The aim of this essay was to investigate in what manner sexuality is and has been portrayed and represented in course books used in religious studies in Swedish upper secondary school. In order to study the progression of how Swedish education has portrayed sexuality, course books from the 1970s, the 1990s and 2013 were studied. Moreover, to get a deeper understanding of the subject, the curricula from each time period were also investigated. The method used was first and foremost a qualitative content analysis, but a quantitative approach was also used in some occasions. To get the result of this investigation four questions were asked: “In what way is sexuality portrayed in the curricula?”, “Where in the course books is sexuality discussed?”, “Which questions regarding sexuality are discussed?” and also “What types of sexualities are represented?”. The result of this essay demonstrates the fact that how sexuality is portrayed in Swedish course books for religious studies has changed since the 1970s. By discussing the results with the help of Ambjörnsson’s queer-theoretical analysis, it has become clear that Swedish education has gone from a rather heteronormative approach on portraying sexuality to a more including one. The subject of sexuality is more nuanced in the latest course book, and the subject has been given more space in the books.  However, what has remained the same is the fact that only a few of the chapters discussing different religions also discuss sexuality. In the course books from previous time periods sexuality was almost exclusively discussed in chapters about Islam and Christianity, and even though sexuality is discussed in a different manner that is still the case.

Christopher Isherwood’s 1938 autobiographical novel Lions and Shadows is often read in light of its subtitle as the story of “an education in the ‘twenties.” Yet Isherwood’s early work is more than a simple interwar bildungsroman. Lions and Shadows is a narratively complicated account of a privileged, queer youth in interwar England and an exposition of the effects of the Great War on an entire generation. The autobiographical novel provides veiled descriptions of the queer cultures of Cambridge and London in the 1920s, and records the early artistic development of several members of what has come to be called “The Auden Generation,” including Edward Upward, W.H. Auden, and Stephen Spender. In this project, I explore how and why Christopher Isherwood obscures his sexuality in Lions and Shadows, looking in particular at his friendships with Edward Upward and W.H. Auden and at the fictional work that the former friendship produced, The Mortmere Stories. Chapter 1 provides background information on homosexuality in England during Isherwood’s lifetime, focusing on how class and privilege affect the experience and expression of homosexuality. Chapter 2 analyzes the obsession with the Great War that pervades Lions and Shadows, concentrating on how the Great War affected ideas of masculinity and male sexuality. Finally, Chapter 3 explores the relationship between Isherwood’s social and sexual discomfort and the production and content of The Mortmere Stories, which tend to poke fun at sexual foibles and the proclivities of the upper classes. / text

The subject of inquiry for my thesis is slash fiction, a subset of fanfiction which creates queer identity, romance, relationships, sex, or desire where it was not ostensibly present in the proto-text. I divide my thinking into a non-linear model of five nodes in order to open up multiple in-roads towards examining the queer work of slash without crystalizing into a comprehensive theory that would efface its nuance and particularities. These nodes figure under notions of failure, embodiment, archives, temporality, and hybrid body erotics. The current, motion, and energy running through all of these nodes is what I call critical queer imagination. Critical queer imagination is not an overarching theory that explains slash (or queer creative works in general), but rather a gesture towards the impulse behind queer activism as well as a signal towards queer futurity. It is ultimately this queer critical imagination that allows me to argue for slash fiction as part of a larger queer project that is necessarily engaged with queer potential and political imagination. / text

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SLUTSATS: För  att  nå  min  egen,  djupaste,  svarta  spegel  hade  jag  behövt  ”möta  mitt  eget  mörker”, som Soran Ismail beskriver det i Absolut Svensk… Gjorde jag det? Njae… Jag hade gärna utforskat mina fördomsfulla sidor mer, för att se var jag själv står på  skalan  mellan  Tes och  Antites.  Soran  gjorde i avsnitt 1 ett vetenskapligt  fördomstest, där reaktioner registrerades för att ta reda på fördomar en ”inte vet om att den har”. Någon liknande miljö eller metod (vetenskaplig, existentiell eller psykoanalytisk)  möttes  jag  inte  av  under  kursen  där  jag  kunde  ta  mitt  fördomsprojekt  så  mycket  längre,  däremot  synliggjordes  en  undangömd identitet  hos  mig  själv  som  jag  har  haft  fördomar  kring,  baserat  på  ett  internaliserat  förtryck.  I  min  vilsenhet  kunde  jag  orientera  mig  mot  att  börja utforska detta ämne parallellt i samband med självreflektionen.   Jag  vill  alltså hävda  att  desorientering,  att  gå  vilse,  är  startpunkten  för  självreflektion.  Och  att  självreflektion  i  samband  med  kommunikation  och kunskap är det som krävs för att krossa fördomar. Konst bör därför sträva efter att inleda en process av självreflektion, för att det betraktande  subjektet  ska  kunna  spegla  sig  i  sin  egen  svartaste  spegel  – där  fördomen existerar inom en. / Svarta speglar - magisterutbildningen i konstnärlig självreflektion

