Följande uppsats baseras på kvalitativa intervjuer med sex LSS-handläggare inom Försäkringskassan och på kommunal nivå med syfte att undersöka sexualitetens utrymme och uttryck inom myndighetsutövningen kring LSS och personlig assistans. Genom ett crip- och queerteoretiskt ramverk undersöker jag på vilka premisser assistansanvändares sexuella liv och subjektsskapande tas i beaktning och kan främjas inom LSS- utredningarna. Empirin visar att sexualitetens utrymme inom dessa utredningar är mycket begränsat, sett till både lagstiftningens utformning, innehållet i myndigheternas vägledande dokument och efterfrågan från individer att ta dessa frågor i beaktning. Handläggarna betraktar således sexualitetens utrymme inom LSS som en icke-fråga, trots att tidigare forskning visar på att det råder ett strukturellt förtryck där sexualiteten hos personer med normbrytande funktionalitet osynliggörs. Utrymmet begränsas vidare genom att om sexualiteten hos personer med normbrytande funktionsvariationer väl ska göras någorlunda begriplig så begränsas den till en heteronormativ och kognitivt normfungerande kontext. Handläggarna målar upp en bild av en sexuell hierarki där den sexualiteten hos personer med funktionsvariationer som är privat, heteronormativ och kognitivt medveten placeras högst upp, medan den som är offentlig, icke-heteronormativ och kognitivt funktionsvarierad placeras nederst. Den funktionsvarierade sexualitetens existens och möjligheter till att främjas sker således på helt andra premisser än den funktionsfullkomliges.

In Russia today, conservative views about gender are often promoted through reference to the past, to show that supposedly ‘traditional’ gender roles are intrinsic to Russian history. Frequently, this idea is upheld in scholarship. My work explores the historicity of commonly held assumptions about gender. This dissertation focusses on gender and sexuality in Russia from the sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries. It shows that ideas about what constituted a virtuous marriage were established by reference to ideas about brotherhood. Brotherhood here refers not to biological siblings, but to a church rite of ‘spiritual brotherhood’ known in Russian as bratotvorenie. This rite has not been studied in any depth before. Based on archival work, this dissertation offers a detailed account of the tradition in Russia until its ban in 1650, when it was prohibited by leading ecclesiastical figures for being too like marriage. One churchman complained: ‘The priest, joining together these two men, unites them in matrimony’. The dissertation shows that bratotvorenie was conceived of in premodern Russia as a form of same-sex union, and that it was through banning this tradition that churchmen came to express in a coherent way which kinds of partnership were legitimate and why. The first chapter challenges the idea that marriage was always a monogamous union between a man and a woman for the creation of children, an idea that is often encountered in academic literature on Russian marriage history. It shows that the church rite of marriage was edited in Russia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when ideas about the sacramental nature of marriage changed. The second chapter builds on these observations, suggesting that marriage and ‘spiritual brotherhood’ were understood as analogous in the premodern period. The final two chapters look at depictions of marriage and brotherhood in hagiography and iconography respectively. They focus on Petr and Fevroniia, the first married couple to be canonised in Russia in 1547. In 2008, their feast day was reworked into a state festival called the ‘Day of Family, Love and Fidelity’, now widely celebrated across Russia. Petr and Fevroniia have been cast as the patron saints of so-called ‘traditional moral-spiritual values’. This view is generally upheld in existent scholarship on the saints. This dissertation responds to the way the saints are being represented today, arguing that they were initially venerated for subverting normative ideas about gender and sexuality—that they were queer. What is more, their veneration paralleled the veneration of holy brothers. Their hagiography seems to have been based on the Life of a monastic brotherhood, and icons depicting Petr and Fevroniia standardly showed them in monastic robes. Focussing on marriage and brotherhood in premodern Russia, each chapter of this dissertation challenges a preconceived idea about the immutability of supposedly ‘traditional’ gender roles in Russian history.

