The aim of the study was to investigate whether the phenomenon of internet drugs should be considered as a moral panic or as a real danger. We have mainly focused on how society perceives young people's use of these drugs. The study is based on a qualitative approach and we have used structured interviews. The interviews were conducted with three different categories of professionals who in different ways have contact with parts of our study in their professional capacity. These are: officials, commentators, and researchers.

Previous studies have pointed out the potential risks involved with targeting homosexual consumers by using ads with homosexual imagery in mainstream media. Many of these studies have indicated that there may be drawbacks with exposing heterosexuals to these kinds of advertisements. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether this is true for all groups of heterosexual consumers. An experimental study was carried out to examine the effects of explicit homosexual imagery on a heterosexual group with a generally positive attitude towards homosexuality. Empirical evidence suggests that homosexual imagery does not elicit any negative reactions among these heterosexual consumers.

This thesis has focused on the construction of homosexual parenthood in Swedish law and preparatory work. The purpose was to describe the norms about legal parenthood and examine if and how homosexual parenthood was included in the normative parenthood. The study was jurisprudential and based on methods such as sociology with a juridical focus and critical discourse analysis of the juridical texts. The theoretical framework was the critical discourse analysis as well as a queer perspective, both influenced by social constructionism and a poststructional theory. The conclusion of the study is that parenthood is described from what is presumably best for the child, which is two parents of different sexes and biological origin.

The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences of being a homosexual immigrant in the Swedish society. Our questions were how the interviewed homosexual immigrants experience being treated by the people in their surroundings and how they are influenced by their attitudes. We also wanted to know what kind of thoughts they have about affiliation considering origin and sexuality, and what positive and negative aspects they experience from the combination of being both homosexual and immigrants.To get the answers to these questions we used a qualitative method and interviewed seven homosexual immigrants between the ages of 25 and 40 years. We then compared our material with earlier studies of the living situation of homosexual immigrants in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. We also linked our findings to Goffman's stigma theory and to heteronormativity.The main result was that the combination of homosexuality and immigrantness can result in various difficulties.

This essay is a meta study of essays published at theInstitution of Library and Information Sciences at theUniversity of Borås in 2009. It aims to answer the followingquestions:What attitudes about new media can be found in essayswritten within SSLIS and are there traces of media panic inthe discourse?The theoretical framework of the essay is based on a theoryof the concept of media panic as defined by Kirsten Drotneret al, and the concept of moral panic as defined by StanleyCohen.The method used is derived from Klaus Krippendorff?sideas on content analysis, as published in the book ContentAnalysis. The method in this study uses computerizedsearches for target words. The target words used were:Internet, web, e-, blogg, facebook and twitter.

This thesis is a queer masculinity reading of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?s short story collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894). The analysis focuses on the dissonances, tensions and queerness that reside within the text itself. This has been done from my problem statement: How is Sherlock Holmes and John Watson?s sexuality and masculinity portrayed within the boundary of the text? What is being said, what is hidden, and what is dealt with silently? To reveal these queer parts this analysis has been focused around five themes: the late Victorian male, the Woman, countertypes and decadence, the homosocial sphere and sexuality.

The thesis aims to study how rainbows families are being treated by the authorities and the surroundings. It focuses on how homosexual parents are met in society. Although, homosexuals have the legal right to have a family and enter into marriage, the social norms are still far behind and rainbows families are seen as ?the others? and abnormal.  Earlier researches have been studding how the authorities still assumes that every family are living in a heterosexual family constellation. By this assumption they exclude families who are not living in a heterosexual family.

Purpose This thesis tries to create an understanding of how male homosexual entrepreneurs, both as persons and as a concept, relates to the fact that entrepreneurship, as well as the society as a whole, is heteronormative. Moreover, it examines by what methods the male homosexual entrepreneurs cope with the seemingly paradox of a homosexual man who also is an entrepreneur. Method The method has been qualitative from a social construction-point of view. We have made semi-structured interviews with nine male homosexual entrepreneurs and structured the findings from the interviews with a computer programme and mind mapping techniques. We have compared the structured findings with theories, in an abducting manner, to find out an answer to the purpose of this thesis.

