Performing female masculinities and negotiating femininities: challenging gender hegemonies in Swedish forestry through women’s networks

Abstract

This paper addresses the discursive and spatial constructions of female masculinities and femininities in separate networks for women forest owners in Sweden. Based on qualitative research conducted with members of six such networks, I explored the spatial negotiations and performances of femininities and female masculinities in relation to hegemonic forestry masculinities. I found that the separate spaces provided by the networks enabled the women to find strategies by which to navigate the spatial relations permeated by hegemonic forestry masculinity, which empowered them to resist the subordinate position of hegemonic femininity and to ‘claim space’. The women claimed this space by asserting alternative femininities and performing embodied female masculinities conceptualized as ‘the tough forest owner’ and the ‘entrepreneurial forest owner’ to gain access to both symbolic and material spaces, including the category of ‘the forest owner’. The performances of female masculinities were largely conducted from other positions of privilege, such as class and heterosexuality, which included performances of hegemonic femininity. Therefore, these performances of female masculinities generated status rather than stigmatisation. Furthermore, the analysis showed how these masculinities and femininities were negotiated and performed in relation to forestry spatiality as well as rurality and urbanity. I argue that the spatial performances of alternative femininities and female masculinities challenge hegemonic masculinities in a way that disrupts the male exclusivity of the category of ‘the forest owner’, although the performances of female masculinities also reinforce the superior position of masculinities in relation to femininities.

Keywords:

• Femininity
• female masculinity
• hegemonic masculinity
• rurality
• forestry
• Sweden

Introduction

There is a rich body of thematically diverse work on gender in rural settings, and an important development in rural gender studies is how rurality has come to be conceptualized as integral to the performance and negotiation of masculinities and femininities rather than simply an entity in which gender relations play out (Little and Panelli 2003). However, such research seems to have engaged more with issues related to how men’s identities and masculinities are intertwined with rurality (e.g., Bell 2000; Brandth 1995; Brandth and Haugen 2000, 2005, 2016; Campbell and Bell 2000; Stenbacka 2011), which has led to further calls to specifically engage with the meanings of rural femininities (Keller, Lloyd, and Bell 2015). Furthermore, as the performance of masculinities and femininities are relational and not tied to a specific sex, it has also been argued that a neglected group within masculinity studies is that of women (Kazyak 2012) who appropriate features of masculinities in their performance of what have been labelled ‘female masculinities’ (Halberstam [1998] 2019). In this paper, I answer these calls and address women’s performance of femininities and female masculinities in Swedish forestry, with the recognition that rurality (in this case expressed as a connection to forests and forestry) and urbanity, are tangled up in the processes of constructing gender and vice versa.

In the Scandinavian context, forestry has been described as ‘an arena where hegemonic rural masculinity is expressed’ (Brandth and Haugen 2005, 148; Lidestav and Egan Sjölander 2007). It has been shown how Swedish women forestry professionals feel questioned and disadvantaged (Johansson et al. 2019a), and the #metoo movement also reached the forest sector. The use of the hashtag #slutavverkat revealed how harassment and sexualised forms of male control have diminished women’s power in the sector (Johansson, Johansson, and Andersson et al. 2018). Furthermore, the ideal forester is constructed as a nature-mastering hardworking rural man and in the construction of such forestry subjects, forestry knowledge has been shown to be central (Lidestav and Egan Sjölander 2007). However, the acquirement of such knowledge is clearly gendered; e.g., women attend fewer trainings than men and ‘[F]forestry knowledge is less often transferred from fathers to daughters than from fathers to sons’ (Lidestav and Ekström 2000, 378–379). Women forest owners also consider themselves to be less knowledgeable than male forest owners (Follo 2008, Häggqvist, Berg Lejon, and Lidestav 2014, Lidestav and Ekström 2000). They also perform fewer practical forestry tasks compared to men and self-activity has been shown to be strongly related to knowledge about forestry (Häggqvist, Berg Lejon, and Lidestav 2014). Nevertheless, the number of women forest owners in Sweden has dramatically increased because of generational successions and a change in the traditional patrilineal forest property inheritance tradition (Lidestav 2010); currently, 38% of forest owners are women (Swedish Forest Agency 2018).

Moreover, the pursuit of gender equality has become more central in the forest sector, although not without resistance. Johansson et al. (2019b) showed how male forestry professionals perform discursive acts of resistance towards what they perceive as affirmative action and a disruption of meritocratic principles. In addition, women forest owners and female employees have been constituted as being in need of help and/or transformation to achieve equality (Andersson et al. 2018, Holmgren and Arora-Jonsson 2015) and the idea of gender equality in the forest sector has been shown to be strongly connected to the construction of women forest owners as entrepreneurs (Appelstrand and Lidestav 2018, Holmgren and Arora-Jonsson 2015). Furthermore, it has been argued that gender equality has become depoliticized (Johansson and Ringblom 2017) and that the constitution of gender and gender equality through market-oriented neoliberal policy logics further limits the space for politicisation and structural change (Andersson et al. 2018).

