Men's violence,men's parenting and gender politics in Sweden

In this article, I discuss how the politics of survival in the science fiction TV series “Battlestar Galactica” (BSG) correspond to contemporary biopolitics in late modern Western society. BSG takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where war between artificial, non-human bodies and organic, human bodies emphasizes the importance of sustained population growth and, ultimately, survival for the human race. The BSG survival narrative accentuates the challenges that advanced reproductive technologies pose to the female body and how this is interrelated to state regulation of reproduction and population control. As a political fiction, BSG facilitates a discussion of the dynamics of choice and duty in relation to post-human reproduction: the right to choose not to reproduce as well as the right to reproduce. In light of my analysis, I suggest that the BSG survival narrative concludes with a displacement of discourses of choice onto discourses of obligation due to biotechnological advancement. I posit that BSG's endorsement of post-human reproduction, coupled with a pro-natalist approach to population control, represents post-human reproduction as an evolutionary advancement the female body cannot refuse. As such, the BSG survival narrative reinscribes gender as a category of difference and the link between the female body and reproduction as key norms for late modern societies.

“I'm not a commodity, I'm a Viper pilot”

Starbuck, BSG 205: The Farm     

From Metaphor to Metamorph? On Science Fiction and the Ethics of Transformative Encounters

This article explores how the science-fictional figure of the metamorph can serve as a feminist figuration, a tool for rethinking structures for determining sameness and difference. The article offers close readings of selected metamorphs in contemporary science fiction and connects these imaginaries/imageries to recent feminist debates about representation, materiality, and agency. I suggest that contemporary metamorphs in visual science fiction open up space for a consideration of changeability and flexibility rather than fixity when issues of identity and ontology—of being in the world—are at stake. In light of the current political situation, where mass migration to Europe is foregrounding the fundamental differentiation between Self and Other, this article invites a discussion of the ethics at stake in the potentially transformative encounter between “us” and “them”, and the political potential of rethinking representation and signification through the figure of the metamorph.     

Psychosocial and Symbolic Dimensions of the Breast Explored through a Visual Matrix

This article explores knowledge about the breast in lived experience, addressing a gap in empirical research on a highly gendered cultural trope and embodied organ. We present findings from a study that used a free-associative psychosocial method—the Visual Matrix—in order to stimulate expressions of tacit aspects of the breast, aiming to generate an understanding of relations between embodied and enculturated experiences. Our data revealed how an aesthetic of the grotesque in one matrix allowed the mainly female group to use humour as a “creative psychic defence” against culturally normative and idealized aspects of the breast. This was expressed through symbolizations, affectively delivered in an exuberant mode, emphasizing the breast‘s potency and its potential for nurturance and “weaponization”. Through this feminine poetic, life and death became inseparable yet ambiguous dimensions of breasts. The breast’s life-affirming qualities included the sensual, the visceral, and the joyful—a material-semiotic knowing. This was incontrast to a second matrix, which expressed a more ambivalent and troubled response, and in which associations were weighted towards the spectacular breast of an ocular-centric culture that privileges hetero-masculine looking. We discuss differences between the two matrices in terms of psychosocial tensions between embodied and enculturated experiences.