When a family member is incarcerated, the task of emotionally and financially supporting the remaining family members and the incarcerated loved one often falls upon women, who are likely to be under-resourced and overwhelmed. Women whose husbands are incarcerated in India are likely to possess multiple marginalized identities, increasing their vulnerability to intersecting forms of oppression. Empirical research is lacking on wives of incarcerated men in India, contributing to their invisibility in policy-making and programmatic interventions. Guided by intersectional feminism and symbolic interactionism, the purpose of this study was to document the stories of women who had experienced spousal incarceration in the Indian context. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 wives of prison inmates who resided in or around the National Capital Territory of Delhi, all of whom either held a lower caste identity or a Muslim religious identity. Transcribed interviews were analyzed following the steps of narrative analysis. Results illustrate the diversity of storied experiences of wives of incarcerated husbands in India. First, by grouping narratives that conveyed the same overall storyline into the same cluster, I identified three story clusters: Ambivalent but Hanging On, Unconditionally Devoted, and Independent and Disillusioned. Second, by attending to how women's day-to-day lives are shaped by intersecting systems of privilege and oppression, particularly those tied to gender and class, I identified three overarching themes that spanned women's narratives: (a) a complicated relationship with patriarchy, (b) the weight of socioeconomic disenfranchisement, and (c) when resilience is not a choice. The results of this study emphasize the need to distinguish between feminist agency and welfare agency, to recognize women's experiences of ambiguous loss and disenfranchised grief, and to critique the systemic injustices that forced women to be resilient. Documenting their stories is instrumental in bringing attention to the needs, challenges, and triumphs of this underserved and overlooked population. / Doctor of Philosophy / When a family member is incarcerated, the task of emotionally and financially supporting the remaining family members and the incarcerated loved one often falls upon women, who are likely to be under-resourced and overwhelmed. Women whose husbands are incarcerated in India are likely to possess multiple marginalized identities, increasing their vulnerability to intersecting forms of oppression. Empirical research is lacking on wives of incarcerated men in India, contributing to their invisibility in policy-making and programmatic interventions. The purpose of this study was to document the stories of women who had experienced spousal incarceration in the Indian context. Interviews were conducted with 14 wives of prison inmates who resided in or around the National Capital Territory of Delhi, all of whom either held a lower caste identity or a Muslim religious identity. Results illustrate the diversity of women's stories and experiences with spousal incarceration. First, by grouping narratives that conveyed the same overall storyline into the same cluster, I identified three story clusters: Ambivalent but Hanging On, Unconditionally Devoted, and Independent and Disillusioned. Second, by attending to how women's day-to-day lives are shaped by intersecting systems of privilege and oppression, particularly those tied to gender and class, I identified three overarching themes that characterized women's narratives: (a) a complicated relationship with patriarchy, (b) the weight of socioeconomic disenfranchisement, and (c) when resilience is not a choice. The results of this study emphasize the need to distinguish between feminist agency and welfare agency, to recognize women's experiences of ambiguous loss and disenfranchised grief, and to critique the systemic injustices that forced women to be resilient. Documenting their stories is instrumental in bringing attention to the needs, challenges, and triumphs of this underserved and overlooked population.

This thesis explores the way we learn to advocate for sexual assault survivors. This multi-methodological, qualitative study examines both popular cultural representations of sexual assault and official training materials provided by rape crisis centers and domestic violence organizations as sites of pedagogical messaging. I argue that it is imperative to incorporate intersectional feminist frameworks into understanding how advocacy is animated in these different sites of learning. This project offers an intersectional feminist analysis of two television shows: Netflix's Unbelievable and HBO's I May Destroy You, in addition to the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault (TAASA) training manual and supplemental training materials from six different rape crisis centers within a 75-mile radius of the Dallas Ft. Worth metroplex. Together, both sets of texts work pedagogically to teach us who is a worthy victim, what counts as "real" rape (and to challenge this very framework), and who deserves organizational resources. This thesis concludes by offering an Intersectional Rape Advocacy Toolkit, aimed at offering a set of values, lessons, and practices necessary for activists to grow in mutual advocacy for survivors and mutual support for fellow activists working to put an end to rape culture.