The discursive and material exclusion of women, in combination with the increase in women forest owners, led to the establishment of several separate forest owner networks for women in Sweden during the 1990s and early 2000s. Some of these networks are connected to the different forest owner associations in Sweden, some are independent, and some are initiated by the Swedish Forest Agency. However, these networks have so far received little attention in research. Brandth, Follo, and Haugen (2004, 2015) discussed the goals, strategies, dilemmas, and paradoxes of a women’s forest network in Norway. Andersson and Lidestav (2016) examined the strategies, functions, and positions of a selection of Swedish forest networks for women. Furthermore, Arora-Jonsson (2005, 2009, 2010) studied gendered discourses in women’s separate organization for local forest management and rural development in Sweden. However, these studies did not explicitly address the spatial constructions of femininities or masculinities. Therefore, in this paper, my aim is to explore the spatial negotiations and performances of femininities and female masculinities in separate forest networks for women in Sweden, as well as how these negotiations and performances relate to hegemonic masculinities in forestry. This paper thus makes the following contributions to the literature on gender, rurality, and forestry. First, it presents an analysis that is focused on women forest owner’s performances of female masculinities as well as their femininity performances. This expands the understanding of subjects’ gender performances, given that studies of masculinity tend to focus the performances of men and femininity performances has been understudied in rural gender studies. Furthermore, the current paper shows how women’s performances of masculinity intersect with heterosexuality and class in a way that both disrupt and reproduce gendered power relations and result in entitlement rather than stigmatisation (the intersection between gender and sexuality has more often been studied through the lens of gay and lesbian sexualities rather than that of hegemonic rural heterosexuality; see Bryant and Pini [2011] on this). Second, this paper highlights the spatiality of these performances, which has not been extensively explored in the literature on gender and forestry. The current analysis highlights the importance of separate spaces in which women forest owners can claim space and navigate spatial relations imbued with hegemonic masculinity. In addition, the paper shows how these women navigate the discourses of urbanity and rurality, as well as how such spatialities inform gender performances.

Gender hegemonies and the performance of gendered subjects

My understanding of femininities and masculinities is one whereby gender is seen as performative (Butler 1990), embodied, relational, spatial, situated, fluid, and intersecting with multiple dimensions of identities. Femininities and masculinities encompass both the practices and discourses connected to the performance of gendered subjects (Connell 1995). Furthermore, the term ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (Connell 1987), captures the idea that there is a normative masculinity that holds a superior position to other subordinated masculinities and femininities, to which all subjects must relate. As gender is always relational, masculinities, and femininities are mutually constitutive and defined in relation to one another. Hegemonic masculinity is thus the pattern of practice that allows the subjugation of women in relation to men (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). The idea of ‘hegemonic femininity’ complements the concept of hegemonic masculinity and captures the hierarchical relationship between the multitude of femininities (Schippers 2007). Furthermore, hegemonic femininity represents ‘the pattern of femininity which is given most cultural and ideological support’ (Connell 1987, 24), or a femininity that is based on subordination to men and (hegemonic) masculinity.

Since masculinities and femininities are performed, they are not essential to a specific sex; thus, women can also perform and embody masculinities, which has been conceptualized as ‘female masculinity’ (Halberstam [1998] 2019). Hence, masculinity is connected not only to the male body but also to the female body. Furthermore, female masculinity should not be thought of as an imitation of maleness (Halberstam [1998] 2019) but rather as ‘women's engagements with practices and discourses associated with masculinity, including embodying and performing masculinity’ (Kazyak 2012, 828). Halberstam argues that female masculinities have been blatantly ignored in culture at large and within masculinity studies. He suggests that this indifference is ideologically motivated and ‘has sustained the complex social structure that wed masculinity to maleness and to power and domination’ ([1998] 2019, 2), which warrants a sustained examination of female masculinities.

Studies of women’s performances of female masculinities have often focused on the intersection between gender, homosexuality, and queerness (e.g., Halberstam [1998] 2019; Pascoe [2007] 2012; Kazyak 2012). Female masculinities, or ‘pariah femininities’ as Schippers (2007) calls it, contrast to hegemonic femininity in that they challenge hegemonic masculinity instead of being complicit with it. While some scholars have shown how the performances of female masculinities are stigmatized (Halberstam [1998] 2019; Schippers 2007), others have found that certain forms of female masculinity are accepted or normative and even generate status, such as masculine enactments by girls who play basketball (Pascoe [2007] 2012) or rural women’s engagement with masculine discourses and practices while performing farm work (Kazyak 2012).

Hegemonic masculinities and femininities are also connected to different ways of representing bodies. Bodies and bodily practices are actively involved in social processes, and embodiment is thus a part of gender hegemonies (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). Moreover, in my understanding, spaces and identities are co-constituted (Valentine 2007). Space is thus central to bodily performance, as well as how the material practices of the body are essential in the creation of (rural) spaces (Little and Leyshon 2003).

