{"title":"Girls Claiming Discursive Space within the Dominant Discourse on Gender Performativity: A Case Study from a Compulsory School in Iceland","authors":"Bergljót Þrastardóttir, J. Kjaran","doi":"10.1080/08038740.2023.2224056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2023.2224056","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article investigates how four teenage girls claim discursive space in a compulsory school in Iceland where the dominant discourse sustains traditional gender performances and (cis)heteronormativity. It also examines how the dominant discourse positions the girls and how they resist such positioning and position themselves. The analysis draws on an ethnographic study conducted in a compulsory school, consisting of observations in various spaces therein and interviews with 13–16-year-old students. The findings suggest that Iceland’s reputation as a gender-equality utopia, with a progressive, cutting-edge curriculum, has not fundamentally changed students’ or teachers’ day-to-day realities or lived experiences. That discrepancy manifested in hegemonic ideas in the discourse on gender performativity, which is deeply rooted and reinforced through ((cis)hetero) normative gender performances. The few female students who tried to find cracks in the (cis)heteronormative discourse in order to claim discursive space for alternative gender performances were positioned as being difficult, wilful subjects—as feminist killjoys—for in addressing those cracks they dared to disturb the dominant discourse on legitimate femininity.","PeriodicalId":45485,"journal":{"name":"NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41887634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Invisible, Responsible Women in Sweden – Planning Pregnancies, Choosing Contraceptives","authors":"Sofia Zettermark","doi":"10.1080/08038740.2023.2214742","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2023.2214742","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this study I explore discourses of contraception and reproduction, which are drawn upon and reproduced in Swedish official online sources on contraceptive advice, through the theoretical frameworks of biomedicalization and reproductive justice. The analysis yielded three interwoven themes: 1) women in need of contraceptives have to balance discourses of exogenous hormones as both an “unnatural” threat to their bodies and as desirable, effective regulators of the same “naturally unruly” body; 2) in search of a “perfect contraceptive fit”, it is the woman who needs to accommodate to available methods, rather than the other way around; 3) women are made discursively invisible, while simultaneously being constructed as individually responsible for reproduction. Underpinning all these themes is the discourse of rational, responsible choices, of exerting agency by choosing the right contraceptive. In the era of biomedicalization, finding a “contraceptive fit” becomes a moral and gendered health practice demanding thorough self-surveillance. The rational woman, exercising control over her reproduction and body, by planning her pregnancy with safe contraceptives, emerges as the only possible position. Recognizing that women’s and fertile person’s reproductive choices are made amid a societal context, with differing personal resources and experiences, would bring us even closer to reproductive justice.","PeriodicalId":45485,"journal":{"name":"NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48488192","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Making Sense of Sexual Harassment Over Time: Young Women’s and Nonbinary People’s Accounts in 2000 and 2021","authors":"Satu Venäläinen, Sanna Aaltonen, A. Phoenix","doi":"10.1080/08038740.2023.2207041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2023.2207041","url":null,"abstract":"The #metoo movement and various other social media campaigns have made sexual harassment increasingly visible in recent years. Such collec- tive practices of naming and thereby resisting sexual harassment have been made possible by feminist discourses that have enabled the linking of personal experiences to gendered social structures. In this paper, we examine temporal shifts in young people’s accounts of sexual harassment based on two datasets generated by 15–16-year-old girls and nonbinary people which were collected 20 years apart (2000 and 2021) in Finland. We draw on poststructuralist discourse theory, intersectionality and Sara Ahmed’s writings on complaints in analysing the participants’ positions in relation to sexual harassment. Notably, in the 2000 dataset, the participants emphasized individual agency and responsibility, whereas in the 2021 dataset, they acknowledged gendered and intersectional patterns in victimization and actively resisted victim-blaming and silencing. We con-clude that the positions the participants held in the two datasets differ specifically in the extent to which they are informed by feminist discourses and the extent to which sexual harassment is seen as warranting and legitimating complaint.","PeriodicalId":45485,"journal":{"name":"NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42483477","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Building Death Literacy Through Last Aid: An Examination of Agency, Ambivalence and Gendered Informal Caregiving Within the Swedish Welfare State","authors":"J. Woodworth","doi":"10.1080/08038740.2023.2204246","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2023.2204246","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45485,"journal":{"name":"NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47566384","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Undoing the Regional Demos? Gender Equality and Economic Growth in Regional Development","authors":"Tomas Mitander","doi":"10.1080/08038740.2023.2201474","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2023.2201474","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45485,"journal":{"name":"NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47115641","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Emergence of LGBT Movements in Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Estonia","authors":"Rebeka Põldsam, Sara Arumetsa","doi":"10.1080/08038740.2023.2195207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2023.2195207","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45485,"journal":{"name":"NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46425774","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unashamed Citizenship: Activist Voices in Scandinavia","authors":"Elisabeth Oxfeldt","doi":"10.1080/08038740.2023.2207310","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2023.2207310","url":null,"abstract":"The Scandinavian countries have a reputation of being happy, egalitarian, and progressive. They have topped the United Nations’ world-happiness rankings since they were first compiled and published in 2012; they are among the most gender equal countries in the world; they are also among the most democratic nations in the world. Measures of well-functioning democracies include politically engaged citizens who vote and “play fair” as well as “an emphasis on preserving civil liberties and personal freedoms of both the majority and minorities” (ibid.) However, despite the countries’ good reputation and high international rankings, minoritized people in Scandinavia continually have to fight against racism as well as gender-based prejudice. An article on institutional racism in the Nordic countries in the Harvard Political Review recently maintained that the Nordic countries are the happiest and the most racist in the EU, with Finland in particular scoring