<p>This study focuses on single peoples construction of their lifes in relation to normative heterosexual coupledom. It is based on five interviews made with single women and men at the age of 24 to 51 who live by themselves. The queer theory which puts the heteronormativity in question is used as a theoretical framework. Discourse psychology functions as an analytic approach. It focuses on the use of language in the construction of reality in a world of determinant discourses. The thesis shows how the life of singles is made understandable where the interviewee´s constructs their reality by either creating their own life's as possible ways of living and distance themselves from coupledom or by striving for the twosome way of living. This is done by a construction of gender and age performance as different in the single and the twosome life. It also shows paradoxes where discourses of advantage independence meet discourses that construct twosome relationships as the only place for the development of real masculinity or of a special form of preferable femininity. The construction of gender and age as performed different in the single and the couple life provides an understanding of the interviewee's creation of self-image in relation to normative heterosexual coupledom.</p>

Diss. Stockholm : Kungliga tekniska högskolan, 2007.

Recent queer scholarship challenges the academy’s longstanding urban and adult oriented trajectory, pointing to the way such studies ignore rural and heartland regions of the country as well as the experiences of youth. In this thesis, I craft a limited ethnographic methodological approach together with a textual analysis of The Oprah Winfrey Show to deliver portraits of gay men living in various rural or heartland areas who use their television sets to encounter and identify with LGBTQ people across the nation. The overarching aim of this project is to explore the ways in which religion, rurality, and Oprah coalesce in the process of identity creation to form rural gay men’s conceptual selves and how they are then informed by that identity formation. I will focus my textual analyses through the frames of six of Oprah Winfrey’s “ultimate viewers” to elucidate how they receive and interact with her star text, how they use television sets in the public rooms of their homes to create boundary public spheres, and how they are impacted by the show’s various uses of the coming out paradigm. In so doing, this thesis seeks to contribute to the scholarship of rural queer studies, television studies, and Oprah studies. / text

There is an awareness of the importance of gender equality in most western societies, both at the political level and in everyday life. In academia, for instance, gender is nowadays a scientific field which indicates that there is a lot of knowledge about the subject. What we do not have much knowledge about is whether gender knowledge leads to changes in gender relations in practice. The aim of this study is to explore how gender scholars relate to using – practicing – gender knowledge. Key issues in this study are how gender scholars construct gender, how they practice gender theoretical knowledge, and their reflections of gender boundaries.             Theoretically, this study is mainly based on Sara Ahmed’s perspective on gender. The main finding of the study is that despite gender knowledge gender scholars tend to reproduce traditional gender orders. By identifying concepts such as reflected and unreflected masculinity/femininity, different ideals of masculinity/femininity are made visible. There seems to be an ideal among gender scholars to practice their gender knowledge. This ideal is practiced among “gender scholar women” by doing reflected masculinity and reflected femininity. Among “gender scholar men”, however, the ideal to practice gender knowledge by doing unreflected masculinity and reflected femininity seems to be a taboo at the same time. For men, it seems important to mark a distance to a certain type of femininity and to maintain the heterosexual – straight – line. For women, it seems desirable both to distance themselves from a certain type of masculinity and femininity and thereby follow alternative – queer – lines. / Stereotypa föreställningar om kön lever vidare i dagens samhälle, trots att det finns en medvetenhet om vikten av jämställdhet på politisk nivå och i vardagslivet. Det bedrivs även forskning om genusfrågor inom akademin. Syftet med uppsatsen är att undersöka hur genusvetare förhåller sig till att använda – praktisera – genuskunskap. Centrala frågeställningar i uppsatsen är hur genusvetare ser på kön, hur de praktiserar genusteoretisk kunskap och vilka begränsningar och möjligheter som kommer till uttryck i intervjuerna.           Teoretiskt utgår uppsatsen huvudsakligen från Sara Ahmeds perspektiv på kön. Uppsatsens viktigaste resultat är att även genusvetare som har gedigen teoretisk kunskap tenderar att reproducera maktordningar om genus. Genom att identifiera begrepp som reflekterad och oreflekterad manlighet/kvinnlighet synliggörs olika ideal för manlighet och kvinnlighet. Det framstår vara ett ideal för genusvetarna att praktisera genuskunskap. För ”genusvetarkvinnorna” praktiseras idealet genom att använda reflekterad manlighet och reflekterad kvinnlighet. För ”genusvetarmännen” är idealet att praktisera oreflekterad manlighet och reflekterad kvinnlighet samtidigt tabu. För männens del verkar det viktigt att markera avstånd till en viss typ av kvinnlighet och upprätthålla den heterosexuella – straighta – linjen. För kvinnorna framstår det eftersträvansvärt att både ta avstånd från en viss typ av manlighet respektive kvinnlighet och följa alternativa – queera – linjer.

