The report gives an introduction to the Linköping-Örebro Centre of Gender Excellence: GEXcel - Gendering EXcellence: Towards a European Centre of Excellence in Transnational and Transdisciplinary Studies of Changing Gender Relations, Intersectionalities and Embodiment.

1986 the Swedish goverment set up a delegation, Aidsdelgationen, with the comission to informingand communicating objective and impartial facts on aids and hiv. The delgation was most known oftheir conspicuous posters that was generously spread in public spaces and media all over Swedenfrom 1987 until about 1993, when the first antiretroviral drugs appeard and most of the campaignsstopped. The posters were, in Sweden as elsewhere, sharply critizised for being moralistic aroundsex, and, above all, for stigmatizing certain groups as risk groups. I have managed to relocate someof the posters and I will discuss what kind of spectatorship they animate; what kind of subjectivitydo we embody by the act of looking, by being exposed to health propaganda?

In this article I investigate how tactile practicies appear in sexual narratives among trans persons and women in an ongoing ethnographic study on sexual feelings. I explore the political subjectivity of the sexual story, and how it is entangled or detached from mainstream imaginary of sex. Aiming at rerouting touch as categorically reconstructing bodily shapes, I highlight the dynamics between the sensational, emotional, material and social representations. Influenced by feminist and queer writers such as Luce Irigaray, Susan Stryker, Eve Sedgewick and Sara Ahmed I turn to the sexual narratives of how touch would revamp the mainstream discourses of an embodied sexual self.

A dominant notion that homosexuality and heterosexuality give meaning to bisexuality already exists. But no one has explored the meaning that bisexuality might accrue with regard to monosexuality. Because bisexuals were never fully recognized within queer theory, the homosexual–heterosexual binary opposition continues to be the primary understanding of difference. Further, within queer theory, the idea of intimacy seems to be attributed to a gendered ontology, that is, the regulation of gender representation as the point of departure for understanding sexual identities. This circular understanding of gender as a reflection of intimacy is predicated on monosexual desires. Drawing on Clare Hemming's critical location of the bisexual middle ground, this article shifts the focus away from gender ontology, to argue for a theory of relationships that problemizes monogamy as a heterosexual norm (and indeed the idea of gay marriage as a way of normalizing bi- and homosexual desire in heterosexual terms). However, the idea that bisexuals are often seen as nonmonogamous is also questioned, as if there were any organizations of desire connected to a specific set of pleasures. This article is based on in-depth interviews with bisexual women in Sweden between 2000 and 2004 and also highlights the “partnership law” from 1995 and gender neutral marriage in 2009.

The thesis examines women's bisexual practices in the power relations that organise cultural imaginaries of sex/gender, bodies and sexualities. It is the first in depth study on bisexual lives in Sweden and fills a gap in the field of critical queer theory and feminism. Its purpose is to document and explore the sexual and gendered imaginary in everyday life as well as in knowledge production about sexuality from a bisexual perspective and highlight bisexuality as an analytical category.

The study emanates from bisexual women's narratives based on interviews, and highlights their different perspectives and subject positions in contemporary Sweden. Many of the women were also engaged in drag king performances, which inspired to seek connections between bisexuality and drag kings.

Drawing on themes that occur in the interviews, such as monogamous and non-monogamous relationships, the materiality of the body, bisexual feminism and drag king performance, the thesis examines how the bisexual middle ground is re-negotiated and operates as an alternative strategy within the geography of sexuality and gender. Compared to the established knowledge about bisexuality, both older and contemporary, the interviewed women both appropriate and reject a normative bisexual middle ground. The study discusses the necessity of a bisexual perspective that emanates from bisexual subject positions and that a bisexual perspective is useful as an analytical category within feminism and queer studies.

Drawing on some of the topics and discussions covered in the 2nd International Conference (10-11-12 May 2012), this third symposium seeks to expand on the relationship between law and language by exploring the role of legal discourse in a wide array of social/institutional settings, where it is an integral and constitutive part of the ‘social practices’ manifested in different languages, cultures and societies. The understanding of legal discourses and practices includes not only the legal rules, institutions, and processes constructed as part of social structures and systems, but also their impact on other diverse social categories and values where the agency of language-discourse is involved in various aspects of social life. - See more at: http://www.iafl.org/conffullposts.php?id=113#sthash.Qcp9QpXj.dpuf

 Recension av tidskriften Lambda Nordicas temanr. "Vad är queer?" 1996 och Res Publicas temanr. "Kön" 1998.

