Queer Phenomenology

This study is situated in current social-political conversations in Canada about how to do gender and sexuality education, and what content should and should not be included in Ontario’s Health and Physical Education curriculum. This research documents a 2 and a 1⁄2 month study in which a queer folk song pedagogy was used to conduct gender and sexuality education with 13 students, ages 16-20 years old, in an alternative secondary school classroom in Ontario. Using a practitioner research methodology, the students, the classroom teacher, and the researcher listened to a set of queer folk songs previously composed from interviews with LGBTQ2S+ families and queerspawn; wrote journal reflection responses to each song; and then participated in sustained, engaged dialogue with one another about a wide range of subject matter related to gender and sexuality. Analysis focused on three main themes. The first key theme was that LGBTQ2S+ individuals and queerspawn are often not expected in certain spaces and have to explain their identities, bodies, and relationships to others. The second key theme was that LGBTQ2S+ individuals often begin making sense of and orient toward their own queer identities in relation to queer and trans others they encounter. The third key theme was that LGBTQ2S+ individuals also make sense of themselves and navigate their own identities in relation to various ideas and discourses about gender, sexuality, bodies, and relationships, whether these ideas and discourses are positive or harmful. Overarching conclusions from this study include the following: a queer folk song pedagogy opens up generative dialogic spaces creating an effective learning environment; students seek and construct much of the knowledge they have related to gender and sexuality outside of schools; queer teachers make a difference in delivering queer pedagogy; and queer curriculum and pedagogy can help orient LGBTQ2S+ students and queerspawn in schools. This research makes a case for listening as an important pedagogical strategy in classrooms, and a queer folk song pedagogy as an example of queer caring that has the potential to move students toward alternate possibilities for learning, relating, and living. The Queer Across Canada Resource Kit can be downloaded for free from Kate Reid's website at: https://www.katereid.net/queer-across-canada-2013

This dissertation was submitted in completion of my doctoral degree from The Graduate Center, CUNY. It is the inspiration for my forthcoming book on stage directions, The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment, which will be available from University of Michigan Press in the fall of 2021.
This project contends that certain kinds of stage directions can affectively engage the
bodies of actors, and the imaginations of directors and designers, resulting in a collaboratively created performance of a given theatre text. As opposed to more literary treatments of stage directions, this project contends that theories of embodiment, especially affect theory, is a useful lens through which to explore the range of potential performances present in various stage directions. By analyzing the ways in which stage directions allow for more agency than has traditionally been considered in theatre scholarship, I seek to encourage theatre makers and scholars alike to explore the potential contained in these historically marginalized portions of theatrical texts. I focus on the work of six English-language playwrights who are known for their creative uses of stage directions: Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Brian Friel, Lisa D’Amour, Sarah Ruhl, and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. Through analyzing the oeuvres of these six playwrights, I have identified five different tactical uses of stage directions that require collaboration from the future theatre makers who will encounter these play texts in order to supply various active and enacted portions of the plays. Although the Method, and other prevalent acting techniques in the United States, have encouraged actors to disregard stage directions, the kinds of stage directions analyzed in this project are written in a variety of ways that challenge that dismissal, ultimately reorienting actors towards these unspoken pieces of text. In this sense, Spoken Stage Directions, Affective Stage Directions, Choreographic Stage Directions, Multivalent Stage Directions, and Impossible Stage Directions all performatively affect the actors, directors, and designers encountering them, allowing for a wide range of potential performances. This process is also inherently queer, as expressed via Sara Ahmed’s concepts from Queer Phenomenology, where Ahmed theorize that queer orientation is a process of physical and ideological reorientation. As stage directions are marginalized portions of texts, privileging them is a process of queering, and one which requires a physical and mental reorientation towards the play scripts being discussed. This project begins the work of a more theatrical approach to the analysis of stage directions, and is meant to be of use not only to theatre scholars, but also the practical theatre makers who will encounter these texts.

