Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Postcolonial feministic theory'

I den här studien analyseras 16 kvinnors självframställningar i antologin Sverige – en (o)besvarad kärlekshistoria ur ett postkolonialt feministiskt perspektiv där mellanförskap och identitet är centrala teman. Syftet med analysen är att finna hur den besvarade alternativt obesvarade kärleken till Sverige blir synliga i författarnas texter och hur det har påverkat dem. Texterna har jämförts med varandra för att finna olika mönster. Framträdande mönster är kritiken av dikotomiskt tänkande, ett tankesätt som har försatt kvinnorna i ett mellanförskap där majoriteten av dem inte känner en besvarad kärlek från Sverige. Kvinnorna har haft olika sätt att hantera sitt mellanförskap. För somliga av dem har det inneburit problem med att känna tillhörighet och för andra har mellanförskapet varit positivt eftersom det har blivit en styrka att se sin identitet som mångkulturell. Vidare ger studien förslag på hur undervisningen på olika sätt kan stärka elever i mellanförskap genom bland annat gemensam litteraturläsning med postkolonial feministisk teori som utgångspunkt.

This thesis is a postcolonial feminist discourse analysis of Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy. Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy is unique to the world, but it is not the only case of incorporating a gender perspective as a central part of national or international politics. Feminism and gender perspectives are increasingly receiving attention and space in global politics. The Swedish case could therefore inform us about where politics are heading. Previous research on the Feminist Foreign Policy has aimed mainly at examining what it means and what challenges it likely will face. The aim of the analysis is to examine whether and to what extent the discourse of the Feminist Foreign Policy interrelates with gendered postcolonial narratives. Feminist scholars have for decades argued for the need to recognize the ways in which gendered and postcolonial structures are interrelated. Excluding either a gender or postcolonial analysis will convey only part of the problem. The method used is discourse analysis, or more specifically, critical discourse analysis. Discourse is an essential part of our social world. It is both constituted by and constitutive of how we understand our surroundings. Critical discourse analysis in particular is a useful method to illuminate power relations in society and how they are reproduced or countered through discourse. Two opposing ideal types are developed based on ideas from postcolonial theory and postcolonial feminist theory: gendered postcolonial discourse and fully feminist discourse. The ideal types are used in order to measure whether, how and to what extent the Feminist Foreign Policy interacts with gendered postcolonial discourse. The analysis looks at official documents, statements and speeches of different forms issued or produced by the foreign office. Using several texts, with varied aims and settings, the material will arguably be representative of the Feminist Foreign Policy. The results show that the Feminist Foreign Policy cannot be placed exclusively in either ideal type. The texts interrelate with gendered postcolonial discourse, reproducing unequal relations of power. Conversely, other parts of the texts are fully feminist, both transforming discourse and contributing to knowledge about what it can look like when discourse manages to avoid gendered postcolonial narratives.

This dissertation explores postcolonial fiction that reflects the structural situation of a genocidal number of third-world women who are being trafficked for sexual purposes from postcolonial countries into the global north—invariably, gender, class and race play a crucial role in their exploitation. Above all, these women share a systemic disposability and invisibility, as the business relies on the victim’s illegality and criminality to generate maximum revenues. My research suggests that the presence of these abject women is not only recognized by ideological and repressive state apparatuses on every side of the trafficking scheme (in the form of governments, military establishments, juridical systems, transnational corporations, etc.) but is also understood as necessary for the current neoliberal model to thrive undisturbed by ethical imperatives. Beginning with the turn of the twentieth century, then, I analyze sexual slavery transnationally by looking at James Joyce’s “Eveline,” Therese Park’s A Gift of the Emperor, Mahasweta Devi’s “Douloti the Bountiful,” Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon, Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, concentrating on the political, economic, and social discourses in which the narratives are immersed through the lens of Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial theory. By interrogating these postcolonial narratives, my project reexamines the sex slave-trafficker-consumer triad in order to determine the effect of each party’s presence or absence from the text and the implications in terms of the discourses their representations may tacitly legitimize. At the same time, this work investigates the type of postcolonial stories the West privileges and the reasons, and the subjective role postcolonial theory plays in overcoming subaltern women’s exploitation within the current neocolonial context. Overall, I interrogate the role postcolonial literature plays as a means of achieving (or not) social change, analyze the purpose of artists in representing exploitative situations, identify the type of engagement readers have with these characters, and seek to understand audiences’ response to such literature. I look at authors who have attempted to discover fruitful avenues of expression for third-world women, who, despite increasingly constituting the bulk of the work force worldwide, continue to be exploited and, in the case of sex trafficking, brutally violated.

