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- Bark Persson, Anna
(author)
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Steel as the Answer? : Viking Bodies, Power, and Masculinity in Anglophone Fantasy Literature 2006–2016
- 2023
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This dissertation examines the motif of the popular Viking in contemporary Anglophone fantasy literature, with a focus on masculinity, power, embodiment,and sexuality. The study draws on queer-theoretical perspectives on masculinity and the method of queer reading, and approaches the Viking as at once bound up with the legitimization of normative and hegemonic forms of masculinity and open to (queer) negotiations and possibilities beyond normative male masculinities.The material consists of contemporary gritty fantasy, a recent subgenre deeply invested in contemporary concerns regarding masculinity, masculine failure, and masculinity crisis narratives, where the Viking motif plays a major role. The texts under consideration are Joe Abercrombie’s The First Law (2006–2012) and The Shattered Sea (2014–2015), Richard K. Morgan’s A Land Fit for Heroes (2008–2016), Mark Lawrence’s The Red Queen’s War (2014–2016), and Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette’s The Iskryne Saga (2007–2015).Understanding the Viking as a motif that is intractably bound up with ideas of the past and the historical period of the Viking Age but not reducible to it, the thesis considers the fantasy Viking as a medial representation of spectacular hardbody action masculinity and puts it in relation to the fantasy text and fantasy worldbuilding as well as more generalized cultural ideas of the North and the Nordics. Furthermore, it asks how we can understand the masculinity of the Viking – long made symbolic of or associated with white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, and reactionary gender roles – beyond an assumed direct relation to men or men’s concerns.Analytically, the thesis considers the Viking in relation to spatiality, temporality, and embodiment, finding that in the fantasy text, the Viking emerges with a strong focus on a mighty, muscular body and as a barbarian Other connected to the past and in direct opposition to civilization and futurity, making it an escapist possibility outside the disciplining power of neoliberal late-stage capitalism. Furthermore, connecting to postfeminist perspectives on masculinity in media, the thesis finds that the fantasy Viking has developed in ways that seemingly take into account feminist and queer critique of traditional, homophobic forms of masculinity, transforming the Viking and offering it up for (queer) objectification. At the same time, the Viking also becomes a safe site of traditional masculinity, where anxieties and concerns regarding a supposed loss of male power in modernity can be projected and ultimately resolved.
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| 3. |
- Lönngren, Ann-Sofie, 1974-
(author)
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Att röra en värld : en queerteoretisk analys av erotiska trianglar i sex verk av August Strindberg
- 2007
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The subject of this dissertation is a queertheoretical analysis of erotic triangles with two men and one woman, in six texts by August Strindberg (1849–1912). The material consists of the novel A Madman’s Defence (1887–88) and the plays Creditors (1888), Playing with Fire (1892), Crime and Crime (1899), Dance of Death I (1901) and To Damascus I–III (1898–1901). Employing a queer understanding of the history of sexuality and a theoretical frame provided mainly by Judith Butler, I interpret the manifestation of “sex” within the above-mentioned texts as constructed by performative means, in particular those intimately linked to expressions of same-sex and different-sex erotic desires. With Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s term “homosocial desire” I direct the attention of the analysis primarily to the dynamic relationship between the male rivals within the erotic triangle. What consequences do the erotic desires have for the gender-categories in the triangular formation, and do they change over a longer time-span in Strindberg’s writings? The result of the study is that the sexual desires of the literary characters within the erotic triangle is of crucial importance for their status as legitimately gendered subjects, and ultimately as acceptable human beings, within the heteronormative context. Moreover, the triangular formation does not alter particularly over time, and the same elements keep occurring with only minor differences between the texts. This process I interpret, within the context of Jacques Derrida’s term “reiteration”, as a means to construct gendered characters that is at one and the same time normative and understandable, as well as dynamic and with a potential for change. In this construction the simultaneous threat and potential of same-sex erotic desires is of crucial importance as it enables new ways to move, create and touch a world.
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