The main aim of this study is to examine the political debate in Sweden around a potentionalcriminalization of buying sex abroad. A second additional aim is to analyze the debate from anintersectional feminist gender perspective, by bringing attention to ideas about gender, ethnicity andpower expressed in the empirical material.The questions at issue are:What are the arguments for and against the potentional criminalization of buying sex abroad andwhich central discursive battles can be discerned throughout the debate?What impact do ideas about gender and power have on the construction of a general advocatediscourse versus a general antagonist discourse?The methodological point of departure is Critical Discourse Analysis, drawing on the theories ofNorman Fairclough, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The empirical material consists of 27articles and editorials publicized in Swedish newspapers between January 2011 and November2014.The result shows that the polemics manifested in the debate are based on different ideas aboutgender, ethnicity and power. A crucial discursive battle stands between human rights andinternational law as a superior principle.

This thesis takes as its point of departure the Swedish governmental family policy and the debate on the proposed reform ?vårdnadsbidraget?. The supporters of the reform present it as something that will increase the freedom of choice for families and benefit the children, whereas the opponents warn for decreased equality and a return to the male breadwinner-model.From a constructivist perspective, language is closely related to power through defining and ascribing meaning to reality. By applying a feminist political theory on the debate within the Swedish national parliament 2007/2008 and conducting a discourse analysis, the aim of this paper is to analyse which concepts are used and how they construct to what makes a family within the political debate ? is there any difference or similarity between the view of the opponents and the supporters of ?vårdnadsbidraget??The main conclusion of this paper is that even though the political ideal and rhetorical concepts differ between the supporters and the opponents, they still constitute the heterosexual nuclear family as an obvious norm in family politics.

Officially, the EU gender policy since 2000 has been guided by the strategy of Gender Mainstreaming. This strategy aims to promote gender equality and is informed by a feminist ontology which stipulates that women are structurally subordinated.In this essay, I examine whether the European Commission has adequately adhered to this gender policy in its free trade negotiations with the ACP (African, Caribbean, and Pacific) countries as part of the Cotonou Agreement. As a result of my text analysis of documents related to the negotiations, opinion pieces by interested actors and policy papers of the EU, I find that the Commission does not act in accordance to its stated gender policy.To explain this discrepancy between policy intent and actions, I employ postliberal feminist theory and Robert Putnam's Two-Level Game Theory Model. By analyzing statistics and published research, I explore how gender issues are being represented politically on a domestic and international level.My findings show that a key cause of this discrepancy lies in the low levels of female participation in the political institutions of the EU and ACP; a lack of participation that is especially pronounced in the area of international economics. In explaining the constraints on female participation and the prospects of full implementation of the EU's gender policy in the international political economy, I emphasize the role of culturally and historically gendered institutions..

The aim of this paper is to describe, visualise- and analyse media’s discursive representations of female politicians in Swedish printed media. The focus of the analysis is to show if, and how these images can be understood and interpreted in terms of a socially constructed gender stereotyped suborder. The paper takes it's theoretical and methodological departure in the discourse analysis, which is combined with feminist political theory. Feminist political theory is concretised in the use of what Yvonne Hirdman calls the "gender system" which arranges the sexes into their respective genders and is based upon two rules/principles/logics: 1) the rule of distinctive separation, and 2) the male norm. Closely related to the aim of the paper lies also the critical theoretic assumption that people has to be aware of their own part in the production and reproduction of the discourse in order to change make a change.

This master thesis is discussing ten pony books from 2006 in relation to the heterosexual matrix. It contains a rather extensive research overview regarding horse riding from a gender perspective, pony books, traditional feminist studies of girls? books and queer readings of girls? and children?s literature. The aim of the empirical study is two folded; firstly to show how the girl protagonists? horse riding is presented in terms of masculinity and femininity (as defined by Natalie Koivula), secondly to analyze the relations between the girls appearing in the books from a queer perspective attempting to find some queer leakage in the depictions.

Offentliga diskurser har historiskt framställt feminitet och feminism som oförenliga med varandra. Feminitet framställs vanligen med en kvinna som besitter normativt feminina egenskaper, medan framställningen av feministen skildrat en radikal och manhaftig kvinna. Tidigare forskning visar att ordet feminist, för många individer, har en negativ laddning samt en otydlighet i innebörden av ordet. Detta speglar hur väl individen identifierar sig med feminism. Denna uppsats handlar om hur bloggaren UnderbaraClara, som aktör i den feministiska diskursen, på sin blogg positionerar sig till feminism och feminitet.

The aim with this essay is to compare strong girls in classic and modern literature and see how the differences in expectations on these girls are reflected in literature. This study is done with the aid of historical, feminist and new criticism..

En undersökning av den amerikanska feminist- och befrielseteologen Carter Heywards syn på andlighet och sexualitet. Undersökningen visar att Heyward med utgångspunkt i en relationell teologi ser både andlighet och sexualitet som lika viktiga aspekter av en autentiskt ömsesidig relation mellan människor..

