Obesity?: Complementary Discourses” seeks to present several perspectives on the entity ‘obesity’ in an effort to establish relationships, differences, and the possibility of critiques between and among the biomedical model, fat studies, media, policy and marketing, and Aboriginality. Using Foucault’s tenets of power, discourse, and governmentality, this thesis will demonstrate the ways in which discourses employ techniques of governance and the responses of self-governing individuals. Each chapter will represent a perspective with its own taxonomy, measures, and constructions of ‘obesity’. To conclude, the thesis will look at the possibility for collaboration in interdisciplinary research on the subject of obesity; in a direct exchange between the perspectives, the thesis will attempt provide a comprehensive account of ‘obesity’ as being comprised of several perspectives simultaneously. Description: Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2012-11-02 16:50:34.912 Mon, 05 Nov 2012 05:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7629 2012-11-05T05:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7528 Title: Reconciling the Discursive and the Material Dimensions of Social Stability and Social Change: A Critical Retheorisation and Non-syncretic Synthesis of Bhaskar, Foucault, and Althusser Authors: Hardy, Nicholas James Abstract: Sociological explanations for human conduct usually place major ontological and epistemological emphasis upon either discursive or material relations without ever establishing or adequately specifying the validity of this dichotomy. Early texts by the Critical Realist philosopher Roy Bhaskar address this forced separation by creating an integrated ontological and epistemological field that provides a more detailed and precise theoretical ordering to agents, objects, and entities. Undertaking a developmental critique of Bhaskar’s arguments, this thesis extends Critical Realism’s role as theoretical ‘underlabourer’ and creates an expanded theoretical framework that balances discursive and material accounts. Utilising the sophisticated analyses of the structure and operation of discourses found in the work of Michel Foucault alongside the innovative arguments for aleatory materialism developed by Louis Althusser, a critique is established that shows discursive, material, and social relations to be complex, immanent, and, importantly, mutually constitutive. In each theory three core concepts of events, emergence, and the extra-discursive are shown to not only be present but also to operate as the main means of explaining social change. The result of integrating Critical Realism, Foucault, and Althusser in this sympathetic but non-syncretic form is the generation of a non-reductionist materialism combined with discursive relations. On this basis, social change is shown to be the result of restructured discursive and material relations of which human agents are only one part. The thesis provides an illustration of the theoretical argument with an empirical component which examines the formation and decline of the British nuclear industry between its inception in the early 1950s to the year 2000. The conclusion is that the form taken by nuclear energy is not entirely determined by any single one of political, economic, or scientific forces but is, instead, the product of multiple and complex interactions of immanent discursive and material relations that are, importantly, mutually reinforcing. Description: Thesis (Ph.D, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2012-09-27 12:38:25.909 Thu, 27 Sep 2012 04:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7528 2012-09-27T04:00:00Z