This article examines the Swedish homebirth discourse and how it is articulated on social media at the beginning of the 2020’s. The purpose is to investigate how homebirths are positioned as a counter discourse to hospital births and are formulated as a feminist question. My empirical data consists of notes from online observations of public Instagram accounts advocating and informing about home births. These accounts position homebirths as a safer, freer, and more natural alternative to what they describe as an oppressive, patriarchal, and misogynistic hospital environment. They also situate homebirths as a feminist question. While the hospital is seen as oppressing women’s innate and intuitive capability to give birth, the home is described as a place of equality and security where the woman has the power to listen to and follow her body’s signals. The main purpose of the accounts is to strengthen the individual woman through giving her knowledge about her body and her rights, and to support her in making the right decision for herself and her body. In this article, I argue that the homebirth discourse uses and reproduces both a gynocentric and a postfeminist vocabulary, through which they simultaneously produce birth as an innate capability of the female body and a powerful force of transformation, and as a matter of individual empowerment, self-discipline, self-improvement, and choice.

Genus är både ett komplext och omdebatterat begrepp. Denna bok belyser begreppets framväxt och etablering, men också den kritik som riktats mot det. Boken lyfter centrala teorier kring kön och genus, diskuterar samspelet mellan biologi och kultur samt hur begreppet förhåller sig till postkoloniala perspektiv och intersektionalitet. Den visar även på utmaningar som könsöverskridande ställer på genusforskning och feministisk teori.

Boken vänder sig till studenter inom genusvetenskap och andra utbildningar inom samhällsvetenskap och humaniora. 

For feminist theory, the search for the material has often found its way via affect. As an immanent and seemingly pre-discursive and bodily experience, affects seem to offer a way out of the language and discourse trap. But should affect really be understood as solely a material matter? If every phenomenon is material-discursive, as Karen Barad suggests, cannot affect, as an immanent and lived bodily experience also be both material and discursive? In this article, I will approach these questions through a reading of a small selection of texts that tell the story of Anders Behring Breivik and the terrorist attack in Norway on 22 July 2011. In a troubling encounter with these stories, I found myself identifying with Breivik, an identification that led to an intense affective experience of anxiety and disgust, but also to an emotional self-reflexive elaboration on shame and guilt. This article presents an analysis of the prevalence of norms on white, adult masculinity in the stories about Breivik, as well as a theoretical elaboration on the relationship between affect and emotion, matter and language, and its relevance for the study of masculinity and violence.

In this thesis, I take a closer look at three books that have received a lot of attention, as well as a handful of popular science and newspaper articles, about Anders Behring Breivik and the terrorist attack in Norway on 22 July 2011, with the intention of analyzing how Breivik and the terrorist attack have been explained and made sense of. My primary focus is on Breivik but I also touch upon the attack, partly by looking at how the violence is depicted in these texts, and partly by discussing the explanations given for the attack. The purpose of the thesis is twofold: on the one hand, I look at how Breivik is being narrated and what kind of knowledge the stories about him produce; on the other hand, I look at what these stories do, that is, how it feels to read them, and how they affect and orientate their readers. My choice to focus on what has been written about Breivik is based on a desire to understand how the white Norwegian terrorist is, and can be, talked about. Through this shift in focus away from Breivik and into the discursive-material context in which his acts are embedded, I want to place Breivik in a larger context where “right-wing extremism”, in Breivik’s case expressed primarily through a nationalistic, racist, and anti-Muslim rhetoric, is seen not as something coming from, and happening at, the outskirts of society but as something being produced and formed by the ways in which “the normal” is understood and practiced. The thesis places a critical perspective on how the stories individualize Breivik and reproduce normative assumptions about gender, sexuality, and age. It also finds that there are important differences in the explanations offered for terrorist attacks that are interpreted as religious or Islamist and terrorist attacks that are understood as “secular”. Methodologically, the thesis explores writing as a method of enquiry, meaning that it not only explores the material, but also the researcher and the context in which both I and the material are situated. Theoretically, the thesis is an exploration of the relationship between language and matter, and between affect and emotion.