NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research

14/10/2025

Special Issue Call for Abstracts: “Ellen Key and Feminist Thought of Eastern, South-Eastern, and Central Europe: Critical Approach to Transnational Knowledge Production”

Guest Editor: Yuliya Yurchuk, Associate Professor of History of Ideas, Södertörn University

More info here: https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/ellen-key-and-feminist-thought-of-eastern-south-eastern-and-central-europe/

The year 2026 will mark a centennial after Ellen Key’s (1849-1926) death. NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research - will dedicate a special issue to a critical approach to Ellen Key’s legacy within the feminist thought and feminist movement in Eastern, South-Eastern, and Central Europe.
Ellen Key was a key figure in the history of feminist thought in the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her ideas about women, marriage, motherhood, gender equality, upbringing and education, interior design and the ways of living shaped not only the feminist discourse of her time but also the intellectual discussions at large. While Key’s influence is well-documented in Western European and North American feminist circles, less attention has been given to her reception and intellectual legacy in Eastern, South-Eastern, and Central Europe. This special issue seeks to address this gap by looking at the transnational networks that carried her ideas across borders, the ways in which these ideas were refracted through local political, cultural, and social contexts, and how they shaped feminist thought in the region.
We welcome contributions that critically examine how Key’s works were circulated, received, interpreted, and adapted in the diverse and politically turbulent regions of Eastern, South-Eastern, and Central Europe during Ellen Key’s life and after her death. By this issue, NORA will connect developments of the feminist thought and feminist movements in Nordic countries with the feminist intellectual discussions and feminist and women’s movements in Eastern, South-Eastern, and Central Europe.

12/09/2025

Call for Host Institutions for NORA Conference:

21/08/2025

We are back after the summer break with the newest NORA Issue coordinated by Yulia Gradskova and Maria Zirra:

Volume 33, Issue 2 of NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research

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

10/04/2025

Meet Maria Zirra, NORA's new Editor!

Maria is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at Stockholm University and at Uppsala University. Her research investigates connections between literature and visual arts in literary magazines from Southern Africa and the Caribbean. She is particularly interested in women editors and the participation of female artists in literary magazines. She has published articles on feminist new materialism and poetry, illustrated periodicals and postcolonial theory. Most recently, she has been working on white masculinities and complicities with apartheid and colonialism. She is also developing a project on fatness studies and the body in magazine archives.

20/03/2025

Meet Mateusz Miesiac, NORA's new Book Review Editor!

Mateusz is Ph.D. Candidate in Gender Studies at Södertörn University in Stockholm. He has a background in comparative literary and media studies and works across life writing, digital cultures, masculinity studies, and bi+sexualities research. As part of his doctoral project, he is currently establishing Bi+ Men's Digital Life Writing Archive (biarkiv.se), where bi+ men can share their auto/biographical accounts of their experiences, thoughts, fantasies, and perspectives on how bi+sexualities and masculinities affect and shape their lives.

10/03/2025

Meet Maria Brock, NORA's new Editor!

Maria is currently Principal Investigator of the Baltic Sea Foundation-funded project "Networked Misogyny in Sweden, Germany and Russia: Articulations, Intersections and Transnational Flows", based at the Department of Media And Communication Studies at Södertörn University. Maria's research interests and expertise include gender and sexuality, digital media and communication, and memory, nationhood and representation.

07/03/2025

Meet Yulia Gradskova, NORA's new Editor!

Yulia is Associate Professor in History. She is Research Coordinator at the Center for Baltic and East European Studies and Senior Researcher at the Department of Gender Studies, Södertörn University. Her research interests include postsocialist gender history (in particular, politics of motherhood), transnational history and women’s internationalism during the Cold War as well as decolonial perspective on Soviet politics of emancipation of “woman of the East”.

Her last book is "The Women’s International Democratic Federation, the Global South and the Cold War. Defending the Rights of Women of the ‘Whole World’?" (Routledge 2021). Gradskova is the author of "Soviet Politics of Emancipation of Ethnic Minority Women. Natsionalka" (Springer, 2018) and co-editor of several books, including "Gendering Postsocialism. Old Legacies and New Hierarchies" (Routledge 2018, with Ildiko Asztalos Morell) and "Gender Equality on a Grand Tour. Politics and Institutions – the Nordic Council, Sweden, Lithuania and Russia" (Brill, 2017 – with E. Blomberg, Y. Waldemarson and A. Zvinkliene).

05/03/2025

NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Studies migrates to Sweden for the years 2025 & 2026

Meet Ramona Dima, the new Editor-in-chief!

Ramona is Lecturer in Gender Studies at Södertörn University and holds a PhD from the University of Bucharest. Her publications and topics of interest include q***r culture, sexuality and migration, and LGBT+ activism. Since 2014, she has been collaborating with her life and work partner in developing a video and performance-based art practice. She is the initiator and co-organiser of QueerFemSEE international conference. Apart from her work for NORA, Ramona is also Executive Editor of Feminist Critique Journal.

12/12/2023

The call for papers for the 7th Nordic Challenges Conference is now open! Submit your proposals by 1 February 2024.

Looking forward to seeing you in Reykjavik!

The 7th Nordic Challenges Conference “Uncertain Futures: Nordic (In-)Securities, New Geopolitics and Societal Ruptures“ invites paper proposals, deadline is 1 February, 2024.

06/12/2023

New open access article : “You Don’t Want to Be One of Those stories” Gossip and Shame as Instruments of Social Control in Small Communities by Gréta Bergrún Jóhannesdóttir and Unnur Dis Skaptadóttir.

This paper examines how gossip and shame are a part of gendered social control in small villages/towns in Iceland, and how it affects young women’s lives. The analysis shows that slut-shaming and the fear of shame control women’s behaviour and sexual activities.

Enjoy!

Small, tight-knit communities often have the image of being places that are full of gossip and where everybody knows each other’s business. This closeness can be claustrophobic for individuals who ...

06/12/2023

🥁 Just published! Open Access Reading 👉 Interview with Anna G. Jónasdóttir on love power!

Published in NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research (Vol. 31, No. 4, 2023)