Patriarchy has no gender. This is a new area of study. There's not much statistics, like how many gay men prefer a "straight acting" or "masculine" partner, that I can use in my research work. In stead I found so many examples, and found the main reason behind this phenomenon is the influence of the patriarchal society. In a patriarchal social system: men are in authority over women in all aspects of society. It divides people into binary genders based on their assigned sex. In the Swedish context the society is not very patriarchal anymore when compared to some other countries around the world. But the patriarchy system still influence our life in so many different aspects. The society in general always expects individuals to fit in certain patterns of life: men need to look and behave like "men"; women need to look and behave like "women", which is not sustainable because individuals have the right to choose the way they want to live. This is the reason that I chose this topic. This stereotypical thinking is a byproduct of the patriarchy society and it is in everyone's mind. This is a patriarchy issue and also a gender inequality issue. It also reminds us we still live in a patriarchal world to some extent.
The background is Sweden in 2017, LGBTQ community gained more and more human rights, for example you can get married and adopt a child if you are gay or lesbian. When you wear something doesn't fit in to the binary gender system, you won't get explicit discriminated, however people give you looks, they treat you differently. And I call that implicit discrimination especially in small cities like Vaxjo. Implicit discrimination is more subtle than indirect discrimination, which is covered in Discrimination Act (2008:567). So it's more difficult to tackle. Patriarchy persisted for a long time in Sweden, the influence of it is not easy to change in a short period of time. That's the reason that I want to use a Living Lab to gather different stakeholders' ideas over a longer period of time in order to tackle this problem collectively and gradually.
