On 12 December last year the American dictionary Merriam-Webster announced that its word of the year was feminism. The word had generated 70% more online searches than in 2016, and although it had remained “a top lookup throughout the year”, there had been several spikes corresponding to widely publicized events such as the international women’s marches in January and the #MeToo campaign in the autumn. According to the dictionary’s editor at large, feminism “was in the air”. Or, as Maria Medina-Vicent puts it in her position paper in this issue of NORA, “The F word seems to have passed from the shadow of social stigmatization into the light of the media”. Moreover, just before the announcement by Merriam-Webster, the news magazine Time named “The Silence Breakers” as its Person of the Year in recognition of the #MeToo campaign. This international campaign against sexual harassment is also making a significant impact in all the Nordic countries. It has been debated in the media and parliaments, as well as in private contexts, and has led to the outing of several high-profile harassers. In Swedish-speaking Finland, the local version is a campaign under the hashtag #dammenbrister, which can be translated as “the dam is breaking”—an apt image of what is unfolding.
While the #MeToo campaign is widely characterized as a watershed, it has inevitably also caused some misgivings, even among feminists, as well as fears of a backlash. One problem is the focus on individual cases, which can be viewed as a depoliticization of the gendered power structure underlying sexual harassment; another is the ambiguity of the concept itself. The latter was discussed by Gunilla Carstensen in her article “Sexual Harassment Reconsidered: The Forgotten Grey Zone”, which was published in NORA 4/2016. With specific reference to workplace sexual harassment, Carstensen points out that the concept, defined by the European Commission of the EU as “any form of unwanted verbal, non-verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature […], with the purpose or effect of violating the dignity of a person”, creates a grey zone. That is because what counts as sexual harassment on the one hand depends on individual perceptions of having been subjected to abusive sexual behaviour, on the other on the views of courts, employers, and colleagues. An unfortunate consequence, she argues, is not only that gender-problematic and inappropriate behaviours may often be left without any countermeasures, but also that the structural problems that are their root cause may be neglected.
The grey zone is a topic in this issue of NORA as well. In her article “‘Excuse me, but are you raping me now?’ Discourse and Experience in (the Grey Areas of) Sexual Violence”, Lena Gunnarsson discusses the contested relationship between discourse and experience in feminist theory. Gunnarsson suggests a dialectical relationship between the two, as a way of avoiding futile polarizations between discourses and experiences of sex and sexual violence between men and women. Autobiographical narratives from the Swedish campaign #prataomdet (#talkaboutit) constitute her empirical material. This social media debate from 2010 demonstrated a need to find new ways of talking about and distinguishing between sexual consent and coercion, and Gunnarsson’s analysis displays several rifts between the dominant discourse and individual experiences. Instead of a sharp distinction between sex and violence, for instance, many people describe a rather continuum-like relationship. Likewise, there is a discrepancy between the dominant discourses of men’s constant sexual drive and (some) men’s concrete experience of not wanting to have sex. Based on the #talkaboutit participants’ complex and nuanced approach to sex and sexual violence, Gunnarsson suggests different kinds of discourse-experience relationships, such as whether a discourse represents the narrator’s experiences or not; whether it coincides with the narrator’s sense of identity or not; and what expectations and behaviour a discourse may generate in other people. The grey zones between sex and sexual violence are difficult to grasp, but Gunnarsson’s theoretical analysis is a useful attempt.
In their article “Eggs on Ice: Imaginaries of Eggs and Cryopreservation in Denmark”, Janne Rothmar Herrmann and Charlotte Kroløkke combine legal and rhetorical analyses to highlight the complex entanglements between the state, the law, and reproductive technologies. Their case is the development of Danish cultural, legal, and political discourses on frozen egg cells. It is approached in the context of the biopolitics of the Danish welfare state, which since 1984 has sought to regulate reproductive technologies, but which under pressure from neoliberal ideology has increasingly emphasized reproductive autonomy. The coexistence of neoliberal ideology and the welfare state, Herrmann and Kroløkke argue, has effectively made women responsible for their fertility. Via the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, defined as collective and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, they show how reproductive technologies such as cryopreservation unfold within changing regulatory and public-opinion environments. To this end they have identified four imaginaries: first, the early imaginary of the Moral State, which stipulated guidelines aligned with gendered constructions of nature; second, the imaginary of technologies to be tamed, in which eggs became bearers of kinship in need of state protection; third, the imaginary of the nuclear family, which connected the imagery of ice to the production of strong and healthy babies; and finally, the imaginary of technology as equality and hope, in which social egg freezing was celebrated as a reproductive revolution enabling women to put their fertility on hold. In conclusion Herrmann and Kroløkke note that although the normative imaginaries associated with reproductive time and age are losing ground, the Danish state continues to regulate both women’s eggs and the age at which women can reproduce.
