Murder,cruelty and sexual assaults

As more and more political institutions stress the significance of gender equality policies, it becomes important to investigate the different interpretations and meanings attached to the concept of gender equality in diverse policy contexts. In this article we are interested in problematizing visions of gender equality by studying the challenges that the growing amount of paid domestic work performed within European households poses for gender equality policies and practices in two European countries. The aim is to reveal normative assumptions and silences in relation to gender equality by comparing how “paid domestic work” has been framed in policy debates in Sweden and Spain. As welfare states, Sweden and Spain are generally considered to be very different, and in policies on care for children and the elderly the differences are perhaps most apparent. In both countries, however, paid domestic work in the home has become more and more common in the last two decades. The rise of paid domestic services in European households has been interpreted as due to the limitations or decline of welfare states, the ageing populations, and the increasing numbers of dual-earner families. These services are most often provided by women, predominantly of immigrant background, and involve a wide range of tasks, including care work. The phenomenon of an increasing sector of domestic (care) work poses a theoretical and methodological challenge to gender and welfare studies. This article argues that the analysis of debates surrounding domestic service in private households is a useful starting-point for an intersectional analysis by means of revealing the normative assumptions and marginalization embedded in gender equality policies. It uses a comparative frame analysis in combination with intersectional analysis to assess how interactions between gender, class, race, and sexuality have been articulated in the policy debates on domestic services in Spain and Sweden.     

Reassembling Gender: On the Immanent Politics of Gendering Apparatuses of Bodily Production in Science

Abstract

Arguing that new feminist materialist work has insufficiently attended to how gender is differently materialized and embodied in practices with non-human others, this article examines ethnographically what genderings come to matter in the knowledge-making practices of mass spectrometry and peer review in a Czech research laboratory. The article returns to Donna Haraway's analytics of the ‘apparatus of bodily production’ and its extension by Karen Barad as a productive device for tracing the situational making and unmaking of gender in specific human–technology assemblages and the sedimenting histories of such intra-actions. Through a triple movement of disassembling, contextualizing and reassembling particular embodiments, the author brings unstable, implicit and absent genderings, and their affective textures, affordances and valuations to the fore, including the corporeal orientations associated with enterprising adrenalin-driven masculinity and denigrated forms of embodiment such as shame and defeat. The article shows how these (de)genderings render present tensions and exclusions in prevailing apparatuses of knowledge production and pose questions of responsibility.     

‘Doing gender and gender equality’ through emotional expressions during a research interview. Views of highly educated Swedish young adults

The aim of this article is to contribute to the knowledge on how concepts of gender and gender equality are constructed within research interviews, deepening our understanding of the underlying gender system in society. We focus on emotions and emotional processes expressed during interviews on work and family when specific questions originating in the World Value Survey were asked. Our study is based on interviews with highly educated women and men, in two metropolitan areas of Sweden. In this article, we seek to shed more light on how incorporating emotional expressions and the evaluation of these emotions can grasp the construction of gender and gender equality. We highlight the range of emotional expressions that appear during the interviews, differences in their usage by women and men and the links to the construction of gender and gender equality. We explore how the specific situation of the interview influences ‘doing gender and gender equality’ through emotions. Our results reveal that men and women use similar but also different emotional expressions in conforming to the gender equality norm. Men and women, interviewers and interviewees agreed on this norm, but the ways they ’performed’ the norm are gender based.     

Reframing Gender Equality in Finnish Online Discussion on Immigration: Populist Articulations of Religious Minorities and Marginalized Sexualities

Gender equality is an essential part of Finnish self-understanding. The public discussion on equality does not, however, only focus on gender; it is also used to promote anti-immigration-minded, homophobic opinions. In the article, the coexistence of contradictory discourses on gender equality is interpreted as populist rhetoric. The articulations of gender equality in online debates on gender, sexuality, and immigration are analysed. The main questions are: How is gender equality reframed in anti-immigration-minded online debate? How are the notions of sexuality and gender fixed in order to oppose immigration? How are gender, sexuality, and immigration articulated intersectionally? The investigation focuses on an article on Muslim homosexuals, published in the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat in March 2013, and the discussion that followed on blogs and in online discussion fora. The logic of the articulation in the empirical material is analysed by identifying five discursive modes for discussing gender equality in opposing Muslim immigration: The Finns Party as defenders of sexual and gender equality; Equality for Muslim women; “The Tolerant” as scapegoats in risking achieved equality; Othering Islam; and Equality for the Westerners. The analysis indicates how the subjects of sexual and gender equality are produced, and illustrates the ability of populist rhetoric to adopt topics, agendas, and ideologies from other discourses and reframe them to promote its political aims. The article discusses how equality is used changeably, referring to varying groups of people. In populist rhetoric, the themes traditionally associated with sexual and gender equality in the Nordic welfare states can be ignored; the concept is detached from all its emancipatory meanings. In populist rhetoric, equality becomes a tool used to promote hegemonic power relations.     

