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Abstracts of doctoral theses

Some of the English abstracts of completed doctoral dissertations can be read here. Abstracts in Finnish

Former students with doctor's degree

Aaltonen, Sanna (HY): Girls, boys and sex-based harassment. Public defence of the doctoral thesis: December, 1st, 2006.

Honkanen, Katriina (University of Utrecht, NL): Historicizing as a Feminist Practice.The Places of History in Judith Butler’s Constructivist Theories. Public defence of the doctoral thesis: November 10, 2004.

Kantola, Johanna (University of Bristol, UK): Gender and the State: Comparisons of Feminist Discourses in Finland and Britain.

Kinnunen, Tiina (University of Tampere): 'Eine der Unseren' und 'Königin im neuen Reiche der Frau'. Die Rezeption Ellen Keys in der Frauenbewegung des deutschen Kaiserreichs.

Koivunen, Anu (University of Turku): Performative Histories, Foundational Fictions. Gender and Sexuality in Niskavuori Films. (Abstract in Finnish.)

Komulainen, Katri (University of Joensuu): Kotihiiriä ja ihmisiä. Retorinen minä naisten koulutusta koskevissa elämän- kertomuksissa. (Abstract in Finnish.)

Kupiainen, Tarja (University of Joensuu): Kertovan kansanrunouden nuori nainen ja nuori mies. (Young Women and Young Men in the Finnish Epic Tradition.) Public defence of the doctoral thesis: November 27, 2004.

Löyttyniemi, Varpu (University of Tampere): Auscultatio Medici: Kerrottu identiteetti, neuvoteltu sukupuoli. (Auscultatio Medici: Narrating Identity, Negotiating Gender.)

Masso, Iivi (University of Helsinki): Democratic Legitimacy and the Politics of Rights.

Paasonen, Susanna (University of Turku): Figures of Fantasy: Women, Cyberdiscourse and the Popular Internet.

Palin, Tutta (University of Turku): Oireileva miljöömuotokuva. Yksityiskohdat sukupuoli- ja säätyhierarkian haastajina.(The Symptomatics of the Milieu Portrait. Detail in the Service of the Challenging of Gender and Class Hierarchies.)

Tuomaala, Saara (University of Helsinki): Työtätekevistä käsistä puhtaiksi ja kirjoittaviksi. Suomalaisen oppivelvollisuuskoulun ja maalaislasten kohtaaminen 1921–1939. (From working hands to clean and writing hands. Encounters between Finnish compulsory education and rural children, 1921-1939.) Public defence of the doctoral thesis: November 27, 2004.

Virkki, Tuija (University of Jyväskylä): Vihan voima. Toimijuus ja muutos vihakertomuksissa. (The Power of Anger. Agency and Change in Hate stories.) Public defence of the doctoral thesis: November 13, 2004.

Vuori, Jaana (University of Turku): Äidit, isät ja ammattilaiset. Sukupuoli, toisto ja muunnelmat asiantuntijoiden kirjoituksissa. (Mothers, Fathers and Professionals. Gender, Repetition and Variety in Expert Texts.)

Östman, Ann-Catrin (Åbo Akademi University): Mjölk och jord. Om kvinnlighet, manlighet och arbete i ett österbottniskt jordbrukssamhälle ca 1870-1940.

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Aaltonen, Sanna: 2006:

Girls, Boys and Sex-Based Harassment

In this research I ask what is interpreted as sex-based harassment by 15-16-year old girls and boys. By sex-based harassment I refer to one-sided, unwanted attention that is based on gender and that makes the target feel embarrassed, frightened, hurt or angry. My focus is not on the most overt cases of harassment but rather on everyday encounters. While young people differentiate between harassing and non-harassing attention, at the same time they define, assign value to and construct differences and power relations on the basis of gender, age and ethnicity, for example.

My main data consists of essays (N 104, 54 girls, 54 boys) and thematic interviews (N 14; 20 girls, 3 boys) of ninth graders of a secondary school in Helsinki. In the essays and interviews, students construe the border between pleasant and unpleasant, tolerable and intolerable attention as clear in principle, but, they suggest that in practice this border is ambivalent, negotiable and contextual. The interpretations of incidents are justified by referring to features of the target, the scene or the perpetrator.

Targets of harassment are most often construed as being girls who are characterized as thin-skinned, but at the same time they are expected to be understanding toward any sex-based attention they may get, particularly when it is not physical. On the other hand, girls are regarded as equal and even active participants in incidents of harassment. Such statements include considerations of how girls either reject or invite particular kinds of attention by their actions and outward appearance.

Forms of harassment, ways of understanding it as well as overcoming it vary according to spatial context. By situating incidents in different spaces and places, young people contrast their experiences with ordinary and predictable non-harassment that takes place e.g. in discos and unusual and unexpected harassment that takes place e.g. in the city streets in the daytime.

