A study of what it is like to belong to double minorities at the same time, how individuals who deviate both with their sexuality but also with their ethnicity. What setbacks do individuals with dual minority identities face and how do individuals succeed in creating relationships and networks in a society that marginalizes them.

In my dissertation, I bring together the fields of comics theory, biopolitics, and queer theory in order to read contemporary coming-of-age graphic novels that represent characters (and sometimes lives) at the margins. Coming-of-age graphic novels in this category often depict complex engagements with trauma and history, and couple those depictions with the loss of attachments: the subjects represented in these texts usually do not belong. I make a case for productive spaces inside of the unbelonging represented in my chosen texts. In Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Alison finds multiple nodes of attachment with her deceased father through the process of writing his history. Importantly, none of those attachments require that she forgive him for past violences, or that she overwrite his life in order to shift focus onto the positive. Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s Skim features a protagonist, Skim, who is rendered an outcast because of her body, her hobbies, and eventually her process of mourning. Skim carves out a life that is survivable for her, and resists the compulsion to perform happiness while she does it. Charles Burns’s Black Hole depicts a group of teens who are excommunicated from their suburb after contracting a disfiguring, sexually transmitted disease, and who take to the woods in order to build a miniature, ad-hoc society for themselves. I concentrate on the question of precarity, and notice that safety and stability have a strong correlation with gender and sexuality: women and queers are overrepresented at the margins. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / In my dissertation, I bring together the fields of comics theory, biopolitics, and queer theory in order to read contemporary coming-of-age graphic novels that represent characters (and sometimes lives) at the margins. I focus, especially, on the way that people who are marginalized come to be that way, and I come to the conclusion that marginalized people suffer losses are that tied to different kinds of trauma. Sometimes those traumas are historical: like slavery, or internment. Sometimes they are personal, like ostracization from one’s community. And, finally, sometimes trauma comes from social systems: some subjects are pushed to the margins of society by the same forces that bring others into it. In the case of all of those types of trauma, I find a possibility for community: if people are sometimes marginalized, they are often resilient. The bulk of my dissertation tries to find where exclusions end, and make-shift communities begin.

This dissertation excavates the multifaceted intricacies surrounding the socioeconomic transformations of southeastern Syria, which subsequently was named Transjordan, from the late Ottoman period (circa 1840s) to the 1930s. Through a rigorous engagement with Marxism, postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, gender and queer theor(y/ies), and studies of “economic theology,” it reinterprets capital, not as a thing or as an illusion, but as the performative effect of the capitalization of networks of knowledge-power, or, in other words, as an intersubjectively (i.e., ideologically) agreed upon symbolization of the power relations that enable the bringing of future revenue into the present.The dissertation unfolds in three parts. The inaugural section, “Deconstructing Fantasies; (Re)Conceptualizing Capital,” problematizes foundational economic theories, scrutinizes capital’s ontological and theological underpinnings, and juxtaposes capitalization to sharīʿa’s moral cosmology. In doing so, it destabilizes conventional dichotomies between the economic and the political, probing deeply into capitalization’s metaphysical affinities with the metaphysics of modernity. The second part, “Explicating Capitalification,” foregrounds the structural transformations of the Ottoman Empire, dissecting its evolution in response to capitalistic imperatives. The narrative delves into the moral cosmologies that underpinned the Empire’s existence and the subsequent structural transformation of the empire, focusing particularly on fiscal centralization, the interplay of debt and power, and technologies of capitalification. This section interrogates the Ottoman Empire’s projects in southeastern Syria, excavating its endeavors in controlling the Bedouin, the implementation of education policies, and its intricate land codes and registration policies. In the third and final part, “Post-Ottoman Legacies,” the narrative transitions to spotlighting the residual colonial imprints on Transjordan’s emergent state structures and its intricate class formations. This part of the exploration takes a critical view of the Jordanian state’s production as an effect through colonizing mechanisms, mechanisms of colonization that limited production, and the performative aspects of class as an effect of citational practices. By focusing on different stratifications such as shaykhs, soldiers, and workers, this section demystifies the intricacies of class within the Transjordanian context, particularly in relation to the capitalization of land and debt-induced expropriation.

The purpose of this essay is to analyse how five small municipalities in Sweden handle and represent LGBTQ-people. This analysis uses the method What´s the Problem represented to be? created by Carol Bacchi and Susan Goodwin, which purpose is to analyse policy documents through a poststructural lens. The method has been combined with queer theory and queer time to analyse how subjectivity is represented in the documents. The findings conclude that the municipalities do represent LGBTQ-people in some compacity but that the documents struggle to explain sexuality and struggle with finding solutions that include nonbinary people. The documents also tend to represent LGBTQ-people as victims in the documents through the focus on discriminatory actions against LGBTQ-people.

