The purpose of this essay is to highlight the conceptions that exist in school towards homosexuality. My overall essay questions are: What rules does the school have to apply concerning homosexuality? What approach do the professors have towards young lesbian women and kind of support is offered to the group? In order to answer these questions I interviewed a professor and a young lesbian female. One of the surveys that has been made, as a normative order, about heterosexuality in the last decade is known as queer theory. One of the theories that in surveys investigates homosexuality as a normative order is known as “queer theory” and it is the one I decided to use in this essay. Inspired by feminist research, gay and lesbian studies and the poststructuralist theory, the queertheory focuses on some peoples way of organizing sexuality is privileged, sanctioned and is perceived as normal, while others are seen as deviant, abnormal and therefore unwelcome. The method chosen for this essay is qualitative with focus on interviews and life stories. The result indicates that there is no specific plan based on the schools fundamental values concerning how homosexuality should be included in teaching.

This essay is about human beings. These human beings in particular are priests and LGBTQ-persons who work in the Swedish Church in Växjö diocese. During research I have conducted qualitative interviews with people who are LGBTQ-persons and work as priests in Växjö diocese. These interviews have been analyzed through queer theory and Mary Douglas theory about anomalia. My aim with this essay is to find out what it means to be a LGBTQ- person and work as a priest in this diocese. I wanted to learn more about where the difficulties lie. How the priests are treated by others and how they see themselves. My conclusion is that both Växjö diocese and the priests in my essay partly look upon themselves through a heterosexual matrix and therefore, in some way, regard LGBTQ-persons as anomalia. Therefore, there is a risk that LGBTQ-persons in Växjö diocese end up in an exclusion.

Thèse:Linköping : Univ., 2002.

“Malice in Wonderland: The Perverse Pleasure of the Revolting Child,” explores the place of “revolting child,” or the child-as-monster, in horror cinema using textual analysis, discourse analysis, and historical reception study. These figures, as seen in films such as The Bad Seed, Village of the Damned, and The Exorcist, “revolt” in two ways: they create feelings of unease due to their categorical perversion, and they also rebel against the family, the community, and the very notion of futurity. This work argues that the pleasure of these films vacillates between Othering the child to legitimate fantasies of child abuse and engaging an imagined rebellion against a heteronormative social order. As gays and lesbians have been culturally deemed “arrested” in their development, the revolting child functions as a potent metaphor for queerness, and the films provide a mise-en-scène of desire for queer spectators, as in the “masked child” who performs childhood innocence. This dissertation begins with concrete examples of queer reception, such as fan discourse, camp reiterations, and GLBT media production, and uses these responses to reinvestigate the films for sites of queer engagement. Interestingly, though child monsters appear centrally in several of the highest-grossing films in the horror genre, no critic has offered a comprehensive explanation as to what draws audiences this particular type of monstrosity. Further, this dissertation follows contemporary strains in queer theory that deconstruct notions of “development” and “maturity” as agents of heteronormative power, as seen in the work of Michael Moon, Lee Edelman, Ellis Hanson, Jose Esteban Muñez, and Kathryn Bond Stockton. / text

My dissertation departs from the idea that horizontal kinship, in particular the sibling bond, has largely been overlooked by criticism of 19th century Argentine literature. Works on the foundational mid-century narratives concentrate on allegorical heterosexual unions, while those of the late century primarily deal with the failed marriages of naturalist fiction. I argue that in viewing the fictional family as a vertical, genealogical structure, these texts often fail to consider what Pierre Bourdieu calls "practical kinship". Also, in primarily focusing on the novel, they overlook the minor genres to which women were traditionally limited, such as pedagogical texts, as well as private or semi-private writing like the diary and the memoir, in which sibling relations are more prominent. This project, in contrast, takes a politically engaged, socially influential family of writers, rather than a fictional representation, as the framework for analyzing the social, cultural, and political shifts of the turn of the century in Argentina (1890-1910). Focusing on the work of two proto-feminist sisters, Delfina and Julia Bunge, and a closeted homosexual brother, Carlos Octavio Bunge, I study the dynamic relationship between these siblings, reading a wide range of their public and private texts. In dialogue with naturalist novelists and positivist essay writers, la familia Bunge challenges the conventional view that the upper class saw the traditional criollo family unit as the last bastion of stability in the face of sexual and class "inversion" by themselves questioning normative gender roles, complicating compulsory heterosexuality, and performing the gaps in the hegemonic division of public and private space. I analyze siblinghood as a dynamic actor in shaping the literature, culture, and politics of the turn of the century, underscoring the role of relational subjectivities in forming notions of gender, sexuality, citizenship, and mutual intelligibility. / text

