Today, Monday 15 June, Sunny Gurumayum has successfully defended his doctoral thesis in gender studies, Stories Telling Worlds: Queer Worldmaking in the Vernacular. The public defence was held in the Eden Auditorium in Lund, with Associate Professor Wibke Straube, Karlstad University, serving as faculty opponent. Colleagues, friends and family gathered to attend the defence, several having travelled long distances to be there.
Storytelling as a way of making worlds
By bringing together autoethnography, interviews and film, Gurumayum explores storytelling as a practice.
"Storytelling is not only a way of describing the world, but also a way of creating it," says Sunny Gurumayum.
Drawing on his own experiences through the method of autoethnography, he is actively involved in the act of queer worldmaking. Gurumayum quotes Ellis et al and writes in the thesis that as a method, autoethnography “seeks to describe and systematically analyse personal experience in order to understand cultural experience” (Ellis et al., 2011).
The thesis shows how stories are shaped through everyday interactions, cultural references and vernacular expressions. Here, vernacular refers to the everyday way of speaking used within a particular community – how people express themselves in their daily lives, rather than in standardised or formal contexts.
From local language to global perspectives
A key contribution of the thesis is its focus on the vernacular – the everyday languages, idioms and expressions through which people make sense of their lives.
Rather than treating the region as an “exception” to global norms, the thesis argues that the vernacular plays an active role in shaping what we think of as “the global”. In this sense, the vernacular becomes a key space where meanings are constantly translated and reworked.
"Stories are always situated. They draw on lived experience but also on shared cultural references that give them form and meaning," says Sunny Gurumayum.
How everyday meanings reshape “homo”
A central part of the thesis is an analysis of the term homo and how it is translated and understood in everyday contexts. Rather than mapping neatly onto Western categories such as homosexuality or homophobia, the term takes on broader and shifting meanings.
In some contexts, homo is associated with an “addiction” to same-sex desire – not necessarily as a fixed identity, but as an excess of desire that exceeds normative boundaries.
To explore how this excess is negotiated, Gurumayum uses the figure of the “softboy” – a form of masculinity that emphasises sensitivity and emotional expression rather than traditional masculine norms – to show how meanings of homo are contained and reshaped through emerging ideals of softness and respectability.
Creativity, exclusion and everyday negotiation
The thesis highlights how queer and trans subjects in the region often live with exclusion and experiences of humiliation, regardless of their visibility in public life or media. At the same time, it shows how queer worldmaking persists through creative and everyday practices.
By tracing how desire, femininity, style and bodily expression are both enabled and restrained, the thesis argues that this “excess” opens up a way of understanding queer worlds as dynamic and continuously negotiated.
"Queer worldmaking is not neat or coherent. It is creative, messy and at times contradictory," says Sunny Gurumayum.
