After recognizing a lack of children’s voices in the debate about the children’s book Kivi och monsterhund and the gender-neutral pronoun hen that occurred in the beginning of the year of 2012, I decided to interview pre-school children about the same book. My purpose with the study was, using semi-structured group interviews, to examine how 6-year olds talked about the main character Kivi. With the help of Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, I have studied how the children constructed Kivi’s gender in their speech. I have looked at how they recall the appearance of Kivi to establish their gender, and detected insecurity when the normative gender attribute was questioned. I have also studied which pronouns the children used, and in which contexts they used them. I found that they mixed pronouns during the interviews, which I noted as a possible sign of gender insecurity or a consequence of grammatical immaturity. Lastly I looked at how the children spoke about Kivi in relation to activity and characteristics. My conclusion is that Swedish language as it is now makes it hard to speak about more than two genders, and therefore the word hen could be useful. The incapacity to speak about Kivi as neither a boy nor a girl, or maybe both, generates a need among the children to “decide” their “proper” gender. With hen comes the opportunity to speak beyond these language barriers, and therefore also make it a possible existence.

What impact does the Swedish society have on the practice of Islam? That is the main topic of this thesis. As a result of migration, the distinction between a specific region and a culture or religion has been mixed. Islam is not just part of the Middle East but is more and more institutionalized in the Western, and the Swedish society. Sweden, which is one on the most secular countries in the world, has developed into a country where the view on religion have been privatized. Religion can be practiced, but not in public. This also has an impact on the individual’s practice of Islam. To grow up in a society where the Islam is dominated in the public space and migrating to a society where there is little public support for practicing your own religion does in many ways affect the expression of Islam. The thesis is based on interviews with ten individuals practicing Islam and living in Sweden,but who have been growing up in different societies. Through the interviews there has emerged a tendency that the visible/outer practice of Islam decreases and the non-visible/inner practice are becoming more apparent. In this thesis this is de-islamisation. For example, praying five times a day is an aspect of Islam that among some of the respondents is less focused on. There is not less of Islam, but the practice of Islam has changed in a way where most of the focus is on the non-visible part of Islam.

This thesis analyzes how gender and sexual identities are discursively constructed through Churchill&rsquo / s Cloud Nine, Kureishi&rsquo / s My Beautiful Laundrette and Stoppard&rsquo / s The Invention of Love / it traces how the dominant discourse reduces the riddle of human sexuality to the binary frame / it also discusses that the bi-polar organization of sexuality does not suppress, but reproduces sexual dissidence. A male-female pair is envisaged by the prevailing discourse / Butler&rsquo / s ideas of performativity and drag performance will be employed to indicate that gender and sexuality are not inborn, but culturally and historically determined, and to explore how deviant sexualities undermine the double columns of the masculine and the feminine, the homosexual and the heterosexual. An investigation into the homosexual/heterosexual split will demonstrate how power shifts between the points of the binary frame rather than being monopolized by the dominant discourse. The regulating discourse polarizes homosexuality and heterosexuality / it deploys the binary frame to overvalue the heterosexual and to disparage the homosexual / the established order seeks to fortify its authority through the binary thought. Yet, the binary logic is internally unstable / binary oppositions constantly threaten to collapse and fuse into one another / therefore, due to the inherent indeterminacy of the binary logic, homosexuality is not annihilated, but rejuvenated by heterosexuality / thus, power flows among the dominant and counter discourses. Queer theory, drawing on post-structuralism, subverts the binary frame, and glorifies the proliferation of sexual identities and practices beyond the dualistic understanding.

