Once known only as Bodybuilding and Women’s Bodybuilding, the sport has grown to include multiple competition categories that both limit and expand opportunities for female bodybuilders. While the creation of additional categories, such as Fitness, Figure, Bikini, and Physique, appears to make the sport more inclusive to more variations and interpretation of the feminine, muscular physique, it also creates more in-between spaces. This auto ethnographic research explores the ways that multiple female competition categories within the sport of Bodybuilding define, reinforce, and complicate the gendered experiences of female physique athletes, by bringing freak theory into conversation with body categories.

This thesis analyzes how gender and sexual identities are discursively constructed through Churchill&rsquo / s Cloud Nine, Kureishi&rsquo / s My Beautiful Laundrette and Stoppard&rsquo / s The Invention of Love / it traces how the dominant discourse reduces the riddle of human sexuality to the binary frame / it also discusses that the bi-polar organization of sexuality does not suppress, but reproduces sexual dissidence. A male-female pair is envisaged by the prevailing discourse / Butler&rsquo / s ideas of performativity and drag performance will be employed to indicate that gender and sexuality are not inborn, but culturally and historically determined, and to explore how deviant sexualities undermine the double columns of the masculine and the feminine, the homosexual and the heterosexual. An investigation into the homosexual/heterosexual split will demonstrate how power shifts between the points of the binary frame rather than being monopolized by the dominant discourse. The regulating discourse polarizes homosexuality and heterosexuality / it deploys the binary frame to overvalue the heterosexual and to disparage the homosexual / the established order seeks to fortify its authority through the binary thought. Yet, the binary logic is internally unstable / binary oppositions constantly threaten to collapse and fuse into one another / therefore, due to the inherent indeterminacy of the binary logic, homosexuality is not annihilated, but rejuvenated by heterosexuality / thus, power flows among the dominant and counter discourses. Queer theory, drawing on post-structuralism, subverts the binary frame, and glorifies the proliferation of sexual identities and practices beyond the dualistic understanding.

This dissertation examines the gendered discourses in the novels of the writers of different sexes/genders, Robert Heinlein&rsquo / s Stranger in a Strange Land, Ursula Le Guin&rsquo / s The Left Hand of Darkness, Joanna Russ&rsquo / The Female Man and Samuel Delany`s Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia. This study investigates how writers linguistically construct their characters as gendered/sexed beings as an effect of certain identity politics, ideologies and power structures. In order to do so, critical discourse analysis is applied to the passages chosen from different parts of the novels under consideration. Moreover, Butler&rsquo / s performativity theory of gender and Foucault&rsquo / s theory of discourse/power/knowledge and his conceptualization of subjectivity are employed in the discursive analyses of the novels. The argument of the study is that there is a close relationship between discourse, ideology and the constitution/representation of gender/sex as contingent on a particular socio-cultural and historical context. This study is based on Butler`s assertion that gender is a doing, a performance, and it is a cultural and ideological construct. Thus, the study shows that writers&rsquo / linguistic choices for the constructions and descriptions of their characters are not ideologically or politically innocent but imbued with socio-cultural and ideological meanings.

This thesis aims to explore the categories of sexuality and gender through an analysis of Jeanette Winterson&rsquo / s well-known novels, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Written on the body, against the background of Butler&rsquo / s concept of performativity and Cixous&rsquo / s &eacute / criture feminine. By underlining the constructedness of these categories and questioning the boundaries of patriarchal concepts and transgressing them, Winterson deconstructs the binary oppositions created by phallocentric discourse and problematizes the verdict that sexuality is inborn. Instead of this ingrained notion, she asserts that gender and sexual identities are culturally and discursively constructed by the dominant discourse. Although the dominant discourse favors heterosexuality over homosexuality and degrades sexuality into a binary frame of oppositions such as masculinity/ feminity and male/female, Winterson, in her novels, seeks an alternative to escape this ideological binarism and achieves to subvert the binary oppositions by highlighting the fluidity of sexuality and gender, and by creating amorphous characters like the ungendered narrator in Written on the body or by bestowing on them bisexuality or homosexuality as in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Hence, the main argument of this thesis will be to display Winterson&rsquo / s deconstruction and dissolution of the patriarchal categories in her novels and to emphasize her escape from the binary charade, in a fictional universe, with references to Butlerian performativity and Cixousian &eacute / criture feminine.

abstract: The term “friend zone” has been used in various areas of social media and pop culture to define a situation where one individual covets a relationship with a close friend that never evolves; typically the situation includes a male seeking a potential romantic partner with a female. Although friendship is often viewed in a positive format and sometimes the foundation of a healthy relationship, this term has been stigmatized as an unfortunate situation and counterproductive to obtaining a fulfilling relationship. To approach the multi-faceted concern of friend zone phenomena and the many areas damaging messages that occur, my thesis starts with the history of friend zone phenomena, establishing a definition of friend zone phenomena for future scholars. Next literature on friendship and love, and Galician’s work used for both the methodology and theoretical framework is introduced leading to the analysis. The methodology and theoretical framework for the analysis uses Mary-Lou Galician’s 7-Step-Reality-Check-Up, twelve Myths social media promoted as the preferred reading and the Twelve Prescriptions (Rxs) for Getting Real About Romance. Resources on the discourses of gender performativity, psychology, and sociology are also included in the theoretical framework. I start with an introduction to retrograde misogyny, The Manosphere (including The Red Pill [TRP]), the Elliot Rodger case and rape culture. This initial segment is analyzed differently from the other texts to describe the crux of social justice issues within friend zone phenomena. I then analyze 10 online memes related to friend zone phenomena. Lastly, I analyze Jet and Star’s new book, How to Get out of the Friend Zone –their book is a textual version of the advice they give on their YouTube channel. Throughout all the texts Myths 5 (Physical Attraction), 6 (Man = Stronger), and 13 (No Cross-Sexual Friends) were all proposed as the preferred reading. Myth 14 (Men Want Sex/Women Want Money) was prevalent across the memes and TRP/Rational Male. All four myths are laden with gender performativity with damaging perceptions of healthy and respectful relationships. Additional research on friend zone phenomena in the form of interviews and surveys is recommended as research is still sparse. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Social Justice and Human Rights 2015

The female characters in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI and Richard III; Rowley’s All’s Lost by Lust; Fletcher’s The Tragedy of Valentinian; Rowley, Dekker, and Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton; and Brome and Heywood’s The Late Witches of Lancashire curse their enemies because, as women, they have no other way to fight against the injustices they experience. At once an extension of the early modern belief that words are “women’s weapons,” and dangerously beyond the feminine ideal of silence, the curse, as a performative speech act, resembles the physical weapons wielded by men in its potential to cause serious harm. Using Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performative and J. L. Austin’s theory of performative utterances, this thesis argues that curses function as part of the cursing woman’s performative identity, and by using speech as a weapon, the cursing woman gains a measure of social agency within the social order even if she cannot change her place within it.

This essay examines how J.K Rowling´s tendency to draw on intertextuality creates a relegation of female characters in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2014). By examining the link between intertextuality and the creation and portrayal of certain female characters in the most selling book series in history, Harry Potter, it is clarified how the use of intertextuality relegates female characters to retrogressive social constructs of gender. The three characters studied in this essay are Fleur Delacour, Molly Weasley and Petunia Dursley. The approach used is mythological criticism, an approach focused on the search for universality in a multitude of modern and historical texts. The main concepts used in this essay are the archetypal woman, postmodernity, gender performativity, myth, and intertextuality. Judith Butler´s concept of gender performativity is combined with Graham Allen’s definitions of intertextuality and postmodernity to understand how and why female characters in Harry Potter are relegated. Evidence has been collected from published journals, books, and encyclopedias. This essay explains how relegation is caused by shining light upon the link between character creation and the myths that the character builds upon. J.K Rowling has used archetypical female roles, such as the siren, the wicked stepmother or the mother, when creating her characters, thus relegating them to past beliefs of femininity, such as the woman as being exotic and dangerous. By examining both myth and postmodern texts such as Harry Potter one can gain a deeper understanding on how intertextuality can cause a postmodernist text to reflect past notions of femininity that would be viewed as retrogressive in a postmodern and postcolonial society.

This essay explores how anti-normativity is achieved in Veronica Roth's novel Carve the Mark and uses Lois Lowry's The Giver and Ursula K Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness as points of comparison. It examines if Roth, Lowry, and Le Guin follow through with creating characters that are more than superficially queer by destabilizing gender and traditional attitudes towards identity markers. Using queer theory and gender performativity theory, this essay examines if the queerness of the characters and their relationships hold up when juxtaposed to normativity. When exploring the novels, it can be seen that these authors fail to create characters and relationships that are anything but superficially queer.

The aim of this diploma thesis is to explore the way how the gender performativity is portrayed in Xavier Dolan's films. The theoretical part of the thesis first deals with the definition and theoretical grounding of gender performativity from the perspective of several authors, mainly Judith Butler. This part of the thesis will detailly introduce the concepts of gender performativity, which will be necessary for the analysis of the studied films. The theoretical part also presents the queer theory and the related chapter devoted to queer film, which would also include Dolan's work. Lastly, this part also includes a chapter devoted to the concept of mise-en-scène. The methodological part introduces the method of semiotic analysis and introduces the synopsis of the studied films. The analytical part of the work presents its own semiotic analysis of the examined films. The aim of the analytical part is to find out how Dolan works with gender performativity in his films and how it is visually portrayed.

There is a scholar consensus that girls have been marginalized in childhood studies. Taking into account the gender effect in constructing different childhoods for boys and girls this thesis explores the frontiers of girlhood. Girlhood as being abandoned and not perceived in the here and now is constructed only in the future, namely in the frames of femininity and womanhood. This initiates pathology in the lives of girls. This thesis through film representation explored new constructions of girlhood. Two films Barbie as Rapunzel and Tangled based in the fairy tale of Rapunzel were explored through Foucauldian Discourse Analysis. The discursive constructions, the “preppy” girl and the “alternative” girl emerged accordingly as the versions of the “authentic” girl that is searching for her identity and leading to the “self-regulated” girl discourse as a way to reconstruct girlhood.These discursive constructions can be used in the reorientation of girlhood as they unravel the necessities that exist in girl studies.