Between incurably degenerative illness and the graffiti which ignited the Syrian Civil War, YOUR TURN, DOCTOR complicates hope. When myths of revolution, of wellness, no longer console—love as measured in anything but loss. Within a multidisciplinary project how an increasingly painful embodiment intersects the material excess of capitalism is explored. Can objects function as a political demand, necessitating changes in the way the world is ordered? Who for? To understand one kind of oppression in necessary sterility and another in marginalization so profound blindness can result. That is to ask, how long must one be told they do not see a thing they see before they don’t, before transgressions become norms? A list of "Indulgences" modeled loosely after Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses outlines content. Five sections reference the five pillars of Islam— with each containing nineteen individual proposals. Nineteen serves as the common denominator for the mathematical structure of much of the text of the Quran.

This thesis examines queer feminine representation in the movie Stonewall (2015). One aim has been to analyse if and how the queer feminine characters have been constructed in a negative way based on hegemonic ideas about queer femininity. Another aim has been to analyse if and how the queer feminine characters can be recognized in a way that is subversive in relation to these hegemonic ideas. The material consists of the fictional movie Stonewall (2015), produced by Roland Emmerich, which is inspired by ”the Stonewall riots”. The Stonewall riots was a series of violent demonstrations carried out by queer people against the police that broke out on June 28th 1969 in New York City. Stonewall Inn was the name of the bar where the riots started, hence the name ”Stonewall”. My theoretical perspectives is based on theories about cultural dominance and deconstruction. My methodology consists of two different readings of the movie in line with the thesis’ two aims. The first reading shows that the queer feminine characters are represented in different negative ways in the movie based on hegemonic ideas of queer femininity. One example is how the older queer feminine characters are portrayed as sexual offenders and how their ”non-passing” femininity is made visible in different ways. Other findings in the thesis show how a deconstructive reading enables a different interpretation of the queer feminine representation. One finding shows how the queer feminine identity is used for provocation as a political strategy that turn a vulnerable position into a subversive position. Another finding shows how dreaming enable a space were the queer feminine characters can express themselves in a more freer way. My conclusions are that a deconstructive perspective enabled both a critique and a transformation of the hegemonic structures in my material. Because of lack of previous research on the historical construction of the Stonewall riots my thesis fill a knowledge gap. The thesis has relevance for gender studies as a field since it examines how norms of gender affect the writing of queer history.

Följande arbete är ett illustrativt, grafiskt bokprojekt om att vara transperson i Sverige. Projektet omfattar den problematik som ofta uppstår när transpersoner rör sig i det heteronormativa rummet, baserat på en biologisk tvåkönsnorm. Resultatet är en bok i pixiformat med titeln Boo, vilken dag!, om den ickebinära transpersonen Boo som vi får följa en dag från morgon till kväll. Under dagen stöter Boo på olika scenarion och frågor, hämtade från verkligheten, som begränsar livsutrymmet för hen som trans. Syftet är att projektet ska ge en inblick i hur det är att vara transperson i Sverige idag och att få läsaren att reflektera över vilken typ av frågor vi ställer, hur och varför vi ställer dem. / The following project is an illustrative book project about life as transgender in Sweden. The project touches the problematic situations that often occur in everyday life for transgender people in heteronormative spaces, based on the norm of two biological sexes. The result is a ”pixi book” about Boo, a non-binary trans person, during a typical day in their life. During the day Boo faces several different scenarios and questions, based on real events, resulting in a limitation of life quality and living space. The purpose with the project is to give insight in what it is like to live as trans in Sweden today, and to make the reader aware of what kind of questions we ask, how and why we ask them.

This artistic, practice-based thesis has been developed based on the idea that design creates social and ideological change. From this perspective, Body Acts Queer — Clothing as a performative challenge to heteronormativity introduces an artistic way of working with and exploring the performative and ideological functions of clothing with regard to gender, feminism, and queer. The thesis presents this program for experimental fashion design—exemplified through a series of artistic projects—while also discussing the foundations of such an approach and the different perspectives that have affected the program and its artistic examples. Working with clothing and fashion design through artistic projects using text and bodies, this thesis transforms queer and feminist theory into a creative process and, by looking into bodily experiences of clothing, Body Acts Queer investigates its performative and ideological functions, with a focus on cultural, social, and heteronormative structures. Body Acts Queer suggests a change in the ways in which bodies act, are perceived, and are produced within the fashion field, giving examples of—and alternatives to—how queer design practice can be performed. In this thesis, queer design is explored as an inclusive term, containing ideas about clothing and language, the meeting point between fiction and reality, and the ability to perform interpretation and bodily transformations—where pleasure, bodily experiences, and interaction create a change.