Submitted by Filipe dos Santos (fsantos@pucsp.br) on 2016-11-16T11:49:30Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Mauricio Marques de Souza.pdf: 6380583 bytes, checksum: 2192847f498e7883d385c701de304d52 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-11-16T11:49:30Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Mauricio Marques de Souza.pdf: 6380583 bytes, checksum: 2192847f498e7883d385c701de304d52 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-09-23 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / This work is cast in the investigation of local discursive records produced by queer groups in Brazil, Argentina and the United States. Nevertheless, not limited to the analysis of graphic materials and productions of sexual dissidents, there are also jointly work being carried out in the researcher's body through the inventive production of a new way to experience their sexuality and their gender from two main axes: the trials being threshold life and art held in Rio de Janeiro together with the artist Anais-karenin, who re-dimensioned possible corporeality and gave birth to a new non-binary expression of sex / gender; and written works by combining the production of a field diary of my experiments with MTF process and a poetic production, culminating in the booklet entitled "Site" which is not only a fragment spread in this work, but the actual research work. Above all, my body is a fanzine (a collage, a mix of heterogeneous references): a body-zine / Essa dissertação se lança na investigação dos registros discursivos locais produzidos por grupos queer no Brasil, na Argentina e nos Estados Unidos. A despeito disso, não se restringindo à análise de materiais e produções gráficas de dissidentes sexuais, há também, em conjunto, um trabalho sendo realizado no próprio corpo do pesquisador por meio da produção inventiva de uma nova maneira de experimentar sua sexualidade e seu gênero a partir de dois eixos principais: experimentações no limiar ente arte e vida realizadas no Rio de Janeiro em conjunto com a artista Anais-karenin, que redimensionaram corporalidades possíveis e fizeram nascer uma nova expressão não-binária de sexo/gênero; e os trabalhos de escrita, combinando a produção de um diário de campo de minhas experimentações com a hormonização “feminilizante” e com os usos das camadas de tecidos, proposição de Anais-karenin, a uma produção poética, culminantes no livreto intitulado “Canteiro”, que não só é um fragmento espalhado nesse trabalho, mas o próprio trabalho de pesquisa, de forma que estudar fanzines sem produzi-los seria confirmar lógicas de pesquisa distanciadas que para mim não interessam. Sobretudo, meu corpo é um fanzine (uma colagem, uma mescla de referências heterogêneas); evidencio um corpo-zine

This dissertation employs both traditional and digital tools to analyze fictional texts through the converging lenses of narratology, queer theory, and trauma studies. I am invested specifically in the work fictional narratives perform within the current cultural context, which is itself problematized by our increasingly fractured media landscape. While most of the work on trauma and queerness examines the trauma that is often implicated in the experience of being queer, I take a different approach, investigating ways in which the experience of trauma is itself queer. Drawing on medical and psychiatric studies of post-traumatic stress disorder, I posit that the fragmented temporal and affective space of trauma is also the space of queerness. “Ring Around the Rosie” locates an intersection between Edelman’s anti-futurism and Muñoz’s utopian hope in the disavowal of the restrictive circularity of traumatic memory, and the subsequent embrace of Stockton’s concept of lateral growth. Written language and linear narrative inevitably fail to adequately reconstruct, convey, and process trauma because traumatic memories are formed in the part of the brain that functions outside of language and chronological time and relies instead on sensory experience. I confront this barrier through queer temporality and a form of destabilized communication that does not rely on such language alone. Since any true employment of the concept of the queer must itself perform queerness, I allow my analysis to develop in a manner as fragmented and multiplicitous as television programming itself, which includes an approach of critical closeness and an increasingly organizationally destabilized presentation of the argument. This project’s preoccupation with form stems, in part, from my desire to not only allow for but demand an affective and personal component to academic research and analysis. The supplementary digital module culminates this study of form through its online presentation that enacts the theories argued within it. Paradoxically, “Ring Around the Rosie” is unified through fragmentation: of traumatic memories, of queer temporality, and of viewer engagement with fictional texts. / 10000-01-01

The essay examines the presence of queer desires and characters in Tove Jansson's books about the Moomins, mainly with a focus on: Finn Family Moomintroll (Trollkarlens hatt, 1948), Moominsummer Madness (Farlig midsommar, 1954) and Tales from Moominvalley (Det osynliga barnet, 1962). These three books are examined one by one and in chronological order, so as to be able to find whether the presence and character of queer representation changes over time. The idea is that this work should fill a gap in the research by exploring norm defying sexuality, gender identity and gender expression, since the books about the Moomins previously have been analyzed through a heteronormative perspective. The result shows that the books frequently feature queer relationships and characters, but also that the nuclear family and heteronormative ideas are maintained and upheld by the Moomin family.

