The aim of this study is to address how “skevt” [skewed] girlhood is constructed in relation to age, time, and sexuality in three literary works of the Swedish author Sara Stridsberg: the novel Darling River (2010), the play Konsten att falla (2017) and the short story Tre systrar (2021). In the study, I pose the following questions: How is the skewed girlhood portrayed in relation to constructions of time and age? How does the construction of skewed femininity interact with the construction of sexual practice and sexual desires?

    I use the term “skev” – a Scandinavian variation and hybrid of queer – to address how the girlhood is subverted in the texts, as well as to analyze how this not only occurs in relation to heteronormativity, but also within it. To explore this, I work with “skeva” [skewed] readings of the texts. My analysis is based on “skev” [skew] theory and queer temporality, through which I illustrate how the characters of the three literary works are challenging normative assumptions of girlhood and femininity, by performing gender and age as well as sexuality in non-normative ways. I discuss the girl’s bedroom as a form of heterotopia, in which both time and ageing are constructed in a skewed way. Furthermore, I locate a “skev” [skewed] temporality in the texts, connected to an absence of futurity. 

The purpose of this essay is to examine how racialized workers are represented in the magazine Kommunalarbetaren which is a part of the Swedish trade union Kommunal. The covers from twenty issues of this magazine published in 2017 were analyzed to study if the representation of these workers was affected by discourses of white normativity. The study is based on theories of intersectionality by Kimberlé Crenshaw and representations and stereotypification by Stuart Hall. My result shows how work is exposed as something white people do and with dichotomies where one is represented as either white, Swedish worker or as a refugee, the latter having vague subject position and as someone who recently arrived in Sweden. The presence, participation and labour of people of color seem to be missing and be a blind spot for the magazine. 

This study analyses how Kim Kardashian West’s and Fredrik Eklund’s depiction of family and career and the relationship there between are constructed as successful in their Reality TV shows Keeping Up With the Kardashians (2007-) and Million Dollar Listing New York (2011-). It is examined in a postfeminist media climate with the theoretical frameworks of Chrononormativity (Freeman 2010) and Queer Kinship Theory (Butler 2002), considering the intersections of gender, sexuality and class, via a critical discourse analysis. The study shows a chrononormative ideal where a successful career and big biological family, through free choices, are vital to become respectable adults. Their careers are built upon their private lives and their heteronormative families. Childcaring is constructed as feminine and can for masculine subjects be outsourced to servants. It is constructed as relatively unproblematic to outsource childbearing to a surrogate mother.

This bachelor thesis examines how terms of heterosexuality are negotiated within the Swedish reality show Gift vid första ögonkastet (Married at first sight), which is presented as a social experiment where strangers marry each other and go on to live together for four weeks. The couples are matched by four experts (two psychologists, one sexologist and one couple’s counsellor), and their roles as professionals and distributors of knowledge are the main focus of this study as it permeates how the terms are negotiated by the six participants. By applying queer theories such as the heterosexual matrix, performativity and temporality, the terms are identified as monogamy, height difference, desire, emotional labour, and equality. These are analysed using the three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis, while also adopting its framework for ideological power to examine how the experts use their position to give way for their interpretations of relationships, love and gender.

The findings conclude that the programme works within a discourse of gender equality to support its own eligibility and does not challenge heterosexual ideals but rather furthers them by offering the heteronormative idea of monogamous love as a solution to a supposed increase of loneliness.

Through the concept of longing, this study aims to explore non-binary embodiment and becoming, with a focus on examining how non-binary embodiment makes and is made possible. The study takes it departure in Karen Barads theories and concepts such as intra-action, and it is also from Barad the concept of longing is inspired. Longing is understood as the drive that is and makes possible life and the livable life. Longing is not reserved for humans but is rather tangent a posthuman understanding of matters agency, where matter is understood as an active agent in its own creation. The study is based on a combination of go-along interviews and semistructured interviews with six non-binary people.The study can be understood as an effort to make possible new or other ways to understand sex/gender, embodiment and becoming. Ways that is not based on a framework of understanding that in its foundational structure reduces the non-binary as something unintelligible. In the study longing is used as a means to create order and direction in the analysis of the participants stories. Longing has the benefit of being in constant movement and change, as such it contributes as a way of understanding that do not limit the participants stories of sex/gender, embodiment and becoming.

