The Journal of Gender Research: Open issue
How are gendered ways of life, identities, and possibilities for agency shaped and challenged? In this issue, the authors explore this question through analyses of family, friendship, and educational institutions. The articles range from contemporary analyses of masculinity and the paternal function to queer theoretical perspectives on friendship and historical studies of women students’ participation in physical activity. Despite their different empirical and theoretical points of departure, all three contributions examine how gendered subjectivities, forms of belonging, and possibilities for agency are continuously shaped and reshaped through the interplay of social relations, cultural practices, and institutional contexts.
Abstracts
Masculinity in Transition: Behavioral Problems, Gang Crime, and Fascism in Light of the Father Function
By Ole Christer Lund
In this article, the author examines contemporary challenges concerning masculinity, male identity formation, and self-regulation in light of the Lacanian ”father function”: the symbolic internalization of law, boundaries, and the demands of reality. The author reviews the consequences of both absent and destructive father function on behavioral problems, gang criminality, and authoritarian attitudes using psychological and sociological research, references to literary works (Lillelord), popular culture (A Better Man, The Sopranos), biographical accounts (Mary L. Trump’s study of the Trump dynasty), and historical events from the interwar period in Germany. The author explores how father’s absence, attachment, contemporary parenting trends and digital escapism can increase risk of behavioral difficulties and criminality, and susceptibility to hyper-masculine ideals and authoritarian “strongmen”.
Keywords: masculinity, father function, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, attachment theory, gang crime, fascism, gender roles, behavioral disorders, father’s absence
Friendship as a Way of Life: A Queer-Theoretical Analysis of Geoffroy de Lagasnerie’s Concept of Friendship
By Kjerstin Aukrust and Vebjørn Negård Kløgetvedt
This article analyses French sociologist Geoffroy de Lagasnerie’s essay 3. Une aspiration au dehors, focusing on the author’s concept of friendship and the political project he builds around it. Drawing on his friendship with Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis, Lagasnerie describes la vie-à-trois as a radical alternative to the family and coupledom, centred on principles such as a practice of synchronisation, an ethics of availability, and loyalty. Friendship is understood as an anti-institutional and anti-conservative relationship that increases social mobility and personal autonomy. Through a queer-theoretical close reading, the article highlights both the liberating potential and the problematic blind spots in Lagasnerie’s thinking, which hardly engages with queer theory. His stringent distinction between friendship and family is criticized, as is his emphasis on autonomy at the expense of care and vulnerability. By applying perspectives from queer kinship studies, the article discusses whether Lagasnerie’s emphasis on autonomy and the public sphere in the construction of friendship may reproduce masculine and class-based ideals. The article concludes that Lagasnerie’s friendship project has a queer potential and that, despite its limitations, it contributes to illuminating relational power and self-determination beyond the definitional power of the state and the family.
Keywords: Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, friendship, queer theory, queer kinship, anti-familialism, Édouard Louis, Didier Eribon, relational self-determination
“We Women Students Should Also Have the Opportunity”: Establishing Women’s Student Gymnastics at the University of Kristiania in 1898
By Erlend Hem
In November 1897, a group of female students at the University of Kristiania applied for permission to establish their own gymnastics classes. Although women had enjoyed full access to university studies since 1884, most organized leisure activities at the university were still reserved for men. The aim of this article is to examine how the establishment of a separate gymnastics group for female students formed part of the development of women’s place at the university. I have examined the archives of the Academic Council at the University of Oslo and searched for material on academic women’s sports in the National Library of Norway’s digital library. The application from the female students was approved, and in March 1898 gymnastics instruction began under the leadership of a female instructor. Participation was limited, but the level of engagement was high. The initiative to establish separate gymnastics classes for female students marks an early step in the development of academic women’s sports in Norway. The establishment illustrates how, over the course of a few years, women entered new arenas at the university, both physically and socially. The initiative demonstrates how female students actively shaped their own experiences of university life and gradually challenged established boundaries for women’s participation within the institution.
Keywords: academic women’s sports, barriers, gender norms, university life, female students, physical activity, social positioning
Read the full issue at Scandinavian University Press (scup.com)
DOI: 10.18261/issn.1891-1781