Stories of life Stories of living: Women’ narratives and feminist biography

Narrative structure in biographical accounts is currently a much debated theme. This article brings together methodological debates in life story research and discussions within feminism about women's narratives and feminist biography. Connections between gendered conceptions of time and structures in narrative accounts are explored, and seen in relation to the context of interviewing. The latter is problematized as a setting that affects both the form and content of the biographical accounts given by informants. From this approach the opportunity arises for illuminating connections between “private troubles” in people's lives and “public issues” in society. An empirical discussion based on biographical interviews with white, Norwegian, middle‐class women, is carried out to illustrate the points made.     

From ‘Tramp Stamps’ to Traditional Sleeves: A Feminist Autobiographical Account of Tattoos

ABSTRACT

In this article I use a feminist autobiographical approach to present my ‘tattoo narrative’ as a gendered, embodied account in which I map out key moments in my life over two decades through the images inscribed on my skin. Specifically, I examine how my bodily modifications have magnified the social responses to my body as a woman. For example, as a teenager, I acquired a naval piercing and trendy ‘feminine’, discretely located tattoos to satisfy a heterosexual male gaze. In contrast, as a woman in my late thirties, my tattoos satisfy a different purpose. They are larger, bolder, and more ‘masculine’ in line with the evolution of my feminist politics. However, as an academic, the social responses to my tattoos are more complex. In class defined social spaces such as the university where I work, my tattoos cause trouble because they challenge gendered and classed norms for femininity. I conclude by calling for women to engage in autobiographical writing about bodily modification as a critical feminist political act.     

The Transitional Justice Gap: Exploring ‘Everyday’ Gendered Harms and Customary Justice in South Kivu,DR Congo

Feminist transitional justice (TJ) has greatly contributed to the study of justice in the ruins of war, notably around prosecuting wartime rape. At the same time, scholars have observed limitations to this research agenda such as externally-driven definitions gendered harms and how to address them. This paper explores two novel areas for feminist TJ research: ‘everyday gendered harms’ and customary justice. Based on a three month field study of baraza, a customary justice mechanism in parts of South Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo, I explore three cases of ‘everyday’ harms against women: domestic violence, polygynous relationships and witchcraft. Through a substantive examination of these baraza cases, I highlight how studying the contextualised functioning of customary justice mechanisms provides new insights into different areas of feminist TJ scholarship, including women’s participation in the transition, justice for harms against women, and advancing gender equality. Additionally, this paper adds to the broader TJ literature by engaging with local TJ needs as they pertain to people’s everyday life in transition.     

Migrating Within “the Gender-equal Nordic Region”: Icelandic Migrants in Norway and the Gendered Division of Work and Care

Migration is a gendered process that shapes the lives of men and women differently, because they generally occupy dissimilar positions within the household, the labour market, and society. This article examines gender and migration within a Nordic context, between two countries that are often presented as gender-equal in cross-national comparisons. The focus is on how the gendered division of labour is manifested in the experiences of Icelanders who migrated to Norway in the wake of the Icelandic financial crisis of October 2008. The results are based on interviews with people who migrated to Norway both with and without their families. In our analysis, we show how the gender-segregated labour market and gender norms lead to different positions and opportunities for men and women at times of economic crisis and migration. For study participants who migrated with their families, the relocation was often organized around the labour-market position and opportunities of men. Those who migrated without their families emphasized their roles as providers for their families. However, only the women described how their absence was perceived as a failure to fulfil childcare responsibilities. The findings highlight the resilience of the notions of men as providers and women as primary parents within “the gender-equal Nordic region”, and indicate how these roles may facilitate or discourage the migration of men and women.     

“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.     

