Canadian females grow up in a sociocultural environment full of contradictory discourses that rarely reflect the social reality they experience. Adolescent girls face abject forms of objectification, sexualization, unequal power relations and high levels of violence in their communities, yet these experiences remain largely unexamined with adolescent girls themselves. In the following thesis I describe a research project I undertook with seven girls between the ages of twelve and fifteen. Using the method biomythography, I ask the girls to tell me who they are in an attempt to determine how these girls relate their social environment to their identity. An analysis of the discourses emerging in the biomythographies as well as in discussion in the research space demonstrates that the girls recognize links with sociocultural environment, yet they do not highlight the effects of this culture on their identity in their biomythographies. Instead, they used the space of the biomythographies to resist, dream, and focus on the best aspects of themselves and those in their social world. At the same time, the physical creation space became an important secondary site of analysis. The analysis of both the biomythographies and the project space demonstrates the importance of girl-only space in the community. Such space allows girls to come together as girls to critique and analyse what it means to grow up female in Canadian society. This space must also provide opportunities for girls to self-reflect on their own social position and identity. / Graduate

In this study on form within the field of Gender and Fem(me)inist Studies I build on, and work with, works created by black women and femmes, as well as femmes and women of color to explore their ways of theorizing through form, as well as finding my own, with roots from all the beautiful experiments lived and written about by these folks. As I sketch out these theories and texts and bring them to the Swedish context in which I write I am breaking new ground for research on blackness, femme-inist theory and form as well as methodologies here. Using an approach of mixed methodologies – formulated in the concepts of femmebodimotive writing and other pleasurable methodologies – I use my body and its emotions oozing from it as a tool for theorizing in the intersections of gender, sexuality, blackness, care and its connections to water, kinship, language, pleasure and rest. I tend to various intersections of these to find new ways of swAfrican (Swedish and African Tanzanian) Black, femme, borderland(s) being in the world. The first chapter sketches out these borderlands as they connect in my body and its surroundings. It is highly inspired by Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Spill in its form and will invite you to think care with me as I wrap my hair in queer kangas (colorfully sketched out in a KangaProject) over which we wander to the Kiswahili coast and take a plunge in black waters. This is where the second chapter starts, in the biomythographical waters, waves and currents carried inside us, and by us, as well as the waters and currents connecting the worlds corners. All water carries the currents of histories of genders, sexualities, kinship and languages and this, as well as the un/realness of the black bodies in focus, is intimately explored with the help of Omise’ekeNatasha Tinsley, Christina Sharpe, Sara Ahmed, a few other theorists, dictionaries and me. And as the waters runs up and down, from side to side, the waves and wakes travel further in time. These waves travel all the way into sleep, and into the third chapter. Upon entering this final chapter, you find a small visual constellation of these sleep waves. Here, rest and pleasure are in focus and I think with and through Navild Acosta and Fannie Sosa’s installation of Black Power Naps as a way to think blackness and femme-inity and their movements as theory, joy and as connected to pleasurable methodologies. My explorations lead me to the importance of form and texture for knowledge production as it may show other dimensions of theoretical thoughts and problems. In highlighting this I also show how the master (thesis) form may be approached differently by Black femmes of color and thus illuminating what issues these bodies have in white academic spaces.