This thesis explores how visions of the good life, as understood by Lauren Berlant, communicate through advertising for home cleaning services in a Swedish context. With an ambition to map out how life is portrayed in these commercials this thesis wants to shed light on how these portrayals of life can be understood as the good life and in turn, how they reproduce structures of power. In relation to research on the debate of the Swedish Rutavdrag, work/life balance and the perception of cleaning in Sweden the thesis continues to look into how paid cleaning service is constructed and understood. It draws on theories about work, emotion/affect and temporality that is tied together in an understanding of the good life as dependent of all of these to become possible. A promotion of happiness and feelings of intimacy, work induced with emotional value and a productivist temporality are all parts of what makes up the good life, that is what I pay attention to in my analysis. Through a multimodal critical discourse analysis, the material is analyzed in three steps where the first two steps is focused on one individual commercial/ad and the third connects several of them to analyze how the good life is depicted. The analysis is divided into two main themes: time for relationships and Win win. The first theme shows an emphasis on close family relationships that appears to be threatened by cleaning or mainly conflicts about cleaning, the service smooth over the frictions and makes an intimate life enjoyable and improved. The good life here is closely linked to good relationships and busy schedules. The second theme Win win analyses material that focuses on how the work and the workers situation. In this theme a picture emerges of the employer as someone who does a good deed by employing someone through a good company that has good conditions. This theme implicitly addresses the tension that surrounds cleaning services in Sweden and dissolves it with smiles. While wrapping the service good feelings and the promise of good deeds the unequal exchange changes into something natural and good. The good life is not as obvious in this theme, the focus on the good conditions rather promotes home cleaning as a possible part of the good life since it does not disturb the narrative of the good life as a moral good. In order to have an opportunity to move towards the good life, time is needed.

In her 1929 essay "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf famously asserts that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction" (4). This concept places an immediate importance on the role of the Modernist female subject as an artist and as an architect, constructing the places and spaces that she exists within. With Woolf's argument as its point of departure, this thesis investigates the theme of female space in two Modernist texts: Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963). The respective protagonists of Quicksand and The Bell Jar, Helga Crane and Esther Greenwood, each undertake journeys to obtain spaces that are purely their own. However, this thesis positions each space that Helga and Esther occupy as both male-constructed and male-dominated in order to address the inherent gendering of space and its impact on the development of feminine identities. This thesis focuses specifically on the roles of the mother, the muse, and the female mentor, tracking the spaces in which Helga and Esther begin to adhere to these roles. Expanding on Lauren Berlant's theory of cruel optimism, this thesis will use the term "cruel femininity" to support its intervening claim that the respective relationships that Helga and Esther each have with their own feminine identities begin to turn cruel as they internalize the male-dominated spatial structures surrounding them. Overall, this thesis argues that there is no space in existence where Helga and Esther can realize their full potential as human beings, as long as the spatial structures within their communities continue to be controlled by hegemonic, patriarchal beliefs.

Den här uppsatsen handlar om döva flyktingar och har tre huvudteman: dövhet och asylprocessen för döva flyktingar, och för att förstå det i en svensk kontext är det tredje temat dövhet historiskt i Sverige och internationellt. Fältarbetet är gjort under en månads tid i början av 2018 på en folkhögskola i Sverige och metoder som tillämpats är deltagande observation och intervjuer. Folkhögskolan har i samarbete med Migrationsverket sedan 2009 i uppgift att utbilda döva asylsökande i svenskt teckenspråk, som i många fall blir det första språket, för att de ska kunna uppge skäl för asyl. Frågeställningen berör hur dessa personer upplever sin identitet och hur den förändras och produceras. Det är två av folkhögskolans grupper, en grupp med och en grupp utan uppehållstillstånd, som jämförs och ligger till grund för denna uppsats. / This essay is about deaf refugees and has three main themes: deafness and the asylum process for deaf refugees, and to understand it in a Swedish context, the third theme is deafness historically in Sweden and internationally. The fieldwork has been done for a month at the beginning of 2018 at a school in Sweden and methods used are participant observations and interviews. The school has since 2009, in cooperation with the Swedish Migration Board, been responsible for training deaf asylum seekers in Swedish sign language, which in many cases becomes the first language in order to give reasons for asylum. The question concerns how these people perceive their identity and how it is changed and produced. The study is mainly based on two groups. One group with and one group without a residence permit are being compared and form the basis for this essay.

