Search

This paper explores how participants in a Swedish secondary school do gender talk with comics. Swedish schools are tasked with working with gender, but this can be a challenge for many teachers, and finding materials to work with gender aspects can be difficult. Meanwhile, literary research on comics has shown them to be a potential tool for problematising gender, but little educational research has investigated the gender discussions that comics can promote. Therefore, using conversation-analytical methodology, we have documented situated classroom talk through video observations, focusing on the social construction of gender. Five excerpts are shown, where different aspects of gender talk are displayed and discussed. Results indicate that although students deconstruct and criticise gendered binaries in characteristics and behaviour from comics' imagery, this critique remains superficial, revolving around the hypersexualised body imagery of the muscular superhero the Phantom or the outdated femininity of the girly Daisy Duck. Although comics present an opportunity for discussions of norm critique in the classroom, we suggest that more social-realistic comics, wherein gender roles are more subtle and nuanced, be used for furthering the research on this topic and allowing students more width when it comes to deconstructing gender binaries.

Underrepresentation of women in physics is a prominent issue in the western countries. Since physics teachers are in a unique position to affect new generations of students, it has been suggested that they are an important part of the solution. In this paper, we explore how trainee physics teachers create spaces for themselves as learners of physics while negotiating their positioning as women and trainee teachers. The empirical data consist of interviews with 17 trainee physics students, and the analysis focuses predominantly on the identity negotiations of three woman students. We find that the women simultaneously submit to and master a "physics nerd" discourse that connects physics with nerdiness, masculinity, and intelligence, which enables them to successfully create subject positions incorporating physics student, teacher-student, femininity, and constructive study practice. This is of particular importance to trainee physics teachers, who will be responsible for creating inclusive and productive physics learning environments for their students.

Background Researchers have long studied the social stratification of physical activity patterns in terms of 'determinants' of physically active lifestyles. In this article, we set out to explore how Bourdieu's concept logic of practice can be used as an intermediating analytical tool to promote understanding rather than the calculation of human participation in movement culture. Theoretical framework The logic of the practice is similar to the logic of the logician, but it differs in terms of temporality and directionality. Specifically, where the logician needs not take notice to such worldly matters, they are inevitably inherent in social life. Thus, logics of practice guide how practice is played out as well as, on the level of the unconscious, the attitude of its participants towards themselves, the practice, and each other. Different logics of practice, as previously theorised by Engström, may 'taste' differently to people depending on their habitus, that is, their embodied dispositions. In this article, such logics of practice of movement culture are investigated further. Purpose The purpose of the article is to investigate how gender and social position relate to participation in movement cultures that are guided by different logics of practice. Method In 1968, just over 2000 Swedish teenagers who were born in 1953, answered a questionnaire about their participation in movement culture. New data collections took place in 1973, 1978, 1983, 1994 and 2006/2007. The current paper is based on data collected from 846 individuals, now 63 years old, who chose to participate in a new data collection. Data about self-reported participation in movement culture, and the stated taste (or dis-taste) for certain logics of practice in movement culture, was calculated in relation to gender, level of education (cultural capital) and self-reported class affiliation (economic capital). Results and conclusions The statistical analysis indicates that while the logic of performing in this study indicates masculine and upper-class values, the logic of experiencing indicates feminine and academic values. The logic of improving seems to hold a middle-ground position. Importantly one of the logics, experiencing nature, which is actually also the one that most of the 63 year-olds express a taste for, seem not to be linked to either gender or social position. We conclude that this may have important societal and pedagogical implications, for example, that increasing the possibilities to experience nature could facilitate participation in movement culture at least among Swedish upper middle-aged people.

In the hairdressing occupation emotional labour has often come to overshadow other vocational skills. The present study, using ethnographic methods, explores how students and teachers in vocational education and training (VET) for hairdressers in Sweden describe and explain the emotional labour being carried out when a hairdresser perform good service. The results show that to look happy and smile has a central position in students' and VET teachers' descriptions of how an ideal service worker is expected to act. A positive attitude and a special voice are other signs that characterise the hairdresser who provides good service. The happy ideal is both reproduced and challenged from students in the hairdresser education. One conclusion is that an ideal service worker reinforces femininity norms to act as a professional, which is in line with the requirements of the hairdresser education and the customer's and employers' expectations. At the same time, the happy ideal limits students' opportunities to challenge and question prevailing power structures, which is also part of the Swedish upper secondary school mission.

Variance in interest and engagement by gender is a complex and long-standing research agenda in the field of technology education. Studies report that girls are more reluctant to participate in technology education, less interested in the subject and more negative towards technology than boys. It is argued that specific attitudes and roles hinder girls from engaging in technology education because technology is presented as a predominantly male domain, which fuels ideas about what technological agency is as well as whose interest in technology and what kind of technology are regarded as legitimate. There is, however, the potential to improve female engagement if we can gain knowledge about what girls do during lessons and how they think about themselves when learning technology. Therefore, the aim of this study is to examine the self-image of girls aged 9 to 12 when participating in primary technology education, by using Harding's (1986) three gender levels: the symbolic, the structural and the individual. The methods used for this study were participant observations during technology classes followed by a focus group interview. From the perspective of Harding's three levels of gender, the analysis of the observations and the focus group interview reveals that girls confirm the prevailing male norms and conceptions that are linked to what technology is and what it means "to be technical", despite the fact that the teacher introduces gender-neutral activities. However, there is an ambiguity in our findings because the girls also resist the self-image of not being technical, especially when they work together and have ownership of their work with and learning about technology.

