| 1. |
- Persson, Thérese, 1975-
(författare)
-
Kvinnlig för sin ålder : en intervjustudie om ålder, kropp och femininitet
- 2010
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of the dissertation to understand how age is given meaning to different age groups as weil as in relation to the body and femininity. These relationships are examined on the basis of interviews with 25 individuals 6-99 years old. The study deal s with how the interviewees describe and perform age, and how the relationships between age, body and femininity are expressed. Norms, and in particular how norms are constructed and used during the interviews, are also the focus of analysis. Parts of Judith Butler's gender theoryare used to set up a performance perspective on the body, femininity, and age, and to discuss norms.During the interviews the individuals repeat, use and negotiate age norms. Norms for what is considered adequate for a certain age is constructed simultaneously along with norms of femininity and the body. The interviews iIlustrate perceptions that femininity should be staged in certain ways for certain age groups. It is also perceived as normal, the expectation that the body will change in certain ways throughout life.The interviews reveal how the meaning of age varies depending on the age from which the person is speaking or in regards to what age one compares with. It appears that the individuals, based on their different ages, express different ways of defining and evaluating different ages and becoming older.Same events are constructed as appropriate for girls and women of certain ages. The consequence of this is that other events are constructed as unfit. Based on these norms people risk being defined in negative ways. The study show how norms for age, gender and body interact so that people's ability to understand themselves and others becomes limited, whiIe these norms at the same time are used to create meaning and make oneself understood.
|
|
| 2. |
- Berg, Linda, 1974-
(författare)
-
InterNacionalistas : identifikation och främlingskap i svenska solidaritetsarbetares berättelser från Nicaragua
- 2007
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this thesis is to explore what solidarity workers from Sweden narrate about and from activities in Nicaragua. I focus on how identities reflect nationalising, racialising and gendering imaginations, and how these are being handled within the context of an international solidarity movement – with the ambition to strive for global justice. My search for answers takes its point of departure in a wide gender-oriented postcolonial perspective. With an understanding of identities and places as relational and plastic, postcolonial theory attempts to see the inevitable dilemmas of colonialism, to visualise people who have been sacrificed in the name of colonialism and nationalism. It is a theoretical field concerned with the struggle for the word, values and actions categorised by a (post)colonial order. The dissertation is divided into six chapters. After the introductory chapter, chapter 2 contains a discussion of the concept solidarity as a valuable designation for these activities, connected to a national self-image and as a determining factor for the informants' understanding of their identities. One fundamental theme in this study is the tension concerning “white”, “western”, “Swedish” solidarity workers speaking for and working with people in Nicaragua. In Chapter 3, “To make oneself trustworthy”, I take a closer look at this and discusses how the interviewees verbalised strategies to handle possible positions and the paradoxes of their employment. In chapter 4 “Nationalising gender”, I examine the speech of women, men, machismo and gender equality – and how they interrelate with other factors within the stories from the period in Nicaragua. The difficulties to intervene as a Swedish volunteer or coordinator in Nicaragua were well known among the interviewees/narrators and their organisations. How and what activities for change could be in different parts of the world were, and are, repeated questions within (at least this part of) the Swedish international solidarity movement. This is one reason why the solidarity organisations emphasised the importance of creating space for social change via information and moulding of public opinion. In Chapter five, “Describe Nicaragua”, I analyse the written stories by solidarity workers. I take departure in a few of the dominating themes and clarify how Nicaragua was mediated to a Swedish speaking reader. I argue that the stories of the solidarity workers are captured between recognising difference and creating stereotypes and exotic projections. Even though their object is the opposite, they tend to produce representations which demand the Other to stay in the place of difference. In the very last part I discuss some problems with being the “voice of the poor”. The dissertation concludes with a short summary of some of the most central themes. Here I refer to the narrated liminality and inherited boundaries of the employment. I discuss the anti-imperialist and feminist work with a national dead weight and the efforts to create alternative images and translocal subject positions. I end the study by reflecting on the difficulties of an internationalist “we” and with reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, I call for “unlearning our privileges as our loss”.
|
|
| 3. |
- León Rosales, René, 1971-
(författare)
-
Vid framtidens hitersta gräns : Om maskulina elevpositioner i en multietnisk skola
- 2010
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this thesis is to highlight the central conditions, norms and values which enable the staging of certain masculine pupil positions and hinder others at a school located in the northern part of the municipality of Botkyrka, during 2004–2005. The school and the neighbourhood in this study are characterized by a high percentage of people with immigrant background, a result of urban ethnic segregation. The methodological approach is qualitative. The empirical data consists of interviews with 15 boys in grade 6, participant observations, and official documents. The study examines the central position of socially sanctioned conceptions of “good becoming” in society. Children are expected to control their own bodies and take on certain areas of knowledge in the correct way in order to create themselves as expanding subjects: they learn to ask for “success” and “upward” social mobility. But as this study shows this does not apply equally to all pupils. The boys in this study have to create themselves as pupils on terms that make it harder for them to establish themselves as successful pupils. The teaching they encounter in school, the socioeconomic conditions and the effects of the segregation that characterises the urban landscape they live in makes it harder for them to live up to the requirements of what an “ideal pupil” should be. The study also highlights the ways in which difference is being made between girls and boys in school, creating arenas that are more open for boys than for girls to enter into in everyday life, namely football and the multiethnic youth language. These arenas allowed the boys to stage masculine coded subject positions which in one way or another were connected with a positive social status. Thus boys in this study do not have as much reason to establish themselves in the position of a good pupil in comparison to girls since there is a greater variety in how they can create themselves within subject positions connected to social status.
|
|
| 4. |
- Lundell, Erika, 1975-
(författare)
-
Förkroppsligad fiktion och fiktionaliserade kroppar : Levande rollspel i Östersjöregionen
- 2014
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation concerns live action role-playing (larp). Larp may be described as improvised theater without an audience, as participants simultaneously embody both audience and actor in their constant interaction with one another. Hence, larp can be seen as a participatory culture. The study is based on participant observation, interviews and online ethnography in Denmark, Latvia, Sweden and Norway.The aim of the thesis is to analyze how bodies materialize, take and are given space in larps. At the heart of the study lie questions on how processes of embodiment are enacted before, during and after the game.Two central concepts - larp chronotope and matrix of interpretation – shape the analysis. The first denotes the specific timespace in which a larp takes place, e.g a Soviet military camp or a fantasy world. The second concept stands for a general matrix of norms that informs participants on how to enact their characters in the larp chronotope.The thesis shows that participants strive to act in ways that are intelligible according to the matrix of interpretation that reigns during the game days. In addition, although game and everyday matrixes of interpretations are always inseparable, while attending a larp the participant’s ordinary lives are temporarily allowed to fade into the background. Thus, larps are complex combinations of objects, spaces and bodies that are given new relations and new meanings.Furthermore, the thesis shows that larp embodiment is conditioned by normative ideas of what it means to be an intelligible live action role player. White male bodies are more likely to access the sphere of larp intelligibility than others, which is evident in many of the stories and made up worlds portrayed in the study. Yet, the collaborative narration of game worlds that take place before larps can include all sorts of bodies. Consequently, larps provide an opportunity for alternative forms of embodiment and experiences.
|
|
| 5. |
|
|