The world today is globalized like never before and with countries becoming more multicultural it is important to strive towards an intercultural society. This essay aims to answer the question “In what ways can one teach representation in the intercultural classroom through fantasy literature?”. That is, to illustrate and exemplify how one can use fantasy literature in the English classroom to give students intercultural knowledge through discussions on representation and intersectionality. The discussions in the essay are based in the democratic values stated in the Swedish course curriculum for upper secondary school (Gy11) in relation to the theoretical background. With examples from the book Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, the essay breaches both difficult and sensitive subjects that can be discussed to make certain issues less alien for the reader. Cultural diversity is magical and it is important that students get the right tools to form deep relationships across cultural borders, and the fantasy genre is a great tool to use in the classroom to lessen these bridges between different cultures since the genre creates an arena for intercultural meetings where ‘the other’ is in focus, which reduces the alienating aspect of different cultures and identities.

She inches glass to break: conversations between friends is a project that aims to manifest, through research and practice, my own feminist language within the videos I have produced in my final year of my Masters of Fine Arts. My feminist language is Australian and intersectional, invested in combating sexism, racism and in deepening language and representation around sexuality in relation to Asian women. This project discusses my video She inches glass to break (2018) in length, which created intersectional feminist dialogue in response to feminist filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger’s film Ticket of No Return (1979) and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). Additionally, given this project’s investment in language, this body of work is influenced both by aspects of psychoanalysis – in which speech is central to a “therapeutic action” – and by feminist linguistics in which linguistic analysis reveals some of the mechanisms through which language constrains, coerces and represents women, men and non-binary people in oppressive ways.

Previous research on social movements shows that as a consequence of social stratification, structurally privileged groups in society are more prone to engage in and take on leading positions in collective action than those who are structurally marginalised. This essay takes off in the puzzle of deficient inclusion in social movements that identify as inclusive, and looks at how that problem also appear empirically in the environmental movement Extinction Rebellion (XR). As attention to environmental issues and climate activism has increased significantly over the last years, many activists and scholars have pointed out the importance of tackling the problem with an intersectional feminist approach. Therefore, an interpretive discourse analysis with a “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) approach is applied to the strategically chosen case of XR, and the results are interpreted through an intersectional feminist lens as conceptualised by Angela Davis (1981, 2016). The analysis contributes to the research problem through identifying two parallel problem representations, one representing the problem as proximate, local and technical-environmental and one representing it as current, global and societal-environmental. It is concluded that part of XR’s discourse rests on a problem representation that risks reproducing structural power relations. According to Davis’s conceptualisation of intersectional feminism this could have dire consequences for a movement which has shown to have potential to influence politics.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore how gender norms are represented and depicted in the commercial sphere of fashion, affecting primarily females. The thesis will highlight the voices of several young females of today and their perception of how it is to be influenced and exposed to gender norms in regards to fashion. This thesis theoretical chapters consists of theories in gender norms, norm-critical design, fashion magazines, editorial design, fashion photography, norm-critical photography and intersectional feminism. Furthermore, the method used for this paper are interviews, a total of 17 people were interviewed, whereas five of them are currently working in either the commercial fashion industry or as creatives on a global level. The interviews occurred online, through both emailing and Instagram. This thesis concludes that several aspects, primarily based on the male gaze negatively influence gender norms in the commercial sphere of fashion. However, it is also concluded that there are several change agents, working towards breaking these toxic influences. The thesis is also part of a design project, which final outcome is exhibited at the exhibition Windows Of Opportunity. An online exhibition hosted by the program Design + Change and Visual Communication + Change, at the Linnaeus University in Sweden. https://2020.designportfoliolnu.se/studentwork/rewrite/

