In this essay I have looked deeper into the heteronormativity in Gun-Britt Sundströms Maken – en förhållanderoman. My focus has been on the maincharacter Martina; how she questions the heteronormativity and what consequences of her questioning this norm are. Through the eyes of queer researcher Fanny Ambjörnsson I have used a queer theoretical perspective in this essay. My study shows that the fact that Martina is questioning the norm at all makes you realize that she is identifying the many obligations heterosexual relationships have. The norms she is questioning are the institution of marriage, the pressure to have a sexual relationship with your partner and to later on have children. Gustav wants the relationship to be the greater meaning of life but Martina does not want that - she wants a relationship resembling a friendship rather than the relationship of two passionate lovers.

This study investigates how tagging is being used in a new way when members of a Swedish dating site get to tag themselves in an act of self-presentation with the aim of meeting new people. In the study seven members of the dating site Mazily were interviewed about their self-presentation, tagging and identity formation there. The questions concerned how they formed their own tags, but also how they interpret and use other members' tags in their search for a potential partner. I have been using queer theories for this study, in order to find out what kind of norms and structures that lie behind and affect the members' behaviour on the website. My study finds that the interviewed members to a high degree reflect about both their own and other members tagging and self-presentations. Although they spend quite some time trying to analyse other people on the website they have a great sense of understanding that a person may give two very different impressions on the site and offline. Another finding is that although tagging is a very free way to present yourself, there still are structures and norms about gender, sexuality and culture that will affect members actions on the dating site. This is a study in Library and Information Science.

São Paulo, Brazil is currently pursuing a project of creative urbanism. Though city rhetoric insists this project is rooted in tolerance of sexual diversity, I suggest that city policy effectively perpetuates normative conceptions of family and respectability. Using data gathered through a series of qualitative interviews with transgender and travesti individuals living in São Paulo, I argue that the straight time of São Paulo’s creative urbanism generates exclusionary temporalities and spatialities in the city that render travestis out of time and out of place. Furthermore, I argue that travestis use their capacity to enact shame through scandals to generate temporalities and spatialities of their own, ones not aligned with the reproductive, progressive futurity of straight time. In doing so, travestis participate in their own kind of creative urbanism and provide an affective challenge to the hetero- and homonormativity of São Paulo’s creative urban project. Building on recent scholarship in queer urbanism and affect, this thesis adds to critical efforts to understand how creative urbanism sexualizes space and time in contexts outside of EuroAmerica and how a queer theoretical approach contributes to critiques of progressive modernity.

The writings and life of Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (1942-2004) have had an immense impact in a variety of disciplines. Her oft-cited text Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) is included in many university courses’ reading lists for its contributions to discourses of hybridity, linguistics, intersectionality and women of color feminism, among others. Unfortunately, most scholars content themselves with the intricacies of Borderlands to the neglect of her corpus of work, which includes essays, books, edited volumes, children’s literature and fiction/autohistorias. This analysis presented here wishes to expand our understandings of Anzaldúa’s work by engaging with her pre- and post-Borderlands writings in an attempt to highlight the unrecognized contributions Anzaldúa offers to feminist theory, spirituality, spiritual activism, queer theory, expansive ideas of queerness and an articulation of alternative, non-Western epistemology. This project offers close readings of published and archival Anzaldúan text and draws parallels between her life and her writing.

The Problems of Protest and the Persistence of Domination: Social Movement Theory and Bourdieu’s Economy of Practice is a normative intervention into social movement theory and debates about social movement goals, strategies and tactics. The project asks: what normative implications derive from incorporating Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological framework into social movement research? My core arguments are that Bourdieu’s framework has the potential to sensitize activists and analysts to the tension between conformity and failure and that escaping radical/reformist debates requires working through this tension. The dissertation intervenes in social movement theory from within the critical theory tradition by refusing to separate empirical and normative questions. I develop my argument using two strategies. First, I undertake a close reading of Bourdieu’s most important works and the debates they have provoked. Second I apply the conceptual tools this close reading offers to reconsider the logic behind two key social movement theory concepts: collective identity and repertoires of contention. Following a general introduction and literature review, I undertake a close consideration of habitus and an argument for how attention to the suffering produced by symbolic power constitutes grounds for normative justice claims. I then consider how collective identity formation in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer mobilization indicates the presence of symbolic violence, primarily in the form of epistemic violence. Next I argue that the nature of neoliberal symbolic power creates political antinomies for representation and affinity-based segments of the alterglobalization movement. Finally I argue that Bourdieu needs to be balanced by Nietzsche and that an orientation toward ‘overcoming’ offers a way out of the tension between conformity and failure. My findings point to the need for more sophisticated instruments for understanding the relationship between objective interests and subjective perception, impositions of, and challenges to, ‘logical consensus’, and strategies for counter-training and other mechanisms to support activists in resisting symbolic violence. / Thesis (Ph.D, Political Studies) -- Queen's University, 2013-01-29 14:14:16.699

