Last Men Standing: Chlamydatus Portraits and Public Life in Late Antique Corinth

Notable among the marble sculptures excavated at Corinth are seven portraits of men wearing the long chlamys of Late Antique imperial office. This unusual costume, contemporary portrait heads, and inscribed statue bases all help confirm that new public statuary was created and erected at Corinth during the 4th and 5th centuries. These chlamydatus portraits, published together here for the first time, are likely to represent the Governor of Achaia in his capital city, in the company of local benefactors. Among the last works of the ancient sculptural tradition, they form a valuable source of information on public life in Late Antique Corinth

Maskulinitet i feminismens tjänst. Dragkingande som praktik, politik och begär

Masculinity in the service of feminism. Drag kinging as practice, politics, and desire. The aim of the thesis is to explore drag kinging as lived experience at the crossroads of masculinity, the body, and feminist politics. Drag kinging is defined as a conscious performance of masculinity. Theoretically, the study takes a feminist and queer phenomenological perspective as a point of departure. In particular, it draws on Sara Ahmed’s and Iris Marion Young’s work on the gendered and queer body and its orientation in space. Following the work of Nira Yuval-Davis, drag kinging is conceptualized as a feminist epistemic community, a space for knowledge production and belonging for individuals sharing feminist emancipatory values. Methodologically, the study is inspired by feminist critical ethnography. It is based on interviews with individuals that do drag kinging and participatory observations as an observant participant in drag king contexts. My material shows that through the practice of drag kinging the informants experience moments of wonder that expand and deepen their feminist understandings. The emotional regime of drag kinging is oriented around an ethics of care, a feeling of wonder, individual agency, and the hope for the possibility for change – both on a personal and societal level. Drag kings evolve in my analysis as sticky objects saturated with desire from many different others, and also as desiring different others. Public spaces are experienced as powerful venues for doing politics, but are also spaces where drag kings become vulnerable. The drag king workshop is the primary method for expanding the epistemic community of drag kinging and for transversal politics. In workshops in hetero-cultural contexts drag kinging as a queer and feminist practice is under-communicated and drag kinging runs the risk of heterosexualization and depoliticization. The risk of obscuring unequal relations of power, reproducing stereotypes and the problematic need of continuous recognition from the mainstream is highlighted. My material shows that despite its shortcomings, drag kinging provides a serious challenge to gender norms, and creates a space for the subversion and challenge of hegemonic definitions of femininity and masculinity. It also provides a sense of political meaningfulness regarding societal transformations both at the individual and the collective level

Notes on a Queer Feminist Ethnography

My paper has a two-folded aim. First it aims at proposing ethnography as a useful method within queer studies discussing the implications and usefulness of “queer ethnography”. Secondly it aims at exploring feminist ethnography with special focus on the study of gender and sexuality expressed in/through/as the practice of drag kinging in Sweden. I would like to suggest that a queer feminist ethnography is a way of emphasizing the emancipatory aims of my research and situating my queer ethnographic work within the field of feminist scholarship

"Vi gör det på vårat sätt" : Pride på *bygd, av-urbanisering och de-centrering av hbtq-frågor.

Research on Pride festivals highlight the ambivalent meanings of Pride today. While debates about Pride have illuminated a variety of important issues they tend to be located in urban contexts and the effects of urban normativity is absent in these debates. This article explores LGBTQ activism in a rural setting in Sweden with a point of departure in ethnographic material from a fieldwork conducted at a Pride festival organized in 2015. In the material Pride was situated at the crossroads of metropolitan conceptualizations of Pride and specific conditions relating to rural spaces. This intersection presented Pride organizers with different challenges that they reflected and acted upon when organizing a festival. Organizers described local expectations of their festival resembling Stockholm Pride, and emphasized the difficulty of designing their festival with Stockholm Pride as both model and antitype, pointing out the different conditions facing urban and rural Pride festivals. Wanting to counter the urban image and take local conditions and what was needed in the region as a point of departure they expressed how they wanted to do the festival their “own way.” This article takes this notion of “doing it our own way” as a starting point. Doing it their own way meant de-urbanizing Pride by localizing and familiarizing the festival. The rural Pride festival represented a “paradoxical space” (Rose 1993) where LGBTQ activism and Pride were de/ constructed and re-worked. When adapting Pride to the everyday realities of rural life the festival became a space focusing on different subjects relevant to the region and a space in which metropolitan conceptualizations of LGBTQ struggles and Pride were challenged. By de-urbanizing Pride the festival became less normatively urban, but also less LGBTQ centered. Decentraliserad stolthet: En etnografisk studie av Pridefestivaler bortom Sveriges storstäde

"Vi gör det på vårat sätt" : Pride på *bygd, av-urbanisering och de-centrering av hbtq-frågor.

Research on Pride festivals highlight the ambivalent meanings of Pride today. While debates about Pride have illuminated a variety of important issues they tend to be located in urban contexts and the effects of urban normativity is absent in these debates. This article explores LGBTQ activism in a rural setting in Sweden with a point of departure in ethnographic material from a fieldwork conducted at a Pride festival organized in 2015. In the material Pride was situated at the crossroads of metropolitan conceptualizations of Pride and specific conditions relating to rural spaces. This intersection presented Pride organizers with different challenges that they reflected and acted upon when organizing a festival. Organizers described local expectations of their festival resembling Stockholm Pride, and emphasized the difficulty of designing their festival with Stockholm Pride as both model and antitype, pointing out the different conditions facing urban and rural Pride festivals. Wanting to counter the urban image and take local conditions and what was needed in the region as a point of departure they expressed how they wanted to do the festival their “own way.” This article takes this notion of “doing it our own way” as a starting point. Doing it their own way meant de-urbanizing Pride by localizing and familiarizing the festival. The rural Pride festival represented a “paradoxical space” (Rose 1993) where LGBTQ activism and Pride were de/ constructed and re-worked. When adapting Pride to the everyday realities of rural life the festival became a space focusing on different subjects relevant to the region and a space in which metropolitan conceptualizations of LGBTQ struggles and Pride were challenged. By de-urbanizing Pride the festival became less normatively urban, but also less LGBTQ centered. Decentraliserad stolthet: En etnografisk studie av Pridefestivaler bortom Sveriges storstäde