This essay investigates Jamaica Kincaid´s the book Annie John (1985) and its protagonist Annie John´s search for a coherent self-and/or a de-colonized identity through a subject transformation. Using postcolonial feminism, including theorists such as Homi K. Bhabha and Stuart Hall, I suggest that the protagonist Annie John does not perform a subject transformation as she is unable to embrace the state of hybridity needed to perform such a transformation. Annie John is a colonial subject drawn to the two worlds in which she resided, the East and West- and cannot create herself in the presence of them both. I conclude that Annie John´s mother, under the influence of colonialism and patriarchy, is part reason as to why Annie John is unable to perform this transformation. With the help of postcolonial feminism, I find that as Annie John cannot recover her mother from this double oppression of colonialism and patriarchy. The conclusion of this essay proposes that the protagonist Annie John does not manage to create a subject formation as she is not able to reside in a state of hybridity between her own culture and that of her colonizer.

The purpose of this study is to examine how two Muslim feminists perceive themselves to betreated by the Swedish majority society and within the secular feminist movement. Thesurvey was conducted using qualitative method with a total of two interviews. For the study'stheoretical perspectives, I have used postcolonialism and postcolonial feminism. The result ofthe survey and the analysis show that the informants say that they face an image of Muslimwomen as considered being under oppression. The informants believe that this stereotypicalimage has its origin from the colonial period. The question that is most important for themwithin feminism is to be treated as a feminist and as a Muslim without being questioned. Theyfeel like it's hard to identify with the Swedish secular feminism, but they also feel that thegroup of Swedish secular feminists have a difficulty identifying themselves with Muslimwomen too. Consider this, one of the informants does not feel welcome among Swedishsecular feminism while the other one never had an interest in becoming a member of itbecause she did not consider them to strive for the same goal as herself. The informantsclaims that there are opportunities for them to speak in the public debate, but as Muslimfeminists they are facing a bigger struggle.

The purpose of the study is to highlight women's experiences of and beliefs about the labour market, in relation to wearing the veil. It´s based on a qualitative study of semi-structured interviews with thirteen university students of women wearing hijab and illustrate how their reflections of discrimination affect educational choices. It also describes what treatment the women wearing hijab has experienced in previous contact with the labor market and when the veil has been actualized in different work situations. The result is described in three themes:  “wearing hijab”, “education and profession” and “work life”. It displays how the women highlight their experiences of discrimination towards their hijab and states that there is discrimination in social and public contexts, as well as in the Swedish labor market. Furthermore, the women tell how difficult it is for the hijab wearing woman to be considered as her own individual, instead, she is defined by the hijab and met with prejudiced values and reactions. The results were analyzed with theories as postcolonial feminism, orientalism, and different forms of discrimination, stigmatization and exclusion. During the job search, the respondents in this study tells that they need to over emphasize their skills because they constantly feel that they need to disprove prejudices about an imagine incompetence. Especially after the European Court of Justice ruled (2017-03-14) that entitles the employers to deny women wearing hijab at the workplace. Additionally, the negative attitude is not always visible but hidden outward and towards the periphery of society. This study clarifies how they are treated in society and highlights the limits of their opportunities in the labor market because of prejudice about the hijab. The results are related to previous studies and are discussed in relation to the dominant image of the veil in the West.

Understanding women’s experiences of mangrove forest conservation in the Global South is important because mangrove forests are a crucial defense against climate change, and are also increasingly the targets of global climate change policies. The intervention of postcolonial feminist theory combined with feminist political ecology has the potential to bring forward women’s seldom-heard experiences of climate change in these valuable ecosystems. This work supports previous feminist political ecology scholarship focused on understanding women’s complicated relationships to the environment and the gendered effects of climate change policies, while challenging dominant conservation discourse around women as a monolithic group. This thesis focuses on women living in Madagascar’s largest mangrove, particularly under current mangrove reforestation efforts and emerging blue carbon climate change policies. This project explores how the women in this mangrove forest are situated along axes of power differently, the implications of social divisions for conservation, and the ways in which current mangrove conservation projects reproduce power relations in the mangrove by failing to recognize difference.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the power relations in women’s farmers’ cooperatives in Nicaragua, and to see if the women feel that they have power over their decisions and if they feel that their power has changed after joining the cooperative. The theory used in this thesis is postcolonial feminism theories of women empowerment and frameworks on development efforts to women. The method used to gather data has been semi-structured one-on-one interviews. The investigated cooperatives are part of the umbrella organization Femuprocan. Femuprocan has received development funds from We Effect (formerly Swedish Cooperative Centre) and other aid agencies in order to form cooperatives and for capacity building. Previous studies show the importance of involving women in the decisions about how the development funds should be used.   The interviews showed that the women have been involved in the decisions within the cooperatives such as how the funds should be used. Most of the interviewed women perceived an increased sense of power after joining the cooperative, and can exemplify this. However, the change is slow. The women have identified that capacity building, meeting other women and gaining more money have been crucial in the empowerment process.

