Till Örebro universitet

Gender equality measures are now common in the policies of European film industries and can be an important tool for rendering visible gender inequalities. Recent research, however, indicates that top-down institutional gender mainstreaming might mean better conditions for some women in certain aspects, but structural inequalities tend to remain, including lack of an intersectional approach. In this article, these issues are addressed by analysing gender equality policies currently implemented in the Swedish and Spanish film industries. Following Carole Lee Bacchi’s argument that the way in which a problem is represented must be analysed backwards, by looking at the solutions suggested, we unpack what inequalities gender equality measures render visible and, in so doing, highlight the aspects that remain invisible. We also discuss how such problem representation plays out for women in the film industries of both countries and consider the counter-practices women deploy to cope with continuing gender inequality in the film industries of Spain and Sweden. Our main argument is that Swedish and Spanish gender equality policies, despite having increased the presence of women film workers, still fail to render visible the structural basis of inequalities cemented by androcentric film governance structures and a male norm around which the film industry has been built.

This article analyses (self)representations of women filmmakers active in the Swedish and Spanish film industries, looking at how “technologies of gender,” as theorised by Teresa de Lauretis, work to resist change within the industry’s “gender regimes” (as conceptualised by Raewyn Connell), but are also simultaneously rein-vented by women film workers. Even though the gender regimes of Spain and Sweden are quite different, and despite the diversity of positions adopted by women film workers concerning cinema—as art, commodity, and socio-political technology—there are striking similarities in the obstacles faced by women in a male-dominated industry. We identify these similarities in a series of interviews with women filmmakers from both countries. What emerges as shared across both contexts is the ambivalent negotiation that women film workers have to carry out in their self-representations, when entering an industry built around a male norm. But along with these representations marked by the relation to patriarchal technologies of gender, many women creators also search for bottom-up narra-tives and appropriations of such technologies to construct themselves and their works outside and beyond the androcentric model of the current film industry.

Denna bok är en ovärderlig introduktion till feministisk statsvetenskaplig forskning. Här presenteras feministiska teorier och empiriska analyser som tillsammans tecknar en bild av ett kreativt forskningsfält som samlas kring vikten av att använda kön som analytiskt verktyg, och som rymmer både konstruktiva teoretiska debatter och intressanta empiriska resultat.

Boken innehåller introduktioner till feministisk forskning inom de statsvetenskapliga subdisciplinerna politisk teori, svensk politik, jämförande politik och internationella relationer samt fördjupningar i de för fälten centrala begreppen kön, representation, medborgarskap och säkerhet.  Dessutom presenteras exempel på empirisk forskning. Läsaren får här veta mer om hur närbyråkrater för omsorgsetiska resonemang, hur svensk familjepolitik drabbar ensamstående mödrar, vad som karaktäriserar olika typer av könskvotering och hur ritualerna kring begravningar av kvinnliga soldater som har dött i striderna i Afghanistan återskapar den manliga soldaten som norm.

This article aims to investigate how articulations of women’s relation to the welfare state and modes of political agency has changed in Sweden between 1977 and 2017; a period characterized by the introduction and implementation of a neoliberal political rationality. By way of discourse analysis, the article highlights the reciprocal relationship between the construction of the welfare state and women. To this end, it analyses the debates following two films that problematize women’s relation to the welfare state, Summer Paradise (1977) and Beyond Dreams (2017). The article argues that: (a) childcare as a structuring factor for women’s work is replaced by a focus on the responsibility of the individual to provide for herself; (b) gender as a structuring principle is replaced by gender as an attribute of the individual, and; (c) the relation between women and the state is individualized. As a result, the state becomes articulated as an individualized collectivity, which aims to serve the individual’s self-preservation as opposed to the state being an arena for solving societal and collective problems. We argue that the neoliberal turn has changed women’s political subjectivity from a focus on collective action to an atomization of agency against systemic gender inequalities.

This article seeks to unpack variations in feminist film sector activists' articulations of collective grievances and demands for change since the mid-1970s and compare them to how gender equality is articulated as a problem in public policy. Based on an analysis of problem representations found in three instances of women's mobilization - from the second wave to #metoo - the article argues that there seems to be a consensus about the appropriate boundaries of what problems can be targeted by policy. Problem representations found in gender equality policies in the film sector do not verbalize structural inequalities. However, feminist activists interpreted them to support their ariculations of structural problems. Feminist activists problem represntations include testimonies of sexual harassment and violence, articulations of structural inequalities, and the promotion of women's separatism. The article also identifies a discursive dislocation produced by critics to gender equality reforms in conjunction to #metoo. The dislocation is produced by successfully opposing gender equality to artistic freedom and denying the existence of structural gender inequalities.