“Feeling Historical,” examines why history has played such a central role in the construction of queer identities by analyzing how same-sex desiring individuals, particularly elite white individuals, in the U.S. looked to history to construct and navigate their own sexual identities. My project begins in the late nineteenth-century U.S., when history took on new cultural significance in the United States. Americans, previously more preoccupied with the future than the past, became engrossed in finding truth in history and origins. Parallel to this preoccupation with the past was the emergence of modern notions of sexual identity and the rise of the new sexual science of “sexology.” For sexologists, same-sex desire was new, a product of modernity and degeneration in which the sexually deviant fell behind on the evolutionary ladder. “Feeling Historical” analyzes the cultural and racialized work of white queer individuals who pushed back against such pathologizing discourse, arguing that their sexual affinities were not something aberrant, connected to degenerate desires of the racial other. Instead, they positioned themselves as rooted in a complex whitewashed transnational and transhistorical past. Mobilizing the past to construct their present, these individuals often drew on orientalist histories of great ancient civilizations in which they believed same-sex desire was accepted and even celebrated. They did so to not only counter the homophobic violence they experienced in their own time but to also reclaim their privileged racial identities. Much cultural work went into the construction of such a queer history. Using an interdisciplinary framework linking history, memory studies, queer theory, performance studies, visual culture studies, and critical race studies, I examine how these individuals appropriated examples of same-sex desire in the history, literature, and art of Ancient Greece, Italy, and the Middle East with imperialist understandings of such cultures. I ask which histories they found useful, and how gender, race, class, and ethnicity informed their historical reclamations. Through acts of history writing, auto-biography, performance, sexual tourism, and the creation of queer archives, I argue that such same-sex desiring individuals used history to not only navigate their identities and carve out spaces in a hostile world where they could survive and even thrive, but also reclaim their racial privilege by fashioning a queer identity based on a past that positioned queerness as inherently white.

No description available.

Logo currently holds a self-described monopoly as the "Gay Channel for America." Logo stands alone as the single most concentrated national-level vehicle of LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered) visibility in the post millennial television era. The Logo Channel has reaped financial rewards from its strategy as a business entity, as LGBT American television viewers embraced its presence as a signifier to America that gays and lesbians have finally "made it". First, any claim to a monopoly deserves critical attention for its place in mainstream television, for its business practices, and for the power it holds in representing and targeting LGBT audiences. Second, Logo's construction of its audience is an extremely important window into current perceptions of LGBT identity, history, and progress. Third, Logo's ability to capitalize on gay and lesbian visibility in American culture and the rhetoric of "inclusiveness" are important historical and cultural moments to explore the political costs and benefits of these strategies-in business practices, programming content, and advertisements. In this study, I argue that Logo does not capitalize on its television presence to participate in LGBT political, economic, and social equality. Despite its significant visibility and messages of "inclusiveness" in American popular culture, Logo contributes to the perpetuation of negative and narrow stereotypes of consumerist gay culture, as it marginalizes ethnic minorities and women, through a variety of conformist, self-serving practices that undermine the libratory opportunity it holds for its LGBT viewers. Chapter Two "Another Lost Opportunity" examines a brief history of the cable television industry, the television business model and the representations of gays and lesbians on television to draw a parallel social history centered on visibility. Chapter Three "Like Taking Candy from a Baby" examines three reoccurring series on Logo: Noah's Arc, Can't Get a Date, and Round-Trip Ticket. Chapter Four "Easy as Shooting Fish In a Barrel" examines the histories of 1) television advertising, 2) the risks and benefits of advertising on Logo, and 3) the history of gay and lesbian print advertising. This history lays the foundation for 4) exploring contemporary constructions of Logo's target market as the "ideal demographic."

Janelle Monáe is a pop superstar whose Afrofuturist art is paving the way for a new revolution of popular music. An investigation into her oeuvre reveals an artform that ­relies on technological aesthetics and science-fiction narratives as a critical lens through which capitalism and its racist, sexist, homophobic, and hegemonic tendencies are clearly revealed. Monáe displays a masterful understanding of social hierarchy and power imbalances, and uses her music as a form of resistance to those heterosexist, white-supremacist institutions that attempt to reduce Monáe to the profitability of her body and culture. Situating herself as a visible and celebrated queer black musician and activist, Monáe uses her voice to provide political commentary on present-day America, through imagined future dystopias. Her seamless synthesis of black music genres and aesthetics allows for a unified musical project that is accessible, socially informed, powerful, and impactful.

Claude Cahun was an artist and a leader who subverted social binaries by employing a non-determinable style. This intentional ambiguity is omnipresent in all of Cahun’s works, regardless of their style. To demonstrate this commonality, I will analyze her work of theatre, Heroines, five of Cahun’s self-portraits and her autobiography, Aveux Non Avenus. Although Cahun’s artistic mediums are very different respectively, all three of these works use a sense of artistic ambiguity to resist social binaries. Such techniques of indeterminacy include subversive rewritings of famous characters and self-portraits that use motifs such as masks and masquerade to subvert the gaze of the spectator. Additionally, her photomontages include a fleeing gaze, an obstructed gaze, and a gaze that confronts itself. In this thesis, I affirm that Cahun's methods are aligned with queer theory because the way that Cahun uses a queer identity in her works creates a form of political and social resistance against heteronormativity and homophobia. Therefore, I will show all of the ways that Cahun has used visibility as a Jewish gender neutral lesbian for social resistance.