The purpose of this essay is to investigate how the writers of two history textbooks describe females and males, and how they are presented in different discourses. The theories, which constitutes the foundation of the essay is that of gender studies, queer-theory and gender-socialization. The main methods of the essay are discourse analysis and text analysis. The main questions are: - What type of discourses are found in the text books and how would they be described? - How are women and men depicted in the found discourses? - How are the discourses holding up with school values? The results of the essay concluded that there are three different discourses present in the two text-books. These discourses are as follows: ”women as oppressed”, ”women mentioned in relation to the male sex” and ”males as the oppressors”. These discourses are analyzed with the mentioned theories above.

Navigating the process of coming out led to feelings of isolation, depression, and a loss of self-worth that were compounded by a period filled with negative social media and mainstream messaging. This thesis explores how an understanding of the systems and processes of nature as well as physical exposure to nature offered a place of healing and an avenue for understanding my identity as a Gay man: from identity confusion all the way through to identity synthesis. Using Scholarly Personal Narrative Methodology, I will interweave poetry and counter narrative storytelling to illustrate the significance of nature during my identity development. Sexual orientation is scrutinized and vilified through social media platforms, advertisements, and daily life under the basis of cultural ideology and social construction. This disregards the larger contextual importance of other species that exhibit similar behaviors. I maintain that a connection with nature can provide individuals with a broader and more balanced perspective of sexual orientation--whilst navigating through the coming out process leading to a confluent sense of identity with reduced internalized conflict.

ABSTRACT Navigating systems of leadership in Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) in higher education as a Queer Woman of Color can be a challenging and complex process--one that integrates identity, experience, expertise, knowledge, patience, and most importantly the ability to risk; while remaining authentic and professional. It is a balance, which in my own experience and expertise requires constant reflection, evaluation, and adaptation. A negotiation of owning that one has power and agency, while realizing that the many intersecting identities that one holds influences how dominant culture perceives that power and agency. To reach authentic reflection and evaluation in leadership it is critical to examine and investigate one's own vocation to lead and to ask, what leads us and sustains us in that leadership? This dissertation will offer a counter-narrative of leadership in prose-poetry through a lens of intersectionality outside of the hegemonic or dominant ways that define the parameters of leadership. Through the use of personal narratives reinforced by scholarship using the methodology of Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN), I explore my own experiences of trauma throughout my life that led to agency and inevitably to leadership. I additionally examine the overarching tenants and themes that continue to inform, sustain and strengthen my leadership. "Damned If You Do--Damned If You Don't" represents a phrase often used amongst marginalized communities that signifies the challenges of navigating one's own power and agency within oppressive dominant systems. This SPN dissertation will be supported by the paradigms of Critical Race Theory (CRT) with a specific focus on Counter-Narrative/Storytelling and Critical Race Gendered Epistemology or Feminist Black/Latino Theory, while also incorporating aspects of positive psychology. It will offer a counter-narrative in leadership that highlights how my multiple intersecting identities, coupled with my life experiences, create meaning and go on to further shape my approach to trauma, agency, and leadership. As a Queer woman of color in leadership, I find that by honoring and examining my own stories of trauma and agency, and how it led me to leadership. I am better equipped as a professional to honor the narratives, identities, and experiences of those that I serve.