Masculinities, femininities, and rurality

Just as masculinities and femininities are constituted in tandem, rurality is constructed in relation to urbanity, and there is a hierarchical relationship between urban and rural areas. The relative positioning of places and symbolic space is integral in constituting gendered ruralities (Stenbacka 2011). Based on an analysis of rural masculinities in Swedish media, Stenbacka (2011) argued that although rurality was part of hegemonic masculinities in the past, this is no longer the case, as rurality is currently seen as deviant in relation to normative urbanity. Rural masculinity constructs the rural man as traditional, unequal, and incapable, while urban masculinity represents the opposite, i.e., an equal, capable, and forward-looking man. Although the masculinities attached to rural men may be dominant in their specific context, they are not hegemonic from a wider perspective; rather, they are subordinate and constructed as ‘the other’ in relation to an urban masculinity (Stenbacka 2011).

Forestry work has been described as one of the most masculine-coded rural activities (Brandth and Haugen 2005); and in an analysis of the discursive constructions of masculinities in the forestry press, Brandth and Haugen (2000) identified two embodied positions of masculinities within forestry, which the they refer to as the ‘tough’ and the ‘powerful’, similar to the discursive constructions of masculinity identified by Liepins (1998) in an Australian and New Zealand agricultural context. In Brandth and Haugen’s work (2000, 2005), the tough masculinity is mainly performed in physical work, such as logging activities and the use of machinery (e.g., chainsaws), and can be understood as a blue-collar working-class masculinity for which heavy machines and working clothes constitute the material base for the embodied display of masculinity. In contrast, the powerful masculinity is constructed as a white-collar middle-class masculinity embodied through managerial, organizational, and expert work displayed through the wearing of suits in business settings.

The powerful organizational man is associated with urbanity, whereas the tough forestry worker is associated with rurality. Despite the urban norm and the hierarchical relationship between rural and urban symbolic space, Brandth and Haugen (2005) argued that it appears to be an advantage for the organizational man to prove himself with practical forest knowledge, or, in other words, to incorporate the rural into the urban powerful organizational masculinity. Moreover, they do not find this type of spillover the other way around, i.e. the urban powerful organizational masculinity does not influence the rural tough masculinity. In contrast to Stenbacka’s (2011) finding that rural masculinities are subordinated to urban masculinities Brandth and Haugen (2005) argued that the rural tough forestry worker represents hegemonic masculinity in relation to the urban powerful organizational man, as they found that in the rural setting of their study, practical experience-based knowledge was valued higher than white-collar managerial expertise. This result is in line with the findings of Lidestav and Egan Sjölander (2007), who, based on a discourse analysis of forestry profession advertisements, argued that the ideal forester is continually reproduced ‘as a hard-working and nature-mastering man’ (351). These different findings illustrate how contingent and fluid identities are constituted differently in different spaces.

The studies on femininity and rurality are not abundant, but some examples are discussed herein. In Brandth’s (1994) analysis of Norwegian farm women, she showed how women redefine femininity and assert themselves in masculine-coded work by using agricultural machinery. She argued that women create a new femininity that both challenges and draws on masculinity and other femininities. Brandth noted the ambiguity in identity formation by showing how farm women resist a traditional femininity that entails the subordination to masculinity while drawing on particular aspects of the same traditional femininity (in combination with parts of the work-oriented masculinity). However, Brandth concluded that farm femininity is reconstructed, although in a way that maintains the superiority of masculinity. Grace and Lennie (1998) also pointed out the tension and contradictions in Australian rural women’s need to affirm their traditional identities while taking up leadership roles that challenge patriarchal relations. In a discourse analyses of Australian and New Zealand agriculture, Liepins (1998) identified a traditional subservient farming femininity in which women are defined in their relation to male farmers as wives, daughters, and sisters. In regard to Australian agricultural politics, she found that women are given minimal discursive recognition or are constructed into political spaces that are feminised such as local-level politics oriented towards health and education. In contrast, she found that in New Zealand there is a discursive space available for women to take up powerful leadership roles when drawing on traits associated with hegemonic masculinity. Pini (2005) described how the performance of women leaders in Australian agriculture not only requires self-representation of masculinity but also a blending of amplified femininity and masculinity. Keller (2014) showed how farming women in Wisconsin reshape rural femininity when trying to be recognized as farmers. She identified an alternative rural femininity that she labelled the ‘self-identified farmer’, drawing on the symbolic resources through which these women challenge and disrupt the male exclusivity of the farmer category and resist the hegemonic rural femininity represented in the category ‘farm wife’. She suggested this alternative femininity is informed by both hegemonic rural femininity and masculinity. Morris and Evans (2001) analysed how femininities and masculinities are represented in UK agricultural magazines. They found evidence of multiple coexisting femininities, whereby the category of ‘women achievers’, depicting qualified women as managing businesses and pursuing professional careers, challenged the idea of a coherent emphasized (hegemonic) femininity. However, overall, the notion of a hegemonic masculinity and a subordinate emphasized (hegemonic) femininity remained. Keller, Lloyd, and Bell (2015) obtained similar results in their study of the representations of femininity and rurality in U.S. magazines. They identified a hegemonic rural femininity, which they called ‘productivist rural femininity’. Although this productivist rural femininity constructs women as being engaged in productivist agriculture, this position is better described as a helpmate with relatively little involvement in major farm decisions. Such femininity is thus a practice that supports rural masculinity. Finally, Mayes and Pini (2010) studied media reports of women entering the mining industry in Australia. Mining, as a rural extraction industry, is also a mode of work that has been traditionally coded as masculine. They found women resist an undefined femininity by enacting a narrative of gender neutrality whereby they attempt to disguise or dismiss their femininity, which results in the prevailing of hegemonic masculinity.

