Abstract: This ethnographic study compares and contrasts performative masculinities of the overwhelmingly male heavy metal (HM) and hardcore (HC) subcultures. Conclusions derived from this research indicate the following: identities associated with HM and HC conflate masculinity with working-classness, HM and HC identities (and thus masculinities) are merging at present; participation in HM and HC enclaves can serve to symbolically marginalize constituents, and this symbolic marginalization can result in repercussions in the lived world outside of subculture; the hegemonic masculinity of HM and HC subcultures is subsidiary hegemonic masculinity, meaning that it supports the male-dominated structure of mainstream culture without empowering HM and HC males in an extra-subcultural sense; and that despite these negative ramifications, HM and HC participants still find the shared identities and community interaction of these enclaves to be empowering. Keywords: heavy metal, hardcore, subculture, masculinity, performativity, gender, class, ideology, rock music, identity

The study analysis Anaïs Nin's work, Henry & June from a queer theoretical perspective. The purpose is to show what the work makes with text and how it produces ambivalence with sex and gender and thereby demonstrate the queer leakage in heteronormative performativities. The first part analyzes how it is working with self-representation in diary form. In order to view the work historically and linguistically the work has been related to analyzes and essays by other researchers mentioned in the analysis. The analysis shows that the writer Anaïs Nin has a clear agenda with her work. Nin want to develop an alternative approach to sex, gender and marriage.

This thesis examines the establishment and maintenance of an early childhood playgroup project in an Australian university setting. It examines the playing out of the intention of a university to create a collaborative partnership with an early childhood playgroup initiative within a higher education policy climate actively promoting such endeavours. The study documents the struggle to establish the playgroup project, elaborating the conditions that enabled and/or constrained its inclusion into a university setting. To do so, it investigates the contextual and relational issues that sustained or impeded the operationalisation of the playgroup project, identifying the stakeholders and the parts they played in supporting the initiative. The aim of the study is to generate new knowledge of a little-researched area, namely that of partnerships between universities and the community in the area of early childhood education. The study is underpinned by the feminist theoretical work of Dorothy Smith (1987), and so takes the everyday world as problematic, using this standpoint as an analytic framework through which to observe and understand women's lives as they worked to establish the playgroup project in the university setting. Additionally the work of Marilyn Strathern (1997) concerning the audit culture of universities was used to enhance Smith's epistemological approach. The data collection methods for the study were in-depth interviews, participant observations and document analysis. In-depth, unstructured interviews were conducted with seventeen women involved with the playgroup project. The sample comprised ten playgroup parents, four women from the Centre for Human Services, and three lecturers from the Child and Family Studies section of the School for Human Services. Additionally participant observations were completed and recorded as field notes. The majority of these took place in the playgroup rooms. The collection and examination of documentation associated with the playgroup project focused on significant documents ranging from emails and parking permits, to government and university policy imperatives. These documents were analysed as texts mediating the playgroup initiative. Findings detailed the conditions that enabled and/or constrained the inclusion of the playgroup project into a university setting. It was found the playgroup project was enabled by: government and university policies encouraging university and community partnership; a genuine intention on behalf of the university to promote partnerships with the community; thematics in the discourse of early childhood education promoting the profession's caring nature; and, committed people who worked to ensure the continuation of the playgroup project. It was found that the playgroup project was constrained by: government and university policies promoting research agendas; a partnership that was not collaborative in nature; disagreements about decision-making and leadership within the playgroups; the hierarchical nature of the university; and, differing notions of work and play that made the playgroups difficult to sustain. The study identified factors that enabled and/or constrained a specific community and university partnership in relation to early childhood education. In doing so it begins to fill a gap in the literature in this area. Findings from this study may be used to inform early childhood professionals and academics by expanding their awareness of the issues involved in undertaking a partnership such as this one. The implications that flow from the study included the need for greater understanding of the anthropology of the university and its systemic organisation, a formal contract for the partnership specifying the obligations of each party and outlining expectations, and the inclusion of committed people, prepared to work toward genuine collaborative partnerships.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how secondary school media educators might best meet the needs of students who prefer practical production work to ‘theory’ work in media studies classrooms. This is a significant problem for a curriculum area that claims to develop students’ media literacies by providing them with critical frameworks and a metalanguage for thinking about the media. It is a problem that seems to have become more urgent with the availability of new media technologies and forms like video games. The study is located in the field of media education, which tends to draw on structuralist understandings of the relationships between young people and media and suggests that students can be empowered to resist media’s persuasive discourses. Recent theoretical developments suggest too little emphasis has been placed on the participatory aspects of young people playing with, creating and gaining pleasure from media. This study contributes to this ‘participatory’ approach by bringing post structuralist perspectives to the field, which have been absent from studies of secondary school media education. I suggest theories of media learning must take account of the ongoing formation of students’ subjectivities as they negotiate social, cultural and educational norms. Michel Foucault’s theory of ‘technologies of the self’ and Judith Butler’s theories of performativity and recognition are used to develop an argument that media learning occurs in the context of students negotiating various ‘ethical systems’ as they establish their social viability through achieving recognition within communities of practice. The concept of ‘ethical systems’ has been developed for this study by drawing on Foucault’s theories of discourse and ‘truth regimes’ and Butler’s updating of Althusser’s theory of interpellation. This post structuralist approach makes it possible to investigate the ways in which students productively repeat and vary norms to creatively ‘do’ and ‘undo’ the various media learning activities with which they are required to engage. The study focuses on a group of year ten students in an all boys’ Catholic urban school in Australia who undertook learning about video games in a three-week intensive ‘immersion’ program. The analysis examines the ethical systems operating in the classroom, including formal systems of schooling, informal systems of popular cultural practice and systems of masculinity. It also examines the students’ use of semiotic resources to repeat and/or vary norms while reflecting on, discussing, designing and producing video games. The key findings of the study are that students are motivated to learn technology skills and production processes rather than ‘theory’ work. This motivation stems from the students’ desire to become recognisable in communities of technological and masculine practice. However, student agency is not only possible through critical responses to media, but through performative variation of norms through creative ethical practices as students participate with new media technologies. Therefore, the opportunities exist for media educators to create the conditions for variation of norms through production activities. The study offers several implications for media education theory and practice including: the productive possibilities of post structuralism for informing ways of doing media education; the importance of media teachers having the autonomy to creatively plan curriculum; the advantages of media and technology teachers collaborating to draw on a broad range of resources to develop curriculum; the benefits of placing more emphasis on students’ creative uses of media; and the advantages of blending formal classroom approaches to media education with less formal out of school experiences.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Miami University, Dept. of English, 2003. / Title from second page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 212-224).