Equality versus difference and gender versus class in Danish women's history

The articulated goals of feminist research and politics in Denmark have been changing during the last twenty years, from “liberation” to “equality” and now perhaps to “difference”. Open theoretical debates on these changes have been rare in the Danish context, but the need for such debates has been made topical by the latest theoretical and political discourses in Denmark on equality and difference, gender and class. The American feminist historian Joan W. Scott has shown the detrimental effects to feminist research and politics of constructing the concepts of equality and difference as binary oppositions. She argues that women's equality with men could be claimed on the basis of sameness/ similarity as well as on the basis of difference. The same detrimental effects occur, however, when sameness/similarity and difference, gender and class, are constructed dichotomously. The history of the women's movements in Denmark around the turn of the century shows that some women have tried to avoid such dichotomies. Other women have contributed to them, however, and their arguments have been sustained by the hegemonic discourses of the time. Women's history research is part of competing discourses on gender. It may have political impact on the gender relations of today. Therefore, an important purpose of feminist history is to expose the way dichotomous discourses act against feminist goals, and to avoid making such discourses part of one's own theoretical framework.     

“It Is So Swedish That You Have to Work”. Returning Swedish Migrant Women’s Negotiations of Gender Equality and Heterosexuality

Notions of gender equality are strongly linked to the Swedish self-image. This article explores returning Swedish migrant women’s negotiations of heterosexual gender equality ideals based on their experiences of being housewives to middle- and upper-class men with work contracts abroad. From fieldwork conducted within two networks for returning Swedes, the article provides an analysis of the ways in which the women talk about work, gender equality, and domestic workers.

The analysis of the women’s accounts of gender relations shows that different ways of doing femininity are central in their narratives. By using the concepts “emphasized femininity” and “gender-equal femininity” the article highlights the different forms of femininity that can be traced in the women’s narratives. Drawing from the empirical examples, it is shown that the women are troubled by Swedish gender equality ideals and express a feeling of not “fitting in” after returning to Sweden. I suggest that the women’s articulations of not “fitting in” to (imagined) gender-equal Sweden tend to downplay the fact that they still have advantages that assist with “fitting in” from social positions such as class, whiteness, and (hetero)sexuality: positions which may create space for negotiating social norms in Sweden.     

Talking about gender equality: Swedish women's discourses on the home front

Housework is a useful arena for a study of the manufacturing of everyday femininity and masculinity. This article focuses on discourses and practices concerning housework and its equal or unequal distribution between husband and wife. It analyses how gender equality ideologies are met with or assimilated into everyday speech and understandings among Swedish women. Interview accounts from two women of different ages and class positions are analysed in detail, using a discursive approach of analysis. Their ways of relating to available discourses on gender equality and femininity are contrasted, and related to the feminist project of fifty‐fifty sharing of housework and traditional discourses of separate spheres for women and men.     

"Heavyweight" men and younger women? The gendering of selection processes in Norwegian sport organizations

This article concentrates on discourses and practices concerning leadership selection in Norwegian sport organizations, how meanings of gender are made relevant and how these processes may contribute to build and rebuild organizational gender structures. The empirical material focuses on selection procedures and how these are discursively underpinned. The analyses revealed that the selection discourses were strongly related to images of corporate leadership skills: skills associated with "heroic" masculine traits, but seen as gender-neutral. Most female candidates were not regarded as sufficiently possessing the most preferred skills. The selection procedures seem to indicate a gendered political situation, where overall organizational objectives to promote gender equality are relatively subordinated.     

Shameful Separations and Embarrassing Proximities: Affective Constructions of Political (Il)Legitimacy in the Danish Debate on Prostitution

Political documents on gender equality in the Nordic countries contain interesting systematic variations in justification strategies and discursive commitments at different political-rhetorical levels. This is particularly apparent when political texts move from general gender equality to arguing about specific issues. This article looks at the variety of "versions" of gender equality that appear when the discourses of gender and the conceptualisations of power that inform Swedish political party documents are scrutinised. Consequences of different versions of gender equality for rhetoric about policy measures and rhetorical uses of "uniformity" versus "heterogeneity" are also discussed.     

