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Current medical discourse and endless media debates on obesity and health have rendered the fat body highly visible. However, the lived experiences of fat have to a large extent remained absent in these discourses. This thesis, therefore, expands and reconceptualizes notions of fatness and fat embodiments. Using semi-structured, in-depth interviewing with individuals of marginalized genders living in Sweden who identify as being fat, the thesis explores (1) the individuals’ perception of fat; how it is seen, felt, and known, (2) how their fat, gendered embodiments shape their identity and their ”being-in-the-world”, and (3) the coping strategies and/or opportunities for resistance available to deal with and/or challenge negative and stigmatizing experiences. Merging phenomenology, affect theory, and temporality theories, findings suggest that fat individuals experience struggles and hatred while navigating a thin world that excludes their fat flesh, resulting in feelings of hyperawareness, shame, and being out of place. Through everyday experiences in this intersubjective world, they are also constructed as being out of time, affecting their access to the present. Navigating conflicting demands of visibility/invisibility, embodying the innocent/guilty fatty, and embracing the body/disembodying from it, the author reflects on the implication of these findings for understandings of fat embodiments as multiple, ambiguous, shifting, and at times contradictory. The thesis offers thickened understandings of the significance of fat embodiments for challenging the ways in which power operates on bodies, for (re)conceptualizing normative notions of fatness, and for fat people themselves.

Working at the intersection of queer feminist affect studies and queer Indigenous studies, this thesis focuses on theorizations and enactments of queer Indigenous joy in Billy-Ray Belcourt's A History of My Brief Body, Gregory Scofield's Love Medicine and One Song, and Joshua Whitehead's Jonny Appleseed. It explores how these contemporary texts uniquely emphasize the relational queer Indigenous body’s tenacious capacity for care and love in order to enact more breathable, collective, and ultimately joyful modes of embodied life, even amid the stifling settler colonial present. I argue that, in doing so, these authors foster joy as a rebellious and healing affective orientation that opposes injurious colonial constructions of queer Indigenous embodiment and contributes to the future-bearing project of radical Indigenous resurgence. By examining these authors' invaluable interventions with joy, which is largely an under-acknowledged positive affect, this thesis aims to convey why the young but burgeoning field of queer Indigenous literature merits far more critical attention than it has received thus far.

This thesis is structured as a feminist creative endeavour, a practice of self-love that aims at exploring (my) depression as a cultural and social phenomenon caused mainly by an inability to correctly embody swedishness, a constant haunting of a colonial and Colombian past, and the affective dimensions of language. This text is based on autoethnographic material about the experiences of being a Colombian-born migrant in Sweden and uses mainly affect theory and decolonial theory to make sense of these experiences. The thesis showcases my temporal relation to both swedishness and colombianness and how that dimension influences the (re)production of my self, and the consequent “negative feelings” linked to depression I experience. Furthermore, as a creative endeavour following the tradition of WOC feminist writers, this thesis highlights how writing and theorizing can lead to healing.

This thesis examines readership communities on the social media application TikTok, and more specifically videos published under the hashtag SpicyBooks, where users discuss the literary genre of romance. Together with the closely related #BookTok, #SpicyBooks has had a profound impact on the book market. Correspondingly, the formation of readership communities on the app should be of interest to anyone who wishes to understand the changes of and within literacy among young adults. This study examines the top 130 featured videos under #SpicyBooks, which are thematically divided into categories analysed in three separate chapters. Taking its cue from affect theory, the thesis examines how the affect of shame is produced, represented and mediated in the videos. Furthermore, the study maps the various reader positions conjured by shame, and surveys how the video creators present themselves in the prevailing ideas and norms of aesthetic taste and social gender that circumscribes the literature discussed in the videos. By focusing on how the social media users and readers represent themselves, rather than how libraries and librarians can make themselves visible on social media, the study proposes a methodological shift, which might begin bridging the generational gap between libraries and their potential users.

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This thesis aims to analyze and interpret a number of central works – Vimpelstaden (1985), Som en gång varit äng (1988), Blomman och människobenet (2003), I en cylinder i vattnet av vattengråt (2005) and Vad hjälper det en människa om hon häller rent vatten över sig i alla sina dagar (2009) – by the Swedish poet Ann Jäderlund (1955-) in the context of phenomenology and affect theory. The analysis consists of three chapters and proceeds chronologically with technical scrutinies of separate phases of Jäderlund’s œuvre – from the aphasic-like treatment of established phraseologies in Vimpelstaden and frozen expressions of the botanical discourse in Som en gång varit äng, to the uncanny focus on perceptual patterns as such in her later works. Throughout these analyses the thesis observes a series of techniques with which the author presents us with a kind of sensory paradox, through a) creating language-based complex appearances, non-appropriable by means of the normal perceptual patterns of embodied perception, while still b) simulating, and thus implicitly emphasizing, these appearances as something already concretely looked at and felt. In short, to experience what cannot be experienced, to live the unlivable. Many of these technical observations made are pinned down analytically using concepts from the field of cognitive poetics, namely George Lakoff and Mark Johnsons findings of experiential image schemata underpinning spoken phraseologies and their influential theories on conceptual metaphors. The interpretative conclusion following these observations is that Jäderlund handles her writing aesthetically as a kind of sensory material in a very literal sense, a “being of sensation” in the terminology of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Not as means of experiential or intellectual representation, not as some sort of critical enterprise through mere language-gaming of free- floating signifiers – but as a material able to preserve and perform sensory processes immanent to its own material compilation, a tendency that earlier research fails to grasp or simply ignores altogether. Thus the affectivity immanent to the literary material – often being the starting point of studies in affect theory and cognitive poetics – is here proven to be a characteristic, thereby playing the role more of a conclusion than a field of inquiry. The aesthetics of interrogating the limits of sensory experience, introducing a sort of crisis to embodied perception through the experience of poetic language – and the experience of it as having a “metaphysical significance”, as French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau- Ponty puts it – is articulated in the thesis against the background of influential readings of modern art carried out by Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze.