We write this editorial in early September, just a few days prior to the Norwegian parliamentary election. Based on the recent polls, the present right-wing coalition-government parties are doing surprisingly well, compared to what most experts guessed before the election campaign. The social democrats have so far not been able to mobilize as they had expected, while some of the small parties are doing well. But, as the candidates emphasize, there is only one poll that counts: the election. The days ahead are exciting, also from a gender perspective, and in this issue we are pleased to publish a position paper addressing the Norwegian equality and anti-discrimination reform—which may be revised with a change of government. Law professor Anne Hellum claims that the reform does not respond to the legal needs of individuals belonging to vulnerable groups. Nor does it introduce appropriate tools and mechanisms to address structural discrimination. For those reasons, the unified anti-discrimination bill has been contested by women’s rights, LGBT, and anti-racist organizations, as well as by organizations of people with disabilities. Like Hellum, we encourage studies on the implementation of the bill in the short and long run. Also required are comparative studies, preferably in relation to the wider international legal and political trends.
This issue of NORA has one more contribution addressing contemporary equality work, Andreas Öjehag-Pettersson’s intriguing article “Working for Change: Projectified Politics and Gender Equality”. His point of departure is the widespread use of the project form in gender-equality work, legitimized in New Public Management as an efficient policy tool capable of handling complex issues. The project is, however, a political phenomenon that is notably overlooked by scholars. Based on interviews with people working in, or in relation to, regional women’s resource centres in Sweden, and relevant documents, Öjehag-Pettersson not only analyses contemporary equality work in regional development, but also makes the project visible as a governmental technology. As such, the project is not a neutral form, he claims, but serves particular purposes and is imbued with power. Drawing on Haraway and Barad, he applies the optical metaphors of reflection, refraction, and diffraction to make visible how the project form may work to shift the direction and attention in ongoing gender-equality work. For example, when project funding becomes a means of survival for the resource centres, short-term aims may take precedence over the long-term planning for change.
The second article in this issue, also from Sweden, addresses sick leave, a topic that seems to be continuously on the political agenda. Sick leave is clearly a gendered issue; women’s higher levels of sick leave are well established. But explanations for the gender difference in sick leave are contested. In her article “What Mothers Do: Motherhood as a Resource for Negotiating Sick-Leave Legitimacy in Swedish Sickness Insurance Interactions”, Marie Flinkfeldt suggests an alternative to linking women’s relatively higher levels of sick leave in a causal way to their various family responsibilities. Following a constructionist perspective on gender, she emphasizes that motherhood is not something one “has”, but something that is done or constructed in specific ways and to specific ends. How is motherhood negotiated or “done” in relation to sickness insurance, Flinkfeldt asks. To answer this question, she has audio-recorded sick-leave “status” meetings (prescribed by Swedish law), transcribed the records, and then applied a conversation analysis and a membership categorization analysis. Based on detailed scrutiny of the texts, Flinkfeldt elaborates how motherhood functions in this particular setting. She displays by concrete examples how motherhood can be a resource for legitimizing sick leave, but also how orientations towards motherhood may constitute a risk. The normative expectations on women as mothers mean that expressions of too much mothering may indicate insufficient rehabilitation, while restricted or too little mothering may be interpreted as parental unfitness, which may call for institutional intervention.
In addition to these analyses of contemporary work-related topics, this issue contains an article dealing with the history of women’s suffrage. In “Norway as an Example in the UK Suffrage Campaign”, Sissel Rosland discusses a little-known transnational aspect of the UK struggle for women’s suffrage, namely the many references in contemporary British media debates to the “lessons” that could be drawn from Norway. Her focus is on the years between 1907, when restricted female suffrage in parliamentary election had been introduced in Norway, and the outbreak of the First World War. In particular she foregrounds the role of two “unsung” Norwegian activists, Helga Gill and Ella Anker, who both lived in the UK during this period and were involved in the suffrage movement there. Both aligned themselves with the moderate faction of the British suffrage campaign and used the Norwegian experience as a case in point to demonstrate the positive social consequences of women’s enfranchisement. Likewise, they referred to the “lesson from Norway” as a way of countering the anti-suffragists’ dire predictions of doom. However, Rosland’s richly detailed argument also provides insight into the challenges of such political exchange across borders by showing how supporters as well as opponents of women’s suffrage often questioned the validity of using a small country as role model for the world’s largest empire.
This issue of NORA also includes three wide-ranging book reviews that demonstrate some of the diversity of current gender research. Deniz Akin reviews Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Culture, edited by Elisabeth L. Engebretsen and William F. Schroeder, and Inger Furseth reviews Religion, Gender and Citizenship: Women of Faith, Gender Equality and Feminism, written by Line Nyhagen and Beatrice Halsaa. Finally, Riikka Homanen reviews Assisted Reproduction across Borders: Feminist Perspectives on Normalization, Disruptions and Transmissions, edited by Merete Lie and Nina Lykke.
In August the Centre for Gender Research at the University of Oslo hosted the conference “Age Agency Ambiguity—Gender and Generation in Times of Change”, the sixth in a series of Sino-Nordic women’s and gender studies conferences. This is the impetus behind our 2018 special issue “Gender and Generation in Times of Change—in China and the Nordic Countries”. It will be co-edited with Professor Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen, who was the main organizer of the conference, and will address some of the transformatory effects on gender and generational relations of processes of industrialization, urbanization, deregulation, migration, and globalization. We invite contributions related to topics such as gender and the generational aspects of family life, family–work relations, ageing societies, the situation of the younger generations, popularization of higher education, the expanding middle class and emerging precariat, the environment and sustainable development, and the increasing inequalities between different groups and classes—all of which have a far-reaching impact on the conditions for gender equality work and academic research practice. As the title of the issue indicates, we are particularly interested in comparative studies of China and the Nordic countries. However, studies of other regions are also welcome. The call for papers, with a deadline of 1 March 2018, has been posted on our Facebook page as well as on the NORA website.
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