Redi Koobak

The decolonial challenge: Framing post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe within transnational feminist studies

The article explores the location of Central and Eastern Europe in transnational feminist studies. Despite the acknowledgement of the situatedness of knowledge, feminist theorising nevertheless seems to continue to be organised around a limited number of central axes and internalised progress narratives. The authors argue that there is a pressing need for theories which can approach the near absence of Central and Eastern European perspectives from transnational feminist theorising, and challenge the limited number of discursive tropes associated with post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe – especially that of a ‘lag’, where difference is translated into a temporal distance. Instead, the authors suggest that a more inclusive vision of transnational feminist studies can be achieved by applying the decolonial framework to the post-socialist context, as explicated in the work of Madina Tlostanova.

Editorial : Post-humanities is a Feminist Issue

It is a great pleasure to introduce this special issue of NORA, entitled Posthumanities—which we construe as the conceptual re-tooling and reinvigoration of feminist research within the humanities and social sciences. Such re-tooling is here regarded as necessary so as to meet up with the accelerating changes within contemporary life engendered by technoscience (new technologies for baby-making is but one intimate example), our natural world (the climate for instance), and the discrepancies that mount up when we keep Man as the given focal point of sociocultural analysis. As has often been commented upon in recent discussions about this predicament, the deterioration of the humanities is often linked to the growing cultural and financial importance of technoscience. With this issue, in which we engage in various forms of post-humanist gender studies, we would like to make a strong case for an updated alliance between feminist theory, humanities research, and technoscience studies—an alliance that could re-calibrate the analytical tools for understanding the everyday practices of the sciences and how they affect our sense of self, while enhancing the relevance of the humanities as well as making the applicability of feminist theory more visible. As something of a transdisciplinary area of its own, feminist technoscience studies has emerged out of more than four decades of feminist materialist critiques of biological determinism and androcentric medical expertise. It is a heterogeneous field of research that takes its cues from the larger field of science and technology studies (as the study of the history and social construction of knowledge, technology, and medical practice), from actor-network theory, but also from cultural studies and post-colonial and feminist theory. Feminist technoscience studies zooms in on the ways in which gender, as it intersects with other power differentials, gives shape to and challenges technology, the medical and natural sciences, and our very understanding of nature, culture, and humanness. As humans, more obviously today than ever, are entangled in co-constitutive relations with technology and science, with other animals, and with the environment, it has become difficult to uphold notions of the human along the lines of androcentrism and anthropocentrism. This is the raison d’être for research in the registers of both post-humanities and feminist technoscience studies. In fact, feminist technoscience studies—such as the oeuvre of Donna Haraway—pioneered much of the work that today may be called post-humanities (to emphasize the transitional dimensions of the disciplines connected to the human, cultural, and natural sciences) as well as that peculiar philosophical trend of returning to (process) ontological issues as these link up with epistemological and ethical ones. Sometimes such trends are termed the material turn, or the post-human

Border thinking and disidentification: Postcolonial and postsocialist feminist dialogues:

In the context of the continuing dominance of delocalised Western feminist theoretical models, which allow the non-Western and not quite Western ‘others’ to either be epistemically annihilated or appropriated, it becomes crucial to look for transformative feminist theoretical tools which can eventually help break the so-called mere recognition patterns and move in the direction of transversal dialogues, mutual learning practices and volatile but effective feminist coalitions. Speaking from the position of postcolonial and postsocialist feminist others vis-a-vis the dominant Western/Northern gender studies mainstream, and drawing on examples from a broad range of social contexts (from the Armenian queer social movement to a recent Indian gang rape controversy), the authors of this article address the validity of two such transformative feminist tools: border thinking that operates on a more general theoretical level, and disidentification that offers a more praxial operational realisation of the border principle.