Den här studien fokuserar på framställningen av transpersoner i svensk television. Mer specifikt studeras klipp från de två största svenska kanalerna, SVT och TV4. Från varje kanal har två klipp valts ut, ett klipp med en intervju och ett klipp med någon form av rapportering. Klippen har valts ut strategiskt för att matcha studiens syfte, vilket innebär att de på ett eller annat sätt berör transpersoner. För att kunna undersöka och analysera framställningen av transpersoner har kritisk diskursanalys (CDA) tillämpats, både som teori och metod. Studiens teoretiska ramverk utgår även från queerteori och de teorier som grenar ut därifrån, exempelvis teorin om genussystemet. Studiens tillvägagångssätt utgår ifrån tre olika nivåer som klippen analyseras utifrån. Den första är textens nivå, där lingvistiska verktyg studeras. Den andra är diskursnivån, där diskurser i texten identifieras. Den tredje och sista är den sociala praktikens nivå där innehållet kontextualiseras och sätts i förhållande till en social omvärld. I analysen identifieras fyra teman. Det första temat, exponerandet av en minoritet i en minoritet, visar att i hälften av analysmaterialet har transpersoner som ångrat sin könsbekräftande behandling exponerats, vilket inte är representativt för majoriteten av gruppen. Det andra temat, heteronormativitet som rådande norm, visar att heteronormen kan utläsas i samtliga klipp genom diskussioner, berättelser och ordval. Det tredje temat, transpersoner som utsatt grupp, visar på en framställning av transpersoner som utsatta. Det fjärde och sista temat, HBTQ som folkbildning, visar en utbildande tendens i materialet. / This study focuses on the portraitation of transgender people in Swedish television. More specifically, clips from two of the biggest Swedish TV-channels, SVT and TV4, are being analysed. Two clips have been chosen from each channel, one interview and one reporting/news segment. The clips have been chosen strategically to serve the purpose of the study, which means that they in one way or another treats the topic of transgender people. To be able to examine and analyse the portraitation of transgender people, critical discourse analysis (CDA) have been implemented both as a theory and as a method. The study’s theoretical framework is based on queer theory and the theories that branch out from it, for example gender theory. The approach of the study is based on three different levels, from which the clips are analysed. The first one is analysis of language texts, where linguistic tools are being studied. The second one is analysis of discourse practice, where discourses in the text are being identified. The third and last one is analysis of discursive events as instances of sociocultural practice, where the content is contextualized and is put in relation to a social world. Four themes are identified in the analysis. The first one, the exposing of a minority in a minority, shows that half the analysis material shows transgender people who have regretted their gender confirmatory treatment, which is not representative for the majority of the group. The second one, heteronormativity as present norm, shows that the heteronorm can be identified in all clips, through discussions, stories and wording. The third theme, transgender people as a vulnerable group, shows a portraitation of transgender people as vulnerable and exposed. The fourth and last theme, HBTQ as education, shows an educational tendency in the material.

Cette dissertation propose un nouveau récit des expériences de William Faulkner à Hollywood afin de réévaluer la deuxième moitié de son œuvre de fiction. Dans ses premiers projets de scénarios de films, Faulkner a choisi d’adapter des œuvres de fiction qu’il avait publiées antérieurement. À la lumière de l’utilisation du genre —autant des films que des personnes— par les studios d’Hollywood pour organiser la production et le marketing des films, la fiction de Faulkner apparut soudainement comme perverse et ses représentations de la masculinité comme homoérotiques. Dans les premiers jets de Turn About et de War Birds, Faulkner s’approprie les normes du genre hollywoodien pour nier ces connotations sexuelles. Ses révisions ultérieures révèlent un recul systématique par rapport à la perversité d’Hollywood et au genre du woman’s film, au profit de la performance de la masculinité propre aux war pictures. Ses révisions réimaginent également des matériaux qui sont au cœur de son œuvre de fiction. Quand il se remet à écrire de la fiction, Faulkner répète cette approche narrative dans des nouvelles telles que “Golden Land” et “An Odor of Verbena,” deux récits qui rompent avec les pratiques et le style de ses premières fictions majeures. Les conséquences découlant de cette influence hollywoodienne—une volonté d’éradiquer toute connotation sexuelle, l’adoption authentique plutôt qu’ironique du mélodrame générique, et une rhétorique morale explicitement construite comme une négation d’Hollywood—se manifestent plus tard dans des textes aussi divers que The Reivers, Compson Appendix, ou son discours de réception du Prix Nobel. Vues sous cet angle, les dernières fictions de Faulkner deviennent une composante essentielle de son œuvre, fournissant une base nouvelle pour réexaminer la place des genres narratifs populaires, du genre et de la sexualité dans son cycle de Yoknapatawpha. / This dissertation offers a new narrative of William Faulkner’s Hollywood experiences and uses it to initiate a reevaluation of his middle and late fiction. In his earliest screenplay projects, Faulkner chose to adapt his previously published fiction. Read in light of Hollywood studios’ reliance on gender and genre to organize film production and marketing, this fiction suddenly appeared perverse; its portraits of masculinity, homoerotic. In his draft screenplays for Turn About and War Birds Faulkner appropriates Hollywood genre norms to negate these sexual connotations. His revisions reveal a pattern of recoil from Hollywood perversity and the woman’s film; and of an embrace of the war picture’s performance of masculinity. They also re-imagine materials central to Faulkner’s ongoing fictional project. Faulkner later repeats this pattern of response in such stories as “Golden Land” and “An Odor of Verbena,” both of which break from the defining practices and styles of his earlier, major fiction. The consequences that follow from this Hollywood influence—an effort to extinguish sexual connotation, an authentic rather than ironic embrace of generic melodrama, and a moral rhetoric explicitly constructed as a negation of Hollywood—later manifest in texts as diverse as The Reivers, the Compson Appendix, and the Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Viewed in this light, the late fictions become an essential component of his oeuvre, offering a new site for re-examining the place of popular genre , gender and sexuality in the Yoknapatawpha saga.