This study investigated how gender and sports capital are expressed in sports leaders' talk about sports for young people with a refugee background. Empirical data were derived from four focus group interviews representing 21 sports club leaders in Sweden. The leaders defined boys and girls as distinct groups but also as groups within which there are differences. Compared with the boys, the girls were presented with lesser possibilities to participate in sports. According to the leaders, the differences in the group of girls rested on that the sports culture in the girls' country of origin, which may be more or less permissive for girls to be engaged in sports, whereas differences within the group of boys were understood in terms of bodies and mentalities.

This study connects to the term 'emotional labour', coined by [Hochschild, A. R. (1983) 2003. "The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling." 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press], and explores how skin and spa therapy students are constructed as emotional workers in learning processes surrounding the body. Drawing on a poststructural approach, inspired by Foucault, regularities of description and self-description were analysed in the material, which consist of interviews and field notes derived from observations of classroom interaction. The results show how student subjectivities are produced as a response to the presumption about body availability in the educational arrangements. It also shows how students are positioned and position themselves as emotional workers through three reoccurring issues surrounding the body; the body as a private sphere, the body as a place of pain, and disgusting peculiarities of the body. Here, struggling subjectivities emerge, striving to overcome the obstacles that the body might entail in becoming a professional. The participants self-position and are positioned as responsible concerning each other's' learning processes, making their bodies available for their classmates to practice on, communicating their thoughts and feelings as posing clients, developing their empathic abilities towards future clients. Thus, the participants are not only produced as emotional workers, but emotional students, pinpointing the necessity of educational research on emotional labour.

Applying a critical gendered lens, this article examines academic leadership ideals. It draws on a content analysis of job advertisements for Vice-Chancellors at Swedish higher education institutions from 1990 until 2018. The aim of the article is to investigate to what extent masculine or feminine wordings have been used to describe the ideal Vice-Chancellor in these documents. The analysis reveals that a shift in the leadership ideal has taken place during the time period investigated. Before this shift, during the 1990s, the ideal Vice-Chancellor was described as competitive, bold, strong, tough, decisive, driven, and assertive. These wordings are still included in the job advertisements from the 2000s and the 2010s. However, a more communicative and collaborative leadership ideal also emerges during these decades. There is thus a significant shift in how the leadership ideal is described. This shift is analyzed from a gendered perspective, suggesting that the traditional masculine-biased leadership ideal has decreased in influence with the feminine, transformational leadership ideal acting as a counterweight. The article argues that the shift in leadership ideals, as constructed in the job advertisements, mirrors the increase of women Vice-Chancellors appointed in the Swedish higher education sector.

This article reports results of an ethnographic study of how girls are positioned, and position themselves, in relation to gender regimes in three vocational programmes in Swedish upper secondary education: Restaurant Management & Food, Health & Social Care, and Vehicle & Transport. The comparison shows that there are different possible feminine positions where the girls resist and comply to varying degrees both within and between the programmes, with expectations interrelated with discourses of consumption, caring and production. However, generally the position of emphasised femininity is most prominent and becoming a female worker in the programmes' settings involves complying with feminine ideals of a caring discourse, regardless of whether the VET is oriented towards education for masculine production work, or feminine consumption work.

For this study, Swedish upper secondary schoolteacher students were interviewed about their experiences and perceptions of teacher work in light of the traditional gendered division of labor in teaching. While female teaching has been signified by caring work, male teaching has been signified by distant teacher-pupil relations and the use of bodily resources to discipline pupils. In this study, both genders expressed feeling comforted when teacher practice corresponded to the traditional gendered division of labor and experiencing unease when it did not. Women expressed shortcomings in their ability to perform authoritative work because of their lack of male bodily resources. This subordination has been understood as symbolic violence, processed by a gendered habitus that structures women to prefer a special type of teacher work. Despite a small female majority in the profession and in teacher education, male domination still permeates the professional properties of the upper secondary schoolteacher work.

This article explores how schools define situations in which students have been exposed to violence at school. The purpose of the study is to explore and investigate whether and how school violence is gendered and whether acts of violence are being coded as either masculine or feminine. The data were gathered at Swedish secondary schools. The results indicate that gender influences how professionals categorise violence, with physical violence often being considered masculine and relational violence often being considered feminine. As a consequence, boys are perceived as less violent when they are involved in relational violence, and physical violence among girls is not always taken seriously.

The purpose of this study is to discuss notions of femininity and masculinity in situations of argumentation among Swedish upper-secondary students who are studying Natural Science. The empirical material is drawn from an ethnographic inspired study, where I followed a group of students in all of their science teaching throughout a semester. This study includes three classroom situations where the students are given a task to play roles where they either argue for or against nuclear power and where they are asked to argue for or against genetically engineered organisms. The students also asked to defend the position of one country in negotiations to limit greenhouse gas emissions in an international climate conference. This study will focus on relational situations at the micro level that are related to masculinities and femininities at the macro-level. The results show how the constructions of argumentation in the role playing tasks are based on an economic terminology and rationality, which can be said to represent a masculine approach. In contrast, the discussions that followed the role playing allowed for affective presentations, which are often regarded as feminine. This study discusses how a critical perspective can contribute to the awareness of the logic of these rendered performances.

