{"title":"What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use","authors":"Emily J. Hogg","doi":"10.1080/08038740.2022.2117919","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2022.2117919","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45485,"journal":{"name":"NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42331347","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":"Witches’ Milk: Queer Breastfeeding and Alternative Kin-Making in Isak Dinesen’s “The Caryatids”","authors":"Peter Mortensen","doi":"10.1080/08038740.2022.2100824","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2022.2100824","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this essay, I use the recent convergence of queer, feminist, and ecocritical perspectives under the heading of “queer ecology” to analyse how Danish bilingual author Isak Dinesen (real name: Karen Blixen) deploys breastfeeding in her Gothic story “The Caryatids: An Unfinished Story.” Queer ecology entails critiquing the assumption (or myth) that heterosexual identities, monogamous relationships, consanguineous kinship networks, and reproductive nuclear families are better, healthier, or more “natural” than other formations. I situate Dinesen in opposition to the tradition of Enlightenment “lactivism,” whose proponents (chief among them Jean-Jacques Rousseau) celebrated exclusive maternal breastfeeding within hetero-reproductive nuclear family structures. In my reading of “The Caryatids,” I place special emphasis on three Gothic-related female characters—the incestuous wife, the adulterous mother, and the “gypsy” witch—who breastfeed queerly, knowingly or unknowingly thwarting the demand that women nurse the monogamous and patriarchal bio-family order into existence. When removed from its sanctioned familial context, I argue, the lactating breast in Dinesen’s narrative proves a disorderly signifier of errancy and dissent, pointing towards the possibility of alternative, emergent, contingent, and potentially more sustainable configurations of gender, relationship, and community.","PeriodicalId":45485,"journal":{"name":"NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47473390","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, Leadership, and Change – Navigating between Contradictory Cultures","authors":"Jennifer Hobbins, E. Kristiansen, E. Carlström","doi":"10.1080/08038740.2022.2098377","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2022.2098377","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores how women in top leader positions navigate between the two contradictory cultures of masculinity and femininity and, in particular, if and how these positionings and negotiations develop over time. Drawing on working-life biographical interviews with women on the top of organizational hierarchies within the crisis management systems in the Nordic countries, the article illustrates women top leaders relating to norms of masculinity and femininity, demonstrating how these have shaped their roles as top leaders, and how these have shifted along their careers. It shows how, in the beginning of their careers, women in organizations marked by cultures of masculinity conform to these gendered norms, while in their roles as top leaders, they do gender differently and assume roles as change agents. The findings suggest that processes of navigation between organizational cultures of masculinity and societal cultures of femininity can be better understood when individual experiences are situated within their gendered social and cultural expectations.","PeriodicalId":45485,"journal":{"name":"NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42719323","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":"Special Issue Editorial: Nordic LGBTQ Histories","authors":"Niels Nyegaard, Dag Heede, J. Rydström","doi":"10.1080/08038740.2022.2104022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2022.2104022","url":null,"abstract":"Recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in Nordic LGBTQ histories, both in and outside academia. In Nordic media, political institutions, and civil societies, narratives about lesbian, gay, bi, trans, and queer people’s historical experiences circulate each year during the Pride weeks that take place throughout the region. For the most part, these narratives tell a celebratory story about grand historical transformations from social stigmatization to citizen inclusion. The Nordic countries’ world leading role in introducing lesbian and gay registered partnerships in the late 1980s and early 1990s plays a prominent role in these narratives. Alongside later citizen rights for LGBTQ people, such as rights to marriage, adoption, assisted reproduction, and legal sex change, the early introduction of registered partnerships supports a widely held image of the Nordic countries as progressive and liberal welfare states. In line with this image, supporting sexual and gender minorities’ social equality has further become a hallmark of what it means to be a citizen in the Nordic countries, at least within most constituencies. The idea regularly surfaces in contemporary discussions about integration policies, especially in relation to the social status of Muslim immigrants and minority cultures (Kehl, 2018; Nyegaard, 2021; Petersen, 2013). Nordic book markets show a growing interest in LGBTQ histories. In the last couple of years, several publishing houses have reprinted older novels and literary texts with LGBTQ themes. For instance, in Denmark, the publishing house Ti Vilde Heste has reprinted an early lesbian novel from 1883, Nina by Otto Martin Møller (2021), and Escho recently reprinted