In this thesis, I focus on the relationship between gender and nation in post-colonial India, through the lens of Muslim women, who are located on the margins of both religious community and nation. The contradictory embrace of a composite national identity with an ascriptive religious identity, has had critical consequences for Muslim women, to whom the state has simultaneously granted and denied equal citizenship. The impact is felt primarily in the continuing disadvantage of women through the denial of gender equality within the family. The state's regulation of gender roles and family relationships in the 'private sphere', inevitably has determined women's status as citizens in the public sphere.
In this context, the notion of citizenship becomes a focus of any exploration of the legal status of Muslim women. I explore the idea of citizenship as a space of subaltern secularism that opens up the possibility for Indian women of all faiths, to reclaim a selfhood, free from essentialist definitions of gender interests and prescripted identities. I evaluate the realm of constitutional law as a counter-hegemonic discourse that can challenge existing power structures. Finally, I argue for the need to acknowledge the hybridity of culture and the modernity of tradition, to emphasise the integration of the colonial past with the postcolonial present. Such an understanding is critical to the feminist emancipatory project as it reveals the manner in which oppositional categories of public/private, true Muslim woman/feminist, Muslim/Other, Western/Indian, and modern/traditional, have been used to deny women equal rights.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD (Women and Gender Studies)
Events in the last few years on the global stage have heralded a new era for domestic workers, which may afford them the voice as subaltern that has been silent until now. Despite being constructed as silent and as subjects without agency, unionised domestic workers organised themselves globally, becoming more visible and making their voices heard. This culminated in the promulgation of the International Labour Organisation's (ILO) Convention No.189 on Decent Work for Domestic Workers (or C189) in September 2013, and the establishment of the International Domestic Workers' Federation (IDWF) in October 2013. This broadening of the scope of domestic workers' activism has not yet received sufficient attention in academic research. These two historic events on their own have the potential to change the dominant discourse around domestic workers, by mobilising workers with agency to challenge the meaning of the political ideologies informing their identity positions of exploitation and subjugation.

More than a decade has now passed since the concept of “gender mainstreaming” and polices addressing a gender perspective first appeared on the international agenda, yet evaluations on these policies’ implementation show that progress has been slow in the field of humanitarian assistance. As executive workers, the humanitarian field staff have in policy documents been identified as crucial actors in the “gender mainstreaming” work, however, no previous research have been found evaluating their achievements in the field. This study examines if formulated gender policies, within Swedish humanitarian organisations and agencies, are implemented and translated into action in the field. This was carried out by investigating Swedish humanitarian fieldworkers’ gender sensitiveness and experiences of working with a gender perspective in the field. The empirical material was collected from qualitative deep interviews with ten fieldworkers from four different humanitarian organisations/agencies. The interview data was then analysed by using a theoretical framework based on Gender theory, Postcolonial feminist theory and Policy implementation theory. The results show that even though most of the interviewed fieldworkers mean that they are aware of gender issues and the importance of using a gender perspective in the field, they have a general low understanding of the gender concept. An emerging “cultural sensitivity versus gender policy implementation” dilemma was valid and possibly affecting the informants’ attempts to act on formulated policies. Moreover, the method that the organisations/agencies use when educating staff on gender issues seem to have an impact on this dilemma. It became apparent that the fieldworkers underestimate their own responsibility in using a gender perspective in the field; at the same time the organisations/agencies overestimate their workers’ capacity to implement their gender policies. Much also indicate on how a still old-fashioned gender discourse is produced, and reproduced, in gender policy formulations and among the fieldworkers. In conclusion, it seems like a gap occur between the initial intention of a policy, its formulation, interpretation and the final intervention result.
Mer än ett decennium har passerat sedan begreppet "gender mainstreaming " och genus policys först dök upp på den internationella dagordningen. Trots detta visar utvärderingar att genomförandet av dessa policyer varit långsamt inom humanitärt- och katastrofbistånd. Som verkställande arbetare har personalen inom humanitär verksamhet i flera policydokument identifierats som viktiga aktörer för arbetet mot att implementera genus policys, dock har ingen tidigare forskning utvärderat deras faktiska utförande i fält. Studien undersöker huruvida svenska humanitära biståndsorganisationer- och myndigheters formulerade genuspolicys implementeras och omsätts till handling i fält. Detta görs genom att granska svenska humanitära fältarbetares genusmedvetenhet och erfarenheter av att arbeta med ett genusperspektiv i sina uppdrag. Det empiriska materialet samlades in från kvalitativa djupintervjuer med tio fältarbetare från fyra olika svenska organisationer/myndigheter. Materialet analyserades med hjälp av ett teoretiskt ramverk baserat på Genusteori, Postkolonial feministisk teori och teori kring policyimplementering. Resultaten visar att även om de flesta av de intervjuade fältarbetarna säger sig vara medvetna om begreppet genus, och vikten av att använda ett genusperspektiv i fält, har de en låg förståelse för innebörden av konceptet. Ett dilemma mellan ”kulturell känslighet” och ”implementering av genuspolicys” uppkom, där organisationernas/myndigheternas utbildningsmetod av ett genustänk möjligtvis har en förstärkande inverkan. Tydligt var att fältarbetarna verkar underskattar sitt eget ansvar i att använda ett genusperspektiv i fält, samtidigt som organisationerna/myndigheterna överskattar sina anställdas förmåga att arbeta efter de formulerade policyerna. Mycket tyder också på att en fortfarande ganska otidsenlig könsdiskurs produceras och reproduceras både i formulerade genuspolicys, och bland fältarbetarna. Sammanfattningsvis verkar det som att det uppstår en klyfta mellan den initiala intentionen av en policy, dess utformning, tolkningen av denna och interventionens slutresultat.

