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- Abrahamsson, Elin, 1983-
(författare)
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Enahanda läsning : En queer tolkning av romancegenren
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This doctoral thesis investigates popular romance, a mass-cultural genre with a large female audience. Popular romance is often considered ”lowbrow” and is referred to by terms such as ”porn” and ”garbage”. The female reader of this so called “sentimental trash” is often portrayed as naïve and unworldly. The thesis makes this derogatory view of the genre its point of departure, to investigate what cultural understandings of gender and sexuality the critique against popular romance entails. The thesis further investigates how these conceptions of gender and sexuality deviate from and challenge a culturally promoted and normative sexuality.The thesis consists of six chapters. The first chapter describes the selection of the empirical material and the theoretical and methodological framework. The empirical material consists of the three novels in the popular series Fifty Shades of Grey and the four novels and five films in the popular series Twilight. The thesis places itself within the field of feminist cultural studies and queer theory. It makes use of the concept of masturbation (both literal and figurative) as an analytical entry point and as a method focusing on the “here and now” of romance reading.The second chapter contextualizes the study by defining the term “popular romance” and by providing a brief historical overview of the genre. Previous research on popular romance is presented and discussed in relation to the derogatory view of the genre.The third chapter studies the Swedish media commentaries on Fifty Shades of Grey and Twilight to define how the rejected romance reader is conceptualized, and how this romance reader is presumed to be reading. This “romance reader” is thereafter discussed in relation to the Western historical discourse on masturbation, “female illness” and (women’s) private reading. The chapter closes with a discussion on the form of reading that the romance reader is associated with. This self-immersed, excessive and over-invested reading form is defined as “masturbatory”.The fourth chapter explores the act of romance reading when defined as a sexual activity. The romance community is compared to the “second wave” feminism of the 1970s in order to demonstrate how the genre establishes a separatist female community where relations, positions, and identifications are in motion, revealing both homoerotic and autoerotic elements to this homosocial context.In the fifth chapter, a close reading of the material is performed with a focus on the “here and now” of the reading situation. The dichotomy of desiring subject and desired object is problematized in relation to looks and gaze. The thesis argues that the romance text uses detailed and intimate descriptions to instill a sexual charge and to freeze the flow of the storyline in order to make room for constant erotic contemplation. These “frozen moments” and the repetitiveness of the genre are discussed in relation to theories of queer temporality. The romance text constructs a room “outside of time” that privileges the overwhelming pleasures of the “here and now”. This liminal room is not only available for the heroine and hero of the story, but for the romance reader as well.The sixth and final chapter ties together the main arguments of the thesis in an overarching discussion on how conceiving romance reading as a form of masturbation challenges previous research on popular romance and the gendering of and contempt for mass culture.
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| 2. |
- Annell, Cecilia, 1965-
(författare)
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Begärets politiska potential : Feministiska motståndsstrategier i Elin Wägners Pennskaftet, Gabriele Reuters Aus guter Familie, Hilma Angered-Strandbergs Lydia Vik och Grete Meisel-Hess Die Intellektuellen
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation investigates the way that feminist resistance is expressed in two Swedish and two German so-called New Woman novels from the turn of the twentieth century: Elin Wägner’s Pennskaftet (1910, Penwoman), Gabriele Reuter’s Aus guter Familie (1895, From a Good Family), Hilma Angered-Strandberg’s Lydia Vik (1904), and Grete Meisel-Hess’s Die Intellektuellen (1911).The theoretical apparatus is comprised by the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Jacques Lacan, and Jessica Benjamin. By introducing a psychoanalytic and feminist perspective, this dissertation seeks to develop the possibilities for agency and resistance within the framework of Foucault’s theories. It investigates four textual and contextually grounded strategies of resistance that are prominent in these novels: individuality, openness, desire, and eugenics.This study demonstrates how Gabriele Reuter, Grete Meisel-Hess, and Hilma Angered-Strandberg, inspired by the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and Ellen Key, depict feminine individuality in relation to a scientific and philosophical discourse that specifically denied women individuality. The authors anchor individuality in a corporality that was similarly denied to women by a bourgeois and dogmatic Christian discourse.Openness and wit function as resistance strategies in Elin Wägner’s