The ecological crisis and gender inequality are two serious problems in society today and a study conjoining them can contribute to a deeper understanding surrounding the issues. This paper argues that there is a relation between these problems with the support of ecofeminist theory. This relation can be analysed in literature and in the following study the colombian novel La Vorágine (1924), by José Eustasio Rivera, works as the base of interpretation since its main theme is the Amazonian jungle and its relation to humans. The objective of this study is to firstly, interpret and analyse the descriptions of nature and how it relates to the feminine sphere, secondly analyse the correlation between them in the question of domination and finally, look at how the masculine play a role in this relation. This writing concludes after the hermeneutic analysis, that feminine associations can be detected in the descriptions of nature and a correlation between the domination of women and the exploitation of the jungle in the story is visible, since both phenomena’s occupy a similar position within the patriarchal society. It also concludes that the masculine plays an important part, the white man acts as the exploiter of the female and nature. But they are at the same time not a homogenous group, and have different roles depending on class. The feminine characters are likewise not a homogenous group. / La crisis ambiental y la desigualdad entre los géneros son dos problemas graves en la sociedad actual y un estudio conjunto de ambos puede contribuir a una comprensión más profunda de estas cuestiones. La tesina que sigue se basa en el marco teórico del ecofeminismo y su idea de que existe una relación entre estos dos problemas. Esta relación puede ser analizada en la literatura, y en este estudio se parte de la novela de José Eustasio Rivera, La Vorágine (1924), ya que su tema principal es la selva amazónica y su relación con el ser humano. El objetivo de esta tesina es, en primer lugar, analizar e interpretar las descripciones de la naturaleza y cómo esta se relaciona con la esfera femenina. En segundo lugar, analizar la correlación entre ambas en lo que se refiere a la dominación. Finalmente, ver cómo aparece el papel de lo masculino en esta relación. Después de un análisis llevado a cabo con el método hermenéutico, se concluye que se detectan asociaciones con lo femenino en las descripciones de la selva y una correlación entre la dominación de la mujer y la explotación de la selva en la historia de la obra, ya que parece que se encuentran en situaciones similares en la sociedad patriarcal. Se concluye también que lo masculino tiene un papel importante. Por un lado, el hombre blanco actúa como explotador de lo femenino y de los recursos naturales, pero por otro lado, el masculino no es un grupo homogéneo y su papel cambia según la clase social, algo que también ocurre con los personajes femeninos.

In this study I apply social constructionism as propounded by Vivian Burr (1998) to show that although J. K. Rowling uses stereotypes in the Harry Potter series as a reflection of how gender is constructed across a wide range of societal institutions in contemporary Britain, she created complex characters who on an individual level subvert social constructs and thereby offers her readers alternatives to culturally defined concepts of gender. I explore the all-pervasive social phenomenon of gender and examine how it is constructed in present-day Britain and reflected in the series (bearing in mind that the first book was published in 1997 and the last one in 2007). My analysis of female and male characters in the books, and their interpersonal relationships, shows that Rowling's often tricky portrayal of femininities and masculinities gives us an honest view of teenagers’ lives and contemporary gender relations in an ever-changing, complex world. / English Studies / M. A. (English)

The aim of this thesis is to describe and analyze the Swedish artist Marianne Lindberg De Geer’s public sculpture Jag tänker på mig själv in relation to the female nude as a traditional motif within the western art and aesthetic. The artwork in question depicts two naked upright standing women, one of whom is represented as emaciated and skinny and the other one as voluminous and fat. By using previous research on the subject of aberrant bodily representations as its main theoretical framework and with a methodological approach based on visual semiotics, this study has found that Jag tänker på mig själv is to be seen as a deviant representation of the female body in several ways. The way in which the female body is represented in Marianne Lindberg De Geer’s sculpture has shown to deviate not only from the traditional female nude but also from the visual norms that usually characterizes aberrant representations of the female-coded body.

