This study involves an analysis of arguments on parental allowance debates and sex legislation debates. The debates that will be analyzed are the following; allowance, equality bonus, stricter punishment for the purchase of sexual services and men's violence against women, violence and oppression, and violence in same-sex relationships. This empirical research is a qualitative study in its entirety, as for the method is an argumentation analysis. The arguments which the debates contain will be analyzed from a gender perspective. The theoretical question is: What is considered equality as a gender perspective? The empirical question is: How did parliament debates the issue of parental and prostitution laws issue from a gender perspective? The debates about genus and gender equality perspective have been a crucial issue in the Swedish Parliament. That women and men are equal or unequal has been heavily emphasized in the debates. My study aims at an in depth investigation in these debates based on an analysis of arguments. Moreover, I have evaluated what gender combined with democracy and democratic self-determination entails. I have structured my analysis up by various arguments and analyzed these arguments on the basis of the perspectives above. My conclusion is that the first two debates were treated particularly in the genus and the gender equality perspective and there was a possibility to connect the theories in relevant argumentations/discussions. However, complex problems emerged in the last two debates, stricter penalty regarding the purchase of sexual services, violence against women, violence and oppression, and violence in same-sex relationships where gender and equality issues have been avoided to be treated. Generally occurring from the bourgeois side than from the opposition.

This thesis explores the roles of gender, sexuality, and the body in the works of six Mozambican authors: poets José Craveirinha (1922-2003) and Noémia de Sousa (1926-2002), and prose fiction writers Lília Momplé (1935-), Paulina Chiziane (1955-), Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa (1955-), and Suleiman Cassamo (1962-). Building primarily on the critical precedents set by Hilary Owen, Phillip Rothwell, and Ana Margarida Martins, the study aims to make an original contribution to the field of Mozambican cultural studies by proposing that the gendered body has a unique capacity for reappropriation as a means of resistance to oppressive power mechanisms, thanks to its consistently central position in Portuguese imperial and Mozambican postindependence discourses of nationhood. In addition, the thesis seeks to illustrate the value of intergenerational, inter-gendered, and inter-aesthetic author comparison, and an eclectic ‘toolbox’ approach to critical theory, for the production of innovative new perspectives on Mozambican literary output. Following the contextual scene-setting laid out in the Introduction, Chapter 1 explores constructs of masculinity in a selection of poems from José Craveirinha’s first published collection, Xigubo (1964), and compares them with Paulina Chiziane’s third novel O Sétimo Juramento (2000), using Judith Butler’s theories of compulsory heterosexuality and gender subversion (1990 and 1993). While Craveirinha’s work is posited as a counternarrative to Portuguese imperial emasculation of the black male subject that ultimately reproduces colonial gender structures, Chiziane’s novel is shown to engage with strategies of parody and realism in order to challenge such reproductions. Chapter 2 makes use of the concept of ‘disidentification,’ developed in the late twentieth century by U.S. feminists and queer theorists of colour, to compare selected poems from Noémia de Sousa’s Sangue Negro (1948-51) with prose fiction by Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa (1987 and 1990). Despite the authors’ aesthetic dissimilarities, their work is shown to share a successful commitment to the rejection of imposed femininities. Whereas de Sousa articulates this refusal via a ludic use of language, Khosa roots his narratives of disidentification in grotesque gendered corporealities. Chapter 3 compares novellas and short stories by Lília Momplé (1988, 1995, and 1997) and Suleiman Cassamo (1989 and 2000), examining the authors’ uses of the (dis)embodied states of suicidality, hunger, and ghostliness. Making use of Achille Mbembe’s (2001 and 2003) postcolonial reworkings of Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics (1976), this final chapter seeks to understand the ways in which the authors exploit imperial and postindependence instrumentalisations of the Mozambican body as a means of reasserting subjectivity and selfhood in the face of massification. Throughout the study, emphasis is placed on the often concealed and latent nature of gendered resistance, which remains a persistent feature of Mozambican literary output despite the relative intransigence of sexual politics in the country. By centring the body in their aesthetically diverse works, writers from Mozambique demonstrate the value of gendered resistance not only as an end in itself, but also as a means of accessing wider subversive discourses and gestures.

