| 1. |
- Ah-King, Malin
(author)
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Sexual selection revisited– towards a gender-neutral theory and practise : A Response to Vandermassen’s Sexual Selection, A Tale of Male Bias and Feminist Denial
- 2007
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In: The European Journal of Women's Studies. - : SAGE Publications. - 1350-5068 .- 1461-7420. ; 14:4, s. 341-348
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In a recent issue of this journal, Vandermassen suggested that feminists should include sexual selection theory and evolutionary psychology in a unifying theory of human nature. In response, this article aims to offer some insight into the development of sexual selection theory, to caution against Vandermassen’s unreserved assimilation and to promote the opposite ongoing integration – an inclusion of gender perspectives into evolutionary biology. In society today, opinions about maintaining traditional sex roles are often put forward on the basis of what is natural and how animals behave. However, the natural sciences have proved to be pervaded by gendered values and interests; Darwin’s theory of sexual selection has been criticized for being male biased, and partly due to the unwillingness of Darwin’s scientific contemporaries to accept female choice, research has been overwhelmingly focused on males. More recently, theory has become less gender biased and research has come to include a large variety of issues not present in the first version of the theory. However, there is a need to increase the awareness of gender bias in order to develop a gender-neutral evolutionary biology.
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| 2. |
- Andersson, Katarina, 1963-, et al.
(author)
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The neoliberal turn and the marketization of care : the transformation of eldercare in Sweden
- 2015
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In: The European Journal of Women's Studies. - : Sage Publications. - 1350-5068 .- 1461-7420. ; 22:3, s. 274-287
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The care for older and disabled people has been described as a core area of the Nordic model. The Nordic countries’ welfare model has also been described as women friendly, as women are not forced to make harder choices than men between work and family. The Swedish eldercare system has, during the last several decades, undergone significant changes. Previously, eldercare could be described as universal, meaning a publicly provided, comprehensive, high-quality service available to all citizens according to need and not based on the ability to pay. In later years transformation of eldercare has been influenced by neoliberal politics, which emphasize economic efficiency and cost reduction through competition. Eldercare has become a more diverse multidimensional system, and a private market for home-based eldercare has been created. The numbers of eldercare providers have increased considerably, and new ways of organizing eldercare have been established. In January 2009, the Act on System of Choice in the Public Sector was introduced (in Swedish: Lagen om valfrihetssystem [LOV]). The Act was supposed to provide an opportunity for interested municipalities and county councils to expose their publicly provided services to market competition, and to enable users to choose their providers. This article aims to illustrate how neoliberal reasoning dominated the policy process leading to adoption of the Act on System of Choice in the Public Sector. With the use of a discursive policy analysis the authors specifically explore how neoliberal logic dominated, and also how choice and equality were understood and interpreted in the policy process. They conclude that the neoliberal turn in eldercare claiming to centre on the individual choice of persons in need of care runs the risk of creating unequal care that decentres the eldercare worker and creates precarious work situations.
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| 3. |
- Andersson, Renée, 1979-
(author)
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The myth of Sweden’s success : A deconstructive reading of the discourses in gender mainstreaming texts
- 2018
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In: The European Journal of Women's Studies. - : Sage Publications. - 1350-5068 .- 1461-7420. ; 25:4, s. 455-469
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This article investigates discourses of Sweden's success in gender mainstreaming. Using the theoretical concept of myth, discourse analysis is performed on different categories of texts (including academic texts, grey papers and official reports). The aim is to analyse how this discourse of success is constructed and to increase the understanding of its components. The themes identified in the reading include adaptation, integration, volume and initiatives. In conclusion, it is argued that a conflation of gender mainstreaming (viewed as a strategy) with gender equality (as a policy objective) has been a vital part of the construction of Sweden as the best case of gender mainstreaming.
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| 4. |
- Azong, Jecynta Amboh, et al.
