Gender - Power - Text

The Nordic countries are often imagined by the outside world to be a haven of sexual equality and exemplary gender relations. Gender - Power - Text: Nordic Culture in the Twentieth Century presents a more nuanced picture to the English-speaking world, interrogating the constructions, negotiations and transformations of gender and power in a diversity of texts and textual practices. GENDER theory informs all sixteen essays in this volume, and a productive and provocative juxtaposition of disciplinary and theoretical boundaries is in evidence throughout. The contributors draw on the work of theorists including Roland Barthes, Judith Butler, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Julia Kristeva and Hayden White, reading this against texts by Nordic writers, filmmakers and artists such as Edith Sodergran, Ellen Key, Knut Hamsun, Monika Fagerholm, Mai Zetterling, Gunvor Hofmo, Ingmar Bergman, Liv Ullmann and Vibeke Gronfeldt.
POWER and its distribution in society are analysed both as a problem central to the construction of the nation-state and welfare society, and as a dynamic underlying the cultural texts which function as sites where social practice, political engagement and aesthetic creativity meet and merge. TEXT is understood in this volume in a wide sense, encompassing painting, handicrafts, film , photography and installations, as well as poetry, the novel, and drama. The texts explored by the contributors belong to the Danish, Finnish, Finland-Swedish, Norwegian, Sami and Swedish traditions, but the cross-currents that constitute a wider 'Nordic' cultural community are also teased out by connections and continuities between the chapters.