In our study we examined recurrent patterns and changes in the representation ofhomosexual persons in Swedish daily newspapers 1987, 1997 and 2007.We analysed articles about HIV-infected persons and articles with a view to portray thelife conditions of gay and lesbian persons from the three different years. We chose toonly analyze news articles that intend to represent real human beings, which mean thatwe did not analyze reports that only reproduce abstract knowledge from authorities.With analytical tools from semiotics and discourse analysis we identified some recurrentpatterns in the representation of homosexual people. We found that a recurrent pattern inthat when homosexual people are seen as groups, they are described as deviant,discriminated and some times as a threat. When portrayed as individuals the nonanonymouspersons appear in articles and pictures as normal, strong and healthy. Lesbianwomen are not represented in the articles from 1987, but in articles from 1997 and 2007they appear as unhappy when single and happy in a relationship.The results also showed some interesting differences in news representation ofhomosexual persons between the three investigated years.

This survey's main purpose is to highlight how the two Swedish newspapers Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter writes and describes four different school shootings. We wanted to find out if there is a general pattern of how school shootings are reported by the media. Two of the shootings occured in USA, Columbine and Virginia Tech, and two in Finland, Kauhajoki and Jokela. The analysis aims at three areas: the whole event, the perpetrator and the victim. We have used a qualitative content analysis with a semiotic model to examine the articles in the survey. The theories in the study is based upon views on social constructionism, media logic, stereotypization, representation, morale panic/media panic and media events.

The aim of our study was to examine how homosexual and heterosexual men and women are represented in the Swedish magazine QX, a magazine for gay, bisexual and transgender people. We wanted to find out what kind of roles the persons in QX appears in, and inquire the relationships that exist between them.We analyzed the texts in twelve magazines, from December 2008 to November 2009, in order to get the most current results as possible. We used a discourse analysis, with focus on identities, relationships and the representation of the world. Representations, gender, hegemonic masculinity and stereotypes have been significant theories to analyze our results.The results showed that the successful gay man is the most important person in QX. He is the perfect masculine macho fagot, who is highest in rank.

Purpose/aim: This study was performed in order to describe how Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) is reported in Swedish daily newspapers during a five-year period. MMA is a relative new sport in Sweden and it is important that the description by the Swedish daily newspapers is accurate and balanced. Then this sport will have the same opportunities to grow as already well-established sports in Sweden. Material/Method: The material consists of 159 articles from six different daily newspapers gathered from 2006-12-07 to 2011-12-07. Quantitative content analysis is used to investigate how the newspapers describe MMA. The result from this quantitative analysis are then compiled, analysed and discussed by applying theories of agenda setting, framing and moral panic. Main results: The result shows that the Swedish daily newspapers give a relative neutral and balanced picture in their coverage of MMA but they are affected to a certain degree of moral panic.

This case study is an attempt to give empirical support to Georgio Agambens theory, regarding how the exceptions from the constitutional order should be regarded as a constant element in modern societies. The purpose was to investigate if Agambens theory is valid in the Swedish context. The exception, as definied by Agamben, is a reappearing phenomenon, which implies that the constitutional order is fragile. Individuals and groups are transferred into ?homo sacers?, meaning people that is to be regarded as legally naked, and offset from the rest of society.What then is it that make the legal norms fragile? In this thesis I will discuss the causality of moral panic.

We believed that knowledge organisation of manga and manhwa with homosexual (including lesbian) themes might be a challenge for Swedish public libraries. One of the reasons for this is that these themes in manga and manhwa usually occur in genres not directed towards an LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) audience. To see how Swedish public libraries treat such titles and why they treat them as they do, we examined a selection of public libraries, their collections, acquisitions, cataloguing and shelving of relevant titles. The theory used is mainly Grant Campbell?s binarisms, subject access to LGBTQ literature and critical analysis of knowledge organisation.

The purpose of this study is to identify and make attitudes among social workers towards homosexual and bisexual people visible, examine how these attitudes relate to their actions in their professional role and how these attitudes and actions can be understood by theories of heteronormativity and power. The study is a cross-sectional quantitative survey in the form of a questionnaire completed by social workers. The result shows that there are two groups among the social workers. One larger group that reproduces a norm of acceptance toward homosexual and bisexual people and one smaller that reproduces a heterosexual norm. This reproduction of heteronormativity increases the risk for homosexual and bisexual people to be made invisible and treated more negatively in contact with social workers, which in turn can lead to worse health among the clients..