The behaviour of boys harassing a girls is naturalized by appealing to young masculinity and the childishness but also strong sexual drive which is seen as characteristic of teenage boys. On the other hand, sex-based harassment is racialized and pathologized in ways that separate the phenomenon from young, Finnish, "normal" masculinity.

Both the material experiences of the young people and the definitions of the parties involved in harassing incidents are gendered. Girls encounter and deal with sexualized commenting and unwanted approaches much more often and in a more intensive way than boys. Furthermore, there is a vast cultural repertoire of acceptable accounts that can be mobilised in order to excuse male harassers, to critically evaluate the appearance or action of the female targets and to divide the responsibility between the female target and the male perpetrator.

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Kantola, Johanna 2004:

Gender and the State: Comparisons of Feminist Discourses in Finland and Britain

The thesis focuses on feminist discourses about the state. It examines feminist discourses in two contexts, Finland and Britain, and in two debates, childcare and violence against women. The thesis explores the ways in which feminist discourses construct the state within these specific debates and the meanings that these constructions have for feminist engagements with the state. The objective is to develop feminist perspectives on the state. The thesis argues that this can be done by combining Nordic feminist and poststructural feminist perspectives on the state, which requires focusing on differences between and differences within states. Theoretically, the thesis combines discourse analysis with comparative analysis by way of developing feminist comparative discourse analysis. The thesis situates the states in the changing institutional context and studies the states in a multi-level governance framework by focusing upon devolution in Scotland (substate) and the European Union (suprastate). The aim is to understand feminist engagements with the state in these two countries and to inquire what we can learn from the similarities and the differences between the two debates in the two countries. In particular, the comparisons challenge the women-friendliness of the Finnish welfare state and expose the ways in which the discourse is constructed and maintained. The thesis shows that the more traditional feminist perspectives on the state fail to deal with the issues and complexities addressed in the thesis.

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Kupiainen, Tarja 2004:

Kertovan kansanrunouden nuori nainen ja nuori mies. (Young Women and Young Men in the Finnish Epic Tradition.)

My research focuses on representations of young women and young men, and also on the wider issue of gender in an epic tradition. In constructing my approach to the topic, I have applied feminist theories and methodologies, especially feminist anthropology and feminist folklore studies. Judith Butler’s notions of gender performances and drag as revolutionary, along with Luce Irigaray’s mimetic strategy, have provided some of the key conceptual tools for analysing the epic tradition. Sara Heinämaa’s phenomenological studies and remarks on the interpretative processes have also inspired applications that exist in a specific kind of material, that is, the Kalevala-metre folk epic: this epic tradition has spread throughout Ingria in the south, Karelia in the east, and Finland in the west. The starting-point of my study will be provided by the task of constructing a feminist study of folklore as once asserted by Aili Nenola. In sum, it is my intention to deconstruct the representations of women and men in the Kalevala-metre epic tradition.

I have approached my research topic in the context of several epic songs that deal with young women and men from different perspectives. The texts were originally collected in the nineteenth century in Karelia and Ingria and published in the Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot (SKVR; “Ancient Poems of the Finnish People”). Obviously, the same verses can acquire different meanings and interpretations in differing contexts. In my study I have, indeed, attempted to prove that the analytical viewpoint itself tends to influence the analytical process. The conventional way of reading the poems provides strongly male-centred results that strengthen the consensus: the tradition establishes the status quo, and masculine values remain untouched – the male does undoubtedly take precedence over the female. In my research, I have interpreted the poems through the eyes of others, and from a feminist point of view.

I have also examined the gendered meanings of two particular localities of Finnish Karelian mythology: Pohjola and Saari. Both Pohjola and Saari have been considered to be feminine. The leader of Pohjola is a strong female character, and Saari is the hiding-place of male heroes who – according to folk narratives – sleep with every woman there. The cultural attributes of Pohjola and Saari also underline their otherness. However, it is necessary to reconsider the terms of femininity and masculinity before labelling the localities, since male-femininity and female-masculinity complicate the whole issue. In general, the gender of tradition does not depend solely on the sex of the performers or the leading characters. Both Pohjola and Saari convey complex gendered meanings that cannot be reduced to either gender. Nonetheless, the interpretations attached to them tend to label them as feminine.

Throughout my study my effort has been to discover breaking points in the male-centred frame of interpretation and consensus. If we question gender and discuss the gender of tradition it is possible to consider and uncover the breaking points of tradition.