The aim of this paper is to examine the possibility to be impossible, to examine how the socially intelligible can come to exist. This is done through the concept of sex/gender, as sex/gender has such a determining place in the production of what can be understood as human, it also has the properties to shed light on the possibility to be and exist beyond the socially intelligible. In this paper I will interview and analyze how four genderqueer people understand themselves and their identity in relation to the phenomenon sex/gender. Through Karen Barad’s concept of posthumanist performativity and her conceptualization of phenomena and intra-action I understand sex/gender, not as entities, but as phenomena of ever changing and ever intra-acting agents. The study suggests that the limitations of the concept of sex/gender can be addressed through an understanding of the body as itself a web of intra-actions, that is, the body as a phenomenon.

The aim of this article is to examine the representation of female masculinity in genre literature. Reading female masculinity as queer embodiment, I put two science fictional texts driven by a typical action narrative in dialogue with earlier research on representations of female masculinity in literature and popular culture to demonstrate the importance of bringing the genre of the text into the analysis when examining female masculinity.

In the article, I use the connection between female masculinity and tragedy as my starting point to exemplify how the genre of a text shapes the depiction and reading of female masculinity. In the action-driven science fiction texts I study, this link is very much present, but tragedy is given another role to play. Instead of being an element in the constitution of gender non-conforming as an unlivable experience, the representation of these masculine female heroes as oriented away from heteronormative constructions of a good life (Ahmed 2006) makes possiblethe depiction of these women as masculine, as well as the glorification of their gender non-conformity within the framework of the action-based SF narrative.

This article discusses gritty fantasy, a fantasy subgenre, which was established in the early 2000s and has since gained a lot of traction. In previous research, gritty fantasy has often been understood as a deconstructive form of fantasy that draws on the barbaric Middle Ages and subverts fantasy tropes as a reaction against earlier forms of popular fantasy. I examine, rather, the genre’s relation to the medieval and its depictions of power. Drawing on queer temporality and theories on fantasy literature and worldbuilding (Mendlsohn; Roine), I approach gritty fantasy first and foremost as a form of fantasy literature, placing it within the context of speculative fiction and asking what it does as a fantastic literature.

Since Michel Foucault’s proto-queer theoretical History of Sexuality (1976/2002), time and history have functioned as important sites for the theorization and understanding of sexuality and gender as productive, culturally situated phenomena, rather than static, transhistorical, or naturally ordained. In particular the medieval has been a central site of contrast for the rethinking of modern conceptions of sexuality and heteronormativity (Dinshaw 1999). By contrast, popular fantasy often seems overwhelmingly normative in its medievalism, imagining the fantasy medieval as much ‘further back’ in a supposed linear development of greater social acceptance for sexual diversity than modern Western society.

With the popularity of Game of Thrones, this particular construction of the fantasy medieval has gained critical academic attention. Recent feminist inquiries into the medievalisms of the current popular trend towards grimness and realism in fantasy media have revolved around what Amy Kaufman refers to as “muscular medievalism,” which “imagines the past as a man’s world in which masculinity was powerful, impenetrable, and uniquely privileged” (Kaufman 2016, 58; see also for example: Polack 2015; Young 2016; Carroll 2018). In these readings, the medievalism of popular fantasy is understood as constructing problematic understandings of gender, sexuality and race through its use of the ‘past.’ 

In this presentation I want to offer a queer reading as a complement to these feminist engagements with the temporality of fantasy fiction. Drawing on theory on queer temporality and queer uses of the past (Dinshaw 1999; Fjelkestam 2018), I here make an initial attempt to sketch out a queer reading of the temporality of popular epic fantasy.

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.

When encountering problems and dissatisfaction in the workplace, employees may choose between three strategies: voice; exit; or silence. Using survey data and interview material from a study of employees in an elderly care organization in Sweden, this article investigates the workers' perceptions of the eligibility and prospects of these strategies and which individual characteristics and situational factors might affect them. The focus is on racialized workers (operationalized through their region of birth) who, according to earlier studies, are less likely than other employees to choose voice behaviour. Contrary to some earlier studies, the results here attribute such a propensity to the importance of power differences across racial hierarchies' rather than to differences in cultural values. Individuals in this (racialized) category have a lower occupational status, earn less and experience less favourable relationships with their managers.

Using quantitative and qualitative methods, this study investigates inequalities in occupational status and wages between native-born and foreign-born employees in elderly care institutions in Sweden. It finds that employees from Africa, Asia and Latin America - the "Global South" - are disadvantaged in both respects. Combinatory explanations of the inequalities are needed. The shorter work experience of foreign-born workers in the care sector plus the lesser value given to educational credentials obtained outside Sweden are among the factors related to human capital theory. Access to less-valuable resources in the workplace social networks of foreign-born employees is related to social capital theory. The processes that result in exclusion from powerful social networks, in turn, are found to be affected by discrimination in the workplace.