There are many ways in which gender diversity and sexualness are experienced, spoken of and transacted in India. Recent activism against marginalisation related to sexual and gender nonconformity has led to transformation of some of these idioms into objects that circulate in particular registers of governmentality. In the process, something quite else is created, and this something else portends to speak the truth of 'sexuality in India'. Based on fieldwork carried out between 2005 and 2007 in cities, towns and villages around India, this thesis tells a story of this emergence of 'sexuality' as an aspect of personhood, a political object, a basis for social mobility, a mode of connectedness between people and as a legitimate cause for a movement. The term 'Queer', used variously in India, is a shorthand in some contexts for people who identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and with South Asian identities such as Hijra, Kothi and Aravani. In others, it refers to a political project challenging norms of heterosexual monogamy, marking a conscious move away from identity-based politics premised on a bio-medical presumption that desire defines personhood. Evoking both these meanings, I examine queer activism as the negotiation of terms of entry of Queer bodies into epidemiological and juridical registers. In relation to the first, I examine interventions of the transnational HIV/AIDS industry that target 'men who have sex with men' – or 'MSM' – the category through which the industry apprehends sexualness between male subjects. I focus on the political-economic conditions of epidemiological knowledge, and on the transformation of idioms of gender and sexualness that its production draws upon. The industry, I argue, is involved in establishing availability of socio-economically marginalised bodies for intervention and research. These relationships of availability are possible because of their promise of social mobility and respectability for queer folk, hitherto despised in masculinist political economies. This mobility is contingent upon the creation and adoption of epidemiologically overdetermined identities which ironically find political significance in being seen as timeless and 'traditional'. The dichotomous being of the 'MSM' - simultaneously the producer and the object of this epidemiological knowledge, implies that the production of this knowledge is predicated upon the ability of queer folk to perform their place in the 'community'. The relationships in the 'field' are already written into the data, and thus the knowledge. Epidemiological knowledge, and the subjects it speaks of, I thus argue, are best understood as articulations of the conditions of their production. The second theme, of Law and the juridical register, opens with an examination of the tensions involved in the production of 'homophobia' as a political object. The disavowal of erotic dimensions in the naming of experiences as 'homophobic violence' is situated in the context of a popular imagination of a worthy juridical subject, and in broader imaginings of power. I then turn to the conditions under which the law, and in particular, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a Victorian anti-sodomy law under which homosexuality is seen to be criminalised, comes to be central to the Queer movement in India. Activism has given Section 377 a 'social life', an awareness of the law in public spheres, amongst law enforcers and branches of the State. Simultaneously, the Law has been inaugurated as a space for the articulation of more diffuse tensions. It has given a tangibility and intelligibility to experiences of exclusion, marginalisation and violence. I then examine a litigation at the High Court of Delhi challenging this law on grounds that it violates Fundamental Rights, focussing on the constitution of a coherent Queer body, cast simultaneously as enumerable, drawing on epidemiological knowledge; and, as capable of instantiation through individual narratives of violation. This project, where a sexuality is ascribed to the citizen-subject, is then juxtaposed with instances where activists actively strip sexualness off of the Queer body in order to make claims to citizenship. This is a cleavage in the Queer movement, an effect of the diversity of bodies it claims to speak of, as, and for, and the conditions under which these diverse bodies seek articulation. Between these projects lies ambiguity, which, I argue, is a precious resource for Queer folk, and for the movement. I suggest a conceptual shift from 'sexuality', (as personhood), to 'sexualness' (where desire flows through subjects without constituting them), argue that the Subject found in registers of governmentality may best be understood in terms of its political economy and distinct from psychic formations, and finally, offer up thoughts for a politics of ambiguity.