With this study, the authors wish to highlight the way artificial intelligence, as a new form of media technology, seems to be ascribed gender, both in fiction and reality. These, by humans artificially developed beings, would not need to be gendered, but still are. Given these beings are human made and new phenomenas, an opportunity of preventing boundaries considering gender, class and etnicity to be reproduced would be possible and in favour. By analysing the Alex Garland 2015 film Ex Machina, the authors wish to discuss how and why the artificial intelligence becomes gendered, particularly feminised, and what this means from a wider perspective concerning the way we look at this new technlology not yet fully introduced in real life. By using post- and transhuman theory mixed with feminist theories such as Judith Butlers theory of perfomativity, Donna Haraways posthuman feminist theory and Laura Mulveys theory of The Male Gaze, this study results in a qualitative text analysis. The methodic tools used in this study contains elements from visual text methods and therefor also semiotics.   The authors reach to the conclusion that the depiction of artificial intelligence in the film Ex Machina (2015) reproduces stereotypic feminine gender acts and even intensifies these. When these ways of presenting new and futuristic technology seems to appear in ficiton, an assumption can be made that they origin from existing and deep gender acts in the western society. Researchers, such as Donna Haraway, wishes for these strong boundaries in gender, class and etnicity to not be reproduced in new technology, but in the fictional case of the film Ex Machina (2015), this wish has unfortunately not been fullfilled. If society would be able to rethink the sharp boundaries between nature and technology and succeed with this ontological change in the way we look at humanity, it would hopefully be easier to approach the new technology with an open mind. Perhaps then the reproduction of gender stereotypes in this new technology would cease in fiction, but also in reality.

