Welcome to the second issue of this year’s NORA. We are happy that many readers took the time to join our first NORA@live event, where two authors of recently published articles presented their work. We also heard Pernille Ipsen give a talk on her fascinating new book, which is reviewed by Professor Emerita Nina Lykke (Linköping University) in this issue of NORA. Even though many of us are probably growing tired of online meetings, we are sure the online format also has immense benefits, which will allow us to gather authors, readers, reviewers, and editors more frequently and easily—also in the post-pandemic era, which lies ahead of us. Look out for future NORA@live events on NORA’s Facebook and Twitter.
In this issue of NORA we are thrilled to present four articles, two book reviews and a call for papers.
The articles engage with a range of topics in diverging contexts and using disparate methodologies. In “Feminism means business: Business feminism, sisterhood and visibility,” Johanna Lauri interviews self-proclaimed feminists with small-scale businesses who sell feminist commodities to explore why and how the market has become an arena for doing feminism and what this can tell us about contemporary feminism. She shows how feminism is renegotiated as ownership, empowering other women into ownership and reshaping the feminist discourse of sisterhood into business support and advice. She explains this employing the phantasmatic narrative of business sisterhood which veils the competition and simultaneously enables the enjoyment of feminist sisterhood. She finds this reconciliation is also expressed through a renegotiation of business as feminism: competition is reshaped into a positive value for expanding the feminist struggle, and making profit is reshaped into a feminist discourse of equal pay. This produces a feminist subject who is individual, visible, affluent, and entrepreneurial and does not challenge economic structures or ownership conditions.
In “Re-Reading Eduard Vilde’s Mäeküla Piimamees: Liminal Silence as ‘Queering’ Dramatic Irony,” L.J. Theo re-reads Estonian writer’s novel based in Derridean différance, which reveals that Mari also “queers” the narrative through delivering its dramatic irony. Alongside a notable body of early twentieth century Nordic and Baltic literature, the text writes a “trope of silence” that constructs Mari as a “liminal” character in three interlinked ways. A Bakhtinian threshold chronotope delivers aa ‘here-and-there” logic that underpins the storylines of all the characters, while writing Mari as socially “betwixt-and-between” and the male characters as outsiders, thereby delivering the feminist message of women’s right to individuality and equality.
In “Power and subjectivity: Making sense of sexual consent among adults living in Sweden,” Ida Linandera, Isabel Goicoleaa, Maria Wiklundb, Anne Gotfredsena, Maria Strömbäck provide empirical studies, which they use to analyse and understand the complex power relations that matter in the negotiation of sexual consent. Based on interviews, they use a Foucauldian analytical lens to explore and challenge understandings of autonomous, rational subjects who communicate consent on the basis of authentic feelings.
In “Attitudes to Sexism and the #MeToo Movement at a Danish University,” Lea Skewes, Joshua C. Skewes & Michelle K. Ryan use a survey to explore the relationship between academic employees’ attitudes to modern sexism and the #MeToo movement to better understand how interventions designed to address sexual har assment might be received in Danish academia. On this backdrop the authors discuss the implications for the implementation of interventions targeting sexual harassment.
This issue also features two reviews that in many ways speak to each other across national boundaries and time, exploring similar topics. As mentioned above, Prof. Em. Nina Lykke reviews Pernille Ipsen’s Et åbent øjeblik: Da mine mødre gjorde noget nyt (2020), an historical exploration of Ipsen’s seven mothers, who experimented with lesbian–feminist collective living in early 1970s Copenhagen. By combining memory and biographical research with historical archival research, Ipsen, as Lykke points out, movingly portrays a key moment in Danish feminist history. In addition to this groundbreaking historical analysis by Ipsen, this issue also features a review of the Swedish anthology Den kvinnliga tvåsamhetens frirum: Kvinnopar i kvinnorörelsen 1890-1960 (2018), edited by Eva Borgström and Hanna Markusson Winkvist, reviewed by Karin Lützen (Roskilde University). This anthology, Lutzen mentions, exemplifies imaginative new analyses of women-loving-women’s lives from around the turn of the century until the 1960s, using essays and articles that range from biographical explorations to historically anchored discussions. Both reviews invite the reader to delve deeper into the stories of these women’s challenges, refusals, loves, lives and communities that all negotiate the limits of female homosocial desire.