Wealth is often seen as an object of desire. That is, it is what desire desires and it comes to represent desire. The accumulation of wealth is commonly considered excessive and coming at the cost of environmental and corporeal needs. Such an account of wealth follows an either/or logic that produces a set of oppositional terms such as nature or culture, desire or need, wealth or necessity, luxury or survival. This article explores questions of wealth and desire via the 2018 film Crazy Rich Asians. It uses the lens of ornament to zoom in on how the film depicts the relationship between the natural and the artificial, winning and losing, and subject and object. It proposes a feminist ornamental approach to wealth and desire that reworks the either/or logic and the oppositional terms that undergird it. It argues that this approach allows for an analysis of the relation between race, gender, nature, style, wealth and desire beyond one of commodification or recognition, ownership or dispossession.

The concepts glass escalator and glass ceiling have been widely used in studies of gender and organisations. In this paper we propose a novel metaphor to describe and analyse gender segregation and discrimination, that of a glass funnel. This concept does not relate to men and women as groups in the sense of fixed collective entities, but rather shows how taken-for-granted distinctions between men and women are reiterated and promote men in a way that downgrades women. However, as gender intersects with other power structures, both men and women can be propelled down-wards through the funnelling motion made up of a market- oriented devaluation of the healthcare profession. Through an empirical investigation of the community of practice and gender regime of an upper secondary healthcare education programme in Sweden, we develop the glass funnel concept, an analytical tool aiming to open up for intersectional ana-lyses of healthcare education and work.

In this chapter, we provide an overview of masculinity in relation to technology, entrepreneurship and organizations connected to technology entrepreneurship. In doing so, we address how masculinity as an underlying gendered configuration of technology entrepreneurship, and particularly Big Tech, has been and can be conceptualized in masculinity studies, and how this kind of masculinity has taken centre stage as a dominant form of masculinity in global business masculinities, social media representations and films. We combine the elements of entrepreneurial and technology masculinities in order to address their importance for organizational forms and ideals. We also incorporate intersectional perspectives as far as they are applicable to the literature we review. We hint at the larger socio-cultural implications of the technoentrepreneurial masculinities that we outline. We want to emphasize, in particular, that the figuration of a hegemonic geek masculinity that we propose here needs to be contextualized within a wider frame of other gendered and racial inequalities in the tech industry. 

As part of a global trend of improving the societal impact and relevance of science, co-creative platforms for developing new knowledge and innovations are increasingly common in Sweden and internationally (Mauser et al, 2013; Owen et al, 2013; Reypens et al, 2016). This study investigates two Swedish cases – The Gender Academy and Gender Contact Point – in order to scrutinize if, and if so how, the societal impact of gender studies may be reinforced by platforms for academia-society collaboration. Previous studies in the field of social innovation help distinguish mechanisms for organizational and societal transformation in these constellations (Westley et al, 2017; Howaldt et al, 2018). Our study reveals that both platforms engage researchers and stakeholders in innovation processes of joint identification, exploration and solution of societal and organizational challenges, as is common in social innovation. Both struggle, however, to bridge the critical agenda of the researchers and the constructive agendas of the stakeholders. They do this by emphasizing the potential of gender studies to improve organizational competitiveness, innovativeness and attractiveness, on the one hand, while advancing academic knowledge on mechanisms for organizational and societal transformation, on the other.

The article examines how members of worker cooperatives articulated friendship as resistance against capitalist work relations. This elucidates relatively unexplored links between research on workplace friendships and resistance studies. Based on interviews with members from small Swedish worker co-ops, the analysis shows that the co-ops hinged their friendships on authenticity, but also valued friendship explicitly for its economic and political benefits. Yet, this ideal of authentic and equal friendships sat side by side with narratives of what the article calls 'friendship compliance'. This concept denotes how friendships may instil loyalty, reduce dissent and promote self-sacrifice. It is argued that while such compliance can be at odds with cooperative ideals, its expression in the worker co-ops studied here did not coincide with how the same mechanism has been described as operating in capitalist work organisations.