Materials and methods

The current paper draws upon research conducted on six Swedish networks connecting women who own forest properties. Initially, I identified twelve larger networks, and during the subsequent fieldwork, a few additional networks came to my attention; however, these were smaller and less formal. I strategically chose the six networks in the study based on size, formality and geographical dispersion, although there were still variations in regards to these criteria (e.g., the networks with a more coordinating function had as few as 10 to 20 members, while others had as many as 300 to 350 members).

The material was collected between 2013 and 2015 and consists of semi-structured interviews with 37 members of the different networks and ethnographic participant observations that were conducted at network meetings and events. The interviewees were selected based on a combination of a strategic selection of active network members and, in cases in which the informality of the networks inhibited strategic selection, I used a snowball selection. The networks and the regions they cover have been anonymised for ethical reasons and the interviewees have been given pseudonyms.

The women I interviewed were homogenous in some ways and diverse in other ways. Swedish forest owners are on average over 58 years old (Lidestav et al. 2017), which was reflected in the group of interviewees (although some were younger, and some were older). The interviewees were also generally well-educated with white-collar occupations or former careers (as some were retired). However, some of the interviewees had working-class professions and/or were working in forestry and/or agriculture. The group was also diverse in the sense that some of the women were rural resident forest owners, while others were non-residential urban forest owners. There was also a mix of experiences and relationships with (their) forests and forestry. Most of the interviewees had inherited their forest property or married into it, although some had procured it as an investment. In terms of land ownership, the scope varied between three and more than a thousand hectares, although on average, the interviewees each owned a couple of hundred hectares of forestland. Some of the women were co-owners with a spouse or relative, and some were individual owners, or a combination of both.

Negotiating femininities and challenging hegemonic masculinities in forestry

Networks for women were initially formed as a response to exclusionary practices in Swedish forestry, and they should be understood as a strategy by which to resist the subordination of hegemonic femininity in forestry. The interviewees clearly articulated their experience of Swedish forestry as a male space in which (hegemonic) masculinity is normative, which is in line with the findings from other studies on forestry (e.g., Andersson and Lidestav 2016, Brandth and Haugen 2005; Johansson et al. 2019a; Johansson, Johansson, and Andersson et al. 2018; Lidestav and Egan Sjölander 2007; Reed 2003). Many interviewees brought up examples of exclusion in both symbolic and material forest spaces, i.e., exclusion from the idea of the forest as a male space, as well as exclusion in forest courses and activities, representation in forest owner associations, and from the use of material items such as forest gear and protective clothing (because of the sizes and designs being based on the male body). In addition, they also experienced exclusion from being recognized as belonging to the category of forest owners, especially in their contacts with various (male) forestry professionals and forest owners.

The intention of forming networks for women was to create separate spaces where women could find fellowship and educate themselves about forests and forestry to actively engage in their forest ownership. Many interviewees argued that the networks enabled women to ‘claim space’ and thus gain access to both material and symbolic spaces within forestry, as well become recognized as (knowledgeable) forest owners. The networks arranged activities focused on learning different aspects of forest ownership and management (e.g., the use of machinery such as chainsaws and safety equipment, writing and interpreting forest management plans, taxes and declaration, generational successions, entrepreneurship, environmental issues, cultural heritage in the forest, and recreational forest activities), as well as discussions of forest governance and politics, including advocating for an increased representation of women in forestry organizations. ‘Claiming space’ was thus both an individual (empowering individual women through education and fellowship) and collective project (advocating for female representation in forestry organizations) to resist hegemonic femininity in forestry.

Embodied female masculinities, alternative femininities, and rurality

The primary way the interviewees resisted subordinate hegemonic femininity and challenged hegemonic masculinities in forestry was to perform female masculinities or appropriate features of hegemonic masculinities, which Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) suggested that bourgeois women may do when they perform professional identities. The aspiration among these women was to be acknowledged as knowledgeable subjects, both as forest managers and entrepreneurs. The ideal was to be strong, knowledgeable, assertive women possessing theoretical and practical forestry skills.

Corresponding to Brandth and Haugen (2000, 2005) distinction between two contrasting positions of masculinity in forestry (i.e., the ‘tough’ and the ‘powerful organizational’ man), there were two distinguishable types of female masculinities performed by the interviewees to embody the category of ‘the forest owner’. I have chosen to call these two types of performances the ‘tough forest owner’ and the ‘entrepreneurial forest owner’. Most of the interviewees drew on both types of masculinities in constructing their identities.