We all have stories to share, to build, to pass around, to inherit, and to create. This story - the one I piece together now - is about a Thai-/Bengali-/Muslim-/American-/Feminist looking for home, looking to manage the tension and conflict of wanting to belong to her family and to her feminist community. This thesis focuses on the seemingly conflicting obligations to kinship on the one hand and to feminist practice on the other, a conflict where being a good scholar or activist is directly in opposition to being a good Asian daughter. In order to understand how and why these communities appear at odds with one another, I examine how the material spaces and psychological realities inhabited by specific hyphenated, fragmented subjects are represented (and misrepresented) in both popular culture and practical politics, arguing against images of the hybrid body that bracket its lived tensions. I argue that fantasies of home as an unconditional site of belonging and comfort distract us from the multiple communities to which hyphenated subjects must move between. Hyphenated Asian-/American bodies often find ourselves torn between nativism and assimilationism - having to neutralize, forsake, or discard parts of our identities. Thus, I reduce complicated, difficult ideas of being to the size of a thimble, to a question of loyalty between my Asian-/American history and my American-/feminist future, between my familial background and the issues that have become foregrounded for me during college, between the home from which I originate and the new home to which I wish to belong. To move with fluidity, I must - in collaboration with others - invent new stories of identity and belonging.
B.A. and B.S.
Bachelors
Office of Undergraduate Studies
Interdisciplinary Studies; Philosophy

In recent decades, international feminist activism and research has had significant success in pushing gender issues onto the international agenda and into global governance institutions and processes. The goal of gender equality is now widely accepted and codified in international legal instruments. While this appears to be a remarkable global success for feminism, widespread gender inequalities persist around the globe. This paradox has led scholars to question the extent to which feminist concepts and goals can retain their transformative potential when they are institutionalized in global governance institutions and processes. This thesis examines the institutionalization of feminist ideas in global governance through an analysis of how, and with what effects, gender equality norms are constructed, interpreted and applied in the global governance of refugees: a field that has thus far received little attention in the growing literature on feminism, gender and global governance. This aim is pursued through a case study of humanitarian aid practices in refugee camps in Bangladesh and Thailand. The study is based on interviews with humanitarian workers in these two contexts, and its theoretical framework is informed by postcolonial feminist theory and Foucauldian thought on power and governing. These analytical perspectives allows the thesis to capture how gender equality norms operate as governing tools, and situate the politics of gender equality in refugee camps in the context of global relations of power and marginalization. The findings of this thesis show that in the global governance of refugees, gender equality is rarely treated as a goal in its own right. The construction, interpretation and application of gender equality norms is mediated and shaped by the dominant governing projects in this field. Gender equality norms are either advocated on the basis of their usefulness as means for the efficient management of refugee situations, or as necessary components of a process of modernization and development of the regions from which refugees originate. These governing projects significantly limit the forms of social change and the forms of agency that are enabled. Nevertheless, gender equality norms do contribute to opening up new opportunities for refugee women and destabilizing local gendered relations of power, and they are appropriated and used by refugees in ways that challenge and go beyond humanitarian agendas.

This essay examines the use of literary theory when teaching literature before higher education. The objective isto see how and if the integration of literary theory facilitates students’ engagement with and understanding of literature. The study is conducted with the qualitative method of interviews. Four teachers, certified for upper secondary school, were deemed appropriate to interview about their current use of literary theory, as well as their attitudes towards an increased use of literary theory. Besides the data collected through interviews, this study finds its theoretical foundation in the literary theories feminist, Marxist and postcolonial theory as well as in the Swedish curriculum for English at upper secondary level. Presently, the teachers do not use literary theory distinctly; however, they do consider the use of literary theory together with literature to be beneficial for the students’ understanding of literature and the world around them. Teachers stated that while some students only will grasp the idea of the theories, other students will be able to use and apply them. The curriculum supports the use of literary theory in the core values for students of upper secondary level.

Violence against women continues to be an issue that severely impacts women worldwide. Since the global spread of the #MeToo movement in 2017, debates regarding this issue significantly increased. Yet the precise ways in which women are impacted by violence, heavily influenced by their unique and diverse aspects of identity, are often disregarded. By focusing on two of these aspects of identity, namely gender and nationality, and comparing the circumstances of sexual violence against women in Germany, Nigeria, and South Korea, this thesis aims to showcase the diverse experiences of ‘being a woman’ and what this implies regarding the issue of sexual violence against women. With an additional analysis of four important international conventions aimed at ameliorating women’s lives (UDHR, CEDAW, DEVAW, and BPfA) regarding their acknowledgement of this diversity and guided by three theories, namely Multi-Ethnic Feminism, Feminist Postcolonialism, and Intersectionality, this thesis highlights the necessity of including everyone and their unique experiences with all kinds of discrimination to adequately tackle an issue such as sexual violence against women.

