Using “The gun act”: Federal regulation and the politics of the strike threat during World War I

This study examines the working-class custom of “can rushing,” a.k.a. “rushing the growler,” which was the common saloon-era practice of carrying alcohol (usually beer) from a saloon in a pail for consumption elsewhere. The ubiquitous saloon served as one of the most contentious spaces between the middle class and a burgeoning working class during the Gilded Age/Progressive Era, and reformers attacked it as a blight on their communities and working-class drinking customs as a threat to a moral and orderly society. Reformers' efforts to restrict can rushing was part of a larger effort to impose middle-class control over workers' leisure activities and their parental prerogatives. For much of the working class the saloon and the cultural mores that surrounded it were a mainstay of their culture. While men were the primary customers of the saloon's interior, “rushing the growler” turned women and children into saloon customers as well. Reformers portrayed this practice as the lowest form of saloon patronage for men, while at the same time arguing that it was a dire threat to the moral welfare of women and children. Much of the working class, however, viewed this practice as an efficient and economical way to consume alcohol in the workplace, on the street, and in the home. This study will consider how the struggle over can rushing politicized this cherished working-class leisure activity.     

Making space: an exchange about women and the performance of free noise

This article considers the spatial politics of contemporary performance spaces constructed through DIY, improvised noise scenes. Noise (as something performed) is often categorized as “experimental,” “free,” or “avant garde.” It carries associations of emancipation, eschewing as it does conventional musical training, and the constraints of formal compositional and linguistic expression. Unfolding as a debate between the two authors, this article reflects on the contributions post-structural feminist theory brings to an understanding of where and how women practitioners negotiate noise-performance spaces. By considering noise as a conceptual object as well as noise as sonic performance, and by reflecting on debates around radical democracy, the authors debate the issue of female-only performance spaces and their implications on what we can express and how we might be understood. This contribution seeks to initiate further debate on the inherent complexities of how women create and negotiate spaces of noise performance in the face of normative assumptions and associations that have simplified the debate – for example, that the loud, discordant, and arrhythmic is obnoxious, dangerous, and historically a masculine domain.     

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.     

Letting Women in? Gender Mainstreaming in Regional Policies

Gender mainstreaming has over the last ten years become the dominant strategy of integrating gender issues in public policy. This article presents regional policy as a broad and increasingly important policy field to study, and analyses gender mainstreaming in this policy field in the Norwegian and the Swedish contexts. How do problem representations surrounding “gender equality” and “gender mainstreaming” produce meanings of gender as well as construct possibilities for change? The article shows that, despite some differences between the two countries, gender mainstreaming in regional policy can to a large extent be read as meaning “women”. Women are in this context given a narrow subject position and are constructed as lacking what it takes to produce sustainable regional growth. The concluding discussion highlights the relations between the implementation of gender mainstreaming and neo‐liberal political trends.     

Missing Masculinities: Gendering Practices in Australian Alcohol Research and Policy

The issue of ‘alcohol-fuelled violence’ has been the subject of intense policy debate in Australia. While this debate is warranted, its contours and content have been informed and shaped by a surprisingly narrow range of research resources. Narrow research engagements of this kind warrant scrutiny because they can exclude from consideration crucial issues. In this article we identify one such issue, that of gender. Following a review of the Australian literature on gender, alcohol and violence, our analysis explores four case studies drawn from the Australian research corpus, focusing on large quantitative studies as these tend to receive most attention and citation in policy debate. Such studies consistently erase the contribution of key gender dynamics, namely enactments of particular (often youthful) masculinities, to violence involving alcohol, even where they simultaneously provide strong support in their data for such a conclusion. We show how this research is mobilised specifically in support of claims about the causal role of alcohol in violence and of blanket population-level responses to the problem. There is an urgent need to map the character and scope of the tendency to erase certain gender issues in research on alcohol and violence in order to better inform policy responses.     

“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.     

The Threat or Promise of Popular Therapy? A Feminist Reading of Narratives of “the Good Couple”

Popular therapeutic culture—such as self-help books, TV programmes, and Internet resources—is growing rapidly and posing important questions for feminist research and politics. On the one hand, it can be seen as a challenge to the public sphere in terms of what can be shown and said and by whom, with the emancipatory potential of giving political credentials to the personal. On the other, it can be seen as exploiting, and thereby reproducing, stereotypes and inequalities, such as those related to gender. In this article, the discussion is advanced by the use of Swedish popular therapy for couples as a point of departure. It is argued that a cultural narrative of the “good couple” is constructed in self-help books and TV programmes on relationship issues, a narrative that seems to keep the unequal nature of this heterosexual institution from being challenged. However, in the individual narratives of consumers of this culture, apparent on web discussion boards, the cultural narrative of the “good couple” is being challenged, not least with reference to gender and gender inequality.     