This article analyzes the protection logic that legitimizes criminalization and investigates how this logic affects gender and state-citizen relations. Viewing criminalization as a political response to the challenge HIV poses to the post-Cold War security state, the article examines the intersection between protection as a pretext for controlling vulnerable groups and criminalization as a way to withdraw protection. The article analyzes the constructions of those in need of protection (referents) and the providers of protection according to HIV-specific state laws and media reports of arrests and prosecutions, and it shows that the requirements for being considered worthy of protection are highly gendered. The article argues that laws and the media construct the idea that a popular demand for protection exists and that criminalization practices are produced as the supply needed to meet this demand.

This article examines the emergence and development of breastfeeding as an international concern, focusing on its basis of legitimization and what discourse it (re)produces regarding breastfeeding and gender relations. Using official documents, such as conventions and declarations from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) that are often prepared in cooperation with the UNICEF, the article seeks to answer how policies are legitimized and how gender is construed. The study shows that discourse develops towards stressing medical arguments and individual behavior. This development is crucial for the construction of breastfeeding as a universal practice. Further, the idea of protection of mothers/women is found to be a key to understanding the discourse. An important feature of the article is how breastfeeding policies facilitate constructions of hierarchy among nations framed in terms of the ability to protect women and children.

Gender quotas have been a crucial part of Swedish film policy since 2006 and have resulted in an increasing number of films with women directors, producers and screenwriters. However, films with women directors are still likely to have smaller budgets and less money for marketing and distribution than films with men directors. This article suggests that, in the context of film governance, gender quotas are discursively constructed in ways that circumscribe the opportunities to change current gender relations. Nevertheless, gender quotas have been used as a springboard for more radical interpretations to improve women's conditions and challenge the foundation of the governance regime. The article also explores the idea that bottom-up representational claims are necessary to ensure that quotas and the inclusion of women result in women's voices being heard. Such measures require the governance regime to be sensitive to voices that deviate from the norm.

There are conflicts between waged labour and motherhood that make it difficult for women to seize independence as workers and at the same time be mothers. These conflicts manifest themselves in women’s everyday practices as well as in feminist theory and in the women’s movement. The purpose of the thesis is to study the construction of motherhood and labour, and how the meanings attributed to motherhood and labour uphold women’s subordination. It is a study of how motherhood and labour are used to naturalise the gender order and make it legitimate. This is done by analysing texts on childminders encompassing the period 1967 to 1999.

In Sweden, childminders are often perceived as solving the conflict between waged work and motherhood in a specific way. Employed by the municipal authorities, childminders work at home, taking care of other people’s children as well as their own. However, solving one dilemma, they find themselves in another. Working with children in the confinement of the home is not seen as a “real job” as long as it is connected to motherhood.

The struggle of the childminders to count as “real” workers is a tale of their separation from motherhood. In the study, perceptions of motherhood and labour are seen as expressions of gender relations, which means that motherhood and labour are seen as equally gendered and structured.

In political theory, labour is seen as the key to property in the person, as well as representing labourers’ contribution to society. This understanding of work renders it crucial to theories of democracy, as it legitimises the worker’s political participation. The dissertation shows how this theoretical function of labour rests on   constructing motherhood as the other, and mothers as incapable and illegitimate political subjects. Three key distinctions between motherhood and labour are distinguished and analysed. The first deals with the perception of motherhood as “being” and labour as “doing”. The second focuses on the conception that labour is a goal-oriented, rational activity whilst motherhood is seen as biologically determined with its own intrinsic values. In this view, motherhood can therefore not be understood as an activity that aims to transform. The third distinction is the opposition between the irreplaceability of the mother and the replaceability of labour power.

The thesis concludes that strategies defining mother-like activities as labour presume that these activities are distinguished from motherhood. Paradoxically, when women in general become working mothers, leaving children at day-care, the biological aspect of motherhood is stressed, upholding motherhood as an institution.

The differences construed between motherhood and labour are often naturalised and ascribed to women’s biology and double hardships: that they need to be both mothers and workers. This formulation makes it possible to manoeuvre and control women. Labour and motherhood can be used against each other in ways that grant men control over women, and at the same time deprive women of their power to act. Patriarchal power seems to be necessary to maintain the present underpinnings of democratic theory.

In 1969 the Swedish government opened up for municipalities to formally employ childminders. The history of this group of workers parallels the growth of women’s participation in the labour force and Swedish gender equality policies. But the history of childminders is also a story of strategies to separate private motherhood from professional day care. As the work of childminders take place in private homes, and as childminders almost always have children of their own to take care of – the division between motherhood and work needs to be constantly negotiated.