This article explores the continuing professional learning of Swedish hairdressing and floristry teachers, based on semi-structured interviews with six experienced female teachers. The research question that guided the work asks what continuing professional learning do experienced floristry and hairdressing teachers undertake in relation to their vocational field and to pedagogy. The analysis applies concepts from the theory of practice architectures, and focuses upon the sayings, doings and relatings that surface in the interview data. The findings indicate that the VET teachers handle their learning relatively independently of the schools at which they are employed. Furthermore, more personal agency was required from the floristry teachers, than from the hairdressing teachers for whom organised business interests provide ample education and training opportunities. The article argues that the VET teachers who rely on themselves and their colleagues can control their own continuing professional learning at their place of work.

During the first decades of the twenty-first century, adolescents' perceived stress has been reported to be an important factor in explaining the health problems among students in Swedish schools. Based on interviews with key professionals working in the student welfare team in three secondary schools, the present article aims to contribute new knowledge concerning how the school professionals describe and explain students' mental health with regard to gender and the kind of support the schools offer to vulnerable students. Norms connected to the "supergirl" and respectable girl framed the explanations for girls' health-related problems, whereas the explanations for boys' health-related problems tied to a theme of marginalised masculinities. The findings lead to recommendations concerning the need to recognise and problematise students' mental health, as well as the need for more preventive work on student welfare issues, in schools and in other societal institutions.

In this study, I will introduce the concept of affective atmospheres previously developed by Anderson (Emot Space Soc 2:77-81, 2009) and Anderson and Ash (2015), to explore young social media users' articulated experiences of aggressive behaviour on a popular social networking site in Sweden. This concept opens up for inquiring into bullying, and other aggressive behaviour, as encounters, not only between humans, but also with non-human bodies, and the potentialities to act and the affective states that such meetings enable. In this way the paper contributes to bullying research on school climate and social atmosphere. The paper applies an affect theory approach to atmosphere to explore the importance of different materialities for the production of feelings and emotions surrounding the everyday articulations of hate among these users. The findings suggest that hate, in this context, works through a sexualized and gendered affective regime, which enforces a chrononormative logic, through which temporalized norms are tied to notions of age and bodily growth, that is, through heteronormative expectations of femininity, masculinity, sexuality and age-appropriateness. I found that affordances such as anonymity facilitated and intensified the circulation of hate, feeding into an atmosphere of constant risk. However, I also detail how affordances such as anonymity and hyperlinking, and practices such as hashtagging, enabled expressions of friendship, love and support, thus counter-balancing an atmosphere of hate and enabling it to become bearable for certain targeted users. In this context, sexualized aggression is normalized and expected, but nonetheless also troubled and resisted by these young users. By applying the concept of atmosphere, the paper sheds light on the affective workings within social online settings that become saturated with sexualized and aggressive practices, where certain users become repeated targets of such practices.

During decades of change in the Western higher education sector, new ways of understanding academic work have reinforced notions of the impact of social capital. The present study investigates researchers' experiences of their own career making within two areas of Education Sciences in Swedish higher education: Childhood Studies (CS) and Science Education (SE). The structure at the CS departments is collaborative and integrated; teaching and research are seen as an entity. This structure creates a coherent career path where members of the collective group jointly produce and accumulate social capital; it also appears to be related to discourses of femininity. In the SE departments, the career structure is strategic and differentiated; the two career paths work in parallel through a differentiation between teaching and research. This appears to be related to discourses of masculinity. In conclusion, our analysis shows how social capital and gender mutually create different ways of doing an academic career.

Taking its point of departure in the idea that language is never neutral but always coded in the masculine or the feminine (Irigaray), the main purpose of the paper is to explore the gendered coding of Religious Education teaching and how this coding interplays in shaping relationships and knowledge in the classroom. As recent research shows, debates about religion are becoming increasingly aggressive in many Western democracies and Religious Education is not unaffected by this. Drawing on Luce Irigaray's notion of sexual difference the paper argues that RE tends to have a masculine coding in its overemphasis on beliefs, creeds and concepts. This not only positions both girls and boys as feminine in relation to (masculine) religion, it also fails to offer the more nuanced understanding of religious life so well needed today. The paper is divided into three sections. The first outlines briefly, theoretically and methodologically, the larger study of which this paper is part. The second offers an exposition of Irigaray's thinking on sexual difference, and the third relates her philosophy to three empirical examples. The paper ends with a summary of the main points of the argument and the implications of language matters for Religious Education teaching.

This study scrutinises the production of bodies in skin and spa therapy education and training. More specifically, it focuses on how bodies are produced when participants are positioned and position themselves in classroom interaction and interviews. Drawing on a post-structural approach, inspired by Butler, regularities of description and self-description were analysed. This approach provided analytical tools for analysing how people engage with discourse in this micro-context of education and training, and enabled an understanding of how these processes are gendered. The results show how these educational arrangements enact a process where the students learn to adapt a critical gaze towards bodies, wherein they position themselves as self-aware and responsible through femininity. These self-governing processes produce particular relations to the bodies of others, disciplining others through disciplining oneself. Bodies are produced as biological entities that are unruly and--if left without discipline and correction--imperfect. At the same time, the imperfect body is produced through and produces normativity, offering alternative ways of producing normative femininity, alongside naturalising skin and spa therapy consumption and activity.

