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In this PhD, we examine how experiences with sexism affect women's social relationships with other women. We assess the role played by tolerance of sexism in the workplace, including perceptions of tolerance of sexism at the peer-, manager-, and policy-level. Chapter 1 provides a review of the literature on devaluated group members' responses to stigma on their relationship with other members of their groups and highlight the role of context on the effect of stigma on interpersonal relationships. Chapter 2 reports secondary analyses of existing data to examine the how tolerance of gender devaluation (sexualised harassment and non-sexualised sexism) moderates the impact of sexism on women's psychological wellbeing. Chapter 3 reports a series of studies with working women, focusing on the effects of perceived peer, leader, and policy tolerance of sexism on women's affiliation with female co-workers. Chapter 4 describes a pilot study and a laboratory experiment where we orthogonally manipulated exposure to sexism and peer tolerance of sexism. Our results show some inconsistencies but overall support the idea that organizational tolerance of gender devaluation plays an important role in women's wellbeing and social responses to sexism. We summarize and integrate the findings across the three empirical chapters and discuss implications of theory and practice in Chapter 5.

The focus of this thesis is the identities projected by female contestants on TV dating shows in China. The more particular focus is the gender identity which emerges through their practices of face-attacking behaviours. In addition, the thesis examines the evaluations of these practices by other participants in the shows. The results indicate that female contestants’ positioning of their gender identities is channelled through the language and the usage of it in the context, including the format the show, its immediate co-text. The identities projected are not only the result of their behaviour with the person they are talking with, but also the person being talked about. In these ways, gender identities are discursively constructed in the specific interactional context. The evaluations of these identities can be detected both in the reactions of other participants to the contestants’ behaviour and in online meta-comments on discussion boards. They almost always rate the identities as appropriate, despite the negative effect of the face-attacking behaviours. The details of the reactions and comments show that this is largely because the contestants generally make use of the strategies in response to the context and the dominant social norms. This thesis seeks to contribute a perspective that females can freely make use of any linguistic strategies which they see as compatible with the immediate context, because the identification of a gender identity and its evaluation are not necessarily informed by the compositional content of their words alone, but also their and others’ detection of the local meanings of their expressions through the lens of the immediate context or sometimes its association with the broader conventional ideologies of gender, and sociocultural expectations.

This thesis is an attempt to provide an account of gender. In particular, it is an attempt to develop an ameliorative approach to gender that satisfies a number of transfeminist political goals. That is, following Sally Haslanger, I ask what do we want gender to be? In order to answer the question, I develop a novel Neurathian methodology for conceptual engineering, and a distinctively 'activist' take on that project. From there I criticise a number of theories of gender and suggest that we should instead adopt a position I call Ameliorative Semantic Pluralism. That is, a position that endorses multiple meanings for gender terms. I develop this position in conversation with those traditions that arose from the anti-essentialism debates of the 1990s – family resemblance theories, Butlerian performativity, deflationism, scepticism, and nihilism about gender. I provide novel critiques of each position but take seriously the concerns that each position had. I end the thesis by drawing on Audre Lorde to engineer one of the senses of the term 'agender' that speaks to my phenomenology, before using that account to critique some further recent attempts to theorise nonbinary gender identities.

This thesis investigates the Platonised concept of psychological androgyny that emerged on the radical margins of Rational Dissent in England between the 1790s and the 1840s. A legacy largely of the socio-political and religious impediments experienced by Rational Dissenters in particular and an offshoot of natural rights theorising, belief in the unsexed mind at this time appears more prevalent amongst radicals in England than elsewhere in Britain. Studied largely by scholars of Romanticism as an aesthetic concept associated with male Romantics, the influence of the unsexed mind as a notion of psycho-sexual equality in English radical discourse remains largely neglected in the historiography. Far from a misogynistic concept concerned with male power and the appropriation of the feminine, closer analysis of the broader socio-political ideas not only of Romantic poets but of non-Romantic associates - journalists, physicians, educationalists, ministers and scientists - reveals a more egalitarian ethos, inspired by a revival of ideas from a resurgent Platonism and in particular by Plato's dialogue on love and friendship, the Symposium. A revolution of the human mind was sought through critical reforms to the two great and largely private bastions of patriarchal control, education and marriage. Focusing on androgyny reveals a largely overlooked form of heterodox radicalism on the margins of Rational Dissent, supportive of psycho-sexual equality and distinct and increasingly isolated from more conventional forms of radicalism, concerned largely with public issues of religious freedom, parliamentary reform and universal (male) suffrage. Revealed also, is the important, yet subtle, distinction between a Platonised and egalitarian interpretation of androgyny, influenced by German-led advances in biblical exegesis as well as the natural and human sciences, and a more patriarchal Judeo-Christian and Neoplatonic interpretation of the androgynous union of sexual opposites, enshrined in the conservative doctrine of separate spheres and endorsed increasingly from the 1830s onwards by the generality of society.

The purpose of this thesis is to assess the impact of Female Engagement (FE) policies in setting the conditions for Countering Violent Extremism and to establish to what extent the defence and security sector is contributing through operationalising FE in the fight against extremist organisations. It uses the Ugandan People’s Defence Force (UPDF) Pre-Deployment Training for the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) as the main case study. Adopting a 3Cs framework the research analyses FE through the themes of culture, collaboration and communication to answer two core questions that will assist policy makers and international security forces in the implementation of FE in a non-conventional conflict scenario. ‘Do female engagement policies work in setting the conditions for CVE?’ and ‘Can the defence and security sector better facilitate the operationalisation of these policies?’ The research design applied a qualitative methodological approach in which a scoping review created the 3Cs framework that was confirmed by a literature review and tested against primary data acquired from field research to analyse the operationalisation of FE by soldiers from the UPDF during Pre-Deployment Training for Somalia. The study proposes that FE policies can help set the conditions for CVE identifying three key factors which increase the potential for success.; women’s empowerment; female activism; and feminist research In the defence and security sector a policy-operational gap exists that can be mitigated by a better understanding of the three key factors above alongside improved training, clear definitions and Measurement of Effect.

While gender in textbooks has attracted the attention of scholarly investigations in recent decades approaching the matter from a socio-linguistic and semiotics point of view, gender in textbooks seen through the lens of postcolonial theory has hitherto not been the topic of major academic research. This thesis, therefore, explores constructions of gender in French and English textbooks used in the middle school level in Algeria, during the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. The study focuses on how the discourse of nationalism together with the colonial legacies in Algeria shape the visual and verbal content of the textbooks Andy in Algeria:3.A.M (1982-1983), Majid in England: 4.A.M (1985-1986), Spring: An English Course for Beginners 8AF (2001-2002), Spring: An English Course for Beginners 9 AF (2004-2005), Spotlight on English: Book Three (2002), On the Move (2006), Textes choisis: 3eme année moyenne (1982-1983), and Textes choisis : 4eme année moyenne (1984-1985), Lecture française : 8eme année fondamentale (2003-2004), Lecture française : 9eme année fondamentale (2004-2005), Mon livre de français : 3eme année moyenne (2014-2015), Livre de français: 3eme année moyenne (2005-2006), Français :4eme année moyenne (2007-2008), representing English and French, respectively. Postcolonial theory and theories of nationalism inform this thesis to precisely provide an understanding of the manner in which gender is (re-) constructed in Algerian textbooks. The first chapter is a critical introduction, contextually situating gender in postcolonial Algeria together with state adopted policies of education. Chapter one highlights the need for the examination of gender from a postcolonial perspective as it positions the thesis within previous research in the field. Chapter two investigates the ‘transfer’ of colonial visual legacy into the post-independence textbooks Textes choisis: 3ème année moyenne (1982-1983), Textes choisis: 4ème année moyenne (1984-1985) and Majid in England (1985-1986), illustrating the participation of Algeria in orientalising gender. Emasculating visuality of Algerian men developed in chapter two is further studied in chapter three in the context of the nationalist ideology of the state that defined men as ‘protectors of the nation’. Reconstruction of masculine identity, however, led to a hyper-assertion of masculinity resulting in a symbolic masculine domination. Chapter four argues that in an attempt to reconstruct an exoticising visuality of Algerian women as discussed in chapter two, the content of the textbooks reflects the discourse of nationalism. In the latter, feminine identity bears an exclusive definition of ‘motherhood’ and return to Algeria’s colonial past, thus restoring the gender order under colonial domination that confines women to domesticity, set against the coloniser. Chapter five looks at the ‘selective’ return to Algeria’s past and changing roles for women. This chapter illustrates the modern face of nationalism albeit providing a national model of modernising change from ‘within’ as opposed to from ‘without’. As the thesis provides a fresh methodological approach, analysing the ahistorical and the apolitical limitations of previous research in the field, future avenues of research can take further this notion of modernising change from within and explore it in relation to second generation textbooks of French, English, Berber and Arabic published in 2017.

