This thesis draws on queer theory, media representation, intersectionality and news values to conduct a combined queerfeminist visual and critical discourse analysis examining how representation of same-sex attraction and queer relationships in British teen television—and the media’s reaction to them—has changed between 1994 and 2019.  The queerfeminist visual analysis compares two scenes featuring same-sex attraction between male teenagers in two TV shows: Byker Grove (1989-2006), which featured a chaste but angrily rejected kiss in 1994 and Sex Education (2019-2023), which featured an unseen but implicitly enjoyed blow job in 2019. The Byker Grove scene was the first gay kiss on British children’s television. Sex Education has been praised for its diverse LGBTQ+ cast and storylines. Two series are thus valuable bookends for this quarter-century-spanning but limited comparative study. Supported by a brief content analysis of national and local press coverage of Byker Grove from 1994 and online coverage of Sex Education on the selected newspapers’ websites, the queerfeminist critical discourse analysis compares four news items reporting on each TV show in contrasting British newspapers: populist “red top” The Sun and liberal “quality” paper The Guardian.  The combined study finds that 1) there are visual similarities in the framing of each scene but significant differences in narratives and messaging, especially when decoded by different audiences, and 2) the social discourse has shifted significantly from one of outright opposition to invisibilisation on the political right and from silence to praise on the left.  The thesis fills a gap in queer television studies scholarship that has mostly overlooked British teen/children’s television in favour of American TV shows and makes recommendations for further research, particularly in the fields of audience studies and social sexual script theory with a focus on LGBTQ+ teen and adult viewers.

This thesis explores the intricate interplay of fatness and queerness, as navigated by Greek individuals. Employing a qualitative approach and thematic analysis, the study aims to unfold the experiences, challenges, and resilience. To do so it is informed by queer theory, as well as Michel Foucault’s concept of the Panopticon and Judith Butler’s concept of performativity. Ethical considerations, the application of queer phenomenology, and an awareness of positionality guide the study to ensure a compassionate and empathetic examination of these experiences. The findings reveal the pervasive societal narratives on fatness and queerness and the significant role of self-identification, aiming to contribute to the broader discourse on body image, self-identity, and societal expectations.