Rape Myths and Gender Stereotypes in Croatian Rape Laws and Judicial Practice

In this paper I examine the presence of rape myths and gender stereotypes, and the norms of sexuality they reflect and reinforce, in Croatian rape laws, as exemplified by the recent practice of the Zagreb County Court. I begin with a general discussion of the gendered myths and stereotypes that have shaped the content and application of the criminal law of rape everywhere. I then briefly introduce the definition of rape under the 1997 Croatian Criminal Code which was in force at the time of my research, after which I proceed to the critical analysis and the assessment of the Zagreb County Court practice. Next, I turn to the changes in the new Criminal Code to see how they address the identified problems. I offer a model of an affirmative consent standard, based on a communicative model of sexuality, which values reciprocal responsibility, communication and mutuality of sexual desire. I argue that this standard has greater potential to challenge rape myths and gender stereotypes and to promote sexual freedom and gender equality.     

Narratives of progress: cooking and gender equality among Swedish men

Feminist food studies have repeatedly identified a dichotomy of ‘masculine’ self-oriented cooking as leisure and ‘feminine’ other and care-oriented foodwork (meal planning, grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning up after meals). However, recent research suggests that there is a great deal of variety and contradiction in men’s accounts of their cooking practices. For example, men may find cooking a tedious and stressful responsibility and foodwork a fatherly duty. This article draws on interviews with 31 Swedish men from 22 to 88 years of age, and explores stories about cooking and foodwork as part of their everyday lives and their life transitions and how these relate to broader notions of food and gender equality. The data illuminating the men’s stories can be synthesised into two narratives of progress: a narrative of progress in gender equality in Sweden, where men’s participation in household labour has become taken for granted, and a narrative of culinary progress among Swedish men in general and among some of the interviewed men themselves. We agree with previous scholars who have argued for a reconsideration of the simplistic picture of men’s cooking as only being for the self and for leisure. We further show how the men express foodwork as a self-evident responsibility, regardless of whether the men find it fun or not, and that a desirable masculinity is represented by a man whose cooking skills have progressed beyond the survival level and who is more gender equal than what are perceived to be less-progressive men from previous generations and foreign cultural backgrounds.     

Intersections and Inconsistencies. Framing Gender in Right-Wing Populist Discourses in Austria

The paper contributes to the discussion on (re)framing processes of gender equality focusing in particular on right-wing populist discourses in Austria. Our frame analysis of 50 texts published by four right-wing (extremist) parties and movements reveals that traditional (family) values, women's “free choice”, and LGBT rights play important roles in right-wing populist (re)framing processes of gender equality. Our data also show notable inconsistencies with regard to the meanings attached to gender and gender equality within the discourses studied. For instance, right-wing populists are, on the one hand, concerned with the protection of “the traditional family”—which means being against e.g. same-sex marriage and emphasizing women's wish to stay at home. On the other hand, these same actors argue against immigration by using gender arguments in a different and even contradictory manner, claiming that e.g. Muslim men are bound by their “culture” to discriminate women and LGBT people. Our intersectional approach, analytically focusing on different meanings that gender equality acquires at the intersections with ethnicity, nationality, religion/culture, and sexuality, shows that within right-wing populist discourses inconsistencies in the framing of gender and gender equality arise in relation to the shifting meanings attributed to the essential dichotomy of “us” versus “them”. While the discursive construction of antagonistic positions is essential for right-wing populism, the groups/people designated to fill these “slots” might differ according to topic. We argue that “intersectionality from above” is one of populists' instruments to gloss over inconsistencies and to (re)frame gender equality in an on-going process of (re)negotiations of meanings.     

Gender Equality and Reproductive Decision-Making

In Evans, both the U.K. High Court and Court of Appeal upheld Howard Johnstons right to refuse Natallie Evans access to the stored embryos which represented her only hope of having a child which was genetically her own. In this note, I focus on claims of gender (in)equality in the resolution of Evans. My argument is that such claims are often made all too easily, without full consideration of the problems of advancing them in the context of procreative decision-making, where men and women are inevitably differently situated. I conclude that although equality arguments are not wholly without value in this context, they need be used with extreme care. And, with due caution, I set out an equality argument of my own which was not made in Evans.     

Gender,resistance and land: interlinked struggles over resources and meanings in South Asia

This article examines the nature of women's resistance to gender inequities in resource distribution and ideological representation. It argues that to understand how women perceive these inequities it is necessary to take into account not only their overt protests but also the many covert forms their resistance might take. At the same time, to significantly alter gendered structures of property and power it appears necessary to move beyond 'individual-covert' to 'group-overt' (organized collective) resistance. These issues are examined here especially in the context of women's struggles for land rights and gender equality in South Asia. Although historically South Asian women have been important participants in peasant movements, these movements have not been typified by women demanding independent land rights or contesting iniquitous gender relations within the movements and within their families. Some recent challenges in this direction indicate that attaining gender equality in the distribution of productive resources will require a simultaneous struggle against constraining ideological constructions of gender, including (in many regions) associated social practices such as purdah. And in both types of struggle (namely concerning resources and gender ideologies), group-overt resistance is likely to be of critical importance.     

