Ideals Of Gender Equality Research Articles

Portraits of Swedish natureculture identity – entanglements of (gender) equity and integration in early childhood education

ABSTRACT Photographs of children are used on a daily basis in Swedish preschool practice. Although the preschool curriculum prescribes gender equality and celebration of diversity, photographs of indoor activities have shown to display a homogenous view of children and an emphasis on masculine-coded productions and accomplishments. This article examines 325 photographs of outdoor activities from Swedish preschools with diverse ethnic compositions. Our results reveal a Swedish natureculture identity that is more explicitly performed in the multi-ethnic preschool classes. Since ideals of gender equality and closeness to nature connect to the image of Swedishness, this can be understood as compensatory pedagogy. Moreover, the natureculture identity appears to be neutral in relation to ethnicity and gender, which risks rendering diversity invisible. However, the displayed neutrality is also possible to understand as working towards equity where conventionally feminine values such as care, empathym and sensitivity are underscored as desirable for everyone.

Risky business? Parenting children of deployed Danish soldiers

This article focuses on children’s reactions to military deployment from the perspective of their parents. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Danish soldiers, their female partners and young children over the course of military deployment, the article illustrates how parents’ attempts to access whether their children will suffer from the long-term absence of their father influence parenting practices and experiences of military deployment. Inspired by anthropological perspectives on parenthood, the article argues that the pressure on parents to be ‘involved’ in the upbringing and care of their children is magnified in the Danish case of soldiers and their partners because of cultural understandings of the military as well as ideals of gender equality and sameness. With the purpose of preventing future harm on their children, the article further argues, soldiers and their partners mobilise strategies to limit the uncertainty experienced in relation to deployment. Such strategies include preparing children for deployment, routinising everyday activities and making the absence of their father comprehensible.

Minding the Care Gap: Daycare Usage and the Negotiation of Work, Family and Gender Among Swedish Parents

The article asks whether daycare can alleviate work–family tensions in the dual-earner society or if perceptions of 'care gaps' will hamper women's careers. Using survey data from Swedish parents with pre-school children (n ≈ 2250) and qualitative interviews of survey respondents (n = 40), we explore how children’s daycare hours and parents’ reflections on daycare hours are related to mothers’ and fathers’ involvement in paid and unpaid work and to their perceptions of stress. The results show that parents have a strong ambition to limit daycare hours. This ambition provides a stressful dilemma for mothers but for fathers, daycare is not a source of stress. Maternal part-time work is an important tool for managing daycare hours, but collides with ideals of gender equality. Full-time work can be combined with short daycare hours, provided that the parents take shifts in the home and share care responsibilities. Sharing of care work also reduces mothers' stress. However, such arrangements require flexible schedules which are more available to parents in high-skill jobs. Single parents have little opportunity to keep daycare hours short.

Gender Equality Prior to and Following Separation: Nordic and Liberal Policy Inconsistencies

AbstractWe compare family policy in Australia and Finland, focusing on child support as interrogating how gender equality ideals and realities play out when families diverge from the dual-parent model. Despite Finland’s de-gendered leave and employment policy, a gender wage gap continues to position mothers as primary carers. In Australia, pre-separation policies are gendered in that leave benefits position mothers as primary carers. In both countries, child support policy took the opposite approach. Finland’s child support policy provides less incentive for the father to take care of children post-separation.

“Mit sanfter Gewalt”: Rape and Sexual Violence in the Works of Christoph Martin Wieland

This article contributes to the historiography of rape and sexual violence in eighteenth‐century German‐speaking Europe. Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) portrays rape and sexual violence in seven literary works from the late 1750s through the mid 1770s. Wieland's texts both attack and affirm contemporaneous legal definitions and social norms governing sexual behavior. The article's main argument is that the theme of rape exposes a tension between Wieland's ideals of gender equality and his practical approach to gender relations. In theory, Wieland acknowledges every human's right to sexual self‐determination, but he nevertheless exploits sexual violence (against males and females) for comic effect, resulting in an unresolved dialectic of the Enlightenment, which underlies his texts

Nanny care in Sweden: The inequalities of everyday doings of care

In this article, we analyse practice of care and family in families who employ nannies and au pairs. Taking our point of departure in the narratives of all the participating actors – nannies/au pairs (n = 26), parents (n = 29) and children receiving care (n = 19) – we show how this ‘doing of family’ is reproducing inequalities between families: the new local care loops enable a possibility for some – well-off – parents to realize the (highly valued) ideals of gender equality and ‘good and stress-free parenting’. We also show how this reproduces inequalities within families. The narratives of everyday care situations told by nannies, au pairs and children entail evidence of invisible and complex ‘sentient’ care activities that diverge remarkably from the explicit characterizing of the work as easy and independent. This discrepancy makes nanny/au pair work into precarious gendered care doings, similar to the care performed in families traditionally, by wives and mothers, but now obscured by the nanny/au pairs’ subordinate status. In conclusion, classed, gendered and ethnic inequalities are characterizing the new ‘local care loops’ being encouraged and enabled in Sweden. The driving forces are to be found on a macro level, in processes of globalization and in political and policy changes, but the consequences are detectable in everyday interactions in the micro-settings of the home.

