We write this editorial shortly after the International Women’s Day on 8 March. This day has been observed since the early 1900s, when Clara Zetkin at the second International Conference of Working Women (held in Copenhagen) proposed that women should mobilize for their demands on the same day in every country as a key annual event. In 1977, the UN proclaimed a United Nations Day for Women’s Rights and International Peace to be observed by member states. The turnout on the marches and demonstrations has fluctuated across time and space, but in 2017—in the wake of the formidable Women’s Marches around the world against Donald Trump on 21 January—it seems to have peaked. In Oslo alone, 10,000 women and men took part in the protest demonstration, just to give one example. The main demand in Oslo was “Struggle against violence and rape—legal protection of women now”. In Finland, the international festival WOW Finland was widely celebrated all over the country during the days following the International Women’s Day. In Stockholm, the theme was “Opposition to borders—against patriarchy, sexism and fascism”. In Iceland, the government decided to introduce a new legislation on this day, making it mandatory for employers to prove that they offer equal pay regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality.
To what extent contemporary feminist activism is actually increasing, or these large marches and demonstrations are more random events, remains to be seen. If and in what ways contemporary feminist activism is intertwined with anti-racist, LGBTQ, industrial actions, and other kinds of social movements is yet another open question. So is the urgent issue of how and in what numbers and with what success various counterforces will be able to rally. These are topics that need careful study. We call upon researchers—from every relevant school of thought—to contribute with articles, reviews, or position papers on the complex ways in which the advance of populist, neoliberal, and conservative forces affects both feminist activism (in the broadest sense of the notion) and gender studies.
As this issue of NORA shows, our call for more contributions from gender researchers in the humanities has paid off. In addition to Laufey Axelsdóttir and Þorgerður Einarsdóttir’s article about gender quotas in Iceland, we publish three very different articles from the fields of history, literature, and culture studies. Based on materials ranging from early-twentieth-century newspaper debates to contemporary crime fiction and science-fiction films, they are an indication of the continuing relevance and exciting scope of feminist humanities research.
Niels Nyegaard’s groundbreaking contribution, “Heteronormative Foundations of Modern Citizenship in Early-Twentieth-Century Denmark”, explores the entanglement of issues around male homosexuality, heteronormativity, class, and citizenship that came to light during the 1906–1907 Great Morality Scandal in Copenhagen. Nyegaard argues that this well-publicized criminal case, which had revealed the existence of a male homosexual subculture in the city, was politicized by working-class newspapers that opportunistically exploited it in contemporary debates on citizenship. Analysing the press coverage of the case, Nyegaard demonstrates how these newspapers used the alleged homosexuality of privileged middle- and upper-class citizens to promote full citizen rights for the partly disenfranchised working class. On the one hand, the moral fitness of the elite was thrown into doubt; on the other, working-class males were constructed as ideal heterosexual families men and therefore deserving of citizenship. The implication for bourgeois men was that they could only maintain their position as socially legitimate citizens by abstaining from homosexual acts. By connecting access to full citizenship with heterosexuality, the categories of homo- and heterosexuality became linked to discussions of Danish citizenship, which at this particular juncture was defined as heterosexual.
At the centre of Ingvil Hellstrand’s “From Metaphor to Metamorph? On Science Fiction and the Ethics of Transformative Encounters” is a feminist close reading of two science-fiction scenes. One is the trailer for the film X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), the other an episode from the second series of the TV series Fringe (2009–2012), both showing metamorphs (from the noun metamorphosis), that is, shape-shifters that transform from one form of being to another. While this material in itself may seem to have a rather limited appeal, except for sci-fi aficionados, Hellstrand uses it to ask important questions about the development of an ethics of diversity and mutability that opposes notions of humans as bounded and universalized subjects. Situating her argument in the post-constructivist turn in feminist theory, she asks whether the metamorph may serve as “a potential thinking tool” in the present political predicament, when it has become more crucial than ever to imagine both change and difference, “not as an opposite, but as a possibility for rethinking the fixity, the stickiness, of established reality”.
Transformation is a central theme, too, in Tiina Mäntymäki’s suggestive reading of the Norwegian author Unni Lindell’s psychological thriller Rødhette (2004), a contemporary rewriting of the tale of Little Red Riding Hood. The narrative of a female victim of a “wolf” transformed into a successful avenging agent, who over a period of 25 years murders eight men associated in different ways with her original attacker, Rødhette is interpreted by Mäntymäki as a study of fear and its most extreme consequences. Drawing on affect theory, particularly as represented by Sara Ahmed, Mäntymäki analyses the novel in terms of “an affective economy involving the body, femininity and the radical othering of the objects of fear”. She carefully elucidates not only the novel itself and its crime plot, intertexts, and use of metaphors, but also its female protagonist as representative of a specific emotional trajectory in which agentive potential emerges from paralysing childhood trauma. In that way, her interpretation suggests how Lindell’s thriller has general relevance, not only as a rewriting of the cultural narrative of female victimization, but also as a study—albeit in the form of popular fiction—of the consequences of fear.
Gender quotas have been a controversial tool in the struggle for gender equality. In Iceland, corporate gender quotas were introduced abruptly in 2009, immediately following the financial collapse, and enforced by parliament in 2010. Why did this happen and what were the main arguments for and against the new legislation? Based on a critical discourse analysis of online newspaper articles and parliamentary debates from 2009 to 2015, Laufey Axelsdóttir and Þorgerður Einarsdóttir explore patriarchal power relations and tensions between gender-neutral arguments and arguments about women’s special qualifications - the Wollstonecraft dilemma. They reveal how the collapse created space for public discussions on the lack of women in top positions. A crisis may push gender equality forward, but these arguments matter. Women-centered debate may contribute to gender equality in the short run, but may backfire, cautions the author.
This issue of NORA also includes a substantial review by Marta Kindler of Paid Migrant Domestic Labour in a Changing Europe: Questions of Gender Equality and Citizenship, a collection of articles dealing with migrant domestic work and au-pairing in nine different European countries, edited by Berit Gullikstad, Guro Korsnes Kristensen, and Priscilla Ringrose.
Inspired by Nancy Fraser’s position paper in NORA 4/2016 on the result of the American presidential election, we asked the author and academic Siri Hustvedt to respond. Though she does not engage explicitly with Fraser, her spirited and eloquent analysis can only be read as an indirect rebuttal. In Hustvedt’s view, “Trump embodies the roiling insecurities white people, especially white men, feel in a changing America, a growing sense of emasculation and impotence charged by a terror of sinking into the polluted swamp of the feminine”. Writing some months after Trump’s inauguration, she worries about the consequences of his populist divisive strategies as president. To her, the chaos his administration has already unleashed both in the US and abroad “does not look like an opportunity so much as a disaster”.
One of the most prominent gender scholars in the Nordic region, Ida Blom, died in November 2016. Ida was a cherished colleague, historian, and gender researcher, and we are pleased to share Randi Rønning Balsvik, Siri Gerrard, and Dagrunn Grønbech’s obituary with our readers.
We are delighted to conclude this editorial with some good news. There is going to be another NORA conference! This time it will be arranged in Iceland, hosted by the University of Iceland in Reykjavík, and will take place on 23–25 May 2018. We commend NORA’s board for having taken on this huge responsibility. More information will be published in forthcoming issues.
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