Making Places of Intimacy—Ethnicity,Friendship, and Masculinities in Oslo

Through transnational migration, practices of gender, intimacy, and sexuality “travel” with people, get incorporated into new social and cultural contexts, and are negotiated and transformed in the encounter with other such practices. The discussion here will focus on the fluid boundaries between male–male emotional and physical intimacy, male–male sexual practice, and homosexual imagery, as they are culturally understood in Pakistan and incorporated into a minority context in Norway by migrants from Pakistan. While homosexuality in Norway is gradually gaining public and political support, it is regarded as unacceptable by Muslim authorities in the country, thus making the issue of homosexuality a vital marker separating the majority population from the Muslim minority. Against this scenario, which is much debated among politicians, activists and various spokespersons from the ethnic and religious communities, practices of friendship and intimacy among Pakistani men in Norway take place. The significance given to the heterosexual–homosexual divide, however, creates a more vulnerable situation for practices of intimacy among men that are not necessarily judged against the homosexual imagery in Pakistan. By using the concept of unmanliness, it is shown how the boundaries of manliness are differently positioned within dominant Norwegian and Pakistani masculinities respectively. This can cause tension on an individual level, as well as on a group level. Therefore, Pakistani men in Norway must create particular places of intimacy, within which culturally specific practices of gender, sexuality, and intimacy are maintained and transformed.     

Problematizing multiculturalism: Respect,tolerance and the limits to tolerance

The complexities of multiculturalism are discussed and it is argued that multiculturalism has to be critically defined and scrutinized in terms of respect, tolerance and the limits to tolerance. While avoiding the pitfalls of “Eurocentrism”, it is nonetheless important to recognize that there exist culturally or religiously defined beliefs, customs and practices that run counter to the basic values of society, to gender equality, and which violate women's human rights. The discussion focuses on possible conflict areas pertaining to marriage and family life, tradition‐based unequal authority systems between women and men and violence against women. The aim is to identify areas where conflicts may arise between, on the one hand, respect for women's human rights and, on the other, respect for the cultural identity of immigrant groups. The paper also suggests ways of addressing and handling this type of conflict.     

Regendering the Rural: The Agricultural Training of Office Ladies in Hokkaido

This article investigates the gendering nature of depopulation and rural revitalization in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. After outlining the cultural politics of these twin phenomena, I explore them further through a case study of the depopulated community of Shintoku. By establishing the Ladies Farm School in 1996, the town hoped that the agricultural training of single urban women would eventually lead them to settle down as young (and productive) “farming ladies.” Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in the school, I examine how gender is contested and constructed by seemingly progressive changes in women's social status. The argument I make here is that we reconsider the sexual division of labor as a (historical) product of modernization, instead of interpreting it as a timeless cultural pattern. A society is deeply marked by the specific forms in which its labor power is prepared. —Paul Willis, Learning to Labour     

School predictors of alcohol use in high school Hispanic and non-Hispanic youth

Many youth alcohol prevention programs are not culturally sensitive and have focused on avoidance tactics. Given the differences in alcohol use and the possibly differing intervention strategies for Hispanic and non-Hispanic youth, this study aims to analyze the contributing factors of alcohol use within these two groups. Two hundred and one high school students participated in a survey. Findings indicate that prevention programs should focus on situational opportunities to use alcohol for both Hispanic and non-Hispanic youth. For Hispanic students, school management skills did not relate to less alcohol use, as expected. There should be less emphasis on how risky drinking can be, and more emphasis on the moral implications or “wrongness” of drinking, particularly for non-Hispanics. The discussion includes some possible interpretations of the relationship between skill management skills and heightened alcohol use for Hispanic students.     

Gender differences in self-reported moral reasoning: A review and new evidence

Sixty-four undergraduates wrote responses to the question, “When faced with a moral dilemma, what issues or concerns influence your decision?” The responses were coded according to one or more of 13 themes by independent raters blind to the subjects' gender. Six of the themes were identified as “feminine” themes and seven as “masculine” themes on the basis of previous work by Gilligan ([1982],In a Different Voice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts), Kohlberg ([1976], “Moral Stages and Moralization: The Cognitive-Developmental Approach,” in Lickona, T. [ed.],Moral Development and Behavior: Theory, Research, and social Issues, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York), and others. Only one association between gender and the presence of any given theme reached statistical significance: Thus, there is little evidence to support the idea that men and women differ in their reports of how they think about moral dilemmas. For all subjects, the average proportion of possible feminine themes in a response was higher than the proportion of possible masculine themes. This finding supports the idea than an exclusive focus on themes such as rights and responsibilities will fail to capture many of the considerations all subjects regard as most important.     

Discourses on Honour-Related Violence in Finnish Policy Documents

In Finland, issues linked to honour-related violence (HRV) have gained attention relatively late compared to other Nordic countries. The aim of this paper is to study how the issue has been presented in Finnish policy documents published between 2004 and 2012. The analysis is based on a discourse-analytical approach, which enables critical consideration of prevailing understandings of HRV, of the causes assumed to lie behind it, and the different subject positions the dominant discourses offer for victims and perpetrators. A further question concerns the measures proposed in the analysed policy documents: Do these measures reflect the understanding(s) of HRV promoted in the discourses? It is argued that the presentations of HRV are involved in creating boundaries between “us”, the Finnish-majority population, and the Other, immigrant population. Furthermore, the reasons behind HRV are understood as coinciding with the prevailing schemes of “patriarchal immigrant communities”. This has led to measures combining the combat against violence with integration policies, which in issues of gender equality aspire towards immigrants' assimilation. Consequently, violence against immigrant women—especially HRV—is located outside the sphere of criminal policy.     