Gigekonomin är ett växande fenomen på den svenska arbetsmarknaden. Gigarbete har både hyllats som en möjlighet att komma in på arbetsmarknaden och kritiserats för sin prekära natur. I den här studien undersöks den sociala konstruktionen av gigarbetare utifrån ett ideologiskt perspektiv. Den empiriska basen är intervjuer med sex gigarbetande matbud. Studiens övergripande argument är att gigföretagens nyliberala strukturer driver fram exploaterande relationer på arbetsmarknaden, samt att genusassociationer och ond optimism används för att kamouflera dessa exploaterande relationer. Tidigare forskning har lagt vikt vid att synliggöra hur femininitet används för att driva fram den nyliberala utvecklingen, men mindre uppmärksamhet har givits till maskulinitet. Den här studien illustrerar hur maskulinitet används för att interpellera gigarbetarna genom associationer till frihet och entreprenörskap. Därtill skildras hur ond optimism – en falsk förhoppning om uppåtgående social mobilitet – bidrar till att locka gigarbetarna att kontinuerligt eftersträva otillgängliga ideologiska drömmar. Vidare behandlas även socialt motstånd till gigekonomin och ideologi. Det teoretiska ramverket vilar på Althussers begrepp ideologi och interpellation. Ett begreppsligt bidrag i studien är formuleringen av dubbelbindande interpellation. Begreppet avser interpellationer som har en dubbelbindande natur, det vill säga situationer där individer anropas på motstridiga vis, exempelvis hur gigarbetare omväxlande tilltalas som servicearbetare och entreprenörer, vilket orsakar osäkerhet och väcker frågan: Vem är jag för er? Genom att undersöka och identifiera ideologiska konstruktioner av arbetare kan framväxande orättvisor och ojämlikheter på arbetsmarknaden belysas ur förbisedda perspektiv. / The gig economy is a growing phenomenon in the Swedish labor market. Gig work has been hailed as an opportunity to enter the labor market, but it has also been criticized for its precarious nature. This study examines the social construction of gig workers from an ideological perspective. Interviews with six food delivery workers form the empirical basis. The overall argument of the study is that the neoliberal structure of the gig companies propels exploitative relations in the labor market, and that gender associations and cruel optimism are used to camouflage these exploitative relations. Previous research has emphasized the importance of femininity in propelling the neoliberal development, but less attention has been given to masculinity. This study illustrates how masculinity is used to interpellate the gig workers through associations to freedom and entrepreneurship. In addition, it depicts how cruel optimism – a false hope of upward social mobility – contributes to attracting the gig workers to continuously pursue inaccessible ideological dreams. Moreover, social resistance is discussed in relation to the gig economy and ideology. The theoretical framework rests on Althusser's concepts of ideology and interpellation. A conceptual contribution in the study is double-binding interpellation. The concept refers to interpellations that have a double-binding nature, meaning situations where individuals are interpellated in contradictory ways. The food delivery workers are exposed to a double-binding interpellation when they are alternately interpellated as service workers and entrepreneurs, which causes uncertainty and raises the question: Who am I to you? By examining and identifying ideological constructions of workers, emerging injustices and inequalities in the labor market can be highlighted from overlooked perspectives.

<p>Recent work in affect theory has addressed the category of what Sianne Ngai terms “ugly” feelings (Ngai 2007, Edelman 2004, Halberstam 2011) and the costs associated with the premium placed on so-called positive modes of thinking and feeling (Berlant 2011, Ahmed 2010, Love 2007), yet cynicism persists in many accounts as the feature of an undesirable political subjectivity. Likewise in popular and political discourse, cynicism is denounced as the mark of an ineffectual subject who chooses to opt out, rather than reach for supposedly obvious markers of (capitalist) achievement. This dissertation refuses these characterizations, instead considering cynicism as an affect bound up in neoliberal sociopolitical shifts. I argue that cynicism describes a feeling of living under structural conditions that curtail—in ways that are often effaced—the kinds of self-determining subjectivities that have been taken for granted as a feature of Western, liberal democracies and remain foundational to imagined modes of dissent. Exploring this situation in the context of three cultural frames—politics and governance, modes of labour in capitalist economies, and a structure of feeling premised on the pursuit of happiness—I examine cynical subjectivities in fiction, film, and American political discourse so as to 1) develop an inquiry into affect as situated between subject and structure; 2) acknowledge the commonality of a feeling of impasse and dominant cultural narratives that mask this frustration of agency; and 3) consider inertia and passivity as sensible orientations in a cultural moment in which the costs of momentum are becoming increasingly visible.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)