Employing a methodological approach informed by sociological social constructionist theories of gender, I endeavour to explore representations of Spartan masculinity in the works of Xenophon Thucydides and Plato, to gain better understanding of portrayals and usages of ideologies of Spartan masculinity in Classical Athenian philosophical and historical works. I structure my project by focusing on seven categories which constructionists believe to be important to the formation of masculinity. My aim is to demonstrate the utility of this methodological framework for exploring historical masculinities and to contend that there is no singular representation of Spartan masculinity within Classical Athenian prose. Rather, representations of Spartan masculinity are complex and multifaceted, with authors constructing and employing different ideologies of Spartan masculinity situationally and for a variety of purposes, both internal and external to the texts. In chapter one, I examine Xenophon’s Spartan Constitution, demonstrating the role of masculine ideals in the “Lycurgan” system and suggesting Xenophon depicts Spartan masculinity as highly competitive and performative in nature. In chapter two, I examine Plato’s Laws and Republic, to demonstrate that Plato portrays Spartan masculine ideals as playing a prominent role in the imbalanced development of Spartan character. I also analyse Plato’s depiction of the auxiliary guardians to suggest that problematic elements he associates with Spartan men are unresolved, even within his idealised polis. In chapter three, I explore Thucydides’ History. I elucidate the role of masculine ideals in characterisations of Spartan individuals and the Spartan polis and argue that characters’ redefinition of Spartan masculine ideals is portrayed as politically useful in the text. Finally, in chapter four, I examine Xenophon’s historical works, focusing primarily on the Hellenica. I explore a number of episodes to demonstrate characters’ employment of masculine ideals for political purposes, to demonstrate correspondences between masculine ideals identified in the Lac. and Xenophon’s characterisations of Spartan individuals in the Hellenica and argue that hegemonic masculinity is observable in depictions of of Spartan societal processes and mechanisms.

The thesis fills a particular gap in the literature on gender in the Middle East: it examines love through an affective lens, beyond the religious and the legal frameworks from which the relationship between the Middle Eastern man and woman are often examined. The thesis is interdisciplinary. It draws on sexuality studies and gender theory mainly, whilst embracing an overall feminist approach towards knowledge production. This thesis combines a Deleuzian (from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze) approach with a political economy framework in its examination of 'everyday practices of love' in contemporary Lebanon, namely gifting, 'inclusive intimacy', and leisure. Whereas most of my interlocutors insisted that their choice of a partner is based on feelings of love, they articulated their views within a strictly intra-sectarian framework. How, then, can we conceptualize love as a feeling when its very definition is dependent upon a sectarian type of logic? In order to overcome this conundrum, I conducted fieldwork during nine months in urban Lebanon, between January and September 2014 (in addition to additional shorter periods during November 2014, March 2015, and July 2015). This thesis argues that love is a discourse that is taught and learned from an early age in Lebanon: it is regulated along normative intra-sectarian and heterosexual lines, in addition to confining women's sexuality to the boundaries of marriage. The construction of love as a potential of excess and irrationality in Lebanon is necessary for the construction of love-marriage as its ideal form. This thesis thus views marriage as a 'chrono-normative' (Freeman, 2008) practice that regulates people's lives towards maximum productivity. Additionally, the blurred boundaries between love, desire, and sex produce a hierarchy of desire where the intersection(s) of sect, gender, nationality, and class rank(s) bodies unequally. How the couple experience love is directly informed by the intersection of sect with further social categories, notably class and nationality. Depending on the practice and space in question, these categories can, at times, emerge in isolation.

This thesis is concerned with the role of sexuality and intimacy in austerity politics in the UK since the formation of the Coalition Government in 2010. Conceptualising austerity politics as a broad political, cultural, and economic formation, it interrogates some of the key ways in which sexuality and intimacy are embedded within the discursive and regulatory functioning of austerity. Each of its three case studies examines sexuality and intimacy within a different discursive and/or regulatory site, including policy discourse, media discourse, and processes of policy implementation and service delivery. The cases studies focus, specifically, on the sexual and gendered assumptions embedded in austerity discourse; the limited narrative possibilities available for sexualised and racialised subjectivities in circulations of austerity discourse within popular media; and the materialisation of neoliberal penalisation in sexual and intimate lives as a series of intimate disruptions. In enquiring after the kinds of sexual and intimate lives, subjects, and politics that are made (un)imaginable, (il)legible, or (il)legitimate by and within austerity politics, central to this thesis is the claim that austerity politics has a sexual and intimate life. It focuses on non-identitarian forms and modes of sexuality and intimacy, examining them through the frameworks of sexual inequalities, sexual subjectivities, and intimate disruptions. Finally, as well as intervening in epistemologies of sexuality, this thesis also explores the consequences that the embeddedness of sexuality and intimacy within austerity politics has for conceptualisations and understandings of the political.

Despite an emerging presence of diverse gender identities within the UK and increasing numbers of gender diverse youth seeking psychological support, little is known about their lived experiences. Non-binary youth (those who identify outside the commonly assumed gender binary) face particular challenges navigating a male-female society, yet research is missing their voices. This research responds to calls from communities and literature to centrally involve young people in research to develop affirmative practice. This dual-phase qualitative exploration of non-binary young people's experiences (16-25) incorporates participatory methods including collaborative research question development.

Right-Wing movements have gained political momentum in the last few decades, drawing within their ranks women who not only embody their exclusionary and violent politics but who also simultaneously contest everyday patriarchies. This thesis examines the everyday politics of women in two right-wing movements, the cultural nationalist Hindu right-wing project in India and the settler-colonial Zionist project in Israel-Palestine. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic, narrative, and visual 'fieldwork' conducted with women in both these movements, I argue that through a politics of the everyday, right-wing women bargain and negotiate with patriarchal communities/homes, male-formulated ideologies and discourses, and male-dominated right-wing projects and spaces. These mediations replicate and affirm as well as subvert and challenge patriarchal structures and power hierarchies, troubling the binaries of home/world, private/public, personal/political, and victim/agent. I assert that dominant literature on right-wing women focuses on motherhood and family, ignoring various other crucial subject positions that are constituted and occupied by right-wing women and neglecting the agential and empowering potential of right-wing women's subjectivities. I use four themes/lenses to examine the everyday politics of right-wing women. These are: pedagogy and education; charity and humanitarian work; intimacy, friendship, sociability and leisure; and political violence. By interrogating the practices that are contained in and enabled by these four locations of Hindu right-wing and Zionist settler women's everyday politics, this thesis highlights the multiple narratives, contradictions, pluralities, hierarchies, power structures, languages, and discourses that encompass right-wing women's projects. By capturing the processes of subject formation of right-wing women, I encapsulate how my interlocutors shape the subjectivities of those in their communities, transforming the local and international landscapes of the Hindu right-wing and the Zionist settler project. Drawing together ethnographic narratives, 'story-telling', visuals, methodological and ethical reflections, and inter-disciplinary theoretical engagement, this thesis also asks what the many-layered textures of everyday politics of right-wing women might mean for feminist scholarship in gender studies, politics, and international relations, for feminist methodologies, for feminist ethics, and for feminist activism.

