This thesis analyzes the “home area” learning center in open-ended preschool classrooms to address the various forms of gendered learning and pedagogy elicited by its presence in geographies of early learning. I argue that the home and block areas spatially and symbolically mimic the traditional division of public and private spheres of sociality characteristic of the patriarchal social order. I suggest that the gendered enactments of space and place in open-ended classrooms function to socialize children into heteronormative forms of sex-role consciousness through what I identify as a spatial pedagogy of domestication. I suggest that this pedagogy is enforced by ideologically haunted landscapes like the domestic landscape of the home area. By outlining critical, feminist, and queer interventions in early learning I suggest that taking a spatial approach provides a more capacious explanatory frame for analyzing how, in a neo-Marxist sense, the ideo-culturally bound relations of production are reproduced through the socializing apparatus of the preschool.

This thesis analyzes the “home area” learning center in open-ended preschool classrooms to address the various forms of gendered learning and pedagogy elicited by its presence in geographies of early learning. I argue that the home and block areas spatially and symbolically mimic the traditional division of public and private spheres of sociality characteristic of the patriarchal social order. I suggest that the gendered enactments of space and place in open-ended classrooms function to socialize children into heteronormative forms of sex-role consciousness through what I identify as a spatial pedagogy of domestication. I suggest that this pedagogy is enforced by ideologically haunted landscapes like the domestic landscape of the home area. By outlining critical, feminist, and queer interventions in early learning I suggest that taking a spatial approach provides a more capacious explanatory frame for analyzing how, in a neo-Marxist sense, the ideo-culturally bound relations of production are reproduced through the socializing apparatus of the preschool.

Being is Becoming: selves are constantly changing, always in process, and never able to arrive at a coherent identity. Contemporary discussions of sexual and gendered identity have replaced the view that heterosexuality is an innate or natural category with views that sexuality is fluid and multiple. Consequently, desire is a creative force in the engendering of sexual subjectivities and new social communities, rather than a negative force that limits gendered development to a heteronormative model. With this in mind, this thesis has three interrelated, yet distinct aims. The first is to explore the concept of sexual subjectivity, asking questions such as do human beings have a knowable sexual identity? And how have Freudian psychoanalysis and Foucauldian poststructuralism contributed to our contemporary understandings of sexuality? My second aim is to clarify Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy of becoming, using the metaphor of the rhizome to link feminist philosophy, queer theory, and subsequent deconstructions of sexual identity. My third project is to identify what is meant by becoming queer, including how it challenges the authority of heteronormative institutions. In order to demonstrate the potentialities of becoming queer, I conduct a case study of Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millans performance project Lesbian National Parks and Services. Through their performance art practice, Dempsey and Millan challenge dominant narratives of heterosexuality and fixed gender identity, offering a starting point for discussions of the reciprocity between artistic practice, social movements, and academic discourse. In addition, they demonstrate how queer becomings participate in an ethics of accountability, that is, as materially-situated, localized subjectivities they are able to alter and transform their environments.

This project examines “positive change” with regard to queer/LGBTTITQetc. education-activism in Vancouver, British Columbia directed at building what has been described as “queer-friendly schools” through the development and implementation of policy, as well as activist work connected to those efforts. I employ elements of autoethnography and participatory research by documenting and analyzing my education-activist work in this context and that of others with whom I have done this work. I situate this project within the broader context of the education system and queer/LGBTTITQetc. education-activist efforts in British Columbia. In the process, I problematize what is meant by or capable of activism and “positive change.” As demonstrated in the literature review, various understandings of sexuality, gender, activism, educational leadership, and “positive change” are available to inform queer/LGBTTITQetc. education-activism. This thesis examines how these understandings sit in tension with the practicalities, limitations, and contradictions of activist engagement at the school district level of a complex, politicized public school system. My engagement with the literature, documentation of the practical work, and exploration of a number of guiding questions with the project’s participants comprise the bulk of this project.

