This essay intends to interpret the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (CETS No. 210) using discourse analysis and theories of the sexual contract (Pateman 1988) and the male protective logic (Young 2003). The purpose is to find out which feminist discourses can be made visible in the convention, which subject positions are constructed within the framework of those discourses and how re- sponsibilities are distributed in contemporary policy documents. In summary the results show that the central subject positions within the convention consist of the protector, the victim and the perpetrator, which in turn include the majority of underlying subjects that both overlap each other and sometimes oppose each other's positions. The same subject who holds the po- sition of protector can also be the perpetrator and in this paradox are found, among others, the state and the violent man. A feminist discourse that underlies the convention's presentation is that unequal structures between binary gender categories, which is described as a fundamental problem when it comes to violence against women. Pointing out these structures risks of re- producing stereotypical notions of women and men as generalizable groups, but the convention also contributes through these representations to an international recognition of patriarchal structures and to shift the problem of men's violence against women and domestic violence from being a private matter to a problem for which the state should take responsibility.

This dissertation studies the development of a regulation of prostitution in Stockholm during the period 1812-1880. The development of the regulation system is seen in the light of an analytical framework, developed from Carole Pateman's ideas on the sexual contract, and a feministic critique and elaboration of Jürgen Habermas's ideas on the public sphere. The regulation of prostitution was a common characteristic for many metropolises in Europe during the nineteenth century, where supposedly loose and lecherous women were medically and spatially controlled to impede the spread of venereal diseases. Stockholm, and Sweden as a whole, went from a non-gendered to a gendered control of venereal disease, which eventually developed into a spatial control of public women. This study argues that the practices of a regulation system was at first part of an attempt to import what was seen as part of modernisation. Rather than to prohibit extra-marital sexual relations, these were to be controlled and supervised. Eventually the system was adapted to local circumstances in Stockholm, and a control of women's sexuality in public became part of a metropolitan modernity. In the process of the professionalisation of groups such as the police and the physicians, public women were over time perceived as a group of professional prostitutes. The possibility to live off prostitution as a transitory stage in women's lives disappeared, and prostitution became a medically and spatially controlled trade.