The most dramatic effect of the colonization process is that the colonized are forced to occupy multiple conflicting spaces. Since Aboriginal peoples are caught between traditional viewpoints and mainstream European thought, they struggle to find a space where they can negotiate their identity. Both Three Day Road and Monkey Beach depict the windigo and sasquatch / b'gwus living in what Homi K. Bhabha refers to as a liminal space' ..., and illustrate how both the windigo and sasquatch / b'gwus are caught between the cultural understandings of both European descendants and Aboriginal peoples. By illuminating the roles of windigo and sasquatch/b'gwus in both contemporary literature by Aboriginal writers and Aboriginal oral tradition, my thesis reflects my struggles with the tensions between Eurocentric concepts of knowledge, culture, and values of spirituality and diverse Aboriginal worldviews. --P. iii.
This thesis examines the production and promotion of certain male body images, demonstrating a means by which gender image regulations may be identified in print media. Drawing on the intersection of cultural studies, gender theory, sociology, and biology, this work inquires into mimetic series and their exchanges in such men's magazine as Gentlemen's Quarterly UK and North America editions, Men's Health UK and North America editions, Attitude, and Out for 2002-2011 period. The choice of magazines allows for inclusion of both heterosexual and queer perspectives and respective audiences, and thus for a more comprehensive and balanced collection of quantitative mimetic data from which to derive constructed gender regulations. Multicultural sampling of both magazine and advertisement content is instrumental in observing some of the globalizing influences on the masculine media, which affect and reflect the greater masculine body image culture, and modify both individual and collective masculine gender performance. --Leaf ii.
This thesis extends ecocritical thought into the sphere of popular culture, particularly televised and online advertisements, by examining the ways in which environmentalist discourse is appropriated and obfuscated by corporations for promotional purposes. Moreover, it argues that such an appropriation, which paradoxically utilizes environmentalist discourse to promote consumption, is a manifestation of post-environmentalism, a term derived from a critical synthesis of Angela McRobbie's notion of post-feminism and Slavoj Žižek’s extended discussions of eco-capitalism.' The critical term functions as a way of semantically differentiating between environmentalism and its co-opted counterpart. Ultimately, through analysis of advertising and promotional campaigns from major corporations, I argue that this trend of appropriation threatens environmentalism as a radical politics by conceptually and literally relegating environmentalist activism to spheres of consumerism and through acts of consumption, which has larger ramifications for all hegemony-challenging, radical politics. --[Leaf ii.]
My novella Andrew represents an attempt to establish and then re-contextualize '~creative symptomatology' (Deleuze) of masochistic psychodrama by entering into an intertextual dialogue with the defining text for masochism, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs (1870), and its critical reception by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud, and Gilles Deleuze. With its core being distinctly masochistic, my novella radically unties masochism from predominantly sexual meanings within the rigidly gendered scenario of domination and submission, and transposes it onto familial domain, primarily mother-daughter relationship. Furthermore, alongside the departure from the conventional view that masochism is some deviation in the structure of an individual's desire, or, to use psychoanalytical term, sexual '~perversion,' my novella questions societal normalizing practices instrumental in executing control. By doing so, I intend to prove this notion to be a potent psychological and cultural concept in the construction of gender, familial power dynamic, and identitarian politics. --Leaf ii.
The media's role in shaping Arctic perceptions receives little attention among northern scholars, yet this is where most citizens obtain information about the Arctic. Given the region's geographical remoteness, the media take on substantial power to influence citizens' perceptions. This research critically examines how print media present resource development in the Beaufort Sea region. The project consists of a qualitative discourse analysis comparing local newspapers with national newspapers (i.e. north-south) as well as Canadian and American newspapers. To learn more about northern media, an additional component of this research includes interviews with six journalists who work in the north (Fairbanks and Yellowknife). The study shows how national newspapers tend to portray industry and the federal government as the main decision-makers when it comes to resource development, whereas local newspapers tend to assert the power of local Indigenous groups and municipal/state/territorial governments. --Leaf ii.
Throughout history, women's achievements and struggles often went unnoticed and underrepresented by literature and historiography. Writing Missing Links: Rewriting Women's History through Literature' discusses ways in which contemporary women novelists revise and rewrite histories by providing counter-narratives to established mainstream historical and political discourses. These creative projects of dismantling and questioning history, truth, and objectivity unearth women's history occluded by patriarchal Master Narratives. Three historical novels that redefine literature and history from a woman-centred perspective frame this thesis: Alias Grace (1996) by Margaret Atwood, My Dream of You (2001) by Nuala O'Faolain, and The Sealed Letter (2008) by Emma Donoghue. My theoretical approach focuses on the feminist concept of narrative voice that asserts a women-centered point of view, as well as feminist criticism's relationship to other critical discourses such as postmodernism, historiography, (post-)colonialism, and new-Victorian studies. --Leaf iii.
This thesis examines the construction of masculinity and sexuality in Michael Turner's The Pornographer's Poem. Drawing on a performative and fluid conception of gender identity, it explores how panoptic structures like the family, school, and athletics all help to shape masculinity. Significant attention is given to the interaction between hegemonic and subversive masculinities and sexualities. In this context, the protagonist's pornographies serve as a focal lens through which to inquire into these gender dynamics. The instabilities in identitarian processes are likewise reflected in unreliable narration, cyclical structures, interrogative discourses, and nesting techniques as they influence the act of narration. The thesis concludes that coercive, conflicting, complicated images of masculinity propagating in contemporary culture are difficult to navigate, especially without effective attachment figures. It attempts to propose more nuanced, multifarious, and dynamic interpretations of manhood that allow to transcend societal stereotypes and prescriptions arising from current systems of power and gender. --Leaf ii.