The Functions of Class at the Present Time: Including Taste,or Sex and Class as Culture

Gagnier provides an analytic account of current uses of gender, sex and sexuality, and of class as objective condition, role, identity, subjectivity, performance, product of cultural formation, pain and pleasure. She concludes that we shall do better today to take from the history of political economy a focus on the division of labour, the kinds of work people do, including women's unpaid labour at home, and the ways that work structures identity and subjectivity, than on more abstract class identity (e.g. wage-labourers and capitalists), and to see that both local and global divisions of labour or work patterns are along race and gender lines as much as along class lines. The introduction of consumption models of taste and status draws together both class and gender, for consumption and leisure, the realm for most wage-labourers of pleasure, is as significant in the formation of identity and subjectivity as work, production or pain. We should account for people's pleasures and desires as well as their pain and place in narrowly conceived 'productive' relations. Class is no less significant than it always was, but future work should disaggregate the concept along these lines, mindful of gender salience in the division of labour and the reproduction of class. And it should include critical analysis of the realms of taste, pleasure, consumption, leisure and status.     

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.     

Performing the Self,Performing the Other: gender and racial identity construction in the Nanteuil Cycle

This article focuses on the Old French Nanteuil Cycle of chansons de geste, investigating the nature of medieval identity and its connection to gender, race and religion. The Nanteuil Cycle repeatedly uses disguise as a means of crossing gender boundaries, which allows the repositioning of identity and simultaneously reveals the arbitrariness of cultural categorisation. Although cross-dressing heroines abound in medieval literature, the fourteenth-century Tristan de Nanteuil contains instances where cross-dressing is both gendered and racialised, stretching the malleability of identity to the point that it seems physical form can be altered at will. The article discusses the distortion of genealogies in the Cycle effected by the challenges to the social matrix produced by disguise, with a new relational framework where wives may become fathers and mothers become husbands.     

How “godparents” are made for “unaccompanied refugee minors”: an ethnographic view into the training of future youth mentors

There are many qualitative studies on interactions and activities within mentoring, including on organizational processes. This article concentrates on one pivotal aspect regarding the “doings” of mentorship—the training of future voluntary mentors (known as "godparents") for separated young refugees in a pilot program. The underlying study looks at knowledge production in mentoring. The explorative research done in Austria started during the so-called refugee crisis in Europe in 2015. Using data from participant observation, the “triangle of godparenthood” is reconstructed as a core structure underlying the overall pilot program. Thus the ideal-type figures of the “family-like,” the “professional,” and the “committed contractual” godparent become visible. The interpretation discusses youth mentoring as a form of social problems work. Accordingly, the study shows how social protection is organized based on particular social problematizations and on the construction of voluntary mentors from civil society. The training “teaches” future mentors what kind of young people their counterparts are. It offers a problematization according to which particular “needs” are defined. This allows mentors to legitimize, rationalize, and moralize what is, in the end, a pedagogical approach. By relating the problematization to a personal level, the training provides future mentors with a particular idea and moral obligation regarding what they personally can be for those young people who are categorized as “unaccompanied refugee minors.”     

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.     

The White Woman's Burden: “Feminist” War Rhetoric and the Phenomenon of Co-optation

This article takes a critical stance towards the rhetoric of protecting and liberating Afghan women in the wake of the “war on terror”, in this paper called “feminist” security rhetoric. An increased gender awareness in general and in relation to war in particular has influenced the ways in which war stories have been expressed over the last two decades. References to UN Resolution 1325, on women and security in post-conflict situations, will serve as both an indication and illustration of “feminist” security rhetoric, the co-optation phenomenon included, a practice that absorbs the meanings of the original concepts to fit into the prevailing political priorities. The rhetoric of the former Norwegian defence minister, Anne-Grete Strøm-Erichsen, is presented as a case study of this phenomenon. The Norwegian (and the Nordic) gender equality model has mainly been analysed from a welfare perspective, seldom from a post-colonial war(fare)/peace perspective. By analysing Norwegian “feminist” security rhetoric, I also want to push feminist rhetoric to create a space that is sensitive to post-colonial perspectives as well as political philosophy. I thereby intend to question both cultural relativism and aggressive cosmopolitanism dressed in various feminized outfits, aiming instead to suggest some common ground for feminist post-colonial voices to meet the voices of Western feminists who oppose the tendency to see whole cultures as internally homogeneous and almost externally sealed. These voices may together constitute a potent oppositional discourse to Western feminized security rhetoric.