Gender studies as the political straw man

As we are moving further into the third decade of the twenty-first century the ideological tensions, in and around gender studies, including masculinity studies, are increasing and decreasing in parallel. We are currently, and have for quite some time been, under heavy attack from different expressions of anti-genderism, and especially from ethno-nationalist and alt-right movements (see for instance Verloo, 2018). No cease-fire in sight here it seems, but rather a continuously raised tone, and seemingly small prospects for any common understanding, as joint understanding is not the vocabulary of the current ideological war-mongering of the far-right and neo-conservatism. The ideological stalemate seems to be set for some time to come. Gender studies is a prime target for the general neo-conservative and right-wing wave that has turned countries like Poland and Hungary within the EU into illiberal and authoritarian states within a democratic union of member states. Gender studies have taken the form of a political straw man.

The ignorant, but recurring and utterly exhausting attacks on gender studies are repeating similar arguments over and over again. The most recurrent argument, in the Nordic context, is that gender studies are preaching that everything connected to gender are social constructions. When we are trying to counter such simplistic arguments, which I personally sometimes try to do in different public media outlets (in Sweden), such as op-ed articles, in public panels, podcasts etcetera, there are always diversions and strategies to avoid listening because there is no substance based in knowledge about what gender studies are, and what kind of knowledge that is being produced. At times, it could possibly be a joint frame of understanding when it comes to, for example, masculinity, vulnerability, and mental health, and in particular suicide rates among men. The latter is a subject I have researched the last couple of years, and where we draw upon a wide range of everyday understandings by ordinary Swedes, which feeds into the research and the findings we present. The findings have even been presented in the Swedish Parliament, in a seminar attended by all political parties, including ‘ethno-nationalists’ and conservatives. In personal interactions, prior to and after the seminar, we managed to agree on a basic understanding on mental health, vulnerability, and masculinity, but in the political discourse I have, however, rarely met any genuine intentions of actually trying to understand what kind of knowledge production gender studies stand for.

These misrepresentations are the norm. Typically, a straw man fallacy is when someone takes another person’s argument and distorts it in some kind of extreme way, and then attacks the extreme distortion, as if that is really the claim the person is making. This seems to happen to me and others that are discussing gender and gender studies in an open public debate in different media outlets. It sometimes happens within academia as well, but with less intensity than it happened 20 to 30 years ago. The ‘anti-genderism’, which is official policy in Hungary and Poland, is spreading to other parts of the European continent and beyond in various forms as well. The unifying authoritarian traits of masculinity, political nativism, and populism are surprisingly homogenous, and something that we recently have covered in a special issue of Norma, edited by Marion Löffler, Russell Luyt, and Kathleen Starck (Volume 15 Issue 1 2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rnor20/15/1?nav=tocList).

What we have learnt from the SI, and which resonates with my personal experience, is that is little common ground for communicating about basic understandings as to how power explicitly operates through gender, and in particular symbolic representations of masculinity/ies. This implies that discussing openings and trying to find basic understandings are not part of the right-wing political agenda. As Löffler et al explains in the introduction (2020, p. 5) of the SI on political masculinities: ‘gender equality measures are an elitist ideology working against “the people”’ and ‘“the people” is constructed in terms of biological essentialism (Mayer, Sori, & Sauer, 2016), based on the idea of the traditional conjugal family as the natural cornerstone to society, as well as the pre-eminence of men and masculinities in politics (Kreisky, 2014).’ It is important to stress that political masculinities are not necessarily connected to male bodies; we have many female political leaders and far-right representatives advocating similar ideas. Rather, masculinity is a symbolic resource that men, women, and non-binary people can draw upon. In Löffler et al.’s interpretation, masculinity is always political. Sometimes, I have, probably naively, thought otherwise. Admittedly, it is easy to get disillusioned when one has a wish for a debate based on the principle of charity, which is a critical baseline for anyone raised in critical thinking. It is thus a principle asking you to assume the best possible interpretation of an opponent’s statement. So, to implement the principle of charity, one should not attribute falsehoods, logical fallacies, or irrationality to other people’s argument, when there is a plausible, alternative available.

This is apparently not the case for many of the so-called ‘ethno-nationalists’ that I have come across in public debates. It is rather the idea of creating division and to split, and portray any measures for gender equality, and gender fluidity as elitist liberalism opposed by ‘the people’. Still, for pragmatically ideological reasons, ‘ethno-nationalists’ and neo-conservatives often adopt classical liberal views on gender relations and women’s rights to single out and constructing ‘others’, and which typically are the Muslim immigrants in a way similar to Puar’s (2007) concerns on the relationship of LGBTQ rights to what she terms homonationalism. At the same time, most populists support highly essentialized notions of gender, and vividly oppose any policies that advocate gender equality or gender studies as a subject in its own right. As many of us in the field know, this is not only empty threats as many ethno-nationalists are actively trying to ban gender studies from being taught at our universities. They have partly succeeded in Hungary and Poland. The same rhetoric are currently being applied by ‘ethno-nationalists’ in the Swedish context. The white ethno-nationalist Sweden Democrats party have recently presented a parliamentary motion proposing that all ‘anti-scientific’ activism, and in particular gender studies, in universities should be banned and defunded immediately. They have, since 2015, regularly presented such parliamentary motions. The initiative to the parliamentary motion this time was taken by one of the PMs that took an active part in the previously mentioned seminar on masculinity and suicide in the parliament, and who also declared that the findings we presented were highly relevant and important. It may seem like a paradox, but it is probably not. Straw man politics are apparently overriding any personal doubts on the part of an individual member of the ethno-nationalist party.

