10 years of NORMA

This issue is the 10-year anniversary of NORMA. Back in 2006, when the first issue of the journal was produced, articles were published in the Scandinavian languages or in English. This was an expression of the journal as a joint effort of the community of Nordic gender and masculinity scholars. Researchers from all Nordic countries contributed to the first issue, discussing theorizations about ‘unmanliness’ and homosociality, men's movements, masculinity and food, and men in elementary schools.

The last two years we have broadened our scope and NORMA has become an English-only, international journal. Even though Nordic contributions are still in majority, there is a steady increase of manuscripts from other parts of the world, including the global South. Last year, for instance, we had a special issue on North–South dialogues amongst feminist activists and scholars (Hearn, Ratele, & Shefer, 2015). Another special issue, called ‘War, violence and masculinities’ (Christensen & Rasmussen, 2015), presented empirical studies from a number of societies and conflict areas, including India, Palestine, Philippines, Uruguay, and Zimbabwe. We will continue to promote and encourage research not only on, but also from the ‘periphery’ and ‘semi-periphery’, that is, those parts of the world outside the Anglo-American and West European academic ‘centre’. This is crucial if we want to develop feminist theorizing on men and masculinities from numerous and heterogeneous viewpoints.

The current issue reflects the history and development of the journal. It includes two contributions from the Nordic countries, one from the UK, and one from South Africa. In ‘Becoming a Swedish military ranger’ Aida Alvinius, Bengt Starrin and Gerry Larsson explore the gendered process of becoming a military ranger and what it means to be one in a Swedish setting. Military rangers are an elite unit whose chief skills and capabilities centre on unconventional warfare and intelligence gathering in enemy territory, as well as conducting low-intensity warfare. Jón Ingvar Kjaran and Ingólfur Ásgeir Jóhannesson's contribution to this issue is called ‘Masculinity strategies of young queer men as queer capital’ and is a unique study of gay and bisexual young men in Iceland. They argue that these young men constitute a certain type of what they call ‘queer capital’, which helps them to utilize being gay or bisexual to gain social status within the otherwise heterosexually hegemonic field of masculinity.

While these two papers are empirical contributions to two important topics within masculinity studies, militarized and queer masculinities, the other two pieces in this issue contribute to methodological and theoretical reflection and development. Christopher R. Matthews discusses the appropriation of the hegemonic masculinity thesis within research on men's health. He demonstrates that the concept is still used in ways that produce reified and reductive account of masculinity. By highlighting specific examples of the need to appraise the relevance and adequacy of hegemonic masculinity as a conceptual frame of lived experiences, we might encourage researchers to access the multitude of different theoretical positions that speak to the lives of men. In ‘Constructing the “respectable” client and the “good” researcher: the complex dynamics of cross-gender interviews with men who pay for sex’, Monique Huysamen reflects upon her experience of a fieldwork with South African men who pay female sex workers for sex. She particularly shows how the interview became a setting in which men could negotiate their masculinity in relation to their client identities in favourable ways, as well as a context in which both the participants and the researcher reproduced and performed dominant discourses of masculinity and femininity through interactions with one another. These two articles express our explicit ambitions with the journal: to contribute to development of gender theories about men and masculinities and to feminist methodologies in the area.

Finally, we are happy to announce that NORMA has been raised from level 1 to level 2 in the Danish Bibliometric Research Indicator Authority Lists. Level 2 is the elite level, which only accounts for 20% of the total world production within the specific expert group (in this case gender research). Even though we are somewhat reluctant to this neoliberal way of organizing and evaluating research it is crucial for many researchers as this means that they will get more points for their publications in NORMA, and, hence, funding for their institutions. But more important: it highlights the journal as one of the most recognized within gender research in Denmark. We hope that similar systems in other countries will follow and recognize the journal as an important venue for transdisciplinary gender studies research.