25 May 2018 is a landmark date in the history of women’s struggle for reproductive rights. On that day the people of the Republic of Ireland voted overwhelmingly to repeal the eighth amendment to the constitution, which gave “the unborn” and “the mother” equal rights of life. The result paved the way for new legislation, promised by Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, that will allow abortion on demand within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. One immediate question following the referendum was what effect, if any, it will have in Northern Ireland. Will the landslide south of the border provide the impetus to overturn some of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe? Another question is to what extent the Irish vote might have impact further afield, for instance in countries like Poland and Russia that have equally restrictive abortion laws.
The Irish decision was particularly poignant in Norway, coming as it did almost to a day 40 years after the Norwegian parliament by a one-vote majority passed a law legalizing abortion up the twelfth week of pregnancy. Slightly different, but equally liberal, laws regulate abortion in all the Nordic countries. On the face of it, women’s reproductive rights are now unassailable in our corner of the world, and as the numbers of abortions—in spite of some dire predictions—have remained stable after legalization, there seems little reason to fear that they will be undermined. Indeed, a clear sign of governmental commitment to legal abortions in the Nordic countries is their support of the European initiative to increase funding for pro-abortion organizations like the International Planned Parenthood Federation, as a response to President Trump’s reinstatement of the “global gag rule” blocking US financing of groups that give women information about terminations.
However, there are also signs that reproductive rights can never be taken for granted. A case in point is the US, where a Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice may jeopardize women’s constitutional right to access legal abortion. Closer to home, there have recently been debates in both Finland and Sweden about the right of health personnel to refuse to participate in abortions on the basis of conscience. In Norway, the small Christian Democratic Party in 2013 introduced a proposal that would allow conscientious objections by doctors opposed to issuing abortion referrals—in addition to their present right to refuse to perform abortions. Because it was part of a deal with the minority government, it almost became law. Two years after it was defeated as a result of massive protests—a social media storm, followed by the largest turnout for International Women’s Day demonstrations since the 1970s—the Christian Democrats proposed legislation requiring women to undergo a mandatory waiting period before having abortions. Again they were unsuccessful, and polls show that the Norwegian people are firmly in favour of women’s self-determination. But such proposals are reminders of how easily even established rights may be eroded.
In other parts of the world, of course, the issue of reproductive rights is much more urgent. Restrictions on access to abortions do not reduce their number. According to the World Health Organization as many as 47,000 women die each year from complications of unsafe abortions, the vast majority of them in developing countries. Worldwide, then, there is absolutely no reason for complacency. As NORA editors, we would therefore have welcomed contributions by Nordic gender researchers on the socio-political, historical, legal, philosophical, or health aspects of the global struggle to gain and protect women’s right to safe abortions. While reproduction has been the topic of several articles in NORA during our editorial period, they have been concerned with fertility and fertility technologies. Abortion rights are equally basic and existential, as the intense debates surrounding the Irish referendum have abundantly demonstrated.
The thematic span of the articles in this issue of NORA is very wide, but in different ways they all touch upon the role of narratives in gender research. Indeed, narratives are the material analysed in the first article, “(Re)configuring of Non-violence as a Matter of Sustainability and Response-ability” by Suvi Pihkala, Tuila Huuki, Mervi Heikkinen, and Vappu Sunnari. It has as its explicitly normative starting point the need to tackle violence and to cultivate sustainable non-violence. The authors elaborate on this intriguing issue by exploring the ways in which violence and non-violence have been part of the life of one woman, whom they call Lena. Based on interviews with Lena, as well as on the journals she produced during an e-learning study programme, the authors generate three stories of how violence and non-violence came to matter from childhood into the future of Lena’s life. The careful analysis of the three generated stories perceives violence and non-violence as a relational socio-material entanglement, and is inspired by Barad’s notion of agential realism and rethinking of ethics. Hence, the authors argue that violence and non-violence should not be seen as external objects, but rather as always in-becoming invitations for an ethical response. Through Lena’s case, the authors shed light on non-violence as intricately entangled in social-material fields of relations.