This dissertation examines the gendered discourses in the novels of the writers of different sexes/genders, Robert Heinlein&rsquo / s Stranger in a Strange Land, Ursula Le Guin&rsquo / s The Left Hand of Darkness, Joanna Russ&rsquo / The Female Man and Samuel Delany`s Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia. This study investigates how writers linguistically construct their characters as gendered/sexed beings as an effect of certain identity politics, ideologies and power structures. In order to do so, critical discourse analysis is applied to the passages chosen from different parts of the novels under consideration. Moreover, Butler&rsquo / s performativity theory of gender and Foucault&rsquo / s theory of discourse/power/knowledge and his conceptualization of subjectivity are employed in the discursive analyses of the novels. The argument of the study is that there is a close relationship between discourse, ideology and the constitution/representation of gender/sex as contingent on a particular socio-cultural and historical context. This study is based on Butler`s assertion that gender is a doing, a performance, and it is a cultural and ideological construct. Thus, the study shows that writers&rsquo / linguistic choices for the constructions and descriptions of their characters are not ideologically or politically innocent but imbued with socio-cultural and ideological meanings.

This thesis aims to explore the categories of sexuality and gender through an analysis of Jeanette Winterson&rsquo / s well-known novels, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Written on the body, against the background of Butler&rsquo / s concept of performativity and Cixous&rsquo / s &eacute / criture feminine. By underlining the constructedness of these categories and questioning the boundaries of patriarchal concepts and transgressing them, Winterson deconstructs the binary oppositions created by phallocentric discourse and problematizes the verdict that sexuality is inborn. Instead of this ingrained notion, she asserts that gender and sexual identities are culturally and discursively constructed by the dominant discourse. Although the dominant discourse favors heterosexuality over homosexuality and degrades sexuality into a binary frame of oppositions such as masculinity/ feminity and male/female, Winterson, in her novels, seeks an alternative to escape this ideological binarism and achieves to subvert the binary oppositions by highlighting the fluidity of sexuality and gender, and by creating amorphous characters like the ungendered narrator in Written on the body or by bestowing on them bisexuality or homosexuality as in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Hence, the main argument of this thesis will be to display Winterson&rsquo / s deconstruction and dissolution of the patriarchal categories in her novels and to emphasize her escape from the binary charade, in a fictional universe, with references to Butlerian performativity and Cixousian &eacute / criture feminine.

This performance ethnography analyzes the means by which performers at Tampa, Florida‘s Bay Area Renaissance Festival constitute community and gender through performance. Renaissance Festivals are themed weekend events that ostensibly seek to allow visitors to experience life in an English Renaissance village. Beginning with the theoretical assumption that performance is constitutive of culture, community, and identity, and undergirded by David Boje‘s festivalism, Richard Schechner‘s restored behavior, Victor Turner‘s liminoid communitas and Judith Butler‘s performative agency, The Festival is explored as a celebratory community that engages in social change through personal transformation. Employing reflexive ethnography and narrative as inquiry, Chapter Two catalogues and analyzes a broad range of festival performances, from stage acts and handcraft production, to participatory improvisation, dance, and song. Playful and liminoid, these performances invite participants to make performance commitments and mutually to produce community through participative performance, celebratory objects, and the surrender of personal space. Chapter Three argues that performances of alternative masculinities at festival play out against the backdrop of R.W. Connell‘s heteronormative masculinities. These alternative performances break down social barriers, promote self-definition, and provide agency in the embodiment gendered experiences. Likewise, Chapter Four features Festival‘s feminine performances that reveal the community to be a ―wench‘s world‖ privileging Judith Butler‘s notion of performative agency in order to enable communities of difference. The Wench, the Queen, and the Pirate She- ing all embody feminine power and serve as archetypes of feminine narratives that privilege self-definition. This study demonstrates Festival to be a women-centered community that engages in a mythopoeia of feminist history. Acknowledging Festival as a multi-vocal community of mythopoets, this ethnography significantly extends the work of previous research on Renaissance Festivals. Rather than focusing on Festival performances as attempts at historical ―authenticity,‖ this study reveals Festival‘s mythological stance and the means by which performers embody mythology and archetype to their own purposes. Moving away from an audience centered discussion of performance, this study demonstrates how individual performers, through personal transformation, become agents of change through performance.