Depoliticization is explicitly addressed in two articles challenging economic issues, gender, and neoliberalism: one offering a macro-level analysis of the dynamics behind the gender pay inequity in Finland, and the other on gender quotas for corporate boards in the EU—both discussing consequences of women’s under-representation in economic decision-making.
In “The Corporatist Regime, Welfare State Employment, and Gender Pay Inequity”, Paula Koskinen Sandberg challenges widespread conceptions of wages as mainly determined by market forces and as a reflection of differences in productivity and investments in human capital. Wages, Sandberg suggests, should rather be seen as political, as shaped by historical developments and political struggles in which institutions and actors play important roles. Historically, the Finnish welfare state has relied on the inexpensive labour provided by women’s reproductive work, she argues, and women’s wages have been based less on productivity than on gendered norms of what would be reasonable and fair. Moreover, the institutionalized under-evaluation of women’s work is not a matter of the past, but instead an ongoing process. The formal structure of wage determination is crucial. Horizontal gender segregation means that women and men are often not covered by the same collective agreement, and when the method to determine wages is conducted only within so-called pricing groups, gender differences are effectively disguised. Sandberg demonstrates her claim by two examples of mutually reinforcing wage dynamics: collective agreements in the local government sector (where much of women’s reproductive work is carried out), and a recent reform in the Finnish gender-equality legislation. She shows that when attempts to increase women’s wages are launched, they are met with strong opposition from employers as well as trade unions who defend their vested interests. The renewal process to include advice on pay surveys in the Finnish gender-equality legislation encountered similar problems. In the final compromise, a comparison of wages across collective agreements was prevented. This also weakened the means to make the under-rating of women’s work visible. With ongoing privatization and pressure to increase the competitiveness of the Finnish economy, Sandberg is worried about the prospects for gender pay equity.
Anna Elomäki’s article “Gender Quotas for Corporate Boards: Politicizing and Depoliticizing the Economy” also examines economic issues, but from a different perspective. While Sandberg critiques the mainstream economized understanding of women’s wages in Finland, insisting on analysing them as political, Elomäki is concerned with the depoliticizing effects of economization and neoliberalization on gender-equality discourses more generally. The article examines how women’s under-representation in economic decision-making was constituted as an economic problem in the European Union’s gender-equality policies and how the economization of the debate on gender quotas for corporate boards affects understandings of gender equality and the economy. The article contributes to research on gender and neoliberalism through developing an approach for analysing the depoliticizing effects of economized gender-equality discourses. Elomäki’s empirical field of research is corporate gender quotas in the EU, and her research material consists of various policy documents of EU institutions and interest groups which call for gender balance in economic decision-making and boardroom quotas. Why are corporate quotas mainly discussed as a matter of economic benefits, Elomäki asks, and not as a matter of gender justice and as a way to democratize the economy? The claim is that when gender balance in economic decision-making is mainly focusing on economic growth, competitiveness, and business benefits, the result is a twofold depoliticization—an apolitical and individualized understanding of gender equality, as well as a weakening of the potential of gender quotas to democratize the economy. The EU’s economized language of diversity further contributes to the depoliticization of gender equality through a neglect of gendered power relations. When EU institutions separate economic decision-making from political decision-making within a market-oriented rationale, women are cast as unused human capital to be exploited, and as self-interested career climbers. Gender equality is dislocated from discourses on justice.
The depoliticization of gender equality is also the topic of Maria Medina-Vicent’s position paper. Inspired by Christina Scharff’s Repudiating Feminism: Young Women in a Neoliberal World (2016), she discusses two apparently contradictory trends within contemporary feminism. While a new kind of celebrity feminism seems to be emerging, young women in Western countries tend to dissociate themselves from feminism because it is perceived as no longer relevant. Both trends, Medina-Vicent finds, can be explained by the individualist and aspirational logic of neoliberalism. With reference to two earlier position papers in NORA, by Nancy Fraser and Birte Siim, she calls for a renewal of feminism that takes account of the structural causes of gender inequality and re-articulates a collective feminist awareness of pressing social issues such as immigration and racism.
Finally, this issue contains Susan Brantly’s review of Eva Borgström’s Berättelser om det förbjudna. Begär mellan kvinnor i svensk litteratur 1900–1935 [Tales of the Forbidden: Desire between Women in Swedish Literature 1900–1935]. Since neither this study nor most of the texts it deals with is available in English, Brantly’s account provides an introduction to a little-known chapter in the history of the literature on female homosexuality.
As we were completing this editorial, we got the good news that the organizing committee has now secured much of the necessary funding for the NORA conference, which will probably take place in Iceland on 22–24 May, 2019. Mark your calendars!
[email protected]