Previous discussions of the category of homosexual panic have tended to dismiss it as anachronistic or homophobic. In contrast to these approaches, this thesis takes the term more seriously, arguing for its structural necessity to particular instances of literature, psychiatry and law in the United States. This interdisciplinary endeavor tracks the histories of the term, examining the impact of homosexual panic on contemporary understandings of sexuality, time and personhood. Adopting a Foucauldian framework, the chapters avoid offering a singular definition of homosexual panic in order to articulate the forces that historically make sense of the category. Divided into three sections, each organized around one of the areas in which homosexual panic occurs (literature, psychiatry and law), the thesis returns to the primary texts on homosexual panic, reading them against their source texts and in the context of current approaches to homosexual panic within the field of sexuality studies. In the literature section, I focus on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's appropriation of the term in Between Men and Epistemology of the Closet, reading this against her sources (both literary and critical) including Henry James' 'The Beast in the Jungle,' Gayle Rubin's 'The Traffic In Women,' James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner and contemporary uses of Sedgwick's concept in P.J. Smith's Lesbian Panic. The chapters explore the imploded time of homosexual panic to expand upon theorizations of temporality by queer scholars, including Lee Edelman, Judith Halberstam and Elizabeth Freeman. Secondly, the psychiatry section reads the origin of homosexual panic in Edward Kempf's 1920's text Psychopathology in context with its dismissal in 1980's psychiatric articles. Here, the mythologization of Kempf is read as establishing the American Psychiatric Association as coherent. Developing a theory of myth from psychoanalytic theorist, Shoshana Felman, the section creates alternate possible histories of homosexual panic through close readings of parallel concepts like Freud's derealization and Roger Caillois' dark space. Thirdly, the legal section offers close readings of Cynthia Lee's 'The Homosexual Panic Defense' and two court cases, the murder of Matthew Shepard and the trail of John Stephan Parisie, to articulate the components of the Homosexual Panic Defense (HPD). The chapters suggest that arguments against the HPD work by upholding panic-structures of revelation, outing and latency, while failing to address how homosexual panic is prefigured in certain versions of the U.S. Law. These readings show how homosexual panic has become an example of, and strategy for, people living moments 'beside' their literary, psychiatric and legal selves. I call these moments 'paratime', which, I argue, enables new queer theorizations of concepts constituting these fields. By showing how homosexual panic structures queer time in literature, mythology in psychiatry and truth in law, the thesis demonstrates the influence of homosexual panic on the terms placed at the center of each field. The conclusion argues that homosexual panic troubles the centrality of these concepts and, invoking Judith Butler, proposes alternate modes of theorization that enable us to recognize how particular lives continue to be made unlivable.

This thesis deals with the topic of body image and bodily dissatisfaction with non-clinical population with a focus on gender aspects. It has two main parts - theoretical and empirical. The theoretical part focuses on the term body image as a psychological concept that is a component of self-concept. For that reason, there is a definition of the overall self-concept and the difference between the real self and the ideal self. This part of the thesis stresses out the theoretical basis of the term. An important part is a chapter describing factors influencing a development of the bodily self-concept that influences the development and extent of bodily dissatisfaction. I talk about the current western society and its high standards on a physical appearance for both men and women. The thesis then deals with possible consequences of this dissatisfaction on human behavior, again with respect to the gender differences. The thesis also mentions human sexuality that is related to one's relationship with their own body. In the end of the theoretical part there are some possibilities for measuring body image and bodily dissatisfaction outlined. The empirical part consists of a quantitative study called " Gender aspects of Body image and body dissatisfaction in nonclinical population", just like the whole...