This thesis examines the gendered production of political and social transformations in contemporary Egypt through an analysis of political affects. It suggests that the relationship between feminism, the state and change in contemporary Egypt cannot be understood or critiqued purely on a discursive level. As a form of governing, the management of affects draws on the everyday politics of gender and sexuality in order to regulate political and social change. The political management of terror, love and safety in Cairo appropriated and capitalized upon deepening reproductive anxieties, generational aspirations and urban transformations in an unstable context. This research looks at women's rights activism and young feminists that emerged in Cairo between the late Mubarak regime and the current El Sisi regime to examine the feminist disruption of affective management in the deteriorating context of neocolonial repression and masculinist restoration. I chart the intensification of political consciousness and the unfolding of feminist practices that engage with knowledge production and gender-based violence in contrast with the authoritarian patriarchy of the state. The chapters draw on fieldwork conducted between 2012 and 2013 in Cairo as a crucial site of political turmoil, feminist intervention and violent state remaking. Amid the articulation of existing hierarchies of domination and new forms of control, women's activism and feminist groups challenged the Egyptian regime's affective monopoly on gender roles, in both nationmaking and everyday life. Bodily suffering, erased memories, acts of courage - together with the advocacy of reform, interventions on the ground, and denunciations of a wide range of forms of inequality and oppression - were central to personal and political transformation. Opposing the state projects and gendered fantasies that organized violence and nationalism, Egyptian feminists subverted gender models, and revealed the contested and complex work of negotiation that shapes gender subjectivities and brings political, social and cultural change.

This thesis is a case study of the relationship between gender and sexuality at the empirical sites of asexuality and sexual abstinence. Whilst this relationship has been theorised in a number of ways, there has been limited empirical research on how this relationship ‘works’ in practice, with extant studies focusing largely on transgender. I suggest that asexuality and abstinence represent an interesting site to explore this relationship since they represent, for want of a better term, a lack, absence, or negative sexuality (in that there is a lack of sexual attraction to others, or there is an abstention from sexual activity). The study is also warranted due to the insufficient sociological research on abstinence, as well as the limitations of the literature and research in the nascent interdisciplinary field of asexuality studies. Through conducting qualitative research (using interviews and notebooks) with 33 participants who identified as asexual or abstinent, I found that gender and sexuality were experienced as entangled in the lives of participants. With reference to the socio-structural context of hetero-patriarchy, I trace how ideas about sexual desire, sexual activity and sexual agency are (still) gendered, and how this impacts on both the construction of abstinence and asexuality as concepts, as well as in the experiences participants had as asexual people or as people who were practising abstinence. I also explore how sexuality was central to participants’ understandings of gender, and how this affected their gender identities, gendered appearances, and experiences of gendered embodiment. Ultimately, this thesis argues for the importance in theorising and researching gender and sexuality together, and in particular, for the importance of ‘gendering’ sexualities research.

The development literature establishes a correlation between changes in a set of variables and increases in labour force participation by women. The Middle East and the North African (MENA) region have experienced considerable progress in those indicators; however, women's economic participation rates have remained low and relatively stagnant over the last decade. Lebanon, and more specifically Beirut, is a pertinent case study of this paradox. This research uses a theoretical model linking the empowerment literature, household bargaining models, and theories on decision-making, to unpack the choices of married women in low-income Beirut vis-à-vis the labour markets. It employs an intersectional and interdisciplinary methodology, and a mixed qualitative and quantitative method. The quantitative component is a survey of 400 women in Beirut, which attempts to determine general trends and sketches out the profiles of women in the labour markets in Beirut (their backgrounds, household characteristics, labour market profiles, and perceptions). The qualitative constituent is a qualitative account that is based on a study of 80 married, economically active and inactive women from low-income Beirut, scrutinising their decision-making processes with regards to the labour market. While the empowerment paradigm places the economic activity of women as one of the main pathways to their empowerment and advancement, women's lives, choices and subjectivities in low-income Beirut are much more complex than this theory suggests. Their decision-making is an outcome of a multifaceted web of structural, institutional and legal constraints, as well as of social pressures and expectations. Choices regarding work are intertwined with dynamics surrounding marriage- and a fragile equilibrium in their conjugal lives involving complex intra-household bargaining. It also rests on several factors, such as their definition of work, a cost benefit analysis of the choice to be economically active, and their desires: a continuum between structure and agency. Additionally, the context of low-income Beirut -a patriarchal, connective, relational setting that lacks state services and the adequate valuation of women's contributions- proves to be a disempowering context for women involved in the labour market at times. Finally, many women chose to be economically inactive, something that the literature does not engage with fully in its attempts to explain the puzzle of low labour force participation by women in the MENA region.

This dissertation contributes to debates around women's subjectification in contemporary Western countries; contexts characterised by an increasingly sexualised culture, economic insecurity and xenophobia, and an upsurge in the feminist 'sex wars' (Chapkis, 1997: 11). In particular, it explores the ways in which sexuality, pleasure and work interrogate each other and differently impinge on women's subjectification and agency according to class and race. The case study is contemporary Italy, which was recently gripped by a wave of panic about sex, and maintains a position - standalone in Western Europe - in favour of a return to state-regulated prostitution and in opposition to same-sex unions. Processes of women's subjectification are heavily constrained by heteronormativity, compelling them to take on the position of either the chaste wife/mother or the sexually enticing but stigmatised 'whore'. This dissertation, therefore, looks at how Italian and migrant women navigate these roles through an exploration of the contradictory subject positions voiced by women working in different leisure, erotic and sex market niches: pole dance entrepreneurs and teachers, 'image girls', lap dancers, indoor and street sex workers. Overall, this thesis argues that understanding women's display and use of sexuality, whether for pleasure and/or work, requires overcoming dichotomies juxtaposing sexual objectification and empowerment, dependence on a desiring male audience and autonomy, victimisation and choice. It argues that the position of radical feminists and abolitionists, that prostitution engenders a uniquely dire and unacceptable form of work-induced alienation, is flawed by heteronormative biases, and reproduces the class-based and racialised privileging of white Western women. Therefore, it shows that for many migrant women, pursuing dreams of social and/or spatial mobility and feeding their affective bonds, entails investing different blends of sex, care and love into their work; whether stigmatised as whores or praised as cheap carers, they express a form of resistance to an unwanted fate. Finally, the thesis argues for retrieving the affective and existential value of desirability, beyond its significance for gender relations of power.

