This essay is about human beings. These human beings in particular are priests and LGBTQ-persons who work in the Swedish Church in Växjö diocese. During research I have conducted qualitative interviews with people who are LGBTQ-persons and work as priests in Växjö diocese. These interviews have been analyzed through queer theory and Mary Douglas theory about anomalia. My aim with this essay is to find out what it means to be a LGBTQ- person and work as a priest in this diocese. I wanted to learn more about where the difficulties lie. How the priests are treated by others and how they see themselves. My conclusion is that both Växjö diocese and the priests in my essay partly look upon themselves through a heterosexual matrix and therefore, in some way, regard LGBTQ-persons as anomalia. Therefore, there is a risk that LGBTQ-persons in Växjö diocese end up in an exclusion.

This thesis aims to explore lesbian desire and sexual identity in Lydia Kwa¡¦s This Place Called Absence, beginning with the textual subversion of heterosexual norm, evolving through the author¡¦s mapping of butch/femme desire and concluding with the protagonist¡¦s formation of self-identity. Chapter One discusses how the text subverts the heterosexual norm through the erotic chaos created by queer characters. I will apply Judith Butler¡¦s notions of heterosexual matrix and gender performativity to look into the textual strategies of subversion. The appropriation of gender is not only a strategy of queer politics, but also the primary means by which lesbians articulate desire. To illuminate Kwa¡¦s mapping of lesbian desire, I apply Teresa de Lauretis¡¦s theory of lesbian fetishism in Chapter Two to examine how butches and femmes in the novel express their desire through manipulating gender signs. The masculinity fetishes are prone to social misunderstanding as penis envy and thereby arouse male hostility. The anxiety of lesbian characters with the paternal phallus will be the focus of the second part of the chapter. Chapter Three looks into how the protagonist establishes positive self-identity through reversing social stigma to empowering self-image in queer coalition. The queer coalition comprising gays and lesbians, nevertheless, cedes its place to equalitarian women¡¦s community at the end of the novel. The problems of the concept of universal women for lesbians will be discussed in the latter part of the chapter from the perspectives of Butler and de Lauretis. After probing into textual details, I will argue that the protagonist, in spite of her desire for female solidarity, ultimately identifies with queer coalition. In conclusion, I will regard the novel as a lesbian counter-discourse by summarizing its strategies of displacement, resignification and reversal of the heterosexual symbolic and foreground the multiplicity of desire and differences among lesbians against the reification of heterosexual symbolic.

Thèse:Linköping : Univ., 2002.

The Argentine tango, a beautiful and sexually-charged partnered dance form, is most often characterized as a passionate drama between a man and a woman, where the masculinity of the male dancer as the leader contrasts with the femininity of the female follower. Its origins are deeply rooted in earliest twentieth-century Argentine life, particularly in the barrios of Buenos Aires, where tensions of culture, race, class, sexuality and privilege clashed head on. Because tango is historically and popularly accepted as a heterosexual dance, little attention has focused on its very earliest development and practices, when men often partnered with other men to learn it. This practice was so common that in 1903 the Argentine magazine Caras y Caretas [Faces and Masks] published a series of photographs portraying two men dancing tango to illustrate its basic steps and maneuvers. Inside this early practice lie uninterrogated questions on issues of sexual preference, identity and homosexuality. As a professional dancer and dance scholar, I have explored this aspect of tango’s history from two perspectives: through traditional historiography that investigates the documentation of its iv early practice, and through choreography and performance of an original dance work that affirms that continued practice today. Tango Vesre is a dance performance, that through live performance and video projection, spotlights a 100-year evolution of male tango dance in the Buenos Aires of 1910 and 2010. This work analyzes male/male tango partnerships from historic, performative and choreographic perspectives, examining issues of homosexual bonding and sexual identity through tango dance practice. The choreographic creative process for the dance performance intertwines deep archival research in Argentina and the United States, ethnographic research in Buenos Aires, and studio/movement explorations. In 2009, tango was designated an “Intangible Cultural Heritage” by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organizations (UNESCO); Tango Vesre investigates this art form's unacknowledged history and brings forward a new perspective. / text

