http://hdl.handle.net/10464/2358 2013-05-22T19:35:48Z 2013-05-22T19:35:48Z Comfort, Laura. http://hdl.handle.net/10464/1497 2011-04-21T11:04:00Z 2009-06-01T19:30:25Z

Will the "fight" ever end? : a critical reading of the metaphors and discourses that construct HIV/AIDS in an African context Comfort, Laura. In this thesis, I critically examine the discourses that inform how we conceptualise HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa as they are produced in a sample of Canadian news articles, two nonfiction texts - Stephanie Nolen's 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa and Jonathan Morgan and the Bambanani Women's Group's Long Life ... Positive HIV Stories - as well as two literary texts - John Le Carre's popular fiction novel The Constant Gardener and an anthology of stories and poems from Southern Africa titled Nobody Ever Said AIDS, compiled and edited by Nobantu Rasebotsa, Meg Samuelson and Kylie Thomas. Paying particular attention to the role of metaphor in discursive formation, I have found that military metaphors, usually used in conjunction with biomedical discourses, continue to dominate what is said about HIV/AIDS. However, the use of military metaphors to conceptualise HIV/AIDS contributes to stigma and limits the effectiveness of responses to the pandemic. I argue that accessing alternative metaphors and discourses, such as biopsychosocial discourse, can lead to a more layered - and more beneficial - conceptualisation of HIV/AIDS, encouraging a more active response to the pandemic.

2009-06-01T19:30:25Z Cormier, Andre. http://hdl.handle.net/10464/1392 2011-04-21T10:58:13Z 2007-05-21T13:54:42Z

Disabled legislators : disability and Irish colonial pathology in James Joyce's Ulysses Cormier, Andre. Why are there so many disabled characters in James Joyce's Ulysses? "Disabled Legislators" seeks to answer this question by exploring the variety and depth of disability's presence in Joyce's novel. This consideration also recognizes the unique place disability finds within what Lennard Davis calls "the roster of the disenfranchised" in order to define Joyce as possessing a "disability consciousness;" that is, an empathetic understanding (given his own eye troubles) of the damaged lives of the disabled, the stigmatization of the disabled condition, and the appropriation of disabled representations by literary works reinforcing normalcy. The analysis of four characters (Gerty MacDowell, the blind stripling, the onelegged sailor, and Stephen Dedalus) treats disability as a singular self-concept, while still making necessary associations to comparably created marginal identities-predominantly the colonial Other. This effort reevaluates how Ulysses operates in opposition to liberal Victorian paradigms, highlighting disability's connections to issues of gender, intolerance, self-identification and definition.

2007-05-21T13:54:42Z