Transsexuella personer hör till de mest utsatta personer i världen. Deras rättigheter regleras och diskrimineras av statlig lagstiftning som strider mot de mänskliga rättigheterna och de utsätts för våld och diskriminering p.g.a. deras avvikande könsidentitet som överskrider existerande genusbarriärer eller för att de utmanar de dominerande uppfattningarna om genus roller. Uppsatsen belyser sambandet mellan transnationell aktivism och kroppspolitik, för att påvisa hur transsexuella rättigheter diskrimineras och hurkroppar ses som en statlig angelägenhet. Jag utgår ifrån ett genusperspektiv inom IR, för att hänvisa till ett genussystem som förklarar de ojämna maktrelationerna och vill därmed betona lagens roll inom beskrivningen av samhälle och i föreläggandet av förändring. Studien påvisar ett samband på individ, statlig och transnationell nivå, för att illustrera den komplexa relationen mellan den politiska och diskursiva möjligheten inom den transnationella aktivismen. Genom en jämförande fallstudie av Chile och Finland, påvisar jag likheter och olikheter som påverkar hur transnationell aktivism tas emot, och ifall den påverkatländernas interna lagstiftning för transsexuella rättigheter. Chile och Finland visade sig vara stater med mycket likheter, varav den oberoende variabel som skiljer dem åt är den religiösa aspekten. Chile påvisar den tydliga relation som finns mellan staten och den katolska kyrkan, medan Finland ses som en sekulär stat. / Transgender people belong to the most vulnerable people in the world. Their rights are regulated and discriminated by state laws that violate human rights, and are subjected to violence and discrimination because of their gender identity, which exceeds existing gender barriers or because they challenge dominant views on gender roles. The paper highlights the connection between transnational activism and body politics, to show how transsexual rights are discriminated and seen as an affair of the state. I assume a gender gender perspective within IR, referring to a gender system that explains the uneven power relations,and thus wish to emphasise the role of the law in description of society and in the description of change. The study provides an insight into a relationship at the individual, state and transnational level. Through a comparative case study of Chile and Finland, both of which are current about the issue of gender reassignment, I demonstrate how transnational activism is used and received, and if the transnational activism has effected the internal laws for transsexual rights. The countries showed to have a lot in common,whereby the independent variable that differs is the religious aspect. Chile shows the strong connection between the state and the catholic church, while Finland is seen as a secular state.

This dissertation examines the political negotlations involved in border encounters, focusing particularly on mobile groups in border areas in South America. It discusses the connection between international and border politics, privileging a definition of the latter as the negotiation processes over the terms and modes of presence of the 'inter' of the international. The dissertation analyzes border politics from the perspective of three major tenets: displacement, practices of zoning and the construction of borders as sites of solidarity. I argue that in order to understand these processes we need to elucidate how the global politics of mobility is played out (or translated) in border crossroads and from a range of social groups that encompass not only the Nation-State, but also a myriad of actors that, despite having little or no say in the international framework of human mobility, perform bordering practices that are central to the enactment of difference as a primary trait of inclusion/exclusion from the political. These processes of political differentiation are reinforced but also contested by mobile groups, especially in relation to discourses that try to equate human mobility as a choice between freedom and protection. In important respects, their intervention attempts to problematize the dichotomous portrayal of freedom and protection as two irreconcilable dimensions of life in displacement, thus evincing the possibility that the 'inter' of the international can actually become a site of living, rather than a rite of passage. I also argue that by incorporating the narratives of diverse social actors at these border crossroads we might come closer to displacing the politics of human mobility from one premised on a conventional reading of the international, as a strategy of separation, modulation and management of difference, towards a global politics of (dis)connections, in which mobile groups can become active participants in the framing of their lives possibilities. This moving-away from the international is always embedded in tenuous, dangerous and ambiguous exchanges about what constitutes mobility, how movement is to be interpreted, stimulated or prevented, where and when it can take place and under what conditions. The dissertation discusses these more theoretical claims in the context of refugee and migration movements in Brazil, particularly in relation to Bolivians, Africans and Colombians living in border zones. As such, this dissertation hopes to contribute to a better understanding of what is at stake in dealing with the border encounter from a political perspective and how different narratives on life in displacement can, in fact, indicate different paths of action and research, especially in the context of South-South circulations. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis is about border politics, in more than one sense. It looks at the recent period of anxiety about the control of Australian national borders (approximately, from the late 1990s until the 2007 Federal election), and attempts to understand how certain assumptions about women as potential reproductive bodies permeated biopolitical discourses in Australian national culture during this period. I employ the term ‘containment’ in order to make sense of this cultural moment. With reference to the work of theorists of modernity such as Michel Foucault and Zygmunt Bauman, I argue that containment is a key discourse in modern cultures—a way of thinking and speaking about confinement, control, management and order. It structures how we think about the management of populations and is a central part of the justification for the confinement of problem populations by modern political authorities. As such, then, it describes the ways in which the use of immigration detention for unlawful non-citizen asylum seekers has been thought about and accepted as reasonable in Australian national culture. / However, a discourse of containment has also been central to the thinking about gendered bodies in modernity, in particular to assumptions about the control of women’s bodies. The assumptions about the containment of women in the modern gender order are directly linked to ideas about political status, citizenship and sovereignty in modern nation-states. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’—the life that is excluded from the protections of citizenship and thus left unprotected from violence—I attempt to make sense of the connections between the immigration detention camp as a site where the modern state exerts control over the life of the nation, and that modern state’s attempts to control reproductive and reproducing bodies. The reducing of certain people to the status of bare life is, then, a gendered process. Women and men are stripped of political status in different ways because they are assumed to have, or potentially have, different kinds of political status. / I therefore consider how ideas about women as reproductive bodies were integral to the discourse and practices of containment which underpinned the use of immigration detention in Australia. These ideas were important at a number of levels. Firstly, ideas about women as reproductive bodies infused the thinking about national borders, border control and the management of national reproduction. Secondly, a racially inflected discourse about ‘women and children’ was of central importance in shaping the ways in which male and female asylum seekers in immigration detention were treated. In the techniques used to control and manage gendered asylum-seeking bodies, key modern assumptions about women as reproductive bodies, the family, sovereignty and violence are revealed. Furthermore, I argue that many popular culture texts which attempt to make sense of, or critique, Australian national border politics have reinforced the same gendered ideas about containment, the same naturalised assumptions about the reproduction of the nation, which underpinned exclusionist border politics and the use of immigration detention. Examining the intersection of gendered and national discourses of containment in national border politics reveals the gendered violence which infuses the modern social order.