A poem that concerns an incestuous relationship between siblings is the starting point or key text of my study. In Finnish the poem is entitled Sisaren turmelus, which I have translated as the Ruined Sister Poem. The poem reveals the unhappy faith of a sister and brother who accidentally end up sleeping with each other. I have considered the incest taboo in the study of culture to reveal some of the cultural meanings of sibling incest. According to the Finnish folk narrative, to sleep with his sister is disastrous for a brother: it is worse than to kill a man. The tradition provides the brother with the opportunity to survive, but the sister is left with no possibility of survival. In fact, the tradition silences the faith of the sister. For this reason I have attempted to solve the mystery of the sister’s faith through examining other young women in folk poetry. My intention has been to uncover the gap within the tradition – to examine something that the tradition forgets and silences. To this end, I have studied in detail two different versions of the Ruined Sister Poem. The first was sung by a female (Maria Luukka), and the second by a male (Miihkali Perttunen). A woman singer emphasises different elements than a man, and in my study I have demonstrated that some of this emphasis can be explained through the gender of tradition.

I have also found it necessary to display the family relations in the Kalevala-metre folk poetry, not only in epic but also in lyric songs, to reveal the various roles played by a young girl and woman in the family context; she is a daughter, a sister, the object of men’s lust, a wife, a sister or a daughter-in-law. She can play several roles at the same time, and many of those are connected with the brother. According to Malinowski’s theory of marriage, the sister remains at the centre of everything that is sexually forbidden to her brother. The role of a bride’s brother is also worth noticing: in Ingrian wedding rituals the future of a married sister is dependent on her brother. If a bride receives lucky shoes from her brother during the wedding rites, her future will be secure.

The Ruined Sister Poem also reveals a specific representation of a young man who is not a conventional folktale or role model for the community, someone to be admired or identified with. He is not an independent person but highly dependent on his mother. He does not measure his strengths or capabilities with any other man or male hero. He has to manage his interactions with women. We find his parallel in the Finnish national epic Kalevala: Kalevala’s Kullervo is also a sister’s seducer. According to the versions of the Ruined Sister Poem that were sung in the Kalevalaic singing area of Viena (Archangel) Karelia, the parallels between Kalevala’s Kullervo and the sister’s seducer in the folk poetry are obvious. Both characters face their fatal turning points in their interactions with women. They both lose their family and societal associations because of a woman. The woman even ridicules them and questions their masculinity and masculine sexuality. Their fall is their own sister: after sleeping with one’s own sister there is no way back, no real solution, yet tradition appears to open up for the brother – but not for the sister – the opportunity to survive the incident.

Female sexuality has often been seen as dangerous, especially if it is not under communal control. We can find similar tendencies in the Kalevala-metre poetry. The tendency is obvious in the Ruined Sister and the Hanged Maid (Hirttäytynyt neito) poems, where a young girl meets her seducer or suitor outside her home area. A girl is safe at home, but defenceless outside it. Not only her sexuality but her whole essence are vulnerable when she is outside the home; the poems underline this by destroying both maidens. One girl hangs herself and the other’s destiny is simply to vanish: if nobody thinks or talks about you, you do not exist.

Both poems can be interpreted as moral narratives. They remind young girls about the dangers outside the home or beyond the shelter provided by the community. The sister seduced by her brother seems to have no other alternative but to die. She has been her brother’s victim but comes to be treated as the guilty one; she has placed her community under threat and deserves to be silenced. But alternatives exist in the faith of the hanged girl: according to one narrative, she also dies, but her death is not in vain. By dying she makes a better future possible and encourages more opportunities for the young maidens of future generations, and the tears of the grieving mother are shown to be ultimately fertile. Leafy trees, birds, and streaming rivers arise from her tears to keep her daughter’s memory alive. Thus, as I have shown in my study, if we retell and reconsider the story of the ruined sister we break the tradition of silence.

Within the context of the woman’s multiple roles that she plays in the family, her role as her brother’s sister appears important. I have examined in some detail the poem Oljamissa käynti, the Former Daughter’s Visit to Her Previous Home. We need to say “former” because in the context of Ingrian Kalevala-metre folk poetry a woman loses her status as a daughter once she enters into a marriage. However, in her own mind she would still like to be the loved daughter and sister, and not merely the accused wife and oppressed daughter-in-law. A poem about a visit to a childhood home displays the situation in its full cruelty: no one welcomes the former daughter, who is only offered inedible food and miserable beer. Her childhood home is no longer hers. It is, above all, the brother’s wife who is to blame for mistreating her husband’s sister.

With regard to the gender of tradition, in the course of my study I have found it worth asking about who benefits if women are set up against each other. The poetry is interesting in that it displays the situation from the sister’s – the woman’s – point of view, but the ultimate solution seems to be a strengthening of the cultural order of the genders and of the position of men.

The poem named Tytärten hukuttaja, the Daughter-Killer Mother, displays the complex relations that exist between family members in an extended family. The sisters have been looking after their brother, who would want to find a spouse, but no girl will marry him because of his unwed sisters. The mother decides to drown her own daughters in order to obtain a daughter-in-law, a wife for her son. The newly-wed bride turns out to be a poor worker and cannot fulfil her duties as a daughter-in-law. The mother regrets the murder of her daughters but cannot get her children back: they now belong to the sea.