a scandalous erotic lesbian novel, Kan Mænd undværes? (Carell, 2021) [Can One Do without Men?], originally published in 1921. More publications are on the way (e.g., Petersen, 2022). The interest has also resulted in an increasing number of activist publications that tell Nordic LGBTQ histories. Recent examples of well-received publications are Lars Henriksen and Chantal Al-Arab’s book Bøssernes Danmarkshistorie 1900–2020 [Gay Men’s History of Denmark 1900–2020] (Henriksen & Al-Arab, 2021), published in 2021, and Swedish Jonas Gardell’s book Ett lyckligare år (Gardell, 2021) [A Happier Year], also from 2021. Both books recount histories of male gay intimacy and love over the course of the twentieth century. In addition, several new lesbian and gay autobiographies have appeared. In 2020, Kristian Tofte Petersen and Ole Kongsdal Jensen published a joint memoir about their lives in the 1970s’ Danish Gay Liberation Front (Petersen og Kongsdal Jensen 2020). In 2022, the activist Vibeke Vasbo finished her memoirs about the Danish Women’s Liberation Movement and the Lesbian Movement (Vasbo, 2022). Last year, the prominent gay historian Arne Nilsson published a second volume of his memoirs about growing up and living as a gay man in Sweden during the last half of the twe","PeriodicalId":45485,"journal":{"name":"NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45984149","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":"“A Man Is Practically the General Norm” – A Case Study of Gender Inequality and Whiteness in the Classical Music Scene in Finland","authors":"Anna Ramstedt","doi":"10.1080/08038740.2022.2088611","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2022.2088611","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this article I show how generally accepted forms of performance practice and performances by generally idealized performance figures reveal gendered and racialized imaginaries that prevail in the Finnish classical music culture. The research material for this article was gathered through thematic in-depth interviews with fourteen white cis women professional Finnish classical pianists, violinists, violists, and cellists between the ages of 25 and 45. I ask how gendered and racialized constructions are conveyed in performance ideals maintained by widely acclaimed performers and traditionally accepted ways of performing musical works. Further, I ask how gendered and racialized constructions associated with idealized performers and performance ideals shape, intertwine in, and influence the embodied experience of Finnish women musicians. I argue that the performers that are widely seen as quintessential form a canon of performers, that have a crucial role in maintaining the oppressive status quo of classical music by reaffirming and maintaining the idealized aesthetics through the very fleshy act of performing Eurocentric, gendered and racialized social imaginaries. These social imaginaries partly shape musicians’ embodied subjectivity and affect their self-esteem as well as their understanding of gendered and racialized bodies, and their social value.","PeriodicalId":45485,"journal":{"name":"NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43509571","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":"Sódó Reykjavík: How Homosexuality was Brought into Discourse in Early and Mid-Twentieth Century Iceland","authors":"Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir","doi":"10.1080/08038740.2022.2086908","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2022.2086908","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores how homosexuality, as a concept and phenomenon, became in the early and mid-twentieth century a part of Icelanders’ vocabulary, public discourse, and conception of the world. To use Michel Foucault’s terms, the following discussion focuses on how homosexuality was brought into discourse in Iceland and asks if that process was concurrent with the neighbouring countries or unique for Iceland, a rural island on the periphery of Europe. Building on media discourse, memoirs and personal recollections it seeks to shed light on how Icelanders’ awareness of (predominantly male) homosexuality and the existence of homosexual men became more public and vocalized, and how this new public awareness and formulation of male homosexuality was an integral part of the modernization of Icelandic society. The findings show that while it was rarely addressed in the first half of the twentieth century, public discussion of homosexuality increased significantly around 1950 and included grave concerns regarding the existence of male homosexuals in Reykjavík. This suggests that (male) homosexuality was in this period becoming a more prominent part of Icelanders’ vocabulary and conception of the world.","PeriodicalId":45485,"journal":{"name":"NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43134774","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":"Postfeminism as Coping Strategy: Understandings of Gender and Intragroup Conflict among Swedish Welfare Workers","authors":"Britt-Inger Keisu, Helene Brodin","doi":"10.1080/08038740.2022.2080256","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2022.2080256","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper explores how workers in the women-dominated public sector in Sweden speak about and make sense of gender and intragroup conflict and the consequences of this way of thinking and acting for gender equality at work. Using qualitative interviews with 26 first-level managers and employees, we introduce an analytical framework that employs critical discourse psychology and the conceptualization