Challenging Unequal Gendered Conventions in Heterosexual Relationship Contexts through Affective Dissonance

ABSTRACT In Nordic countries, intimate relationships are routinely compared against ideals of gender equality, even though equality is not always achieved in everyday life. In this article, we analyse interviews with women that lived in unconventional relationships: mid- to later-life women in relationships with younger men, and bisexual women who have had relationships with people of different genders. The women’s expectations of equality and reciprocity in heterosexual relationships collided with the lived reality of inequalities, causing affective dissonance. We identify three strategies that women use to deal with this affective dissonance. In the first strategy, unequal relationship patterns are rejected and displaced onto other people’s relationships. In the second strategy, interviewees legitimize the unequal situations in their own relationship by utilizing culturally available interpretative frameworks that circulate notions about gender and couple relationships. Both strategies provide a means for dealing with the unpleasant affective dissonance, but they make it difficult to demand change in the relationship. In the third strategy, the annoyance and hurt caused by inequality are not explained away. Confronting affective dissonance has politicizing potential: it allows women to actively challenge the inequalities in their relationships.

The politics of persuasion. Opinion-shaping activities and gender equality in Sweden, 1960-1970

ABSTRACTIn this paper, the role and significance of opinion-shaping and persuasion activities are explored through an analysis of the activation of women in the Swedish labour market in the 1960s, highlighting the ways in which gender equality ideals became infused in these activities through a process of ‘transformative state feminism’. The analysis draws on qualitative data including archival material and interviews. Activation policies in the 1960s emphasised the ideology of full employment including the importance of increasing women’s participation in paid work, hence paving the way for a dual-earner family model. The concrete measures associated with implementation of such policies were carried out by the National Labour Market Board (AMS), and included retraining and advanced training courses but also a number of innovative opinion-shaping activities. Two of these are analysed in this paper: a radio series called ‘Housewife switches job’ and the establishment of a so-called ‘activation inspector’. Following this analysis, the underlying ideas permeating such opinion-shaping activities and the actors who infused ideals of gender equality into the process are examined. In conclusion, lessons for the ongoing transformation of traditional gender relations and prospects for future advances in gender equality are discussed.

‘Enhance her pleasure – and your grip strength’: Men’s Health magazine and pseudo-reciprocal pleasure

This paper provides a snapshot of the Top Ten free, digital Men’s Health magazine articles, accessed on a randomly selected day, that can be viewed as a collection; both a product for readership consumption and a construct of readership priorities. Through close textual analysis, we examine how discourses about masculinity, heterosex and consumerism have intersected to create a model of masculinity based on the discipline of male pleasure, which impacts on men’s approach to female pleasure and gender dynamics. The analysis contributes to the developing research about the sexual and bodily discourses the magazine promotes and identifies a model of masculinity where men can ‘have their cake and eat it’; seeming to adhere to ideals of gender equality and reciprocity while retaining their traditional patriarchal position of producer/provider. They are encouraged to do so by approaching female orgasm as a product, which they can ‘purchase’ through adhering to Men’s Health magazine’s sexual advice and bodily labour at control, delay and discipline of their own pleasure and orgasm. We argue that this approach to sex disenfranchises men, and in turn their partners, of opportunities to access alternative models of embodied pleasure.

Swedish fathers choosing part-time work

ABSTRACTIn Sweden, both parents have a legal right to reduce their working hours to 30 hours per week. Quantitative analysis of 20,000 Swedish parents with children aged between 2 and 7, however, shows mothers to be 14 times more likely to work part time than fathers. Gender imbalance in parents’ part-time employment is thus even more pronounced than in their parental leave take-up, at least in Sweden. An analysis of 14 in-depth interviews with Swedish fathers who have chosen parental part-time work reveals that part-time work represents for them a way to reconcile their separate identities as professionals and as involved fathers. Nevertheless, this study revealed that certain difficulties of a more structural nature complicated this solution for these men; these issues included, in the first place, a strong full-time norm prevailing in male-dominated workplaces, and traditional ideals of masculinity centred on men's breadwinning role. Furthermore, ideals of gender equality and involved fatherhood also showed themselves as having an impact, enabling new masculine positions for part-time working fathers to emerge.

