The purpose of this essay is to study the gender system and structures for a married couple in the late 1900-centery in the southern part of Sweden. More precisely the gender system of the lord Joseph Stephens and his wife the lady of the castle Elisabeth Stephens that lived in Huseby mansion during this time. I attend to do a qualitative textual analysis of the couple's correspondence from 1880-1900. I will interpret the results based on a theory of gender and gender division between the genders and the concepts of the private and the public sphere for the two genders. The results shows that the couple for most of the time has a gender based division between themselves were Elisabeth attempts to the privatesphere and Joseph for the public. Joseph does not involve Elisabeth with the operation of the estate or with his political duties. The way they appeals to each other can also implie that Joseph is superior to Elisabeth. The couple has also embraced the bourgeois ideal of love that means togetherness and exclusiveness in the relationship. But the result also shows that the division is not that fixed for the man in the relationship. Joseph can also enter the private and the female sphere which can implie that he is in control of the gender relationship and thinks that this is the best way to make sure the gender roles are kept safe which also will secure his superior position.

Recent queer scholarship challenges the academy’s longstanding urban and adult oriented trajectory, pointing to the way such studies ignore rural and heartland regions of the country as well as the experiences of youth. In this thesis, I craft a limited ethnographic methodological approach together with a textual analysis of The Oprah Winfrey Show to deliver portraits of gay men living in various rural or heartland areas who use their television sets to encounter and identify with LGBTQ people across the nation. The overarching aim of this project is to explore the ways in which religion, rurality, and Oprah coalesce in the process of identity creation to form rural gay men’s conceptual selves and how they are then informed by that identity formation. I will focus my textual analyses through the frames of six of Oprah Winfrey’s “ultimate viewers” to elucidate how they receive and interact with her star text, how they use television sets in the public rooms of their homes to create boundary public spheres, and how they are impacted by the show’s various uses of the coming out paradigm. In so doing, this thesis seeks to contribute to the scholarship of rural queer studies, television studies, and Oprah studies. / text