The starting point of this thesis is that gender equality should be studied as an empirical field. After the Swedish general election in 2014 the newly formed government proclaimed itself to be the world’s first feminist government. This study aims to examine how gender equality is made and filled with meaning by this feminist government since 2014 and to analyse the results by making use of postcolonial feminist theory and relevant research. Carol Bacchis analytical strategy, “What´s the problem represented to be?” is used as the study’s methodological framework. This approach to critical policy analysis focuses on how governing takes place through problematizations within policy. The results of the study show that gender equality is made by problematizing a lack of regulation, a lack of knowledge, a lack of collaboration, wrongful designation, a lack of attention for certain groups as well as a lack of Swedish strategy. One of the most significant results drawn from the analyses confirms previous research findings that neoliberalism as well as ethnocentric discourses dominate this field of policy. This leads to the conclusions that Swedish Gender Equality Politics, through to its fragmentation is emptied of a specific content and direction as well as that Swedishness and Norms of Honor are created in an asymmetric-diametrically relationship.

This thesis investigates the counter-hegemonic formation of Danish-based transnational feminist curatorial collective Kuratorisk Aktion in a single-case study. It serves as a unique example, presenting how the collective engages to overcome the existing gap between curatorial aims and the implementation through curating. Their work and approach is shaped highly by their political mindset, aiming to resist tendencies of depoliticisation, right-wing populism or neoliberalism with the means of curating. Chantal Mouffe’s theory of radical democracy and her deliberations and notions concerning agonisms, citizenship, feminism, counter-hegemonic interventions and activism through art are used in order to contextualise and discuss the possibilities and limitations of the political work by Kuratorisk Aktion. An interview with the collective conducted by scholar Angela Dimitrakaki in 2010 as well as their realised curatorial projects enhanced the argumentation. The analysis exemplified, that over the years Kuratorisk Aktion has developed their personal and exceptional curatorial paradigm, which is able to counteract hegemonic structures. This reveals their radical democratic potential and aspiration through curating and the curatorial.

Under 1995 togs ett riksdagsbeslut om att skapa en stödform som möjliggjorde för partier med mandat i riksdagen att med Sida-finansierade projektmedel verka för att bygga upp partisystem i Östeuropa och i utvecklingsländer genom så kallade partianknutna organisationer (PAO). Dessa organisationer skall enligt ett regeringsbeslut från 1998 också arbeta med att särskilt uppmärksamma kvinnor i sina projekt. Jämställdhet har sedan mitten av 1990-talet varit ett av huvudmålen för svenskt bistånd och på senare år har jämställdhet kommit att utgöra en betydelsefull markör för svensk nationell identitet.

I uppsatsen studeras hur svenska nationella identiteter konstrueras i PAO:s biståndsarbete för jämställdhet, och med att särskilt uppmärksamma kvinnor. Syftet fokuserar på hur dessa föreställningar, sammanlänkade med idéer om kön och ’ras’, etableras och upprätthålls inom PAO-biståndet. Ett kompletterande syfte är att lyfta fram ambivalenser i konstruktionen av dessa identiteter, för att visa att organisering kring andra identiteter är möjligt. På det här sättet vill uppsatsen ifrågasätta förgivet tagna identiteter och sätta in dem i ett sammanhang där olika aspekter av identitetskonstruktioner inom bistånd kan diskuteras.