Traditionally the perspective of philosophy and science in general has seen itself as "gender-neutral" while at the same time being practiced by males. This paper examines how phenomenology and constructivism can account for gender if we bracket the idea of “male” perspective as objective because it historically has dominated debates. To do this the paper thus examines philosophers and scholars Butler and Ahmed and Wickström and Zeiler who realise and acknowledge that the aforementioned perspectives have influenced the analyses of gender and that important knowledge might have been missed. The paper finds that when these ideas are bracketed, it turns out that gender is not determined by one’s body but is instead contingently, socially and temporally constructed through intersubjective practises and dis-courses. As a consequence, it does not make sense to think that we have subjects unaffected by discourse, that ontology is pre-political and nonnormative, to think that gender essential-ism is a tenable position, nor to operate on children with intersex anatomies unless they can and do consent. The paper concludes that there is no right or wrong when it comes to gender and that we therefore should neither require people to do their gender in a certain way nor punish them if they do not. It also concludes that the reason we, as a society, do anyway is because most of us are collectively oriented in ways which make being intersex, non-binary, and trans etc. “impossible”. We get “disoriented” when we see people whose gender we can-not place and we reorient ourselves by “fixing” what is “wrong” with those bodies.

Keywords: sex, gender, orientation, lines, intersex, intersubjectivity, corporeality, constructivism.

This article brings together feminist philosophy, phenomenology, and masculinity studies to consider the gendered formation of ethical practices, focusing on the construction of “male” and “female” identities in quotidian social encounters. While scholarship on masculinity has frequently focused on hegemonic modes of behaviour or normative gender relations, less attention has been paid to the “ethics of people I know” as informal political resources, ones that shapes not only conversations about how one should act (“people I know don’t do that”), but also about the diversity of situations that friends, acquaintances or strangers could plausibly have encountered (“that hasn’t happened to anyone I know”). The article rethinks mundane social securities drawing on Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, and Sara Ahmed to consider anecdotal case studies around gender recognition and political practice, and in doing so also develops the notion of interpellation in relation to everyday ethical problems. The article suggests that inquiry into diverse modes of quotidian complicities – or what de Beauvoir calls the “snares” of a deeply human liberty – can be useful for describing the mixtures of sympathy, empathy, and disavowal in the performance of pro-feminist and queer-friendly masculinities or masculinist identities. It also suggests that the adoption of an “anti-normative” politics is insufficient for negotiating the problems of description and recognition involved in the articulation of gendered social experiences. In doing so, the article approaches questions around political identification commonly considered in queer theory from the viewpoint of descriptive practices themselves, and thus reorients problems of recognition and interpellation towards the expression of ethical statements, rather than focusing solely on the objects of such statements.

My original undergraduate thesis, “What About Hal?”, is comprised of three core segments, titled “What,” “About,”and “Hal,” respectively. I used this question to structure my Queer phenomenological approach to 2001. In the first section, “What,” I identify the presence and use of physicality in 2001; “what” is in 2001 and “what” else interacts
with it? In “About,” I articulate 2001’s use and treatment of potentiality, using “about” as a spatial term that relates to imminence and anticipation of a particular action or moment. In the third and final section, “Hal,” I examine the specific interplay between physicality and potentiality in which 2001, specifically Hal, indulges, which ultimately
allows for a Queer amalgamation of the two.

This chapter discusses the intersecting relationships of feminist phenomenologies, queer phenomenologies, and phenomenologies of disability and race, in three contemporary examples of moving image work centrally featuring individuals or characters with lived experiences of disability. While each of these phenomenological modes puts forward substantively different methodologies, their common ground is found through a critique of the normative boundaries of the body as constituted by the white, male, able-bodied subject of philosophical and political discourse. Broadly speaking, their aims are also to create alternative visions of what these non-normativised subjectivities might be.

Phenomenologies extend far beyond the field of philosophy: examples of phenomenological praxis are also found in cultural studies, visual cultures, anthropology, the medical humanities, and, of course, film. The epistemological claims of feminist phenomenologies are therefore necessarily interdisciplinary. Not only this: I argue that feminist phenomenologies 'inform' the study of film no more and no less than the study of film informs the development of feminist phenomenologies. No one single relationship, identity or definition can designate the ways in which feminist phenomenologies contribute to ongoing intellectual conversations about the place of bodies and embodied experience in the world; the means by which these experiences and bodies are performed and represented in the world, through film, constitutes a vital dynamic in the development of feminist phenomenologies.

