Homosexuell och religiös? - diskursanalys av homosexuella mäns identitetsskapande i skönlitteratur med fokus på homosexualitet och religiositet

Sammanfattning: The aim of this study is to examine homosexual men’s identities, and focus on how they form their identities in fiction when it comes to being both homosexual and religious. In order to be able to approach and study this phenomenon, three research questions are used: how is identity constructed discursively when it comes to the combination of homo- sexuality and religiosity, what affects the formation of homosexual men’s religious/non- religious identity and how do homosexuality and religiosity affect one another in identity formation? The theory used in this study is discourse theory which includes the following concepts that have been chosen and used to analyze the material: antagonism, hegemonic interven- tion, hegemony, interpellation, subject position and the chain of equivalence. Together with these concepts and with template analysis style, a qualitative discourse analysis is made to categorize and analyze the findings made in the material. The material in this study consists of Jonas Gardell’s novel Torka aldrig tårar utan handskar, 1. Kärleken and Tony Kushner’s play script Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. The material was chosen because of the themes homosexuality and religiosity are includ- ed, and thus were eligible to be used in this study. Three religious groups are being touched upon in this study, namely Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormonism and Judaism. This study showed that the relationship between the identities homosexual and religious is mostly antagonistic in the material used in this study, but there was an exception in once case where the combination of these two identities seemed to be possible. The an- tagonistic relationship between these identities lead to a hegemonic intervention where the individual had to choose the one or the other of the identities in order to reach hegem- ony. In most cases homosexual and religious were not included in the same chain of equivalence, and seemed to rule each other out.