Pennskaftet. Humorous rejoinders and narrative comments can disarm a conservative. An open attitude towards the emancipation project could also help to resolve the conflicts between different feminist positions and between different women.Desire functions as an important resistance strategy in each of the novels examined. It is variously represented as a vital instinct, a desire for knowledge, and a sexual desire, as in Gabriele Reuter’s Aus guter Familie – or as a desire for suffrage, as in Pennskaftet, or for maternity legislation, as in Grete Meisel-Hess’s Die Intellektuellen. By formulating a notion of feminine desire, turn-of-the-century feminists were able both to seize control of sexuality from the church and to wrest morality from the grasp of the bourgeoisie. These resistance strategies could also have a biopolitical character: in Grete Meisel-Hess’s Die Intellektuellen, woman is placed at the service of humanity on eugenicist grounds, and her good qualities are seen as capable of promoting humanity’s progress.This dissertation shows that in these novels desire at the individual level serves to reinforce feminine subjectivity. Love is seen as associated with an intensified sense of life and as a precondition of creativity. At the social level, desire also functions as the basis for a feeling of solidarity among women that instils in them courage and an urge to persevere in the suffrage struggle, this latter a highly protracted process. In this way desire acquires political potential.A framing chapter on context provides the intellectual and philosophical backgrounds of the various strategies of resistance. It is followed by four analytical chapters, each of which addresses one novel.
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| 3. |
- Jakobsson, Hilda, 1984-
(författare)
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Jag var kvinna : Flickor, kärlek och sexualitet i Agnes von Krusenstjernas tidiga romaner
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The Swedish author Agnes von Krusenstjerna is known for her depictions of girls becoming women, a motif that she returns to again and again throughout her works. Previous academic literature on Krusenstjerna highlights that she writes about girls, maturation, and eroticism, but does not explore what ‘becoming a woman’ means. While the terms ‘girl’ and ‘woman’ are commonly regarded as signifiers of age and sex only, they are in fact laden with a number of assumptions, which I explore in Krusenstjerna’s novels. This thesis analyses the depictions of girls coming of age through their encounter with love and sexuality in Krusenstjerna’s early novels Ninas dagbok (The Diary of Nina, 1917), Helenas första kärlek (Helena’s First Love, 1918), and the Tony trilogy Tony växer upp (Tony Grows Up, 1922), Tonys läroår (Tony’s Apprenticeship, 1924), and Tonys sista läroår (Tony’s Last Apprenticeship, 1926). I explore how the idea of girls becoming women relates to love and sexuality, and I pose the following questions: How is the term ‘girl’ constructed in Krusenstjerna’s early novels? How does a girl become a woman and what implications does womanhood have? Which characters and phenomena in the girl’s surroundings constitute the conditions for her becoming a woman, and which ones risk delaying or even preventing this transition? Furthermore, I seek to connect the depiction of girls, love, and sexuality with Krusenstjerna’s contemporary literary critics’ view of her early novels as girls’ books, i.e. novels for young women, or associated with that literary tradition, even though they were not published as such. I use a combination of feminist and queer theory focussing on temporality. Throughout the thesis, I connect Krusenstjerna’s writings to those of other authors. The following novels are connected to the tradition of books for girls and are used as the starting point for my hermeneutical readings of Krusenstjerna’s works: The Girls at His Billet (1916) by Berta Ruck, Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Daddy-Long-Legs (1912) and Dear Enemy (1915) by Jean Webster, as well as Anne of Green Gables (1908), The Blue Castle (1926), and Emily’s Quest (1927) by L. M. Montgomery. Examining these novels, I focus on the motif of girls becoming women as well as a selection of other related topics. The thesis addresses two different ways of coming of age depicted in Krusenstjerna’s early novels. The protagonists of the first two novels, Nina and Helena, are portrayed as ‘girls’ who become ‘women’ through their encounter with men and their choice in love, whereas the protagonist of the Tony trilogy is described as a ‘girl’ who only temporarily becomes a ‘woman’ but then turns into a ‘girl’ again. Accordingly, the act of becoming a woman in Krusenstjerna’s first two novels, which is typical for the girls’ book tradition, follows normative expectations of the life trajectory, whereas the queer act of becoming – or rather un-becoming – a woman in the later Tony trilogy does not adhere to the same assumptions. I argue that the fact that the second part of the Tony trilogy has the same plot as Ninas dagbok, and the third instalment the same story as Helenas första kärlek, amplifies the impression that the Tony trilogy queers the normative life trajectory that is found in those two novels and is typical for the girls’ book tradition. Thus, as this thesis proposes, the girls’ book as seen in Krusenstjerna’s work, is queered.