Purpose: To provide women in the wider Bahraini society and in the Bahraini banking sector in particular a language with which they can challenge traditional Arab patriarchal practices and other forms of sexism they encounter—especially in the workplace—while remaining true to Islam. Methodology/Design: Semistructured interviews designed to collect in-depth findings were conducted with 21 women and nine men working in the Bahraini banking sector, along with a review of governmental and organisational documents that, in the Global North, usually incorporate gender-equality clauses. Findings: Findings demonstrate the prevalence of gender bias in the Bahraini banking sector. Barriers that impede women’s efforts to climb the corporate ladder were found to be similar to those reported in other Global North contexts. The major difference was the impact of the Muslim patriarchal culture in Bahrain, which has greatly influenced expectations about women’s roles in society and the workplace and women’s behaviours. I also found that labour regulations and policies in Bahrain are gendered and are designed to restrict women’s role to the private sphere. There are no explicit laws at the governmental level or policies at the organisational level that ban gender discrimination in the workplace or mandate equal rights for both genders. This is made worse by the lack of any type of positive action to help women navigate their way to the top and juggle family and work responsibilities, as well as by a lack of decision makers willing to commit to gender equality. Practical implications: The study contributes to our understanding of the hurdles in the Bahraini banking sector that impede women’s career progression and contribute to a glass ceiling. The study also contributes to our understanding of the lack of gender regulations and policies in Bahrain in general and in the Bahraini banking sector in particular. This knowledge will be valuable for organisational leaders who seek to bring more diversity to the executive levels of the banking system. The findings will also be valuable for governmental and organisational leaders interested in improving existing labour regulations and policies in Bahrain and elevating them to the level seen in the Global North. Originality/value: This study, to the best of my knowledge, is the first to investigate the glass-ceiling phenomenon in an underresearched context—namely, the Bahraini banking sector —and to examine the effectiveness of existing gender regulations and policies at governmental and organisational levels in the sector.

Over the last decade, studies of trans people have somewhat shifted away from essentialising and pathologising narratives, whilst recognition of gender plurality has grown. However to date, gender identities outside of the binary of male/female have received little specific sociological attention. This thesis considers negotiation of non-binary gender identities, in a UK context. Examining how non-binary individuals are involved with and integrated into LGBTQ communities exposes important nuances. This is also true regarding the negotiation of medical practice by non-binary people in relation to gender transitions, and more generally. Eighteen participants with non-binary gender identities were recruited to record ‘mixed media diaries’ for a four month period. These diaries allowed participants to use any methods they wished to express themselves. Follow-up semi-structured interviews were then conducted with the same participants in order to discuss their experiences and views, relating to broad conceptions of queer communities and medical practice. The objectives were to understand how non-binary people are integrated into queer communities and negotiate medical practice, as well as what the emergence of non-binary gender identities implies for these contexts. Symbolic interactionism provided the project’s theoretical framework, as this effectively allowed space for a multiplicity of participant interpretations resulting from interactions with the social world. The findings of this study illustrate both commonalities and difference between binary and non-binary trans experiences. Non-binary identities can present in static or fluidic forms, which may be associated with differential needs. Access to gender affirming medical services is varied, and not always pursued. Non-binary identities may be associated with discourses and practices of reduced legitimisation in both medical contexts and some queer communities. The study concludes that the improvement of a wide range of medical policies and practice is needed, together with community support initiatives to better recognise and serve non-binary people.

This thesis investigates the rise of lads’ mags and the wider sexualisation of British popular culture, with a specific focus on the ways in which gender and sexuality are socially constructed and how such constructions work to inform a broader ideology of patriarchy. As a consequence of this, postfeminism and new sexism are critically analysed and it is argued that they hinder progress towards gender equality and serve to justify sexism. Body theory, feminist theory, Foucauldian theory and a Foucauldian Feminist approach underpin the theoretical framework of this research and are used to examine how the body is politicised in lads’ mags and wider popular culture. Notions of gender, sexuality and identity are analysed and revealed as naturalising gender divisions. The methodological framework this research draws upon includes semi-structured interviews, an online survey, content analysis and critical discourse analysis, which collectively contribute an in-depth exploration of people’s perceptions of lads’ mags and the content of the magazines. Ten men and ten women were interviewed, complementing this research with respondents’ observations, assessments and experiences from a broad range of ages. Further to this, an online survey provides over 2,000 responses on public perceptions of lads’ mags and is thus the largest piece of empirical research on this topic to have been conducted. This thesis studies the female body as a site of social and political contestation and concludes that the representation of women in lads’ mags reflects a conflict about sexuality and identity which feeds into the normalisation of patriarchy in British society. How we come to embody the discourses prescribed to us by popular culture is examined through drawing upon empirical data, public debate and wider research on sexualisation. This thesis subsequently argues that the way in which we embody discourses becomes a part of our reality and lads’ mags thus exist as part of a wider cultural story that upholds patriarchy as both normal and desirable.

This thesis explores how gender and sexuality are conceptualised in human spaceflight. The culture of outer space has received relatively little critical attention, and even less on the subjects of gender and sexuality. In this thesis I aim to expand upon this limited field and to investigate how the cultural dimensions of outer space can be used to productive critical ends. The history of gender in human spaceflight is a troubled one. For decades, women were systematically excluded from most spaceflight endeavours. I argue that in addition to this, more insidious forms of exclusion have continued despite increasing representation of women in the global astronaut corps. Representations of gender in space culture are drawn from a long history of traditional conceptualisation of masculine and feminine bodies, particularly in spatial theory. Additionally, using the particular spatiality of extra-terrestrial spaces, I argue that traditional notions of gendered bodies and spaces can be uniquely destabilised by human spaceflight experience. The gendering of outer space is often entangled with sexual culture in space discourse,as discussions of women in space are often conflated with discussions of sexuality, reproduction, and human futures in space. I analyse these ideological connections alongside feminist and queer theory to argue that while space culture is primarily heteronormative, it also holds great potential for destabilising narratives of heteronormativity. Discussions of the future, in particular, often revolve around heteronormative ideas of family and procreation, however the temporality of space culture is not as straightforward as these narratives would suggest. It is my contention that the critical potential of outer space both necessitates and facilitates a radical shift in understandings of spatiality and temporality. Ultimately, I argue that the extremity associated with extra-terrestrial exploration can inform broader theoretical discussions of gender, sexuality, cultural space, time and the future.

Research shows that very little is known about the experience of ‘gender disappointment’ amongst parents in Western cultures, where there is not an explicit cultural bias that favours one sex of child over another as occurs in parts of Africa and Asia. This study explores the lived experience of nine White British women, residing in the UK, who profess to having struggled with ‘gender disappointment’; feelings of sadness about the sex of their children. The participants were mothers of sons only, who would have liked daughters. The transcripts from semi-structured interviews were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Four superordinate themes emerged: Alienation, Loss, Control and Commodification. The results indicate that ‘gender disappointment’ is a pervasive and multi-faceted phenomenon which left the participants feeling isolated from their families and society, grieving for something they could not have, and feeling out of control of their bodies, thoughts and emotions. These experiences were underpinned by a wider socially constructed phenomenon of the commodification and objectification of children, and the ethics of reproductive autonomy. Results are discussed in light of the cultural context, drawing on previous discourse on maternal ambivalence and gender stereotyping. It is proposed that the research will be of significance in improving the therapeutic services offered to mothers, and recommendations for future research are made.

