This research contributes a detailed personal account of a FEMEN activist. It presents an autophenomenographic analysis of cultural artefacts, including a Retrospective Diary, resulting from the activity of Yelena Myshko in FEMEN between 2012 and 2014. Previously FEMEN has been used as raw material for external analysis by press and academics to fit their individual agendas. To counteract this, Myshko’s research proposes an insider perspective on FEMEN activism. She writes herself in response to academics and FEMEN leader Inna Shevchenko who ignore the contribution of FEMEN Netherlands. Myshko merges author/researcher/researched and uses evocative storytelling to provide an introspective account of sextremism, connecting it to relevant embodiment concepts that illustrate its technology of empowerment and unintended side effects.   Through an autophenomenographic analysis of her personal experience, Myshko suggests how FEMEN employs sextremism to create soldiers of feminism. Her research proposes that sextremism is an attitude, a way of life and technology of resistance. For Myshko, sextremism embodies feminist polemic that turns against patriarchy through topless protest. Through personal accounts she illustrates how she internalized this aggressive femininity during physical and mental training. Myshko argues that in protest FEMEN activists communicate to the public and mobilize new activists through feminist snap. In addition, Myshko observes that sextremism produces visual activism that internalizes feminist polemic and transforms it into figurative storytelling. Myshko explains how she reproduced sextremism through body image that made her assertive and empowered her in action.   In turn Myshko demonstrates how personal accounts of sextremist embodiment and problems encountered as a woman in the world reproduce FEMEN’s fight in the media. Myshko analysis interviews with the press where she pinpoints topical feminist issues, making FEMEN real and relevant in Western society. Myshko observes that the media appropriated the spectacle created by FEMEN Netherlands but often distorted it and bend the news to fit its own agenda. In addition, the media criticized FEMEN Netherlands for cross-passing national values and power symbols. For Myshko, sextremism is empowering but also destructive. It promotes an unapologetic self-critical attitude that accumulates collateral damage in battle. The sporadic and restrained relationships between activists does not allow intimacy. Because of the eye of the media, tenderness is perceived as weakness and is not aloud. The combination of criticism, media scrutiny and police persecution hurt Myshko’s feelings. These unresolved feelings of hurt led to resentment and disengagement from FEMEN.

La thèse est une contribution à l’étude des tourbillons longitudinaux qui se développent sur la lunette arrière des véhicules automobiles, dans l’idée de provoquer leur éclatement afin de réduire la traînée aérodynamique. On conçoit tout d’abord un système d’acquisition dénommé A-SPIV, permettant de reconstruire le champ moyen de vitesse 3D d’un sillage turbulent à partir de plans stéréo-PIV acquis par translation du système caméras-laser, sans qu’il soit nécessaire de le recalibrer. En complément, on propose une méthode de reconstruction de la pression moyenne reposant sur les données A-SPIV et sur une mesure de la pression pariétale. L’ensemble forme un nouveau protocole expérimental, validé dans le sillage d’un corps d’Ahmed 25° et dont les résultats à haut Reynolds sont comparés à la littérature existante. L'analyse topologique des tourbillons longitudinaux suggère l’existence d’un éclatement tourbillonnaire spontané dans le sillage proche, malgré l’absence de point de stagnation. On démontre formellement l’existence de cet éclatement par deux critères théoriques qui considèrent ce phénomène, soit comme la conséquence d’une réorganisation de la vorticité, soit comme la résultante d’une accumulation, en un point critique, d’ondes inertielles se propageant le long du tourbillon. Les analyses sous-jacentes sont menées dans un repère cylindrique attaché à l’axe tourbillonnaire et prédisent une même position d’éclatement, en bon accord avec la position singulière issue des mesures A-SPIV. La thèse se conclut par une analyse de stabilité globale de l'écoulement moyen qui suggère un lien possible entre l’éclatement et une instabilité globale de l’écoulement tourbillonnaire. / This thesis is a contribution to the study of the longitudinal vortices developing in the near wake of ground vehicles, with the general purpose of reducing the aerodynamic drag by triggering the vortex breakdown phenomenon. We present a new data acquisition system called A-SPIV, allowing to reconstruct a 3D turbulent time-averaged velocity field from stereo-PIV planes measured by translation of the whole cameras-laser system, with no need to recalibrate. We also propose a method to reconstruct the mean pressure in the bulk from the A-SPIV data and from a dedicated wall static pressure measurement. This new overall experimental protocol is applied to a standard aerodynamic test-case, the 25° Ahmed body, all results being compared and validated at high turbulent Reynolds number against existing data from the literature. A thorough analysis of the longitudinal vortices suggests the occurrence of a spontaneous vortex breakdown in the near-wake, although there exist no stagnation point in the experimental data. Such vortex breakdown is therefore evidenced using two different theoretical criteria considering the phenomenon as the consequence of either a reorganization of the vorticity, or an accumulation of inertial waves propagating along the vortex core. The underlying analyses are carried out in a cylindrical system attached to the vortex axis and predict a single breakdown position, in good agreement with the singular position initially inferred from the A-SPIV data. The thesis ends with a global stability analysis of the turbulent mean flow suggesting a possible connection between the occurrence of vortex breakdown and a global instability of the longitudinal vortex.