The Elephant in the Room: Heterosexuality in Critical Gender/Sexuality Studies

Gender equality workers have to perform a balancing act between feminist ideals for change and neo-liberal management trends. So-called audit discourses have gradually been introduced into Swedish universities, in line with an enterprise model. In this new context, the aim of our article is to investigate how gender equality workers at universities articulate gender equality and possibilities for change. What are their visions and strategies for achieving gender equality? This article is based on interviews with gender equality workers at three Swedish universities and explores how the legitimate gender equality worker is constructed. We found that there is a lack of visionary thinking among gender equality workers, which manifests itself in a sense that the distinction between visions and strategies has collapsed and technologies like auditing have become the vision. It seems that, whilst navigating between liberal feminist discourses and an increasingly neo-liberal setting, two positions are available for gender equality workers. The first is the “administrator”, who asks for more tools and monitoring of gender equality, in order for the work to become more efficient and legitimate. The second position, the “critical cynic”, makes scepticism and resistance to the increasing bureaucratization of gender equality work possible, but lacks alternative visions and strategies. Gender equality initiatives have thus become increasingly embedded in auditing technologies, and the possibilities for articulating alternatives or visionary ideals, beyond liberal values of anti-discrimination, seem limited.     

Love and the State: Gay Marriage in Spain

On 30 June 2005, the Spanish Parliament approved Law 13/2005, which amends the Civil Code to permit same-sex marriage. This formal equality measure put Spain in the spotlight of the international media. It is the culmination of a series of developments spanning from the last years of the Franco regime (which ended in 1975), through the enactment of anti-discrimination measures in 1995, to the recent fight for kinship recognition. It also follows a recent shift, from 1998 to 2005, towards the enactment of same-sex partnership laws at regional level, the approval of same-sex marriage and finally, the approval of a ‹gender identity law’ (2007). This legislative note assesses the context in which the new law on same-sex marriage has been enacted. I argue that although same-sex marriage has been represented by many activists and politicians in Spain as a gender neutral contract, it has the potential for differential impacts on lesbians and gay men, and further research and debates are needed in this area.     

The “Crisis” of Gender Equality: The Norwegian Newspaper Debate on Female Genital Cutting

This article examines how tensions between feminism and multiculturalism conflate in a media debate on female genital cutting. The following questions are addressed: how is gender equality problematized, in what ways is the gender equality approach challenged, and what are the main solutions to prevent female genital cutting. The empirical analysis is based on the newspaper debate that followed the Norwegian Broadcasting Company's (NRK) documentary on female genital cutting in June 2007. The findings of our study do not support a claim that gender equality would be challenged by accommodations to multiculturalism. Our conclusion is that it is difficult to disconnect policy-making aimed at combating female genital cutting from the processes of stigmatization. Rather, by advocating the type of measure that is the most contested by the actors of ethnic minority organizations, the proponents for adopting routines of genital examination ultimately contribute to a problematic pattern, where the political debate about the situation within ethnic minority groups is run and dominated by the majority.     

The Question of Feminism in Gender Mainstreaming—A Case of Non-conflict in Local Politics

This article discusses gender equality and how and why a gender mainstreaming strategy avoids the question of gender conflict. The making of gender-equality work is studied by investigating how feminism is talked about and rejected in a specific gender mainstreaming project in the municipality of Örebro, Sweden. Drawing upon the theoretical concepts of hegemony and discourse, the focus is on the silences—the unspoken questions and problems—surrounding the project. I examine how the exclusion of feminism and conflict is articulated when gender mainstreaming is introduced as a new way of doing gender-equality work in the municipality. The struggles identified show that feminism is rejected because it is seen as being in opposition to (1) professionalism and (2) legitimate political issues. I conclude that within the local discourse of gender mainstreaming there is a notion that this form of gender-equality work ought to be performed without harmful or threatening gender conflicts. This means that the strategy of gender mainstreaming constitutes a short-cut to bypass controversial problems like equal treatment, special efforts for women, and men's privileges in gender-equality work.     

Girl culture as a chastity belt

The concept of the women-friendly welfare states, introduced by the Norwegian political scientist Helga Maria Hernes in 1987, has had a considerable influence on welfare theory and research. In this article the normative basis and the analytical potential of the concept are explored. The concept can be criticized for its bias towards social democratic welfare states, which has challenged its analytical potential. Instead of abandoning it altogether, the authors suggest that an alternative could be to reformulate and contextualize the concept with gender equality as the key notion. The reformulation would make it possible to distinguish analytically between women-friendliness and policies that promote gender equality between different dimensions of welfare, and between civil and political from social aspects of citizenship.