At the same time as we have these undignified attacks on gender studies, and generally a non-principle of charity in the current political discourse that increases the tension and polarization with regard to the straw man status of gender studies, we also observe that the tension around issues, concerning gender research, more generally decreases. As I have a long record of being on different committees and panels in various research councils in the Nordic countries and other places, I currently experience much less controversy in relation to gender studies in such public organizational bodies. If I compare the situation now with those of the 1990s and the 2000s there is much less resistance in the research community, and more research applications that more or less explicitly include a gender perspective. In the 1990s and 2000s there was much welcomed institutional support, and also outright resistance and questioning in the mundane academic community and in different research councils. Gender studies were a controversial academic territory. This is rarely the case today according to my experience.

In a round of assessments of research proposals for a Swedish research council recently (of which I am a committee member) (March 2021), approximately 20 to–25 percent of the applications had an integrated gender perspective. This has also been the case the last couple of years in other assessment processes that I have been part of. To have an integrated gender perspective implies to either use feminist theorizing or/and addressing gender as a central analytical category in the research plan. This is quite different from 20 to 30 years back when, for example, all research applications, in the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), were assessed by a committee that only dealt with gender studies. Today we find gender studies’ perspectives and feminist theorizing in various disciplinary committees assessing research proposals, such as sociology, political science, psychology, anthropology, etc. Gender research has become the mainstream to an extent many of us could not have anticipated in the 1990s and 2000s, due, in no small part, to the activities of activists and researchers. Although my opinion is, of course, based on personal and anecdotal evidence, and would require more systematic investigation, I believe things have changed. The academic territory of gender studies is now much more integrated into the overall theoretical landscape of a general social science, and not to forget the humanities as well. In many fields, it is also a new invigorative force for theoretical advancement in more classical fields such as political science or international relations.

My experience of conducting empirical research on masculinity in various fields, such as migration, mental health, suicide, the rescue services, tech entrepreneurship, and gender equality mainstreaming in small- and medium-sized companies, also speaks to such a change. When I did ethnographic fieldwork, concerning masculinity and technology in the early 1990s, I often ended up in male-dominated workplaces interviewing men about gendered experiences, and I could receive answers such as: ‘Gender? No, we don’t have gender here, as we don’t have any women here.’ In parallel, receiving such answers in the empirical work I undertook, I would often meet raised eyebrows in academic circles when I explained that my subject was masculinity. My topic was at best seen as esoteric. This rarely happens today. I dare say that the everyday, as well as the academic understandings around research addressing gender issues are much more informed today in comparison with the early 1990s. In my experience, the tension surrounding gender issues are today much less symbolically loaded, in terms of theoretical and everyday understandings. Gender studies have become an established academic field, still minor and marginal in many ways, but nonetheless established.

In my understanding, we have seen, to use a metaphor from physics, a centrifugal development where an assemblage of knowledge objects moves outwardly from the center of rotation. It is possibly an optimistic metaphor, but not unlikely considering a growing institutionalization of knowledge being produced in gender studies’ departments, centers, in parallel with methods and knowledge being produced within NGOs, and activist circles, all under the umbrella of an enormously diverse, paradoxical, and often contradictory feminist movement. I guess that the ‘ethno-nationalists’ don’t realize the vastness of the undergrowth and how deep the roots run in such a movement. One thing we can be pretty certain about is that the straw man will appear in many new guises, so to eradicate one will only feed another. But this shouldn’t stop us from trying.

This issue

In this open issue of Norma no 2 volume 16, we are presenting three different articles and one book review. The focus of the articles is very different, but as such represents the variety and the vast range of topics that are discussed in contemporary masculinity studies. In the three texts, we learn about the conceptual debate around hybrid and inclusive masculinity and change: reading, identity, and masculinity in rural Sweden: post-nationalism and the television drama ‘Hinterland/Y Gwyll’ in Wales.

Andria Christofidou is, in her article ‘Men and Masculinities: A Continuing Debate on Change’, addressing the underlying conditions for masculinity and change. It is a long-standing debate that Christofidou engages with, and where the core question is whether we see a durable change in masculinity/ies or not. She stresses the importance of a contextual and situational intersectional analysis for further theoretization of masculinity and change. The article is, furthermore, providing a good overview of current debates of the topic.

Stig-Börje Asplund is in his article ‘Books as Happy Objects: On Swedish Rural Masculine Reader Identities’ investigating a rather rare topic in masculinity studies, namely, the literary practices of rural working-class men. It is a fascinating read where we encounter the life history of the book collector Robert, who has over

10,000 books. Asplund is in his innovative contribution, highlighting the connection between reading, place, masculinity, and identity.

Elke Weissman is in her contribution ‘Imagining the Welsh Nation in a Post-patriarchal, Post-national World: Y Gwyll/ Hinterland and the Re-construction of Trans/National Masculinity’ discusses the role of the television drama ‘Hinterland/Y Gwyll’ (produced by BBC) as a way of imagining a post-national and post-patriarchal reality. In particular, she points to the importance of transnational masculinities and femininities as catalysts for change. Her article also provides a terrific example of how television drama can be a fertile soil for analyzing masculinities in an intergenerational perspective.