The aim of this study is to describe how nature is portrayed in swedish poet and critic Aase Berg’s two earliest poetry collections, Hos rådjur (1997) and Mörk materia (1999), and how it relates to notions of humanity, culture and civilisation. The concept of ”nature” is problematized in a short survey of how it has been used by and critizised in ecocritical literary theory, which is used as the main theoretical framework for this survey, with an emphasis on selected theoretical concepts by Donna Haraway. As a methodological starting point, ”nature” is tentatively defined as ”that which does not let itself be subsumed under the human, culture or civilisation”, and this definition is contrasted with how the concepts are handled in the texts.The investigation shows that the relationship of nature to the human is a fundamental theme that provides a structure for both poetry collections. In Hos rådjur, wild nature takes the shape of a ”raw” animal that seems to threaten the human characters. In Mörk materia the threat to humanity comes from matter itself, matter that is dark and unruly. The nature/culture relationship is complex and continuously evolving, with several different and mutually exclusive possibilities being explored in the poems. Berg’s poetry has often been characterised as transcending boundaries, and metamorphoses and dissolution of boundaries between humans, animals and other organisms are abundant in the two poetry collections. Despite this, the study demonstrates how dualistic notions of nature and culture, body and spirit, are upheld throughout the texts.

[pt] A pesquisa investiga o estatuto das fabulações na criação de transformações individuais e coletivas multiespécie no contexto da emergência climática (e suas interseccionalidades), com foco em histórias criadas por mulheres. Investiga-se um conjunto selecionado de criações artísticas que poderiam ser ditas simpoiéticas, nos termos de Donna Haraway, e que se mostram capazes de deslocar lógicas, disposições e sensibilidades arraigadamente em curso no contexto do Antropoceno. A investigação parte de um estudo do conto Estórias de Camille, do livro Ficar com o problema:fazer parentes no Chthuluceno, da própria Haraway, buscando em seguida ocasiões de cotejo e contágio entre essa história (em certo sentido inaugural) e duas outras fabulações: a obra de arte híbrida Proliferações, de Fabíola Fonseca, e o filme Teko Haxy: ser imperfeita, co-dirigido pela cineasta indígena Patrícia Ferreira Pará Yxapy e pela antropóloga não indígena Sophia Pinheiro. Feito à luz do conceito de simpoiese, o exame conjunto das criações analisadas busca somar-se aos esforços contemporâneos de contraposição às narrativas antropocêntricas (falocêntricas, etnocêntricas, especistas), tanto em suas versões utópicas e salvacionistas, quanto em reações distópicas e apocalípticas. / [en] The research investigates the status of fabulations in the creation of multispecies individual and collective transformations in the context of the climate emergency (and their intersectionalities), focusing on stories created by women. A selected set of artistic creations is investigated that could be said to be sympoietic, in Donna Haraway s terms, and that are capable of displacing logics, dispositions and sensibilities that are deeply rooted in the context of the Anthropocene. The investigation starts from a study of the short story The Camille Stories, from the book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, by Haraway herself, then looks for occasions of comparison and contagion between this story (in a certain sense, inaugural) and two others fabulations: the hybrid artwork Proliferações, by Fabíola Fonseca, and the film Teko Haxy: ser imperfeita, co-directed by indigenous filmmaker Patrícia Ferreira Pará Yxapy and non-indigenous anthropologist Sophia Pinheiro. Made in light of the concept of sympoiesis, the joint examination of the analyzed creations seeks to add to contemporary efforts to oppose anthropocentric narratives (phallocentric, ethnocentric, speciesist), both in their utopian and salvationist versions, as well as in dystopian and apocalyptic reactions.

The aim of the study is to elucidate what enables positive attitudes towards buying sex. The study has a posthumanist approach and the data is gathered trough hidden observations of a Swedish web forum dedicated to discussions of prostitution. The theoretical frame that is used in the study consist of concepts from the material feminists Karen Barads and Donna J. Haraways theories and Niels van Doorns argument of the embodiment of virtual texts. A theoretical inspired thematic analysis is used to examine the data from the observations of the web forum. The study shows that positive attitudes towards buying sex are given space and permanence though a variety of intra-actions between material and human agents. At the same time the result of the intra-actions is that the positive attitudes get mediated and endorsed, which enables positive attitudes towards buying sex. In addition to that, the intra-action between material and human agents creates normative understandings about buying sex and prostitution, which also enables these attitudes. In conclusion, the study shows that the enablement of positive attitudes towards buying sex is created through intra-action between not only human agents, instead the material shows to have a significant part in the enablement of positive attitudes towards buying sex.

En komparativ uppsats som illustrerar tavlans inverkan och betydelse i Oscar Wildes The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) och Donna Tartts The Goldfinch (2013). Fyra huvudteman utröns: tavlan som tidlöst objekt, undangömd, människans spegelbild och moraliskt korrumperande.