Populärvetenskaplig rapport från ett projekt om ojämlikhet mellan kvinnliga och manliga anställda och mellan anställda från olika delar av världen i svensk äldrevård samt förslag till förbättrad jämlikhet på arbetsplatserna.

Written by an interdisciplinary collective of authors, this powerful book documents the largely unknown histories and politics of trans lives, activisms, and culture across the post-Yugoslav states. The volume sheds light on a diversity of gender embodiments and explores how they have navigated the murky waters of war, capitalism, and transphobia while forging a niche for themselves within the regional and transnational LGBTQ movements. By unleashing the knowledge concentrated in trans lives, this book not only resists trans erasures in Eastern Europe, but also underscores the potential for survival, self-transformation, and engagement in politically challenging circumstances.

The article discusses the emergence and criticism of norm-critical pedagogy in Sweden and thedevelopment of the concept in relation to the societal contexts in which it has evolved, contextswhich has had significance for how norm-critical pedagogy has come to be interpreted and used.The article is partly built on arguments put forward in the anthology Norm critical pedagogy –perspectives, challenges and opportunities (Björkman & Bromseth, 2019) and on a study of texts fromthe Swedish National Agency for Education that includes norm-critical pedagogy (Hill, forthcoming).The ambition is to contribute to the Nordic discussion regarding the practice and developmentof norm-critical pedagogy.

This chapter is a collective autoethnography that reveals the messiness and fractured identities of (non)mothers and (non)researchers in and out of academic contexts. Luce Irigaray’s writing on breath, interiority and autonomy brings together the reflections. In Between East and West, Irigaray (2002) has learnt “the importance of breathing in order to survive, to cure certain ills, and to attain detachment and autonomy” (p. 10). She explores “a sexuation of breathing” as a woman “by practicing, by listening (to myself), by reading, by awakening myself” (2002, p. 10). Collectively, the stories in this chapter reveal living with and letting go of the demands of academia and the complexities of caring for selves and others.

The aim of this essay is to examine students’ experiences of Juventas Ungdomsjours violence prevention work from the method material “Kärlek börjar aldrig med bråk”. This with the intention of studying students understanding of violence, gender and power and how masculinity and femininity are expressed in this understanding. The essay also intends to study how this understanding affects students view of Juventas Ungdomsjours educational strategies. My questions follow my aim. My theories are based on gender regimes in school, masculinity and femininity and change process, resistance and crisis. The method is focus group- and individual interviews and the empirical material is based on interviews with students and teachers from two schools who have taken part in Juventas Ungdomsjours violence prevention work. The results show that students understanding of violence, gender and power is based on maturity and that more perspectives should be taken because it was important to them that not only girls are subjected to violence. Masculinity and femininity are expressed in this understanding by boys’ responses are coming from a superior position and girls’ responses from a subordinate position. This understanding affects students view of Juventas Ungdomsjour educational strategies by they wish for more preparation, involvement and interaction.

The subject of this paper is research that explored how young people use text messages and songs stored on their mobiles and MP3 players to escape everyday life. Two separate research studies from Australia and Sweden were juxtaposed because of the similarities in findings as well as the similarity between these cultural objects. The various types of escape that were found were part of everyday routine and experienced in short bursts, such as the length of time it takes to re-read a text message or to listen to a song. However, there were also more extreme examples of these devices being used to temporarily retreat from everyday social interaction. The authors argue that these forms of escape seem to be necessary for young people to be able to maintain a “sense of being” (as defined by Heidegger in 1962) in their everyday life

This special issue advances feminist inquiry and theorizing of the politics of knowledge within our current, highly paradoxical societal landscape. It draws together feminist analyses of “expertise” with feminist epistemologies of situated knowledge, Black feminist thought, theory of affect and emotions, sociology of knowledge, and science and technology studies (STS). As such, it enables a timely interdisciplinary engagement with current paradigmatic shifts in knowledge production and claims to expertise as well as an examination of the gendered and racialized epistemic authority.

For several decades, the study of “knowledge,” changing modes of knowledge production, and the dynamics shaping the recognition of expertise were largely confided to the specialized subfields of sociology of knowledge..

This special issue advances feminist inquiry and theorizing of the politics of knowledge within our current, highly paradoxical societal landscape. It draws together feminist analyses of “expertise” with feminist epistemologies of situated knowledge, Black feminist thought, theory of affect and emotions, sociology of knowledge, and science and technology studies (STS). As such, it enables a timely interdisciplinary engagement with current paradigmatic shifts in knowledge production and claims to expertise as well as an examination of the gendered and racialized epistemic authority.