(author)
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Into a footnote : Unpaid care work and the Equality Budget in Scotland
- 2017
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In: The European Journal of Women's Studies. - : Sage Publications. - 1350-5068 .- 1461-7420. ; 24:3, s. 218-232
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This article analyses the visibility of unpaid care work in Scotland by examining the (non-)development of discourse on unpaid care work in economic policy documents. Drawing on the problem approach to policy analysis, the article engages with the Equality Budget Statements (EBS) as policy documents that not only inform the government’s spending plans but are foremost statements of values and norms pursued by the government. This critical reading reveals that certain discourses give different meanings to women’s lives through the political significance of what remains unproblematized as part of the ensuing care discourse in Scotland. The developing discourse on economic policy and equality suggests that equality in Scotland is presupposed on labour market participation. This shrinks discourse on unpaid care work; the problem of unpaid care work is silenced, while the problem of women’s access to employment is redefined to mean a problem of difference and costly childcare only. The way certain issues have or have not appeared in governmental documents is explanatory of the importance and relevance of unpaid care work to the political discourse.
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| 5. |
- Backman Rogers, Anna, 1981
(author)
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Abandoning Happiness for Life: Mourning and Futurity in Maja Borg’s Future My Love (2012)
- 2016
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In: The European Journal of Women's Studies. - : SAGE Publications. - 1350-5068 .- 1461-7420. ; 23:4, s. 353-364
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- A dilemma, posed as a question, lies at the heart of Maja Borg’s poetic and alternatively distributed documentary film, Future My Love (2012): why do we labour so hard to sustain relationships that are fundamentally deleterious and corrosive to our wellbeing ? The detrimental bonds on which the film focuses are those that maintain our connection to an economic system that has thrown us into an acute state of crisis and the stillborn emotions that keep us attached hopefully to a romantic partnership that we have already outgrown; this elision imbricates and implicates the personal in the political . Indeed, Borg herself has stated that it was through the lens of her own personal loss that she was able to explore and to question our global relationship to an economic system that is fast failing us: ‘(t)he question that kept coming back to me was: if we know what is wrong with the economy and we know how to change a lot of what is wrong, why don’t we? I needed something in the film to explore that issue: why we don’t change the fundamentals of a relationship when it is hurting us. So, that’s when I brought in my experience of love – I needed something that was true to me, that I understood personally and that I could explain and make universal’ (in Fielder 2012). In the film’s opening moments, Borg addresses, by way of dedication, the idealistic lost love of her life (actress and activist Nadya Cazan), thus: ‘my only way to tell you what I could not then is to try to understand it your way: “Our global economy simply does not work. We have to find something new”. It is equally hard to learn to live without you.’ Through a prism of painful and, at times, unbearable emotion, and by blurring the boundaries between the public and the private, the real and the fictional, this film urges us to imagine ourselves into a future in which it might be possible to live otherwise; but this requires us to abandon the future we have already imagined and, as the film evinces through archival imagery from the 1950s or golden age of capitalism, imaged ourselves into. Moreover, the intimate nature of the voiceover that is such a prominent part of the film’s poetics – namely, its address from the first person to the second person – works to foreground reparative labour: there is a form of power in naming loss. By drawing on the work of Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed on the cultural politics of emotion, Judith Butler’s work on the act of mourning, and the writing of Eva Illouz, Luce Irigaray, and Alain Badiou on love (in the age of late capitalism), I set forth a (mostly) queer reading of Borg’s film as an intervention into traditional narratives of happiness. More specifically, the work of Ahmed and Berlant in particular engages directly with the notion of futurity as a promise within a critical context – a context that was powerfully and controversially outlined already by Lee Edelman in No Future (2005). In contrast to Edelman, though, Berlant and Ahmed do not call for us to reject the future, but to rethink the place from which hopefulness over the future emanates. As such, their work seeks to un-ground and destabilise those life scripts to which we so readily subscribe and to open up new ways of imagining and imaging life and the notion of futurity. In short, this article contends that Future My Love pleads with us to abandon ‘happiness for life’ (Ahmed 2010: 75), to forsake an ideology that is invested in a highly specific conception of what it means to flourish and to thrive, to mourn and name our losses, and to think about the future creatively and without cynicism.