This study aims to explore gender norms within the romance genre when they are no longer applied on a romantic relationship between a man and a woman. Through a close reading of the novel Power Plays & Straight A’s by Eden Finley and Saxon James, the study examines the main characters, Foster Grant and Zach Sawyer, to observe how they fit into the roles of a traditional romance hero and heroine. The main source for this observation comes from Janice Radway’s study Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1991) which exemplifies the differences between the genders with the use of contrasting traits. The characters are also analysed in a societal context to observe how they abide by traditional masculinity and how their sexuality plays a part in it. There is also an overview of the novel through the perspective of both a traditional romance as well as a queer romance novel, in which terms like escapism, happy endings and coming outs are explored. Finally, there is a section specifically focused on desire and how it has changed within the genre, which is applied because the novel in question is an erotic novel as well as a romance novel. The conclusion showcases how the characters cannot be assigned to a typical female nor male role, as they both possess the traits traditionally assigned to both genders. As for their role in society, traditional masculinity is questioned, seeing as the character of Foster specifically embodies the rules of masculinity through his athletic pursuits and place within the jock culture – but would still get shunned because of his bisexuality. Furthermore, the novel possesses several traits of a traditional romance novel, most importantly the happy ending, while also including typical queer romance traits – such as a coming out scene. Desire also takes a prominent role since both main characters have an equal craving for the other. The overall conclusion of this study showcases the changing tides of the romance genre and how, despite its formulaic layout, it doesn’t render the ability for change of a genre that once seemed predictable. / Denna uppsats utforskar könsnormer i romancegenren när det inte längre tillämpas på en romantisk relation mellan en man och en kvinna. Genom en närläsning av romanen Power Plays & Straight A’s av Eden Finley och Saxon James, undersöker studien huvudkaraktärerna, Foster Grant och Zach Sawyer, för att observera hur de passar in i rollen som hjälte och hjältinna utifrån en traditionell romance-roman. Den primära forskning som uppsatsen bygger på är Janice Radways studie Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1991) som exemplifierar skillnaderna mellan könen med användning av motsatta egenskaper. Karaktärerna analyseras också i ett samhälleligt sammanhang för att observera hur de förhåller sig till traditionell maskulinitet och den påverkan som karaktärernas sexualitet har i förhållande till den maskulina kulturen. I uppsatsen görs även en översiktlig studie av romanen genom perspektivet av både en traditionell romance och en queer romance, där jag utforskar begrepp som eskapism, lyckliga slut och att komma ut. Slutligen finns det ett avsnitt som fokuserar på begär och hur det har förändrats inom genren, vilket tillämpas eftersom romanen i fråga är en erotisk roman såväl som en romance-roman. Slutsatsen visar hur karaktärerna inte kan tilldelas en typisk kvinnlig eller manlig roll, eftersom de båda har egenskaper som traditionellt tilldelas båda könen. När det gäller deras roll i samhället ifrågasätts traditionell maskulinitet, eftersom karaktären av Foster specifikt förkroppsligar maskulinitetens regler genom hans plats inom sportkulturen - men ändå skulle bli avvisad från machokulturen på grund av sin bisexualitet. Romanen innehåller flera drag av en traditionell romance-roman, viktigast av allt det lyckliga slutet, samtidigt som den innehåller typiska queerromance drag – som en komma ut-scen. Begär tar också en framträdande roll eftersom båda huvudkaraktärerna likgiltigt får sukta efter den andre. Den övergripande slutsatsen av den här studien visar romancegenrens föränderliga tidvatten och hur den, trots dess typiska formler, inte hindrar möjligheten till förändring av en genre som en gång framstått som förutsägbar.

This essay examines the ways that the underlying meaning of the keywords queer and gay had changed between, and during, the periods of 1989-1991, 1999-2001 and 2009-2011 within the medium of written American English as collected by the Corpus of Historical American English across multiple written genres. The examination of the two chosen keywords was conducted by sorting the list-results of respective COHA queries into each period, and then conducted by a systematic sorting of the query results into one out of four categories depending on how the keywords were primed, framed and used. These categories are pejorative, sexuality, identity and lastly if the word was used in its historical context of meaning either something odd and/or strange in the case of queer, or to imply happiness in the case of gay. The essay concludes that over these 30 years, there is a clear indication that there has been a shift, moving from pejoratives and firmly cementing gay and queer as terms used by and to be attributed within the LGBTQ+ community.

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