The representation of gender and sexuality is well-explored territory in film studies. In Film Bodies, Katharina Lindner takes existing debates into a new direction and integrates queer and feminist theory with film phenomenology. Film Bodies explores the female body's presence in a range of genres including the dance film, the sports film and queer cinema. Moving across mainstream and independent cinema, Lindner provides detailed 'textural' analyses of Black Swan, The Tango Lesson, 2 Seconds, Offside, Tomboy and Girlhood and discusses the queer feminist encounters these films can give rise to. This provocative book is of vital interest to students and researchers of queer cinema, queer/feminist theory, embodiment and affect and offers a unique new way of understanding the relationship between queerness, feminism, the body and cinema

This article critiques Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology in light of psycho- analytic theory of sexuality. I argue that there is a conspicuous absence of the unconscious, sexuality, and fantasy in Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. I turn to the work of Jean Laplanche both to address this absence and to argue for a theory of the formation of sexuality and gender that is not exhausted by the phenomenal world.

Ce mémoire a pour but d’identifier les manières par lesquelles l’idéologie influence la formation du sujet, principalement par le discours et par ses ancrages dans les corps. Pour se faire, nous mobiliserons les écrits de Pierre Bourdieu et de Judith Butler sur la question, représentant respectivement les positions structuralistes et postmodernes de la formation du sujet (lecture classique). Nous tâcherons de comprendre, à l’aide de la conception de l’idéologie de Louis Althusser, s’il est possible de trouver un terrain d’entente entre nos auteur.es lorsqu’on s’attarde à l’émancipation du sujet et, ainsi, nuancer leurs positions. La théorie bourdieusienne a été critiquée pour son déterminisme latent, alors que la performativité de Butler a été accusée de volontarisme et d’ignorer la matérialité des corps. C’est en explorant les critiques faites à nos auteur.es et les possibilités de réunions entre l’habitus de Bourdieu et la performativité que nous constaterons le rôle de l’idéologie dans la mise au monde du sujet, mais également dans sa libération. Si les structures se retrouvent dans les corps sous la forme de dispositions et que la corporalité ainsi que la parole sont indissociables, ne faudrait-il pas trouver un moyen de penser la libération par le corps? Là où il est difficile de théoriser l’émancipation chez Bourdieu, sa pensée sur le corps contient plusieurs outils pour penser une subversion ne relevant pas exclusivement du discours. La performativité, dont l’objectif est la libération politique et l’habitus gagneraient donc à dialoguer. Nous verrons que la phénoménologie queer a le potentiel les réunir.

The purpose of this thesis is to identify the ways in which ideology influences the formation of the subject, primarily through discourse and its embedding in bodies. To this end, we will mobilize the writings of Pierre Bourdieu and Judith Butler on the question, representing respectively the structuralist and postmodernist positions on subject formation (following a classical reading). We will try to understand, with the help of Louis Althusser's conception of ideology, if it is possible to find a common ground between our authors regarding the emancipation of the subject, and attempt to nuance their positions. Bourdieusian theory has been criticized for its latent determinism, while Butler's performativity has been accused of voluntarism and of ignoring the materiality of bodies. It is by exploring the criticisms made to our authors and the possibilities of convergence between Bourdieu's habitus and Butler’s performativity that we will be able to recognize the role of ideology in the making of the subject, but also in its liberation. If structures can be found within the bodies in the shape of dispositions, and if corporality and speech are inseparable, should we not find a way to think liberation through the body? Whereas it is difficult to theorize emancipation in Bourdieu's work, his thought on the body contains several tools for thinking a subversion that is not exclusively a matter of discourse. Performativity, whose objective is precisely political liberation, and habitus would thus gain from being brought into dialogue. We will see that queer phenomenology has the potential to bring them together.