Abstract Title: Dragshow on the seven seas Number of pages: 51 (56 including enclosures) Author: Therése Plastrougi Tutor: Ylva Ekström Course: Media and Communication Studies C Period: Fall 2007 University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala University Purpose/Aim: My main purpose with this paper is 1) to study how film as a media can subvert traditional gender constructions and 2) study the character of Elizabeth Swann in the trilogy Pirates of the Caribbean through four dimensions; Gender performance, Class, Desire and Power. Material/Method: My main material is the trilogy Pirates of the Caribbean. I have studied Elizabeth’s character based on semiotic and narratological methods. Main results: Film as a media possesses the full potential to change traditional gender roles, but the full subversion is denied due to the heterosexual matrix. Elizabeth’s character almost completes her subversive journey throughout the trilogy, but since she too is a victim of the heterosexual matrix, a full subversion is not possible. Key words: gender performance, class, desire, power, sex/gender, subversion, narratologic, semiotic, queer, feminism, pirates of the caribbean, intersectionality, parody

Abstract Title: Who are you? Who am I? – Charades in the mediated world of today. A study of the construction of identity at Facebook. (Vem är du? Vem är jag? – Charader i dagens medierade värld. En studie av identitetskonstruktionen på Facebook.) Number of pages: 58 (66 including enclosures.) Author: Mathilda Wahlund Tutor: Ylva Ekström Course: Media and Communication Studies C Period: Fall 2007 University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala University. Purpose/Aim: The aim is to study how people construct their own identities today. I want to understand and study how such a central thing as identity is being constructed, in a place which offers members to freely present themselves, the community Facebook. Material/Method: Through Internet based interviews and observations I approach the inner worlds of my informants. Using semiotics I can detect underlying meanings. My theoretical base consists of modernist and postmodernist perspectives among others. Gidden’s theory of the self narrative, Butler’s queer theory, the theory of articulation represented by Stuart Hall, Gauntlett’s model of objects and intersectionality represented by Nina Lykke among others. Main results: The main result is that people do not actively construct identity in one way on the Internet. They do it in several ways, deliberately and non deliberately. Identity construction today is very fragmented, like the world we live in. People choose their own ways to present themselves, and the ways they do it vary. But people are often aware of the fact that they do present themselves, they’ve just not been reflecting over who they present. Key words: Identity, the self, the subject, construction of identity, modernity, postmodernity, Facebook, Giddens, Butler, queer theory, articulation, the model of objects, intersectionality, interviews, observation, semiotics.

The decades after World War II were a time of growth and change for queer people across the country. Many chose to move to major metropolitan centers in order to pursue a life of openness and be part of queer communities. However, those people only account for part of the story of queer history. Other queer people chose to stay in small towns and create their own queer spaces for socializing and community building. The Gulf Coast of Florida is a place where queer people chose to create queer community where they lived through such actions as private house parties and opening bars. The unique place of the Gulf Coast as a tourist destination allowed queer people to build and join communication networks that furthered the growth of a sense of community leading ultimately to the founding of Bay AIDS Services and Information Coalition in 1989.