This essay deals with recurring grotesque motifs in Mikael Niemi’s novels Kyrkdjävulen, Populärmusik från Vittula (Popular Music from Vittula), Fallvatten and Koka björn (To Cook a Bear). It aims to widen the academic understanding of Niemi’s works by focusing on their aesthetics in relation to previous studies, which have mostly been concerned with placing Niemi in a context of Tornedalian minority literature. With the grotesque defined as monstrous and boundary breaking imagery that challenges common rational, ideological or moral world views, this study shows that these motifs can both strengthen, nuance and undermine postcolonial interpretations of the novels.Through Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque, emphasis is placed on the subversive and utopian aspects of the grotesque motifs. With the use of Sigmund Freud’s term the uncanny (das unheimliche) and Julia Kristeva’s term the abject, psychological and emotional aspects of the selected motifs are drawn to the surface. And, by turning to Sara Ahmed’s thoughts on emotions and performativity, the function of disgust in said motifs is examined. The grotesque motifs in question are: the degradation of the mouth, the lower animals, the boy with the knife, the witch mother, and the androgyne. The first part of the analysis shows that in Niemi’sworks the mouth is associated with storytelling, power, agency and the subject’s ability to both knowand express himself, but also to take the world into himself and be changed by it. The mouth is often degraded, which in a carnivalesque manner results in a linguistic revival. The second part of the analysis argues that lower animals, such as rats, reptiles and bat-like devil spawn, are symbols of the abject – that which man must cast out in order to exist. The motifs of the rats and devils are associated with themes of language, identity and writing, but also allude to a threatening feminine principle. In the third part of the analysis, the motifs of the boy with the knife, the witch mother and the androgyne are found to be juxtaposed to and interwoven with each other in narratives concerning gender, sexuality and coming of age. The results of the study show that Mikael Niemi utilizes grotesque aesthetics to give shape toprocesses of growth and change, captivity and liberation, and a complicated sense of identity that eludes clear and rational definitions. The grotesque in these novels is not purely utopian in a Bakhtinian sense, but more emotionally ambivalent. A determining factor to whether the grotesque image brings true renewal or only a repetition of past pain is the will and choice of the individual. Thus, Mikael Niemi’s novels speak not so much of the power of a minority identity, as of the power and potential of the individual to reinvigorate that identity. They form an individualized, existential project in a Tornedalian context.

This essay explores and examines disgust in five literary figures and books based on scent, bodyfluids and abjection. Together with Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection and Sara Ahmed's "The Performativity of Disgust" in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, I analyze these books, and my position as a researchsubject. The questions I ask are: What does disgust mean? How do the subject's boundaries shift when things penetrate the body? How are scents, body fluids and disgust expressed in relation to power and the female body? And what does it mean that I stick my reading experiences on the texts I read?   The analysis begins in Mare Kandre's novel Aliide, Aliide and how gaze, power and girlhood are made, as well as how abjection takes place in the intake of milk and larvae. Body in body and body against body are analyzed based on Aliide's disgust in the novel. I discuss how something growing inside is experienced as disgusting and frightening and connect it to the pregnant body and the fetus as abjection. In the second chapter of the analyze, it is Parfymen: berättelsen om en mördare by Patrick Süskind that focuses on the scent of the female body that Grenouille, the main character tries to extract and master. The gaze on the female body and the extraction of fragrance is in focus here and in Nekrofilen by Gabrielle Wittkop, Lucien's desire for the dead body is examined. The body fluids, such as the vomit that the bodies excrete can be read as limits to life and death. In the third and final analysis section, I read these books with affect. I reconnect to my introduction where Ulf Lundell's poems made me feel disgusted. I use Ahmed's concept of performativity to discuss how cannibalism - reading - eating body fluids are connected, and how writing about disgust, is a form om vomiting. I examine my own writing subject and what an affective reading does to literary studies and the research position. In conclusion, I discuss how the universal and the subjective making of disgust effect research.

