This thesis intends to examine how taste, identity and community works in a Swedish Facebook group exclusive to women and people who define themselves as non-binary. The study is based on a material that stretches from 2019–01–01 to 2019–06–30. With a political framework, this group has based its values on intersectional feminism and postcolonial theory, which gives the posts made in the group a certain setting to relate to. By using Jürgen Habermas’ classic book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere : An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1962) together with Pierre Bourdieu’s notions on habitus, field, dox and capital, this thesis examines the perception of how the group develops a shared taste, as well as how it forms a certain kind of community. The first part of the analysis introduces statistics to form an overview of where the group members find their interests in literature most fulfilled and how interactions and commentary is spread over different kinds of posts. Here, a categorization is presented to clarify what the most prominent posts in the group are. In the second part, a closer examination is made through an approach to the new public that this group constitutes, how taste is formed and what kind of books the members are interested in and how conflicts arise not through discussions on good or bad taste, but rather political matters. Finally, the analysis shows how the community fulfills certain functions for the members and how they seem to perceive the group as a whole. In conclusion, this new cultural environment has impact on how we can understand our ability to express ourselves and make ourselves heard. Together with this we can see that the group forms a certain taste that mainly consists of popular culture, even though more literary titles can be found. Still, the most important function seems to be the one of community and the sense of belonging to a group, to participate and receive approval as a human being.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-178482 |
| Date | January 2020 |
| Creators | Hedman-Dybeck, Sarah |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för kultur och estetik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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