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| 5. |
- Ohlsson, Hélène, 1961-
(författare)
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”Gudomlig, ingenting mindre än gudomlig!” : Skådespelerskan Ellen Hartmans iscensättningar på scen och i offentlighet
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The purpose of the thesis is to examine the diva femininity, career strategies, and acting style of the Swedish actress Ellen Hartman (1860-1945). The aim is to highlight her importance to Swedish theater during the fin-de-siècle. The dissertation is a contribution to the history of actresses and explores her gender performance and diva codes and how they influenced her career strategies and acting style. The analysis is based on Tracy C. Davis’s feminist historiography, Mimi Schippers’s notion of pariah femininity, and Wayne Koestenbaum's concept of diva codes.Historical contextualisation, critical imaginativeness, and actors’ embodied knowledge are the methodologies used in the present thesis. The study emphasizes the close interplay of the gendered contexts and structures that framed Hartman’s career strategies, acting style and performance. The conclusion thereby underlines the idea that Hartman as a popular actress challenged the gender norms of her time and contributed to the empowerment of women in Sweden. As an actress, Hartman was a forerunner and thereby became a pioneer of Swedish modern acting.
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| 6. |
- Raivio, Magdalena, 1972-
(författare)
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Gudinnefeminister : Monica Sjöös och Starhawks berättande - subjektskonstruktion, idéinnehåll och feministiska affiniteter
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis examines the discursive position of 'goddess feminism', in relation to some of the difference- and eco feminist positions from the1960s and until today. In focus are the texts of the two goddess feminists, Monica Sjöö and Starhawk. The thesis contributes to a historiographical (re)situating of their political and religious narratives. It also contributes to an elaborated understanding of these goddess feminists and the goddess feminist discourse they are part of. The tentative feminist figuration 'the goddess identified feminist’ is articulated as a tool to discuss the religious and political discourse of goddess feminists as part of contemporary feminist and environmental political conversations and practices.Donna Haraway’s and Karen Barad’s post humanist theoretical interventions are used to explore and discuss the affinities between goddess feminists (re)negotiation of the subject/s 'goddess/nature/human' – and the (re)negotiation of 'nature/human’ made by new materialist/post humanist difference- and eco feminists of the 2000s. Rosi Braidotti’s writings on sexual difference, becoming and feminist figurations further informs the conclusions drawn in the thesis.Drawing on the methodological approaches of Clare Hemmings and Mieke Bal in the analysis of story-telling and subject construction, a contribution is also made, to the understanding of how story-telling as part of a discourse, produces meaning and asymmetric subject relations. In particular the thesis shows how a compassionate feminist storytelling involuntarily produces subject positions through, essentialist dualisms, hierarchical ordering and othering. In parallel, the thesis also discusses alternative narrative strategies that focus on both the discursive boarders and affinities.
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