While there is abundant scholarship discussing gendered discourse on care in early childhood and compulsory education, little exploration has been made to explore whether care might also be gendered in higher education. This article, based on data from a year-long narrative study, examines the conceptualisation of care and its effects on teaching and learning in the university context with a gender lens. It on the one hand reveals an implicit but persistent feminine ethic of care in the university context, and on the other hand delivers the hope of developing an ethic of care that values and de-genders care in universities with the demonstration of agency in the two sensitive students.

In Sweden, as in Western countries generally, most preschool teachers are women. This fact sometimes leads to the assumption that preschools are "feminine", and that this might be bad for boys. We challenge this assumption. Using a gender critical approach we have studied preschool student teachers. "Femininity" might be used as a rhetorical and demeaning stereotype by them. Women and femininity however, are not interchangeable concepts. Failure to acknowledge this can pave the way for subtle sexism against girls and women. Our argument is supported by ethnographic observations and interviews with student teachers. By means of a Foucauldian genealogical analysis we uncover the conditions of possibility for two long-lasting feminine stereotypes. One stereotype argues that young girls should never fuss. The other claims that women are chattering gossipers. Our study shows that these archaic notions persist in Swedish preschool teacher training, despite its long tradition of work for gender equality.

Group work is used in physical education (PE) to encourage student-directed, collaborative learning. Aligned with this aim, group work is expected to shift some power from teacher to students and enable students to make decisions and co-construct meaning on their own. There are, however, very few investigations focusing on power in group work situations in PE, with most research focusing on learning and content. Assumptions about the nature of power and its mechanisms have been largely implicit. The purpose of this paper was consequently to explore power relations in PE group work. To do this, we have drawn primarily on observational data of three groups working together to choreograph a dance performance in a Swedish PE lesson. A small amount of pre- and post-lesson interview material is used as a complementary data source. Michel Foucault's notion of power as action-on-action is used to identify different types of power relations in this group work. Four specific kinds of relations are presented concerning: (1) the students' task; (2) other cultures; (3) gender; and (4) interactions with one another. These relations suggest that power relations are not simply created locally between group members, nor are power relations only a function of the members' proficiency in the task. In these respects, the results encourage a reconsideration of learning in group work and open up new avenues for further research. The paper is concluded with practical considerations that relate to common assumptions about student power, teacher authority and the potential benefit of ambiguous tasks in group work.

This study focuses on rights and gender in educator and child interactions in Nordic preschools. The research questions are as follows: What kinds of rights are communicated in the interactions and how? What kind of gender patterns can be identified? Rights refer to entitlements related to the early childhood education context, given or claimed by educators or children. The research material consists of 25 video observations of conflicts in educator and child interactions in Nordic preschools. Jürgen Habermas' concepts of strategic and communicative actions informed the interpretation of the communication of rights, and Bronwyn Davies's idea of duality between femininity and masculinity informed the analyses of gender. The analyses revealed two kinds of rights: individual and collective rights. The individual rights were connected to the integrity of the person and, alternatively, to the institution. Collective rights were related to shared institutional rights. The governing of the children appeared as benevolent. The study displayed how masculinity was given hegemony in interactions on rights and how adaptation was directed toward girls, which required them to compromise and sometimes waive rights.

Gender inequality in academia might be understood as an effect of the belief of a contradiction between woman and science, which make it difficult for women to appropriate the right to author and authorise acts of knowing and thinking in science. In relation to this concern, the aim of this article is to explore how a group of successful women researchers do science and uphold their position as researchers. It is based on evidence from participant observation and qualitative interviews. Theoretical understandings of femininity and cloning culture are used to analyse how the women united as a group that displays a subordinate, heterosexual femininity. Their strategies might be understood as a form of cultural cloning. By expressing a collective emphasised femininity grounded in white, heterosexual, middle-class norms, the women experienced a sameness that rendered them strong as a group and well adapted in academia.

Informed by a social and critical turn of reading practices and a poststructuralist paradigm of gender, this study delved into the commonly held belief that reading and language learning is a feminine domain, and examined the connection between the construction of gendered subjectivities and English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) reading practices among two high-achieving female students and two low-achieving male students in China and Sweden. The narrative inquiry revealed that gender played a role in shaping their decisions concerning the extent to which they invested in EFL reading. The students' narratives, characterized by subject positions that revealed a feminization of EFL reading and a subjectification to the patriarchal order, leads to our argument that English reading in both contexts can be viewed as a right for men but as work for women. This view gives male students a legitimate excuse to distance themselves from avid reading, but female students an inclination toward contradictory feelings of both desire and stress.

This paper is based on analyses of ideas about girls and boys in sports as they are presented in textbooks used in coaching education programmes in Sweden. Specifically, it explores gender in relation to descriptions of girls' and boys' bodies and bodily development during puberty. Texts construct gender differences. Masculinity is shaped around being an athlete with a functional, naturally athletic body. Femininities are shaped in relation to the female specific body and in contrast to the male athletic body. Descriptions of girls' bodies and physical development emphasize problems that girls are expected to experience during the pubescent period. Gender theory and discourse analysis are used in the study. Ideas about gender are exemplified as well as how these ideas are presented by the use of different discourse types, genres and styles in the texts.

