Anorexia Nervosa is a debilitating illness characterized by the limitation of food intake and a fear of weight gain. While we might at face value take the illness to be irrational, within this...Show moreAnorexia Nervosa is a debilitating illness characterized by the limitation of food intake and a fear of weight gain. While we might at face value take the illness to be irrational, within this project we find that the dangerous condition is fueled by a foundation of justifications based on shared cultural ideas and the values derived from them. I will argue that anorexia occurs when an individual manages to embody attitudes of mind, body, and desire found in the Western philosophical tradition. For the anorexic, rather than being a project of vanity, losing weight can be understood as a spiritual project of transcending the human body and dissolving craving, thus, a quest for liberation. The illness functions in a way in which the anorexic individual sees the world through a filter that seeks out motivation to continue starving, as the self-denial is so extreme that it goes against the individual’s basic human instinct of survival and thus requires constant fuel to persist. What I call the anorexic worldview is a system of values and beliefs that promises the individual who adopts it liberation through transcending one’s ordinary humanity and becoming invulnerable, but at the end of the day, this worldview serves merely the contrary purpose of powering the mental and physical deterioration of the individual. Interestingly, themes inherent to anorexia such as a negative view of the body and the strict denial of craving are also prevalent in early Buddhist philosophy.Show less
James Marion Sims (1813-1883) is known as the ‘godfather of gynaecology.’ This American doctor had a career spanning Alabama, New York City and even undertook a European tour. He founded the United...Show moreJames Marion Sims (1813-1883) is known as the ‘godfather of gynaecology.’ This American doctor had a career spanning Alabama, New York City and even undertook a European tour. He founded the United States’ first Woman’s Hospital, but one of his first major contributions to medicine was finding a cure for vesico-vaginal fistula: the tearing of the vaginal wall due to trauma. This launched his career in medicine. However, he found this cure by performing medical experiments on enslaved Black women in his private clinic. In the Woman’s Hospital his patients were predominantly Irish immigrant women from the working classes of the city. This research explores what made it possible for a White man such as Sims to perform these unethical experiments on these women, who were racialised as Black. Through Foucault’s concept of the medical gaze and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectional feminist critique, this thesis explores the professionalisation of medicine in the nineteenth century, scientific racism, the genesis of gynaecology, racial formation, medical experimentation and how Sims fits into these structures. The focus is the identity formation of Sims himself and his patients, who were intersectionally marginalised. Considering their race, class, ability and gender, one can reconstruct how they fit into the fabric of American society, and why exactly Sims and his colleagues were allowed to experiment on enslaved, working class, ill women when they never considered treating more privileged women (or men) in such a manner.Show less
The author Agatha Christie wrote more than sixty detective novels between 1916 and 1973. Christie wrote her detective stories during a time in which English society also experienced the first and...Show moreThe author Agatha Christie wrote more than sixty detective novels between 1916 and 1973. Christie wrote her detective stories during a time in which English society also experienced the first and second wave of feminism. This thesis will investigate to what extent the first and second wave of feminism influenced Christie’s depiction of her well-known female detective Miss Marple and her views on women’s roles and identities in British society. This analysis will focus on the following three Miss Marple novels: The Murder at the Vicarage (1930), A Murder is Announced (1950), and Nemesis (1971). Eventually, this thesis will show that the feminist thought and activism key to the first and second wave of feminism have had a significant influence on Christie’s depiction of Miss Marple. Throughout these years, Christie has gradually increased Miss Marple’s agency, prominence and engagement with feminist thought expressed in her time. Even so, the exploration of feminist thought concerning same-sex relationships presents to be a boundary for Christie.Show less
Representative of the new and daring generation, Matsui Fuyuko experiments with traditional Japanese art and infuses it with grotesque motifs that respond to contemporary interests and anxieties....Show moreRepresentative of the new and daring generation, Matsui Fuyuko experiments with traditional Japanese art and infuses it with grotesque motifs that respond to contemporary interests and anxieties. She discusses the delicate topics of female suffering and self-expression, which broaches unavoidably the salience of religious influence on the historical formation of gender roles in the Japanese society. In this thesis, I will analyze this subject through the dichotomy of purity versus impurity, as it is instrumental in organizing space in the lives of ordinary Japanese. In varied contexts, purity is used to contrast the sacred and the abominable, the clean and the polluted, or the male and the female body. By placing the paintings of Matsui Fuyuko in the syncretic religious context unique to Japan, it is possible to establish a connection between Buddhist meditation practices and Shinto rituals. In this sense, the aesthetic collation of the pure feminine and the shock-inducing realism of the rotting female corpse in Matsui's paintings can be seen as a form of social protest against pernicious gender biases. She challenges the traditional expectations towards women to display humility, self-restraint and to embrace their role as mothers and caretakers by instead painting them in defiant and provocative poses. The main question to be tackled in this research is how the painter modifies the concept of purity to communicate her feelings and ideas to the viewer through artistic means. I will disclose why the art of Matsui Fuyuko can be seen as an emotional purification of the artist, a meditative tool for the audience, as well as how it defies traditional views on the female body.Show less