Thesis advisor: M. Shawn Copeland / Thesis advisor: Amy Hollywood / This dissertation offers a constructive theological reflection on transformational anger. It proposes two theories of transformational anger that aim to contribute to the alleviation of suffering in marginalized communities, especially those marginalized by sex, sexuality and gender. First it proposes a theory of the transformational power of anger drawn from the work of Judith Butler; second, it demonstrates that there is also a theory concerning the transformational anger of the meditative body in the work of Julian of Norwich. While Julian's and Butler's theories have distinct merits, I fuse the two in order to propose a third theory of transformational anger that integrates Butler's theories with Julian's meditative training of the mind and body. Chapters 1 through 3 investigate the work of Judith Butler to show how she articulates new relationships between anger and subjectivity, ones that alleviate suffering. Chapter 1 outlines several important concepts as background for Butler's theories of anger. These include her ideas about gender binaries, genealogy, the materialization of reason, and scenography. Butler shows that a series of binaries--which may seem at first sight unrelated to gender--establish the cultural acceptance of inequality. Matter and Reason prove to be especially important among those binaries. They function like a root system that predetermines the shapes of the leaves that gender will take. Consequently, the investigation of those binaries is a radical investigation into gender. Chapters 2 and 3 explain how the root system of binaries moves into psychic life through a consideration of Butler's account of melancholic anger and her ethics of survival. These investigations show that although people feel anger towards the demands of this root system, Western culture provides no outlet for their expression, which causes them to psychically redirect that hostility inwards as self-punishment. I then propose a theory of anger and its role in the alleviation of suffering by introducing a new category--transformational anger--that is not present in Butler's account of melancholy, but that takes its direction from her account. In my account of transformational anger I suggest a role for public mourning of the loss of fluid relationships, those that would operate outside of the demand for rigidly opposed ideals of masculinity and femininity. Mourning loosens the rigidity of internalized anger. This results in a more fluid and less violent relationship between parts of the self. Applied to communal dynamics, public mourning creates more fluid and less violent relationships between classes of bodies that are marked by masculinity and femininity, and hence a method of survival for those bodies most vulnerable to violence. The second part of the dissertation applies the theory of transformational anger to a reading of Julian of Norwich's A Revelation of Love. In chapters four through seven Butler's lens reveals the previously unexamined role of anger in Julian's text. It allows us to see that Julian's project is systematically directed by her scandalized grief: she is scandalized and grieved that she feels sensitivity to divine and human suffering, but that the all-powerful deity's failure to prevent suffering shows that he does not feel sensitivity to her human suffering. She therefore questions whether the deity is responsible for suffering. While Julian initially rejects her sense of scandal and outrage as sinful, thinking about Julian together with Butler's method of genealogy enables us to see that Julian's anger is at work throughout A Revelation and its insistent return to her experience of outrage at God's seeming indifference to human suffering. As Julian repeatedly returns to her own feeling of outrage, she gradually converts the role of her scandal from a sinful act into the guiding message of her theology. Through these returns she progressively revises the root system of traditional Western binaries that would exclude her anger towards the deity as unintelligible. Julian's reiterations of outrage model an extensive training of awareness and bodily sensation that seek out tensions in her background thoughts and feelings, which are at odds with each other about basic human categories. Through her mature meditative awareness she sees the inconsistency of the Western binaries that frame categories of meaning; this then allows her to revise these binaries and to replace them with new theological ideas. Because these new ideas erode authoritative binaries in the Western imaginary, they also oppose common church teachings about the responsibilities that the deity and human beings hold for suffering, replacing traditional sources of authority with new ones that encourage her anger rather than exclude it. This dissertation therefore emphasizes more than previous scholarship the shifts in sources of authority that occur across Julian's Revelation. Her revision of binaries, her new theological ideas, and her changing patterns in relation to authority model a melancholic anger that turns into transformational anger enabled by the meditative body. Butler's framework reveals that Julian's idea of mother Jesus plays two key roles in the transformational anger at work in the Showings. According to the first role, Julian calls the motion of this transformational anger mother Jesus--a term that is shown to be a practice rather than a personified ideal. Further, reading Julian against the framework provided by Butler suggests that before Julian introduces the idea of mother Jesus late in the text, the revisions that she previously made to Western binaries have already evacuated the feminine and the masculine of their usual meanings. As a result, mother Jesus occupies a third position to which the Western imaginary cannot easily apply categories of femininity or masculinity. According to the second role, mother Jesus is a practice that answers Julian's anger towards the unequal sensitivity that she perceives between divine and human sensitivity to suffering. The dissertation suggests that in this role Julian uses aspects of motherhood as an ideal in the Western imaginary to represent sin or debt. She provisionally uses the maternal ideal in order to erode the boundary between blameworthy human beings and the innocent deity. Motherhood serves to transfer responsibility for suffering from human beings to the deity in the form of divine motherhood. As a result, mother Jesus may owe human beings salvation, for in the Western imaginary femininity is an imperfection, and so may be considered a debt. Through these investigations I show that Butler and Julian use transformational anger through different skill sets to expose the arbitrary nature of binary social ideals. I propose their combination as a contribution to studies in Butler and in Julian as well as to the theologies of marginalization, especially in relation to sex, sexuality and gender, that those two may inform. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