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| 6. |
- Berggren, Kalle, 1980-
(author)
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Hip hop feminism in Sweden : Intersectionality, feminist critique and female masculinity
- 2014
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In: The European Journal of Women's Studies. - : SAGE Publications. - 1350-5068 .- 1461-7420. ; 21:3, s. 233-250
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Hip hop has grown into a worldwide genre in recent decades, often being associated with issues of race and class. However, as research on ‘hip hop feminism’ in the US context demonstrates, the categories of gender and sexuality are no less fundamental. In the growing body of international hip hop research, though, questions about gender have been relatively absent, and relatively little is known about how gender norms are negotiated and challenged in hip hop in Europe. This article seeks to contribute to filling this gap in the literature by exploring how women negotiate the gender norms of hip hop in the case of Sweden. To this end, rap lyrics by 12 female rap artists are analysed through poststructuralist discourse analysis. The analysis focuses on intersectionality, feminism within and beyond hip hop, as well as the possibilities and limitations of female masculinity. It is shown how the masculine norms of the genre are simultaneously resisted and resignified as many female rappers incorporate some elements commonly associated with masculinity but mobilize them in their challenging of masculine norms. In this way, complying with the genre interestingly produces a hard and explicit feminism in which ‘all sexist pigs will be slaughtered’.
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| 7. |
- Bredström, Anna, 1972-
(author)
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Intersectionality : A Challenge for Feminist HIV/AIDS Research?
- 2006
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In: European Journal of Women’s Studies. - : Sage Publications, Ltd. - 1350-5068 .- 1461-7420. ; 13:3, s. 229-243
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The aim of this article is to engage critically with feminist HIV/AIDS research from an ‘intersectional’ perspective. Focusing in particular on the work of Tamsin Wilton (1997) and Janet Holland et al. (1998), the article examines how ‘race’, ethnicity and class are theorized and conceptualized in this literature. Through a scrutiny of their empirical analyses, the article points to the pitfalls of a descriptive approach to ‘differences’ and problematizes Wilton's and Holland et al.'s theoretical focus on gender and sexuality. The benefit of including a critical perspective on ‘race’ and ethnicity and other axes of domination is illustrated further using some empirical examples from the Swedish HIV/AIDS policy context. The article concludes by arguing that an intersectional perspective poses a challenge to feminist HIV/AIDS research that needs to be addressed in order to produce an effective sexual health policy.
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| 8. |
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| 9. |
- Carbin, Maria, 1972-, et al.
(author)
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The intersectional turn in feminist theory : a dream of a common language?
- 2013
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In: The European Journal of Women's Studies. - London : Sage Publications. - 1350-5068 .- 1461-7420. ; 20:3, s. 233-248
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Today intersectionality has expanded from being primarily a metaphor within structuralist feminist research to an all-encompassing theory. This article discusses this increasing dedication to intersectionality in European feminist research. How come intersectionality has developed into a signifier for ‘good feminist research’ at this particular point in time? Drawing on poststructuralist and postcolonial theory the authors examine key articles on intersectionality as well as special issues devoted to the concept. They interrogate the conflicts and meaning making processes as well as the genealogies of the concept. Thus, the epistemology and ontology behind the ‘intersectional turn’ in feminist theory is the main concern here. The authors argue that the lack of ontological discussions has lead to its very popularity. Intersectionality promises almost everything: to provide complexity, overcome divisions and to serve as a critical tool. However, the expansion of the scope of intersectionality has created a consensus that conceals fruitful and necessary conflicts within feminism.
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| 10. |
- Dagkouli-Kyriakoglou, Myrto, 1986-
(author)
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'Keeping the children close and the daughters closer.' Is family housing support in Greece gendered?
- 2022
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In: The European Journal of Women's Studies. - : Sage Publications. - 1350-5068 .- 1461-7420. ; 29:2, s. 266-281
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The welfare regime of Southern Europe, and Greece in particular, does not adequately cover the needs of its citizens. On the contrary, and within this context, family welfare has to be much more efficient. Moreover, the support received from the family imposes a sense of reciprocity, as receivers are expected to be givers in the future. This reciprocity is assisted mainly by the female members of the kin, defining to a degree their housing practices. Data for this paper is derived from a wider research project investigating young people's housing practices and family strategies through in-depth interviews in Athens, Greece. Bringing gender to the fore, it explores how the housing provision from family is impacted by the receivers' gender role in connection to family welfare obligations.
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