Constructions of Deportability in Sweden. Refused Asylum Seekers’ Experiences in Relation to Gender,Family Life,and Reproduction

Drawing on ethnographic material, this article examines how the experiences of refused asylum seekers in Sweden are shaped by migration policies, welfare policies, and gender norms. The article develops a feminist account of deportability to examine some gendered and reproductive aspects of everyday experiences of seeking asylum in Sweden. Focusing on the interview accounts of one heterosexual couple and one woman from Kosovo, I explore how their experiences are formed by the refusal of asylum claims in cases of sexual violence and/or their relationship and parental status. The analysis reflects on the way in which the specific legislative situation in the time period in which these interviews were made led to a privileging of families with children above single migrants and/or couples without children. It also reflects on how experiences of deportability clash dramatically with the idea of Sweden as a women-friendly welfare state.     

Crossing Identitarian Lines: Women's Liberation and James Baldwin's Early Essays

Since a gender‐free society has never existed historically, feminist thinking that posits the equality of the sexes is inherently Utopian. Feminist Utopian writers, working within the traditional genre of science‐fiction, a genre particularly well‐suited to revolutionary theoretical discussions, have explored three types of feminist utopias: all‐female societies, biological androgyny, and genuinely egalitarian two‐sex societies. This essay examines examples of feminist utopias in each of these three paradigms to determine to what extent they are “abstract” (in Ernst Bloch's terminology), ie. merely wish‐fulfillment fantasies, and to what extent “concrete” and thus viable blue‐prints for future political and social organization.     

Åkesson at Almedalen: Intersectional Tensions and Normalization of Populist Radical Right Discourse in Sweden

This study analyses the populist radical right discourse of the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna, SD), examining how Jimmie Åkesson, the SD chairperson, conceptualized gendered social positions in the folkhem ([Swedish] people’s home) in his annual speeches in Almedalen, since the SD entered the Swedish Parliament in 2010 to date. Attention is being paid to whose voices are allowed to come forth and in which manner this is done, and to how inequalities intersecting gender and ethnicity are explained and reproduced, as means to normalize populist radical right discourse in Sweden. Theoretically, the study rests on the conceptualization of the populist radical right as a thin-centred ideology, which is contingently adapted to national politics, to which it ads “intersectionality from above” as a specific analytical perspective. The discourse-historical approach (DHA) provides the methodological tools for the analysis and facilitates its contextual positioning. The article contributes analytically to the field, shedding light on how, in the context of populist radical right discourse, welfare chauvinist appeals are employed formally to acknowledge the importance of gender equality in Sweden, and are used as a device to contour two antithetic entities: the supposedly gender-equal Swedish ethnic majority as the opposite of the allegedly deeply patriarchal migrant Other. The article also contributes empirically to the study of the populist radical right in Sweden. It provides a more nuanced picture of the party’s ideological transformations in what is envisaged to be their ideological normalization—from fringe nationalism (antidemocratic national socialism) and outright racism to welfare chauvinism and cultural racism (Islamophobic exclusionary nationalism) in conservative clothing.     

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.     

crisis,austerity and gendered governance: a feminist perspective

Feminist scholars have been highly attentive to the ways that crises have become an everyday technique of global governance. They are particularly sensitive to the mechanisms through which ‘crisis management’ entrenches the power of particular economic orders and constrains the possibilities, and space, for contestation and critique. This paper seeks to contribute to but also to extend existing feminist research on financial crisis by arguing that, over the course of what has commonly been labelled the ‘global financial crisis’, the emergence of ‘crisis governance feminism’ has enabled existing structures and mechanisms of gendered privilege, such as the global financial industry, to suppress calls for their overhaul and to re-entrench their power in the global political economy. Adopting a discursive approach to gender and governance that situates gender centrally in understanding governance discourses and their reproduction of common sense (about what people do, how they labour, where they invest and so on), this paper argues that the governance of crisis in the contemporary era, in particular the various actors, institutions, policies and ideas that have sought to describe and ‘contain’ the global financial crisis, are gendered. Gender has become, in the contemporary global political economy, a technique of governance, and with deleterious effects. Despite inciting more discussion of ‘gender’ in economic systems than ever before (particularly in terms of discussions of ‘economic competitiveness’), this paper argues that the ‘global financial crisis’ has precipitated and continues to reproduce techniques of governance that trivialise feminist concerns while further embedding a masculinised, white and elitist culture of global financial privilege.     

