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This thesis analyses the links between masculinity and representations of power in the fiction of John Banville and argues that his use of the category of the aesthetic,especially the sublime, strategically presents the masculine subject as the site of a loss of power, often figured as selffragmentation or self-delusion. This strategy is particularly evident in Banville’s approach to problems of representation, especially with regard to narrating the past, the construction of systems of knowledge, and efforts to achieve or articulate self-presence balanced by an ethical relation to the other. In each case, gender difference and sexual desire act as markers within Banville’s key themes as part of the enactment of failure that defines the male protagonist. Existing gender criticism has examined many of the representations of women and femininity in Banville’s fiction, but has fully considered neither the ways in which these representations contribute to the construction of the male narrative subject that is the origin or focus of the text, nor the gender politics of the various articulations of creativity and intellectual activity valorised by Banville. Drawing upon Nick Mansfield’s work on cultural masochism, the thesis argues that the disavowal of power, or its entanglement in unresolvable dialectics, constitutes a subtle technique for managing power relations, the origins of which lie in the ambivalent relation to power at the heart of subject-formation. Contrary to the view that Banville’s fiction directly de-centres or deconstructs subjectivity, it shows that by aestheticising the de-centred subject the fiction works to neutralise difference and ultimately recuperate unity within elastic, even contradictory, narratives of self. Through readings of seven of Banville’s novels, it demonstrates that the misrecognitions and ironies that drive his fiction present epistemological and representational failures within an aesthetic closure that asserts itself, paradoxically, through these very failures to establish closure. Crucially, it is in the language of desire that this paradox is expressed. The thesis concludes that the logic of the sublime enables Banville to dramatise a fragmented masculinity that has lost its basis in traditional representational and philosophical ideals, but that it simultaneously brings about a recuperation and consolidation of the very power structures his writing appears to disavow.

In 2014, the newly elected Swedish government declared itself as the first feminist government in the world. When CEDAW in 2016 released their review of the Swedish gender equality policy work, they criticized the lack of concrete results. In the recommendations they suggested that Sweden should adopt a national strategy in their work with violence against women. Being the first public feminist government, working with women issues such as violence against women, it is therefore of interest to study what kind of theoretical and practical policy work the Löfven administration has done during their first term. In this study, the purpose is to find out what the government has done in regard to stop the violence against women, by using the theoretical framework of feminist institutionalism and state feminism. In the result, that is gathered from government documents, it is shown that the Löfven administration has had a similar goal and policy work that the CEDAW recommended, but there is still questions in the area that is yet to be a part of that work. In conclusion, you can with safety say that women´s issues have taken a place in the political agenda, but not even the first county in the world governed by a feminist government is equal.

Poster exhibited at GPSC Student Showcase, November 7th, 2014, University of Arizona. This research has been presented at the 2014 Annual Student Showcase, where first prize recognition in the College of Humanities was received. An earlier version was presented at the 24th Annual Graduate and Professional Symposium on Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literature, Language and Culture. Recognition as the first undergraduate poster presented at the graduate symposium was received, as well as an award for Best Paper. Special recognition is due primarily to Dr. Katia Bezerra, head of the Department of Spanish & Portugese, for extending an offer for me to present, to Edgard Ore-Giron for private mentorship of my work, and to Akeem Flavors in the Department of Art History for willingly assisting me practice my presentation skills. / No amount research need be referenced to justify the consensus that a power differential exists among women and men. The outcome that this power differential has created, however, varies from one society to another. The role of women in male-dominated societies is deconstructed through two films, each situated in the drug trafficking industry—one set in Latin America and the other in the United States-Mexico border. While substantial literature explores the gender power differential in the United States and developing countries, little attention is given to the impact of gender participation in the developing world. Each of these countries has diverse expectations with gender politics; that is, some countries have women as leaders in suffrage reforms and corporations, while women in other countries are not even granted the right to divorce. This paper examines the relationship between gender participation of women and their defiance of the power differential as depicted in the Brazilian film City of God and the American film Traffic. While no evidence is independently presented that economic development provides a basis for equal participation, the most important factors such as gender violence and civil liberties provide a means of understanding the gender gap from a sociopolitical perspective.

This article presents the findings of a corpus linguistic analysis of the hashtags #mansplaining, #manspreading, and #manterruption, three lexical blends which have recently found widespread use across a variety of online media platforms. Focusing on the social media and microblogging site Twitter, we analyze a corpus of over 20,000 tweets containing these hashtags to examine how discourses of gender politics and gender relations are represented on the site. More specifically, our analysis suggests that users include these hashtags in tweets to index their individual evaluations of, and assumptions about, "proper" gendered behavior. Consequently, their metadiscursive references to the respective phenomena reflect their beliefs of what constitutes appropriate (verbal) behavior and the extent to which gender is appropriated as a variable dictating this behavior. As such, this article adds to our knowledge of the ways in which gendered social practices become sites of contestation and how contemporary gender politics play out in social media sites.

