This study explores how same sex couples in Sweden, a country with strong gender equality policies and discourses understand their lives and relationships. Central to the study is the analysis of the tensions between a public discourse favoring openness for lesbians, gays, and bisexuals and a lack of acknowledgment of non-heterosexual family practices; as well as the tensions between gender equality policies and discourses and the specific construction of same sex couples. The study is grounded in a feminist and queer perspective and inspired by narrative analysis. Furthermore, it uses an intersectional perspective in which different axes of power are seen as mutually constituted. Interviews were conducted with same sex couples, both individually and together, in which the following topics were addressed: intimacy, division of household labor, domestic decision-making, conflict resolution, and the social context in which the couples live. One part of the study analyzes the economic foundations upon which the couples live and how income and possessions are organized within their relationship. This study shows that income and status are key questions for studying equality within same sex couples. The analysis is concerned with the tensions generated by the partners' class position as well as the negotiations which occur between the couple. It becomes apparent that the equality as an ideal is difficult to attain in practice. Even same sex partners are forced to relate to household labor as gendered practices. The interviewees describe their couple relationship and everyday life within heteronormative discourses. Through their stories, the interviewed couples give a view of the way in which everyday experiences of heteronormative confrontations affect the construction of their relationship. This study also indicates that same sex couples are neither more equal nor less conflict laden than heterosexual couples, even if they position themselves in relation to heterosexual couples as anti-role models. When the interviewees position themselves in relation to heterosexual couples they simultaneously embody the ideal of the gender equality discourse and the norms of being an ideal couple.

De senaste decennierna har utbudet av matlagningsprogram och kokböcker ökat dramatiskt, samtidigt som samhället blivit allt mer jämställt. Trots detta är de professionella köken fortsatt kraftigt mansdominerade platser som kvinnor aktivt exkluderas ifrån. Föreliggande studie utforskar därför, ur ett genusperspektiv, hur två vinnare av Sveriges Mästerkock konstrueras i sina kokböcker. Analysen utförs inom ramen för den kritiska diskursanalysen och utgår från en socialkonstruktivistisk syn på språk och makt. Studien intar även en feministisk ansats där Yvonne Hirdmans teori om genussystemet är den huvudsakliga utgångspunkten för förståelsen av samhällets förmåga att reproducera könsnormer. Materialet består av Erik Hammars bok Min franska matresa och Klara Linds bok Sydamerika – min matpassion som ges ut av Bonnier Fakta. Syftet är att undersöka hur Klara och Erik konstrueras i sina kokböcker och om böckerna bidrar till att upprätthålla dikotomin mellan det manliga och kvinnliga köket. För att åstadkomma detta används kvantitativa metoder från den systemisk funktionella grammatiken i kombination med kvantitativ innehållsanalys.Resultatet visar att Erik konstrueras som en aktiv, framgångsrik kock till skillnad från Klara som framställs som mer passiv och familjeorienterad. Förekomsten av teman skiljer sig markant böckerna emellan där Eriks bok främst refererar till tävlingsprogrammet och franska rätter och tekniker vilket inte sker i Klaras fall. Detta bidrar tillsammans till att böckerna bidrar till att reproducera dikotomin mellan det manliga och kvinnliga köket.

This thesis explores the scope for children’s voices offered to children in court mandated investigations regarding custody, residence or contact. The focus is on children who have been exposed to their father’s violence against their mother The aim is to study how the legislators’ intentions concerning children’s participation in this area are implemented in work groups. The assumption is that implementation can be seen as collective learning. Implementation may in this case challenge established relations of power like age and gender orders. Professional discourses on violence have to shift from gender neutral to gendered discourses and discourses on children have to include a participation discourse. Learning which includes a shift in discourses and challenges established power relations is defined as radical learning.The approach is social constructionist and draws on group interviews with social workers specialized in family law.The thesis analyses which discourses of violence and of children are accessible and used at group level. This can be seen as a discursive opportunity structure. The discourses in question are: gender violence, child protection, treatment and family law discourses as well as care and participation discourses. The conclusion is that all these discourses are accessible to the professionals and the effects of the different discourses are discussed regarding the possibilities for creating a safe situation for mother and child during the investigation.The thesis furthermore analyses the organisation of the work groups. These characteristics can be seen as an organisational opportunity structure. The analysis shows different patterns in the groups when it comes to structure and stage of learning process. One group seems to be at the stage where the members are prepared to start talking to the child about the father’s violence.The final chapter presents a discussion of radical learning and the possibilities for radical social change when established power relations are challenged.

This dissertation fundamentally explores the nature of change, and the development interventions that aim to bring this change into a particular society. What emerges is the notion of a ‘spiral’: imagining the dynamic relationship between paradigms and discourses, the institutions and programmes operating in a place, and the way individual identities are constructed in intricate and contradictory ways. Within this spiral, discourse has power – ‘words matter’ – but equally significant is how these words interact dialogically with concrete social structures and institutions – ‘it takes more than changing words to change the world’. Furthermore, these changes are reacted to, and expressed in, the physical, sexed body. In essence, change is ideational, institutional, and embodied. To investigate the politics of change, this dissertation analyses the spiral relationships between gender discourses, institutions, and identities in contemporary Indonesia, focusing on their transmission across Java. It does so by exploring the Indonesian state’s gender policies in the context of globalisation, democratisation, and decentralisation. In this way, the lens of gender allows us to analyse the dynamic interactions between state and society, between ideas and institutions, which impact on everything from cultural structures to physical bodies. Research focuses on the gender policies of the Indonesian Ministry of Women’s Empowerment, substantiated with case study material from United Nations Population Fund reproductive health programmes in West Java. Employing a multi-level, multi-vocal theoretical framework, the thesis analyses gender discourses and relational structures (how discourses circulate to construct the Indonesian woman), gender institutions and social structures (how discourses are translated into programmes), and gender identities and embodied structures (how discourses enter the home and the body). Critically, studying gender requires analysing the human body as the site of both structural and symbolic power. This dissertation thus argues for renewed emphasis on a ‘politics of the body’, recognising that bodies are the material foundations from which gender discourses derive their naturalising power and hence ability to structure social relations. The danger of forgetting this politics of the body is that it allows for slippage between ‘gender’ and ‘women’; policy objectives cannot be disentangled from the reality of physical bodies and their social construction. This thesis therefore argues that there are distinct and even inverse impacts of gender policies in Indonesia. As the ‘liberal’ and ‘modern’ assumptions of gender equality are overlaid onto the patriarchal culture of a society undergoing transformation, women’s bodies and women’s sexuality are always and ever the focus of the social gaze. The gender policies and interventions affecting change on discursive and institutional levels may thus provoke reaction at the level of individual identities that are contrary to explicit intentions. In effect, projects that purport to work on ‘gender’ are often so deeply rooted in underlying gender normativity that their net effect is to reinscribe these gender hierarchies. By exposing the contradictions in these underlying paradigms we gain insight into the politics of a transforming society. Furthermore, engaging with the politics of the body allows us to analyse the spiral processes between discourse and practice, the question of power, and the way men and women embody social structures and experience social transformation.