‘Throbb[ing] with a consciousness of a knowledge that appalled her’: Embodiment and Female Subjectivity in the Desert Romance

This article examines the relationship between the desert and embodiment in E. M. Hull’s international best-seller The Sheik (1919). This novel, a desert romance, has been the focus of feminist scholarship for decades because of its controversial rape narrative. Drawing on theories of embodiment, in particular the work of Elizabeth Grosz, the author interrogates how the desert is paradoxically presented as a space of liberation and oppression within which female sexuality could be explored despite the gendered violence of pre-existing patriarchal frameworks. Ultimately, the author provides a reading of Diana in terms of her transition from an androgynous ‘girl’ to a sexually desiring, seemingly feminized ‘woman’, and examines the connotations associated with this. The author establishes a connection between the transient nature of the desert and the liberation offered to women within this liminal space. Through an in-depth examination of the protagonist Diana’s corporeal subjectivity over the course of the novel, the author positions The Sheik as offering a voice to female sexuality and erotic fantasy, demonstrating Hull’s depiction of the desert as an appropriation of that space through which to explore female desires. This opens up new understandings of what constituted innovative literature in interwar Britain and marks Hull’s book, with its overtly erotic content and specific focus on female desire, as a political and social departure.     

Theorising The Everyday

This article reflects on the gender politics integral to theories and cultural histories of the everyday in the contemporary Humanities and (to a lesser extent) Social Sciences. Since the 1990s feminist scholars have observed the gender bias integral to many canonical twentieth-century theories of the everyday. In spite of these observations, I suggest that much everyday life theory and recent studies that map a cultural and intellectual history of the everyday continue to reflect this gender bias. I suggest that one possible reason for this is women’s historical exclusion from the realm of theoretical discourse broadly conceived, and propose that in order to trace alternative critiques and histories of the everyday feminist scholars need to look to alternative modes of cultural and discursive production—for example, literature, the essay and art—through which to trace implicit and explicit analyses of the everyday by women. The second part of the article turns to the work of the twentieth-century photographer Dorothea Lange as a case in point. While Lange’s work has never been discussed in studies of the everyday, the concept underpins her practice and her work offers some suggestive points of comparison to approaches to the everyday both in Lange’s time and in contemporary theory. Focusing on her little-known essays ‘Documentary Photography’ and ‘Photographing the Familiar’ and some of her images of rural California during the Depression years, I examine her account of the role of the ‘familiar’ and everyday to the social, aesthetic and ethical potential of documentary photography as a medium at the time.     

Judging in Marriage’s Shadow

This paper contributes to feminist debates on cohabitation by studying judicial discourse after legal reform. It examines how Canadian judges speak about cohabitation and decide whether cohabitants qualify as “spouses” for the purposes of property sharing. Judges assess cohabitants against an ideal of companionate marriage with gendered and class overtones. A contrasting tendency is to disavow moral judgments by declaring openness to a diversity of relationships. It seems difficult to operationalize cohabitation as a relationship form distinct from marriage. Indeed, the cases undermine assertions that reform makes married couples and cohabitants equal. Efforts to “modernize” family law appear to give new life to traditional ideals of the good marriage.     

‘it was better during the war’: narratives of everyday violence in a Palestinian refugee camp

The distinction between what is commonly regarded as the routine of impoverishment and what is acknowledged and remarked upon as violence is increasingly being questioned in scholarship and public policy circles. Interrogating the distinction between routine and remarkable not only reveals the habits and relationships constituting everyday life as the site of violence, but also foregrounds questions of gender. Given that the everyday is shaped by a given community's norms regarding the gendered division of labour that produces and reproduces the conditions of the everyday, in what ways is violence as well as its experience gendered? This article examines this question in the particular context of Palestinian camp refugees’ lived experience of forced displacement in Lebanon. It explores the ways in which the violence used against Palestinian camp refugees draws on norms regarding masculinity and femininity shared by the refugees as well as their Lebanese oppressors. It also examines the ways in which Palestinian camp refugees’ everyday experience of impoverishment as well as the acknowledged violence of forced displacement, subjection to Lebanese military intelligence control, and participation in the armed struggle for national liberation are constituted by and constitutive of unequal subject positions of gender, class and citizenship.     