For most writers who deal with displacement, rewriting themselves, articulating and communicating their sense of estrangment is their lifetime work. For displacement forces one to leave behind the familiar and embrace the unknown. In this process of deconstruction, the concepts of home, belonging and identity are renegotiated and questioned constantly. Le Grand Voyage – the working title for the draft of a novel that is presented in conjunction with this exegesis – is a fictional work that is produced out of the implications of displacement, which inscribes itself in a series of explorations I started in 2001, cumulating with two video works Frammento in 2003 and Footnotes in 2004. Le Grand Voyage investigates further the concept of home by questioning the home/mother relationship. The exegesis aims to contextualise the making of Le Grand Voyage by using another woman’s narrative as the main point of reference: Linda Olsson’s Let Me Sing You Gentle Songs (2005). Olsson’s work – like mine – is conceived out of the effects of displacement, and the literary form and structure display symptoms that are characteristics to narratives of displacement. By putting the home/mother/daughter in context, the narrative displays home as a patriarchal construct showing how the idealisation of home/place is predicated on a gendering of home, whereby, as McDermott notes, ‘home is constructed as a maternal, static and past, to which the (male) subjects longs to return’ (2003: 265). The narrative’s point of view is that of daughters but also that of mothers as daughters, and enables not only a feminist discussion of the notion of home but also of motherhood. Therefore, the theoretical approach for this work has encompassed feminists’ writings that have particularly focused their research on space, place and gender. In challenging the dominant form of gender constructions and relations, the first and second wave feminism have empowered many women to leave home in order to shape their own version of identity. I believe it is within the perspective of displacement, of being out of place, that many women continue to find the necessary distance to contest a particular reading of woman and home that still prevails in academic literature and fiction. Thus, an important part of this exegesis concentrates on the critic of home. I want to argue in a feminist way that our ideas of home and belonging still reflect gendered assumptions and are therefore contestable. That displacement as a catalyst for loss, emotional grief and mourning becomes an enabling way for women to rethink home in terms of what was at play rather than in place and to do the ‘memory work’ that feminists ask women to do: to remember in order not to forget because ‘forgetting is a major obstacle to change’ (Greene, 1991: 298). Their attacks on the feminisation of place have opened up for me possibilities to think of home outside the parameters of sameness. They have also enabled me to understand the paradoxical position a displaced person is faced with: if displacement is favored and privileged why then do longings for home still persist for some? – a fact that is well illustrated in the actual resurgence of the preoccupation to belong. The gain in displacement also involves the fact that distance forces one to look at the longing and nostalgia for what they really conceal. In the case of a woman and, motherless daughters, distance, as this exegesis demonstrates, enables the writer to unveil the longings as subversive and fraudulent, tricking women into thinking there was nothing better than the past: home sweet home, the safe, bounded nest where women could be women: could be the mother. With the ‘memory work’ they both learn to think away from the parameters of sameness and the past, outside the nostalgic stances of singularity, safety, boundaries and internalised histories, therefore outside of the maternal, the home/mother relationship. ‘What is home?’ is a difficult question to negotiate for a woman. The exegesis and the first draft of the novel show what is at stake when one asks the question and the responsibility of women when writing about home.