Gendered Violence, Cultural Otherness, and Honour Crimes in Canadian National Logics

Abstract. Honour-based violence, and the honour crime in particular, have assumed a central place in Canadian national discourse and consciousness. Understood within mainstream Canadian discourses as a uniquely dangerous form of violence, the honour crime has been linked to recent waves of migration and culturally specific notions of honour. Imagined as a foreign and imported phenomenon brought to Canada by immigrants who fail to assimilate to national and “western” ideals of gender equality, the crime is also viewed as an extreme form of violence that must be managed and ultimately expelled. Discourses sur- rounding the honour crime now inform various key social, racial, and cultural debates across national and transnational scales. By analyzing the discursive strategies used to construct and disseminate dominant discourses on honour killings, this article maps the heightened official state and public media interest in honour-based violence and crimes.

Retreat from multiculturalism: community cohesion, civic integration and the disciplinary politics of gender

AbstractThe intersections of gender, religion and migration status have attracted only limited commentary to date. The significance of migration status as a marker of gender inequality, and one that further increases the burden of intersecting axes of discrimination, requires further scrutiny. This article examines the rise of civic integration requirements within the European Union and the significance of this rise for religious freedoms and complex ideals of gender equality. Particular attention is given to recent developments in the UK and France in the context of wider debates on immigration and integration policies. Against the background of diminishing sovereignty and the expansion of rights to non-citizens, states are rethinking the significance of citizenship and migration status and the criteria to be applied in determining membership and access to the nation-state. The adoption in France of the Charte des Droits et des Devoirs du Citoyen Français marks a further step in the expansion of integration conditions imposed by states, and signals a continuing willingness to deploy juridical forms to enforce such conditions. Of particular concern to this Special Issue are the implications of civic integration requirements for migrant religious women and for feminist engagement with migration laws and the discourse of rights.

Sexual Protection, Citizenship and Nationhood: Prostituted Women and Migrant Wives in South Korea

This article examines the making of two distinct groups of women—‘prostituted women’ and migrant wives—into citizen-subjects in South Korea at the turn of the twenty-first century. Though the lives of these women barely intersect, they become visible in the public sphere as victims of sexual violence and therefore in urgent need of state protection. Defined as such, prostitutes and migrant wives come under the gaze of the state and civil society through anti-prostitution policy and multiculturalism policy respectively. I suggest that, through the language of protection, the South Korean state and civil society seek to redefine moral order and national borders through the regulation of a woman's body and sexuality. For prostituted women, leaving prostitution restores them to the embrace of the nation as good Korean daughters. For immigrant wives, reproduction is their gendered path to citizenship as good Korean mothers. Through an analysis of the gender ideals reproduced in these policies, and their repercussions on the lives of women, I tease out the gendering of citizenship and nationhood and its tensions with the universalist ideals of gender equality and human rights in the modernising project in South Korea.

Gender Equality Revisited – Changes in Nordic Childcare Policies in the 2000s

AbstractThe Nordic childcare policy model is often reviewed and even recommended internationally for its contribution to gender equality, high female labour force participation and, perhaps more indirectly, to a high fertility rate. Nordic childcare services and parental leave schemes have thus been portrayed in the literature as policies which have managed to facilitate a work–family model of dual earners and dual carers. However, the recent introduction of cash‐for‐care schemes seems to go against the Nordic dual earner/dual carer model and ideals of gender equality, in supporting parental (maternal) care of the child in the home. At the same time, new upcoming trends of political fatherhood and the perspective of lifelong learning for the child are also changing the Nordic childcare model.This article provides an analysis of how new childcare policy goals have been articulated into policies from the late 1990s to the late 2000s and how these may challenge the traditional goals of the Nordic welfare states.

Does Gender Matter? an Exploratory Study of Perspectives Across Genders, Age and Education

Using a convenience sample and survey research methods, the authors seek to better understand how perspectives on gender are shaped by individuals’ age, level of education and gender. Study participants responded in writing to scenarios and survey questions, revealing their personal views on gender as an identity category and as a marker in the social hierarchy. Analysis indicated that there were differences between male and female views on these dimensions of gender, and that age and educational levels were also influential. While younger respondents from both genders demonstrated flexibility in their definitions of gender and expressed strong support for gender equality, they were noticeably lacking in their knowledge of the historical context of gender relations and did not show the skills required to realise their ideals of gender equality, especially when compared to older respondents of both genders with higher levels of educational attainment.

