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  • Author or Editor: Kajsa Widegren x
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One of the flag-ship reforms of the Swedish welfare state was the parental leave–reform from 1974. In this chapter images from official, state-mandated information material designed to increase Swedish fathers’ use of parental leave are scrutinized. Images are often inherently contradictory, with meanings that tend to move beyond the intention to ‘inform’ the viewer. The images in the parental leave campaigns reproduce Sweden as well as Swedish fathers as modern, white and heterosexual. At the same time as some of the images strive to articulate the message that ‘dads should be pregnant’, that is to be bodies capable of taking care of infants, they show little or no closeness between fathers and children, either emotional or corporeal. Thus these messages simultaneously incite and deter men from parenthood as it might be lived in a more gender-equal context.

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Perspectives from the Nordic Region

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The #MeToo movement sparked many debates and increased the demand for more problematized perspectives on the issue of sexual harassment.

This book opens for new understandings of sexual harassment by bringing researchers, writers, and policymakers in the Nordic region into dialogue in an ambitious volume. It asks what role juridical frameworks can and should play in prevention and raises questions about how the image of Nordic states – as gender equal, colour blind and with strong welfare – affects the work against sexual harassment in the region.

Re-imagining definitions of justice, violence, exploitation and work, this book offers knowledge of immediate importance for everyone working to prevent sexual harassment, through research, policy making, or in everyday practice.

Open access

The Introduction starts with a critical approach towards the ways in which previous research, policy and juridical systems of sexual harassment have constructed this phenomenon as an anomaly and not as an integral effect of social and structural power relations. In the Nordic region, this status as an anomaly is even more prominent due to these countries’ national self-images as utterly democratic, gender-equal and humanitarian societies with robust welfare systems. This chapter presents previous sexual harassment research and the demarcations of this field: its focus on prevalence and close connection with US legislation, its lack of an intersectional approach when it comes to sampling informants, and its simplified relationship to preventive measures and recommendations. Social imagination as a concept is introduced as a way to approach sexual harassment and violence as part of broader contexts of intersecting power relations and to introduce dialogues between sexual harassment research and the broader Nordic field of gender, sexuality and intersectional studies.

Open access

In this concluding chapter, the editors take a comprehensive approach to the phenomenon of sexual harassment relating it to a continuum of violence, to flaws in the juridical systems, and to Nordic gender equality discourses and their status in previous research. Through these thematic strands, the results of the previous chapters are discussed and positioned in dialogue with each other. The chapter ends with a discussion on knowledge production, re-imagining as practice, and a compilation of reflections and lessons learned aimed at political structures, activists, HR staff, equality officers, and bystanders.

Open access

This book takes as its starting point fifty years of research, lifetimes of experience and a global #MeToo movement that has shown how sexual violence and harassment are persistent problems in society. Its inception was driven by the imperative to move beyond simplified and one-dimensional understandings of sexual harassment. Through investigating other perspectives, primarily from the Nordic field of gender, sexuality and intersectionality studies but also from outside academia, sexual harassment as a phenomenon is explored and developed. The book offers a unique empirical context by focusing on the Nordic region, with its high levels of both gender equality and sexual violence, its welfare states and increasing inequality, and its strong feminist movements and its exclusionary practices. Throughout the book, questions about violence, vulnerability, belonging, exposure, justice, and repression are brought into the realm of knowledge production around sexual harassment and violence. The inclusion of texts from writers and poets from outside the academic context also brings a complexity and nuance that are much needed in the framing of sexual harassment today. Hence, the book highlights what kinds of questions, imaginaries and knowledge can emerge when sexual harassment is incorporated into a broad field of research and knowledge-building.

Open access

This book takes as its starting point fifty years of research, lifetimes of experience and a global #MeToo movement that has shown how sexual violence and harassment are persistent problems in society. Its inception was driven by the imperative to move beyond simplified and one-dimensional understandings of sexual harassment. Through investigating other perspectives, primarily from the Nordic field of gender, sexuality and intersectionality studies but also from outside academia, sexual harassment as a phenomenon is explored and developed. The book offers a unique empirical context by focusing on the Nordic region, with its high levels of both gender equality and sexual violence, its welfare states and increasing inequality, and its strong feminist movements and its exclusionary practices. Throughout the book, questions about violence, vulnerability, belonging, exposure, justice, and repression are brought into the realm of knowledge production around sexual harassment and violence. The inclusion of texts from writers and poets from outside the academic context also brings a complexity and nuance that are much needed in the framing of sexual harassment today. Hence, the book highlights what kinds of questions, imaginaries and knowledge can emerge when sexual harassment is incorporated into a broad field of research and knowledge-building.

Open access