This article discusses whether and how Art education is gendered, and whether and how the art world is gendered. The history of Art education is briefly described from a gender perspective, as well as some current reports on Art education in Sweden. The article draws on material from a postgraduate study about Art education and gender. Art lessons were observed and pupils were interviewed about their views on art. Based on the interview data, it is suggested that one reason that Art education is femininely gendered is that the subject is strongly associated with expressing feelings. Concerning the gendering of the art world, more women than men are professional artists today. However, due to the fact that there is a male art historical canon, that is taught in schools, the art world appears to be masculine, making 'artist' one possible position for boys within art education. That the art world seems masculine while Art education is gendered feminine is an interesting paradox worthy of further investigation.

A historical perspective may provide important insights for understanding contemporary discussions and the expectations attached to women and men in today's teaching. The role of gendered meanings in relation to teachers' work is explored in this article by focusing on discussions on school discipline during the period 1960-1970. Teachers' Journal, a Swedish weekly union publication, is examined. The findings show that in the 1960s it was still possible for a male teacher to position himself as a 'real man' by defending corporal punishment. Further, the stereotype of a bad mother was taken up in the discussions. Discipline problems were connected to pupils not properly cared for by their mothers. Bad mothers were depicted as either lazy, overprotective or working women. In contrast, femininity, motherhood and paid work were linked in the caring female teacher. In the final section, the relevance of the findings for the present is discussed.

This study sought to investigate participatory values in relation to gender, as expressed in interactions between teachers and children in circle-time situations in Swedish and Norwegian preschools. This paper reports evidence from three research questions: How is children's participation conditioned in circle-time situations? How are participatory values communicated to girls and boys? and What gender-related patterns emerge in teacher-child interactions in circle-time situations? The study is informed by Habermas' concepts of strategic and communicative actions, as well as Davies' idea of duality, the bi-polarity, between femininity and masculinity. Data consist of video observations of teacher and child interactions during circle time. The results show that children's participation is conditional on children's own willingness to participate, and on teachers' willingness to involve the children in a communicative action. Data reveal that the girls are more likely to take the initiative than boys and appear more comfortable in such an active position. It was also noted that there is a tendency for practitioners to interpret and value male and female traits as oppositional behaviours.

In 1962 the Swedish Parliament decided on a school reform. Meritocracy and equal opportunity were important goals. However, these ideals were not applied to elementary school teacher education, where a sex quota policy favoured male applicants. In the parliamentary debate, a woman member of the Right Wing Party raised objections to the policy. A man representing the Social Democrat government's education politics had to explain why the admission policy that favoured men was not abolished. By evoking historical ideas of women teachers as inferior, and warnings of the feminisation of schools as a great threat, the admission rules were defended. Further, analysis of the debate shows that women were supposed to hold back their individual rights and a woman arguing in favour of a gender-neutral admission policy risked being labelled 'unwomanly'.