For most writers who deal with displacement, rewriting themselves, articulating and communicating their sense of estrangment is their lifetime work. For displacement forces one to leave behind the familiar and embrace the unknown. In this process of deconstruction, the concepts of home, belonging and identity are renegotiated and questioned constantly. Le Grand Voyage – the working title for the draft of a novel that is presented in conjunction with this exegesis – is a fictional work that is produced out of the implications of displacement, which inscribes itself in a series of explorations I started in 2001, cumulating with two video works Frammento in 2003 and Footnotes in 2004. Le Grand Voyage investigates further the concept of home by questioning the home/mother relationship. The exegesis aims to contextualise the making of Le Grand Voyage by using another woman’s narrative as the main point of reference: Linda Olsson’s Let Me Sing You Gentle Songs (2005). Olsson’s work – like mine – is conceived out of the effects of displacement, and the literary form and structure display symptoms that are characteristics to narratives of displacement. By putting the home/mother/daughter in context, the narrative displays home as a patriarchal construct showing how the idealisation of home/place is predicated on a gendering of home, whereby, as McDermott notes, ‘home is constructed as a maternal, static and past, to which the (male) subjects longs to return’ (2003: 265). The narrative’s point of view is that of daughters but also that of mothers as daughters, and enables not only a feminist discussion of the notion of home but also of motherhood. Therefore, the theoretical approach for this work has encompassed feminists’ writings that have particularly focused their research on space, place and gender. In challenging the dominant form of gender constructions and relations, the first and second wave feminism have empowered many women to leave home in order to shape their own version of identity. I believe it is within the perspective of displacement, of being out of place, that many women continue to find the necessary distance to contest a particular reading of woman and home that still prevails in academic literature and fiction. Thus, an important part of this exegesis concentrates on the critic of home. I want to argue in a feminist way that our ideas of home and belonging still reflect gendered assumptions and are therefore contestable. That displacement as a catalyst for loss, emotional grief and mourning becomes an enabling way for women to rethink home in terms of what was at play rather than in place and to do the ‘memory work’ that feminists ask women to do: to remember in order not to forget because ‘forgetting is a major obstacle to change’ (Greene, 1991: 298). Their attacks on the feminisation of place have opened up for me possibilities to think of home outside the parameters of sameness. They have also enabled me to understand the paradoxical position a displaced person is faced with: if displacement is favored and privileged why then do longings for home still persist for some? – a fact that is well illustrated in the actual resurgence of the preoccupation to belong. The gain in displacement also involves the fact that distance forces one to look at the longing and nostalgia for what they really conceal. In the case of a woman and, motherless daughters, distance, as this exegesis demonstrates, enables the writer to unveil the longings as subversive and fraudulent, tricking women into thinking there was nothing better than the past: home sweet home, the safe, bounded nest where women could be women: could be the mother. With the ‘memory work’ they both learn to think away from the parameters of sameness and the past, outside the nostalgic stances of singularity, safety, boundaries and internalised histories, therefore outside of the maternal, the home/mother relationship. ‘What is home?’ is a difficult question to negotiate for a woman. The exegesis and the first draft of the novel show what is at stake when one asks the question and the responsibility of women when writing about home.

Suicide holds an ambivalent position in contemporary social and cultural contexts. It questions what it means to live and die, yet provides no clear-cut answers about death or dying, life or living. This thesis explores some of the ways suicide has been understood and represented, to demonstrate that knowing suicide is dependent not only on what suicide means, but also on how meanings of suicide become part of knowledge. Knowing suicide is not a matter of responding to it as self-evident, transparent, neutral and obvious, but rather is implicated in social processes and norms central to how knowledge gains intelligibility. Guided by poststructuralist, postmodernist, feminist and postfeminist philosophies, the thesis takes up gender and gendering as its central focus, to interrogate how knowledge about suicide becomes knowledge. Critically examining a wide variety of textual sources, it argues that suicide is principally rendered as a masculine, and even a masculinist, practice. Knowing suicide today is anchored in suicidology - the study of suicide - and maintained by institutional sites of practice including sociology, law, medicine, psy-knowledge and newsprint media, each of which is analysed here. Suicide as masculine and masculinist practice is invoked through multiple, often-contradictory and inextricably linked readings of gender, even while claiming homogeneity. Its gendered foundations can however be made to appear gender-neutral, even when actually gender-saturated. The twin gender movements of neutrality and repleteness are in fact crucial to the knowing of suicide. The thesis establishes that knowing suicide can never occur outside discourse. Even more importantly, how suicide enters discourse cannot be thought outside gender. The body matters to the production of deeply problematic understandings of agency, intent and violence, on which the production of suicide as masculine and masculinist depends. It becomes clear that such dependence rests not only on gender, but also on race and sexuality, as conditions of its knowing. The thesis suggests that further attention be given to the production and maintenance of highly reductive and limiting homogenous truth claims in suicide - truth claims that validate and privilege some interpretations of suicide, at the expense of rendering others less legitimate and serious. If the processes and practices of interpreting suicide become a site of permanent debate, they are more likely to challenge the ways in which masculinist ways of knowing render, and limit, the intelligibility of suicide.

