Marit S. Haugen

Doing Rural Masculinity – From Logging to Outfield Tourism

This article deals with the issue of stability and change in rural masculinity by studying how masculinity changes when work changes. Logging, which used to form a basis for the construction of masculinity in peripheral areas, is in the process of being replaced by new types of work brought about by the commodification of natural and cultural resources. Hunting, fishing and adventures in the wilderness as products are grounded in the traditional competences of rural men, but include elements of service work that go beyond masculine rural knowledge and networks, and introduce features of femininity and urbanity. When urban customers enter places and activities that used to be central for the identification of the rural masculine, rural men seek new places and challenges where ‘real rural masculinity’ may be expressed.

Doing Farm Tourism: The Intertwining Practices of Gender and Work

Drawing on the perspective of doing gender, Berit Brandth and Marit S. Haugen explore how women and men do gender in farm tourist work. On the basis of five case studies of farms that have shifted from farm production to hosting tourists, the expectation is that the new occupation of tourism may create conditions for (un)doing gender at the interactional level and reshuffling power within the couple. The segmented work and unequal work statuses of men and women known from research on family farming seem to be less distinct in farm tourism as women are managers and men do cleaning, catering, and caring. However, the symbolic meaning of the indoor‐outdoor dichotomy plays a defining role. And even if women and men have changed their performances, gender and work are still interpreted and perceived according to the heterosexual matrix.

Breaking into a masculine discourse: women and farm forestry

This paper studies the gendering processes of farm forestry by means of discourse analysis. Forestry has traditionally been one of the most masculine rural activities. In spite of a relatively large number of women forest owners, women have only been active in this industry to a limited extent, and made little impact on the masculine culture of forestry. Looking at the main sites of discourse in the magazine of the forest owners, women are absent at the most influential site : organization and management. At the site of practical forestry work, women are sometimes represented, but as tokens in a mans world. The only site in which women can be seen to obtain a position is that of expert work and knowledge, but this is not a change originating from forestry itself.

GENDER DIFFERENCES IN MODERN AGRICULTURE: The Case of Female Farmers in Norway

Studying women farmers who are equal to men in their formal status, this article explores the extent to which womens entry into a male occupation challenges the existing gender system. Our analysis shows that young women farmers represent a change toward a new work role for women in farming. They have become similar to men farmers in many important aspects of farming such as vocational training, technological know-how, and union membership; however, important aspects of the existing gender system are being preserved. Young women farmers still have the main responsibility for domestic work; their income from farming is less important for the household than their husbands; and, compared to men farmers, their farm income is less. There is no indication that young women farmers challenge the masculinist way of farming.

Norwegian gender roles in transition: the masculinization hypothesis in the past and in the future

Abstract This paper discusses the so-called masculinization hypothesis which states, in the Norwegian context, that the female share of the agricultural labour force has been declining for the past four decades. Historically, the female contribution of agricultural labour has been under-estimated, but in recent times, social scientists and politicians have ‘discovered’ the important role of women in agriculture. Nevertheless, women are still leaving the farming industry and, while gender equality is on the political agenda as never before, it has not been easy to mobilize rural women to enter the troubled farming sector. The female exodus from farming is deeply embedded in changing gender roles. While the role of Norwegian women in the labour market saw major changes in the 1970s and 1980s, changes that gave women a greater share in wages and welfare benefits, the inequality between agriculture and other industries is growing again. Young rural women seem reluctant to join a low-paid industry in which they have to work on their own most of the day, without enjoying the recent social gains of women employed in other industries.

Text, Body, and Tools: Changing Mediations of Rural Masculinity

This article explores processes by which masculinities change, using examples from the Norwegian forestry industry. Forestry has traditionally been one of the most masculine rural work activities and an arena where hegemonic rural masculinity is expressed. The study is based on mediations of masculinity in a forestry magazine covering a period of twenty years. Using text, body, and tools as an analytic scheme, pictures of temporal variations of, and relations between, “traditional” and “new” types of masculinity are described. Even though practical, physical work in the forest is a basis for rural hegemonic masculinity, other types of work with new cultural influences (organizational and expert work) lead to “dialogical” masculinities, which open up for more flexible boundaries and cultural borrowing. This might be important to secure the future viability of rural industries and communities, especially if the recruitment of women is desirable.

Visitors to Farm Tourism Enterprises in Norway

Abstract In Norway, as in many other countries, rural and farm tourism is becoming an important activity for promoting the vitality and sustainability of rural communities. This paper focuses on the analysis of visitors to Norwegian farms, which offer various tourism activities and services. The countryside has increasingly become a place of consumption and recreation, and as such, farm tourism is part of the shift in the economic base of rural societies. Moreover, in building appreciation for the distinctive features of local places and people, farm tourism represents a counter‐trend to homogenisation and mass tourism. In this paper we focus on the Norwegian domestic market. Based on data from ten representative national Norwegian surveys conducted by Synovate Norway between 1991 and 2007, our analysis shows significant increases in the proportion of the population visiting farm tourism enterprises since 1991. In addition to describing who the visitors are, the paper also characterises potential visitors within the domestic tourism market.

Big Brother in rural societies: Youths’ discourses on gossip

The article examines the rural discourse among rural and urban youths. The ‘rural’ is not seen as a fixed reality, but as a constructed and contested concept. The article is based on essays and focus group interviews with youths in a comprehensive school. The youths construct the ‘rural’ by contrasting it with the ‘urban’. ‘Safe and good’ is found to be a general representation of rural life. The feeling of security is closely related to the idea of visibility, that ‘everybody knows everybody’ in small communities. The youths stress, however, a negative aspect of the visibility, as it facilitates mechanisms of social control such as gossip and rural justice. Girls are more concerned than boys with the limitations this puts upon rural life. Visibility is found to be a premise for the representation of the countryside as ‘safe and good’, while at the same time visibility allows informal social control. The article focuses on the balance between freedom and informal social control, between visibility and lack of privacy in rural areas. The narratives of the rural are explained in terms of the relationships between expectations and representations of social processes in small-scale communities.

Discourses of rurality in a norwegian context

In this introductory article to the special issue of Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography, we give a brief presentation of the tradition of rural studies in Norway. The bulk of Norwegian rural studies can be classified as rural development research where the main objective is to improve the conditions in rural areas. This is in line with the strong connection between social science and welfare state policies in the Nordic countries. Research carried out in a rural change tradition, which focuses more on differences in interests and values, identities, representations and imaginations, has been more limited, but is growing. We claim that a functionalist approach focusing on quantifiable socio-economic variables still has some degree of hegemony in the strong tradition of policy-related research in Norway. The contributions following this article, though, take on new theoretical perspectives with their discursive and social constructivist approach. The articles presented are focusing on rurality as a contested concept in the Norwegian context. They focus on how academics, politicians and ordinary people adopt different meanings of the concept, and how these different meanings have impact on policy formation, research agendas and everyday life.

Women in Forestry: Dilemmas of a Separate Women's Organization

This paper discusses womens organization within forestry in Norway. As a separate womens organization, Women in Forestry (JiS), which aims to increase womens influence, faces several dilemmas and challenges. One of the main dilemmas is that by founding a womens organization, gender is made visible and put into focus, while its ultimate aim is to make gender irrelevant and the organization redundant in the future. Based on interviews with founders and representatives of JiS, and with women active in forestry, written documents and the magazine The Forest Owner, the study analyses the strategies that the organization pursues to deal with this dilemma. Strategies that reduce their particularity and increase their universality include avoiding a feminist label, seeking alliances with men and having a diverse group of members.