This thesis expands the currently available approaches to theorising the relation between subjectivity and the body – by developing a notion of an embodied subject. This is done by exploring the implications which Henri Bergson’s process philosophy has for understanding Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. I undertake an analysis of Butler’s account of the gendered subject, demonstrating its value for thinking the politics of sexual difference but emphasising its methodological short comings. Specifically, I criticise her reduction of the body to a signifying effect, her exclusion of a notion of self-reflexivity, and the way she explains the psychic investment in gender through a principle of melancholia. Taken together, I argue that these theoretical perspectives become problematic because they radically limit an understanding of how and why hegemonic subjects repeat normative signifying practices. In turn, this limitation distorts Butler’s understanding of how subversive repetitions can effectively de-naturalise gender norms. Following this critique, I use Bergson’s temporalised understanding of the relation between consciousness and language to theorise an account of the gendered self which conforms to Butler’s ideas concerning regulated subject positions, but provides the possibility of attaining reflexive distance from the norms of gender intelligibility. I then develop Bergson’s sensory-motor conception of the body, and its relation to consciousness and memory, in order to re-evaluate the lived dynamics of repetition, gender investment, and identification. Through Bergson, I will demonstrate how historically sedimented gender practices are reproduced by forming the motor habits of individual bodies. This allows me to explain the circulation of gender norms in terms of bodily processes and tension rather than signifying effects and, I argue, grounds the basis of gender investment in the familiarity which habits provide for action. I then use Bergson’s principles that consciousness expands when action is indeterminate, and that memory forms general ideas in response to the present moment of action, to explore how variable processes of gender identification develop when habits are subverted. Through these perspectives I re-describe Butler’s notion of performativity as a lived, embodied process in which gender investment and identification are contingent upon an individual subject’s reflexive responses to the immediate social conditions of action. In order to clarify the nature of these responses I then call upon Yaak Panksepp’s neurological theory of emotion to characterise several prominent tendencies and, ultimately, argue that the effectiveness of subversive repetition depends upon producing the right emotional response. This, I suggest, provides a more diverse explanation of the naturalisation and potential transformation of signifying practices than is available in Butler’s own theoretical framework.

The transformation of traditional gender ideology has been actively promoted in Mexican society over recent decades. While adults’ renegotiations of traditional ideals and their efforts to forge modern relations have received significant ethnographic attention, little is known about how children in Mexico engage with the contradictions inherent in the coexistence of old and new expectations. This thesis, based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork, explores children’s readiness to resist gender divisions and embrace gender equality in the Mexican village of Metztitlán in the state of Hidalgo. The research focused on the, often contradictory, information that was made available to children at home, in the neighbourhood and in the school setting and on how children, aged between six and eleven, negotiated expectations that concerned aggressive behaviour, toy use and the division of labour. The thesis asks whether children regarded gender divisions as problematic and, if they did, whether this translated into readiness to resist traditional expectations through everyday interactions. It pays particular attention to how different kinds of audiences both influenced and were influenced by children’s resistance to gender divisions. The finding is that in domains, such as toy use or the division of labour, in which egalitarian alternatives to traditional expectations were available (e.g. through schooling), most girls and boys, in conversations with the anthropologist, expressed their allegiance to gender equality. However, children did not put these attitudes to work through interactions with peers and adults unless they found personally meaningful advantages in egalitarian arrangements. When they recognised tangible benefits of equality, they not only showed readiness to resist traditional divisions themselves but also to encourage adults to do the same.

This thesis focuses on the role and impacts on women of the system of wilaya (guardianship) - enshrined in Muslim family laws and, more specifically, in the Jordanian Personal Status Law. In this thesis, wilaya over women is treated as crucial to maintaining a system of domination over women, as such designates women as legal minors and forms the basis of women's legal and social subordination. Therefore, I argue that wilaya plays a key role in the reproduction of the gender hierarchy system. The thesis makes three central points with regards to wilaya. First, the systematic inclusion of provisions of wilaya over women serves as a construct of normative femininity. In this light, I address the relevance of the state as a gender regime in analysing how the masculine and feminine selves are constructed and reproduced in the context of Jordan. I also probe how a masculine state works in collaboration with other institutions to give power, founding legitimate operations and procedural methods for institutions such as family and tribe to manage, produce, and construct normative femininity and masculinity. Second, a relationship exists between the extent/degree of wilaya over women and the view of the Self from within, through, or outside the normative construction of femininity. I argue that women's experiences of male authority that intersects with tribal, ethnic and class membership inflect the ways in which women interpret and experience the boundaries of the wilaya system. Therefore, this system impacts the diverse and contradictory constructions of Jordanian women's femininity, where some conform to the system and others contest or embrace a complex combination of compliance, accommodation and resistance. Third, the ambiguous and contradictory state of women's various forms of femininity resulted in women's adoption of practices with a tactical nature, which are also informed by available options, opportunities, and the potential for escaping the wilaya system without facing sanction or punishment. Although these tactics of survival and/or resistance have not ensured a substantive transformation in women's lives at the collective level, they can materialise into strategies aimed at achieving autonomous selves at the personal level, where wilaya is questioned and possibly contested.

My PhD thesis draws from feminist and post-structuralist approaches to examine the construction of gender and Islam in Indonesian Islamic cinema between 1977 to 2011. This thesis asks: how, when, and where do Indonesian femininity and masculinity in film become Muslim? Previous studies on representations of gender in Islam have shown that clothes are immediate markers of Islamic identity. This thesis, however, seeks to transcend clothing as an obvious visual marker of Islamic identity and the fixation on the Islamic veil and turban and focus instead on the dynamic relationship between modernity and (trans)-nationalism in the construction of Muslim femininity and masculinity in Indonesian cinema. The Islamic film genre produces various mechanisms to isolate Muslim characters from their non-Muslim counterparts while at the same time marking distinctions between the 'good' and 'bad' Muslim. This thesis demonstrates that such mechanisms behind the binaries of the Muslim/non- Muslim and 'good' Muslim/'bad' Muslim are shifting concepts rather than fixed and selfevident. Furthermore, these shifting distinctions are achieved through narrative device, audio-visual tropes, and political discourse and governed by economic and cultural imperatives in the Islamic film genre. Ultimately, this thesis aims to make a contribution to the study of gender in Indonesian cinema more generally and to the definition of Islamic cinema as a film genre.

Ma la'asot? 'What can we do?' Spoken with a sigh and a shrug of the shoulders, this sentiment often brings to a close the tense pause which follows discussions of ha sichsuch, 'the quarrel', in Israel- Palestine. As expressed by Leftist Jewish Israelis, the phrase ma la'asot becomes a way of conveying political emotions of despair, helplessness and disappointment at the same time as it presents a practical question of power. Faced with the seeming intractability of conflict, the interminability of a stalled peace process and increasing social and political conservatism, those Jewish Israelis opposed to Israel's occupation of the Palestinian Territories find themselves at loose ends: what to do indeed? While an extensive body of research critically engages with 'the Israeli-Palestinian conflict' through lenses including history, political economy and activism, this thesis shifts focus to the production of stasis. In considering how things stay the same, we might better understand the roots and routes of how they may become different. Drawing upon one year of ethnographic research with Jewish Israelis living in Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem, this thesis explores the processes, practices and beliefs which sustain normalcy in conditions of conflict. Central to this investigation is gender - as an aspect of subjectivity, relation of power and ordering principle of state and society, gender is integral to the conduct of everyday life and the maintenance of political realities. Thus, this thesis asks what a gender analysis of Jewish Israeli society might tell us about the trajectory of 'Israel-Palestine', what the textures of normalcy, apathy and stasis mean for our visions of the future. Moving through degrees of division and entanglement, modes of avoidance and activism, sites of investment and withdrawal, and instantiations of normalcy and rupture, this thesis foregrounds the gendered subjectivities and sociality central to the production and maintenance of power in Israel-Palestine. By attempting to unpick to relationship between gender and political stasis, this thesis ulti

This thesis engages with the politics of gender equality in the context of democratisation processes in the Middle East, with specific reference to an oftenneglected case study, i.e. Jordan. By analysing the gender dimension of representation and political participation, my thesis contributes to the literature on gender quotas, social change and gender mainstreaming in the region, and does so from a bottom-up perspective, bringing in women's lived experiences. More specifically, I investigate how the international gender equality rhetoric is understood and translated into practice in the context of women's political empowerment. I also problematise the role of women's organisations in advocating gender justice. Drawing on original ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Jordan between 2010 and 2011, my case study focuses on the experiences of female candidates in the parliamentary elections of November 2010, the role of local and international organisations in empowering women in politics, and the influence of the authoritarian regime on the promotion of women's rights. Analysing the intersections between diverse dynamics involved in the promotion of gender justice in Jordan, I argue that gender equality is often instrumentalised and/or treated as an add-on in local, national, regional and international policies. In addition, while analysing the reasons behind the adoption of gender quotas, I stress the need to look at the sociocultural and political context in which quotas are introduced. In the specific setting of gender justice advocacy, my research findings indicate that the association of women's rights promotion with government-related or royal-supported organisations may be problematic, especially when the role of the state is being discredited and challenged in the wake of the recent uprisings (2011 and 2012). Finally, in the context of gender equality rhetoric, I suggest that it might be more productive for practitioners and researchers to employ an intersectional approach that not only addresses women's multifaceted and diverse gender interests, but also recognises that gender-based struggles are frequently linked to neoliberalism and neocolonial policies.