high on discrimination based on “ethnic or immigrant background” (Kataja, 2020). The illusion of Nordic exceptionalism must be broken, and “those who do not have to experience racism themselves must try to consider how others experience it,” Finnish politician Vesa Puuronen urges. There are various ways of communicating the experience of racism, oppression, exclusion, and minoritization. This Special Issue on Unashamed Citizenship: Activist Voices in Scandinavia explores contemporary Scandinavian feminists raising their voices against racism as they experience harassment and exclusion due to immigrant or indigenous Sámi backgrounds. These are counter-narratives and alternative scripts negating the official story of the countries being just, democratic, and non-racist. They seek to change both majority and minority opinion, attitudes, and behaviour, whether they be written from the position of diaspora groups such as the Norwegian Pakistanis or by and about indigenous groups such as the Sámi. The material in focus in this special issue is first and foremost literature considered in various ways as literary activism. This literature constitutes a particularly salient form of communication, allowing for in-depth reflection and emotional involvement on the part of the author as well as the reader, with genres ranging from non-fictional autobiographies, testimonials, memoirs and essays, to fictionalized forms such as the novel. The texts can furthermore be more or less poetic, including conceptual poetry. While expressing the voice of an individual author at a particular time and place, they always function in a greater context of collective voices, from a contemporary, historic, intermedial, and transmedial point of view. In terms of history, they build on previous texts, often through intertextual quotations used directly in the texts or paratextually in titles, epigraphs, epilogs, etc. They can also link to previous texts through direct mention of inspirational works or, conversely, through critical re","PeriodicalId":45485,"journal":{"name":"NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59566402","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beyond Heroes and Hostility: Greta Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate, and The Transnational Politics of Girl Power","authors":"J. Locke","doi":"10.1080/08038740.2023.2206673","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2023.2206673","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article develops a feminist and democratic theory of girls’ activism framed around the work of Greta Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate, and the global youth climate movement. It draws from recent work in girlhood studies to criticize the discourse of the “girl hero” and challenge the two dominant ways that political theorists engage with girls and politics or political change, through Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone and Hannah Arendt’s “Reflections on Little Rock.” A politics of heroism, I argue, unwittingly invests itself in the hostility the hero must face and overcome and therefore minimizes the political networks that make politics possible. Through my readings of Thunberg and Nakate, I attend to girl activists’ local attachments within family, community, and nation; intergenerational, transnational, and transcontinental relationships; and the effects of colonialism, white supremacy, and misogyny and anti-feminism. Underscoring networks of support and solidarity (rather than hostility that the girl hero must face down), I provide a new way of thinking about girls and politics (and politics, in general) outside of the framework of heroism.","PeriodicalId":45485,"journal":{"name":"NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43890795","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Women Became Free!” Activism, Feminism, Race, and Political Poetry of the Second Degree in Henrika Ringboms Händelser ur Nya Pressen 1968-1974","authors":"K. Malmio","doi":"10.1080/08038740.2023.2183987","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2023.2183987","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Author Henrika Ringbom’s collection of poems entitled Händelser ur Nya Pressen 1968–1974. Prosadikter (2009) is a rare piece of Finland-Swedish literature. Rewriting news from a Finland-Swedish evening press paper during the 1960s and 1970s, it offers a view on the colonial mind-set of the Nordic countries. The poems not only depict political events from various parts of a global world, they also open up an unmarked category in Nordic literature, that of race and whiteness. An essential part of Finland-Swede’s self-understanding goes back to its status as a minority. This applies even to Finland-Swedish literature. It also has a notable tradition of female feminist writing that runs through the 20th century. Finland-Swedish literature, however, belongs also to a majority when it comes to Western ideas of race and whiteness in a Nordic context. In my analysis, I show how Ringbom scrutinizes events from a phase Tobias Hübinette and Catrin Lundström (2014) call the “white solidarity” (1968–2001), characterized by antiracism, anti-apartheid, social justice and gender equality, but also of color-blindness. I show how Ringbom contributes to the current discussions of political Nordic literature with a rich, complex, ambivalent and defamiliarizing way. The poems actively remind us how both political events and political poetry are complex and contradictory. Rather than offering a clear-cut poetic activism, Rinbom writes political poetry of the second degree, one that examines and reflects upon the conditions of politics, popular media, and political poetry.","PeriodicalId":45485,"journal":{"name":"NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46524836","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Companion Texts and Spaces of Encounter: Reading Experiences in Shazia Majid, Ivo de Figueiredo and Yohan Shanmugaratnam’s Life Writing","authors":"T. Vold","doi":"10.1080/08038740.2023.2205660","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2023.2205660","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Analyzing reading experiences represented in transnational literature clarifies how the author’s story connects to a larger world literature. Building on the feminist and postcolonial work of Sarah Ahmed, and Elleke Boehmer, Rita Felski's study of the uses of literature, I investigate the signification of the representations of reading experiences in three contemporary Norwegian works. These center thematically on gendered and racialized identity processes, as well as politics and history, in the aftermaths of colonialism and migration: Shazia Majid, Ut av skyggene. Den lange veien mot likestilling for innvandrerkvinnene [Out of the shadows. The long road to equality for immigrant women]; Ivo de Figueiredo’s A Stranger At My Table [En fremmed ved mitt bord. En familiehistorie] and Yohan Shanmugaratnam’s work Vi puster fortsatt [We are still breathing]. My analysis of the reading experiences and the intersectional aspects in these works, explores how their stories refer to and enter into various networks of book communities: Feminist, imperialist, antiracist, Norwegian, English, American, Asian, African, 19th-century, colonial, black, white and more. The authors use their family history to tell a larger transnational story, leading to further explorations of how gender, ethnicity, nationality, class and religion form identities in transnational Norway.","PeriodicalId":45485,"journal":{"name":"NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41428382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}