The tough Forest owner and the entrepreneurial forest owner

For the interviewees, the use of machinery, clothing, and safety equipment was central to the embodied performance of the tough forest owner, echoing findings by Brandth and Haugen (2000, 2005). In particular, the skills of using chainsaws and brush cutters were symbolic when embodying the tough forest owner masculinity. Similarly, Follo (2002) described how using a chainsaw is considered a male competence and skilfully handling one is an initial trial for women entering forestry work. Within several of the women’s networks, chainsaw courses for women were reported as popular and continuously in demand. Many interviewees emphasized the importance of learning such practical skills in separate spaces, especially at the time when the networks first started.

Women skilled in using chainsaws and brush cutters were admired and described as role models by many of the interviewees. Barbro enthusiastically told me about a woman she met at a forestry trade fair who displayed the use of chainsaws and held courses and lectures on safety procedures. Barbro said that this woman was ‘an incredible person. I admire her so. Unbelievably knowledgeable’. In a study on farm women’s negotiations of femininity and use of heavy machinery (mainly tractors) in agricultural work, Brandth (2006) showed how the use of powerful tools defines women as strong, just like men. Becoming defined as strong, skilled, and knowledgeable was an ideal that the interviewees in my study were trying to achieve when they resisted subordinated femininities and performed a female masculinity based on the use of tools and machinery such as chainsaws.

Brandth and Haugen (2005) suggested that safety equipment is coded as masculine; however, the way in which the interviewees talked about safety precautions (both procedures and equipment) surrounding the use of machinery, these precautions seemed to be coded as feminine, or at least seemed to be in the process of changing their gendered meaning. Several of the interviewees made comments about women being more considerate than men regarding safety procedures connected to the use of chainsaws and how they often encountered men with macho attitudes who disregarded such safety precautions. The idea of safety precautions as being feminine is similar to the constructions of femininity in Australian mining where women were considered gentler by nature, which translated into the notion that they were better at operating machinery (Mayes and Pini 2010). Articulating safety precautions as a feminine consideration can be understood as an attempt to assert an alternative femininity and a way of challenging the superiority of the tough forest owner masculinity.

When the interviewees performed the entrepreneurial forest owner, they appropriated attributes similar to those Brandth and Haugen (2000, 2005) described as constituting the powerful organizational man in forestry, such as managerial skills. For some interviewees, such performances (also) occurred within forestry associations in the capacity of elected trustees on boards and committees. However, for most of the interviewees, such qualities were expressed in the identification as entrepreneurs running a forestry business.

In the interviews and at events, the importance of making women active as forest owners was emphasized, which is central to the identity of the entrepreneurial forest owner. The active forest owner is a discursive construction that can be found in Swedish forest policy. In their analysis of the Swedish government’s vision for the forest sector (launched in 2011), Holmgren and Arora-Jonsson (2015) showed that the notion of an active forest owner is connected to taking overall responsibility for forest management, not necessarily by carrying out operational work, but by overseeing the economic side of forestry and having enough knowledge to buy the services connected to timber production and felling. For the interviewees, being active was translated into an entrepreneurship identity requiring engagement with economic development and market processes, similar to Brandth and Haugen (2000) powerful organizational man battling and controlling economic processes. The emphasis on active forestry entrepreneurship was also expressed in the number of business-oriented activities in the networks. Moreover, the exclusion in forestry that some of the interviewees expressed was articulated as a desire to be taken seriously as an entrepreneur. In addition to performing female masculinities that appropriate features of the powerful organizational man in forestry, the interviewees can be said to draw on multiple sources of masculinity, as the feminist scholarship on entrepreneurship has shown that masculinity is central to the performance of entrepreneurial identities (e.g., Ahl 2006). The performances of the entrepreneurial forest owner also aligned with the gender equality discourse in the forest sector, where the construction of women as entrepreneurs is central (Appelstrand and Lidestav 2018, Holmgren and Arora-Jonsson 2015).

Some of the interviewees performed the entrepreneurial forest owner identity by also drawing on elements of the tough forest owner, although at a symbolic level. They learned how to use machinery such as chainsaws to generate status as knowledgeable subjects; however, not that many of the interviewees engaged in much operational work themselves (similar to the forest owner collective at large). Others resisted masculine-coded work with machinery, one of whom was Yvonne:

‘I do not use a chainsaw, for example, I have almost made a thing of it. Otherwise, there are many girls who have been engaged in the forest that believe one must learn how to use a chainsaw and be similar to the men like that. However, I think that (…) not all forest owners use chainsaws, and one should not feel that it is some type of requirement.’