I argue that Margaret Atwood’s work in MaddAddam is about survival; it is about moving beyond preconceived, thoughtless ideology of any form with creative kinship. Cooperation and engagement cannot be planned in advance, and must take the form of something more than pre-established ideology. I will discuss MaddAddam in light of Donna Haraway’s recent work in which she argues that multispecies acknowledgement and collaboration are essential if humans are to survive and thrive in the coming centuries. By bringing the two texts into dialogue, one sees that Atwood’s novel constitutes the kind of story deemed necessary by Haraway for making kin in the Chthulucene. Various scenes depicting cooperation and interdependence among humans and other animals offer chthonic models of kinship; these relationships, as opposed to ideological and anthropocentric isolation, will serve as the means of surviving and thriving within an ongoing apocalypse. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This thesis examines a recent trend in contemporary science and speculative fiction to produce new and/or alternative iterations of reproduction that are not limited by biology, gender, or species. Through Donna Haraway’s notion of “cyborg regeneration” and recent critical and theoretical revisionings of this concept, I investigate this trend in three key texts: Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber, and Larissa Lai’s long poem “rachel” from her book of poetry Automaton Biographies. Each of these authors offers representations of reproduction that counter gender stereotypes and essentialism and produce new cyborg maternal or explicitly non-maternal figures unbound to patriarchal models of repronormativity and colonialist constructions of the mother. By portraying these nonunitary maternal figures and/or non-reproductive bodies, I argue that these sf texts present new forms of procreation that further feminist conversations about gender, the body, the limits of the human, future populations, and desire.

WILD EMBRACE is a collection of poetry that explores the themes of abuse, survival, and fragility. The speaker of these poems, older and distanced from the abuse, asks what it means to be a survivor, and explores our obligation of compassion that, as human beings, we owe one another. While much of the work in this collection is rooted in personal experience, it is not intended to be read as memoir or autobiography. Many of these poems may have begun as lived experience, but between memory, the transcription of memory, and their final form on the printed page, they have been run through a variety of embellishment, artistic license, and shifting narrative forms. The poems in this collection attempt to capture a heightened emotional truth that can’t be attained by mere reporting of fact. WILD EMBRACE sifts through the ashes of suffering and loss, and constructs a mythology as personal as it is collective.

This thesis is for a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture.

Abstract: This thesis aims to explore how utopian desires re/shape the posthuman, cyberspace and histories by means of information technologies in William Gibson¡¦s Idoru and All Tomorrow¡¦s Parties, which construct a fragmented but subversive power by representing the world in a utopian text that allows the free play of ideology. Gibson uses utopian imagination to cobble together a near future that reflects his concern with information technologies and media over contemporary society. Utopian imaginations on the one hand open up possibilities and transform fixed ideas; on the other, utopian imaginations are easily turned into utopian desires that are subject to manipulation if utopian designers want to sell. I intend to discover how desires to realize a utopia (body, space, and history), which is the ultimate goal of utopian program, are being manipulated by utopian designers. I will mainly adapt and blend Katherine Hayles¡¦s notion of the posthuman perspectives to challenge human possibilities, Donna Haraway¡¦s notion of the cyborg as a blasphemy to Western traditions, Louis Marin¡¦s Disneyland analysis as an apparatus to examine utopic expressions in William Gibson¡¦s textual constructions of utopias, and Walter Benjamin¡¦s notions of material historiography and history¡¦s messianic power in tracing individual memories under a capitalist contextualized History. In Chapter One, I will argue that Idoru as well as Idoru metamorphosize from a dialectical structure into an informational pattern-random structure, from a commodity into a posthuman subjectivity. I will adopt Katherine Hayles¡¦s concept of information narratives in explaining the re/shaping of Rei¡¦s body and her concept of the posthuman to explicate the struggle between the posthuman and the transhuman. In Chapter Two I will argue that cyberspace serves as a utopia that brings forth the desire to transcend the flesh. This utopian desire is a transgressive discourse that breaks up the totality of a closed system. Moreover, cyberspace exposes the feedback looping of the discourses of capitalism and anti-capitalism. Respectively, by the representation of virtual Venice and the Walled City, these two utopias write proposals that project discourses of pleasure and criticism for achieving their programs. I will adopt Donna Haraway¡¦s cyborg ontology in explaining cyberspace as a transgressive discourse and Louis Marin¡¦s Disneyland analysis as an apparatus of utopic expressions and the limits of utopia. Next, in Chapter Three, I shall expose how Harwood the capitalist manipulates the world to fit into his utopian proposal: modernization of the city as a manifestation of a utopia by means of cyberspace as a network that connects people globally. To contravene Harwood, Idoru, Laney and the Walled City denizens collaborate to checkmate Harwood¡¦s king. I will elaborate on the interactions between the universal history and the individual histories based on Walter Benjamin¡¦s concept of history.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Northwestern University, 1997. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 58-04, Section: A, page: 1336. Adviser: Rosemary Radford Ruether.