When milking machines were introduced on Swedish farms during the first half of the twentieth century, milking and taking care of cows had long been women's responsibility, and adult men seldom entered the cowshed. As dairying became a commercial operation and the number and yield of cows increased, farm wives, daughters, maidservants, and hired milkmaids continued to perform this work. By the end of World War I, however, so many young women had left the countryside that farmers had difficulty hiring enough milkmaids. When milking machinery became available, it promised to save labor and do the job more effectively than milking by hand. At the same time, adult men entered the cowshed and milked alongside women. But how were these simultaneous changes connected? This study analyzes advertisements for milking machinery in Sweden's most popular farm weekly. Manufacturers deliberately associated machine milking with images of masculinity. In the 1920s and 1930s, ads emphasized that both men and women could milk by machine. By the 1940s and 1950s, the ads depicted milking in an ungendered way, as a depersonalized technical process that was neither manly nor womanly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hunting has a unique status as a sport and leisure activity alongside its practices having high stakes for society related to ecology, biosecurity, animal welfare and public safety. As such, hunting must increasingly legitimate itself before the public both in terms of ethically justifiable motivations for why to hunt and ethical standards for how to hunt. One way in which public acceptance has been sought in recent years has been to frontline 'women hunters' as the hunting community's indirect ambassadors. An effort to recruit more women is also seen as imperative to the survival of hunting in a practical, demographic sense. When women enter hunting, they enter an arena that is opaque and difficult to navigate along with heavy baggage from gender roles, expectations about proximity to wildlife and nature, and masculine norms on behaviour. In this study, we demonstrate through semi-structured interviews, participant observation and auto-ethnography of a hunting license education in Sweden, how women navigate spaces carved out for men. The findings show traps of emphasised femininity, expectations of women as 'softening influences' on male hunters to rein in their potentially unethical behaviour, and as differentially positioned in the learning process of hunting. However, using Bourdieu's social capital, findings also reveal that women negotiate and trade attributes in creative ways – such as landownership, meat handling skills and knowledge – to gain an advantage, status or level the playing field. We argue that regardless of gender, being in a position of sufficient capital to be able to call out unethical behaviour in the hunting team is crucial insofar as it serves the hunting community's ultimate interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores meaning-making and performances of femininity through material culture among ordinary women who engage in recreational sports races for women in Sweden, and the discursive effects for individual participants, and society at large. Positioned within a framework of discourse theory and poststructuralism, the study is based on a multi-method approach in data collection of written and oral accounts of race participants, auto-ethnographical notes, and material objects. The exploration shows that the female participants' usage of sportswear and gear points to stereotypical gender identities that are tied to women's shopping practices, which discursively undermine the physical achievement, while creating a female sports community. Linked to social class and resources, women can learn how to enhance their athletic practices and become proper athletes with the help of sporting clothes and gear – even when their bodies are weak, aged or malfunctioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on girlhood in one of the youth subcultures of rural Sweden, EPA greasers. The EPA, a car that Swedes aged 15 and older can legally drive, is at the centre of EPA culture. In this uniquely and previously male Swedish youth greaser culture, there has been a recent increase in the number of Swedish girls driving EPAs. Previous research has shown how EPA culture and EPA girlhood are shaped through distancing from hegemonic urban and middle-class norms and ideology. In this article, we seek to develop an understanding of EPA culture, specifically the ways in which it has been adopted by girls. Starting out from their online performances, we will explore how place, femininity and resistance intersect. The findings demonstrate how EPA girls use a playful way of troubling norms in their online performances, understood here as space and outlet to resist and mess around with dominant discourses and prejudice. This can also be understood as a way of talking back to masculinity, the majority society and urbanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Socjologiczne is the property of Studia Socjologiczne and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The study analyses female fandom in Sweden, focusing on female football supporters' self-presentation on social media. We found social media to function as a forum for empowerment, where the female football fans construct and express solidarity between girls and women and challenge hegemonic notions of femininity. Female football supporters are actively involved in formulating and shaping their own agenda and self-presentation and are drawn to the supporter culture for many of the same reasons as their male peers: group community, thrill and excitement, and the love for their team. The contribution of the study is two-fold: it fills a knowledge gap regarding Swedish female fans, while also making a conceptual intervention in the study of female fandoms more broadly, demonstrating the usefulness of critical theorization on femininities and indicating how social media enables female football supporters to 'play' with different conceptions of femininity to create space within the supporter milieu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and objectives: To examine how gendered discursive norms and notions of masculinity and femininity were (re)produced in professional conversations about users of long‐term municipality psychiatric care. Focus is on the staff's use of language in relation to gender constructions. Background: Psychiatric care in Sweden has undergone tremendous changes in recent decades from custodian care in large hospitals to a care mainly located in a municipal context. People who need psychiatric care services often live in supporting houses. In municipal psychiatric care, staff conduct weekly professional meetings to discuss daily matters and the users' needs. Official reports of the Swedish government have shown that staff in municipal care services treat disabled women and men differently. Studies exploring gender in relation to users of long‐term psychiatric care in municipalities have problematised the care and how staff, through language, construct users' gender. Therefore, language used by staff is a central tool for ascribing different gender identities of users. Design: The content of speech derived from audio recordings was analysed using Foucauldian discourse analysis. The COREQ checklist was used in this article. Results: The results indicate that by relying on gender discourses, staff create a conditional care related to how the users should demonstrate good conduct. In line with that, an overall discourse was created: Disciplined into good conduct. It was underpinned by three discourses inherent therein: The unreliable drinker and the confession, Threatened dignity, and Doing different femininities. Conclusion: The community psychiatric context generates a discourse of conduct in which staff via spoken language (re)produces gendered patterns and power imbalances as a means to manage daily work routines. Such practices of care, in which constant, nearly panoptic, control despite the intention to promote autonomy, urgently require problematising current definitions of good conduct and normality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In most parts of the world, nursing historically has been considered an occupation for women. Gender stereotypes are associated with the nursing profession. Aim: The aim was to describe and compare the self‐reported competence in female and male nursing students. The students were also compared according to their different background college educations. The theoretical framework of hegemonic masculinity and femininity was used. Design: A cross‐sectional design with a questionnaire was used at two points in time, 2012 and 2017. Methods: Nursing students completed a