This study investigates the transitioning terms of lesbian visibility and identity in the distinctive spatio-temporal context of Northampton, Massachusetts in the 1980s. Drawing on interviews with a diversified sampling of lesbian-, bisexual-, and queeridentified participants, I consider the coalescing of two lesbian communal formations – a social community and a social audience – as mediating sites for the interrelations between subculture and dominant culture. Informed by the literatures and methods of queer theory, cultural studies, and feminist film criticism, I examine the 1980s queer crossover from lesbian subcultural separatism to mitigated assimilation by the end of the decade. The 1980s crossover was a constellation of interlocking factors manifested through the entrance into national visibility of gay liberatory and feminist politics, the incorporation of overt lesbian sexuality into Hollywood and independent films, and the surfacing of the conservative and feminist backlashes alongside “Reaganomics.” These converged in an anti-lesbian backlash produced in Northampton in the 1980s through the interrelations between the rapid revitalization of the city’s downtown and the increasing visibility and concentration of the lesbian population. The emergence into public visibility of a lesbian social community and a lesbian social audience in 1980s Northampton prefigured questions about the desirability of a goal of cultural assimilation for lesbian and gay people along with concerns about the role of consumption in the assimilative process that were to become important to LGBT politics in the 1990s and 2000s. In this project, I consider the multidimensional and conflictual aspects of assimilation as well as the gender-specificities of lesbian film consumption and the lesbian Sex Wars as part of the crossover from subcultural separatism to mitigated assimilation. In spite of the strides in the acceptance of the lesbian population in Northampton in the 1980s, I argue that such changes were laden with tensions negotiated through the contradictions between appearances of tolerance and acceptance versus experiences of discrimination and violence. The constellation of factors that manifested in the 1980s queer crossover provided symbolic materials not only for a realignment of lesbian subjectivity, but also for a realignment of heterosexual subjectivity.

Denna studie har behandlat lärares val av läromedel när det kommer till normkritiskt tänkande kring heteronormen. Syftet med studien har varit att undersöka hur lärare inom grundskolan arbetar normkritiskt kring heteronormen genom valet av läromedel och dess användning. Empirin har insamlats genom semistrukturerade intervjuer av fyra lärare inom grundskolan. Intervjuerna har sedan transkriberats, analyserats och tematiserats. Resultatet som framkom analyserades sedan utifrån bakgrund, tidigare forskning och studiens teoretiska utgångspunkt. Bakgrunden i denna studie handlar om lärares val av läromedel, samt Lgr22s revidering av ämnet som numera heter sexualitet, samtycke och relationer. Under tidigare forskning har studien undersökt läromedel ur ett historiskt perspektiv, läromedlens användning och utsträckningsområde samt lärares prioriteringar i val av läromedel. Den teoretiska utgångspunkt som denna studie vilar på är Queerteori.  Resultatet visar att lärare prioriterar att materialet uppfyller läroplanens mål, att fakta i materialet stämmer, att innehållet väcker intresse hos eleverna samt att materialet förhåller sig till värdegrundsarbete. Dessa faktorer vägde tyngre än det normkritiska perspektivet kring heteronormen i valet av läromedel. Resultatet visar även att lärarna gör egna anpassningar, bland annat genom att lyfta egna normbrytande exempel, för att göra undervisningen mer normkritiskt kring heteronormen.

Denna kvalitativa översiktsstudie har som syfte att övergripande undersöka våld i nära relation när det kommer till samkönade par. Genom en narrativ syntes identifierades ett antal teman som analyserades med hjälp av ett Queerteoretiskt ramverk och med genusperspektivet i åtanke. Under analysen framgick att det fanns likheter med det våld som förekommer i heterosexuella relationernär det kommer till utsatthet, förlopp och våldets natur. Orsakerna till våld och möjligheten till att söka stöd och hjälp kompliceras dock till följd av heteronormativa ideal, där extern homofobi och fördomar internaliseras och leder till spänningar och våld i relationen. Vidare upplevde deltagarna att den allmänna uppfattningen om vem som är offer och förövare inte passar in på verkliga narrativet och att organisationer som arbetar med våldsfrågor saknar kunskap om hbtq- personers specifika behov. HBTQ-personer är en bred och svår målgrupp att fånga in när det kommer till våld i nära relation vilket genomsyrar forskningen i stort såväl som den här studien. / The purpose of this qualitative overview study is to examine overall violence in close relationships when it comes to same-sex couples. Through a narrative synthesis, a number of themes were identified that were analyzed using a Queer theoretical framework and with the gender perspective in mind. The analysis showed that there were similarities with the violence that occurs in heterosexual relationships when it comes to vulnerability, course and the nature of violence. However, the causes of violence and the ability to seek support and help are complicated by heteronormative ideals, where external homophobia and prejudice are internalized and lead to tensions and violence in the relationship. Furthermore, the participants experienced that the general perception of who are the victims and perpetrators does not fit into the real narrative and that organizations that work with issues of violence lack knowledge about the specific needs of LGBTQ people.

