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.     

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.     

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?     

The equality principle and the sexual division of labour

Australia has one of the highest degrees of sex segregation in the workforce of any advanced OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) country (OECD, 1980).¹ Predominantly female occupations are characterised by poor conditions and low pay (Power, 1975; Kramar, 1983; Working Women's Charter, 1984). Despite the currency of the rhetoric of sexual equality, however, such phenomena, which are characteristic of the sexual division of labour, have been successfully immunised against formal challenge.Although sex-segregated occupations are not expressly excluded from Australian anti-discrimination legislation, the complaint-based model does contain insuperable hurdles for most women in respect to both substance and procedure. Affirmative action measures, as presently conceived, are also unable to deal with this manifestation of structural discrimination.The fact that seemingly egalitarian measures are designed to effect minimal change is further illustrated when we look to wage-setting. Although the concept of equal pay for work of equal value has been accepted in Australia, it has had little practical effect on predominantly female occupations in the male-dominated arbitration arena.As the ideology of patriarchy operates in multifarious ways to prevent focus on the fundamental inequalities in women's working conditions, law reform, perforce, demonstrates its limited capacity for change. However, rather than jettison anti-discrimination and equal pay measures altogether, such mechanisms can be used to publicise the issues and to encourage women to assert themselves collectively.     

The cultural construction of gender

Bronwyn Davies, Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales. Preschool Children and Gender (Allen and Unwin) Sydney, 1989; E. Deidre Pribram (ed.), Female Spectators. Looking at Film and Television (Verso) London/New York, 1988; Derek Longhurst (ed.), Gender, Genre and Narrative Pleasure (Unwin Hyman) London, 1989.     

The social construction of gender in physical education

This paper presents some findings from a case study of the social reproduction of gender in one university physical education programme. It explores how knowledge about gender is organized in courses in the programme and examines students' interpretations of and reactions to this knowledge. The curriculum in this programme is organized around a distinction between biological and behavioural courses on the one hand and socio-cultural courses on the other. Each type of course provides students with alternative views of gender. When gender is taught in biological and behavioural courses it is examined as a personal attribute and the focus of attention is on how differences between males and females explain the gap in their performance levels. When gender is taught in socio-cultural courses it is viewed as a social issue, and the focus of attention is upon analyses of the ways in which play, games, and sport have been socially constructed to produce and legitimize male hegemony. Despite this diversity in the curriculum students' definitions of important knowledge lead them to view knowledge from biological and behavioural courses as “really useful” and knowledge from socio-cultural courses as peripheral. Students see biological and behavioural explanations of sex differences in performance capabilities as information they can use to improve performance. Information about the social construction of gender issues is seen as peripheral as it does not help them to function within the existing social frameworks.     

Debunking the social democrats and the myth of equality

This article argues that Sweden's Social Democratic party is an unreliable ally for feminists. It suggests that some of the most formidable obstacles to feminism in particular and progressive politics in general were constructed from within and not outside the party. To support this assertion the author carefully examines their record on women's employment, battery, and sexual assault. She concludes with an overview of additional policies which further demonstrate their abandonment of egalitarian principles.     

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.     

The gender implications of large-scale land deals

This article introduces a discussion of gender dimensions into the growing debate on large-scale land deals. It addresses the current information gap on the differential gender effects of large-scale land deals through (1) an overview of the phases of large-scale land deals and discussion of related effects on rural men and women based on new literature on large-scale land deals and past literature on the gender effects of commercialization and contract farming; (2) a presentation of further evidence using several case studies on the gender effects of large-scale deals; and (3) a conclusion that looks at knowledge gaps and areas for further research as well as broad recommendations for gender equitable large-scale land deals.