As Richard Thomas writes, “there is nothing like Star Trek…Of all the universes of science fiction, the Star Trek universe is the most varied and extensive, and by all accounts the series is the most popular science fiction ever” (1). Ever growing (the latest Star Trek film will be released in Spring 2013) and embodied in hundreds of novels and slash fanfiction, decades of television and film, conventions, replicas, toys, and a complete Klingon language Star Trek is nothing short of a cultural phenomenon. As Harrison et al argue in Enterprise Zones: Critical Positions on Star Trek, the economic and cultural link embodied in the production of the Star Trek phenomena “more than anything else, perhaps, makes Star Trek a cultural production worth criticizing” (3). A utopian universe, Star Trek invites its audience to imagine a future of amicable human and alien life, often pictured without the ravages of racism, sexism, capitalism and poverty. However, beyond the pleasure of watching, I would ask what do the representations within Star Trek reveal about our popular culture? In essence, what are the values, meaning and beliefs about gender, race, sexuality and disability being communicated in the text? I will explore the ways that the Star Trek universe simultaneously encourages and discourages us from thinking about race, gender, sexuality and disability and their intersections. In other words, this work will examine the ways that representations of identity are challenged and reinforced by Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager. This work will situate Star Trek specifically within the science fiction genre and explore the importance of its utopian standpoint as a frame for representational politics. Following Inness, (1999), I argue that science fiction is particularly rich textual space to explore ideas of women and gender (104). As Sharona Ben-Tov suggests in The Artificial Paradise: Science Fiction and American Reality (1995) science fiction’s “position at a unique intersection of science and technology, mass media, popular culture, literature, and secular ritual” offers critical insight into social change (ctd. in Inness 104). I extend Inness and Ben-Tov here to assert that the ways in which science fiction’s rich and “synthetic language of metaphor” illustrate and re-envision contemporary gender roles also offers a re-imagination of assumptions regarding race, sexuality and disability (Inness 104). Extending current scholarship (Roberts 1999, Richards 1997, Gregory 2000, Bernardi 1998, Adare 2005, Greven 2009, Wagner and Lundeen 1998, Relke 2006, and Harrison et all 1996), I intend to break from traditions of dichotomous views of The Next Generation and Voyager as either essentially progressive or conservative. In this sense, I hope to complicate and question simplistic conclusions about Star Trek’s ideological centre. Moreover, as feminist media theorist Mia Consalvo notes, previous analyses of Star Trek have explored how the show constructs and comments on conceptions of gender and race as well as commenting on economic systems and political ideologies (2004). As such, my analysis intends to apply an intersectional approach as well as offer a ‘cripped’ (McRuer 2006) reading of Star Trek in order to provide a deeper understanding of how identities are represented both in science fiction and in popular culture. Both critical approaches – especially the emphasis on disability, sexuality and intersectional identities are largely ignored by past Trek readings. That is to say, while there is critical research on representations in Star Trek (Roberts 1999, Bernardi 1998) much of it is somewhat uni-dimensional in its analysis, focusing exclusively on gender or racialized representation and notably excluding dimensions of sexuality and ability. Moreover, as much of the writing on the Star Trek phenomena has focused on The Original Series (TOS) and The Next Generation this work will bring the same critical analysis to the Voyager series. To perform this research a feminist discourse analysis will be employed. While all seven seasons and 178 episodes of The Next Generation series as well as all seven seasons and 172 episodes of Voyager have been viewed particular episodes will be selected for their illustrative value.

This study analyses the history of a large hydroelectric scheme – the Great Ruaha power project in Tanzania. The objective is to establish why and how this specific scheme came about, and as part of this to identify the key actors involved in the decision-making process, including the ideological contexts within which they acted. Although the Tanzanian actors and the World Bank (IBRD) are discussed, main focus is on the Swedish actors on project level.Kidatu, the first phase of the Great Ruaha power project (constructed between1970-1975), became the first large-scale hydropower station in Tanzania. As such, it paved the way for Tanzanian entrance into the Big Dam Era and significant changes within the Tanzanian landscape. As well as the dry river bed at Kidatu, and the small reservoir that precedes it, the Great Ruaha power project also involved the creation of a huge artificial lake, the Mtera reservoir. The Kidatu hydropower station was the first large undertaking within Swedish bilateral aid, and implied the takeover of control of hydropower construction in Tanzania by Swedish enterprises, replacing the enterprises of the former colonial power. A hydropower plant is a complex technoscientific artefact. The construction of a hydropower plant is preceded by a large number of technological choices, scientific prestudies and estimations of costs and revenues. A hydropower plant is also a complex social creation, and is as such filled with social actors engaged in conflicts, compromises and power structures. The decision to construct Kidatu hydropower station was a result of negotiations and activities within what is called “development assistance”. This brings in yet another dimension, the political one, involving export and import of technology, foreign capital, and foreign influence in decision-making processes, as well as ideas about how to bring development and progress to a people supposed to be living in “poverty and misery”. The study is divided into three main parts. The first part analyses the context of Swedish development assistance in the support to the construction of hydropower plants. This part discusses Swedish state-supported hydropower exploitation of indigenous people’s territory within Sweden’s borders in the 20th century and the background of Swedish development assistance, from the 1950s to the early 1960s. The second part analyses the event of Swedish development assistance entering Tanzania and the Great Ruaha power project, with the main focus being on the period 1965 – 1970. The third part is an analysis of the technoscientific basis for the decisions taken to implement the Great Ruaha hydropower scheme. Main focus is on the period 1969-1974, discussed against the backdrop of precolonial and colonial studies. While focus is on the 1960s and 1970s, in both part two and three events in the 1980s and 1990s are discussed. The study shows that although Sweden was not a colonial power in Tanzania, colonial imagery, and relations to the colonial era, as well as Sweden’s background of internal colonialisation, exerted an influence on the decision-making process and the actors involved in the Great Ruaha power project.The study is mainly based on archival sources, complemented with oral sources from Tanzania and Sweden. Recognizing the complexity of large-scale hydropower and the attempts to control watercourses that large scale hydropower necessitates, in the specific context of decolonisation and development assistance that the decision-making process behind the Great Ruaha hydropower scheme reveals, the analysis of the actors involved is based on feminist and postcolonial perspectives.
QC 20100825

