20/05/2025
The new NORA Issue is now out! Welcome to read it here: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/swom20/current
EDITORIAL
by Maria Brock, Ramona Dima, Yulia Gradskova, Mateusz Miesiac, and Maria Zirra
"This is the first issue managed by the new Swedish NORA editorial team for 2025–2026. We would first like to thank the former Icelandic editorial committee (Brynja E. Halldórsdóttir, Eyja Margrét J. Brynjarsdóttir, and Irma Erlingsdóttir) for their important work. We are committed to continue offering a platform for publishing novel and relevant Nordic-related research in gender and sexuality. The current hostile climate against the field highlights the importance of such platforms. At the same time, we are critical of the structural power relationships within the scholarly publishing complex based on profit, a certain understanding of the concept of impact, and uneven sharing of resources. This means that we strive to explore new ways of collaborating while challenging the status quo, as well as intersecting and connecting different topics and spaces within and outside the Nordics. This vision will ideally be reflected by NORA´s future articles and calls for special issues during the next years.
The present issue has two overarching foci: one is dedicated to experiences and representations of parenting in the Nordics, while the other interrogates how gender and labour intersect in Nordic academia. One contribution looks at gendered violence through ecofeminist lenses.
Margaret Anne Johnson and Gyða Margrét Pétursdóttir explore the concept of regret and the role it plays in constructing motherhood by looking at empirical material from Iceland. In their article, “‘It’ll be All right, Everybody Has Children’: Regretting Motherhood in Iceland”, the authors show how pronatalist expectations as well as emotional and interpersonal experiences are intertwined and highlight a novel take, where the focus has shifted from the child to the actual process of mothering as the primary source of regret.
Continuing to explore different notions of family in Nordic contexts, the contribution “Committed and Responsible: Single Fathers in Swedish Dailies” by Helena Wahlström Henriksson and Disa Bergnehr investigates how Swedish family policies have influenced the “normalization” of single parenthood, specifically single fathers, by analysing an extensive corpus of Swedish newspaper articles over 2010–2020. This study offers an overview of tropes concerning fatherhood as well as a critique of their selective representations in Swedish newspapers which often exaggerate, the article argues, the involvement and time single fathers spend with their offspring.
“Negotiating Good Parenthood in Swedish Climate Change Fiction” by Jenny Björklund analyses how parenthood is conceptualized in relation to environmental consciousness in two contemporary Swedish climate change novels, Jens Liljestrand’s Även om allt tar slt (Even If Everything Ends) and Anna Dahlqvist’s Det är tropiska nätter nu (Now We Have Tropical Nights). By focusing on Sweden, where progressive family politics and environmental politics are key to the nation’s self-image, the article provides new perspectives from a non-Anglophone context, showing how climate-friendly parenthood cannot be understood in isolation from other parenthood ideals.
“Sons of Honor, Honor of Sons. Expectations of Chastity and Restrictions of Marriage to identify Boys with Culture of Honor in Sweden” by Jan-Magnus Enelo, Rúna í Baianstovu, and Sofia Strid takes a different approach in problematizing matters of honour, marriage expectations, and chastity by looking at how boys in Sweden negotiate them in relation to their parents and in connection to the degree of one´s involvement in religious practices. The authors explore the two main factors at work, namely patriarchal structures and age-based hierarchies which lead to complex understandings and practices of honour.
The essay “Merging Narrative and Landscape: Margaret Atwood’s Narrative Techniques in ‘Stone Mattress’ to Write Back Against the Masculine Tradition of Silencing and Exploitation” by Eleonora Togyer offers a literary and feminist perspective on Margaret Atwood’s short story “Stone Mattress” (2014). In Atwood’s text, the Arctic landscape becomes transformed from place into subject, as she engages with ecological and moral debt, exploitation and oppression in the Anthropocene. The author demonstrates how, in resonance with ecocriticism and ecofeminism, literary works such as Atwood’s can serve as valuable resources for comprehending the underlying social origins of gendered and ecological violence.
In “Emotional Labour in the Neoliberal University: The Standpoint of Female Academics in Norway with Experience of Sick Leave”, Tale Steen-Johnsen, May-Linda Magnussen and Irene Trysnes’s interview study with female academics working in a new university in Norway, it unfolds that the interviewees had to hide feelings of exhaustion, fear, and a lack of control. The authors underline that such instances of emotional labour—in part a byproduct of the increasing neoliberalisation of academia—are a political issue that demands political solutions.
“Intersectional Gender Equality Challenges—A Review of Gender Equality Research Conducted in Fennoscandian Arctic Academia” by Anna Reetta Rönka et al. focuses on the northern areas of Nordic countries and gender equality research conducted in that sociocultural context, offering a review of articles on the topic of GE in HEI by Arctic Five universities affiliated scholars on journals indexed in the Scopus database. One important finding is a shortage of research regarding gender equality (GE) in higher education institutions (HEIs) in the Arctic, while existing research lacks Arctic geographical and cultural contextualization.
In “Gender Mainstreaming in Academia Flowing Between Policy and Bureaucracy”, Tonje Lauritzen and Ingrid Guldvik analyse how universities and research organizations in Norway respond to the European Union´s Gender Equality Plan (GEP). One of the key findings revolves around how gender mainstreaming has eroded policies of gender equality, and the argumentation leads to reflections and suggestions for raising the impact of gender-related policies in academia."
Volume 33, Issue 2 of NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research