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This dissertation examines lesbian and queer desire in texts in Catalan and Spanish written in Barcelona, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires from the 1960s to the present. In the texts, desire includes but is not limited to the erotic; it encompasses issues of queer textuality, relationality, and literary transmission. I focus on the works of three authors who have spent the majority of their lives in Barcelona. However, the city appears almost incidentally in their works; the genealogies that the authors trace are transnational. The texts combine literal movement (through exile or diaspora) and a metaphorical sense of being “out of place” that prompts writers to take refuge in writing. I demonstrate that despite depicting affinities beyond the family and nation, the works reveal the persistence of familial and national ties, albeit in spectral or queer ways. Rather than tracing continuous lines of descent that emphasise origins, the works are principally concerned with futurity and fragmentation, as in Michel Foucault’s reading of genealogy. Chapter One on Maria-Mercè Marçal’s La passió segons Renée Vivien (1994) traces a literary genealogy from Sappho to Renée Vivien in fin de siècle Paris to Marçal. The novel represents a merging of literary desire and erotic desire; Marçal’s search for symbolic mothers turns out to be a search for symbolic lovers that is oriented towards the present and future. In Chapter Two, I posit that in Cristina Peri Rossi’s La nave de los locos (1984) “happiness” consists of being open to chance and unpredictability unlike in conventional “happy” scripts in which a valuable life is believed to consist of (heterosexual) marriage, children, and property ownership. In Part II I argue that through fragmentation, allegory, and ambiguity, Peri Rossi’s El libro de mis primos (1969) contests authoritarian discourse without itself becoming a site of hegemonic meaning. In inviting the reader’s collaboration, it ensures authorial legacy. Part I of Chapter Three is an analysis of the temporality of obsession in Flavia Company’s Querida Nélida (1988). I propose that obsession and melancholia may point to a utopian future rather than signalling an entrapment in the past. My study of Melalcor (2000) in Part II suggests that queer forms of relationality that are not centred on procreation and monogamy offer ethical models of sociality. Part III focusses on Company’s return to biological family in Volver antes que ir (2012) and Por mis muertos (2014). The resurgence in these texts of family members who have died signals that just as the queer haunts the family, the family haunts the queer.

This study assesses the loyalty behaviour of consumers in fast-food restaurants in Saudi Arabia by studying the antecedents and the consequences of loyalty behaviour. The sample consisted of 231 Saudis and non-Saudis living in Saudi Arabia. They were approached using the “snowball” technique. Participants were all over the age of eighteen, and they were customers of Al-Baik restaurants. Data was collected through a face-to-face questionnaire, and analyzed using SPSS software. Specifically, Cronbach’s Alpha test, Pearson correlation coefficient, Spearman correlation coefficient, and multiple regression analysis were used. Results show that significant relationships exist between the antecedents and the consequences of loyalty behaviour. It is also indicated that participants’ personalities and values were significantly related to the loyalty behaviour of consumers in Saudi Arabia. The major limitation of this study is that it was conducted in only one city, Jeddah. Therefore, additional research should be carried out in other cities with larger samples. The research results offer compelling evidence that Saudi loyalty behaviour differs from Western behaviour. Therefore, it suggests that international fast-food operators in Saudi Arabia should take local factors into account when formulating marketing strategies, such as the role of women and youth in Saudi society. This thesis makes a novel contribution to the literature, as it is the first to model the antecedents and the consequences of loyalty behaviour of consumers in a single study. It is also the first to study contributed to the literature to examine the relation between the Six Dimensional Achievement Motivation Scale (Jackson, Ahmed, and Heapy, 1976), Rokeach Value System (1973), and loyalty behaviour of consumers.