The Journal of Gender Research: Open issue
The first issue of this year’s Journal for Gender Research brings together four articles that, in different ways, examine how power, norms, and institutional frameworks shape people’s gendered, embodied, and relational experiences, and how these frameworks both enable and constrain agency, recognition, and lived experience. The contributions range from debates on sexual consent and the tension between an ethics of care and the logic of criminal law, through fathers’ caregiving practices under conditions of temporary employment, to young women’s experiences of coercion in eating disorder treatment and the ways in which humour on digital platforms can be mobilised to undermine academic expertise.
Abstracts
Sexual Consent: Between Feminist Ethics of Care and the Logic of Criminal Law
By Maria Hansen
In this article, which discusses the concept of consent in the legal definition of rape, I examine two different logics that seem to underpin the Norwegian consent debate: One is an understanding of consent shaped by a liberal, legal logic, which makes consent a binary concept; the other is an understanding of consent as an ongoing ethical practice, which can be linked to feminist ethics of care. By first explaining why consent became a feminist concern and then exploring some theoretical implications of merging these two different logics, I argue that if the goal is to promote good sexual ethics, consent is an ambiguous and blunt tool. Therefore, I suggest that it is more important to discuss how sex can be “good” or how it can become rape, rather than focusing solely on consent as the delineation between sex and rape.
Keywords: sexual consent, logic of criminal law, feminist ethics of care, rape, sexual ethics, Norwegian consent-discourse
Childcare Practices among Fathers of Young Children in Temporary Work
By Lisa Vaagan Moen
To further encourage fathers to take paternity leave, the father’s quota was introduced in 1993. This was an explicit political aim not only to strengthen father–child relations but also to change the gendered division of work with respect to caring for small children. The father’s quota is an individual right given to fathers and not to the family as a caregiving entity. Although the father’s quota has become a majority practice among Norwegian fathers, different forms of workplace dynamics interact with fatherhood ideals in shaping fathers’ use of paternity leave. Because the father’s quota interrelates with the dynamics of working life, the use of the quota will be affected by the different workplace contexts in which the fathers find themselves. In this article, I contribute to the research field by analyzing interviews with Norwegian fathers in temporary work, as well as how this work context interacts with the fathers’ use of paternity leave and the fathers’ caregiving practices. The main finding is that the period of paternity leave consists of work. The fathers either have to work or need to apply for jobs. This renders fathers in temporary work mostly unavailable for care.
Keywords: caregiving practice, father–child relationship, the father’s quota, the flexible father’s quota and temporary positions
Compulsory Treatment and Subjectivity: Eating Disorders as a Case
By Birgit Nordtug og Gunn Engelsrud
The purpose of this article is to explore effects of using coercion in the treatment of eating disorders on young women’s subjectivity. In the analysis, the authors explore two cases, which are analysed using semiotics as a method. The cases feature different approaches to treating patients. Case 1 uses coercion, demonstrates distance and control regimens towards a patient, and the process ends with her death. In Case 2, there is no use of coercion, and a young woman with an eating disorder who has developed iatrogenic disorders due to the use of coercion in earlier treatment, is met with contact, and there is a discursive change taking place. By using phenomenology and psychoanalysis, the authors highlight that the women’s experiences of coercion in treatment are manifested in their entire body’s autonomous as well as voluntary organism and experience levels, and that the women are subjected to a knowledge discourse in which, due to the deprivation of their competence to consent, their own experiences and subjectivity are not valid knowledge.
Keywords: women’s health, compulsory treatment, eating disorders, subjectivity, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, semiotics
Weaponised Humour: Delegitimisation of Academic Expertise via Persona-Based Parody
By Hande Eslen-Ziya
This article examines how humour can operate as online violence against academics through a persona-based parody of my public writing. I situate this case within three overlapping frameworks – humour as social infrastructure, epistemic injustice, and the digital hall of mirrors – to show how parody enacts delegitimisation while simultaneously shielding attackers under claims of “just joking”. Anchored in the Norwegian context, the analysis connects this case to the tullestudier (“bullshit studies”) debate, demonstrating how ridicule circulates across social and political arenas and how this normalises epistemic violence.
Keywords: online violence, humour, epistemic injustice, anti-genderism, Norway
Les hele nummeret hos Scandinavian University Press (scup.com)
DOI: 10.18261/issn.1891-1781