Sexual Politics and the Zuma Rape Trial**

This article focuses on post-apartheid developments in relation to the sexual politics that surrounded the 2006 rape trial of South Africa's former Deputy President, Jacob Zuma. The trial and its aftermath highlight contested interpretations of rights, morality, religion, culture and political leadership in post-apartheid South Africa. It also serves as a mirror reflecting the tension between sexual rights and patriarchal cultures. Whereas race and class concerns dominated oppositional politics during the apartheid era, sexual and gender rights now compete for space in the post-apartheid public sphere. There is a glaring gap between the progressive character of ‘official’ state, constitutional and NGO endorsements of gender and sexual equality on the one hand, and the deeply embedded ideas and practices that reproduce gender and sexual inequality on the other. Idealised conceptions of ‘civil society’ fail to adequately acknowledge its ‘unruly’ and ‘uncivil’ character. The responses of Zuma supporters, including NGOs, activists, academics and journalists attending the trial reveal a chasm between the sexual and gender equality ideals enshrined in the Constitution and promoted by progressive civil society organisations, and the sexual conservatism within the wider South African public. The article also examines how ideas about ‘traditional’ Zulu masculinity were represented and performed in the Zuma trial, thereby highlighting a tension between constitutional conceptions of universalistic sexual rights on the one hand, and claims to particularistic sexual cultures on the other. This tension, I argue, is reproduced by the rhetorical productivity of a series of binaries: modern and traditional, rights and culture, liberal democracy and African communitarianism.

Mainstream Sexualization and the Potential for Nordic New Feminism

Processes of sexualization mark a wide range of popular and high‐cultural representations in media and culture. This trend has led to academic and public feminist debate. In this article I argue that the common polarization between the repressive and the subversive potential of sexualized representations fails to understand processes of sexualization as forms of mainstream cultural experimentation. Since the mid‐90s we have witnessed the emergence of a new feminist cultural wave in the Nordic countries, embracing post‐feminist modes and popular culture that re‐politicizes feminist questions in controversial ways. I argue that this development and the Nordic context of state feminism and gender equality ideals pose a challenge to analyses of sexualization as exclusively part of commercial colonization, anti‐feminist backlash and de‐politicization. I will present a case that exemplifies the discussion of sexualization by the critical reception of the Norwegian young feminist anthology with the title Rosa Prosa. Om jenter og kåthet [Pink Prose. On girls and horniness] (2006). The ideological and aesthetic hybridity of the texts poses a problem for the critics who denounce the book's feminist potentials.

Gendering the Holy Cross School Dispute: Women and Nationalism in Northern Ireland

This article explores the Holy Cross school dispute in Northern Ireland from a feminist perspective. This ethnic quarrel produced a situation whereby women and young schoolgirls became the focal point of a sectarian protest from September 2001 to early 2002. Throughout the conflict, issues of gender were sidelined from the analysis of the dispute. The article attempts to remedy this omission by moving the category of gender to the forefront of the analysis. It examines the relationship between nationalist discourses of gender identity and representations of the nationalist women's agency during the dispute. While exposing these dimensions of the conflict, the article also considers the impact of women's ethno-nationalist agency on their role and positioning within nationalist cultures. It concludes that the Holy Cross conflict exposes the potentially disruptive aspects of women's ethno-nationalist agency and highlights the political significance of that agency for nationalist cultures pursuing ideals of gender equality.

A reconstruction of the gender agenda: the contradictory gender dimensions in New Labour's educational and economic policy

This article reviews current interpretations of Labour's education policy in relation to gender. Such interpretations see the marginalisation of gender equality in mainstream educational policy as a result of the discursive shift from egalitarianism to that of performativity. Performativity in the school context is shown to have contradictory elements ranging from an increased feminisation of teaching and the (re)masculinisation of schooling. Also, whilst underachievement is defined as ‘the problem of boys’, the production of hierarchical masculinities and ‘laddishness’ by marketised schools is ignored. The policy shift towards performativity also masks girls' exclusion and the disadvantages working‐class girls face within the education system. The rhetoric of gender equality, although stronger in the field of post‐16 training and employment, is no less contradictory. The effects of New Labour are found in the aggravation of social class divisions within gender categories and the spiralling differences between male and female paths. Gender equality ideals in education are therefore shown to have a far more complex relationship to New Labour politics than previously thought.

The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle: The Example of Housework

Although the last decade of research on families has contributed enormously to our understanding of diversity in family structures and the relationship of family units to various other aspects of social life, it has, it seems to me, generally failed to identify and address sources of conflict within family life. Thus, the usefulness of this research for understanding women's situation has been particularly limited. The persistence and resilience of family forms in the midst of general social change, often forcefully documented in this research, have certainly helped to goad us, as feminists, to consider what women's interests may be in the mainte-