School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemGendered discourses of war: deconstructing gender and the warrior myth in postmodern warfare( 2011)This thesis seeks to integrate a gender theoretical perspective into the study of gender and war. Scholarship on gender and war in the disciplines of history and political science has typically endorsed a binary model of gender whereby “gender” has been conflated with the oppositional and incommensurable categories “male” and “female.” Such approaches have resulted in a lack of critical engagement with the varying roles of men and women in war as they have tended to bifurcate wartime populations into male perpetrators and female victims. In contrast, this thesis employs a poststructuralist feminist approach to uncover the ways in which the Western gender binary is constructed through the mechanisms of postmodern war. I explore the interaction between symbolic and material manifestations of gender through a focus on the sexing of the human body at war. Biological discourse that insists on the ontology of sexual difference combines with gendered war mythologies to construct the warrior as an exclusively male embodied identity. This thesis examines the interaction of these discursive and narrative processes in the postmodern mediascape. Media are a central and constitutive component of the postmodern war machine. They also play a central role in the perpetuation of gender hegemony in the postmodern period, shaping gendered reality in ways that have material implications for men and women. I analyse fictional and non-fictional, and traditional and new media forms, in recognition that these all combine to comprise the postmodern media landscape. I argue that representations of postmodern war in Western media are characterised by an underlying tension between gender conservatism and gender transgression. Media reinforce the male/female binary by constructing the warzone as an exclusively male space and the warrior as an exclusively male identity. Yet through their engagement with the unstable identities that characterise postmodern war—particularly that of the female combatant—media also suggest the possibility of subverting the gender binary in the context of war. New posthuman technologies are changing the nature of both the physical and the virtual battlefield, with potential ramifications for the future of war, sexed embodiment, and the relationship between the two.
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ItemTaken: a history of bride theft in nineteenth-century Ireland and Australia( 2011)This examination of the practice of bride theft and the prosecution of abduction in Ireland and the Australian colony of New South Wales in the first half of the nineteenth century draws upon an extensive collection of government documents, legal archives, newspapers and fiction to show how both acts of bride theft and abduction trials offer a unique means of examining gender, marriage and British imperialism in both societies during this period. Whether it was a forcible abduction that employed deception or violence to take a woman against her will, or an elopement in which she actively colluded, taking a woman without parental consent was an act of property theft that carried with it the possibility of a capital sentence. Consequently, what started in the private sphere of the family often led to dramatic scenes that were played out in the public domain of the courtroom and the newspapers where they became embroiled in broader concerns relating to imperial reputation and the establishment of civil society. An understanding of abduction in these two nineteenth-century societies offers a way of investigating how gender was enmeshed within the political and imperial concerns of the period, and played a role in the formation of both nineteenth-century societies. I argue that the primacy of paternal authority and the denial of female consent that lay at the heart of abduction law supported the growth of civil society and the extension of male franchise, as well as the push for greater political autonomy that took place in both regions during this period. As more and more men became property-owners who were considered sufficiently respectable to participate in the political processes of their societies, abduction trials offered a vehicle through which these men could use to demonstrate their authority, assert their respectability and ensure the removal of women from the public sphere. Simultaneously, the abducted woman became the embodiment of the incipient nation, functioning either as property to protect and territory to defend, or as an inspiring symbol of freedom and romance, defiance and agency.