“Malice in Wonderland: The Perverse Pleasure of the Revolting Child,” explores the place of “revolting child,” or the child-as-monster, in horror cinema using textual analysis, discourse analysis, and historical reception study. These figures, as seen in films such as The Bad Seed, Village of the Damned, and The Exorcist, “revolt” in two ways: they create feelings of unease due to their categorical perversion, and they also rebel against the family, the community, and the very notion of futurity. This work argues that the pleasure of these films vacillates between Othering the child to legitimate fantasies of child abuse and engaging an imagined rebellion against a heteronormative social order. As gays and lesbians have been culturally deemed “arrested” in their development, the revolting child functions as a potent metaphor for queerness, and the films provide a mise-en-scène of desire for queer spectators, as in the “masked child” who performs childhood innocence. This dissertation begins with concrete examples of queer reception, such as fan discourse, camp reiterations, and GLBT media production, and uses these responses to reinvestigate the films for sites of queer engagement. Interestingly, though child monsters appear centrally in several of the highest-grossing films in the horror genre, no critic has offered a comprehensive explanation as to what draws audiences this particular type of monstrosity. Further, this dissertation follows contemporary strains in queer theory that deconstruct notions of “development” and “maturity” as agents of heteronormative power, as seen in the work of Michael Moon, Lee Edelman, Ellis Hanson, Jose Esteban Muñez, and Kathryn Bond Stockton. / text

My dissertation departs from the idea that horizontal kinship, in particular the sibling bond, has largely been overlooked by criticism of 19th century Argentine literature. Works on the foundational mid-century narratives concentrate on allegorical heterosexual unions, while those of the late century primarily deal with the failed marriages of naturalist fiction. I argue that in viewing the fictional family as a vertical, genealogical structure, these texts often fail to consider what Pierre Bourdieu calls "practical kinship". Also, in primarily focusing on the novel, they overlook the minor genres to which women were traditionally limited, such as pedagogical texts, as well as private or semi-private writing like the diary and the memoir, in which sibling relations are more prominent. This project, in contrast, takes a politically engaged, socially influential family of writers, rather than a fictional representation, as the framework for analyzing the social, cultural, and political shifts of the turn of the century in Argentina (1890-1910). Focusing on the work of two proto-feminist sisters, Delfina and Julia Bunge, and a closeted homosexual brother, Carlos Octavio Bunge, I study the dynamic relationship between these siblings, reading a wide range of their public and private texts. In dialogue with naturalist novelists and positivist essay writers, la familia Bunge challenges the conventional view that the upper class saw the traditional criollo family unit as the last bastion of stability in the face of sexual and class "inversion" by themselves questioning normative gender roles, complicating compulsory heterosexuality, and performing the gaps in the hegemonic division of public and private space. I analyze siblinghood as a dynamic actor in shaping the literature, culture, and politics of the turn of the century, underscoring the role of relational subjectivities in forming notions of gender, sexuality, citizenship, and mutual intelligibility. / text

This study is about "transness" in contemporary Istanbul. As this thesis demonstrates, transness is an urban phenomenon, an identity specific to time and space. In Istanbul, it is a subculture, defined by sex, gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity. "Transness: An Urban Phenomenon in Istanbul" situates itself as part of a conversation about marginal subcultures in Gender Studies, Queer Theory, and especially Transgender Studies. This study fills two gaps: the temporal gap between the early Turkish scholarship on trans issues and the contemporary trans world of Istanbul; and the conceptual gap between trans words -- transvestite, transsexual, and transgender -- and trans identities in Istanbul. Furthermore, this study brings the current issues and discussions of US-based queer scholarship into the Turkish context and does so by discussing recent Turkish examples of media representations ranging from a documentary to a movie, and to a newspaper article; and by analyzing certain drag performances. All these examples discussed in this work exemplify the temporality and spatiality of transness, its relation to heteronormativity, and its publicness as a subculture. As is suggested by my examples, transness is 'out-of-time' and 'out-of-place,' always already public, and, as a performance, it asserts individual identity. Moreover, it is also always a public performance. All the examples point to the complex relationship between queerness and transness, and claim that the queerness of transness is always contextual. Combining the detailed analysis of these examples with the ethnographic work on Istanbul's trans world, "Transness: An Urban Phenomenon in Istanbul" provides answers to the following questions: "What is transness?" "What is the impact time and space have on transness within the urban structure of Istanbul?" "What is the relationship between dominant normativity and transness?" Finally, this MA thesis offers new perspectives and opens new paths for further research on the topic intended to help imagining new futures for trans folk in Istanbul. / text