This study examines an archive of peer-reviewed articles in which physical, financial, and psychological harm were used metaphorically as source material to elaborate on more literal concerns about arts-based research. We examined the ways metaphoric language shapes our notions of arts-based research by asking: What social conditions are enabled by the prevalence of danger discourse in relation to arts-based research? We explored common metaphorical themes including exploration, landscape, and warfare. Three categories of metaphor are discussed: danger as a cautioning agent or direct danger; reversals of danger or metaphors that frame danger as desirable; and danger that involves the loss of legitimacy. Metaphorical danger discourse serves a number of functions: reproducing cultural norms, promoting caution, encouraging risk taking, revealing net- works of institutional power, and polarizing debate. This article ends with a discussion of the implications of the use of metaphorical danger discourse in the field of art education.

This call is no longer current -- the volume in question should appear in the fall of 2021. But if you work in this area, I'd still be interested in hearing about your research. 

In recent years there has been an increasing level of interest in connections between phenomenology and political philosophy, including the very idea of 'the political' itself. In this context, a wide-ranging body of new work has appeared, much of it engaging productively with emerging tendencies in political theory. What is largely absent from these developments, however, is a serious encounter between phenomenology and Marxism as a philosophical tradition. This absence is all the more notable inasmuch as there is currently a general resurgence of interest in Marxist ideas as providing a framework for the critical analysis of the contemporary world. There is, to be sure, an older tradition of phenomenological Marxism that includes many important contributions. But much of that work is now rather dated in terms of the salient political issues, as well as with regard to current levels of scholarship within the phenomenological tradition. What motivated those contributions, however, remains as pertinent as ever, if not more so—to wit, the recognition of important methodological and philosophical complementarities between a phenomenological analysis of lived experience and a Marxist approach to understanding the historical dynamics of capitalist society.

This volume is intended to gather together new work aiming to revitalize the tradition of phenomenological Marxism (or Marxist phenomenology) by combining cutting-edge scholarship that is fresh and rigorous, with a lucid sensitivity for the practical no less than the theoretical complementarity of the respective traditions. The emphasis will be on philosophical issues as opposed to political-economy as such, but in ways that are not oblivious to the political-economic realities of our time. Although historically-oriented and figure-focused contributions are welcome, preference will be given to proposals having substantive consequences that advance important contemporary debates.

This article examines Sarah Ruhl's plays In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play, The Clean House, and How to Transcend a Happy Marriage as examples of a dramaturgically queered approach to the American household drama. My argument involves close readings of portions of the texts associated with the physical set and the emotional connections among the characters through the lens of queer theory. I first trace the lineage of the families and set designs that define this subcate-gory of drama, highlighting the relationship between physical form and cultural content. I contend that the household sets that accompany the canonical works of family drama have created a parallel between the structures we see on stage in these plays and the kinds of (normative) families we expect to encounter inside. Citing these predecessors in both the visual and emotional landscape of her plays, Ruhl in her works then tears both the physical houses and normative boundaries of families asunder. The result is an expanded concept of what a house and home can do and mean in the world today.

Becoming an artful rhizome.

I will more than family. I will more than trees. I dare my world to smooth itself in asignifying ruptures, Rhizomatically. I will more than an alienating lineage. I will more than congealing blood. I will less of an empty I, flooded by dint of sobriety with more of us. I will more than a striated below. I will less than an exalted above. I will more than a summative commencement of fleeting hellos and lingering goodbyes. With a perpetually becoming Forevermore, I will a nomadic milieu of love.

'Dissonance of Objects' is an essay by Lotte Løvholm accompanying artist Nour Fog's exhibition Body Objects at Overgaden, Copenhagen Spring 2019.

Excerpt: In ‘Body Objects’, the material references to the human body as a creature are less clear than in Thek. They are mere hints. This is where ceramics, smoke, and noise come together in a conference on bodies. Hearts pump out smoke and, whether it is an intended criticism of twenty-first-century biopolitical health regimes remains unclear, since, like the smoke throwing a veil of mist across the exhibition, the din upends any hope of clarity. It prophesises and compels. This is not a linear narrative as is that of Thek, for, in the words borrowed from David Gauthier’s text on the Sirens, the works ‘no longer carry a specific meaning; they carry all or none’.This is the reason for nausea. But not in an unpleasant sense of the word. Rather as a clarified human condi-tion. Like a devotion to ’seeing the body’. The demons of death are not dangerous, they are just part of existence.

