title: Women (Un)Moored: Shirley Jackson's entropic female characters

authors: Grard, Pascale

subjects: Shirley Jackson

abstract: Shirley Jackson’s fiction presents an expansive catalogue of female characters who find themselves in eerie predicaments that they negotiate in interesting ways. This thesis explores the presentation of female characters in these predicaments. What roles do the female characters play in the stories they inhabit? What modes of escape do they employ from their predicaments? What makes their situations fundamentally anxious? To explore these questions, I examine the roles ascribed to female characters and their various responses to them. I inspect Jackson’s use of the ghost story and the fairy tale and the ways in which she engages with characteristic tropes to explore female agency. I interrogate anxieties about the self, and examine how these anxieties haunt many of the stories through their presentations of the female protagonists. These anxieties play out in the spaces that form and deform possibilities for women – the home, the suburb, the city – and through their allotted roles as wives, mothers, daughters, women alone. This study hopes to illuminate the entropic and anti-entropic nature of Jackson’s female characters: women variously unhinged by their roles or grounded by them. These women produce diverse reactions to oppressive situations as they negotiate their restrictive circumstances that simultaneously anchor and imprison them.

text: Women (Un)Moored: Shirley Jackson's entropic female characters Shirley Jackson’s fiction presents an expansive catalogue of female characters who find themselves in eerie predicaments that they negotiate in interesting ways. This thesis explores the presentation of female characters in these predicaments. What roles do the female characters play in the stories they inhabit? What modes of escape do they employ from their predicaments? What makes their situations fundamentally anxious? To explore these questions, I examine the roles ascribed to female characters and their various responses to them. I inspect Jackson’s use of the ghost story and the fairy tale and the ways in which she engages with characteristic tropes to explore female agency. I interrogate anxieties about the self, and examine how these anxieties haunt many of the stories through their presentations of the female protagonists. These anxieties play out in the spaces that form and deform possibilities for women – the home, the suburb, the city – and through their allotted roles as wives, mothers, daughters, women alone. This study hopes to illuminate the entropic and anti-entropic nature of Jackson’s female characters: women variously unhinged by their roles or grounded by them. These women produce diverse reactions to oppressive situations as they negotiate their restrictive circumstances that simultaneously anchor and imprison them.

year: 2022

title: Perspectives and experiences of female surf lifesavers in Aotearoa New Zealand

authors: Onken, Rachel Kai

abstract: This study aims to explore and understand the experiences of female surf lifesaver athletes in Aotearoa New Zealand. The popular image of lifeguards, particularly in the media, has long been based on a particular heroic masculinity, yet women have been active participants in surf lifesaving in Aotearoa New Zealand since 1911 (Harvey, 2010). Jaggard (1999) dubbed female lifeguards as the ‘forgotten members’ of surf lifesaving clubs, this research refocusses the narrative and seeks to highlight women’s experiences in SLS sport. This study is qualitative and used an interpretive approach grounded in feminist theory. The research consisted of semi-structured, one-on-one interviews with six women who competed in the Under 19 or Open categories of surf lifesaving sport in the summer of 2020/2021. Three guiding topics led the conversations: connections to blue space, female athlete experiences in surf lifesaving sport in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the significance of required volunteer patrol hours to athletes.

Thematic Analysis was used to analyse the data collected from interviews; three core themes were identified. The first theme explores participants' connections with blue coastal space, which was a key landscape for participants’ experiences in sport and leisure. The second theme identified highlights the complex and nuanced social culture of SLS sport. The final theme revealed the gender discourses around key topics such as embodiment, experiences of motherhood, inclusion, and marginalisation. This research explores the complex ways in which women navigate societal expectations around their bodies, their time, and what it means to be a female athlete.

text: Perspectives and experiences of female surf lifesavers in Aotearoa New Zealand This study aims to explore and understand the experiences of female surf lifesaver athletes in Aotearoa New Zealand. The popular image of lifeguards, particularly in the media, has long been based on a particular heroic masculinity, yet women have been active participants in surf lifesaving in Aotearoa New Zealand since 1911 (Harvey, 2010). Jaggard (1999) dubbed female lifeguards as the ‘forgotten members’ of surf lifesaving clubs, this research refocusses the narrative and seeks to highlight women’s experiences in SLS sport. This study is qualitative and used an interpretive approach grounded in feminist theory. The research consisted of semi-structured, one-on-one interviews with six women who competed in the Under 19 or Open categories of surf lifesaving sport in the summer of 2020/2021. Three guiding topics led the conversations: connections to blue space, female athlete experiences in surf lifesaving sport in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the significance of required volunteer patrol hours to athletes.