This is an auto/ethnographic account of one organization and one person as we concurrently moved thru a process of IT driven planned organizational change. The purpose of the study is to explain how the change agent is affected by the experience of leading change. Using actor-network theory and a polyphonic approach, I present a multi-voiced, multi-actor account of the social network in situ and trace how the various actors engaged with one another during the organizational change process. I reflect upon my own multi-role performativity when acting in the role of the internal change agent next to my daily job roles and explore the effects on both me and the network; which identifies that a new actor network has been created. Finally, a multi-voiced exploration of myself is presented which traces my evolution from researcher to auto/ethnographer, further demonstrating the effects of multi-role performativity on the human actor. The study demonstrates that the effects of organizational change on both the social network and the actors within the network cannot be foreseen. Furthermore, in combining the use of Actor Network Theory and auto-ethnography, the study provides new insights into the effects of performance on the human actor within a socio-technical network, which is an unexplored dimension within the field of organizational change.

The purpose of the present essay is to illuminate to which extent figurations of victims in cases of intimate partner homicide is conditional upon the sexes of these individuals. Furthermore, the aim of this study is to determine whether or not these gendered discrepancies reproduce or transform the existing gender-related social systems? The theoretical as well as methodological basis consists of Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis (CDA), which is combined with Judith Butler’s concept of performative acts. To answer the abovementioned questions I have requested/collected an empirical material consisting of 20 district court judgments (ten for male victims and ten for female victims).The results of this essay indicate, according to my interpretation, that the established figurations of the victims in these cases are determined by the victim’s sex in several but not all discourses. Furthermore, I establish that the demonstrated gender determined discourses contribute to re- produce prevailing standards regarding sex/gender in which male victims are associated with a guilt-burdened role while female victims are considered innocent.

In this study, I explore how school band organizational culture produces gender roles and stereotypes within a percussion section. While previous research (Abeles, 2009) records percussion as predominantly male demographically and in popular perception, such research limits itself to battery percussion, largely excluding mallet percussion. Additionally, researchers have not addressed how existing gender stereotypes influence percussionists or how such stereotypes propagate. This research, a case study, supplements existing findings by qualitatively assessing how students and directors perceive gender stereotypes’ influence the organization, and how stereotypes emerge. By using multiple data sources, I illuminate various understructures (Acker, 1990) that help enforce gender roles and stereotypes observed and described by participants. Understructures represent the unintended impact of aspects of organizational culture. The exploration of understructures helps to explain how gender patterns in percussion sections continue despite the wishes of directors and students alike. Data analysis revealed percussion as divided into two “zones:” mallet and battery percussion, wherein females predominantly play mallets. Participants associated two different skill sets with the zones. Data revealed that experiences in middle school, family tradition, and other factors directly affected what zones students occupied and what skills they had obtained. The most valued musical skills reflected masculinized ideals of marching band and battery percussion. I concluded that understructures influenced percussion students by tacitly predetermining their placement in one of two instrument-based zones. These zones embodied a hierarchized system that privileged masculine-typed battery/marching instruments. I theorized that dividing percussion into gendered zones negatively influenced the musical and academic prospects of all students. / 2019-10-23T00:00:00Z

Set in the relatively new and fast developing field of investigation known as Internet of Things (IoT), this research starts by looking at the lack of critical and conceptual reflection on the area. With a main research question that challenges the underlying concepts of the IoT, the study develops a performative design framework to critique the field of investigation. The main corpus consists of: 1. speculative inquiry into the ontological dualisms of ‘objects’ and ‘things’ and the emerging social dimension of humans and non-humans; 2. the identification of an ontological-performative model based on the idea of Props; 3. the entanglement of theory and practice to construct a performative design framework, called the Internet of Props, which includes: an enabling platform (Smarter Planet Lab) and a set of design strategies (Transactional Props) to demonstrate and evaluate this model and framework; 4. a combined-evaluation conversational analysis methodology that assesses the performativity of the setting and the Props, through linguistic and socio-behavioural studies. Inspired by the concepts of ontological theatre, the entanglement of humans and non-humans, and the Internet of People; the IoT is imagined and performed in a theory-driven, practice-based investigation of the Internet of Props, which aims to bring new theoretical and practical knowledge for the future of the IoT.