questionnaire on graduation from a 3‐year university nursing program from 12 universities/university colleges in Sweden. In total, 1810 students were participating, 1577 female and 227 male students. The Nurse Professional Competence scale was used for data collection. Results: There were statistically significant differences in the self‐reported competence between female and male students (t tests and ANOVAs). These differences are in agreement with the patterns of hegemonic masculinity and femininity. Female students estimated their competence in giving value‐based nursing care as higher than males. Male students estimated their competence in development and leadership higher than females. Conclusion: The pattern of hegemonic masculinity and femininity could be identified. This indicates a difference in power between female and male students. Impact: The study addresses the self‐reported competence of female and male nursing students. The results indicated that male students possibly looked on themselves as superior to the female students. In order to change the image of nursing as a woman´s work, the self‐images should be discussed in nursing education as well as in college education. Women interested in development, research, and leadership and men interested in nursing care and administration must feel that nursing is a suitable profession for them. The stereotypical image of nursing as a women's work is a barrier to nurses' professional development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to explore how adolescent girls with minority backgrounds experience different forms of sexual harassment in school. The study draws on semi-structured interviews conducted in a lower secondary school located in one of Sweden's most socially disadvantaged urban areas. The results reveal that the girls repeatedly experienced misogynist comments such as "whore" and "slut" and were subjected to moral judgements connected to their manner of dressing and behaving. The girls' narratives were also framed as tough-girl femininity, which is related to how they had to show a tough façade against acts of harassment as well as to other students at the school. When the name-calling became personal, the girls stuck together against the harassing boys and fought back verbally. The study contributes important knowledge about how adolescent girls perceive sexual harassment at school; this knowledge is important in efforts to create a safer school environment for all students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this article is to analyze how women who have been victims of intimate partner violence (IPV) position themselves in relation to the image of the "ideal victim" and how gender is constructed in that positioning. There is a need for a gender analysis framework to understand how various forms of femininity are constructed and how narratives linked to this can either maintain a woman in an abusive relationship or encourage her to leave. Christie's theory of the "ideal victim" and Connell's gender theory are applied in this study, in which the narratives of 14 female IPV victims in Sweden are analyzed using a narrative method. Three strings of narratives, representing different forms of femininity, are revealed in the material. The master narrative of the ideal victim reveals a form of femininity that describes women as inferior in relation to men. In the alternative narrative, the narrator positions herself as inferior in relation to the offender but discusses resistance. She describes herself as a caring mother who risks a great deal to protect her children. In the counter-narrative, the narrator positions herself as strong and independent in relation to the offender and as a strong and caring mother. The positioning of different narrators may shift depending on the duration of the relationship and the type of violence. The narrator may also take different positions during different phases of the story. However, the dominant narrative among the narrators is the story of the caring mother, which may have several functions and can partially be understood as a sign of the strong discourse of motherhood in society. The study contributes to a more profound understanding of the complexity related to women's own positioning and reveals that awareness is required when attempting to understand the narratives and behavior of abused women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Assesses electric mobility and V2G preferences in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. • Uses expert interviews (N = 257), a survey (N = 5067), and focus groups (N = 8). • Men report using cars more than women, more often own a car, drive further, and use less public transport. • Women report stronger preferences for the environmentally friendly or safety attributes of vehicles. • Women attach less importance to acceleration, power, or sound, whereas men emphasize range, sex appeal, and acceleration. • Other gender roles and perceptions are more fluid and evolving. In this paper, we provide a comparative and mixed methods assessment of the gendered dimensions of electric mobility and stated preferences for electric vehicles in the Nordic region. This includes the potential for such vehicles to be configured in a vehicle-to-grid (V2G) manner, where they can store energy and offer services to the grid, generating revenue and accelerating decarbonisation. Based primarily on a survey distributed to a mix of more than 5000 respondents across five countries, research interviews, and focus groups, and supplemented with a comprehensive literature review, we examine how perceptions, attitudes, values and identities towards electric mobility differ by gender. We use this data to test, and largely confirm, with some exceptions, three hypotheses: H1: Men use cars (conventional and electric) more than women, more often own a car or EV, drive further than women, and use less public transport. H2: Women have stronger preferences for the environmentally friendly or safety attributes of vehicles (such as EVs and V2G), reflecting higher levels of environmental awareness. H3: Women attach less importance to acceleration, power, or sound, whereas men will emphasize range, sex appeal, and acceleration. In examining these hypotheses about gender, we reveal the more complex social dynamics behind how potential adopters in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden consider and calculate various aspects of conventional mobility, electric mobility, and V2G. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Gender, class and living conditions shape health and illness. However, few studies have investigated constructs of femininity in relation to health and living conditions among young women who are unemployed and marginalised at an early age. Objective: The aim of this research was to elucidate constructs of femininities in relation to structuring living conditions and expressions of health in Northern Swedish women. The time period of interest was the transition from unemployed teenagers to young adults in a social context of high unemployment and societal change across the critical 'school-to-work-transition' period of the life course. Methods: Qualitative content analysis was used to analyse data from repeated interviews with unemployed young women, aged 16–33 years, during the 1980s and 1990s. These longitudinal interviews were part of a cohort study in a 'remote' municipality in Northern Sweden that began in 1981. All girls who were not in education, employment, or training were selected for interview. An inductive analysis phase was followed by a theoretically informed phase. The contextual frame is the Nordic welfare-state model and the 'caring state' with its particular focus on basic and secondary education, and women's participation in the labour market. This focus paralleled high rates of youth unemployment in northern Sweden during the study period. Results: The results are presented as the theme of 'constructing respectability from disfavoured social positions'. Within this theme, and framed by dominant norms of patriarchal femininity, we explored the constructs of normative and altruistic, norm-breaking, and troubled femininity. Conclusions: Gender-sensitive interventions are needed to strengthen young women's further education and positions in the labour market and to preventing exposure to violence. More research on health experiences related to the multitude of constructs of femininities in various social contexts and across the life course is needed to help design and implement such interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relatively high gender equality in the Swedish society is likely to exert an influence on gender role construction. Hence, the present research aimed to investigate Swedish women's perceptions of and conformity