In “This Word is (Not?) Very Exciting: Considering Intersectionality in Indigenous Studies”, Torjer Olsen argues for the necessity of applying gendered and intersectional approaches in indigenous studies. Drawing on a wide range of indigenous methodologies, he points out that their general lack of gender perspectives prevents a critical understanding of many of the ways in which power and privilege operate in indigenous communities as well as in the majority society. Olsen illustrates his argument by a multilayered analysis of the Swedish director Amanda Kernell’s award-winning film Sami Blood (2016). Its young protagonist Elle-Marja grows up in a South-Sámi reindeer-herding family during the 1930s but breaks with her family and community because she cannot reconcile an indigenous and a Swedish identity. Peeling away layer after layer of the film’s narrative, Olsen shows how the trajectory of Elle-Marja’s life can be interpreted intersectionally as a series of choices involving gender and indigeneity, but also dimensions such as power, privilege, and class—all mutually constitutive. Although the film must be understood in terms of the power relations between the Sámi and the Swedish state at a specific historical juncture, in Olsen’s analysis it clearly has much wider ramifications.
How does the meaning of place—a suburb or city centre, an affluent or an underprivileged area—affect who is rendered vulnerable and who is attributed agency in rape cases in court? This is the question asked by Ulrika Andersson and Monika Edgren in “Vulnerability, Agency and the Ambivalence of Place in Narratives of Rape in Swedish High-profile Cases”. In their novel take on rape cases, they explore in what way the act of rape is linked to place in legal discourses. They also discuss how agency relates to vulnerability, that is, whether and in which cases the courts perceive that agency precludes vulnerability. Their study is based on the court judgements in three hyper-mediatized rape cases in Sweden that were explicitly linked to the geographical area where the crime took place. The analysis demonstrates that court narratives, divided into “background narratives” and “assessment narratives”, include ambivalent place associations. Geographical area, as related to vulnerability and agency, plays a significant role in sentencing and also paves the way for the labelling of rape cases in media.
The final article, “Psychosocial and Symbolic Dimensions of the Breast Explored through a Visual Matrix” by Birgitta Gripsrud, Ellen Ramvi, Lynn Froggett, Ingvil Hellstrand, and Julian Manley, has in many respects a narrative form. It describes an exploratory study using a free-associative psychosocial method—the Visual Matrix—with the aim of generating both embodied and enculturated experience of the breast. The authors analyse the procedures and results of two Visual Matrix sessions, one in which the participants were invited to share images and associations of the breast/breasts, and one in which they were encouraged to respond to a slideshow of stimulus images of breasts. While the purpose of the first session was to elicit material close to lived experience, the second focused on cultural imaginaries. The resulting associative material—spanning from the sensual to the grotesque and from isolated images to brief instances—gives fascinating glimpses into the complex and often contradictory imaginaries of the breast. It leads the authors to conclude that their method not only allows tacit knowledge of the material-semiotic aspects of the breast to surface, but also offers a way of “thinking through the body” that resists dominant cultural ascriptions.
The position paper in this issue, “Structuralism versus Individualism in Swedish Gender-equality Policy and Law” by Åsa Gunnarsson and Eva-Maria Svensson, is a follow-up to Anne Hellum’s position paper on Norwegian gender-equality reform published a year ago in NORA. The authors argue that while the social democratic legacy entailed a structural approach to gender equality, recent laws reflect a narrow legal perspective which is mainly individualistic and reactive. Whether the Gender Equality Agency established in 2018 will bring about change remains to be seen.
Two of the three book reviews in this issue deal with democracy and citizenship. Beret Bråten finds Drude Dahlerup’s Has Democracy Failed Women? with its emphasis on the how as well as the who of democratic decision-making a timely contribution to the question of women and democracy. Elisabeth Stubberud contributes a thorough review of Gendered Citizenship and the Politics of Representation, edited by Hilde Danielsen, Kari Jegerstedt, Ragnhild Muriaas, and Brita Ytre-Arne. She notes particularly that the anthology offers wide-ranging theoretical contributions to the question of how representation is connected to re-presentation—the possibility of re-presentation without representation—and applauds its wide-ranging empirical examples that span Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Finally, Mona Mannevuo’s review of Maria do Mar Pereira’s Power, Knowledge and Feminist Scholarship: An Ethnography of Academia suggests that it ought to be required reading for all researchers involved in women’s, gender, and feminist studies. According to Mannevuo, the book is a valuable contribution to the growing body of works critiquing the performative university and the logic of neoliberal academia. She also applauds the author’s effort to go beyond “the typical laments and diagnostics” to ask uncomfortable questions about the impact of our own actions and inactions as feminist scholars.
The title of the 2019 special issue of NORA, co-edited by Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen and Dorthe Staunæs, will be “Intersectionality, yes but how? Approaches and conceptualizations in Nordic feminist research and activism”. The call for papers, with a deadline for submissions on 15 March 2019, has been posted on our Facebook page as well as on the NORA website. Please note that there is an earlier deadline on 15 October 2018 for abstracts.