Thematic Analysis was used to analyse the data collected from interviews; three core themes were identified. The first theme explores participants' connections with blue coastal space, which was a key landscape for participants’ experiences in sport and leisure. The second theme identified highlights the complex and nuanced social culture of SLS sport. The final theme revealed the gender discourses around key topics such as embodiment, experiences of motherhood, inclusion, and marginalisation. This research explores the complex ways in which women navigate societal expectations around their bodies, their time, and what it means to be a female athlete.

year: 2022

title: Faith, politics and reconciliation: the Roman Catholic Church, New Zealand Maori and indigenous Australians

authors: O'Sullivan, Dominic

abstract: The Roman Catholic Church claims from Jesus Christ a mission to teach consistently religious ideals in accordance with its understanding of God’s constant truth. These ideals include the belief that human creation in the image and likeness of God establishes rights to dignity, to culture, to religious freedom, to self-determination and a share in the common good. These ideals form the basis of the unique contribution to human affairs which the Church claims it can make. Although these are religious goals for the Church, they require political realisation, which means that the Church cannot but be alert to the formation of alliances of common intellectual aspiration around concrete political issues so that secular expression and context can be given to the magisterium (the Church’s body of teaching). At the same time the Catholic hierarchy is conscious of a need for caution in how it responds to political events lest that religious mission be compromised by a perception of it as a partisan political lobby group, thus lessening its capacity to make its unique contribution to human affairs. 

The Second Vatican Council reaffirmed that the Church’s religious objectives do not exist in isolation from the political order because human law, which is developed through the secular political process, should conform to the religious natural law. Prior to the Council’s reaffirmation the Australian and New Zealand Churches generally, but not exclusively, understated or misunderstood this relationship and became impotent in challenging secular objectives inconsistent with religious aspiration. In contrast when the Church has accepted the relationship, as it has since the Second Vatican Council, it has positioned itself to identify opportunities to give secular context and expression to religious thought. Such opportunities increased from the 1960s onwards as political developments in both Australia and New Zealand saw a secular questioning of racism and a broadening of the parameters of secular political debate to the extent that established Catholic thought was shifted from the fringes to the widening mainstream of public opinion on indigenous policy. 

Although the Second Vatican Council required attention to the relationship between religious ends and political means, the changing secular environment was a significant factor in encouraging public advocacy in support of indigenous aspiration, which peaked in Australia in the 1990s with substantial Church interest in the native title debate and with the Church playing a leading role in the entrenchment of reconciliation - a religious concept - on the Australian political landscape. In New Zealand there has been an equal but less vocal interest in reconciliation because the political process itself established the Treaty of Waitangi as a political context for reconciliation and a context around which the Church has been able to focus its interest in the advancement of Maori aspiration. Yet, while the Treaty of Waitangi and the associated bicultural discourse have provided contexts for the expression of religious principle, they have also detracted from the Church’s use of its own magisterium as the moral authority for the articulation of its aspirations for Maori.

text: Faith, politics and reconciliation: the Roman Catholic Church, New Zealand Maori and indigenous Australians The Roman Catholic Church claims from Jesus Christ a mission to teach consistently religious ideals in accordance with its understanding of God’s constant truth. These ideals include the belief that human creation in the image and likeness of God establishes rights to dignity, to culture, to religious freedom, to self-determination and a share in the common good. These ideals form the basis of the unique contribution to human affairs which the Church claims it can make. Although these are religious goals for the Church, they require political realisation, which means that the Church cannot but be alert to the formation of alliances of common intellectual aspiration around concrete political issues so that secular expression and context can be given to the magisterium (the Church’s body of teaching). At the same time the Catholic hierarchy is conscious of a need for caution in how it responds to political events lest that religious mission be compromised by a perception of it as a partisan political lobby group, thus lessening its capacity to make its unique contribution to human affairs. 

The Second Vatican Council reaffirmed that the Church’s religious objectives do not exist in isolation from the political order because human law, which is developed through the secular political process, should conform to the religious natural law. Prior to the Council’s reaffirmation the Australian and New Zealand Churches generally, but not exclusively, understated or misunderstood this relationship and became impotent in challenging secular objectives inconsistent with religious aspiration. In contrast when the Church has accepted the relationship, as it has since the Second Vatican Council, it has positioned itself to identify opportunities to give secular context and expression to religious thought. Such opportunities increased from the 1960s onwards as political developments in both Australia and New Zealand saw a secular questioning of racism and a broadening of the parameters of secular political debate to the extent that established Catholic thought was shifted from the fringes to the widening mainstream of public opinion on indigenous policy. 

Although the Second Vatican Council required attention to the relationship between religious ends and political means, the changing secular environment was a significant factor in encouraging public advocacy in support of indigenous aspiration, which peaked in Australia in the 1990s with substantial Church interest in the native title debate and with the Church playing a leading role in the entrenchment of reconciliation - a religious concept - on the Australian political landscape. In New Zealand there has been an equal but less vocal interest in reconciliation because the political process itself established the Treaty of Waitangi as a political context for reconciliation and a context around which the Church has been able to focus its interest in the advancement of Maori aspiration. Yet, while the Treaty of Waitangi and the associated bicultural discourse have provided contexts for the expression of religious principle, they have also detracted from the Church’s use of its own magisterium as the moral authority for the articulation of its aspirations for Maori.

year: 2003