Sexual abuse is increasingly covered in mainstream public media in Kenyan magazines.This thesis examines the perception of victims of sexual abuse in public opinion through the lens of intersectional and queer theory. This study aims to consider how are the victims of sexual abuse presented in the local mainstream media, using examples from articles from The Star Magazine, and what is missing in discussions around gender-based violence? The thesis also concluded that silence around sexuality education impacts the depiction of sexual abuse and its victims.

The aim of this paper is to examine whether or not current textbooks in social sciences for the Swedish Gymnasium follow the criteria set up in the new subject area Sexuality, consent, and relationships (Sexualitet, samtycke och relationer), which was brought into the current curriculum for the Swedish Gymnasium at the start of the autumn semester 2022. The study is performed by examining what content related to Sexuality, consent, and relationships is presented in the textbooks, in what way, which discourses are influencing the books, and what effect this can have on the socio-cultural practice in the form of consequences for the teaching process. The paper uses a combination of gender and queer theory, together with discourse theory as a foundation to interpret both the textbooks and the criteria of the curriculum. The used method is an adaptation of Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis, as modified by textbook researcher Lina Spjut. The material consists of three social sciences textbooks made for the class Samhällskunskap 1b at the Swedish Gymnasium School level.  The analysis revealed that two of the textbooks still contained and reproduced harmful heteronormative and binary norms, and lacked the norm-critical thinking required by the updated curriculum, showing influence of risk-emphasized silence discourse with elements of tolerance discourse. The third book was found to be more aligned with the criteria of the curriculum, having a high degree of norm-critical thinking, showing influence of a balanced-emphasized norm-critical discourse. All books were however lacking specific elements required that were added to the new curriculum, such as critical approach to pornography and information about honour-related violence and oppression.

I den här uppsatsen görs en postkolonial, feministteologisk och konstruktivistisk analys av det ursäktstal Svenska kyrkan framför till det samiska folket hösten 2021. Med hjälp av den postkoloniala feministteologen Kwok Pui-lan och den kontextuella teologen Marcella Althaus-Reid närmar sig uppsatsen frågan om det i ursäktstalet finns uttryck för koloniala tendenser eller möjliga befrielser från sådana. Analyses leder till ett utforskande av dynamiken mellan föreställningar om kön, sexualitet, den Andre och naturem, där dessa visar sig vara tätt sammanvävda i en dualistisk ontologi konkretiserad i heterosexuella antaganden. För att bli fri från koloniala tendenser krävs de gamla heterosexuella antagandenas undergång. Bara i den ömsesidiga enhetens harmoni skapas nytt liv.

My approach in this exploratory thesis is to lay the foundation for the development of pastoral care for a new time and a new social situation, and to build a foundation for later studies to be able to apply existential queer theological perspectives to the pastoral care work within the Church of Sweden. The work is thus hypoyhesisgenerating in order to develop a method. This is done on the basis of a literature review. By bringing together two theoretical areas, a foundation is created for the development with in the next stage of a new model and tools that improve practical interventions in theological contexts, and that provide new approaches to pastoral care when meeting confidants suffering from depression. athe diagnosis of depression is increasing drastically and affects the world health situation at large. We live in a secular/post-secualr age, when neo-liberalism with its system measures everything in terms of efficiency, productivity and profit. Existential perspectives are generally missing in the National Board of Health and Welfare´s guidelines regarding health today, and the question is what the transformative approach of existential queer theology can contribute to the theological and pastoral care work/meeting with depressed people. My theory is that these perspectives open new avenues for pastoral care in a theological context to contribute to personal health. It is about laying the faoundation for the development of pastoral care with a transformative perspective, for a new time and a new situation. The results and conclusions of the study will be used to develop practice in future research.