Similarly, the poem of the Sold Maid (Myyty neito) illustrates family relations. At the beginning of the poem, a sister asks her brother for an area of field so that she could grow flax to make linen. Reluctantly, the brother gives her a tiny piece of barren land, but he also provides his sister with an opportunity to practise an independent line of agriculture. The sister succeeds in making the field flourish, but she cannot keep her field because her family sells her as a spouse to strangers. Thus, the position of the young woman in the poem is complex. According to the poem, the maiden cannot own a field so as to practise her own independent business – she is always oppressed by others. But I have also demonstrated that the poem can be read differently, from a feminist perspective, and that it can be considered a sign of women’s wishes and possibilities. It was not the woman’s own wish to get married, but she has been forced to do so because she lacks real alternatives. According to the poem, the woman can manage on her own as soon as she is given the opportunity.

Another interesting character in the Finnish epic poetry is the woman who occupies the masculine role by acting violently. In the poem named Sulhasensa kylvettäjä, the Husband-Bathing Wife, the woman batters her husband until he dies. If we consider the poem in the context of the numerous lyric texts in which a man beats his wife, we may notice its irony. The woman imitates masculine behaviour by exaggerating it. But something remains untouched: the gendered division of labour. However, the poem undermines the roles and action models of women and men.

I have approached traditional representations of the young man by studying a male character who interacts with women. Because I have made the Ruined Sister Poem my key-text, I have chosen the character commonly known as Kullervo, and the poetry attached to him, as the object of my examination. The poems are: Kalevanpojan kosto (The Revenge of the Kaleva-Boy), Sisaren turmelus (The Ruined Sister), and the poem of Untamo and Kalervo, which also contains the common mythic theme of fratricide. I have shown that the culminating points in Kullervo’s life circle are women: he is ridiculed by a woman and his manhood is questioned; he also has an incestuous relationship with his sister. In addition, I have also paid attention to aspects of women’s laughter related to Kullervo. His employer is a woman, and he has to submit to female power. Furthermore, his employer makes him break his multiply precious knife and, from his perspective, he is wounded by the woman’s laughter. Kullervo is not the only male hero ridiculed by a woman. The eternal wise-man Väinämöinen and the other shaman, Lemminkäinen also meet a woman, a young maid who ridicules them (Vellamon neidon onginta; The Angling of the Maid Vellamo). I have examined the revolutionary potency of women’s laughter with a view to discovering whether it is possible to locate a new order of genders within the power of female laughter? My conclusion is that revolutionary laughter can make the oppressed feel more powerful. In laughter the oppressed sex or class can find new opportunities to cope with a world where mainstream values normally work against them.

I have also examined the gaps and breaks in the tradition in my attempts to provide the muted with a voice. My intention has been to discover the gender of tradition. In conclusion, it is obvious that the tradition predominantly serves the benefit of men, and therefore the tradition should be regarded as masculine. In my study I have, further, demonstrated that most published interpretations have been made from the male perspective, although they have typically been presented as neutral. If one disregards gender as a tool in the interpreting process, interpretation tends to become gender-blind and conventional in ways that eventually serve the interests of the consensus and of masculine mainstream values. Nevertheless, in my study I have concluded that quite frequently the poems themselves are not self-evidently masculine in their gender. Frequently, they are, rather, feminine – or they can at least be read as feminine texts. Sometimes the poems not only question male-dominated mainstream culture but also the exclusivity of heterosexuality, a form of hetero-normativity. Finally, I have proved that a permanent element in feminine folk poetry is the woman’s yearning to determine her own life.

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Löyttyniemi, Varpu 2004:

Auscultatio Medici: Kerrottu identiteetti, neuvoteltu sukupuoli. (Auscultatio Medici: Narrating Identity, Negotiating Gender.) Faculty of Medicine, School of Public Health, University of Tampere, Finland

This doctoral research dates back to the unemployment spell that actualised among the Finnish medical profession during the economic depression in the early 1990s. The unemployment rates among physicians never rose very high, but the benign outcome was not known when estimations were made about thousands of doctors out of work by the end of the century. There was a lively discussion about the topic where unemployment was given the meanings of threat and forced change. In this research, the meanings that physicians gave to unemployment are scrutinised. However, the focus is on the physician’s identity more generally, and the period of actual unemployment in the early 1990s is considered to be a historical moment when physicians and the medical profession faced questions that were crucial to their identity: What is the meaning of work to a physician? What is the meaning of uniformity to the profession? By answering these questions doctors negotiated the grounds of the profession and professional – and a professional’s personal – identity. In this study, these negotiations are auscultated.