From a triple perspective including travel writing studies, disability studies and gender studies, this essay addresses a corpus of works and letters by deafblind activist and political writer Helen Keller (1880-1968)-exploring both published material and documents from the digital Helen Keller Archive. Rather than use a non-intersectional "Blind Lives Matter" approach avant la lettre, it draws on how a new, tactile phenomenology "imports", how it is imported into Keller's writings-on-the-go, especially in the travelogue Helen Keller's Journal 1936-1937.An experimental, collective sensorium emerges from Keller's strange prose, its passion for speed and machinic rhythms contrasting with its more lyrical moments. As a socialist, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, a wobbly, and as the first deafblind woman to graduate from Radcliffe college, she was not only an exceptional individual; she had to critically adjust to the values of American "exceptionalism", and claimed her interest for "mattersthat-are-not-me". Her countless voyages, business trips and journeys in the company of other women-her helpers-were the occasion for novel orientations in space as well as in gender. Looking "back" at her writings involves blindly groping into the future of queer studies.

In her 1929 ‘Phases of Fiction’, Woolf writes: ‘[T]he enormous growth of the psychological novel in our time has been prompted largely by the mistaken belief […] that truth is always good; even when it is the truth of the psychoanalyst and not the truth of imagination’.
In my research, I explore the impact of psychoanalytic discourses on Woolf’s works using feminist, queer, and phenomenological lenses. What has emerged is that, more often than not, Woolf’s phenomenological explorations have suffered rather than benefitted from the application of psychoanalytic theories to literary analysis.
Woolf’s uses of tensions, oppositions, and contradictions are what is most apt to render perceptual experience (Allègre 2020). In her words: ‘[F]ew poets and novelists are capable of that high degree of tension which gives us reality’ (‘The Art of Biography’, IV). Woolf’s tension is never binary, however (Ryan 2013); hers is a dialectics persistently exceeded in the manner of a ‘hyperdialectic’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968; Mildenberg 2017). If we use the phallus as axis, we run the risk of pathologizing her poetic explorations of lived experience as porous and multiple, of associating them with a (more or less metaphorically) psychotic discourse.
In this paper, I address oedipal readings of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and The Waves, also refering to short stories and essays concerned with perception and the everyday life of the mind. I argue that Woolf complicates the dualism psychoanalysis tends to reinstate between what it sees as subjective positions or modes of discourse.

The aim of this paper is to explore how museum educators employ emotions when they are doing guided tours and to investigate what these emotions do. The paper explores five guided tours in the Museum of Medicine (Uppsala, Sweden) located in the former Ulleråker psychiatric hospital and asylum. The guided tours take place in the exhibitions focusing on surgery, nursing and mental care, but this paper focuses on guided tour in the exhibition displaying mental care. The guided tours were filmed and documented using participant observation. The material is analysed with the help of Sara Ahmed’s queer-feminist phenomenological approach to emotions. The paper shows that the museum educators used a multitude of emotions to orient the students’ emotional experiences and their knowledge about mental care and mental illness. Emotional restraint, fear, antipathy and sympathy were expressed in relation to patients, and this contributed to an othering of patients. The depiction of patients was used to express empathy in relation to caretakers. The study reveals that the appropriation of emotions works along sanist norms that largely contribute to a further marginalisation of patients. The paper, therefore, calls for a further examination of sanist norms in cultural heritage productions.

Queering phenomenology (Thanks to Sara Ahmed) within an artistic research project with Nikolaus Gansterer, Katrin Ströbel, Alex Arteaga and Lilia Mestre.
Queeriser la phénoménologie (Merci à Sara Ahmed) au sein d'un projet de recherche artistique avec Nikolaus Gansterer, Katrin Ströbel, Alex Arteaga et Lilia Mestre.

