To Örebro University

Online violence against queer sex workers is a growing research field and societal problem. This article explores modalities of violence against queer online sex workers in Turkey, a context characterised by homophobic and anti-queer politics. Based on narrative interviews conducted with queer online sex workers in Turkey and grounded in a feminist understanding of violence, the article illustrates how different forms of violence travel between the online and offline by identifying three spatiotemporal patterns: the offline experience of online violence, the threatening offline, and the merging of online and offline. The article concludes that while the violence is often banal, mundane, and normalised, the impacts are both felt and embodied in the offline context. Further, broadening the conceptualisation of violence benefits the investigation of how violence(s) travels between the offline and online contexts and where they intersect, thereby contributing to the fields of violence studies, feminist studies, and queer sex work studies.

Rapporten ”Viktig fråga, men vem bryr sig?" handlar om hur reformer om jämställdhet och mångfald som en gång utvecklats för att åtgärda strukturella ojämlikheter mellan olika grupper i samhället, idag å ena sidan ifrågasätts och beskrivs som politisering som hotar konstnärlig frihet, yttrandefrihet och demokrati, och å andra sidan ses som en marknadsfördel. 

Polarisation and an increased blending of politics and fiction in various media outlets makes audiovisual storytelling and politics increasingly intertwined. This article presents the first systematic literature review of what we know about the relationship between audiovisual fiction and democracy. We investigate how articles conceptualise 1) democracy and 2) the relationships between politics, fiction, and audiences. We find that most articles implicitly assume a taken-for-granted liberal representative democracy, rather than elaborate on particularities. Further, extant research tends to find that fiction relates to democracy primarily by the way it may impact political opinions, attitudes, and behaviour under certain circumstances, or by contributing to constructing identities and belongings that can either enhance or diminish democratic values. Finally, some research elaborates on how cross-media flows makes fictional elements part of democracy movements.

In the face of recent challenges to gender equality and diversity, most European countries feature such policies in their support schemes for film production and in regulation of public service television. Moreover, global streaming platforms such as Netflix have made inclusion policies part of their brand. In an effort to unpack how EU-policies are intertwined with inclusion efforts, this article investigates gender equality and diversity discourses in the implementation of the 2018 EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive in Lithuania, Spain, and Sweden. The article uses a discourse policy analysis to compare problem representations and to understand how the articulation of the implementation of the Directive have continued, challenged or been intertwined with different discourses. The article finds that in Spain the Directive continued a discourse on gender equality and diversity, while in Lithuania and Sweden, the implementation of the Directive was intertwined with discourses seeking to limit or roll back gender equality and diversity.

This article analyses how students in two Swedish upper secondary schools with different demographics articulate inequalities, and how their positions in society give rise to different learning patterns. Using material from focus group interviews undertaken during a teaching module about trust, the article departs from the proposition that learning about trust in school also means negotiating trust and experiences from outside the school context. The article concludes that students who identify as non-ethnic Swedes must bridge the gap between the learning content and their own experiences. Such negotiations allow for a critical view on democratic institutions. However, this critical potential stems from a position that also necessitates more work to ‘learn’ the content provided, compared to the ethnic Swedes who encounter the teaching materials from a position where it can be inserted and combined with an already existing and matching worldview. The article argues that challenging the views and the normative position held by the latter group is a remaining task for citizenship teaching.

This article seeks to analyze audience constructions in Swedish policy documents dealing with televised media from 2012 to the present. The period analyzed has been characterized by changes in Swedish media policy due to new technology, neoliberal governing ideas, and globalization. Further, debates about media policy have recently become polarized, and longstanding ideals of diversity, gender equality, and inclusion have been challenged. The article analyzes the political work performed by audience constructions and unpacks the characteristics of spectators in their capacity as citizens, Swedes, consumers, and the protected. The article shows that audience conceptualizations reproduce hierarchies based on socio-economic conditions, age, disabilities, gender, ethnicity, and place of residence. Further, the article finds that the tensions between audiences in their capacity as citizens and consumers have been smoothed out and identifies the beginning of a nationalist turn in public service policy, as it moves from an emphasis on inclusion through acknowledging differences to the pursuit of a more assimilationist agenda and the creation of an essentialist Swedish identity.

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.

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.