to feminine norms. A mixed methods approach with two studies was used. In Study 1, young Swedish women's gender role conformity, as measured by the Conformity to Feminine Norms Inventory 45 (CFNI-45), was compared to the results from previously published studies in Canada, the United States, and Slovakia. Overall, Swedish women displayed less conformity than their foreign counterparts, with the largest difference on the subscale Sexual fidelity. In Study 2, focus group interviews with young Swedish women added a more complex picture of feminine norms in the Swedish society. For instance the results indicated that Swedish women, while living in a society with a strong gender equality discourse, are torn between the perceived need to invest in their appearances and the risk of being viewed as non-equal when doing so. In sum, despite the fact that traditional gender roles are less pronounced in Sweden, gender role conformity is still a pressing issue. Since attending to the potential roles of feminine norms in women's lives previously has been proposed to be useful in counseling and therapeutic work, the present research also offers valuable information for both researchers and practitioners. [Correction added on 5 May 2017, after first online publication in April 2017: An incorrect Abstract was inadvertently captured in the published article and has been corrected in this current version.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Males and females score differently on some personality traits, but the underlying etiology of these differences is not well understood. This study examined genetic, environmental, and prenatal hormonal influences on individual differences in personality masculinity–femininity (M-F). We used Big-Five personality inventory data of 9,520 Swedish twins (aged 27 to 54) to create a bipolar M-F personality scale. Using biometrical twin modeling, we estimated the influence of genetic and environmental factors on individual differences in a M-F personality score. Furthermore, we tested whether prenatal hormone transfer may influence individuals’ M-F scores by comparing the scores of twins with a same-sex versus those with an opposite-sex co-twin. On average, males scored 1.09 standard deviations higher than females on the created M-F scale. Around a third of the variation in M-F personality score was attributable to genetic factors, while family environmental factors had no influence. Males and females from opposite-sex pairs scored significantly more masculine (both approximately 0.1 SD) than those from same-sex pairs. In conclusion, genetic influences explain part of the individual differences in personality M-F, and hormone transfer from the male to the female twin during pregnancy may increase the level of masculinization in females. Additional well-powered studies are needed to clarify this association and determine the underlying mechanisms in both sexes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses changing views about gender and drinking in Sweden c. 1830-1922. The author posits that the emergence of bourgeois morals in the 19th century were associated with a decline in the tolerance for female alcohol consumption, and also shows how the values, norms, and activities of the temperance movement interconnected with religion and notions of purity. Yet, in spite of hardening attitudes against women's drinking, alcohol remained integral in Swedish upper-class women's lives. The results are based on a qualitative study of Swedish women's diaries. The study was financed by the Swedish Research Council, 2009-2012. Study limitations are also noted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how men's involvement in the care of aging parents is accounted for in relation to discourses of masculinity and femininity. The article draws on semi-structured interviews with Swedish men and women caring for elderly parents. Using the concepts of doing, re-doing, and undoing gender as a theoretical tool, both reproduction and renegotiation of gendered understandings of caregiving were found. When accounting for men's lack of involvement in care, gender was often resorted to as an explanation. As men took on care responsibilities, the meaning of both care practices and masculinities were renegotiated, either by re-doing gender through distinctions of “new” hegemonic masculinities, or even by undoing gender through making gender irrelevant in care arrangements. Gender equality discourses were surprisingly absent from accounts of eldercare arrangements. Since policies on gender equality in Sweden have focused more on parenthood than other caregiving relationships, “caring masculinities” have not been made an ideal in relation to the care of aging parents. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyzes young Swedish women’s experiences of living stressful femininity from an existentialist gender theoretical perspective. The study is based on qualitative interviews with 25 women, aged 17–25, who had registered for a stress management course at a youth health centre. Our analysis suggests that their experiences of stress can be related to the renegotiation of gender constructions that have occurred within the Swedish society. The young female subject can be viewed as living through a historic break between a historical position as a subordinated ‘Other’ while simultaneously having to navigate within contemporary discourses of successful femininity. The doing of normative femininity resulted in an exhausting and draining self-evaluating circle. The experiences of having a painful and collapsing body led to a sense of loss of access to and confidence in their bodies. This should be understood as a loss both of subjectivity and connectedness with the corporeality of existence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Previous feminist analyses have pointed out how the news media demonize women who drink, labelling them as irresponsible, disturbing or behaving “like men.” Popular media such as women's magazines, however, construct alternative representations, that frame women's drinking encouragingly and as part of a successful and “modern” femininity. This study carries out an analysis of fashion reports from six Swedish women's magazines, published between 1984 and 2008. It concludes that despite the fact that women's magazines create an alternative to problematizing portrayals of women who drink, this does not necessarily make them unproblematic from a feminist point of view. While the prevalence of positive and encouraging images may be interpreted as indicating a change towards more gender equal or gender neutral depictions of drinking; this article argues instead that these images should be regarded as parts of a discourse that celebrates stereotypical femininity and reproduces gender difference. As such, the present article brings new perspectives to the complex discourses that give shape to ideas about gender and alcohol in general, and women's drinking in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses how Swedish Salvationists wrote about femininity and masculinity in conversion narratives during the period 1887-1918; the 'breakthrough' of modern Sweden. Through their religious conversion female Salvationists adopted a femininity that demanded the same right to participate in religious life as men. In a similar manner, men in the Salvation Army achieved a changed masculinity through conversion, which allowed them to express feelings and cry in public. Doing so, these Salvationists expressed an unconscious or conscious criticism towards the prevailing values about gender in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses the responses and reactions among women in Umeå during the period of threat from the Haga Man: a serial rapist operating between 1998 and 2006, and highlights how women in this new situation handled feelings of vulnerability and fear of violence in public space. The article analyses the ways women positioned themselves in their narratives and how this could be understood in terms of how they negotiated spaces for agency within a context where public space has been represented as safe and gender-equal. Women’s fear of violence is discussed in relation to Swedish gender equality discourses and contextual constructions of femininity. The research is based on empirical data collected through in-depth interviews with women in Umeå. The results show the difficulties of claiming the official position of a gender-equal femininity. The informants’ ambivalence, and partly anger, in relation to a femininity they wanted but could not have also created an opportunity for critique of women’s position in society and thus a challenge to a presumed gender equality that stands in the way of addressing issues of gendered power relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]