The aim with this dissertation is to analyse the construction and challenge of body and personhood in transsexual persons narratives on gender correction, as well as what these narratives tells of the terms through which human bodies become intelligible and recognised as possible persons. The analysis focus on the human body as a lived socially produced materiality, yet also a dynamic material actor of flesh and blood. Questions raised are: What consequences does the Swedish act for declaration of sex in certain cases have on transsexual person’s life situation? How do material bodies matter in the processes where psychiatrists decide a person as transsexual or not? What does narratives on lived gender corrective time courses tell on resistance to prevailing conditions of transsexual personhood? The study is based on in-depth interviews with transsexual persons, autobiographical blogs, texts written by informants, internet posts, e-mails, photographs and fieldwork notes.

The dissertation shows that original bodies play an important role in the psychiatric assessment that decides who will be granted the diagnose transsexualism. Current health care logic stresses that a Swedish citizen should be unequivocally materialised as one or the other sex. Therefore, transsexual women must reject their penis and no transsexual men get to keep their ovaries. By contrast, aversion towards penis does not count for all transsexual women. Also some transsexual men wish to give birth. Moreover, the gender corrective health care system does not only make transsexuals lives more liveable. It also functions as an oppressive gender conservative biopolitical system that often leads to experiences of life as less liveable. Those who qualify for gender correction are legally acknowledged as the gender they recognise themselves to be. Nonetheless legal recognition is conditioned by loss. Any Swedish citizen who aims for a new legally defined sex must submit to enforced bodily surgery, renunciation of reproduction, and if married divorce. Prevailing conditions of gender correction means that many transsexual’s turns to internet. Internet serves as an important political platform where persons and groups can resist the meanings that medical doctors and Swedish society assigns transsexual bodies and lives.


Keywords: Queer phenomenology, queer, heteronormativity, gender, materiality, transsexualism, body, Swedish health care, psychiatry, ethnography, activism, lgbtq studies, transgender studies, ethnology, etnologi, welfare state, internet, body politics

Language: Swedish, including an english summary

Year of publication: 2011

Published at the commersial publisher Makadam and thus not available as fulltext pdf-file online.


Swedish back book cover text:

År 1972 är Sverige först i världen med att lagstifta om statsfinansierad vård till transsexuella personer, vilket i ett internationellt perspektiv ansågs radikalt. När Socialstyrelsen närmare fyrtio år senare publicerar utredningen ”Transsexuella och övriga personer med könsidentitetsstörningar -- Rättsliga villkor för fastställelse av könstillhörighet samt vård och stöd” beskrivs denna vård istället som ojämlik och otidsenlig. Den lag som reglerar svenska medborgares möjligheter att ändra juridisk könstillhörighet kräver exempelvis att den sökande är ogift och steril. Socialstyrelsens utredning gav upphov till en intensiv och kritisk debatt om lagens villkor. Det är i detta högaktuella sammanhang som Signe Bremers doktorsavhandling placerar sig.

Vilka konkreta konsekvenser får lagen om fastställelse för enskilda personers upplevelse av sin livssituation? I vilken utsträckning förfogar en person som vill ändra juridisk könstillhörighet över rätten till sin egen kropp? Hur spelar materiella kroppar roll för transsexuella personers möjligheter att bli igenkända som det kön de själva känner igen sig som? I boken diskuteras dessa frågor, med fokus på hur lagar, förordningar, diagnoser och könsnormer både begränsar och möjliggör transsexuella kroppar och liv.

Genom att närläsa arton personers skrivna och talade berättelser om att genomgå könskorrigering undersöker Bremer hur transsexualism förkroppsligas, görs, omförhandlas och levs under ett könskorrigerande tidsförlopp.