The research question as a broad problem-field thus concerns physician’s identity as a multivoiced dialogue between individuals and the (professional) culture. The approach is narrative. Besides unemployment, the question of multiplicity is concretised through two other research themes: physician’s sex or gender, and narrative methodology. What features of doctoring emerge in light of the premise that sex makes a difference to a physician’s identity, career, and life story? How does a doctor’s story sound when it is listened to as polyphonic, voiced by different physician figures? At the same time, analytical methods are developed that enable the researcher to focus on the multiple and gendered aspects of autobiographical and other kinds of narrative data.

The research material includes 1) young physicians’ oral life stories, 2) texts about unemployment that were published in the Finnish Medical Journal and The Junior Physician (Nuori lääkäri) between 1991–1995, and 3) young physicians’ short career descriptions that were collected with an open question that was included in the last questionnaire of a follow-up survey in 1998. Of these, the life stories are the material in four (out of six) articles included in this doctoral thesis. 30 doctors who had graduated in 1995 from two Finnish medical faculties were asked to tell their life stories in the context of a research interview. Unemployment was not suggested to the narrators as their point of view but instead, the question is what are the meanings of uncertainty to the doctors who were faced with it during their medical education and the early years of their professional careers.

In the six articles, the empirical and methodological considerations are intertwined. The empirical results concerning professional identity can be summarized as six dialogues and potential identity dilemmas that are 1) the negotiation between life or career control on the one hand and letting go with the flow of life on the other, 2) the relation of economic efficiency demands to professionality, 3) the reconciliation of work/career and family, 4) the autobiographical definitions of ethics and commitment, 5) the dialogue between a critical attitude and trust, and 6) the fragility of the physician’s own material body.

In this summary section, an image of the mythical doctor is created based on previous literature. The mythical doctor is rational, stable, and firm. He(sic!) is mentally strong and physically invulnerable, as if he was in control of the whole phenomenon of illness both materially and intellectually. He commits to his work, which is the central theme of his life (story). His career progress is steady and continuous. To him, the professional status and personal esteem are a main concern, and he would not do things that challenge the scientific and ethical basis of the profession. Individual doctors seldom adopt this myth as their models as such. Yet the myth provides them with the norm or expectation concerning their doctors’ lives and stories. The myth claims to be acknowledged and questioned at the same time; it multivoices the physician. The empirical results of this research, the dialogues and dilemmas of being a doctor, can be heard as reactions to the all-demanding myth.

As to gender, it is essential that the myth is displayed noting how its implications are different to a woman and a man. The physician traditionally presented by professional theory and ideology is taken to be sexless. Yet he is by implication male when professional career is conceptualised as an autonomous structure that is not penetrated or disturbed by other life spheres and commitments. The expectation of commitment to work has different meanings to a physician who has children depending on if (s)he is the mother or father as the family is still considered to be a female responsibility. However, the autobiographical narratives in this research do hint at the fact that fathers, too, are challenging the myth, partly empowered by the ideologies of gender equality and new fatherhood. In this doctoral study, the autobiographical approach is chosen in order to question the mythical priority of the career and to make visible the different ways in which doctors commit themselves to career, family, and other people and affairs of consequence.

The developments of narrative analytical methodology include the concept of key dialogue and the method of wondering. When interpreting the key dialogue of a personal story and the narrated self, a key episode is first located. In key episodes, the linguistic evaluation is thickened and the substantial voices of the self meet. Key episodes are the moments of integration of the self in the narrative, yet the emphasis put on multivoicedness reminds that the purpose of personal stories is not only to create the coherence of the self but, also, to express and manage multiple, partly contradictory selves and experiences. Key dialogues of narrated selves take place between integration and disintegration, between unity and difference, and they consist of the substance of the many voices and the rhythm of their involvement.

The method of wondering stretches the field of narrative studies into the direction of phenomenology. The notion of wonder draws on Luce Irigaray’s writings. In wondering, the researcher attempts to suspend her or his customary conceptions and natural ways of feeling and observing in order to create space for the narrator to appear different from those conceptions, which include the cultural expectations about the different sexes as well as conventional conceptions of professional identity and career. In Irigaray’s ethics of sexual differece it is essential that the difference between woman and man, feminine and masculine, is not seen as dichotomous or hierarchic. In the research at hand, the same non-hierarchic difference is suggested between different kinds of medical careers and different ways of being a physician. Both notions of key dialogue and wondering put into scientific practice the emphasis on dialogue, which refers both to the multivoicedness of narratives and identities and to the negotiations of identity and gender between the one who narrates and the one who listens.