This study aims to make out, which notions and ideas about gender and sexuality that comes into expression in the description of the deviant youth. This study is a narrative analysis, based on a queer theoretical approach. The queer theory directs attention to the normative frameworks on gender and sexuality. Queer theory also illustrates the relationship between the normative and what is considered abnormal/deviant. The study's empirical basis is 8 legal texts, legal documents formed in a Swedish context, which include the welfare state´s judiciary and social services. The legal documents are concerning the social services care of deviant youth, based on the law that gives them  right to force care and treatment on anti-social youth. The study aims to examine the legal documents from a narrative analysis; in the way the story of the young is portrayed and what type of norms about gender and sexuality that emerges from that story. The study’s result, although based on a content of 8 legal texts, is a finding of a one-sided story about the antisocial youth, depending on the youth´s gender. These findings are portrayed in what the study entitles: The damaged girl and The dangerous boy. These categories are used to illustrate in what way the social welfare system and judiciary constructs the way boys and girls may differ from the norm standards about gender and sexuality. The standard-setting institutions tend to retain the description of the young, despite the youngster's counter-stories, in which the young states their awareness of their normative violations. In conclusion the social welfare system and the judiciary, has the authority to construct the story about the deviant youth; a story that is constructed to legitimize the social institutions intervention in the care of antisocial youth.

This study has the purpose to reveal whether gender stereotypes are manifested or challenged in the children comic Bamse - världens starkaste björn based on six different stories widespread over 40 years. The results will be studied in the light of the contemporary gender development in society and emanate from theories about power, discourse, representation, queer and gender. An eclectic analysis based on semiotics and critical discourse analysis will be the method to reveal the underlying gender perspective in Bamse. The conclusion of the study shows an ambiguous perspective in the comic where both men and women occasionally are represented in a manifested as well as a challenged stereotypical role. In some of the stories the gender is erased and all characters are represented based on their individual attributes instead, meanwhile in some stories men are represented as active heroes while women are portrayed as passive nurturer. The representations are getting better over time and the latest stories from 2005 and 2013 tend to show a development in the gender issue.

The Periscope and the Labyrinth is an investigation into cultural identity, consciousness and landscape rooted in the body’s experience of the city. The modern phenomenon of flânerie is used as a means of examining vari- ous sites of particular interest to queer mythology within New York and Rome via the device of personal ‘derives’ or drifts inspired by a legacy of city writing, whereby the particular relationship between identity, place and space becomes clear. The flâneur has been essential to previous writings on the topic of ‘queer space’ in that he is one who ‘relies on the ambiguities of the modern city, and the uncertainties that linger in the fleeting experi- ence of a backward glance.’ It is these very ambiguities that associate the flâneur as the quintessential ‘cruiser.’ Yet the potential of the flâneur lies in his ‘alchemical’ abilities. A contemporary interpretation of alchemy is used through out the thesis as both a psychological method for understand- ing the ‘union of opposites’, as well as a reading of the parallels between individual and collective identity as they relate to particular sites. These archetypal opposites are typified by the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus; the duality of their characteristics exemplified by the metaphor of the title in which the conscience of the ‘Apollonian eye’ of the flâneur within the labyrinth of the Dionysian underworld’ describing the alchemical teachings which underpin this work.

What makes identity readable? To answer this question, I examine the constructions of queer, non-German women in three contemporary transnational German films, Aimée und Jaguar, Fremde Haut and Auf der anderen Seite. To become readable, and thus to survive within the socio-political realm of German culture, these protagonists must construct and perform interconnected dimensions of identity— sex, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, language, clothing, and name—that can be located along a hegemonic-defined continuum. But when the characters cannot be read within this framework, they trouble dominant readings and understandings of their positions in this system and disrupt normative conceptions of identity. These threats to the system, however, do not lead to a renegotiation of the protagonists’ identities. Rather, hegemonic German society reacts to the unreadability of these queer figures by violently rejecting them through deportation and/or death.

This essay examine the meaning produced around bodies and body fat in the queer community, but also in the surrounding straight community. The author has interviewed fat activists, and are using queertehory, to examine and analyze the relationship between body fat and the understanding and construction of sexuality and gender. The author concludes that even if norms around body shape and body fat are overlapping between the two contexts to some degree, they also differ. In the straight community, people with larger body shapes and sizes are punished, and encouraged to stay, or become, slim. However, in the queer community, „fat‟ or bigger body sizes are not frowned upon in the same degree. Even if the slim bodily ideal still is present in the queer community in some degree this bodily ideal seems to be changing and be replaced by more diverse ideals. The author describes how bodily ideals and ideals surrounding body fat factors into the construction of categories such as gender and sexuality, and concludes on how body fat is a factor in the construction of heteronormativity.

No description available.