Search

Beginning from Joan Scott's notion of the paradox of French eighteenthcentury feminism - with both its acceptance and rejection of gender-based inequality - some of the trends in Swedish gender history are discussed. Gender history's scholarly and political successes may be indisputable, but they cannot completely obscure a more ominous picture. The field today is large, but it is also fragmented. The issues of gender history may well be integrated into other positions, but equally they there run the risk of marginalization. Multifaceted and embracive power analyses illustrate the complications, but at the same time are open to interpretations that are of less social history interest. The multidimensional power analyses prompted by the intersectionality perspective can thus be questioned, as can the emphasis of recent research on cultural identity as an umbrella term. Although the intentions have been different, post-colonial perspectives still have the potential to elucidate what is culture and what is economics, and how these two structures come together and, paradoxically enough, counteract each other. A clarification of the paradoxes of history is also called for if gender history research is to remain successful, both in politics and in academe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article gives examples of how gender history research in Finland has been influenced by the ever-broader field of gender studies and by new directions in historical research. It is stressed that all gender history is formed in relation to current gender discourses, which mark the prevailing historiographical culture - the way in which the past is given meaning in the present. Given these influences, the purpose here is to indicate what is distinctive about Finnish gender history research. Further, it is argued that historical perspective has played a crucial role in determining the course of multidisciplinary gender studies in Finland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues for sport and physical culture to be recognized as a fruitful field for gender history research. I would argue that different forms of physical activity should be considered part of the processes that create, reproduce, or challenge current gender positions - and identifications - be it symbolically, structurally, or individually. Women's sport challenges the historical linkage of femininity and passivity, as well as calling into question the 'naturalness' of the body and gender. Physical activity shapes the body in historically or culturally specific ways at the same time as the body, by embodying or challenging norms, in turn shapes history. The empirical examples discussed include Svenska Kvinnors Centralförbund för Fysisk Kultur (the Swedish Women's Central Federation of Physical Culture), an association that was active in the inter-war period and had close links to Sweden's liberal women's movement. Based on a feminist analysis, bodily activity and strength are here viewed in relation to women's emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the point at which gender history finds itself today, starting with the 15th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women held in the US in 2011.Transnational and transgender issues together characterized this world conference - the world was growing bigger. But what would come next? In a recent work on gender history, Sonya Rose has also highlighted the importance of the fact that national concerns have been transcended in gender history, while emphasizing the continued diversity of approaches. In conclusion, two particularly inspiring works by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Mary Hartman are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theoretical and methodological discussions are rare in gender history in Sweden today. This article asks why, reflecting on the author's own participation in gender history. This is done with special regard to the intellectual and emotional space of Swedish gender history. Historically, gender history has long been a substantial part of gender research. Has the gap between gender historians and other gender scholars widened over the years, and if so, why? Several historians have noted the absence of internal theoretical discussions, compounded by the silence from gender historians in the ongoing discussions within gender and feminist research. In gender research and feminist theory, an increasing interest is being shown in questions that certainly fall within the range of historians - temporality, narration, historicity. To what extent has (gendered) historical space an effect on this, their absence or disinterest? What measures could be taken in order to overcome that gap? How can we encourage the internal debates that will improve our way of conducting research and thinking about the past?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting with the questions raised in the seminar series Genushistoriens utmaningar ('The challenges of gender history'), I describe and reflect on the milieus and contexts where I received my education in gender theory. The relation between interdisciplinary gender theory debate and new cultural history is addressed. The classifications of gender, class, and ethnicity have, in cultural-historical research, often been historicized and problematized without the authors referring to defined gender theory concepts such as intersectionality. Based on my experience of researching early history, I raise the questions of how we define gender history and how research on medieval and early modern society relates to mainstream gender scholarship. Finally, I take up the gender historians' gauntlet: the need to discuss and define gender history as an academic field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text deals with a very particular dilemma: how should I, a post-linguistic- turn gender historian, deal with the reality that women are constantly excluded from the continuing writing of the past (or are silenced in the history that is played out in front of my eyes) without falling back on the herstory tradition that the majority of us academics say we have left behind? The problem is discussed in theoretical terms, but also empirically in relation to two specific situations. The first is a commission to write a history of women and the women's movement for the Swedish city of Lund. The second is an invitation to address a Social Democratic women's association on the subject of the Swedish general election campaign of 2010, and more specifically the media resistance shown towards Mona Sahlin, the female candidate for prime minister. With the help of a further example - the play Historia A by the dramatic arts collective Potato Potato, a reaction to the omission of women from Swedish school history textbooks - I will conclude by illustrating the new path I would advocate: a very queer women's history - Herstory revisited, or Herstory 2.0. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is called My dependence on the present, and in it I reflect on how I have changed track a number of times during my research career. I came late to research, having just turned forty when I began my postgraduate studies, and this meant I did not feel bound to prove my loyalty to any particular school of thought--an independent researcher, no less! However, I had not been at Umeå University long before the radical student milieu and lively research on women's issues had me in their grip and made me into a social historian and feminist. The turn came in the 1990s, when I worked on a project on Swedish schools with Ulla Johansson from the Department of Education. With this change came Pierre Bourdieu's cultural analyses, Yvonne Hirdman's gender theory, and Joan Scott's theories of language into veiw, all of which prodded me towards a greater interest in culture, power, and the body. Embarking on a project on the emotions and universal suffrage in which discourses were to be the focus, I found myself strangely drawn back to social history, armed with a fresh interest in social practices and the significance of experience for the people of the past. And now I am writing about women worldwide as part of an instructional-media project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article suggests that it behoves gender historians to engage in intra- and interdisciplinary gender research discussions in order to address the questions of time, temporality, and the value of a historical perspective in understanding societal and gender-creating processes. Metadiscussions about the discipline of history as a whole, and gender history as a particular sub-discipline, tend to hover between criticism of one's own subject's theoretical shortcomings and the remainder of the research community's lack of historical interest. I would argue that gender historians instead ought to formulate themselves actively and theoretically about what the historical perspective can offer, so that the interdisciplinary exchange on gender research can become the mutual exchange of views that was first anticipated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the relative numbers of gender researchers, Swedish historians do not participate much in the interdisciplinary debate in Tidskrift för genusvetenskap ('Journal for Gender Studies') - participation meaning either publication in the journal, or a clearly stated position towards the field and references to interdisciplinary studies. Above all, it is historians of earlier periods who are notable by their absence. The same trend is also evident in international gender journals. The article examines the participation of Swedish gender historians in the leading Nordic interdisciplinary gender journal, Kvinnovetenskaplig tidskrift ('Women's Studies Journal'), which in 2007 was renamed Tidskrift för genusvetenskap, in the period from the 1980s to 2008. One hypothesis presented by researchers in Norway, who noted that Norwegian gender historians frequently elect to publish in history journals, is that the theoretical radicalisation of gender studies has proved problematic for historians with an empirical focus. They argue that post-structuralism and deconstruction sit ill with the discipline's conservative character. Their hypothesis is considered in this article, in which I also trace changes in the interdisciplinary field as a whole. In the period in question, Kvinnovetenskaplig tidskrift, and later Tidskrift för genusvetenskap, published articles on a vast range of perspectives, reflecting the full span from women's history to the history of gender difference, to difference as the engine of meaning creation. Theoretical debates came increasingly to the fore in the interdisciplinary gender debate in the 1990s. Once the true import of the subject of "differing from" and the study object in creating identity and inequality had been understood, gender history enjoyed considerable success in interdisciplinary gender research. However, with the shift to deconstructionism and the fuller understanding of difference in creating meaning, the revisiting of terms such as sex, gender, and gender differences, and the acknowledgement that differences within the subject were increasingly interesting for interdisciplinary gender research, it was other, more theoretical, disciplines that vitalized the field. Philosophy and literary history can be singled out. Admittedly, several Swedish gender historians were active in introducing to the field the shifts of perspective inspired by post-structuralism, yet it is evidently the case that there is a correspondence between the absence of historical, empirical studies from interdisciplinary gender journals in both Sweden and Norway, and the theoretical radicalisa-tion of gender studies. Naturally, publication in interdisciplinary gender journals cannot be taken as the only measure of researchers' participation in interdisciplinary studies, their knowledge of the interdisciplinary arsenal, or their awareness of cutting-edge international research. Recent articles in historical journals show ample evidence of all this -- even on the part of historians of earlier periods. I can only concur with the editors of Tidskrift för Kjannsforskning, Gro Hageman, Jorun Solheim, and Åse Røthing, that history on the one hand, and research inspired by post-structuralism and gender deconstructionism on the other, will be the poorer if it proves impossible to combine the two branches of knowledge. Indeed, I would go so far as to state that the realisation that differences create meaning is a necessary precondition for understanding of how inequality is (re)created. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]