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.     

The breakdown of the sex/gender distinction in anthropological discourse

This contribution to the ongoing process of questioning the sex/gender distinction in feminist research sets out from two different points of departure. First, from an anthropological perspective, examples are given to help us “rethink” sex as a universal “given”. Second, it is examined how the distinction, when used in feminist analyses, has confused rather than clarified our understanding of sex/gender. Finally, the implications of the breakdown of the sex/gender distinction for feminist research are discussed in brief.     

Weblogistan goes to war: representational practices,gendered soldiers and neoliberal entrepreneurship in diaspora

In this article, which is based on twenty four months of combined online and off-line ethnographic research, I show the way that some Iranian diasporic bloggers use their weblogs as entrepreneurship resources during the ‘war on terror’. Through a discourse analysis of a documentary film about Weblogistan and interviews with diasporic Iranian bloggers in Toronto, I argue that Weblogistan is implicated in discourses of militarism and neoliberalism that interpellate the representable Iranian blogger as a gendered neoliberal homo oeconomicus. The production of knowledge about Iran in transnational encounters between the media, think tanks, policy institutions and the Iranian diasporic self-entrepreneurs, relies on gendered civilizational discourses that are inherently tied to the ‘war on terror’. Following feminist scholars who have theorized militarism and gender, I argue that dominant representations of Weblogistan produce different gendered subject positions for Iranian bloggers. Although the masculine blogger soldier takes freedom to Iran through his active participation in proper politics (enabled by his freedom of speech in North America and Europe), the woman blogger finds freedom of expression in writing about sex and telling the truth of her sex in a confessional mode. It is in this war of representation that women bloggers negotiate their subjectivity while shuttling in and out of local and global politics, as subjects of politics (markers of freedom and oppression) and political abjects (not worthy of political participation).     

“I have always been so afraid”: Fearsome Encounters in Unni Lindell’s Rødhette

Norwegian crime writer Unni Lindell’s novel Rødhette [Red Riding Hood] (Oslo: Aschehoug & Co, 2004/2010) is a narrative about a woman whose feeling of safety transforms into a fear of violation, and how her defence against this fear takes the form of systematic violence. The novel is a rewriting of the traditional tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” and is a comment on the patriarchal premises of the most widely known version of this folktale. In the article, I discuss the representation of the female murderer as being in the grip of an affective economy based on the fear of male violence, represented in the novel by the metaphor of the “wolf”, and how fear grows into a comprehensive, moral and pragmatic, murderous orientation towards the world after an experience of violence. Theoretically, I draw on affect theory and particularly Sara Ahmed’s ideas about the affective politics of fear (The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014) and how this fear turns into a significant qualifier in encounters with people who are experienced as strangers (Strange encounters: Embodied others in post-coloniality. London: Routledge, 2000). Fear is treated in Lindell’s novel as a psychological constriction and a tool for the construction of agency, through which the mechanisms of othering and violence are explored.     

Rhythms of resurrection: The comebacks of Ruth St. Denis

Ruth St. Denis (1879–1968) had one of the first and longest careers as a professional modern dancer. At age 62, she embarked on a “comeback” that lasted nearly three decades, appearing on stage and screen in the dances that had made her an international star earlier in her career. This essay examines the relationship between her well-known “Orientalism,” her feminism, her spirituality, and her perspective on aging and ageism. In particular, it brings into relief her innovative efforts to redefine dance as a feminist project at the intersection of aging and modern dance history. St. Denis converted “oriental tradition” into a feminist dance praxis, thus, staking a claim for the aging dancer under the banner of feminist politics.