Is There A Nordic Feminism

This text focuses on changes in culture and society that concern women and feminists in the Nordic countries. It examines women's political strategies, questions of identity, rationality and subjectivity, and social and cultural values.

This book explores how feminist movements in the Nordic region challenge the increasing gender, race and class inequalities following the global economic crisis, neoliberal capitalism and austerity politics, and how they position themselves in the face of the rise of nationalism and right-wing populism. The book contextualizes these recent events in the long histories of racial and colonial power relations embedded in Nordic societies and their gender equality and welfare state regimes. It examines the role of whiteness and racism and seeks to decolonize feminist knowledge and genealogies of feminist movements in the region. The contributions provide in-depth knowledge on the different orientations, dilemmas and tactics that feminisms develop in these challenging times and show the centrality of antiracist and decolonizing critiques of feminisms. They further highlight the strategies of feminist and related antiracist and indigenous movements in regards to ideas about hope, solidarity, intersectionality, and social justice. Chapters 6, 7, 9 and 10 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book examines the meanings of gender that underpin policies in the Scandinavian welfare states, historically and today, and raises the question whether the hallmark of the Scandinavian welfare model is a special combination of gender equality and gender differentiation.

Celebrating more than two decades of feminist theory and gender research, this book provides an essential overview of current theoretical positions, hot topics and state-of-the-art perspectives in the field of Nordic Gender Studies: an area currently facing the challenges of internationalization and destabilized well-fare states, intersectionality, materiality, and academic transformation. Forming an overview, the introductory texts collected here are intended for Nordic and international students and teachers specializing in gender studies or related areas of interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences. With vibrant contributions from Nordic and international key scholars, think pieces and position papers culled from NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, are in fact essential reading for anyone in need of accessible yet condensed guidance on key discussion points such as post-constructionism and new materialism, neo-liberal academia and interdisciplinarity and the role of critical gender theory and posthumanism. The volume also looks at the differences within Nordic Gender Studies of today. This book is made up of material that was previously published in various issues of NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research.

Who Stays at Home?

Sweden is often considered one of the most gender-equal countries in the world and held up as a model to follow, but the reality is more complex. This is the first book to explode the myth of Swedish gender equality, both offering a new perspective for an international audience, and suggesting how equality might be rethought more generally. While the authors argue that the gender-equality mantra in Sweden has led to a society with increased opportunities for some, they also assert that the dominant norm of gender equality has become nationalistic and builds upon heteronormative and racial principles. Examining the changing meanings and parameters of gender equality against the country's social-democratic tradition and in the light of contemporary neoliberal ideologies, the book constitutes an urgent contribution to the debates about gender-equality policies and politics.

This book explores how gender equality, a central part of the Nordic imaginary, is used in the political communication of Nordic states. The analyses presented move beyond conventional images and discourses of Nordic gender- and women-friendliness by critically investigating how and to what extent gender equality serves nation-branding in the Nordic region. Nation-branding is an unescapable part of globalisation, which is a market-oriented process dominated by the West and predicated on the creation of winners and losers. Hence, efforts to strengthen the national brand or reputation of specific Nordic countries with the aid of gender equality as a political and symbolic value inevitably help to reinforce already established global hierarchies where the Nordics play the role of moral superpower. This book comprises scholars from various fields of specialisation, and provides evidence and understanding for the growing interaction between gender-equality policies and nation-branding in all five Nordic countries. It does so by exploring a variety of policy fields and issues including women’s rights, foreign policy, rape and legislation, female quotas and business policies, in addition to the index industry. The rise of the global indexes has reproduced forceful images of the Nordic countries as frontrunners of gender equality, which indeed help the Nordic countries to further position themselves as ‘best at being good’. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Nordic gender equality in political science, sociology, law, criminology, political psychology and history, as well as those interested in nation branding, Nordic studies and exceptionalism. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003017134, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Originally published in 2004. Nordic Equality at a Crossroads makes a major contribution to the debates on equality and difference in contemporary Europe. In this absorbing work, feminist legal scholars from four Nordic countries provide a critical account of the latest legal policies in these countries linked with gender (in)equality, such as public financing of children's homecare, regulation of the labour market towards substantive equality, and the reforms concerning violence against women. These issues are matters of concern everywhere in Europe, and the solutions adopted in the Nordic countries will be of interest to all policy-makers. The increasing multiculturalism and the shift toward greater market orientation, however, have challenged the traditional Nordic equality policies. The authors argue that a structural and contextual analysis of inequality, also in the field of law, is necessary to encounter the challenge of pluralism.