Book Review: Work,children and gender equality

The motivating concern behind this article is that women, in the diversity of their ages, life situations, cultural traditions of gender and actual sexual connections to men, are still marginalized by prevailing approaches to HIV and AIDS. Safe sexual practices for women, within social contexts and actual sexual relations with men, are not being approached in ways that engage women's (or their male partners') active involvement. Conventional heterosexual distinctions between women's and men's sexuality disables prevention processes. Categories and perspectives which prevail in ''interpreting'' the HIV/ AIDS epidemic, inhibitions and assumptions framing sexual safety information, and cultural narratives of gendered love/desire/sex, converge into two highly problematic outcomes: a dissociation of heterosexually-defined men who have sex with women from central responsibility for HIV prevention, and marginalization of women who have sex with men from concern about women's sexual safety.     

Book Review: Narratives on gender,generations and ethnicity

ABSTRACT. Though the study of men and masculinities has always been part of Women's Studies, recent Finnish studies on men have often developed without explicit attention to gender relations. In a Nordic context, Finnish studies on men have been relatively neglected. In this article we provide a concise review of Finnish research on men, including special reference to men's relations to home and work, men's violences, and the social exclusion of men. We present a synthetic account of the recent development of these studies and a critique of the field, and suggest some ways forward in future studies.     

Book Review: When gender equality becomes men's rights: An analysis of EC law

In a society that is becoming more and more dependent on science and technology, there is an increasing need for alternative ways of understanding our existence, so that we can construct societies and ways of living that are sustainable. This article focuses on technoscientific challenges in feminism, by identifying how the meanings of concepts and categories change over time and vary according to different contexts and periods. How are we to succeed in modifying the prevailing discourses of science and views of knowledge and the processes through which technoscience shapes and is shaped, in order to achieve more permanent changes? Do feminist positions make sense in challenges of dominated discourses of technoscience and in transformative research projects?     

Book Review: Magic,body and social order

Specifically designed for single‐family use, the type‐planned house of the 1940s was a new form of dwelling. As a social system and in the domestic practice upheld by them, these houses differed from previous housing models in Finland. In rural and urban areas, these architecturally conventional and characterless houses were built using ready‐made type drawings, and according to a fixed set of housing principles. The prevalent view of the proper organization of everyday life reached its most tangible monument in the architecture of these houses; they were “model houses for model families”. Instead of a purely aesthetical perspective, this study analyses the housing ideology and the notions of family and gender implanted in their architecture. Crucial is the concept of dwelling: dwelling is analysed as a cultural signifying system, in which‐spatial arrangement produces and maintains a certain ideology, conventions of behaviour, and notions of family and gender. Accordingly, it controls and orders people's lives, and also structures gender identities at a certain level. In creating a new differentiation of space, the type‐planned house also differentiated the genders.     

Book Review: Gendered mobility

In the decades after 1945, Danish governments approved a series of family policy reforms which came to constitute the core elements of what is considered the women-friendly welfare state. In order to understand these developments, this article explores the rise of women's political influence, looking specifically at women's agency outside the parliamentary sphere. This article analyses how a network of influential women combined critical resources such as knowledge of families' concerns and inside information from commissions and boards with agenda-setting strategies promoting family policy reforms, even though women constituted a minority in parliament and had no permanent women's state institution. Hence, modern Danish family policy was not a state project granted to women but to a great extent the result of a network of exceptional women setting a new agenda.     

Book Review

Andrea Dworkin. Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant. New York: Basic Books, 2002.     

Book Review

Women Playwrights in England, Ireland, and Scotland, 1660–1823. David D. Mann and Susan Garland Mann with Camille Gamier. Bloomington &; Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1996. 432 pp. $57.50 cl.