No description available.

Yes / Imagine that you’re entering a cave on a sunny, warm summer day. There is a swift, and distinct, change in the temperature as you walk into the darkness – a cold, dampness that cuts through to the bone. The lack of internal light immediately plunges you into darkness as you journey further into the cave, and the inherent stillness and silence means any noise you make is amplified twofold. If the Underworld exists, this is likely where it would be situated. And yet, if you simply turn around to face the entrance of the cave, you are greeted by a completely different setting; you can see the bright sun, the clear blue skies. By walking back to the start, you can already feel the warm air, hear the natural noises that one associates with the outdoors. But stop right in the middle, between the entrance of the cave and its deeper chambers – here, you’re in between what can only be described as two completely different worlds. This is a liminal space – and its where I exist, as a researcher and as a queer, mixed woman.

Coffins and Conditioner is part one of a modern fantasy story follows a latine, nonbinary hairdresser named Mura Saiz whose entire clientele consists of supernatural entities like werewolves, vampires, and fae. When a fight breaks out in their salon and catches the attention of a new surveillance program meant to destroy those very same supernatural entities, Mura realizes that they must give up their own peace of mind and physical safety to protect their clients. During their journey, Mura must learn how to juggle the secrets they keep within the salon with their now-suspicious chosen family while also making time for the strange vampire that saved them during the initial fight at the salon. Will they be able to keep an entire population safe from an ill-informed government? Or will the life Mura has built for theirself crumble beneath them? Fantasy, namely urban fantasy, is often severely lacking when it comes to representation. The goal of Coffins and Conditioner is to both tell a compelling and exciting story while including the queerness that is often shunned from this genre. Queer young adults deserve to see themselves in stories as much as anyone else, and Coffins and Conditioner is another step in normalizing that for a wider audience.

This book is a guide to bottoming. There are more ways to do it than you might think. Bottoming may be read as passive and intransitive today, but for most of its nearly six hundred years as a verb, "to bottom" has been active and transitive. One goal of this guide is to activate the passive sense of bottoming by connecting it to a wider linguistic history. If the bottom so wishes, their bottoming may be as transitive as bottoming has ever been. A bottom may bottom their top, not merely for their top. The top may be objectified by its want of a bottom. Another proposition: the top, by topping, is bottoming, too. He must be. By outfitting himself with a bottom, he bottoms himself. This guide proposes a marriage of active and passive, bumming and bottoming, sexual and nonsexual bottoms. It embraces the versatility inherent in "bottom" and seeks enlightenment through the vast, ever-expanding network this word has woven through our language. It aims to bottom you, the reader, around its thesis (i.e., its bottom): Everybody bottoms. Or at least, everybody should.

This dissertation takes musical theatre seriously as a historiographic practice, and considers six musicals that take the past as their subject matter in order to interrogate how these works craft their historical narratives. While there have been studies of historical drama and performance, musicals have generally been left out of that conversation, despite (or perhaps because of) their immense popularity. This project argues that not only can musicals “do” history, they offer an excellent genre for theorizing what I call “queer historiography.” While sexuality remains one category of analysis, I use “queer” to signify opposition, not simply to heterosexuality, but to heteronormativity, and normativity more broadly. Musicals’ queer historiography, then, is a way of engaging past events that challenges normativity in form as well as content; a way of productively challenging not only what we think we know about the past, but how we come to know it. Each chapter uses a different theoretical lens to guide close readings of a pair of thematically linked musicals. The first chapter considers 1776 (1969) and Assassins (1991, 2004) as challenges to official narratives of United States history. My primary lens in this chapter is form, as I analyze how musicals’ structures influence their queer historiographic potential. Chapter 2 examines two musicals that offer histories of U.S. popular culture, Gypsy (1959) and Hairspray (2002), considering how the placement of divas at the center of each show enables a historiography that is feminist as well as queer, challenging ideas about gender and sexuality while making women central to the histories they represent. In the third chapter I look to two musicals, Falsettos (1992) and Elegies: A Song Cycle (2003), which present histories of trauma while featuring overtly gay, lesbian, and queer characters. I use these two texts to theorize how musicals might not simply present history as it “really” was, but also as it might have been, thereby offering what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick terms a “reparative reading” of history. In examining each of my six case studies, I analyze specific performances as well as written texts whenever possible. / text

My work explores subculture as a form of cultural resistance to the dominant ideology. I'm concerned with the ambiguous relationship we occupy as subjects to the material produced by popular culture, and how this is digested and understood by female viewers and cultural outsiders. The specific temporality of the queer subject is a key theme in my work.

This reception study, drawing on Robert White’s culturalist approach to religious media and Jane Mansbridge’s oppositional consciousness, explores the meaning-making process of Queer Christians in Sweden about Parvez Sharma’s A Jihad for Love. The study argues that against a background where Muslims and Queer Muslims facing multiple forms of othering in Western mainstream media, queer-affirming Muslim alternative media can be a precursor to interfaith encounter and interreligious dialogue between Queer Christians and Queer Muslims. The results show that A Jihad for Love potentially increased the imagination and political interest of Queer Christians in Sweden in Queer Muslim lives. Finally, this study contributes to the reception of queer-affirming Muslim alternative media which has long been neglected and offers interesting insights about Queer Christian conceptualization of freedom, tolerance, secularism, religion and media in Swedish society.   Keywords: A Jihad for Love, religious media, queer affirming alternative Muslim media, Queer Muslims, Queer Christians, Sweden, interfaith dialogue, secularism

The aim of this essay is to discuss some of the shared legacies of oppression between queerness, femininity, and fatness in order to theorize a form of activism that can do justice to these intersecting identities. A key component of this is to discuss the complexities of negotiating the shame and pride that go hand in hand with stigmatized identities, a project recently taken up by queer theorists that has yet to be well represented in fat studies or activist circles. This essay will engage with conversations happening in queer theory and fat studies about shame as it relates to the politics of attachment. I hope to begin a conversation about how to organize effective activist circles that can do justice to queer fat femmes' complex relationships with visibility, embodiment and community building. / text

This paper´s main purpose was to analyse textbooks used in religious studies in Sweden in upper secondary education to see how LGBTQ persons and information about norm breaking sexual identities is emphasized in these textbooks. To obtain that information a context analysis was used and five books were used during this specific analysis.The theoretical foundation of the analysis was based on queer theory and norm critical theory with an focus on norm critical pedagogy which was used to highlight, criticize and understand the previous research that has been done and give wider perspective when it comes to the text in the textbooks.What the analysis shows is that even if there is some information in the textbooks about LGBTQ people there is not enough information to execute a norm critical educational lesson and to achieve the central content of the course Religionskunskap 1 in upper secondary education in Sweden. There are huge varieties of information in the textbooks and usuallythey are under chapters such as ”marriage”, ”sexuality” and often not discussed in the context of religion and only as sexuality as a whole.

This study aims to undertake a queer reading of four Swedish picture books, with the names: Punkpapporna, Kivi och Monsterhund, När mammorna blev kära and Regnbågsbesbisen. Furthermore its purpose is to explore the concept of family, and more specifically the rainbow family. This will be explored in the relations to previous research made in the field of queer kinship, children's literature, representation and silencing. Aditionaly this will be influenced by representational and queer theory. The methodical approach is as mentioned queer reading, but in combination with thematic analysis, where a few themes have been picked out. These themes will help in analyzing the representation of the rainbow family in the chosen books. The research concluded that rainbow families can be portrayed and represented in many different ways and how they are understood is completely dependent on the story in the books but also on the reader.