This dissertation is a case study of the public performances of Gregory Bateson at The Esalen Institute. The case study is a reconsideration of the work of Gregory Bateson from the perspective of performance studies. The author brings together performativity, cybernetics, and the sacred to argue that Gregory Bateson, in his public performances, was striving for grace in encounters with others. The author has conducted archival research into Bateson’s presentations and has spoken with several close to Bateson to get a sense of how his process of public presentation paralleled his ideas—a process of continually working through ideas in conversation with others. In his dissertation the author tries to present the work in a form fitting with Bateson's own process.

This thesis argues that the inscription of bodies is necessary in order to constitute the cosmos, gender and sex. A study of the Vedic cosmogonic mythologies of the deities Purusha and Prajapati illustrates the ways in which sacrifice, as a form of inscription, constitutes the cosmos by ordering and fashioning the boundaries of the bodies of the deities through differentiation and unification. An analysis of samskaras, or consecratory rites of The Law Code of Manu, show that they operate as regulatory norms in order to constitute sex and gender. But the instability and unnaturalness of the categories of gender and sex are exposed when an analysis of the samskara rituals of the bride and student show that performative acts and speech involved in their respective rites are nearly identical. This discussion of bodies, gender and sex is founded on Judith Butler's work to show how bodies, sex, and gender are also social and cultural constructs. In particular, Butler's work with performativity reveals the ways in which performative action and speech acts constitute people through their stylized and strained repetition. It is this repetition that proves to be deceiving as it creates the illusion that sex and gender are inherent to bodies. We discover that the problems maintaining the appearance of these categories is experienced in both the cosmogonic myths and with the wife and student.

This project explores how musical improvisational processes come into being through interacting discursive power relationships that are embodied and enacted through performance. By utilizing the concepts of framing and performativity I am able to show how discursive power constitutes the performance of improvisational music. To exemplify this theory, the project presents a case study examining a Grateful Dead cover band named Uncle John's Band that performs at Skipper's Smokehouse in Tampa, FL. Using an ethnographic methodology, the project articulates the dominant discursive power relationships that constitute Uncle John's Band's improvisational performances. The dominant discursive power relationships revolve around the lived philosophies and performance style of the Grateful Dead as embodied and communicated through performance by the members of Uncle John's Band. Dominant discursive power relationships also form among audience members as well as the staff at Skipper's Smokehouse. All of these power relationships constitute the performance of improvisational music. In a reflexive turn, the project also offers a re-articulation of ethnography through the tenets of improvisation. Finally, the project presents conclusions concerning the nature of researching improvisational music performance and some future directions for this study.

This thesis offers new models for participatory and performative interventions in sites of heritage tourism through a theorized practical engagement. Drawing on both Tourism Studies and Performance Studies, the primary aim of these interventions is to reveal and provoke ways of seeing and using these sites as places of multiple meanings rather than as ones constricted and bounded by normative heritage narratives in their production and management. The experimental phase of the project discussed in the thesis includes three contrasting case studies: GeoQuest, Sardine Street, and Water Walk. These are each analysed and evaluated through my development of a ‘mythogeographic’ framework that includes the performative techniques of layering, rhizomatic interweaving, the making of 'anywheres' and the self-mythologising of the activist. The thesis charts a trajectory through praxis, from developing models for ambulatory, signage-based and ‘mis-guided’ interventions to be undertaken by performance ‘specialists’, towards a dispersal of their tactics for use by heritage tourists in general. It thus describes a related change in the balance of the research methodology from ethnographic participant observation towards practice-as-research (PaR), the latter of which both generated and enacted knowledge and understanding. This PaR took the form of various visits and forays to and across heritage sites and landscape, and also the production of a ‘toolkit’ of handbook, pocketbook, website and online short films for the dispersal of tactics and a strategy that is eventually called ‘counter-tourism’. The thesis thus includes the publications A Sardine Street box of tricks, Counter-tourism: the handbook, Counter-tourism: a pocketbook and the DVD, Tactics for counter-tourism, as well as their fully theorized critical contextualisation. These represent a PaR enquiry that attempts to creatively express my research findings from productions made in the field through a popular form of writing and presentation that is capable of inspiring general, ‘non-specialist’ tourists to make their own performance interventions in heritage sites.