Sociology

This thesis puts forth an ethnographic, contextual social constructionist account of the non-mainstream body manipulations practiced at the annual Body & Soul body modification event in Western Canada. The radical practices at this event include sewing limes and other items to one’s body, flesh hook pulling, and/or receiving “third eye” piercings and cheek skewers; thus, it constitutes an example of extreme deviance subject to negative reactions from outsiders. This research assumes that meaning is discursively and symbolically constituted by people via an active process of claimsmaking wherein competition for definitional control of reality ensues. From a qualitative stance, data were derived from a combination of participant observation fieldwork at Body & Soul and subsequent in-depth interviews with participants. The results demonstrate a trend in the (counter)claimsmaking activity of practitioners of this extreme form of body modification wherein paradoxically the nature of their deviance is reconstructed and aligned with conformist goals via discursive, corporal, and symbolic claims that simultaneously offer an implicit critique of mainstream Western culture. The results are interpreted as part of a discursive competition for definitional control of extreme body modification, strategy in the negotiation and management of a stigmatized identity, means of implicit social criticism, and an unconventional expression of conventional values.

This dissertation presents the results of in-depth qualitative interviews with twenty-three formerly imprisoned men regarding their lived experience with prison conflict and the pain of incarceration. The results suggest that prison is a gendered ‘total institution’ (Goffman 1961). The pains that men experience in prison are uniquely gendered in that the deprivations imposed by incarceration– deprivation of autonomy, liberty, goods and services, heterosexual sex, and security (Sykes 1958) – in the reverse, define idealized masculinity as it is currently socially constructed: self-reliance, independence, toughness or invulnerability, material and economic success, and heterosexual prowess. From these shared deprivations emerges a gendered code of conduct that perpetuates a hierarchy among incarcerated men by constructing violent masculinity as a subcultural norm. The results suggest that the gender code in prison represents a set of rules that create opportunities for men to police each other’s gender performance and make claims to masculine statuses. Because status is inextricably tied to survival in this context, many men feel pressured to perform violent masculinities in prison despite privately subscribing to a non-violent sense of self-concept. The results suggest that violence is an expressive and instrumental resource for men in prison. A gender theory of prison violence, methodological findings, theoretical implications, ethical considerations and the short and long term aftermath of violent prison conflict are discussed.

This thesis provides an account of Quaker service work for peace and social justice in the Canadian context, drawing from life history interviews gathered during attendance at Canadian Yearly Meeting and Canadian Friends Service Committee meetings. Interviews explored each individual's involvement in peace and social justice within the context of their Quaker spirituality. The analysis of the interviews emphasizes that religion is woven into each person's life over time and through experiences. Further, because Quaker spirituality emphasizes that each person has the capacity to commune with the Divine on an individual basis, the nature of religious experience will differ. This problematizes the notion that religiously-based service for peace and social justice derives from one type of religious experience. Instead, this research shows how, for Quakers, involvement in peace and social justice is intimately connected to personal experiences of the Divine, which are both fostered and tempered by their spiritual community.

This thesis examines the place of the oral contraceptive pill within the context of girls as subjects in contemporary Canadian society. In many ways, discourses that associate pill use with choice, reproductive rights and increased control over the body for women are still prevalent today. Yet, there is an increased emphasis placed on autonomy, self-realization and empowerment, as well as the life-style benefits of the pill; further, young women, not women generally, are the target of campaigns that seek to encourage pill use. In attempting to examine the discourses that constitute young women as subjects on the pill, I have brought together interviews with young women currently taking it and texts from the print news media, pharmaceutical advertising and public health communications. This thesis contributes to Foucault’s later work on ethics and care of the self and practices of freedom, which examines how government of the self occurs within the context of relationships with others. However, through engaging in a dialogue with post-structural feminist accounts of gender and the body, feminist studies of science and technology and recent work on emotional regulation and emotion management, I consider the particular characteristics of subjects and the way that work on the self occurs on an ongoing basis in daily life. In this thesis I argue that young women are actively engaged in constituting ethical conduct, while at the same time the conduct of young women is shaped by various pill discourses. As such, in this thesis, I do not determine whether young women should or should not use the pill, nor do I establish the degree to which it enables or limits choice, reproductive rights and freedom. Instead, I am interested in how tensions surrounding the pill produce ethical dilemmas that young women navigate on an ongoing basis.

Over the past decade, several public reports and discussions have exposed the relationship between secularism and equality between women and men. In many instances, gender equality seems to be considered only in a secular context. Recent public debates on religion and diversity in Quebec illustrate how secularism and equality for women are paralleled. In this article we examine how the notion of gender equality is manifested in some of the briefs submitted before the Bouchard- Taylor Commission, in the report of the commissioners, and in subsequent public discussions conducted on the subject. We then explore the ways in which gender equality has emerged as the central theme of the briefs submitted to the National Assembly of Quebec on the occasion of the debate on the Quebec Charter of Values. Our analysis reveals that both religious and non-religious women are imagined to be in need of protection: religious women because they are assumed to have no agency and non-religious women because they should not be exposed to religious dogma. Both positions, we argue represent the continuation of a patriarchal approach that refutes a woman's ability to act of her own volition. Further, we challenge the idea that gender equality is the property and domain of laïcité, which is itself implicated in patriarchy and invested in the inequality of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Abstract (French):

This dissertation traces the rise and decline of Ontario’s workplace pension system that has resulted with growing emphasis on Canada’s public pension system, focusing on the postwar period to 2016. Since the mid-1980s, workplace pension coverage in Ontario and across Canada has been decreasing, calling into question the ability of this system to provide adequate retirement income for future workers. Currently, large private and public sector employers such as Air Canada, General Motors Canada and Canada Post are seeking to replace secure defined benefit plans with less secure defined contribution plans. Given these trends, policymakers at the provincial and federal levels have attempted to remedy the insecurity produced by diminishing coverage rates. Using Ontario as a case study to examine Canada’s retirement income system, this dissertation asks: Why has the risk of saving for retirement shifted, and what factors have driven this? Drawing from 22 semi-structure interviews with pension professionals, descriptive statistics, and Hansard Parliamentary transcriptions, several findings are established. First, although risk has been increasingly individualized since the 1990s, there is a limit to how much risk workers are willing to accept before political coalitions form to demand government play a larger role in establishing retirement income security. Risk transfer is thus contingent on union power, retiree activism, business lobbying, and the ideological position of governing parties. Second, the rise of individualized risk is generating new provincial/federal political dynamics in the field of pension policy, in which the failure of Canada’s workplace pension systems is impacting the welfare state politics of Canada, pointing to the emergence of a new period of pension politics. This finding leads to the conclusion that in the field of pension policy in Canada, the assertion by risk theorists that globalizing forces are transforming the welfare/citizenship nexus away from a model premised on risk sharing to one in which the state must facilitate the needs of rational, risk taking citizens does not adequately describe recent trends in Canadian pension policymaking.