The use of chainsaws was thus equally symbolic as an artefact of resistance, both in terms of appropriating features of (the tough) masculinity and as distancing oneself from it. Moreover, on the policy level, women in forestry have been constructed as in need of transformation to achieve equality (Andersson et al. 2018, Holmgren and Arora-Jonsson 2015). This narrative of transformation was very much present in the networks and included making women knowledgeable in both the practical and managerial aspects of forestry. Yvonne’s resistance towards chainsaws and the tough forest owner masculinity could also be understood as resistance towards this requirement for women to change. However, Yvonne and the other interviewees who resisted this kind of masculinity instead drew mainly on the entrepreneurial masculinity to be included in the forest owner category. Thus, they only resisted part of the transformation narrative.

Moreover, women performing the entrepreneurial identity also performed an alternative femininity in relation to entrepreneurship, mainly in discussions of feminine coded business opportunities for forest owners, e.g., the specialization towards production of wood fibre products such as clothing and interior design, as well as forest-based delicacies. The practice of drawing on both femininity and masculinity in forming entrepreneurship identities is supported by Lewis (2014), who, based on a review of the gender and entrepreneurship literature, identified a number of different entrepreneurial femininities that all share a key characteristic; i.e., they are ‘all constituted through the doing of both masculinity and femininity via the integration and embodiment of conventional feminine and masculine aspirations and behaviours’ (1845).

The collective effort of performing female masculinities in the form of the tough and/or the entrepreneurial forest owner and/or performing alternative femininities within the networks led to the possibility of claiming space in mixed spaces outside of the networks and to being acknowledged as legitimate forest owners. It is important to note that these performances of female masculinities were not stigmatized. In line with the findings of scholars such as Kazyak (2012) and Pascoe ([2007] 2012), the female masculinities performed by the interviewees were not stigmatized but rather generated status, both among women in the networks and in other spaces in forestry where such performances of female masculinities are normative. Furthermore, similar to how farm women in Norway reconstruct their femininity in a way that reinforces the superiority of masculinities (Brandth 1994) or how women who seek employment in forestry celebrate masculine characteristics in a way that eliminates equal opportunity for women and consequently reinforces women’s marginalisation (Reed 2003), the network women’s performances of female masculinities both challenged and consolidated hegemonic masculinities. These performances challenged hegemonic masculinities in that such performances no longer became exclusive to the male body and thus created possibilities for inclusion instead of exclusion into the category of ‘the forest owner’. However, these women also consolidated the hierarchical relationship between masculinities and femininities in that they positioned the performance of masculinities as being superior to femininities.

This analysis further demonstrates the need to distinguish between normative female masculinities (e.g., Pascoe [2007] 2012; Kazyak 2012) and stigmatized performances of female masculinities (e.g., Halberstam [1998] 2019), or what Schippers (2007) calls pariah femininities, which challenge hegemonic masculinity without simultaneously being complicit with it. Such female masculinities also challenge the heterosexual matrix, i.e., the idea that heterosexuality is central and normative in constructions of masculinity and femininity (Butler 1990). Furthermore, Halberstam ([1998] 2019) wrote about female masculinities as gender ambiguity, but the women in this study were not ambiguous in their gender performances in a queer sense (such as when lesbian women perform butchness) and did not challenge the heterosexual matrix in their performances. Consequently, they were not stigmatised. Heterosexuality was thus integral to the women forest owners’ performances of female masculinity. This outcome shows the importance of incorporating normative (hegemonic hetero)sexuality in the analyses of rural gendered performances, in addition to the focus on ‘the other’, such as gay and lesbian sexualities, which have dominated rural gender and sexuality studies (Bryant and Pini 2011).

The implicit performances of heterosexuality included bodily aspects of hegemonic femininity in everyday clothes, hair and the recounting of mothering and family life, which blended smoothly with their engagement with practices and discourses associated with masculinity in forestry. This blending is somewhat similar to how women who take up leadership roles in Australian agriculture blend masculinity and femininity (Pini 2005) but it also differs in some important respects. Pini described how her interviewees amplify both femininity and masculinity in their performances in a delicate balance, and one of her interviewees even described her position as a third sex. The performance of female masculinities by women forest owners was instead uncontroversial and normative. Their gender performances (of both femininities and female masculinities) were also rather moderate, although their performance of heterosexual hegemonic femininity was a prerequisite for performing female masculinities. Such masculinity performances without this heterosexual hegemonic femininity would probably not pass as easily.

However, the implicit heterosexuality of these performances cannot solely explain how stigmatization is avoided. Many of the women I interviewed for this study were privileged in the sense that they were highly educated and had white-collar careers (or former careers for those now retired), and they were in possession of capital assets through their forest ownership. These women also drew on their privileged class position when performing female masculinities, which contributed to the positive perception of their performances, as middle-class markers are central in the construction of normative femininity (e.g., Skeggs 1997).