Detta arbete undersöker om det fanns några grafiska preferenser hos barn i åldrarna 10-12 år samt om tidigare teorier inom den kognitiva utvecklingsteorin även går att applicera på spelgrafik. Som bakgrund till undersökningen går arbetet igenom forskning kring lärospel, immersion samt kognitiva utvecklingsteorier.Som material till undersökningen skapades en 3D-miljö med en så fotorealistisk grafik som möjligt, utöver detta samlades miljöbilder från elva andra spel med varierad grad av realism in. Undersökningen utfördes med hjälp av strukturerade intervjuer i vilka respondenterna fick svara på vilka miljöbilder de gillade bäst och vilka de gillade minst.Resultatet visade att kognitiva utvecklingsteorier inte går att applicera på spelgrafik då den avgörande faktorn om en miljö gillades eller inte var respondentens tidigare erfarenheter med spel, inte graden av realism. De grafiska preferenserna påverkades också av respondentens tidigare erfarenheter med spel. Slutsatsen skulle kunna bevisas bättre om en och samma miljö med varierad realism använts. .

The purpose of this study is to examine, from a gender perspective, Utbildningsradions TV-program Hej Litteraturen! in the light of feminist literature studies conducted during the last twenty years. I want to examine if the feminist literature studies have had any impact on contemporary teaching material regarding the question of how much space in time is given to men versus women and which female authors are included in the literary canon. Hej Litteraturen! is a TV program produced in 2010 intended for high school teaching of literature history.   By conducting a content analysis in which I divide the study in a quantitative and a qualitative component, I have investigated how much space and time is given to female writers and how they are presented. My analysis draws on use Yvonne Hirdman?s theory of the gender system.   The result shows that the female authors get 37 percent of the total reference space and 42 percent of the time-space. The program has sought to describe male and female authors equally and gives them weight and relevance to the sections in a similar manner.    In conclusion, Hej Litteraturen! is a tutorial which embraces parts of the criticisms that have existed in historical literature review papers in general and literary history textbooks in particular. Hej Litteraturen! has worked on gender aspects of the program and by picking up contemporary authors as reference points for literary history in the present, the program contributes not only not only in renewing the literary canon, but also in balancing out the dominance of male writers in the history of literature..

The main focus of this master?s thesis concerns the relation between subject representation, power and gender. Classification systems and subject heading lists are products of their cultural and social context and some subjects and disciplines are given a greater value than others. Our aim in this thesis is twofold; to discuss and critically analyse the prevailing gender norms that are expressed trough classification systems and subject heading lists and to examine how they manage to represent gender studies as a multidisciplinary subject in theory as well as in practice. We are also discussing the particular problems with the representation of multidisciplinary subjects in general.

Gender politics in Sweden is considered unique because gender policies (jämställdhet) are integrated into national politics and politicised both in the public and the private sphere. The Swedish case is therefore considered a role model by many feminist scholars.This view has been criticised by both post modern feminists and public administration scholars. Critics imply that the increased immigration and more heterogeneous population have led to a new challenge for state institutions. The Swedish model, with its universal welfare solutions, lacks the ability to recognise differences within groups. Universal solutions that treat everyone the same is no longer the most just way to treat people.The growing use of goal orientation in Swedish public administration has increased the civil servants discretion in the implementation process, and thereby the space for differentiated treatment.

AbstractInom forskningen kring personliga hemsidor på Internet har fokus främst riktats mot identitetskonstruktion, hur jaget presenteras och de psykologiska och sociologiska orsakerna som ligger bakom. Min studie tar ett steg ifrån detta och integrerar studiet av den personliga hemsidan med studiet av den politiska hemsidan. Jag undersöker relationen mellan det personliga och det politiska på svenska privata feministiska hemsidor. Jag har intervjuat fyra skapare och analyserat sju hemsidor. Sammantaget utgör min studie en empirisk neddykning i de svenska privata feministiska hemsidor som finns tillgängliga på Internet anno höst 2003 och vår 2004.

Sara Stridsberg?s novels Happy Sally, Drömfakulteten and Darling River are all brimming withliterary images of movement and becoming. The physical aspects of being a female subject inbecoming highlights the enfleshed body as important. Themes such as sexuality, power andviolence can be traced in the beautiful but most disturbing narratives of Stridsberg.The purpose of this study is to show the reader how the literary female characters aretranscending the physical borders of their bodies in order to become something more than what thehuman form allows them to be. Heteronormative sexuality, sickness, closeness to water andanimaling are bound together by the way they enact the female characters to stretch beyond thesurfaces of their skins.

This study looks at Laleh Bakhtiar´s ambitions when it comes to The Sublime Quran, her English translation of the Quran. It also contains a look at how it was received in English and American media, and how Bakhtiar and her like-minded defend her interpretation and translation against critics, focusing on verse 4:34..