This thesis intends to examine how taste, identity and community works in a Swedish Facebook group exclusive to women and people who define themselves as non-binary. The study is based on a material that stretches from 2019–01–01 to 2019–06–30. With a political framework, this group has based its values on intersectional feminism and postcolonial theory, which gives the posts made in the group a certain setting to relate to. By using Jürgen Habermas’ classic book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere : An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1962) together with Pierre Bourdieu’s notions on habitus, field, dox and capital, this thesis examines the perception of how the group develops a shared taste, as well as how it forms a certain kind of community. The first part of the analysis introduces statistics to form an overview of where the group members find their interests in literature most fulfilled and how interactions and commentary is spread over different kinds of posts. Here, a categorization is presented to clarify what the most prominent posts in the group are. In the second part, a closer examination is made through an approach to the new public that this group constitutes, how taste is formed and what kind of books the members are interested in and how conflicts arise not through discussions on good or bad taste, but rather political matters. Finally, the analysis shows how the community fulfills certain functions for the members and how they seem to perceive the group as a whole. In conclusion, this new cultural environment has impact on how we can understand our ability to express ourselves and make ourselves heard. Together with this we can see that the group forms a certain taste that mainly consists of popular culture, even though more literary titles can be found. Still, the most important function seems to be the one of community and the sense of belonging to a group, to participate and receive approval as a human being.

This essay analyses the life of Joyce, the protagonist in “Somewhere in England”, the fourth section of Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips, using an intersectional feminist perspective. It attempts to show how patriarchy, classism, and racism intersect to shape Joyce’s life and to limit her possibilities. The essay argues that at the beginning, Joyce is too naïve to fully understand the power structures prevailing in her society, and therefore, she is different from those around her. However, she successively experiences not only patriarchal oppression but also class and race oppressions. The result is that Joyce accepts her social position when she understands that it is difficult for an individual woman to challenge the intersected multiple oppressions of the capitalist, supremacist, patriarchal society.

In this essay I examine how conceptions of gender can expand the emancipatory ability of feminism. To achieve this the essay analyzes and discusses two conceptions of gender. The first can be found in Virginia Held’s “The Ethics of Care”, while the second can be found in Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s “Feminism without Borders”. By comparing these the essay examines the limits of a stricter conception of gender, in comparison to a more complex conception of gender. These are in turn compared to Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble” and Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex”.  Through the analysis and discussion, it is shown that stricter conceptions of gender give a more simplified view of the real lives of women in different parts of the world. These conceptions may include ideas about contextuality and social factors such as race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality, but these are added to an already established idea of “the woman”. Through complex conceptions of gender these social factors are instead viewed as intersected with gender. Gender is thus seen as a social construct, contextually differentiated by different conceptions of both sexuality and gender expression, as well as other social factors. These social factors are seen as both constructed and used by systems and power structures to oppress women. Complex conceptions of gender can thus expand the emancipatory ability of feminism by bringing both an intersectional and materialistic perspective into view. This perspective shows how gender can both be constructed in problematic ways through discursive representations and feminist theories, but also shows how gender is constructed through social practices and are used to affect women in a material way.

Historically, age has been and still is a major organizing principle for social relations and the allotment of resources and power, yet age is very seldom acknowledged as a social categorization in its own right and in intersection with other identity categorizations. While feminist scholarship and activism have deconstructed racist and sexist discourses, in which biology is often used to legitimize social injustice, the presupposed naturalness of ageism is rarely challenged. The aim of the present paper is to explore if and why age relations and ageism are invisible in feminist work by interviewing eleven feminists in a Swedish context. The interviews, which are qualitative and semi-structured, have been thematically analysed to identify patterns in the respondents’ approaches to age as a social categorization in intersectional analysis. A recurring theme is explaining age and ageism in terms of a fluidity of age relations, which make it a complex categorization to include in intersectional analysis. Drawing on theories of ageing and intersectional feminism I explore how the research material can be understood from a social and historical perspective. The thesis builds on a post-constructionist epistemology which underlines the importance of situated knowledges and accountability, and I therefore chose to make myself as the author visible throughout the text by writing the I and including personal accounts related to ageism and ageing.