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Masso, Iivi Anna 2006:

Democratic Legitimacy and the Politics of Rights is a research in normative political theory, based on comparative analysis of contemporary democratic theories, classified roughly as conventional liberal, deliberative democratic and radical democratic. Its focus is on the conceptual relationship between alternative sources of democratic legitimacy: democratic inclusion and liberal rights. The relationship between rights and democracy is studied through the following questions: are rights to be seen as external constraints to democracy or as objects of democratic decision making processes? Are individual rights threatened by public participation in politics; do constitutionally protected rights limit the inclusiveness of democratic processes? Are liberal values such as individuality, autonomy and liberty; and democratic values such as equality, inclusion and popular sovereignty mutually conflictual or supportive? Analyzing feminist critique of liberal discourse, the dissertation also raises the question about Enlightenment ideals in current political debates: are the universal norms of liberal democracy inherently dependent on the rationalist "grand narratives" of modernity and incompatible with the ideal of diversity?

Part I of the thesis introduces the sources of democratic legitimacy as presented in the alternative democratic models. Part II analyses how the relationship between rights and democracy is theorized in them. Part III contains arguments by feminists and radical democrats against the tenets of universalist liberal democratic models and responds to that critique by partly endorsing, partly rejecting it. The central argument promoted in the thesis is that while the deconstruction of modern rationalism indicates that rights are political constructions as opposed to externally given moral constraints to politics, this insight does not delegitimize the politics of universal rights as an inherent part of democratic institutions. The research indicates that democracy and universal individual rights are mutually interdependent rather than oppositional; and that democracy is more dependent on an unconditional protection of universal individual rights when it is conceived as inclusive, participatory and plural; as opposed to robust majoritarian rule.

The central concepts are: liberalism, democracy, legitimacy, deliberation, inclusion, equality, diversity, conflict, public sphere, rights, individualism, universalism and contextuality. The authors discussed are e.g. John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, Iris Young, Chantal Mouffe and Stephen Holmes. The research focuses on contemporary political theory, but the more classical work of John S. Mill, Benjamin Constant, Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt is also included.

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Paasonen, Susanna 2002:

Ever since the early 1990s, the Internet has been invested with the promises of overcoming the confines of space, time and identity. Named "cyberspace," the Internet has been narrated as a realm of freedom and possibilities that is detached from the conditions and norms of everyday life. When looking at the popular forms of the Internet, however, such promises appear ungrounded and owing to the attraction of narrative rather than the uses of the medium.

Figures of Fantasy looks at the formations and implications of such cyberdiscourse: the ways in the Internet has been articulated as cyberspace and as a field of contemporary media culture, and how the category of women has been debated and made to signify in the process. The study analyses conceptions of (dis)embodiment and identity, as articulated in relation to both feminist theory and appropriations of cybernetics, and especially the ways in which the relations between women and technology have been figured of.

Arguing for a textual approach to studying the Internet, Susanna Paasonen analyses the figures through which the Internet and gender alike become conceptualised and explained. These figures consist of visual representations and rhetorical figures (of speech), ones employed in media studies and products of popular culture, including browser interfaces, guide books, fictions, newspaper articles and popular events.

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Palin, Tutta 2004:

Oireileva miljöömuotokuva. Yksityiskohdat sukupuoli- ja säätyhierarkian haastajina. (The Symptomatics of the Milieu Portrait. Detail in the Service of the Challenging of Gender and Class Hierarchies.) Taide Publishing Company Ltd, Helsinki. Diss. University of Turku, Finland, 2004.

During the 1880s and 1890s, a specific Nordic form of Naturalism was being developed, with a portrait type called the milieu portrait as one of its hallmarks in the field of painting. This concept (the nearest equivalent used in English being the French term portrait d’apparat) refers to portrait figures depicted in a characteristic environment, most often an interior scene. Palin’s study concentrates on the milieu portraits painted by Finnish artists, with the portrait of the French scientist Louis Pasteur, painted by Albert Edelfelt (1854–1905) in 1885 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), as its prototype. Other key painters include most notably Axel Gallén (later Gallen-Kallela, 1865–1931), Eero Järnefelt (1863–1937), Gunnar Berndtson (1854–1895) and Maria Wiik (1853–1928). A selection of Scandinavian and French portraiture has been used as comparative material, the most important names being Christian Krohg and Gustav Wentzel from Norway, Herman Norrman, Allan Österlind, Ernst Josephson and Richard Bergh from Sweden, and Viggo Johansen from Denmark.

A methodological and theoretical framework is provided by feminist close reading and reflections on the concept of the symptomatic or subversive detail. Concentrated attention is paid to unintentional details which make it possible to turn received readings inside out, such as gestures that express a sense of ambivalence regarding patriarchal power relationships. An accumulation of masculine gestures of authority, coupled with a paralyzing repetitiveness of the representation of women, underlines the rhetoric effectivity and constructed quality of these visual conventions. The obsessively detailed world of Naturalism is, thus, seen to ironize the more harmonious and coherent conception of social reality by earlier Realism.

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Raevaara, Eeva 2005:

Gender Equality and the Limits of Change - Gender Equality as a Political Problem in the Debates on Parity in France and Quotas in Finland. Helsinki. TANE-Publications 7, Ministry for Social Affairs and Health, Council for Gender Equality.