Why are men seeking other men online? And how does the Internet influence these men and their sexuality? These are the two underlying questions driving this thesis. To answer these general questions, I conducted a qualitative study, which used in-depth individual interviews with 15 men who have sex with other men who self-identified as gay, queer, or homosexual. Through employing a theoretical framework that is inspired in queer theory, I uncovered three main topics in these men’s lives that are intimately shaped by their use of the Internet: friendship, racial and bodily desire, and HIV. First, I show the creative ways gay men are using the Internet, and specifically a sexualized space, in order to build relations with other gay men, despite the larger obstacles a heteronormative society puts in these men’s way to forge these friendships. In using their gay identity to try to establish relationalities with other gay identified men, the informants in this study challenge the impersonable traits associated with modernity, while seeking to build new alliances that could potentially radically disrupt heteronormative society. Secondly, I highlight how the social exclusionary practices toward people of color and non-normal bodies on Adam4Adam.com reifies whiteness and masculinity, which in turn, reifies heteronormativity. Here, I unmask how the structure of Adam4Adam.com, especially its filtering system, normalizes these discriminatory practices in users’ lives. Thirdly, I examine the role and meaning of HIV and sexual health in the lives of my informants. I incorporate the term “doing sexual responsibility” to show how my gay informants manage their anxiety-ridden lives when navigating their sexuality and sexual health. I also show how the gay men in this study engage in online foreplay as a pleasurable way to manage this anxiety and how trust and hegemonic masculinity are unintended consequences of this danger discourse on sexuality. As these men’s narratives and this thesis illustrate, society is still structured through heteronormative standards, but the Internet provides a new space for gay men to navigate their marginalized status in society. / text

Modalities of Freedom argues that comedy and the laughter it ignites is a vital component of feminist and anti-racist community building. The chapters of my dissertation analyze the work of three Black standup comedians from the United States: Wanda Sykes, Jackie Mabley and Mo’Nique. These three women have an outsized presence in standup comedy, but have been chronically underrepresented in academic literature despite their nuanced, complex and emboldening performance styles. I claim that their particular brands of humor are modalities of freedom. That is, under varying social, temporal and cultural contexts, Sykes, Mabley and Mo’Nique resist and expose marginalization and oppression. In turn, their comedic material and the act of laughter bond their audiences and generate anti-racist/feminist coalitions. The first chapter of my dissertation shows how Wanda Sykes employs comedic performance to “crack up” white supremacist historical narratives. That is, Sykes’ comedy functions as historiographical intervention that not only critiques history, but also moves Black lesbian women from silenced subjects to active (re)creators of United States’ collective memory. My chapter on Jackie “Moms” Mabley claims that Mabley’s legacy has been misremembered in both mainstream and scholarly texts. Employing Black queer theoretical frameworks, I trace how Mabley’s standup solidified important precedents for Black female comics in contemporary U.S. performance and generated specific modalities of freedom unique to Black feminist humor. The final chapter of my dissertation analyzes Mo’Nique’s 2007 documentary I Coulda Been Your Cellmate. This film is a live taping of Mo’Nique performing for convicts at the Ohio Reformatory for Women. Mo’Nique’s performance articulates the multiplicities of identity, and builds feminist community across difference. Mo’Nique and the women in the audience demonstrate how laughter is an intimate survival strategy and a freeing act even while under the restriction of state power. In short, my dissertation is an effort to validate how laughter can harness and express the complexities of Black feminist lives, and be a productive site for social change and stability. / text

"Uncanny Affects" argues, broadly, that the gothic novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries models a critical ethics of reading. By examining recurrent scenes of reading and interpretation in key gothic novels such as Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1797), Walter Scott's The Antiquary (1816), and Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868), I surmise that this critical ethics posits affect, or the experience of generalized emotion, as central to the act of interpretation. I contend that this gothic critical ethics influences the concurrent development of the discipline of literary criticism. By reading these key gothic novels and then tracking their broader influence on Victorian critics such as John Ruskin and Oscar Wilde, I make a case for the significance of a gothic epistemology to the development of literary criticism in British and American universities from the nineteenth century onward. A focus on the gothic novel's critically inclined characters, including antiquarians and detectives, enables me to read gothic novels and other gothically-inflected writing for what they can tell us about the practice of interpretation, particularly as that practice becomes institutionalized and professionalized. Thus I track the gothic mode's tendency toward affective reading in relation to ideas of professionalization, which values critical detachment or disinterestedness in interpretation. As a result, interpretation in the gothic mode can seem too emotional or "creative" for a typically professional practice. Reading the gothic as such links it to modern discussions about interpretive practices such as close reading, paranoid and reparative reading, and surface reading. Perhaps more importantly, reading the gothic alongside these new discussions on critical ethics allows us to think through the place of affect and pleasure in an ethical critical practice. Ultimately, examining how gothic texts formulate a gothic mode or philosophy of reading demonstrates the real ubiquity this mode has achieved in the critical setting, a ubiquity that continues to shape and influence our conceptions of scholarly and critical reading even today. / text