Nordic Terror Is Not Exceptional

We devote this first issue of NORA in 2012 to Norway, and to rethinking Nordicness through the atrocities committed in Oslo and on the island of Utøya. Shortly after the terrorist attacks on Norwegian social democracy and leftist youth, NORA received an emphatic letter from a pioneer of feminist science studies, Professor Hillary Rose. She expressed her condolences to her sisters in the North after the attacks in Norway and also encouraged us to use NORA as a platform for analysis and discussion of these awful events in a wider context. We are very grateful for her suggestion because as researchers we have an obligation to engage in political debates and to continue to insist on the need for feminist analysis of the world—in order both to understand and to change it. In this issue of NORA we have invited three scholars to give their analysis of terrorism in the aftermath of the tragic events in Norway this summer. In the first contribution, “Anti-feminism and Misogyny in Breivik’s ‘Manifesto’”, Professor Stephen J. Walton of Volda University College carries out an in-depth analysis of the so-called manifesto that Breivik put together, showing in detail—for the first time— how anti-feminism underpins every level of his arguments. This is an upsetting reading and also very important as Walton shows that a gender analysis brings forward a quite different picture of Breivik’s aims and driving forces from those previously articulated. The second text, “Violence, Racism, and the Political Arena: A Scandinavian Dilemma”, is written by Professor Diana Mulinari of Lund University and Professor Anders Neergaard of Linköping University. They focus on media representations of the terror attacks. Importantly, Mulinari and Neergaard place these events in the context of a resurgence of extreme right-wing and racist movements and political parties in Scandinavia, building on the authors’ research project on women and migrants in a culturally racist party: the Sweden Democrats. Offering an analysis of various forms of racism prevalent in Scandinavia today, they conclude that, whilst it was a unique person who carried out the massacres in Norway, it happened within a context in which racism is an integral part of Scandinavian society. Although these two texts specifically address the terror attack in Norway, we believe it is important not to treat this event in isolation. What happened in Norway this summer could—and in a way should—be regarded as an exceptional event, but these texts and other feminist analyses demonstrate how so-called single terror attacks must be seen in a broader context where homophobia, racism, and sexism are at the centre of analysis. Thus, there is a need both to situate the terror attack in a Nordic setting where ambitions of gender equality and a strong welfare state still to

Editorial : Getting into the Habit

In this issue of NORA we present three original articles on three diverse topics by authors from three different countries. The first article in this issue concerns popular therapeutic culture, suc ...

Care to Compare

The third issue of NORA 2010 provides ample opportunities for feminist and gender researchers to communicate and revise ingrained ideas about gender equality, violence, and care work in welfare states. Who cares?—And for whom? In this issue, we take care to compare. For instance, how are issues on care and health constructed, and what are the gendered implications of these constructions? How do care discourses and policies in different welfare states compare to each other? What happens when care work enters the public domain? How do we define work and workers in the private sphere? Should work-life policy demand full-health capacity of women throughout pregnancy? These are some of the questions highlighted in this issue of NORA. The so-called reproductive sphere has always been of great interest in feminist research—not least because the traditional division between men and women has often also implied a division between the public and the private, between the production and reproduction, placing women on the reproductive side. In contemporary feminist research, issues that were earlier addressed in terms like “women-friendly” or “women’s experiences” are now addressed in new ways, often critically scrutinizing previous approaches. In the first article, “An Old Map of State Feminism and an Insufficient Recognition of Care”, Hanne Marlene Dahl challenges Helga Hernes’ argument on the women-friendly state and shows that this is in need of revision in order to suit the changing context of care and the changes in the state that have taken place as part of the introduction of new public management. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s work on the need for recognition, Dahl shows that the misrecognition of care and care-giving workers/care professionals is still taking place and argues that neither making care a state responsibility nor professionalization of care work is sufficient to solve the problem of recognition. In the article, Dahl argues for the need to foster additional strategies, such as caring for the carer and degendering care, in order to make recognition of care work possible. In the second article, “‘A Defeat not to Be Ultra-Fit’: Expectations and Experiences Related to Pregnancy and Employment in Contemporary Norway” by Eva Haukeland Fredriksen, Janet Harris, Karen Marie Moland, and Johanne Sundby, the focus on care, or in this case more specifically, health at work for the pregnant body, is shifted from the level of health policy to its effect on embodied women. In fact, a strong discourse of gender sameness, aiming to amend the pathologizing stigma around “natural” processes of the body (“pregnancy is not a disease”), might not have feminist consequences. More precisely, health policy discourse on pregnancy is studied here through a focus on how pregnant women with pelvic girdle pain (a common feature of many pregnancies) handle the expectation and pressure to stay fit and capable of work throughout pregnancy. The findings

