White nationalism is an ideology on the rise. Thus, it is important to understand why many men and women chose to engage with the ideology. This study aims to deepen the understanding of how women in online white-nationalist communities construct their gender through discursive practices, by using theories and concepts developed by Judith Butler and V. Spike Peterson. By researching this mostly uncharted phenomenon this study provides insight into how gender roles and white-nationalist ideas intersect and how the female users on Stormfront.org self express in relation to these ideas. Using netnography and thematic analysis the users' posts were presented in themes that illuminate different aspects of how they construct their gender. The key findings of this study reinforce earlier studies in emphasizing the role of motherhood and child rearing as essential parts of being a woman. They also show how femininity and white skin are constructed as inseparable, as women can not have one without the other. The need for a woman to have knowledge about white culture and to be educated is also a recurring theme. Lastly, the study also concluded that a renegotiation of the gender roles is taking place on the forum, where some users object to the overly traditional ideals of how a woman should be, requesting a more progressive way to view gender within white nationalism.

This study focuses on the connection between cultural identity and Japanese popular music. It contains conducted interviews and semantic analyses on musicians who use Japanese traditional instruments and Western instruments in their repertoire. It uses performativity theory as theoretical framework. The analyses are divided in to the three levels of Sauter’s phenomenological path: the symbolic level, the sensory level and the artistic level.  It concludes how musicians in Japan perceive their own musical identity, and gives insights on the role of cultural identity in Japanese music. The potential significance is to contribute to identity studies using a performativity perspective as explained above, and thereby elucidating both musicological and historical aspects.

On the brink of a sixth mass extinction, I renegotiate, through crafting, some basic assumptions on which our economy-culture is built, those of separation and dominance. The project Till Källan / Water Talks is based on a method where I ask various places what they would want me to do on site. It is a process of reconnecting to place and the non-human, a radical rethinking of relationship between human and the other. I investigate the possibilities of craft to be a conductor of that relationship.The paper tracks various lines of thought around my practice, like trickles gathering more water into my pond. It starts in a quantum physics philosophical base for how the world is in a state of becoming through intra-action, on to why water is the perfect medium to affect the world through a puddle. I look at how my practice has an affinity with animism as philosophy and indigenous ways of relating to place and materials. I explore various facets of performativity, in world-making, craft-making, in the resulting objects and in the restoring of relationship through ritual. The enquiry that runs through the paper is what craft is when the object was made for a place rather than for the “art-world” or other economic systems. Going back and forth between a western and a non-western mindset, between practice and theory and between the poetic and prosaic, makes for a synthesizing of sources, leading up to the concept of Rewilding Craft, and a number of crafted objects and images that speak of the relationship.

abstract: This project will attempt to supplement the current registry of lesbian inquiry in literature by exploring a very specific topos important to the Modern era: woman and her intellect. Under this umbrella, the project will perform two tasks: First, it will argue that the Modern turn that accentuates what I call negative valence mimesis is a moment of change that enables the general public to perceive lesbianism in representations of women that before, perhaps, remained unacknowledged. And, second, that the intersection of thought and resistance to heteronormative structures, such as heterosexual desire/sex, childbirth, marriage, religion, feminine performance, generate topoi of lesbianism that lesbian studies should continuously critique in order to index the myriad and creative ways through which fictional representations of women have evaded their proper roles in society. The two tasks above will be performed amidst the backdrop of a crucial moment in history in which lesbianism jumped from fiction to fact through the publication and obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall's novel, The Well of Loneliness. Deconstructive feminist and queer inquiry of under-researched novels by women from the UK and the US written within the decade surrounding the trial reveals the possibilities of lesbianism in novels where the protagonists' investment in heteronormativity has remained unquestioned. In those texts where the protagonists have been questioned, the analysis of lesbianism will be delved into more deeply in order to illustrate new ways of reading these texts. I will focus on women writers who, as Terry Castle suggests, "both usurped and deepened the [lesbian] genre" with the arrival of the new century (Literature 29). It is my attempt to combat heteronormativity through a more positive approach. As Michael Warner asserts, "heteronormativity can be overcome only by actively imagining a necessarily and desirably queer world" (xvi). This is not to say this study will be all roses and no thorns; a desirably queer world is not about a wish for an utopia. For this project, it is about rigorously engaging in the lesbianism of literature while acknowledging how a lesbian reading, a reading for lesbianism, can continue to both expand and enrich the critical tradition of a text and the customary interpretation of various characters. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. English 2012

This study discusses ways how patterns of masculinity and femininity construct themselves in gendered practices of ice hockey, in the bodies of female ice hockey players and their gender identifications and how the players construct their gender performances. Opening section describes gender as an analytical category in the sport as a male domain where there are reproduced and emphasized elements of traditional masculinity as physical strength and dominance that are contrasted to the attributes of traditional femininity such as vulnerability and passivity. It outlines how gender is constituted in the sport in general and in ice hockey as a masculine sport, and how the norms of masculinity and femininity are reproduced through them. The dynamics of relationship between gender and ice hockey team is treated within the case study of a Czech women hockey team. The study discusses how gender positions of female hockey players of this team are constituted within the team dynamics, the effect of normative femininity to the constructions of physical performances, the concept of physical fitness for hockey and gender conformity appearance. It also outlines the gendered formal grounding of the women hockey through the rules and hierarchical structures and the influence of media coverage and the segregation...