In a book, I have gathered 2 years of research on the heart symbol in the context of social media and the responsibility of Facebook Inc. in the propagation of hate speech. In parallel, new far-right parties such as Alternativ för Sverige use the heart symbol as a logo. I question the benefits of a rising discourse of love in nationalist propaganda, often hiding racist and sexist ideologies.This research is accompanied by a music video: six women are reading a spoken-word piece on the sexualisation of the female body and the idealisation of a nation-state. This work is entrenched in my own experiences and those of my friends. I composed the music and recorded our voices, all of us, speaking with different accents, witness of our current history of migrations. / <p>Work reviewed by artist and graphic designer Benedetta Crippa</p>

<p>Abstract</p><p>The aim of this thesis is to investigate how the Swedish political parties have been discussing gender politics since 1970 to nowadays, in order to see which problems and solutions that have been suggested by the parties to increase the representation of women and the equality between the sexes. The theoretical framework is constructed by theories of women´s representation, gender politics and women’s interest.</p><p>To describe how the discussions about gender politics have been between the different parties, the methodological foundation consists of an ideology critical textual analysis of the political programs from the Swedish parties.</p><p>The analysis confirms that the discussions about gender politics and the political representation of women increase over time. The most important issue of equality is the lack of women´s rights and possibilities in the labor market as a consequence of women´s responsibility of home and childcare. The analysis also shows that parties which discuss women as a category and the underrepresentation of women also point out the importance to increase equality between men and women.</p>

On a May morning in 2013 news broke that a unique figure within British musical life had died unexpectedly in his sleep at the age of fifty-eight. First coming to notoriety in the early 1980s, the composer Steve Martland's output spanned fusions of classical and popular instruments, a song cycle/pop album released on an independent alternative label, a predilection for string music descended as much from Dutch and American minimalists as his more pastoral English forebears, works for his own band of winds, guitars and drums, and ended with a choir piece giving traditional seafaring texts a minimalist treatment. Paralleling this stylistic evolution, all the while he was an opinionated and outspoken left-winger, frequently commenting on both the politics of music-making and broader socio-political topics. But from my perspective most compelling is how he sought to address these concerns with his compositions. With little sustained attention having been paid to Martland beyond journalistic writings and some from a sociological perspective, this dissertation seeks both to be the first tracing of his career but have as its central focus an examination of just how his politics were expressed in his compositions and how this evolved. I cast a critical eye toward the works themselves, sketches held at the British Library and interviews and reviews to build insight into an idiosyncratic artistic response to a period of great social and cultural change in Britain that reveals itself to be a great deal more nuanced, conscientious and sometimes contradictory than it first appears.

With Second Wave Feminism and the Women’s Rights Movement, 1970’s Americans began to see a shift in gender norms affecting how we relate to one another, particularly within a family structure. Scholars have noted an anxiety permeating the decade over the potential negative ramifications of such a drastic cultural shift. We see these issues of gender politics played out in numerous popular films from the 1970s and into the 1980s. Kubrick’s The Shining, like many horror films of the time, preys upon the societal fear for the family, due to these shifting gender norms, by featuring a crumbling patriarch (Jack), a troubled child (Danny), and mother struggling to hold her family together (Wendy). Upon closer examination The Shining stands out for its progressive narrative which supports leaving behind outdated ideas of masculinity and femininity, in favor of embracing a more open and ambiguous definition. Kubrick uses his characters as figures, representative of broader social and cultural conflicts. His film operates at two levels, the individual (or micro level of the character’s story) and the systemic (or macro, how their story reflects large social issues). In this way he exposes the toxicity of traditional masculinity and its detrimental effects on a family. By killing Jack and allowing Wendy and Danny to escape, The Shining emphasizes the need to progress and reshape our perceptions of gender identity. In my examination of the film I combine film theory with historicism, leaning on the works of cultural history scholars as well as film scholars. My analysis of The Shining expands both our understanding of the film and of its cultural moment, unearthing issues we continue to grapple with as a society today.

Mainstream scholarly literature has examined the post-1989 transformations in Eastern Europe without sufficient attention to gendered perspectives. Most feminist scholars and mainstream political scientists expected that the processes of democratization and Europeanization would be harbingers of positive change, and have not fully succeeded in explaining the current lack of gender equality in the region. This dissertation attempts to fill the gap by combining the insights from ‘Western’ theoretical contributions with empirical research of the Polish case. By drawing on multiple theoretical angles (post-colonialism, nationalism and gender, feminist institutionalism, feminist political economy, Europeanization), I aim to rethink the complex position of Poland in the processes of Europeanization and soft norm diffusion. The recent ‘war on gender’, which took the form of a virulent anti-equality and anti-minorities discursive campaign, has demonstrated that, despite the political and economic changes after 1989, gender inequality and social exclusion persist, and indeed may have intensified. My research explores the current discursive products and legacies (construction of subjects and values) of transformation and Europeanization as observed in mainstream political debates. This dissertation focuses on debates in the Polish parliament, the Sejm, because it is the main site of political discourse in Poland and thus influences also broader societal debates. My main argument is that gendered discourses in the Polish parliament reproduce patterns of domination and inequality, thereby creating discursive categories and subjects that are excluded and marginalized. Dominant discourses on masculinity, femininity, and sexuality prescribe a conservative set of social relations in the family and the nation. This implies that anyone who does not fulfil these discursive standards gets symbolically stigmatized and emerges from the political process as a discursive ‘loser’. Furthermore, the dissertation argues that the ways in which Europeanization and democratization were implemented in Poland, focusing primarily on neoliberal economic reforms, have left free rein to right-wing forces and the catholic church to define values and subjects. I specifically address the influential role of the catholic church in the Polish political context and argue that the anti-gender equality and anti-diversity mobilizations are cyphers for a broader backlash led by nationalist conservative actors against Europeanization and globalization processes. My contributions lie in the theoretical and conceptual bridging of various literatures (i.e. on transformation and gender) and the application of critical discourse analysis to the study of Polish parliamentary debates. Moreover, the thesis exposes invisible and ‘gender neutral’ norms about subjects and gender roles as constructed in Polish politics, with particular focus on welfare and family models and the construction of the nation. I highlight hegemonic masculinities and the marginalization or silencing of alternative discourses. The analysis provides insights into the mechanisms of gender power that construct some groups as the norm and others as problematic or deviant.