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This study is about three French plays in which Jocasta, the mother and wife of Oedipus, is shared as a main character: La Thébaïde (The Theban Brothers) by Jean Racine, La Machine Infernale (The Infernal Machine) by Jean Cocteau, and Le Nom d’Oedipe (The Name of Oedipus) by Hélène Cixous. Jocasta has always been overshadowed by the tragic destiny of Oedipus since the onset of Sophocles’ works. Although these three plays commonly focus on describing the character of Jocasta, there are some remarkable differences among them in terms of theme, style, and stage directions. In The Theban Brothers, Racine’s 17th century play, Jocasta is described as a deathlike mother, while Cocteau’s Jocasta, in The Infernal Machine, is portrayed as an “extravagant, liberal, and hilarious” lady. In The Name of Oedipus, Cixous portrays Jocasta as a woman possessing hermaphroditic characteristics, ushering in a new era of resistance to the age-old paternal hierarchy. As for style, Racine’s neoclassical play shows a strict respect for the three unities of time, space, and action. Cocteau’s avant-garde play neglects all these rules, while Cixous goes even further by destroying the order of languages, as illustrated by her “feminine writing.” Freed from Western orthodoxy, Cixous wants to contribute to the creation of cosmic unity. Her deconstructionist play intends to regenerate the world by establishing a new order and new point of view towards universality. The stage directions of these plays are also an important key to better understanding theatrical evolution. It is through the stage directions, indicated both implicitly and explicitly in these three plays, iv that enables us to appreciate the theatrical transformation in terms of visualization as well as metaphysics. In sum, the transformation of theme, style, and stage devices in portraying their own Jocastas demonstrates that while these three plays are deconstructional to one another, each denying the existing value and orders of their respective time periods, they are also constructional in that they all attempt to open a new horizon of theatre

I trace Jacques Derrida's notions of self and truth in Circumfession. This text paints a gruesome self-portrait depicting the inescapable violence of subjectivity. The self is born in blood. Derrida courageously confesses to being a casualty of this lovelessness. Similarly, exploring the depth of patriarchy's inscriptions requires facing the painful truth of my bleeding self. Investigating these wounds seems to reopen them, making me complicit in my own oppression. Drawing from the rich narrative of Ingeborg Bachmann's novel Malina, I allow feminists such as Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Drucilla Cornell and bell hooks to engage Derrida's notions of the wounded and wounding self. Beginning in this bloody place, they attempt to write a way-out of the disempowering systems of subjectivity to which the female self seems confined. They write in order that love will bleed some light on the struggle for empowered female subjectivity, re-writing the self as a space of love rather than violence.

This thesis aims to analyze Dorothy Cross’s sculptural, installation, and video works in relation to Ireland’s Post-Conflict struggle with its cultural and global identity. Throughout the course of history, Ireland’s identity has always been in question, sparking new interest over the last thirty years in producing an Irish identity discerned by “hybridity, multiplicity, and mobility.”[1] Declan McGonagle states that the traditional Irish constructs of gender and sexuality were primarily challenged by Dorothy Cross during this period of rapid sociopolitical change.[2] Cross consistently deconstructs pre-Christian Mother Ireland and patriarchal Catholic Ireland in her early sculptural works, and ultimately transitions towards communicating a collective identity rooted in loss and desire. [3] The constructions of gendered, cultural, and collective identity are dismantled across multiple media throughout Cross’s oeuvre, which can be analyzed through a synthesis of poststructuralist, postmodern, and French feminist theory. In evaluating Dorothy Cross’s destabilization of identity, I will expand the literature on contemporary Irish art during the nation’s turbulent time of globalization, which has been underemphasized in the study of contemporary European art. [1] Robin Lydenberg, “Contemporary Irish Art on the Move: At Home and Abroad with Dorothy Cross,” Éire-Ireland: a Journal of Irish Studies 39, no. 3/4 (2004): 145. [2] Declan McGonagle, Fintan O’Toole, and Kim Levin, Irish Art Now: From the Poetic to the Political (London: Merrell Publishers Ltd., 1999): 19. [3] Enrique Juncosa and Sean Kissane, eds, Dorothy Cross (Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2005), 16.

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My visual art practice explores the point at which a sense of bodily humour and revulsion may intersect in the world of the monstrous-feminine: the female grotesque, presented as my own obese (and post-obese) body. This exegesis is a written elucidation of my visual art practice as research. As an artist I create performative photographic images featuring taboo or otherwise 'inappropriate' subject matter, situations, materials and behaviours including bodily fluids, offal, internal organs and my own post-obese body. Through these modes of working, I establish and investigate the subjectivity of flesh: Why are we repulsed by the female grotesque? How can this flesh be used to subvert readings of the female body? My research is informed by those understandings of the female body, sexuality and difference described in the work of feminist theorists including Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, Ruth Salvaggio and Elizabeth Grosz. I explore the work of influential artists such as Eleanor Antin, Carolee Schneeman, Cindy Sherman and Sarah Lucas. In this context, I present my own visual art practice as a point from which the monstrous-feminine can be given voice as sentient, intelligent flesh.