Contemporary Western feminist scholarship fails to explore the backdrop to the naturalization of feminine subjugation. By analyzing the structures, histories, and theories of gender relations, this study dislocates femininity from its ascribed Otherness and, in doing so, demonstrates how empowered femininities have been overlooked or rendered invisible within gender studies. Femme, as the failure or refusal to approximate the patriarchal norms of femininity, serves as the conceptual anchor of this study and is used to examine how femmephobic sentiments are constructed and perpetuated in contemporary Western feminist theory. In part, this perpetuation is achieved through the pedagogical and theoretical exclusions from the texts chosen for gender studies courses, revealing a normative feminist body constructed through the privileging of identities and expressions. Privileging of identities is demonstrated through the designation of literary space and in an overview of dominant theories, such as how the feminine subject is maintained as the object of critique and as not able to be “properly” feminist. This assessment of gender studies course texts reveals a limited understanding of femme and femininity that maintains these identities as white, middle-class, normatively bodied, and without agency. Feminist theory demonstrates an embedded normative feminist subject, one marked by whiteness and body privileges. By deconstructing the privileging of theories of the normative feminist subject, this study argues that gender studies has replicated feminist histories in which the politics and concerns of the white socially privileged subject are the first to be addressed. While white femininity is present in hir Otherness and in critiques of hir femininity, the racially marked femme does not exist, even in absence. The femme—as a queer potentiality—offers a way of thinking and re-thinking through the limitations of contemporary Western feminist theory and the paradoxical preoccupations with the absented femme. / Thesis (Master, Gender Studies) -- Queen's University, 2013-09-09 19:36:29.903

This thesis examines the gender-subversive potential of mixed-sex martial arts. The research problem takes its significance from the well-documented linkages drawn within feminist research between combat sports and hierarchal gender differentiation. It is posited that from a feminist perspective, gender-subversive physical practices are desirable because they instigate a shift towards fairer and freer bodily discourse, and as such they are deserving of critical academic attention. Furthermore, sex-integrated sports have the potential to lead participants towards embodying and propagating such subversive gender discourses, and when these changes take place within highly masculinised activities such as combat sports, the significance of this subversion is amplified. While existing literature has addressed these themes with reference to women s participation in these kinds of activities, there is a relative paucity of sociological work explicitly examining mixed-sex participation, which this thesis is intended to redress. Using semi-structured interviewing, qualitative data were gathered from a group of male and female martial artists across the English East Midlands. The interviews were transcribed and then subjected to discourse analysis. Findings suggested that mixed-sex martial arts does involve gender subversion but that the practice also remains structured by dominant, hierarchal gender discourse in several significant ways. It is therefore suggested that mixed-sex training can present the possibility of gender subversion under particular conditions, such as: martial arts being accessible to both men and women at multiple levels of participation; a normalised presence of women, particularly at higher levels such as being coaches and competitors; participants coming to share an identity as martial artists which is irrespective of sexual difference; and ultimately training being integrated as much as possible, particularly with regard to the more intensely physical, combative aspects, such as sparring. The participants indicated that under these conditions they were able to conceive of and practice their gender differently, in ways which portrayed little or no hierarchal distinction between the sexes, and as such is considered subversive . Following these findings, the thesis ultimately concludes with a brief outline of some recommendations for good practice in martial arts clubs. In this way, the thesis contributes towards feminist understandings of the body and of physical culture, by highlighting one possible way in which to conceive of the sexed body differently from the prevailing norms of hierarchal sexual differentiation.

The perspectives of gay men on college and university campuses is informed by a rich gay social history and extensive roots of community politics. The experiences of gay undergraduate men have been illuminated in segmented ways in scholarly literature to date. This narrative inquiry develops and advances those efforts by exploring how gay undergraduate men construct, experience, and make meaning of their gender as a population ascribing to both liberationist and assimilationist viewpoints. Data for this qualitative study were collected at one public, four-year research university in the southeastern United States in the fall 2015 semester using recorded personal interviews with eleven men. Interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed for data analysis. The men included in the study represent a broad range of personal identity backgrounds, including a variety of college majors and years of experience in university study. Self-authorship and queer theoretical frames were used to analyze participants’ gender interpretations. Findings suggest men do not understand gender in isolation, but in tandem with intersections of familial ethnic and cultural backgrounds, social class status, and involvement on campus. Four major themes of experience that effect self-authorship of gender evolved from narrative analyses: masking, agency, costs, and policing. Implications for higher education professionals, including faculty, staff, and administrators, are discussed. Opportunities for further research in navigating lived experiences of marginalized campus subpopulations are also suggested and explored.

<p>“War Worlds” reads twentieth-century British and Anglophone literature to examine the social practices of marginal groups (pacifists, strangers, traitors, anticolonial rebels, queer soldiers) during the world wars. This dissertation shows that these diverse “enemies within” England and its colonies—those often deemed expendable for, but nonetheless threatening to, British state and imperial projects—provided writers with alternative visions of collective life in periods of escalated violence and social control. By focusing on the social and political activities of those who were not loyal citizens or productive laborers within the British Empire, “War Worlds” foregrounds the small group, a form of collectivity frequently portrayed in the literature of the war years but typically overlooked in literary critical studies. I argue that this shift of focus from grand politics to small groups not only illuminates surprising social fissures within England and its colonies but provides a new vantage from which to view twentieth-century experiments in literary form.</p> / Dissertation

The purpose of this essay is to investigate how the writers of two history textbooks describe females and males, and how they are presented in different discourses. The theories, which constitutes the foundation of the essay is that of gender studies, queer-theory and gender-socialization. The main methods of the essay are discourse analysis and text analysis. The main questions are: - What type of discourses are found in the text books and how would they be described? - How are women and men depicted in the found discourses? - How are the discourses holding up with school values? The results of the essay concluded that there are three different discourses present in the two text-books. These discourses are as follows: ”women as oppressed”, ”women mentioned in relation to the male sex” and ”males as the oppressors”. These discourses are analyzed with the mentioned theories above.