Why are men seeking other men online? And how does the Internet influence these men and their sexuality? These are the two underlying questions driving this thesis. To answer these general questions, I conducted a qualitative study, which used in-depth individual interviews with 15 men who have sex with other men who self-identified as gay, queer, or homosexual. Through employing a theoretical framework that is inspired in queer theory, I uncovered three main topics in these men’s lives that are intimately shaped by their use of the Internet: friendship, racial and bodily desire, and HIV. First, I show the creative ways gay men are using the Internet, and specifically a sexualized space, in order to build relations with other gay men, despite the larger obstacles a heteronormative society puts in these men’s way to forge these friendships. In using their gay identity to try to establish relationalities with other gay identified men, the informants in this study challenge the impersonable traits associated with modernity, while seeking to build new alliances that could potentially radically disrupt heteronormative society. Secondly, I highlight how the social exclusionary practices toward people of color and non-normal bodies on Adam4Adam.com reifies whiteness and masculinity, which in turn, reifies heteronormativity. Here, I unmask how the structure of Adam4Adam.com, especially its filtering system, normalizes these discriminatory practices in users’ lives. Thirdly, I examine the role and meaning of HIV and sexual health in the lives of my informants. I incorporate the term “doing sexual responsibility” to show how my gay informants manage their anxiety-ridden lives when navigating their sexuality and sexual health. I also show how the gay men in this study engage in online foreplay as a pleasurable way to manage this anxiety and how trust and hegemonic masculinity are unintended consequences of this danger discourse on sexuality. As these men’s narratives and this thesis illustrate, society is still structured through heteronormative standards, but the Internet provides a new space for gay men to navigate their marginalized status in society. / text

"Uncanny Affects" argues, broadly, that the gothic novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries models a critical ethics of reading. By examining recurrent scenes of reading and interpretation in key gothic novels such as Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1797), Walter Scott's The Antiquary (1816), and Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868), I surmise that this critical ethics posits affect, or the experience of generalized emotion, as central to the act of interpretation. I contend that this gothic critical ethics influences the concurrent development of the discipline of literary criticism. By reading these key gothic novels and then tracking their broader influence on Victorian critics such as John Ruskin and Oscar Wilde, I make a case for the significance of a gothic epistemology to the development of literary criticism in British and American universities from the nineteenth century onward. A focus on the gothic novel's critically inclined characters, including antiquarians and detectives, enables me to read gothic novels and other gothically-inflected writing for what they can tell us about the practice of interpretation, particularly as that practice becomes institutionalized and professionalized. Thus I track the gothic mode's tendency toward affective reading in relation to ideas of professionalization, which values critical detachment or disinterestedness in interpretation. As a result, interpretation in the gothic mode can seem too emotional or "creative" for a typically professional practice. Reading the gothic as such links it to modern discussions about interpretive practices such as close reading, paranoid and reparative reading, and surface reading. Perhaps more importantly, reading the gothic alongside these new discussions on critical ethics allows us to think through the place of affect and pleasure in an ethical critical practice. Ultimately, examining how gothic texts formulate a gothic mode or philosophy of reading demonstrates the real ubiquity this mode has achieved in the critical setting, a ubiquity that continues to shape and influence our conceptions of scholarly and critical reading even today. / text

No description available.

This project argues that there is a 'lacuna' in the representation of the demographic understood as 'young, white, urban, gay men' in contemporary South Africa. Whilst mediated popular representations of this demographic exist, these representations perpetuate a transnationalised, commercialised sense of identity – which in turn masks authentically local experiences. There are no literary representations of this demographic which speak to local experiences of support structures, community, identity, and ethics in a post-apartheid context. By deconstructing the label of 'gay' this project maps the problems of interpreting this demographic under a marker of 'gayness'. Using Alex Sanchez's American Rainbow Boys, Rainbow High, and Rainbow Road it traces the history and meaning of 'gay'. It relates this meaning to a South African context by using André Carl van der Merwe's Moffie, Malan and Johaardien's Yes, I am! and mediated representations of the popular Mr Gay South Africa competition. These cultural sources point toward the need for a new framework of understanding in South Africa – one which shifts away from an overreliance on Western discourses. This framework is provided in relation to five local narratives gathered through ethnographic research, where the experiences of these five men are interpreted under a paradigm of 'pomosexuality' rather than 'gayness'. The project argues that pomosexuality, as a perspective, appreciates liminality but does not rely on it for identity. Rather, it focuses on the unrepresented shift from a Western ethic of the politicisation of identity to a local ethic of the politicisation of values. It ultimately argues that the lacuna of representation can be filled by adopting this pomosexual framework and breaking free of assumptions of homogeneity and assimilation. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2011.

Utilizing a model based on Queer theory and comprising four relational paradigms, this thesis examines specific dramas of Mae West and Terrence McNally in an effort to understand the multiple relationships between the text, the society and the culture in the production of a gay male identity and its representation on the American stage in the 1920s and the 1990s. Each relational paradigm is the product of a different twentieth century scholar and can be viewed as an individual lens through which one aspect of a drama or culture can be magnified, illuminated or distorted. These paradigms are: culture and power; science and sex; gender and performance; plus structurization and identity. The most significant paradigm, structurization, provides the culminating focal point for the contributions of the other relational paradigms. Through this examination, Mae Wests dramas in the 1920s produced a prescriptive attitude toward the gay male in society, a thing to be cured. The dramas of Terrence McNally produced a subscriptive attitude toward the gay male, an equal human being who should not be marginalized. Ultimately, Broadway Theater can be seen as a site of cultural production that shapes the views of its audience as much as it is shaped by the larger society in which it exists.