This thesis reexamines the beginnings of Swedish hardboiled crime literature, in part tracking its lineage to American culture and unpacking Swedish identity. Following the introduction, the second chapter asserts how this genre began as a form of escapism, specifically in Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Roseanna. The third chapter compares predecessor Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep with Roseanna, and how Sweden’s greater gender tolerance significantly outshining America’s is reflected in literature. The fourth chapter examines how Henning Mankell’s novels fail to fully accept Sweden’s complicity in neo-Nazism as an active component of Swedish identity. The final chapter reveals Helene Tursten’s Detective Inspector Huss engaging with gender and racial relations in unique ways, while also releasing the suppressive qualities found in the Swedish identity post-war. Therefore, this thesis will better contextualize the onset of the genre, and how its lineage reflects the fruits and the damages alike in the Swedish identity.

This essay examines how family-related violence was depicted in art in Sweden during the 70s, 80s and 90s. A major shift in the views of violence within the family and in relationships occurs during this period, which becomes evident through a change in laws but is also visible in an ongoing social debate. Basing my research on a number of works by female artists, depicting violence, I have analysed ways of interpreting and understanding the violence in these images, in relation to the changed views on family, gender roles and violence. The female perspective on violence is often the same as the perspective of the violated, and I have chosen to study female artists, thus assuming that a changed attitude is most clearly reflected in this group.The artists included in the study are Marie-Louise Ekman, Marja Ruta, Kristina Abelli Elander, Maria Lindberg, Maria Friberg and Monica Larsen Dennis, Helene Billgren, Tuija Lindström, Charlotte Gyllenhammar, Anna-Maria Ekstrand and Annika von Hausswolff.The works are grouped into four categories based on a model created by Gregory H. Stanton, which he developed in the survey of genocide. His model depicts ten stages in which violence slowly increases. My division is in four stages and is named structural violence, embodied acts of violence or abuse, crime victims or traces of crime, and consequences of violence. Seen over the period covered by the study, one can observe an increase in the number of images with violent content. The depictions change from being political messages to becoming more provocative and questioning power structures. This is a development which is happening simultaneously with the breakthrough of postmodern art.The artists have in several works been influenced by or relate to images of violence shown in news media and popular culture, a genre that grows during the 1980s home video epoch. But the art not only interacts with other visual media, it also wants to involve the viewer by exploring and questioning values and hierarchies in society.The girl as a symbol of an innocent victim is represented in several of the works, and the girls are given a much greater freedom of action in the artworks than in reality. A concealed aggression is made visible and in several of the works the girls act violators.Depiction of violence has not been treated as a theme or categorized as a separate genre in the arts. To the extent that I have found analyses of works containing violence in the arts, there has been a hesitative attitude and the images have been perceived as simple in a communicative or interpretive aspect. In my study, I come to another conclusion, Seeing that the processing of violence in the artistic works creates a counter-image to stereotypical and simplified images in media and and so helps us to see the normative values, power imbalances, behaviours and expectations that are often the basis for acts of violence.

Was uns eine Gedenktafel am Haus Nr. 48 in Lotzdorf aussagt - was sie (leider) nicht aussagt - und weshalb die Stifter bzw. Gestalter dieser Tafel ungerecht sind. 'Wilhelm von Kügelgen verbrachte hier Tage seiner Kindheit' - so steht es auf einer Gedenktafel. Der Vater Gerhard von Kügelgen wird weder erwähnt noch geehrt, obwohl er der um ein Vielfaches berühmtere Maler war, der mehrere Jahre zu seiner Sommerkur im Augustusbad mit seiner Familie in Lotzdorf wohnte. Der „Vergesslichkeit“ seines Sohnes Wilhelm ist es sicherlich zuzuschreiben, dass die Gemeindevorsteher Lotzdorfs nicht ihm, dem berühmten und erfolgreichen Maler Gerhard von Kügelgen, eine Gedenktafel widmeten, sondern kurioserweise nur seinem Sohn Wilhelm, der damals als Kind in Lotzdorf mit den Eltern weilte und als alter Mann diese seine Erinnerungen in seinem Buch festhielt. Es kann nur vermutet werden, dass die Persönlichkeit des Gerhard von Kügelgen, sein Rang als berühmter Maler, ebenso wie seine hohe gesellschaftliche Stellung in Dresden, den Lotzdorfern in der Zeit seiner Kuraufenthalte und auch späterhin im Ort nicht bekannt waren. Unbemerkt und unbekannt blieben auch eine Reihe seiner berühmten Besucher und Malerfreunde, die ihren Freund und Gönner in Lotzdorf während seiner Kuren aufsuchten.