Den här studien vill bidra med kunskap kring normkritisk pedagogik inom dramapedagogiken i Sverige. Det genom att belysa det svenska DRACON-projektet ur ett normkritiskt perspektiv. Det svenska DRACON-projektet är en del av det internationella DRACON-projektet vars övergripande syfte var att bygga  en bro mellan drama och konflikthantering. I bakgrunden till den här studien beskrivs dramapedagogik, svensk dramaforskning och internationell dramaforskning utifrån kritiska teorier. Normkritisk pedagogik är en kritisk pedagogik som vänder blicken mot maktstrukturer och privilegier istället för att fokusera på minoriteter eller förtryckta grupper. I det teoretiska perspektivet förklaras och fördjupas begreppet normkritisk pedagogik utifrån feministisk teori, queerteori, postkolonial teori och kritiska vithetsstudier, funktionalitet, intersektionalitet och kritisk pedagogik.   Syftet med den här undersökningen var att genom ett kritiskt makt- och identitetsperspektiv belysa det svenska DRACON-programmet. Det utifrån forskningsfrågorna: Vilka föreställningar om makt och identitet finns inbyggda det svenska DRACON-programmet? Hur förhåller sig dessa föreställningar till den normkritiska pedagogikens syn på makt och identitet?   Studien genomfördes utifrån textanalys av boken DRACON i skolan. Analysen strukturerades med hjälp av en analysmall. Resultatet tyder på att DRACON-programmet i Sverige är inkluderande och försöker ta tillvara på alla deltagares erfarenheter. Samtidigt verkar programmet sakna ett ifrågasättande av kön och genus och fördjupade analyser kring makt. Spår av postkolonialism framträder i någon enstaka lek.
The general aim of this study is to contribute to the knowledge of, so called, norm-critical pedagogy (normkritisk pedagogik) as part of Drama in Education in Sweden. This through looking at the Swedish DRACON-project from a norm-critical point of view. The Swedish DRACON-project is a part of the international DRACON-project which aimed at building a bridge between drama in education and conflict management. Norm-critical pedagogy is a Scandinavian term for critical pedagogy that focuses on the structures of power and privilege, rather than the oppressed. The pedagogy is explained in this paper and has its roots in queer pedagogy, queer theory, feminist theory, postcolonial theory and intersectional perspectives.   The aim of this study was to look at the Swedish DRACON-project from the critical point of view of power, privilege and identity.  The study examines the following questions: What conceptions of power and identity can be found in the Swedish DRACON-program? How do these conceptions relate to norm-critical perspectives of power, privilege and identity?   The examination is done through text analysis of the book DRACON i skolan(DRACON in school). The results indicate that the Swedish DRACON-project is inclusive and tries to seize the experiences of all participants. At the same time the project seems to lack the questioning of gender and the immersing of analyzing power structures.

Muslims have the starring role in the mass media’s curriculum on otherness, which circulates in-between local and global contexts to powerfully constitute subjectivities. This study inquires into what it is like to be a female, Muslim student in Ontario, in this post 9/11 discursive context. Seven young Muslim women share stories of their high schooling experiences and their sense of identity in interviews and focus group sessions. They also respond to images of Muslim females in the print media, offering perspectives on the intersections of visual media discourses with their lived experience. This interdisciplinary project draws from cultural studies, postcolonial feminist theory, and post-reconceptualist curriculum theorizing. Working with auto/ethno/graphy, my own subjectivity is also brought into the study to trouble researcher-as-knower and acknowledge that personal histories are implicated in larger social, cultural, and historical processes. Using bricolage, I compose a hybrid text with multiple layers of meaning by juxtapositing theory, image, and narrative, leaving spaces for the reader’s own biography to become entangled with what is emerging in the text. Issues raised include veiling obsession, Islamophobia, absences in the school curriculum, and mass media as curriculum. Muslim females navigate a complex discursive terrain and their identity negotiations are varied. These include creating Muslim spaces in their schools, wearing hijab to assert their Muslim identity, and downplaying their religious identity at school. I argue for the need to engage students and teacher candidates in complicated conversations on difference via auto/ethno/graphy, pedagogies of tension, and epistemologies of doubt. Educators and researchers might also consider the possibilities of linking visual media literacy with social justice issues.

This is an investigation into the ways that postmodern theories and feminist theories have both failed to learn from each other and yet also reveal the blindness' implicit in each other. Postmodern theory has consistently failed to engage gender in any significant way and feminist theory has consisted failed to find the usefulness of the methods and questions posed by postmodern theorists. Both approaches have failed to address the very real and important perspectives of the post colonial others who have been addressing the questions of race, gender, history, and agency for hundred of years. The second half of this investigation looks specifically at the work of three African American women writers, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor and Gayle Jones, in their most recent work. All three novels, Beloved, Mama Day and Corregidora are historical novels concerned with the legacy of slavery, and these narratives themselves exceed all the expectation for postmodern theory and feminist theory in inviting us to understand the relationship between history, memory and the now. In effect the work of these writers succeeds in "theorizing the present" in ways that both feminism and postmodernism fail.