In this thesis, I have questioned the influence of whiteness in the assessment of female subordination in an increasingly neoliberal Caribbean setting. Indeed, due the rigidity of the gendered role attribution on their commune, Bobo Shanti Rastafarians have universally been accused of institutionalising female subordination by most scholars of Rastafari. In Jamaica, where women have traditionally been key agents of their communities, a passive acceptance of a subordinated status can be puzzling. Is androgyny the only means to gender equality? With the caution of strategic gender universalism against cultural relativism, I have endeavoured to analyse gender construction through the standards of this atypical community. It was the first time that a female researcher was immersed in the Bull' Bay community. It was therefore possible to analyse the EABIC livity from a female perspective, a point lacking in most academic publications about Rastafari, the EABIC and gender equality. From this qualitative study, I have suggested that the EABIC can be regarded as a radical social movement where the potential of its members needs to be federated towards the fulfilment of its objectives; creating a system where equal value is placed on defined gendered roles. I have explored three main areas: the EABIC epistemology; the public; then the private spheres of the commune. I have found that nothing in EABIC theology, the EABIC's foundation for knowledge creation, neither justified nor encouraged female subordination. Men and women are considered to be divine. The Universal supports both men and women. If the EABIC does not promote gender equality 'male style', it enforces the paramount importance of male and female agency for the survival of its purpose: Repatriation with Reparation. EABIC empresses' habitus may not fit the western notion of female empowerment; yet their chosen means to exercise agency in their community cannot be diminished.

The thesis investigates the extent to which acting as a male provider remains an open avenue for coming of age and displaying gender belonging for the shabāb (lads) of the Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon. The literature on Palestinians prior to 1948 suggests that a man would come of age by marrying at the appropriate age and bearing a son. For the Palestinian diaspora in Lebanon, and throughout the 1970s, acting as a fidāʾī (fighter) worked as an alternative mechanism for coming of age and displaying gender belonging. Accordingly, the central question of this thesis is how the shabāb today come of age and display their gender belonging, when on the one hand, Lebanese legislation, through forms of institutional violence, bars their free access to the labour market, forcing them to postpone marriage plans, and on the other hand, participation in the Palestinian Resistance Movement, at least in its military version, is not an option anymore. Through a plethora of investigative techniques – participant observation, questionnaires, focus groups, and open-ended interviews – I have registered the differences between the fidāʾiyyīn and their offspring in their coming of age and gender display. While the fidāʾiyyīn bore pure agency – understood as resistance to domination – and displayed their maturity through the fight to return to their homeland, their offspring have a far more nuanced relation to Palestine and articulate their coming of age and gender belonging in different ways, such as building a house and getting married. Effectively, by observing how the shabāb do their gender, it is not only the full historicity and changeability in time and space of masculinity that come to the fore, but also the scholarly concepts of agency and gender that can be transformed and undone. The tendency in studies of the Middle East to define gender strictly in terms of power and relations of domination fails to grasp the experiences of those, like the Shatila shabāb, with very limited access to power. It is not that the shabāb are emasculated, but rather that defining agency only in terms of resistance to domination and gender in terms of relations of power alone is rather restrictive. Throughout my fieldwork, I have also become acutely aware of anti-state forces at play in Shatila. Accordingly, this study portrays the (dangerous) liaisons between gender and agency as concepts and state machines. Thus, I reflect on what happens to gender (and agency) when state effects organizing and attempting to solidify a sex-gender system at the local level are of limited purchase. Ultimately, this ethnography points to an economics, a politics, a citizenship and sexes-and-genders of another kind, beyond the state.

Taking as a starting point an interpretation of the television medium as an Ideological State Apparatus, in my thesis I examine how gender roles and sexual dissidence are constructed in Spanish and Catalan television series. I focus on a corpus of narrative materials through a perspective informed by theories elaborated by Anglo-Saxon scholars in gender studies and studies of sexual dissidence. In my first chapter, which focuses on the construction of gender roles in Catalan soap operas, I apply the analytical paradigms that Anglo-Saxon feminist scholars have elaborated for the content of soap operas and the viewing practices of their audiences to a corpus of material which has rarely been analysed through this perspective. In the second chapter, which focuses on the construction of sexual dissidence in Spanish and Catalan television series, I aim to challenge ‘essentialist’ paradigms which have so far dominated the examination of the construction of sexual dissidence in television series. Moreover, I query the pedagogical aspirations of public-funded television and the contradictions often involved in the application of this remit. My theoretical base encompasses the work of scholars as diverse as Christine Geraghty and Alberto Mira. Studies by Ricardo Llamas, Charlotte Brundson, and Dorothy Hobson, in particular, help me to articulate my comparative analysis of television content in Spanish and Catalan contexts. In conclusion, the aim of my thesis is to address the role performed by television in the construction of meanings which surround gender issues and sexual dissidence. This is a timely exercise because gender studies and studies of sexual dissidence are fairly recent fields in Spanish and Catalan academia and television has been largely disregarded, especially as far as the analysis of characters and storylines is concerned. My thesis aims to be a contribution to these fields in the Spanish and Catalan contexts.

In this thesis, I aim to investigate and challenge cisgenderism— the ideology that delegitimises people’s own designations of their genders and bodies. In Chapter 1,1 discuss the epistemological concerns that informed my decision to apply a bricolage approach, explain how I applied bricolage techniques in my research, and introduce the cisgenderism framework. In Chapter 2,1 conduct a bibliometric analysis to identify the four most widely cited empirical papers in the field of sexist language research in English. I then discursively analyse these four empirical papers for the cisgenderist assumptions that can lead to misgendering and explore the implications of this misgendering. In Chapter 3,1 shift my disciplinary focus from feminist research to psychology with a quantitative content analysis of pathologising and misgendering forms of cisgenderism in psychological literature on children’s genders and gender-associated expression from 1999-2008. In Chapter 4,1 conduct two experiments that that use Prader’s (1954) diagram of infant genital ‘virilisation’ to explore whether framing effects in ostensibly ‘neutral’ and ‘value-free’ medical communication about infant genitals can affect laypeople’s decisions to recommend or reject ‘normalising’ infant genital surgery. In Chapter 5,1 conduct two studies of people’s self-reported experiences of being misgendered and misgendering others. I explore whether perceptions of the adverse effects of misgendering differ between targets and sources of misgendering, between people who report being perceived as ‘trans’ and people who report that they are not, and between people who report having matching and mismatched identity documents. I complement the quantitative empirical findings with an analysis of qualitative participant narratives of having been misgendered and having misgendered others. Chapter 6 concludes this thesis with a restatement of the aims of this research, a synthesis of how the six bricolage techniques I employed contributed to my findings in Chapters 2-5, and a discussion of how these findings can inform interventions to reduce cisgenderism.