Public record material, union-employer-agreements and in-depth interviews with childminders are analysed in this article. From this material it is possible to conclude that the public/private-split is, in different ways, upheld at the policy level, at the level of labour market as well as in the everyday work practises of childminders. The article argues that childminders take great responsibility for u pholding the private/public division and that the institution and discourse of motherhood iscongruent with the private/public split and thus can be used as a strategic tool to uphold this division.

The HIV/AIDS epidemic caught welfare states unprepared. The initially lethal disease laid bare epidemiological complacency, undermined assumptions of being able to control disease and revealed the limits for tolerance and care. Political responses to the epidemic included educational and informational efforts as well as more coercive measures. One of the most criticized practices to counter the epidemic is the so called criminalization of HIV, which means that non-disclosure, exposure and transmission can be prosecuted as criminal felonies. Criminalization is criticized for undermining preventive work and increasing stigmatization. Studies have also shown that women and black men with female partners run a higher risk of prosecution, indicating that racialized and patriarchal power relations are at play. So how come that welfare states such as Sweden and the US continue to convict individuals based on their HIV status?

Reading HIV/AIDS as a challenge to welfare states’ claims to protect their citizens this paper aims to deepen the understanding of the political dimensions of criminalization by probing the links between legal responses to HIV and the legitimacy of welfare states. While several previous studies have detailed the constructions of those accused, this paper focus on the constitution of the subjects eligible for protection and the power relations produced in this process. Who is worthy of protection and under what circumstances? What measures are undertaken to make the “enemy” visible, and for the benefit of whom is this visibility produced?

Based on empirical material such as media reports and court proceedings, this study compare Sweden and the US, the two states in the world where people living with HIV run the highest risk of being prosecuted because of their HIV status. Preliminary results indicate that while the character of prosecuted cases and legal practices differ between the countries, the legitimacy of criminalization rests on the same construction of these legal practices being a response to a public demand for protection.

When HIV/AIDS was first addressed by the UN Security Council in 2000, it was seen as the culmination of a successful securitization process and a pivotal moment for introducing human security. However, concern for the epidemic was paired with problems in including a nonmilitary issue on the Security Council’s agenda and the fear that peacekeepers were vectors of HIV. Reports of peacekeepers being involved in sexual exploitation and abuse added to these problems. This article aims to understand how gender has informed the efforts to address these issues and to rehabilitate peacekeeping forces and the Security Council from the legitimacy challenges that arose in this context. The article argues that including nonmilitary issues on the Security Council agenda requires adjustment to fit a war/peace logic. Drawing on feminist theories on security and protection, the analysis shows that the security narrative on HIV/AIDS did not form a coherent protection logic until the 2011 reformulation, when HIV/AIDS was constructed as part of the problem of wartime rape. This reformulation is interpreted as an appropriation of gender equality to reproduce a military security doctrine.

Since 2000, the Swedish Film Institute has been tasked with increasing gender equality by distributing commissioner support more equally between women and men. While this has resulted in an increase in the number of women behind the camera, this study shows that the implementation has been hampered due to a representation of gender equality as being in conflict with the core values of the film governance regime. This representation reveals a lingering gender order and opens avenues for stakeholders to consider behaviour that ignores the gender equality goals as legitimate. It is further argued that the design of gender equality measures creates a conflict between the economic conditions of women’s film making and the possibility to tell stories based on gendered experiences.

Genusforskaren Maria Jansson diskuterar hur undervisning i samhällskunskap kan bidra till att kvalificera elevers förmåga att resonera kring, undersöka och granska skillnader i kvinnors och mäns villkor. Maria resonerar kring vad könsproblematiserande forskning är och diskuterar utmaningar hon mött i undervisning på universitetet om frågor som berör kön och genus. Hon menar att föreställningen om Sverige som ett jämställd land måste utmanas och att elever måste lära sig göra skillnader på samhällsstrukturer och individuella val när det handlar om kön, genus och sexualitet.

Svensk film är alltmer konkurrensutsatt och de kommersiella krafterna drar i en riktning, som kan upplevas som ett hot mot mångfald och jämställdhet. Ny teknik har fundamentalt förändrat publikens vanor och ett antal nya möjligheter för möten mellan film och publik har uppstått. I den nya skriften En Riktig Snyftare – Om distribution, produk- tion och jämställdhet i filmbranschen tar statsvetarna Maria Jansson och Katarina Bivald avstamp i 2013 års filmavtal, som släppt kravet på biografdistribution för filmer som söker produktionsstöd. Men biografen upplevs fortfarande som det fönster som tydligast synliggör filmen och biografdistributionen har behållit sitt grepp trots den ändrade texten i filmavtalet. Vi behöver tänka nytt, vända på begreppen och se till att de stödpengar som är nödvändiga för svensk filmproduktion används på ett sätt som tar oss mot de mål vi inom wift kämpar för och vi som samhälle formulerat – jämställdhet och mångfald.