The Subaltern Clinic explores a certain legacy of unreason that Sigmund Freud identified throughout the course of his writings as the "death drive," or the compulsion to repeat. In Freud's work, the death drive is often thought as the opposite of the pleasure principle, which situates the pleasure-unpleasure binary at the center of psychoanalytical thinking and Freud's conceptualization of the psyche as well as morality, ethics, and civilization. The Subaltern Clinic traces a legacy of the death drive and a series of thematic concerns that emerge from it, specifically the instability of the pleasure-unpleasure binary that ostensibly upholds the "principle of reason," through a colonial-postcolonial archive. In doing so, the dissertation attends to those subaltern figures who are constituted as the "unreason" of society, particularly the mentally ill, women, and homosexuals.

In particular, the dissertation looks to the intersection of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, specifically to Jacques Derrida's engagements with Freud's "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," to argue that deconstruction needs to be thought of as a marginal and politicized form of psychoanalytic thinking, the stakes of which emerge through Derrida's readings of Freud's death drive. The dissertation follows the thread of these readings to consider the problems of difference, violence, sadism and masochism, and anxiety in the work of colonial and postcolonial practitioners of psychoanalysis as well as postcolonial artists and novelists. The Subaltern Clinic makes the argument that an attention to the legacy of the death drive in the postcolonial archive allows for a more robust critique of postcolonial reason, which would attend to questions of ethics and aesthetics.

Dissertation

While dominant International Relations (IR) theory has constructed the concept of security in such a way that excludes economic sanctions from considerations of violence, the track record of embargo tells a different story, one with a significantly higher death toll. This project challenges the borders of the hegemonic IR discourse to make room for a theoretical and political account of the deadly impacts of sanction regimes. Through a discourse analysis of IR theory, using Laclau and Mouffe’s holistic discourse theory, it looks to the spaces of meaning negotiation emerging from feminist IR theory. The renegotiated concepts of human security and structural violence make visible economic sanctions as acts of violence, and displace the binary oppositions of international/domestic, military/economic, public/private which shield embargo from the sight of its own violence. Having broken embargo out of its conceptually locked box, this project pushes further, and interrogates the connections of embargo and empire. Embargo functions to uphold imperial control and Western interests, while (re)producing racist colonial narratives. While deconstructing and reconstructing three competing understandings of embargo – embargo-as-nonviolent, embargo-as-violence, and embargo-as-imperial – I interrogate the political implications of hegemonic ways of knowing. I argue that, by challenging the hegemony of IR, we can unmask the practice of embargo, and locate its violent role in upholding imperial structures of power.
Graduate

This dissertation explores how the contemporary Anglophone novel asks its readers to imagine and respond to disposable life as it emerges in our present-day biopolitical landscape. As the project frames it, disposable life is not just life that is disposed of; it is life whose disposal is routine and unremarkable, even socially and legally sanctioned for such purposes as human consumption, scientific knowledge-production, and economic and political gain. In the novels considered, disposability is tied to excess--to the "too many" who cannot be counted, much less individuated on a case-by-case basis.

This project argues that the contemporary novel forces a global readership to confront the mechanisms of devaluing life that are part of everyday existence. And while the factory-farmed animal serves as the example of disposable life par excellence, this project frames disposability as a form of normalized violence that has the power to operate across species lines to affect the human as well. Accordingly, each chapter examines the contemporary condition of disposability via a different figure of disposable life: the nonhuman (the animal in J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals and Disgrace), the replicated human (the clone in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go), the woman (in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy), and the postcolonial subject (the victim of industrial disaster in Indra Sinha's Animal's People and political violence in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost). Chapter by chapter, the dissertation demonstrates how the contemporary novel both exposes the logic and operations of disposability, and, by mobilizing literary techniques like intertextual play and uncanny narration, offers up a set of distinctively literary solutions to it.

The dissertation argues that the contemporary novel disrupts the workings of disposability by teaching its audience to read differently--whether, for instance, by destabilizing the reader's sense of mastery over the text or by effecting paradigm shifts in the ethical frameworks the reader brings to bear on the encounter with the literary work. Taken together, the novels discussed in this dissertation move their readership away from a sympathetic imagination based on the potential substitutability of the self for the other and toward a form of readerly engagement that insists on preserving the other's irreducible difference. Ultimately, this project argues, these modes of reading bring those so-called disposable lives, which are abjected by dominant social, economic, and political frameworks, squarely back into the realm of ethical consideration.