The study looks at the debates on gender equality in political decision-making in Finland and France in the 1990s and 2000s by analysing the argumentation for parité and quotas and the ways in which gender equality was constructed as a political problem. The focus of the study is on the parliamentary debates on the amendment of the electoral law in France in 2000 and the introduction of quota regulations into the Act on Equality in Finland in 1994-1995.

The debates ended in the adoption of quota regulations in the electoral lists (France) and in the executive and preparatory bodies at the national and the local level (Finland). Apart from the analysis of the parliamentary debates, the study explores the political processes preceding the adoption of legislation as well as the debates on quotas and parity in Finnish and French societies in the 1980s and 1990s. The debates on gender equality are analysed as the sites of struggle and change with regard to the normative boundaries of gender equality, as well as of politics and citizenship. The cross-cultural perspective gives room to explore the ways in which gender equality and change can be imagined in different national contexts, and which kinds of discursive resources are available for the politicization of gender equality. Specific attention is paid to the discursive frames and agenda settings in the debates and how these set the limits of the imaginable and the possible in the promotion of gender equality.

In both Finland and France, the promotion of equality was constructed as a national project, in which the main beneficiary was the society or the nation as a whole. In France, gender equality was an inherent part of the promotion of French democracy; in Finland, gender equality was regarded as a means to bring the expertise of both women and men to the benefit of the whole society. Furthermore, in both countries the promotion of gender equality was based on the harmonious cooperation of women and men and the temporal dimension of "nearly achieved" gender equality. In this kind of a context, gender equality served as a means towards the wider national ends, and there was little room to discuss the aspects of power and agency with regard to gender equality.

However, the internationalisation of equality politics, as well as the conflicting interpretations of gender equality in the national political arenas, calls into question the existence of clearly defined and immutable boundaries of "Finnish" and "French" gender equality. At the same time, the rules of the game in politics, including the meaning of French republicanism and Finnish "expert oriented" politics were contested. In this way, the new equality legislation and the preceding political processes played a part in the transformation of the limits of gender equality, politics and citizenship.

Keywords: gender equality - political decision-making - parity - gender quotas - public debate - Finland - France

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Tuomaala, Saara 2004:

Työtätekevistä käsistä puhtaiksi ja kirjoittaviksi. Suomalaisen oppivelvollisuuskoulun ja maalaislasten kohtaaminen 1921–1939. ( From working hands to clean and writing hands. Encounters between Finnish compulsory education and rural children, 1921–1939.) Bibliotheca Historica 89, SKS, Helsinki.

This study of the history of childhood examines rural childhood and its formation alongside modernization in Finland after the introduction of compulsory education in 1921. A central aspect of modernization in Finland was the intensive nationalization of childhood in the early 20th century, which I interpret through the intersection of micro and macro political processes. The early 20th–century in Finland is an interesting period for examining how rural childhood was made to conform to the modern concept of a pupil: during this period, national public education became a key social institution, which defined homes and families through their children. There is a gender and class perspective in my research. Primary school pedagogy and practices aimed at creating a heterosexual citizenship, developing into separate notions of the citizenship of boys and girls. Along with the bourgeois and agrarian civilizing project, citizenship of children in school was characterized by the enhancing scientific programs of medicine, hygiene and social politics. In the process, the dominant activity of agrarian and working-class children was transformed from physical labor to educational study.

In order to interpret the changes in Finnish childhood that coincided with the establishment of the compulsory education system, I study childhood in two rural localities, Paavola, in Northern Ostrobothnia; and Kivijärvi, in Central Finland. For my research material I interviewed 67 elderly narrators, most born in the 1910s and 1920s. I have used the narrative perspective in order to understand institutional interaction between the children, school, home, and village. In the study, narrativity is examined by means of intertextual reading: how the ideals and practices of citizenship are discernible in personal recollections, and above all, the identity narration therein. Intertextuality allows also a micropolitical interpretation of the sources as historical narratives, through which modernization of rural childhood and the meanings of compulsory education are illuminated. I combine my interpretation of interview materials gathered in the 1990s with archival documents and educational texts and other pedagogical materials from the 1920s and 1930s to create historical and political contextualizations.

Compulsory schooling and the concept of the schoolchild are approached as experiential narratives which are at the same time a societal process. Modernization, including popular education and nation-building, is analyzed also from the perspective of the individual subject, the household, and the community. While passing from rural home to school, children were influenced by complex transformations in their bodily and subjective agencies and ways of life. Phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty has referred to the presence of the past a layer, which shapes a subject’s repetitive and reinforced postures in special historical and social circumstances. In the historical study of childhood, there is reason to stress that even the life history of one person is made up of different subjectivities and body politics shaped at different times. The body-subject of a child, its freedom, limits, and circumstantialities are different from those of a youth, an adult, or an elderly person recalling her/his childhood.

