Search results for "Gender Studies."

Homing blogs as ambivalent spaces for feminine agency

2017

This article discusses a form of lifestyle blogging where women blog about their homes and everyday lives. In these homing blogs, selfrepresentations are characteristically spatially demarcated within the private sphere of the home. As these repeated representations of women in their homes take place in the public space of the internet, homing blogs work towards naturalizing the home as a women’s sphere. Written and commented on mostly by other women, homing blogs represent a feminine form of self-expression and communication that functions as a discursive expression of ongoing social, economic, and cultural changes in affluent Western societies. In this article, Finnish versions of these h…

Digital Islamophobia: The Swedish woman as a figure of pure and dangerous whiteness

2016

This article addresses the digital culture of Islamophobic bloggers, focusing on the online circulation of a forensic photograph of a Swedish woman who was assaulted. The analysis shows how through appropriating this image, the bloggers created a unifying, imagined whiteness in the transnational Islamophobic network. The empirical analysis clarifies how this one image migrated and transformed in the blogosphere and legitimated the recurrent discursive trope of “Muslim rape.” This image became a subcultural “memory freeze frame” crystallizing the contemporary Islamophobic ideologies articulated in connection to race, ethnicity, nation, gender, and sexuality. The viral circulation of this im…

Phantom/liminal fat and feminist theories of the body

2017

This article brings together two concepts, ‘phantom fat’ and ‘liminal fat’, which both aim to grasp how fat in contemporary culture becomes a kind of material immateriality, corporeality in suspension. Comparing the spheres of representation and experience, we examine the challenges and usefulness of these concepts, and feminist fat studies perspectives more broadly, to feminist scholarship on the body. We ask what connects and disconnects fat corporeality and fat studies from ways of theorising other embodied differences, like gender, ‘race’, disability, class and sexuality, especially when thinking through their perceived mutability or removability, and assumptions about their relevance …

Negotiating female judoka identities in Greece : A Foucauldian discourse analysis

2015

Abstract Objectives The objectives of this paper are to trace the discourses through which female Greek judokas articulate their sporting experiences and to explore how they construct their identities through the negotiation of sociocultural beliefs and gender stereotypes. Design This article is based on interview data from a larger ethnographic research with women judo athletes, grounded in a cultural praxis framework. Method Ten semi-structured interviews were conducted during fieldwork in Greece. Interview data were analyzed drawing on a Foucauldian approach to discourse analysis. Results We identified four concepts—biology, gender, femininity, and judo/sport—that were central to unearth…

Similar and equal relationships? Negotiating bisexuality in an enduring relationship

2015

In the public debate in Finland, same-sex couples’ right to legal recognition is routinely defended by stressing their sameness to heterosexual couples within the discourse of romantic love. This article explores how bisexual women and their partners use these discourses. The five couple interviews were analyzed by implementing discourse analysis. The results highlight how, when taking positions within the discourse of the enduring couple relationship, the interviewees drew on the discourse of romantic love. Woman’s bisexuality disappeared easily in this talk. Although it seemed effortless at first sight, negotiations and affective tensions arose when the interviewees tried to fit their re…

Care for older people in early twenty-first-century Europe : dimensions and directions of change

2017

Transnational Mediated Commemoration of Migrant Deaths at the Borders of Europe

2019

Digital generations, but not as we know them

2019

The aim of this article is to see whether or not adolescents were the real leaders of the digital ‘revolution’ in the 1990s and whether they have sustained or even improved their position in the 2000s. The analysis is based on two surveys carried out in Italy, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Spain in 1996 ( N = 6609) and in 2009 ( N = 7255). The results show that the adolescents belonging to the first digital generation in 1996 were the most equipped with new technologies, although not the most intensive users. In 2009, the adolescents lost their position as the leading adopters and lagged behind youth and young adults regarding the use of new technologies and computer skills.

Towards gender awareness in couple therapy and in treatment of intimate partner violence

2017

Gender is the most pervasive classification of individuals and thus strongly defines couple relationships. Cultural discourses on couple relationships reproduce hierarchical gender differences, and couple distress is often linked to gendered power inequalities. At worst, gender is the basis for intimate partner violence (IPV). Generally, however, therapeutic interventions do not address the issues of gender and gendered power. This paper discusses the meaning and functions of gender in the context of couple therapy, in particular for IPV. It is argued that the therapist needs to be skilled in discursive deconstruction to be able not only to address the client’s situation as an individual ex…

Dividing Responsibility for Care : Tracing the Ethics of Care in Local Care Strategies

2020

This article analyses local care policies through the lens of the feminist ethics of care. The focus is on the normative understandings regarding care that emerge in local care strategy documents and how these understandings relate with the concept of ‘responsibility’. In this article, strategies published by the municipality of Jyväskylä, Finland, between the years 2008 and 2016, are analysed using Trace analysis. The research questions are: How is the division of responsibility regarding care among different actors constructed in the strategies? How do the roles assigned to these different actors accord with the principles of ethics of care? The findings show that the documents emphasise …