Spatial performances: rurality and urbanity

Rurality and urbanity played into the performance of female masculinities and femininities in a range of different ways for the interviewees. An additional reason for the positive and uncontroversial perception of the women’s performance of female masculinities is likely its compatibility with rurality. The interviewees’ performances of the tough forest owner drew heavily on rurality, and Kazyak (2012) described how butch-like gender representations by lesbian women align well with rurality (while effeminate gay performances by men do not) and that her interviewees maintained that it could be ‘difficult to distinguish between rural heterosexual and lesbian women by using butch gender presentation’ (843). Some practices of masculinity are thus accepted for women as part of rurality, especially as the forest-owning women simultaneously perform an implicit heterosexuality drawing on hegemonic femininity.

Some of the interviewees who drew heavily on the entrepreneurial forest owner identity also drew on ideals connected to urbanity, or rather a business-oriented middle-class urbanity, especially (but not only) some of the non-resident forest owners living in larger cities. For these women, forest ownership rendered status and economic security as investments. Although clearly drawing on urban symbolism of being forward, modern, and professional, the entrepreneurial forest owner identity was not only urban in character. The entrepreneurial forest owner identity was entangled with elements of rurality, even for some of the urban non-resident forest owners. Being a forest owner (both for those drawing on the tough, and/or the entrepreneurial forest owner identity) was interpreted as being rural (at least partly), especially for those who had a family connection to a specific local community. One of the interviewees, Ingrid, a retired urban resident, told me, ‘The forest owners are a very nice group of people, a lot nicer than city dwellers’. In this statement, she included herself in the category of forest owners who are understood as rural in contrast to being urban, despite having lived herself as an urban resident for most of her life. This reasoning reflects the idea of rural areas as being more ‘friendly, supportive and close-knit than its urban equivalent’ (Little and Austin 1996, 109).

Like some of the other interviewees, Ingrid had experienced that her local affiliation outweighed the disadvantage of being a woman in the male tradition of forestry. She told me how other women in her network constantly got side-lined in their encounters with male contacts in forestry but that she had never experienced this herself because of her ancestral belonging to the place where her forest property was located ‘because it is I who belongs to that place. Therefore, it is almost the opposite now, they [forestry contractors] turn to me now (…) since I have owned it from the start, in my family and in my name’. In this instance rurality is not associated with where she resided but rather with her place in her family tradition and in social relations. Ingrid’s statements on the niceness of forest owners, generational ownership and lineage also reveal an important temporal dimension of rural identity that outweighs the disadvantage of womanhood in hierarchical gender relations.

Although some non-resident urban forest owners interpreted rurality as part of their identity as forest owners, several rural resident forest owner interviewees emphasized the difference between rural and urban residents in their descriptions of the differences between resident and non-resident forest owners. Non-resident forest owners were described as more theoretical and emotionally detached (from the forest) in contrast to resident forest owners who were described as practical, connected (to the forest) and down to earth. This separation between resident and non-resident forest owners can be understood as a resistance to an unarticulated urban hegemony, where rurality and practical work (connected to the tough forest owner) is highly valued, if not essential, to forest owner performances (for some of the interviewees). Rurality in this sense was positioned as being inherently better but was also framed as problematic (by both resident and non-resident forest owner interviewees) when it came to contacts with rural men in forestry, in which many of the interviewees reported having experienced exclusion or recounted other women’s experience of marginalisation within forestry. This construction of the rural man as problematic and unequal is to a high degree coherent with the discourse of rural masculinities presented by Stenbacka (2011).

In the (rural) resistance towards the symbolic and material power of the urban norm, urbanity became a disadvantage for some of the non-resident forest owners, e.g., for Frida. She reported currently living in a larger city but planning to eventually move back to her family’s forest property. In her experience, her being a non-resident forest owner living in the city means that she is treated with a certain distrust, in addition to the exclusion she had experienced as a woman in forestry:

‘I’ve had comments like ‘You [in the city] who own forests, you just exploit and make money but are not here to contribute with tax revenue, the houses are empty and you live there [in the city] and reap the harvest (…)’. And I actually plan to live there, and I share the view of abandoned homesteads due to people not living there and that it is negative for the rural areas. It is better if people sell off their houses and only keep their forest properties. So, I agree with that. However, eh, there is a suspicious attitude that becomes even greater because I live here’.

Several interviewees problematized the trend of land ownership to a larger extent becoming external to the municipalities as the number of non-resident forest owners has increased, and the economic consequences for rural areas has added to the resistance towards urban hegemony, which underscores how the relative positions of different spaces matter for the performance of identities. Despite the ideas of differences attached to the categories of resident and non-resident forest owners, most of the interviewees expressed a strong sense of community and solidarity with the forest owner collective at large, as well as with the industry. This sense of community often exceeded the sense of belonging to the women’s network, despite the experiences of exclusion in forestry (comparable to women in Canadian forestry who strongly support the forest industry despite marginalisation in their work; see Reed [2003] on this), demonstrating the ambiguity of subject formation and how performances differ depending on spatiality and in relation to what or whom they understand themselves.