In this study I apply social constructionism as propounded by Vivian Burr (1998) to show that although J. K. Rowling uses stereotypes in the Harry Potter series as a reflection of how gender is constructed across a wide range of societal institutions in contemporary Britain, she created complex characters who on an individual level subvert social constructs and thereby offers her readers alternatives to culturally defined concepts of gender. I explore the all-pervasive social phenomenon of gender and examine how it is constructed in present-day Britain and reflected in the series (bearing in mind that the first book was published in 1997 and the last one in 2007). My analysis of female and male characters in the books, and their interpersonal relationships, shows that Rowling's often tricky portrayal of femininities and masculinities gives us an honest view of teenagers’ lives and contemporary gender relations in an ever-changing, complex world. / English Studies / M. A. (English)

No description available.

Stefan Hirschauer kritisiert mit dem Konzept des Undoing Gender den Theorieentwurf des Doing Gender nach West & Zimmerman. Er begreift Geschlecht als Effekt von Interaktionen und lehnt sich dabei an Garfinkels ethnomethodologisches Konzept der Accountability und der Omnirelevanz von Geschlecht an. Aus institutioneller Perspektive wird die Möglichkeit der Neutralisierung der Kategorie Geschlecht betont. Forschungsperspektivisch ist Geschlecht auf seine konkrete Relevanzsetzung in Interaktionen unter der Bedingung unterschiedlicher kultureller Konfigurationen und institutioneller Arrangements zu untersuchen ("kontextuelle Kontingenz").

In this thesis I explore the social construction of sexuality and sexual dysfunction. Interviews were undertaken with 20 sex therapists practising in Aotearoa/New Zealand in order to elicit accounts of contemporary sex therapy practice in the local context. Using a feminist poststructuralist lens, I explicate and critically examine the dominant discourses informing the construction of sex therapy, and heterosexual sexual relations, and what these discourses enable and constrain. I draw attention to some of the assumptions embedded in the construction of the sexual dysfunctions in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR, APA, 2000), and in accounts of sex therapy practice, examining the ways in which these are based on taken-for-granted norms of (hetero)sexuality and highlighting the differently enabled gendered sexual subjectivities they (re)produce. Although there are nine sexual dysfunctions identified in the DSM-IV-TR, all of which I briefly outline in Chapter Four, I restrict my focus in the analytical chapters to the conceptualisation and treatment of vaginismus, orgasm difficulties in women, discrepancies in desire and, relatedly, the gendering of desire through powerful sociocultural discourses and representations. I pay particular attention to the implications of these for heterosexual women’s sexuality. I also explore some of the generic concepts that dominate the construction of therapy at a broader level than that of sex therapy alone, arguing that while these offer some useful ways of framing therapy they also constrain therapy practice in important ways. Through a critical review of the sex therapy literature and accounts of practice from those interviewed, I contend that contemporary sex therapy tends to reify dominant cultural and sexological norms rather than challenge them. My analyses show that the dominant discourses informing constructions of sex therapy and heterosexual sexual relations produce particular types of sex as normal whilst marginalizing sexual acts or practices that fall outside of such restrictive parameters. In particular, I argue that the genital-coital-orgasm construct that is hegemonic within sex therapy restricts possibilities for alternative erotic pleasures and possibilities amongst heterosexuals whilst contributing to the invisibilization of sexual identities other than heterosexual. Accounts of sex therapy practice that were able to contest such framings are also highlighted. Because these came from sex therapists drawing on radical feminist or feminist poststructuralist discourses, I suggest that these discourses offer important possibilities for a deconstructive (sex) therapy practice that is able to challenge an often inequitable sexual status quo. Attention is also drawn to the significant constraints which act to restrict clients’ choices and possibilities for sex therapists to practise in more critically questioning ways. I conclude this thesis with an ‘invitation to reflection’ where I briefly discuss some deconstructive approaches that I have found useful for developing ongoing reflexive analysis of my own taken-for-granted assumptions in the area of sexuality, and for aiding my thinking about therapeutic practices that support my political and theoretical commitments and that attend to some of the issues outlined in this thesis. / Whole document restricted, but available by request, use the feedback form to request access.