No description available.

When writing about Junot Díaz’s Drown (1996) Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) and This is How You Lose Her (2012), I focus on the iterations of masculinity depicted and embodied by Yunior de las Casas, the primary narrator of this collection. I explore the links between diaspora, hybridity, masculinity, and trauma, arguing that both socio-historical and personal traumatic experience reverberates through the psyches and bodies of Díaz’s characters. I demonstrate the relationship between Yunior’s navigation of the United States and the Dominican Republic and his ever-shifting sexuality, self-presentation, and gender identity. The physical and discursive spaces he must traverse contain multiple, contradictory narratives about how to be a man; within Díaz’s collection, we witness Yunior’s coming-to-terms with the way that these stories of masculinity are rendered dysfunctional and incoherent. Accordingly, Yunior uses the hegemonic discourses of masculinity as a way to cloak his own queer difference, ambivalently interacting and identifying with characters marked as Other. In this analysis, I read Yunior’s masculinity as reactionary to the expectations of Domincan society, and also explore how he shaped by migration, trauma, and unspeakable queer desire.

Esta tesis doctoral analiza la representación de la sexualidad disidente en las obras del alemán Ralf König y el español Eduardo Mendicutti. Utilizaré el término “sexualidades disidentes” para referirme a sexualidades y modelos de género no normativos, pensando la disidencia sexual en un sentido queer. La sección teórica que brindo a continuación fundamenta el trabajo realizado con la sexualidad y el género en esta tesis. Por tratarse de un tema con escasa tradición en nuestro país, la sección teórica traza una genealogía sistemática del estudio de las sexualidades disidentes en su vertiente cultural. Para el análisis de textos culturales realizado en las secciones restantes es necesaria la construcción de un acervo teórico que sustente, fundamente y dé a conocer las categorías con las que se realiza el mismo. La sección teórica se articula en función de un trabajo interdisciplinario que aborda las sexualidades disidentes en el marco alemán y el marco español, así como las especificidades propias de la historieta queer, la literatura en su cruce con las sexualidades disidentes y categorías de lo que ha sido denominado comparatística queer. A su vez, se presenta el trabajo con las sexualidades disidentes de forma genealógica, focalizando en los procesos sociohistóricos y los cambios políticos de las categorías de género y sexualidad. Por esa razón la fundamentación teórica comienza en el siglo XIX con algunas referencias mínimas al romanticismo alemán y la invención de la categoría de “homosexualidad” para trazar (de forma mínima) el recorrido de la sexualidad disidente hasta nuestros días. En particular, me interesa focalizar en el “momento queer”, ya que muchas de las herramientas de análisis de esta tesis provienen del pensamiento queer. En definitiva, trazar un escueto mapa genealógico de la sexualidad disidente permite comprender la ficcionalización de lo misma en la representación cultural y cómo los textos culturales (en este caso las obras de Ralf König y Eduardo Mendicutti) son ejemplos paradigmáticos de los recorridos sociopolíticos de las sexualidades disidentes desde principios de los años ochenta hasta los últimos años del siglo XXI. Respecto a la estructura de esta tesis, en primer lugar se ofrece una introducción teórica que traza un recorrido genealógico escueto sobre cuestiones vinculadas a las sexualidades disidentes en función del corpus analizado y desarrolla mínimamente algunos conceptos clave. En segundo lugar, prosigo con el trabajo analítico sobre el corpus de Ralf König en función de las categorías teóricas vinculadas al género y la sexualidad que se desarrollan brevemente en la introducción. En tercer lugar, se aborda el corpus de Eduardo Mendicutti con la misma perspectiva. En ambos casos se focaliza también en los contextos sociopolíticos vinculados a las políticas sexuales y el devenir del colectivo LGBTIQ en los respectivos espacios geopolíticos. Por último, se ofrecen las conclusiones, con consideraciones acerca del corpus trabajado y reflexiones sobre el uso teórico de las categorías propias de la sexualidad disidente.