of a postfeminist sensibility at work. We identified three competing meanings (postfeminist storylines) of gender and intragroup conflict: Supporting the gendered meanings of conflict, Unawareness of conflict’s gendered meanings and Counteracting the gendered meanings of conflict. The welfare workers acknowledged the role of gender in intragroup conflicts but, paradoxically, constructed their own workplaces as gender neutral, without inequalities related to gender. We interpret these three postfeminist storylines as coping strategies; that is, as ways to make sense of the false promise of gender egalitarianism that characterizes the Swedish labour market.","PeriodicalId":45485,"journal":{"name":"NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47579879","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":"Feminist Academics Strategically Playing Offense/Defense in Pursue of Academic and Societal Change","authors":"T. Heijstra, G. Pétursdóttir","doi":"10.1080/08038740.2022.2080255","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2022.2080255","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this intimate-insider study on feminist activists in Icelandic academia we build on Hark’s theoretical concept of the precarious precondition for change. We unpack the concept and apply it to our own research, revealing how feminist scholars dissent to the masculinized neoliberal academic game in pursue of creating change. The findings reveal how the women play their own offence/defence game within the established rules of the academic game. They utilize strategies, both inside and outside of the academia, to guard their discipline, create a ripple effect and handle and control criticism. Moreover, the findings point to the internalized and individuated nature of feminist activism in this setting and the emotional and socio-political costs it entails. Without game plan and accompanying strategies chances for feminist success and change are slim, as there is the constant threat of becoming absorbed or wiped out by the ruling neoliberal game and male biased system.","PeriodicalId":45485,"journal":{"name":"NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45499926","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":"Into the Enclosure: Collective Memory and Queer History in the Icelandic Documentary “People like That”","authors":"T. Vilhjálmsson","doi":"10.1080/08038740.2022.2080257","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2022.2080257","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article criticizes an acclaimed Icelandic documentary film series from 2019, People Like That (“Svona fólk”), which has become the quasi-canonical history of the country’s gay and lesbian rights struggle. The series tells the story of the forward march of normalizing progress and change from below, breaking through with the achievement of registered partnership in 1996. This article views the series as an attempt to create a collective memory corresponding to Iceland’s new self-image as a queer utopia. While avoiding historicist criticism, the article presents new stories and memories from the documentary series‘ own archive, which has been partly released online, and sources unexplored by the series, such as queer journals and official reports. From these stories, different narratives emerge, in which homonormativity is imposed by the Icelandic state and National Church in the 1990s and conceded by Iceland’s National Queer Organization, resulting in a registered partnership legislation that some homosexual Icelanders saw not as a victory but as a loss of power. The contrast between these stories and those of People Like That foregrounds the politics of remembrance and forgetting and exposes the seldom discussed conditions for Icelandic homosexuals‘ inclusion into the nation in the 1990s.","PeriodicalId":45485,"journal":{"name":"NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43536370","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":"Discursive Constructions of Race and Gender in Racial Hate Crime Targeting Women in Sweden","authors":"Mika Hagerlid","doi":"10.1080/08038740.2022.2076738","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2022.2076738","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Research and official statistics alike identify women from racial minorities as a high-risk group for racial hate crime. Still, the construction of women in racial hate crime remains largely unstudied and the current knowledge on racial hate crime against women can at best be described as fragmentary. Therefore, aim of the present study is to explore the constructions of race and gender from the perspective of female victims of racial hate crime. The study draws on intersectional theory and consists of a discourse analysis based on nine interviews with women who have been targets of racial hate crime. The results show that the construction of race in hate crimes targeting women differs distinctively from the construction of race in hate crimes targeting men. The female victims of racial hate crime often find themselves entangled in racial power struggles between men: a power struggle in which men may show their status vis-á-vis out-group men by sexually controlling or abusing women. Thereby, women’s bodies are used as a tool in racial status conflicts between groups of men, as identities, scripts, and stereotypes found primarily within conservatism and right-wing ideology are enacted on the bodies of the victims.","PeriodicalId":45485,"journal":{"name":"NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45329176","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}