Artikeln belyser hur kvinnorörelsen under 1970-talet sökte ny och förbättrad kunskap om kvinnokroppen och kvinnors sexuella njutning. Genom att betona kvinnors egna (och kolektiv) erfarenheter och med klitoris i centrum erbjöd de ett feministiskt alternativ till rådande förståelse av kropp, kön och sexualitet.

Recension av antologin Globaliseringens kulturer: den postkoloniala paradoxen, rasismen och det mångkulturella samhället. (1999) Red. Catharina Eriksson, Maria Eriksson Baaz, Håkan Thörn.

Children with lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans* and/or queer (LGBTQ) parents have received heightened attention during the processes of policy making regarding adoption and donor insemination legislation in Sweden during the 1990s and early 2000s. Yet, very little academic knowledge exists about children and young people in LGBTQ families and their experiences in schools. We engage the idea of "culturally queer" as a potentially useful framework for understanding the experiences of children and young people with LGBTQ parents.

School, with its major impact on young people’s lives, is one of the sites where family as discourse and practise is negotiated. This is why a group of researchers from Humboldt University, Berlin (Germany), University of Ljubljana (Slovenia) and Lund University (Sweden) are undertaking a study on the school experiences of children and young people with LGBTQ parents.

Our first aim is to discuss how these kids are recognized within queer communities. Our second aim is to analyze what we see as a problematic silence in school around children and young people with LGBTQ parents.

This is about the powerful and everyday workings of normative understandings of who family should be. Schools and teachers might not see the need to actively include non-normative family-structures in their work. This seemingly innocent-looking process in fact re-constructs ideals of family, childhood, sexuality and gender. It is necessary to actively work against the silencing of kids with LGBTQ parents in the context of school. This is important for these kids; it is equally important for children and young people with heterosexual parents to see that family can be more than mum-dad-child.

We see this as a part of the long-established debate in queer theorizing and activism about the meaning and practises of ‘family’. We see a need to further theorize the currently ongoing normalization of queer families. At the same time, there is an equally ongoing need for struggle against indirect homophobia and transphobia.

Det europeiska forskningsprojektet ≫Barn och ungdomar med hbtq-föräldrar och deras erfarenheter i skolan i Tyskland, Slovenien och Sverige≫ (2009 – 2011) har i en jämförande studie undersökt erfarenheter av familjenormer och homofobi i skolan. Undersökningen bygger pa intervjuer med barn och unga med regnbågsfamiljer, det vill säga med föräldrar som är lesbiska, bögar, bisexuella och trans*personer. Även föräldrar och experter inom utbildning intervjuades. Studien är ett samarbete mellan forskare från Centrum för transdisciplinära genusstudier vid Humboldt-universitetet i Berlin (Tyskland), Fakulteten for Socialt Arbete vid universitetet i Ljubljana (Slovenien) och Centrum for genusvetenskap, Lunds universitet (Sverige).

I denna svenska delstudie belyser vi huruvida barn och unga med regnbågsfamiljer upplever homofobisk diskriminering, exkludering eller mobbning. Analysen tematiserar bland annat hur barnen och ungdomarna förhåller sig till en heteronormativ omgivning och vilka erfarenheter av och rädslor för homofobiska uttryck de upplever. Vilka tystnader kring familjen upplever de i klassrummet? Vilket bemötande upplever föräldrarna från skolan ? Studien lyfter även vilket stöd som barn och unga får från föräldrar, lärare och skolkamrater, vilka förväntningar de har på skolan och riktar sig till föräldrar, lärare och beslutsfattare.

Assembling the different stories on hiv and aids we will together discuss how activism can transform health-disease narrative that would relocate the politics of virus.

Queer studies of education have become a growing field with a range of theoretical and political positions and methodological approaches. Moreover, research with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) kids is tightly connected to anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia and norm-critical activism. One of the key contentions within this field is what researchers and activists mean by “queer” in the context of education: is it a focus on queer/ed subjectivities? Is it about using queer theories to critique forms and norms of education in a given sociopolitical context? Who is queer/ed in schools? Is the language of homophobia and transphobia the best or even correct way to describe and analyse normative educational settings and frameworks?