This chapter responds to the broad question of how gender and affect can be co-thought in studies of mobilities and transport. We regard transport and mobility systems as affective structures, where man–machine complexities are being performed. In this chapter, we exemplify these relations, focusing on how cyborgic entanglements of man–machine, transport and affective structures are staged, and enacted in selected historical, contemporary and future cases. We argue that emotion and affect are strong motivational powers that regulate how we travel, in what way we travel and how we appreciate different means of transportation. Last, we discuss whether the current and coming automatization of automobility can possibly disrupt rather than reify the historically strong connection between masculinity, the power of engines, speed and risk. Our question is: as the affective structures of automobility are anticipated to change when future forms of automobility will be more about “passengering” in automated and connected mobility systems, will this also fundamentally change the driver/technology relation?

This introductory chapter provides a rationale for the book, reviews some of the key theoretical underpinnings of posthumanism and new materialism and outlines how they have influenced feminist theorising in relation to debates about the subject, sex, gender, sexual difference, the body, affect, relationality, matter, agency, human and other-than-human entanglements, ecology and technology. The implications of these feminist engagements with posthumanism and new materialism for critical studies of men and masculinities are considered and a posthuman feminist critique of the subject of ‘Man’ as the ideal human is outlined. The authors reflect upon their own biographical intellectual and political journeys of engagement with these issues to ground these debates in their own shifting subjectivities. The chapter concludes with a guide to chapters by the contributors who, from a diverse range of disciplinary backgrounds, bring these theoretical perspectives to life in their own considerations of what posthumanism and new materialism mean for the ‘man question’.

This book brings together the emerging insights of what posthumanism, new materialism and affect theory mean for 'the man question'. The contributors to this book interrogate the question of how 'Man' as a gendered being is entangled with nature, culture, materiality and corporeality, and they explore ways to unsettle men's sense of sovereignty to decentre anthropocentric masculinity. Men have to move from the centre of privilege which grants them supremacy before they can open themselves to the decentred, embodied, affective, vulnerable and relational self that is necessary to embrace the posthuman. This book explores the extent to which this is possible. The book will be of interest to academics, students and scholars across a range of disciplines who are engaging with the intersections of feminist studies with posthumanism and new materialism, especially as they relate to critical studies of men and masculinities. Chapters on fathering, pornography, ageing, affect, embodiment, entanglements with technology and nature and the implications of these issues for changing men and masculinities and the politics of critical masculinity studies' engagement with posthuman feminisms will interest students and academics across these diverse disciplines. © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Ulf Mellström and Bob Pease. All rights reserved.

In this article, we look at how the politics of reproduction take form in Denmarkwhen people are denied access to IVF. Approaching IVF as a selectivereproductive technology, we explore IVF’s selective potential in terms ofreproductive governance and reproductive citizenship by analyzing decisions bythe Danish State Administration about whether people get access to IVF or not.For that purpose, we had access to assessments of people’s inability to parent thatare required by law in case doubts about a person’s ability to parent arise whenthey seek treatment with IVF in Denmark. Through this analysis, we identifythree parenthood and citizenship ideals that characterize reproductive governanceand the politics of reproduction in Denmark: (1) the medically sane/sober selfwhose parenting and societal decisions are not influenced by self-alteringmedical diagnoses and/or treatment, (2) the independent, capable, and productiveself that pursues a meaningful life in societal terms, and (3) the responsible selfthat actively invests into reproductive futures. Based on this analysis, we arguethat people are unduly excluded from reproduction if they are identified as notliving up to these ideals because of the intersections of their gendered, bodily,social, and economic positioning.

This forum has come about through a series of conversations and discussions over a period of time in 2021-2022. Our ambition was to bring together scholars from different disciplines and perspectives, hoping for mutual curiosity and dialogue. We invited the participants to the forum to consider the following question: “How can we understand the complex and often contradictory ways through which sexualities and capital are related to, shaped by, and constitutive of each other?” Due to restrictions and exigencies of the corona situation together with time zone obstacles, the conversation had different modes. The first part of the forum consisted of an online video-recorded conversation between M.E. O'Brien, Nat Raha and Grietje Baars. The conversation was moderated by Liu Xin and Mathias Klitgård. Laura Horn provided editorial support. Jin Haritaworn and Lisa Adkins then kindly sent their contributions to this conversation in writing. What you will read in the following is hence a conversation across three continents, which mixes synchronous and asynchronous elements, and which aims to show the strengths but also divergences and open questions in these different engagements. 