This article draws on popular culture, ethnographic materials and mainstream commercials to discuss contemporary understandings of the relationship between fertility, pregnancy and parenthood among lesbians and other queer persons with uteruses. It argues that, on the one hand, same-sex lesbian motherhood is increasingly celebrated as evidence of Swedish gender and sexual exceptionalism and, on the other, queers who wish to challenge heteronormative gender disavow both the relationship between fertility and femininity, and that of pregnancy and parenthood. The author argues that in studying queer family formation, we must move beyond addressing heteronormativity and begin studying how gender, sexuality, race and class get reproduced in queer kinship stories.

This book examines how a geopolitical grammar works in Nordic and Russian academic feminism and how understandings of a joint feminist “we”, of “Nordicness” and ideas of an “East/West-Divide” shape the formation of gender research fields. In three distinct chapters, each with a different approach to theories, methods and source materials, the book explores the implications of language, translation, and situated knowledges in the development of gender research as a geopolitical area and particular academic space during the mid-1970s until 2005, and considers feminist knowledge production as a field of power relations.

From the intersection of queer studies, area studies and critical kinship studies, this groundbreaking collection explores queer (non-heterosexual) family practices and kinship formations from converging perspectives and in a range of geopolitical settings around the Baltic Sea region and beyond. Empirically grounded and in critical dialogue with international scholarship, the volume simultaneously places (queer) kinship and reproduction at the centre of area studies and contributes to the de-centring of Western, Anglo-American theoretical and empirical dominance within feminist and queer kinship studies. 

Using examples from Denmark, Finland, Greece, Norway, Poland and  Sweden, this book highlights the importance of geopolitics in the understandings of queer kinship. Contributors explore the centrality of sexuality in assisted reproduction, family-making and other forms of queer/ing kinship and intimacy by focusing on equality, the role of the state, of technologies in making and breaking kinship, and further the theoretical discussion on matters of mourning, inter-generationality, embodiment, labour and citizenship.  

The aim of this paper is to examine how women who mosh to hardcore music understand moshing as a meaning making activity and how they understand and negotiate body, gender and space in their relation to moshing. I have done a feminist phenomenological analysis on four deep interviews with women who mosh based on the theories of Sara Ahmed and Iris Young. I have found that my informants discuss moshing in terms of feelings of adrenaline, euphoria, strength and emotional ventilation. They break the norms of female bodily performance at the same time as they feel uncomfortable with how their bodies stand out in relation to the white and male bodies as a norm in hardcore spaces. The women then use how their own and other bodies that stand out as a way to access space and as a ground for resistance, both against the room as masculine and as white. The women show a clear feministic orientation and use a violent bodily performance as a feminist practice.

The purpose of this study is to shed light on how masculinity is portrayed in the selected material, namely the Här kommer [...] series where Halvan is the main character. The study intends to answer the question of what type or types of masculinities that may take up most space and what thatmight mean. To get aswers to the studys questions, three theories are used - temporality and lifelines based on Ahmeds (2006) and Halberstams (2005) theories concerning time and the expected timeline, the hegemonic masculinity with Connell (2008) and the theory of the gender equal Swedish man by Gottzén and Jonsson (2012). The study is based on a qualitative content analysis as well as an image analysis where the material consisted of all books from the series, with a focus on a few selected scenes where I found that the studys questions could be answered. The study found that Halvans daydreams about the fututre are based on norms and expectations regarding the expected timeline, which is based around heteronormativity, among other things. Halvans masculinity also differs from other men in the books where the book series present the idea of the gender equal Swedish man as desirable and normative. This and Halvans desire for vehicles and technology together constitute the ultimate masculinity. The portrayal of masculinity has changed through the book series in that Halvan has been allowed to take up somewhat less space. His colleagues with their vehicles and tasks have been given more space, however, Halvans own maskulinity has become clearer and we can see more noticeable traces of the Swedish hegemonic masculinity in Halvans character.

This essay aims to examine how RFSL (the swedish national association for sexual orientations) is constructing sexsellers by looking at how sexsellers are described in one of RFSL’s texts. The method used in this paper is Fairclough's discourse analysis which will be applied on one text from the website of RFSL. With this method it is possible to study the textual, the discursive and the social practices of the chosen text. The theoretical framework will be Foucault's power theory, the normalization principle and Gayle Rubin’s charmed circle. The result of this study shows that RFSL is forming discourses which construct sexsellers as either voluntary or involuntary. A voluntary sexseller includes sexsellers who see themselves as sexworkers or people who sell sexual services. By speaking of sexsellers as voluntary, RFSL is forming both a liberal feminist point of view but also a postfeminist point of view, and by speaking of sexsellers as involuntary a radical feminist point of view is formed. Therefore RFSL allows three kinds of sexsellers to be heard in their text: a working, a voluntary and an exposed sexseller.