Critical Studies on Men in Ten European Countries: (1) The State of Academic Research

This article is on the work of the European Research Network on Men in Europe project, “The Social Problem and Societal Problematization of Men and Masculinities” (2000-2003), funded by the European Commission. The Network comprises women and men researchers with a range of disciplinary backgrounds from Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Norway, Poland, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom. The Network's initial focus is on men's relations to home and work, social exclusion, violence, and health. Some of the findings on the Network's fourth phase of work, namely the review of newspaper and media representations of men's practices in the ten countries, are presented…

Critical Studies on Men in Ten European Countries

This article is on the work of the European Research Network on Men in Europe project, “The Social Problem and Societal Problematization of Men and Masculinities” (2000-2003), funded by the European Commission. The Network comprises women and men researchers with a range of disciplinary backgrounds from Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Norway, Poland, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom. The Network's initial focus is on men's relations to home and work, social exclusion, violence, and health. Some of the findings on the Network's fourth phase of work, namely the review of newspaper and media representations of men's practices in the ten countries, are presente…

Cinematic images of nation-ness: Space, time and gender inYoung Eagles(Estonia) andLāčplēsis(Latvia)

ABSTRACTIn this article, I analyse cinematic time and space and their interaction, in which nation-ness is articulated as a unifying identity in the epic films Lācplēsis/Bear-Slayer (Latvia, Aleksandrs Rusteiķis, 1930) and Noored Kotkad/Young Eagles (Estonia, Theodor Luts, 1927, digitally remastered in 2008). In discussing the timespace organization of nation-ness in these films, I address representations of the political ‘birth of a nation’ and modern national identity. I discuss the ways in which the narratives in Young Eagles and Lācplēsis re-claim a traditional gender binary, predicated on a splitting and differentiating relationship with Otherness, embodied in the sexual threat of male…

Critical Studies on Men in Ten European Countries

This article is on the work of The European Research Network on Men in Europe project “The Social Problem and Societal Problematization of Men and Masculinities” (2000-2003), funded by the European Commission. The Network comprises women and men researchers with a range of disciplinary backgrounds from Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Norway, Poland, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom. The Network's initial focus is on men's relations to home and work, social exclusion, violences, and health. Some of findings on the Network's second phase of work, namely the review of statistical sources on men's practices in the ten countries, are presented. This is the third …

Media and Newspaper Representations

In recent years there has been a large expansion of European scholarship on the representation of men and masculinities in a wide variety of media, including film, television, video, magazines, painting, fine art, music, dance, Internet, photography and advertising (for example, Middleton, 1992; Pedersen et al., 1996; Edwards, 1997; Nixon, 1997; Sterr, 1997; Penttila, 1999; Jokinen, 2000). However, relatively little attention has been given to the mundane medium of daily newspapers. When studying men, the daily press appears to have been frequently taken-for-granted, unlike, say, Hollywood film. Newspapers are literally everyday phenomena; their very ordinariness may mean that they are not …

Four-wave mixing in a ring cavity

We investigate a four-wave mixing process in an N interaction scheme in Rb vapor placed inside a low-finesse ring cavity. We observe strong amplification and generation of a probe signal, circulating in the cavity, in the presence of two strong optical pump fields. We study the variations in probe field gain and dispersion as functions of experimental parameters with an eye on potential application of such a system for enhanced rotation measurements. A density-matrix calculation is performed to model the system, and the theoretical results are compared to those of the experiment.

Nation, Gender, and History in Latvian Genre Cinema

Configurations of Europe

This book has sought to gender men in Europe by drawing on various sources of information and in relation to key themes and policy arenas. In this final chapter, we consider some broad issues concerning the position and impact of men in the context of changing configurations of Europe, including, but not only, in relation to the EU. There are many ways in which the more explicit gendering of men raises new sets of questions about the EU and the changing definitions of ‘Europe’.

Critical Studies on Men in Ten European Countries: (2) The State of Statistical Information

This article is one the work of The European Research Network on Men in Europe project “The Social Problem and Societal Problematization of Men and Masculinities” (2000-2003), funded by the European Commission. The Network comprises women and men researchers with range of disciplinary backgrounds from Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Norway, Poland, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom. The Network's initial focus is on men's relations to home and work, social exclusion, violences, and health. Some of findings on the Network's second phase of work, namely the review of statistical sources on men's practices in the ten countries, are presented. This is the second…

Imagining Africa and blackness in the Russian empire: from extra-textualarapkaand distant cannibals to Dahomey amazon shows – live in Moscow and Riga

In the nineteenth century, Dahomey amazon shows, traveling circuses with menageries and ‘African villages,’ emerged as part of the transnational entertainment industry. This article extends the geography of this global model and generic system and its role in the visual politics of whiteness and blackness in a context outside the imperial colonization of Africa. The first sections examine a rise of visuality in the Russian imperial imagination of race, Africa and blackness through a ‘symptomatic’ reading of Aleksandr Griboedov's play Woe from Wit and Arkadii Averchenko's Death of an African Hunter. These are followed by a discussion of the Dahomey amazon shows in Moscow and their significan…

Sounds of the Cold War: gendered submarine narratives

The article discusses different narrative and discursive ways in which American and Soviet submarine narratives of the Cold War period scripted nuclear-age submarine masculinity as a ‘structure’ of experience and a ‘structure’ of feelings different from vision-centred technologies of violence and warfare. The comparative discussion of the selected submarine narratives about Cold War underwater adventures is in no way exhaustive. But it allows looking into narrative constructions of submarine masculinity as articulations of subtle ‘gender’ modifications in the cultural normative ideologies of the competing projects of hegemonic war-related masculinity, otherwise, perceived as coherent and si…

Mainstreaming gender in the EU-accession process: the case of the Baltic Republics

Since the early 1990s, the Baltic states have gone through processes of economic transition and liberalization. Although various reports give an overview of gendered impacts of these economic reforms, they fail to elaborate on the more complex relations between gender, citizenship, and social exclusion. This article explores these relations in more detail. The first decade of reforms in the Baltic states resulted in a lack of economic prospects, in particular for women from minority groups and women working in low-pay sectors. This made them increasingly vulnerable to trafficking for sexual purposes: migration to Western Europe was an attractive alternative for those without work, whether …