My thesis examines the question of alienation and belonging in Iran and in exile as it arises in the representation of cultural memory in literary texts by exiled Iranian Jewish women. I establish a contestation between the textual protagonists' Jewish, Iranian and female identities and exile as a mnemonic site for negotiating a fusion of identities. My work thus seeks to contribute to a heterogeneous nature of the relationship between Jews and gender since the narrative of Iranian Jewish women is barely acknowledged in scholarship on Iranian Jews or in studies of Iranian women. My thesis contributes to the growing, but still insufficiently disseminated, body of literature on Mizrahi Jewish identity. I challenge the dominant scholarly representations of the relationship between Iranian Jews and broader Muslim Shi'a society as straightforwardly polarised and complicate Jewish notions of exile which hitherto have focused on a more Zionist narrative where the object of yearning is Israel. My research is based on six novels and memoirs created in American and Belgian exile and represents Iranian Jewish women in the context of shifting state and religious ideologies during the Shah's reign and the subsequent Islamic regime. All the literary texts are sites of resistance and denial and represent the innate desire of the Iranian Jewish women to be seen as belonging to Iran whilst resisting their rejection as Jews. Exile offers the protagonists the opportunity to define their identities rather than accepting definitions by others in which Iranian and Jewish identities are invariably polarised. To achieve belonging to the Iranian nation, exiled Iranian Jews uphold the importance of Iranian Jewish history and memory. The re-instatement and glorification of Iranian Jews in the Iranian narrative of nation is crucial for some yet an ambiguous space results from the coexistence of imagined belonging with victimisation and exclusion.

This thesis examines the gender-subversive potential of mixed-sex martial arts. The research problem takes its significance from the well-documented linkages drawn within feminist research between combat sports and hierarchal gender differentiation. It is posited that from a feminist perspective, gender-subversive physical practices are desirable because they instigate a shift towards fairer and freer bodily discourse, and as such they are deserving of critical academic attention. Furthermore, sex-integrated sports have the potential to lead participants towards embodying and propagating such subversive gender discourses, and when these changes take place within highly masculinised activities such as combat sports, the significance of this subversion is amplified. While existing literature has addressed these themes with reference to women s participation in these kinds of activities, there is a relative paucity of sociological work explicitly examining mixed-sex participation, which this thesis is intended to redress. Using semi-structured interviewing, qualitative data were gathered from a group of male and female martial artists across the English East Midlands. The interviews were transcribed and then subjected to discourse analysis. Findings suggested that mixed-sex martial arts does involve gender subversion but that the practice also remains structured by dominant, hierarchal gender discourse in several significant ways. It is therefore suggested that mixed-sex training can present the possibility of gender subversion under particular conditions, such as: martial arts being accessible to both men and women at multiple levels of participation; a normalised presence of women, particularly at higher levels such as being coaches and competitors; participants coming to share an identity as martial artists which is irrespective of sexual difference; and ultimately training being integrated as much as possible, particularly with regard to the more intensely physical, combative aspects, such as sparring. The participants indicated that under these conditions they were able to conceive of and practice their gender differently, in ways which portrayed little or no hierarchal distinction between the sexes, and as such is considered subversive . Following these findings, the thesis ultimately concludes with a brief outline of some recommendations for good practice in martial arts clubs. In this way, the thesis contributes towards feminist understandings of the body and of physical culture, by highlighting one possible way in which to conceive of the sexed body differently from the prevailing norms of hierarchal sexual differentiation.

This thesis is concerned with exploring to what extent gendered behaviors in interaction are situated and constrained by the situation and the context in the Omani workplace. One of the most important aims of this research was to study the influence of the context on the communication process, and why some rules of interaction are reproduced and others resisted. Therefore, I used social constructionist epistemology that assumes that social categories such as gender and power are constructed through the talk and not taken for granted or independent variables as was previously assumed by the essentialist approaches ( Burr, 1995 ). Within the social constructionist epistemology I used two different frameworks to analyze the data: critical discourse analysis of Fairclough ( 1992 ) and the discursive psychology approach. The two frameworks both served to answer my research question as the ( CDA ) framework provided me with a research tool that combined linguistically oriented discourse analysis with relevant social and political aspects ( Fairclough, 1992) while the ( DP ) is a discourse analysis approach that is concerned with analyzing the talk in interactions (Fitch and Sanders, 2005). The analysis of a meeting between male and female librarians revealed that the participants did not enact gender and they did not interact according to their gender category but according to their group membership as they talked as one group: “the librarians group”. The second conclusion drawn is that in every interaction participants try to achieve particular goals and to achieve their goals they may use more interactional control features, identify themselves with specific identities and reject others, they may take up a specific social position in the discourse and they may reject others, and they may join a specific group or distance themselves from the group.

This study is about the consequences of feminised migration on migrant women workers, on their families and on the Philippine society as a whole. The continued dependence on migration and increasingly, women‘s migration, by the Philippine government to address unemployment on one hand, and by the Filipino families on the other hand, to secure employment and a better life, has led to social change: change in migrant women‘s sense of identity and personhood; restructuring of households and redefinition of families and gender relations and the rise of a culture of migration. To understand these social changes, the study focuses on the return phase of migration situated within the overall migration process and adopts a gendered and feminist approach. Existing theories of return migration cannot adequately capture the meanings of the return of migrant women workers. Studying return through a gendered approach allows us to reflect on the extent migration goals have been achieved or not, the conditions under which return takes place for a migrant woman worker and various factors affecting life after migration for the migrant women and their families. Return of the women migrant workers cannot be neatly categorised as voluntary or involuntary. It is gendered. It is involuntary, voluntary, and mainly ambivalent. Involuntary return was influenced by structural limitations arising from the temporary and contractual type of migration in jobs categorised as unskilled. Voluntary return was mainly determined by the achievement of migration goals, the psychological need to return after prolonged absence and by the need to respond to concerns of families left behind. Ambivalent return was caused by the desire to maintain the status, economic power, freedom and autonomy stemming from the migrants' breadwinning role; the need to sustain the families‘ standard of living; as well as the apprehensions of a materially insecure life back home. The socio-psychological consequences on families and children of migrant women are deep and wide-ranging. Similarly, women migrants, though empowered at a certain level, had to face psychological and emotional consequences upon return influenced by persistent gender roles and gender regimes. By analysing the impact of gendered migration and return on the societal level, the study has broadened and deepened the conceptualisation of the phenomenon of culture of migration by bringing other elements and factors such as the role of the state, human resources, sustainable livelihood, national identity and governance.

The leadership literature, although very well established, has paid limited attention to the differences between people, even when it has examined the different ways in which women and men may lead. In particular, any attention to those differences has been as if sex and gender are the same, while sexuality has been ignored. The conceptual framework for my thesis comes from Butler’s (1990) work on the performativity of gender and her discussion of the heterosexual framework. Therefore, in this thesis I attempt to address the deficiencies above by answering the following questions: How do/can people construct identities that transcend the heterosexual matrix? As people construct their identities as leaders, do they seek to reconcile all their other identities into a coherent whole with their identity as a leader? To what extent are leadership, sex, gender and sexual identities ‘fixed’ or ‘static’? How do queer or borderline identities intersect with leadership? I explore these questions by interviewing 34 leaders of varying sexes, genders and sexual orientations. These respondents were active and retired members of the military and nursing in the UK, Canada or the US. Perhaps the most significant finding was that for these respondents, their body trumped the other two aspects of identity, i.e., their gender and their sexuality, when developing and enacting their leadership within these hypergendered organizations.