This thesis seeks to explore, problematize and critique the violence of norms—normative violence, especially gender norms and heteronormativity-- in contemporary political life. It focuses on the interaction and engagement between norms and the body, and demonstrates that normative violence manifests itself in a twofold way: norms not only regulate, normalize and manage bodies that are already intelligible into reified forms, but also through their exclusionary logic produce unintelligible bodies that are unlivable. Situated within contemporary feminist and queer movements, this thesis bridges between aporias and problems emergent from them and critical readings of Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This thesis identifies and indicates normative violence and erasures inherited in the popular rhetoric of the movements and diverse theoretical accounts of the body. Finally, the argument is made that feminist and queer readings of Foucault and Merleau-Ponty provide possibilities for undoing normative violence by resignifying norms temporally and performatively via collective action. / Graduate / janicefe@uvic.ca

This study shows how political activists during the period from 2008 to 2013 worked toabolish the legal paragraph that demanded transgendered citizens to get a sterilization inSweden. By accounting for the themes of the medial debate, which for the most part aimedit’s criticism against society and it’s rulers for keeping the law intact, the study shows howsympathies for the transgendered group were framed. Most arguments that was put forth inthe news flow centered around the law being outdated, a discrimination againsttransgendered citizens and not correlating with Sweden self image of being a modern andcivilized country. This correlates with the activists view of what is problematic with the law,they considered it being a betrayal towards transgendered citizens, a dismissal of applyinghuman rights and their right to equal citizenship – through rejecting their reproductiverights. Their strategies involved appearing in media themselves, doing strategic processmanagement and meeting with government officials. This study shows that the law isconsidered by the activists to reinforce norms of heterosexuality and the societal belief thattransgendered people were not fit to uphold the role of a parent. The abolishing of the lawsymbolizes an inclusion of transgendered citizens in society and making them culturallyintelligible. The activists saw the abolishment of the law as a victory but also as aanticlimax, since it was decided by the court and not by politics in addition to experiencingthat the decision was formed too late, that the damaged was already done and the activistsfelt that more needs to be done to make transgendered citizens equal to others.

The main theoretical thrust of my project involves the political uses of parodically performing shame and shaming rituals in resisting normative regulation. I argue that parodic performances of this negative affect—traditionally deployed to erase, obscure, and regulate queers—can expose how shame regulates the gender/sexuality performances of straight people as well as queers. I view this project primarily as a tactical shift from the parodic performances outlined by Judith Butler in texts like Gender Trouble, and I feel that the shift is important as a counter measure to increasing homonormative inclusion of (white, middle class) gays and lesbians into straight or neoliberal society. The first section of my thesis is dedicated to exploring theories of homonormativity. I work primarily from Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal, which is a queer polemic, and Lisa Duggan’s The Twilight of Equality, which contextualizes homonormativity in the cultural project of neoliberalism. Homonormativity is, in essence, the opening of cultural space in mainstream society for a certain group of gays and lesbians—those who are “the most assimilated, genderappropriate, politically mainstream portions of the gay population” (Duggan 44). As Warner discusses at length, the shift from queer to conservative gay interests has shifted attention from issues like HIV/AIDS research and physical protection of queers to gay marriage and the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which are causes that primarily benefit the gays and lesbians already most assimilated to straight culture. Section II focuses on the work of Judith Butler and other theorizations of parody. Butler’s theory suggests that gender and sexuality consist of a set of continuously repeated performances, and that by performing gender one is constituted as a subject. Butler argues that it is impossible to step outside gender—to stop performing, as it were —because there is no agency prior to the imposition of gender. She locates the only possibility for resistance to gender as a socially regulatory myth structure in the failure to properly perform gender, or in performing in such a way that gender is exposed as always already performative. I have paired Butler’s theory with Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Parody, which examines the uses, limitations, and value of artistic parody. These two theorists, of course, have different goals, which complicates the potential for combining their work. In the final section I develop my own theory, which largely takes its cue from Butler’s notion that we can resist gender/sexuality regulation through parodic performance. But, whereas Butler argues for parodic performances of gender/sexuality, I suggest the usefulness of parodying shame and shaming rituals. Shame—the social imposition of it, as well as the desire to avoid it—has long been a force maintaining proper behavior in the largest sense, but I am concerned specifically with the regulation of gender and sexual performances. Queers (understood broadly) and women have long been the targets of shame, while straight males have long been the performers of shaming rituals—mockery, brutal laugher, violence. What I suggest is that through an appropriation and parodic reinterpretation of these shaming rituals and shame itself, queers can expose the centrality of shame in repressing not only queer existence and performance, but in restricting the performative possibilities of straight people. This new notion of performative resistance is especially important as some gays and lesbians enter straight society and become subject to its shaming restrictions, but also become complicit in shaming those queers still outside the realm of homonormative possibilities

The majority of discussions of gay and lesbian experiences in the United States associate gay culture with urban areas. However, there is still a significant population of LGBT people living in the rural United States (Baumle et al 2009). Many of these individuals identify with rural spaces and seek to maintain “country” identities. As with rural spaces, there is an assumption that Christian identities directly conflict with those of non-heterosexual identities. This study examines the ways in which these individuals create and negotiate stereotypically conflicting identities regarding their sexuality, their rural identities and their religious identities. The goal of this project is to add to currently sparse literature on rural gay Christians and give an accurate portrayal of gay Christians in rural areas. I found that the sensationalized stereotypes of what it means to be a gay Christian in the country are often far cries from the actual experiences.

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