Surrogacy is an arrangement in which a woman carries, delivers, and then relinquishes a baby to commissioning parents. The arrangement challenges traditional norms and definitions of reproduction, pregnancy and motherhood, and at the same time raises difficult ethical, philosophical and social questions. There is currently an ongoing debate in Sweden, where all forms of surrogacy is illegal. The debate is polemical and harsh, with advocates arguing that surrogacy is defensible on the basis of individual rights and women's right to choose over their own bodies, and those in opposition are convinced on an intersectional basis that women are being used and exposed on the market of surrogacy.The purpose of this study is to investigate the debate on surrogacy in the Swedish context. Using qualitative text analysis, the study aims to increase understanding about the debate over surrogacy by analyzing texts published in Swedish press during 2010-2013. I have analyzed the advocating arguments as well as the oppositional arguments constructing the ongoing debate of surrogacy with a focus on the transnational relations and the discrepancy between the views on altruistic and commercial forms of surrogacy.The findings indicate that surrogacy is in general seen as either a win-win situation or exploitation and confirms earlier intersectional postcolonial research that centers on surrogacy, which highlights a general tendency to not acknowledge the dimensions and intersections of gender, class, race, and ethnicity. This is crucial especially concerning surrogacy is such a transnational phenomenon, where for example (white) Swedes longing for babies go to India and through an Indian surrogate mother become parents. The study shows that the debate is somewhat a minefield, and while being polemical the debate is also very complex.

In this thesis, the author explores the main factors that may have contributed to the development of human trafficking in terms of sexual exploitation in Sweden. The aim is to identify the background of the main women and young girls exposed to human trafficking and to identify the factors that could potentially decrease the development of human trafficking. The theoretical underpinnings, which incorporated the push and pull model, the postcolonial feminist theory and the routine activity theory, as well as the information provided by the seven semi-structured interviews, provided a necessary framework to analyze and discuss the findings. The knowledgeable and experienced informants of this qualitative thesis consist of relevant authorities and organizations in the field of human trafficking. The findings of this thesis suggested that human trafficking in women and your girls for sexual exploitation is driven by poverty, the experience of war, lack of opportunities, the trafficker’s greed for profit and the demand for prostitution from countries such as Sweden. The findings moreover presented that the women and young girls that generally are exposed to human trafficking in terms of sexual exploitation, usually originate from third world countries and through circular migration within Europe. The results of this thesis furthermore presented various aspects and areas of improvement that are needed for relevant actors, in order for them to jointly work towards their common goal; to combat human trafficking cases in Sweden.

Magister Artium - MA / Bettina Wyngaard se misdaadfiksie-trilogie, bestaande uit die romans Vuilspel (2013), Slaafs (2016) en Jagter (2019) het ’n vernuwende uitwerking in die Afrikaanse literatuur gehad. Dit kan hoofsaaklik teruggevoer word na die skrywer se gebruik van ’n (swart) lesbiese protagonis. Wyngaard is ook die eerste swart Afrikaanse vroue-outeur wat haar tot hierdie genre gewend het. Haar misdaadtrilogie toon ’n sentrale bemoeienis met die vroulike subjek se ondergeskikte posisie as deurgaans onderdruk weens verskeie identiteitsaspekte (waaronder ras, gender, klas, seksualiteit, kultuur en nasionaliteit tel). Die simbiotiese verhouding tussen identiteit en mag is dus ’n prominente tematiek in die trilogie. Hierdie bemiddeling tussen identiteit en mag toon raakpunte met die interseksionaliteitsteorie soos voorgestel deur Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989). Sy voer aan dat subjekte onderdruk word deur die tussenspel van identiteitsmerkers en sisteme van onderdrukking wat inherent is daaraan. In hierdie verhandeling word die representasie van die vroulike subjek in Wyngaard se misdaadtrilogie uit ’n interseksionele invalshoek in oënskou geneem. Vanweë die gebruik van literatuur as subjek van analise in hierdie verhandeling, word swart feministiese denkskole oor die letterkunde ingereken as ontledingsinstrumente om Wyngaard se trilogie binne die ruim trajek van swart feministiese fiksie te posisioneer. Terselfdertyd word Wyngaard se subjektiwiteit as swart vroue-outeur krities bekyk omdat sy deur middel van haar tekste verantwoordelik is vir beeldskepping en voorstellings van vroulike subjekte. Aangesien Wyngaard se fiksie dikwels identiteitsaspekte ondervang wat verband hou met haar eie subjektiewe identiteit, sal die wyse bekyk word waarop selfdefiniëring en selfaktualisering in haar trilogie tot stand gebring word.Soos reeds genoem, het Wyngaard grense in die Afrikaanse letterkunde versit deur haar tot misdaadfiksie as genre te wend. As deel van populêre fiksie, staan misdaadfiksie tradisioneel bekend as ’n behoudende genre met ’n resepmatige onderbou wat, só beskou, nie gebruik word om progressiewe argumente in te voer nie. Hierdie aspek van die genre staan dus oënskynlik in kontras met die feministiese aard van Wyngaard se misdaadfiksie-trilogie. In hierdie verhandeling word gevolglik ook die funksionaliteit van genre en die impak daarvan op die beeldskepping van die vroulike subjek bekyk. Maniere waarop Wyngaard gevestigde genrekonvensies oorskry in ’n poging om feministiese benaderings te berde te bring, word in die besonder bestudeer. / South Africa

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This thesis analyses media portrayal of the People's Protection Units (YPG) and the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) in US media by making use of Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis. The thesis investigates if these portrayals have been used as a justification by the United States White House to intervene militarily in the conflict in Rojava. Three ways of portraying the YPG and YPJ have been identified: an Orientalist portrayal contrasting the YPG and YPJ to the Orient and including them in a Western ‘us’, a liberal feminist portrayal where the YPJ are contrasted and distanced to the ‘Third World woman’, and the portrayal of the fighters as nationalist and violent suicide bombers, placing them as ‘the Other’. The Orientalist ‘us’ portrayal was found to be used by the US government to justify military intervention. The contextual analysis of US media and politics showed that these portrayals depend on political agendas and therefore say much more about the political climate in the US than being representative of the YPG and YPJ which in its turn causes troubling misrepresentations of the YPG and YPJ.