Tämän tutkielman aiheena on Suomessa asuvien sateenkaariperheiden arki ja kokemukset. Suomessa asuvia sateenkaariperheitä on tutkittu vain vähän, joten tutkielmani tuottaa tärkeää lisätietoa sateenkaariperheistä. Tutkielmani myös tekee tilaa sateenkaariperheiden äänelle ja kokemuksille suhteessa heistä käytävään sateenkaaripoliittiseen diskurssiin. Lisäksi tutkimus auttaa Sateenkaariperheet ry:n toimintaa valaisemalla Suomessa asuvien sateenkaariperheiden arkikokemuksia. Tutkielmassa kysyn: miten sateenkaaripoliittinen diskurssi materialisoituu ja ruumiillistuu sateenkaariperheiden arjessa? Käsitän sateenkaaripoliittisen diskurssin lähtökohtaisesti negatiiviseksi diskurssiksi sateenkaariperheistä, koska haluan tuoda esiin suomalaisen yhteiskunnan cis- ja heteronormatiivisuutta ja näiden normien väkivaltaisuutta.
Tutkimusmateriaalini koostui viiden (5) sateenkaariperheen perheenjäsenen haastatteluista. Kyseessä oli sisäpiirihaastattelu, sillä itse sateenkaariyhteisöön kuuluvana haastattelin sateenkaari-ihmisiä. Aineiston keräsin syksyn 2020 ja kevään 2021 aikana. Aineistonanalyysiin käytin affektiivis-diskursiivista analyysimetodia, jonka mukaisesti keskityin affektiivisuuden kietoutuneisuuteen kielenkäytön kanssa. Teoreettinen viitekehykseni muodostui erityisesti Sara Ahmedin queer-teoreettisesta otteesta fenomenologiaan ja affektiivisuuteen sekä Judith Butlerin normikriittisestä ajattelusta.
Tutkimukseni perusteella sateenkaaripoliittinen diskurssi materialisoituu ja ruumiillistuu sateenkaariperheiden arjessa monella eri tavalla. Ensiksi diskurssi saa perheet korostamaan perheidensä tavallisuutta, mikä on ristiriitaista, koska samaan aikaan se kuitenkin sulkee perheitä ulos palveluista. Tarkastelin näitä ulossulkemisia törmäysten kautta. Toiseksi se saa aikaan monenlaisia affektimyrskyjä. Erityisesti lakimuutosten ja kampanjoiden aikana käydyt diskurssit ovat herättäneet useita affekteja haastateltavissani. Kolmanneksi se saa perheet liikkumaan. Sateenkaaripoliittinen diskurssi liikuttaa perheitä ja saa heidät valitsemaan sekä asuinkaupungin että asuinpaikan tietyltä alueelta. Sen lisäksi, että sateenkaaripoliittinen diskurssi liikuttaa pois maaseudulta, sateenkaaripoliittinen diskurssi myös liikuttaa perheitä pois aktiivisesta sateenkaaripoliittisessa keskustelussa mukanaolosta. Neljänneksi sateenkaaripoliittinen diskurssi materialisoituu ja ruumiillistuu perheiden arjessa myös positiivisessa merkityksessä. Se luo mahdollisuuden toistaa perhenormeja toisin. Lisäksi se luo merkityksellisiä identiteettejä ja helpottaa elämää. Esimerkiksi sisäisen adoption vaatimuksen poistaminen uuden äitiyslain yhteydessä oli säästänyt perheiden aikaa ja rahaa. Samoin tasa-arvoisen avioliittolain voimaantulo oli helpottanut perheiden elämää ja tuonut juridista pätevyyttä. Sateenkaaripoliittinen diskurssi voi myös luoda vastarintaa. Se voi esimerkiksi liikuttaa antamaan palautetta huonosta kohtelusta ja vaatimaan oikeanlaisia lomakkeita sekä etsimään totuudenmukaista representaatiota, mitä nimitin arjen vastarinnaksi.

Much of the expanding literature positions trans college students as an overly homogenous population, lacking agency and wrought with hardship and tragedy. Drawn from a broader study on transmasculine college students’ conceptualisations of masculinity, this paper draws attention to the multiplicity of transmasculine voices navigating sexuality and romantic relationships. This navigation is embroiled in their negotiations with masculinity, dominance and cissexism, as they chart affirming sexualities and relationships. Participants’ unique and nuanced articulations are suggestive of the gender liberatory possibilities that derive from trans youth’s perspectives.