Conclusions

In this paper, I have discussed the negotiations and performances of femininities and female masculinities by women forest owners from six separate networks for women, and how their performances relate to hegemonic masculinities in Swedish forestry. The study shows how separate spaces for women have enabled them to navigate spatial relations in forestry that are permeated by hegemonic masculinity. A central idea behind the networks was for women to ‘claim space’ in forestry, which was both an individual and collective effort, accomplished through education and empowerment in these separate spaces. The claiming of space entailed attaining access to both symbolic and material spaces and inclusion in the category of ‘the forest owner’. The organization of these separate networks should in itself be understood as a way in which to claim space and to resist subordination in forestry. However, these networks have enabled these women to employ a range of strategies to claim space; they have resisted the subordinate position of hegemonic femininity in different ways, asserted alternative femininities and performed female masculinities. This study thus expands the understanding of rural gendered performances, given that the performance of femininity has been understudied in rural gender studies and that masculinity studies have tended to focus on men’s performances.

The primary way interviewees claimed space, resisted hegemonic femininity and challenged hegemonic masculinities, was through the appropriation of features from hegemonic forestry masculinities in their performances of female masculinities, which I conceptualize as the ‘tough forest owner’ and ‘the entrepreneurial forest owner’. The tough forest owner identity drew on notions of rurality and attributes connected to physical work and the use of machinery, where the chainsaw had a symbolic position. Learning how to use a chainsaw was one strategy that the interviewees pursued to be included in the forest owner category. Resisting the use of such machinery was another strategy employed by some interviewees; such resistance could be understood as a resistance towards the narrative of women as an object for transformation to achieve gender equality in forestry. However, these women instead emphasized the managerial qualities of forest ownership in their performance of the entrepreneurial forest owner identity and thus only partly resisted the transformation narrative. Moreover, there were also interviewees who performed the entrepreneurial and/or the tough forest owner identity while also asserting alternative femininities, either by formulating safety precautions when operating heavy machinery as a feminine consideration, or by drawing on an entrepreneurial femininity by focusing on feminine-coded business opportunities within the forest sector.

This work provides insights into how hegemonic heterosexuality and class inform the performance of female masculinity. An important finding in this study is that the interviewees’ performances of female masculinities were not stigmatised, but rather resulted in entitlement. This outcome can be explained by the implicit heterosexuality of their performances, which included bodily aspects of hegemonic femininity and blended with the performance of female masculinity. Furthermore, the positive perception of the performance of female masculinity was also a result of the privileged white-collar middle-class positions from where many of the interviewees performed their identities.

The findings also extend the knowledge about the spatiality of these gender performances, as well as how these women navigate the discourses of urbanity and rurality, which are topics that have not been sufficiently explored in the literature on gender and forestry. The performance of female masculinities and femininities all intersected with spatial discourses in different ways. While the tough forest owner identity largely drew on rurality, the entrepreneurial forest owner identity was partly built on a white-collar middle-class urbanity, although it also included elements of rurality, as the forest owner identity (regardless of orientation towards the tough or the entrepreneurial forest owner performance) was interpreted as being (partly) rural.

There was also resistance towards the urban hegemony, which was expressed in different ways. The interviewees stressed the difference between resident and non-resident forest owners, where rurality and residency were framed as being inherently better. However, there was a strong sense of solidarity with the forest sector at large, and the construction of the forest owner category (resident or not) drew on rurality. Moreover, rurality could sometimes outweigh the disadvantages of being a woman, while urbanity was sometimes a disadvantage in addition to womanhood. However, rurality was understood as both desirable and problematic. It could be problematic in the sense that the exclusion of women in forestry was largely understood as a rural phenomenon connected to rural men. Nevertheless, rurality also generated status within forestry. The desirability of rurality contributed to the positive and uncontroversial perception of the women’s performance of female masculinities. These gender performances aligned well with rurality, which showed that some practices of masculinity are more accepted for women as part of a rural identity, especially as these women simultaneously performed an implicit heterosexuality drawing on hegemonic femininity. Moreover, rural identity sometimes also had a temporal dimension that could outweigh the subordinate position of hegemonic femininity.

In conclusion, female masculinities and alternative femininities were negotiated and performed in relation to spatialities within forestry and the tension between rurality and urbanity. These performances challenged hegemonic forestry masculinities in a way that disrupted the exclusivity of the category of ‘the forest owner’ to the male body and legitimated women in their forest ownership. However, the performances of female forestry masculinities can also be understood as being complicit with hegemonic masculinity in forestry, as such performances endorse the superiority of masculinities in relation to femininities, which demonstrates the ambiguity and contradictions of gendered performances.

Acknowledgements

I give my sincerest thanks to the women who participated in this study as interviewees and shared their experiences with me. I also want to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography, Albert and Maria Bergström’s Foundation, and Carl Mannerfelt’s fund, who contributed to the funding of field work and conference presentations.

Notes on contributors

Emmeline Laszlo Ambjörnsson

Emmeline Laszlo Ambjörnsson is a PhD candidate at the Department of Human Geography at Stockholm University. She has previously published work on forest governance and social relations in forestry. Her current research focuses on the spatial production of gendered subjectivities in Swedish forestry.