Dissertation

The “Girl Effect” is becoming a growing global movement that assumes young women are catalysts capable of bringing social and economic change to their families, communities and countries, particularly in the Two-Thirds World. The evolving discourse associated with the Girl Effect movement holds implications for sport, gender and development (SGD) programs. Increasingly, SGD interventions are funded and implemented by transnational corporations (TNCs) as part of the mounting portfolio of global corporate social engagement (GCSE) initiatives in development. Drawing on postcolonial feminist international relations theory, cultural studies of girlhood, sociology of sport and governmentality studies, the purpose of this study was to explore: a) how young women in Eastern Uganda experience SGD programs; and b) how constellations of aid relations among a sport transnational corporation (STNC), international non-governmental organization (INGO), and southern non-governmental organization (SNGO) impacted and influenced the ways that SGD programs are executed, implemented and “taken up” by young women. This study used qualitative methods, including 35 semi-structured in-depth interviews with organizational staff members and young women, participant observation and document analysis in order to investigate how a SGD program in Eastern Uganda that is funded by a STNC and INGO used martial arts to build young women’s self-defence skills to help address gender-based, sexual and domestic violence. Results revealed martial arts programming increased confidence, challenged gender norms, augmented social networks and provided social entrepreneurial opportunities. At the same time, the program also attempted to govern young women’s sexuality and health, but did so while ignoring culturally distinct gender relations. Findings also highlighted the colonial residue and power of aid relations, STNC’s brand authority over SGD programming, the involvement of Western actors in locating “authentic” subaltern stories about social entrepreneurial work in SGD, and how the politics of the “global” sisterhood is enmeshed in saving “distant others” in gender and development work. Overall, this study found that the drive for GCSE, when entangled with neo-liberal globalization, impels actors working in SGD to look to social innovation and entrepreneurship as strategies for survival in an increasingly competitive international development climate.

Women's rights and their position became part of political and specialized discussions already at the end of Ottoman empire and remain such during establishing new Turkish republic as well during accession dialogue of Turkey to the European Union or joining the global women's human rights regime. However, I will argue, that this legislative changes are not sufficient for improvement of women's position within society, which is so trongly influenced by Islamic traditional culture. Therefore, in this work I will try to search for the roots of this conflict between Islamic traditional and modern society and their impact on women's position in Turkey. To do so, I will use qualitative content analysis of feminist and postcolonialist texts and also will focus on historic context. At the same time I will examine how contemporary Turkish society, which is in the first place focused on collective identity, deal with individual identity, that is necessary for promoting and claiming human rights for each person as individual.

This dissertation aims to create a scholarly space where a seventy-five-year-old “special relationship” (1945-2020) between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United States is examined from an interdisciplinary comparativist perspective. I posit that a comparative study of Saudi and American fiction goes beyond the limitedness of global geopolitics and proves to uncover some new literary, sociocultural, and historical dimensions of this long history, while shedding some light on others. Saudi writers creatively challenge the inherently static and monolithic image of Saudi Arabia, its culture and people in the West. They also simultaneously unsettle the notion of homogeneity and enable us to gain new insight into self-perception within the local Saudi context by offering a wide scope of genuine engagements with distinctive themes ranging from spatiality, identity, ethnicity, and gender to slavery, religiosity and (post)modernity. On the other side, American authors still show some signs of ambivalence towards the depiction of the Saudi (Muslim/Arab) Other, but they nonetheless also demonstrate serious effort to emancipate their representations from the confining legacy of (neo)Orientalist discourse and oil politics by tackling the concepts of race, alterity, hegemony, radicalism, nomadism and (un)belonging.

Contemporary Canadian prairie women poets write about the mother figure to counter maternal suppression and the homogenization of maternal representations in literature. Critics, like Marianne Hirsch and Andrea O’Reilly, insist that mothers tell their own stories, yet many mothers are unable to. Daughter and mother stories, Jo Malin argues, overlap. The mother “becomes a subject, or rather an ‘intersubject’” in the text (2). Literary depictions of daughter-mother or mother-child intersubjectivities, however, are not confined to auto/biographical or fictional narratives. As a genre and potential site for representing maternal subjectivities, poetry continues to reside on the margins of motherhood studies and literary criticism. In the following chapters, I examine the writing strategies of selected poets and their representations of mothers specific to three transformative occasions: mourning mother-loss, becoming a mother, and reclaiming a maternal lineage. Several daughter-poets adapt the elegy to remember their deceased mothers and to maintain a connection with them. In accord with Tanis MacDonald and Priscila Uppal, these poets resist closure and interrogate the past. Moreover, they counter maternal absence and preserve her subjectivity in their texts. Similarly, a number of mother-poets begin constructing their mother-child (self-other) relationship prior to childbirth. Drawing on Lisa Guenther’s notions of “birth as a gift of the feminine other” and welcoming the stranger (49), as well as Emily Jeremiah’s link between “‘maternal’ mutuality” and writing and reading practices (“Trouble” 13), I investigate poetic strategies for negotiating and engaging with the “other,” the unborn/newborn and the reader. Other poets explore and interweave bits of stories, memories, dreams and inklings into their own motherlines, an identification with their matrilineage. Poetic discourse(s) reveal the limits of language, but also attest to the benefits of extra-linguistic qualities that poetry provides. The poets I study here make room for the interplay of language and what lies beyond language, engaging the reader and augmenting perceptions of the maternal subject. They offer new ways of signifying maternal subjectivities and relationships, and therefore contribute to the ongoing research into the ever-changing relations among maternal and cultural ideologies, mothering and feminisms, and regional women’s literatures.
May 2016