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Virkki, Tuija 2004:

Vihan voima. Toimijuus ja muutos vihakertomuksissa. (The Power of Anger. Agency and Change in Hate stories.) Atena, Jyväskylä.

The purpose of this dissertation was to study the relationship between feelings of anger and agency in autobiographies. The data consists of 273 hate stories written to a writing competition called “The angry feelings in the turning points of my life”. The data was analysed thematically and with the help of ideas of the discursive and narrative analysis.

According to the theoretical standpoint of this study, the emotions are social phenomena and relational in nature. The language of emotion is social language of moral commentary upon our own and others’ actions in social relationships: it characterizes certain forms of action and social relations as insulting and anger provoking. It is our discourse about actions and social relations, and not about emotions themselves, that is critical to the creation of emotions.

The study focused on those hate stories that told about conflicts in intimate relationships. It came out that, first of all, anger is considered as a response to an insult or injustice. Anger is a past-focused emotion that is based in injustices in the past (for example in ones’s childhood). Secondly, some people seem to find strength in their anger. It was told that anger can be a source of power and a source of energy to make needed changes in one’s life and relationships. By telling about their anger in intimate relationships people criticize hierarchical and oppressive relationships between adults and children, men and women. Thus anger seems to be an emotion that has transformative power that may affect intimate relationships.

Keywords: emotion, anger, agency, constructive view, intimate relationships, gender, generation

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Vuori, Jaana 2001:

The research analyses the ways in which family experts perceive parenting as gendered action, as mothering and fathering, in their writings. The data consists of Finnish research, textbooks, guidebooks and popular literature on child rearing from the mid 1980’s to mid 1990’s. The texts are connected to a variety of disciplines, research traditions, professions and institutions.

The analysis of the data is placed in the context of the feminist debate on women’s agency as professionals and as mothers and to the debate started by Michel Foucault on the ‘governmentality’ of the modern society. These discussions investigate how the modern experts shape their objects’ agency and how lay-people analyse their own conduct guided by the experts and the concepts they have produced.

The research takes part in the contemporary debate performed by the texts on how the parent’s gender affects her or his tasks and relationship with the child. Two discourses are uncovered in the data that explicitly deal with the division of labour between women and men in parenting. The discourses are named “exclusive mothering” and “shared parenting”. The exclusive mothering discourse emphasises the woman’s innate character as the one who gives birth, takes care of children and is their primary nurturer. The discourse of shared parenting denies the absolute division between the female and male nurturing roles and suggests that men also should take more responsibility for the care of very young children and their nurture. In this sense these discourses and the different forms they take are not only discourses on parenting but also on gender meanings.

In light of the data analysed the position of the shared parenting discourse seems strong. When the exclusive mothering discourse builds a mother-centred understanding on caring and nurture, it is distinctly defensive and warns about the fathers’ too deep involvement in the mothers’ tasks. The shared parenting discourse often presents itself as a self-evident social reform program. There is no reason to regard the exclusive mothering discourse and the shared parenting discourse as totally opposing. They get their driving force in their reciprocal relationship: they contest one another, raise the same questions from different points of view and avoid the way the other is framing questions. Both discourses perceive both parenting and gender as the family’s internal issues.

In the current versions of both the exclusive mothering and the shared parenting discourse the father is a special point of interest and concern. The fathers are described in a more multifaceted way than the mothers. The talk about fathers is mostly positive and encouraging. Fatherhood is interpreted as an issue of the men’s individual choice and, at most, as the result of in-family negotiations.

The mother’s subjectivity is more ambivalent in both discourses that the father’s agency. Only a small part of the mothers’ agency described in the texts is taken up as consideration of women’s agency, as her experiences, thoughts, feelings and words. The mothers are looked at in a more objectifying way than the fathers.

Although the texts in the data clearly address men and speak to them, as a genre the texts on parenting and education largely work in the relationships between women. The father is constructed through women whether he is a man who shares all the work and responsibility in parenting with the mother equally or an another kind of man who works beside the nurturing mother, supports her and is marked by gender difference. Mothers and women professionals are called to give space for the father’s agency, to discreetly coax men into fatherhood, to help and support them. It is paradoxical that sharing the responsibility for parenting in the family between the mother and the father, which – at least in equality utopias – was to supposed lead to increased options for women, seems to lead to women’s growing responsibility.

The research makes use of the analytical tools in social scientific discourse analysis, rhetorical studies and M.A.K. Halliday's systemic-functional grammar. The methodological principles in the research consist of performativity, analysis of outer-textual contexts and emphasis on intertextuality.

Keywords: Motherhood, mothering, fatherhood, fathering, family expertise, ‘governmentality’, discourse analysis, critical linguistics, rhetorical analysis, intertextuality.

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