This study breaks new ground in the literature of gender and work in the Middle East, by providing an ethnographic account of the public and visible economic activities of women as active protagonists within the formal economy. It examines how gender, class and religion intersect within a factory workplace. Management and labour practices are analysed to show how gendered roles are flexible and multiple, and how discourses of class and piety are articulated in codes of propriety and discipline - as well as in shop-floor strategies of accommodation, resistance and appropriation. The research setting is an export-orientated garment manufacturing enterprise in Port Said, Egypt, bound into a globalised sub-contracting chain. Beset by economic difficulties, management struggles to recruit and retain a mixed-gender workforce to meet rigid contractual deadlines and quality standards. Its control strategies include manipulating issues of class, gender and religion to create a discourse of 'firm as family' which emphasises ihtiram (respectability), legitimating close-quarters contact between female and male workers, and binds workers through constructs of filial ikhlaas (loyalty) to the 'proprietor as patriarch'. As well as staging go-slows and walk-outs, workers turn the 'firm as family' metaphor back on itself to create a framework of entitlement based on a shared sense of taraabut (togetherness). Codes of class and religion are flexed to craft new gendered labour roles, including productive masculinities in a formerly all-female work environment, and distinctive femininities in a previously all-male supervisory cadre. The workers also appropriate the workplace, turning it into an arena for the realisation of their wider hopes and aspirations, including the search for love and material well-being.

The objectives of this thesis are: 1. To contribute to the contemporary agenda on research into fatherhood by focusing on the successes and difficulties of fathers being more involved in the intimate care of their children. 2. To contribute to the understanding of how traditional discourses on fatherhood and masculinity may affect involved fathers' ability to nurture children. 3. To consider how involved fathers manage predominant discourses on fatherhood, masculinity and anger within the home.

This thesis offers a critique of the strong programme of postmodernism/feminism and its associate semiotic analyses. Their utilisation of Lacanian notions of the Symbolic, structured by the Phallus, leads this model, and its cultural examinations, to define woman as 'lack', which renders identity a Symbolic effect. I suggest that if the Symbolic determines the form representation can make, and if these representations go on to constitute gendered subjects dichotomously, then sexual dichotomisation should unambiguously structure representation. However, I contest this and support it with evidence from a content analysis I conducted, which analysed 500 fashion images. I offer a methodological defence regarding the use of content analysis, arguing that if meaning is understood as operating conventionally, it is sufficiently stable to quantify (Goffman: 1979). The defence is based upon the contention that meaning, which serves an ideology, cannot be also polysemic and elliptical. My results show that the cultural representations are free of a whole range of variables that are supposed to secure a dichotomously determined and subordinated femininity. Moreover, the data showed that there was no longer a marked gender difference between codes used; in fact, an increasing homogeneity between the images of men and women was recorded. Thus, images of men are equally commodified. Culture cannot therefore be said to secure gender identity. My results show that representation does, however, reproduce the discourse of the dimorphic body. Thus, in the light of this, I offer a tentative means of bringing the body into the social without the body reassuming its place as the primary determinant of the social. I do this by offering a model of the body that seeks to emphasise the interrelatedness of the body to society, and to sex and gender in particular. I offer the model of family resemblances as a means to escape the dualistic tendency of sex/gender because it is not dependent upon a unitary based classification scheme.

The collapse of socialism has generated enormous social, economic and political upheaval in central and eastern Europe. The impact of these transformations on constructions of gender and daily gendered practices have been hugely diverse. Nevertheless, an emerging, recurrent theme has been the prominence of competing and contested ideas about motherhood, reproduction, femininity and women's work. This thesis addresses how these tensions emerge and unfold within an institution in Prague comprising of a convent, a women's prison and a nursing home. It traces how constructions of motherhood and nurture and particular idioms of 'public' and 'private' moralities, all characteristic of the socialist era in Czechoslovakia, are being reformulated within new ideologies of 'work', patient care and prisoner rehabilitation within this institution. It explores how these processes echo with the experience of different people in a variety of ways. 5 A key concern is how social relationships and daily practices in this institution constitute 'home' as an imagined domain of gendered 'authenticity'. It is proposed that 'home' operates as a key imaginary that is perpetually reified and transformed, invoked as a justification for processes of categorisation and discipline, but also powerfully used to refuse and transcend them. The thesis focuses on how 'home' is performed in ways which constitute it as an authentic 'reality' outside the institution. Accompanying the written thesis is a documentary film, Domov, the making of which was an integral part of the research project. Ethnographically, the thesis focuses on three main areas of investigation. Firstly there is a discussion of eating and drinking practices as arenas for competing ideas about emotional labour and the simulation of 'home' in the institution. Secondly the different scopic regimes in the nursing home and prison are explored. Here the use of a video camera as a research method is central to the theoretical consideration of different modalities of surveillance. Finally, the narrative of the accompanying film is theoretically elaborated, through a consideration of how the imaginaries of 'home' maintained by three women (a patient, a prisoner and a nurse) were fundamentally challenged on their departure from the institution

Humans are social animals. Human societies emerge from vast networks of cooperative interactions between many different individuals. In this respect, humans are similar to most other primates. However, human societies are unusual among primates in the number of different types of cooperative relationships that are involved. In humans, males and females form strong pair bonds within large multi-male, multi-female societies in which many other cooperative relationships are also important. How and when did human social systems arise? Do males and females use different types of cooperative strategies? Under what conditions does paternal care evolve? Do males and females have different constraints, and how do these affect the types of social strategies they employ? How do factors such as environment quality and seasonality modify these strategies? This thesis seeks answers to these questions using computer simulations based on the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. The hypotheses generated by these models are tested using data from living primates. They are then used to investigate the kinds of societies that our hominid ancestors may have lived in. The theoretical and empirical evidence presented in this thesis suggests that sex differences in the energetic cost of reproduction determine the cooperative strategies, and ultimately the types of social groups, that evolve. It is proposed that during hominid evolution female energetic costs increased greatly, in comparison to male energetic costs, due to changes in body size dimorphism, diet and brain size. A two-stage model of hominid social structure is developed. The first stage, at the transition from the australopithecines to Homo erectus, would have involved an increase in female cooperation, especially food sharing. The second stage, occurring between 500,000 and 100,000 years ago, would have involved male care giving, the formation of pair bonds and the sexual division of labour within the context of a wider cooperative network.

This thesis explores the ways in which gender and contemporary anthropology interact, with the special emphasis on the areas frequently referred to as "poststructuralist" or "postmodern." More specifically, I look at one aspect which postmodern approaches and feminist theories have in common: questioning of the dominant narratives. This questioning then leads through a series of constructed realities (or hyperrealities) to the realization of the importance of the concept of difference(s) in all its aspects. The ethnographic examples are from the Republics of Slovenia (primarily concerning feminist groups and scholars) and Macedonia (the region of Prespa, in the southwestern part of the country). In both countries the fall of communism has created a sort of a power hiatus, filled with questions about identity, the future and ways to organize the newly emerging societies (since both countries became independent in 1991). In that regard, both countries are hyper real. After the Introduction, I outline the debates surrounding "postmodern" approaches in anthropology, different theoretical assumptions, as well as the area(s) where these approaches can inform anthropological research. I start with the overview of the working definitions of "postmodernism" and the attitudes towards it that characterize current anthropological theory, continuing with what I regard to be the most illustrative examples of it being misunderstood and misrepresented, and concluding with the meeting point of postmodern anthropology and the study of gender. In the following chapters I present the results of my field research in Macedonia and in Slovenia, concluding with the theoretical implications of contemporary anthropological approaches to the study of gender, as well as the reasons for presenting it as basically a social construct. In Conclusion, I point out at the fact that gender studies seem to be the only area where postmodernism and anthropology interact in the most positive way, primarily through the full exploration of the concept of difference(s).