Re-orienting Nordicness, Again

NORA—Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research is located in the nexus of several advantageous contexts, positions, and networks. All of them pertain to shifting geopolitics, privileges of the northern hemisphere, and other forms of “politics of location”, to evoke the well-known feminist concept coined by Adrienne Rich in the mid-1980s. Devoted to the continuous questioning of the Nordicness of NORA, this editorial returns to one of our on-going discussions. In fact, we return to questions and locations that were already explored by the first and second “editorial couples” ofNORA, Harriet BjerrumNielsen andTorill Steinfeld (in 1993–1996 at the University of Oslo, Norway), and Marianne Liljeström and Harriet Silius (in 1996–1999 at Åbo Akademi University, Finland). In their last editorial, Liljeström and Silius posed a series of questions that still hold sway:

Editorial: Survival Stories

This issue of NORA is dedicated to quite diverse narratives of survival and the feminist politics of rescilience and endurance. In this editorial (editorial survey) we discuss such recent research.

Editorial : Normal People Worry Us

This issue of NORA brings together three articles that could be seen as addressing the question “What is normal?” in three very different ways. These articles demonstrate that this seemingly simple ...

Editorial : Comparing Maps

This second issue of NORA 2010 indicates that the field of feminist and gender research, with its internal paradoxes, multiple contradictions, and transversal dialogues, has truly come of age. That is why we need our differently situated maps, our variously cartographic readings of the present state of the field. NORA aims to be such a—both creative and critical—site where feminist scholars and gender researchers compare maps. NORA provides theoretically rooted and politically informed readings of the present state of the field through the original scientific articles presented herein. In one way or another, all these research papers are situated in Nordic-ness, and they are all touching upon the position-sensitive matter of reflexivity. In different ways, the articles in this issue all reflect upon gender research as such. They also avoid reifying any imagined communities of univocal Nordic-ness or homogeneous state feminism. First, Catrin Lundström discusses methodological dilemmas of the field in general, and of field-work in particular. Lundström examines ethnographic approaches to whiteness, and she does this with the help of Swedish migrant women living in the United States and through participant observations. Lundström’s unique contribution aims to disentangle whiteness as a shared privilege of both researcher and participants, and her questioning of “white passing”, racialization processes, and of middle-class Swedishness in non-Swedish settings are highly telling accounts of the norms made visible by “studying up”, i.e. scrutinizing privileged groups, and also of the blind spots researchers may fail to notice. Second, Susanne Bygnes zooms in on the shift from gender to diversity in policy work on equality and discrimination in Norway. Reflecting on the privileged position of gender equality in her original piece “Making Equality Diverse?”, the empirical analysis here also highlights an incongruity between the intentions of policy-makers and the content of reports, for instance as issued by the Norwegian Equality and Anti-Discrimination Ombudsman. Previous political strategies in Norway have focused on the inclusion of women into the public sphere, but, as Bygnes shows, that does not make for a smooth transition to include other categories, for instance ethnic discrimination. Third, Keith Pringle, Dag Balkmar, and LeeAnn Iovanni provide us with an explorative comparison between descriptions of men’s violence to women and children in Denmark and Sweden in their piece “Trouble in Paradise: Exploring Patterns of Research and Policy Response to Men’s Violence in Denmark and Sweden”. They reflect upon the feminist and pro-feminist influence on policy documents, but also upon the subfield of critical studies of men and masculinity as