Travesti show - in other words men's dressing as women (especially famous singers) in order to create a parody - has become a legitimate part of the Czech cultural events for the last twenty years. Moreover, in comparison with a foreign production of that kind it is very specific as regards terminology and content. Although travesti show theme has penetrated into the Czech academic ground too, it is still understood only from the perspective of gender performativity and is focused on performers themselves. On the contrary, this paper tries to grasp spectators' perspectives regarding not only the audience perception of the performers, but also a wide range of spectators' characteristics related to their general degree of tolerance towards gender roles in the society as well as LGBT issues in comparison with common population.

In this bachelor’s thesis I have studied portraits from the 18th century where the person portrayed is named and in the guise of an antique goddess. I have used a gender perspective through out the paper and have used Judith Butler´s ideas about gender performativity. I have also used Carolina Brown’s Liksom en herdinna. Litterära teman i svenska kvinnoporträtt under 1700-talet and Anna Lena Lindberg’s En mamsell i akademien – Ulrica Fredrica Pasch och 1700-talets konstvärld which both has a gender perspective when they examine portraits and the art world during the 18th century. I have used iconological and iconographical analyses to study what it means to be portrayed as an antique goddess, what the portraits communicate and how they create gender identities. I have also done literature studies to understand and explain the society that created the portraits I’m analysing. My study has shown that it was more common for women to be portrayed as antique goddesses than it was for men to be portrayed as antique gods, and that class was more important than gender but that gender performativity still had an important role.

The aim of this qualitative study is to with the help of discourse theory according to Michel Foucault and queer theory, to define and understand how the sub discourse of regretted motherhood is communicated on online platforms in Sweden. More specifically, how the responses to women who express their regretted motherhood on online platforms take form and what communicative strategies are used. The second part of the study focuses on what characteristics define this specific taboo. The third part focuses on how normative parenthood is maintained. The material in question consists of fifteen media texts, also known as comments, from two different platforms. The first platform is Facebook where the five most liked comments were chosen from a post containing an interview with a woman who discussed why she regretted her motherhood. The second five comments were chosen from the platform Familjeliv from an anonymous post from a woman explaining how come she regretted her motherhood. The last five were also from Familjeliv that refers to a post regarding a mother who wanted to give her 3 year old up for adoption. The result from the analysis showed there is a deep incomprehension regarding what regret means and how it should be met. Subjective experiences were used as universal facts with the intention to shame the woman who regrets her motherhood. The lack of empathy resulting in shameful comments throughout the material, resulted in a wide taboo within the sub discourse dicated by normative parenthood.

Studies of American Indian protest rhetoric often define American Indian opposition either by its resistance or its conformity to non-Native institutional discursive norms, suggesting that only one of the two can be considered authentic to American Indian cultures and identities. Addressing this debate, this thesis examines an instance of Native opposition which successfully blends the two approaches: Russell Means' 1989 statement to the United States Senate. Means employs the mode of story to effectively shift discursive authority from the Senate committee members to pan-Indigenous peoples. I call this shift rhetorical occupation, or the appropriation of rhetorical space. Through rhetorical occupation, Means displaces the dominant narrative of governmental power with his own story, drawing on Lakota storytelling practices and both complying with and resisting white Euro-American forms of persuasion. This analysis suggests that rather than defining a broad category of culturally authentic American Indian opposition rhetoric, scholars should consider how Native opposition rhetorics reflect distinct tribal rhetorical traditions and take unique approaches to navigating non-Native discursive norms.

The field of rhetorical aesthetics has a long and rich history. Despite that history, however, aesthetic artifacts have yet to be considered with the same weight that conventional rhetorical artifacts are. My project is to consider the rhetorical effectiveness of aesthetic artifacts, making a case for more inclusion of these types of artifacts in rhetorical theory. I will demonstrate the effectiveness of the aesthetic by performing a comparative analysis of both an aesthetic and conventional reaction to the 2019 fires at Notre Dame de Paris. By considering the constitutive power of the aesthetic, I will argue that the depth of analysis that the aesthetic allows makes it, in some cases, a more effective space for rhetorical analysis than conventional artifacts.