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- Balkmar, Dag, 1974-
(författare)
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On Men and Cars : An Ethnographic Study of Gendered, Risky and Dangerous Relations
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- It is well known that young men constitute a high-risk group in terms of accidents involving both themselves and others. But comparatively little is known about the roles of gender, masculinity and automobility in reproducing or subverting such particularly risky performances of identity. The study aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of how gender, primarily masculinity, is interrelated with car-related identities, practices and material constructions. Contributing with qualitative insights, this study explores the ways in which gendered individuals and cars co-constitute one another in a particular context, the community of Swedish car modifiers. By using an ethnographic approach, this thesis investigates the lives of young and middle-aged car enthusiasts who invest considerable time, money, skill and passion in modifying, showing and driving their cars. The material stems from fieldwork carried out at car shows, in cars, on online modified-car forums and in garages between 2006 and 2008. In total, 53 men and 14 women between the ages of 19 and 60 make up the informants.The study shows how gender, in particular masculinity, is reproduced and negotiated in the modifiers’ attempts to become “unique” subjects through making their own versions of the car. Cars are not only a means of self-expression and constructing identity, but serve to build community and regulate relations between, primarily, men through competition at car shows and when driving. The study examines the reproduction of craftsmanship as a purified ideal that distinguishes car modifiers as a “special kind” of men, a figure that takes its form through intersecting imaginaries of Swedishness, class and masculinity. To rely on one’s own ideas and hands represented a more authentic way of creating one’s dream car in a heavily commercialised culture. Constructions of masculinity in driving are explored in its profoundly embodied, emotional and dangerous aspects developed in the context of men, cars and risk-taking. The personalised car is shown to generate different forms of risk-taking, which are also productive of counter-discourses on dangerous and risky driving.
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| 2. |
- Mehrabi, Tara
(författare)
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Making Death Matter : A Feminist Technoscience Study of Alzheimer's Sciences in the Laboratory
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis is a contribution to feminist laboratory studies and a critical engagement with the natural sciences, or more precisely research on the biochemical workings and deadly relations of Alzheimer’s disease emanating from a year of field work in a Drosophila fly lab. The natural sciences have been a point of fascination within the field of gender studies for decades. Such sciences produce knowledge on what gets to count as nature and natural, healthy or sick, normal or not, and they have done it with great societal authority and impact throughout European modernity. However, feminist technoscience scholars argue that science and knowledge is socially produced, and political too. Concepts such as nature, animal, human, body, sex, and life itself are not simply given natural realities but phenomena processed through the naturecultures of the laboratory. Situated within such theoretical and methodological approaches, this thesis wonders how scientific facts about Alzheimer’s disease are made in the lab today. What kinds of realities, bodies and ethico-political concerns are enacted? Who gets to live and who gets to die in everyday laboratory practices? Theoretically, the thesis is grounded, particularly, within Karen Barad’s agential realism and posthumanist performativity, and as such it accounts for human and nonhuman entanglements through which AD is performed in the lab in relational ways. In other words, the thesis explores how AD is enacted in the bodies of transgenic fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster), as these flies embody the disease, live and die with it. Last but not least, the thesis explores the materialities of death, dying, embodiment and biological waste in a biochemistry lab as constitutive parts of the produced knowledge about AD.
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