In this essay, I draw on the lyrics of a viral song by Shervin Hajipour titled “Baraye” (meaning: for the sake of) that was released on 28 September 2022 and immediately became the anthem of the protests in Iran. I quote excerpts of the lyrics in three sections of this essay, connecting them to the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” chanted in the streets and the symbolic act of cutting one’s hair that has come to represent the protests. In the first of these sections, on woman, I reflect on the regime’s gender politics (of hair), arguing that the act of cutting one’s hair becomes a symbolic act of resisting such gender politics. In the second section, on life, I focus on the act of cutting hair as a mode of mourning the unjust and untimely deaths, for which accountability is demanded. In the last section, on freedom, I focus on the sexual politics of hair and the politics of the veil. I argue that cutting one’s hair is a symbolic act of resisting modes of sexualization that are used by the regime to justify mandatory hijab. Putting together the three parts – woman, life, freedom – I conclude that cutting one’s hair is a feminist act of resistance, an exercise of agency through which Iranian women are taking control and reclaiming their womanhood, their lives, their bodies and their freedom of choice. 

The existing research on war veterans and sexuality comes overwhelmingly from four disciplines – medicine, psychiatry, psychology, and public health – and is in most cases carried out in military related contexts. This research, though limited in its scope, nevertheless shows the impact that the military institution, deployments to war, and physical and mental injuries from these deployments have on the intimate lives of current and former military personnel. Being diagnosed with PTSD for example increases the likelihood of sexual dysfunction, relationship conflicts, and emotional distance to intimate others. What is more, female military personnel and LGTBQI soldiers are likely to suffer more severely from PTSD, anxiety, and depression due to sexual harassment and homo- and transphobia as part of military service. Yet, what it actually means to live intimacy in light of these chronic conditions and how intimacy is shaped as well as shapes the life of veterans and soldiers impacted by chronic conditions due to their military service is still mostly unknown. This presentation attempts to shed light on militarized intimacies by exploring how Danish war veterans live their sexual lives in light of chronic conditions resulting from their military service. Based on interviews with Danish war veterans and participant observation at a home for veterans as well as relationship courses for current and former military personnel in Denmark, this presentation thus attends to the meaning of sex for coping with chronic conditions as well as the meaning of chronic conditions for the experience of sexual encounters.

Reflecting on the troubled relationship between anthropology and the military, we do so by discussing the underlying epistemological, methodological, and moral claims of the distinction between an anthropology of and an anthropology for the military. Through the term ethnography of things military, we propose to reposition military anthropology as intense engagements with militarisation through empathic immersion in things military. We develop this term through feminist critiques of militarisation and compassion, through discussions of critique and empathy as part of (critical) ethnographic scholarship, and through anthropological debates about the relationality of fieldwork and ethnographer-interlocutor relations. Suggesting that an ethnography of things military relies on empathic engagements with military lifeworlds, we argue that the relationship between empathy and critique in military anthropology should be understood as a continuous collaborative (and not always predictable) process of interrogating military lifeworlds’ frames of reference without necessarily sharing compassion or sympathy for them.

This article is an exploration of trans and non-binary representation in independent Swedish film productions. Two award-winning films, Pojktanten (She Male Snails, 2012) and Nånting måste gå sönder (Something Must Break, 2014), created by director Ester Martin Bergsmark (in collaboration with author Eli Levén), will be in focus and discussed through their ecological aesthetics that build on what I call intimate otherness. The two films represent not only a significant debut moment for Swedish trans cinema, but also offer a radical engagement with nature and the unnatural. While Bergsmark’s films incite a vivid aestheticisation of environmental pollution, ranging from items of garbage in the forest to untidyrooms, unwashed clothes, and dirty bathing water, the films’ ecological aesthetics, as I argue, imagine an enchanted space in which the trans body emerges as livable. Historically reduced to an “unnatural” and “contaminated” embodiment, trans bodies in the films form an intimate otherness with non-human objects and landscapes at the urban peripheries, at the margins of normativity and productivity. The films’ ecological aesthetics shift gender non-conformity from “unnatural” into a possibility. These aesthetics, I suggest, unfold into a gender-dissident´ landscape of rebellious and poetic, intimate otherness.

It is fair to say that the relationship between intersectionality theories and new materialisms has been characterized by tensions. Intersectional approaches have emphasized the multi-faceted positioning of subjects in relation to the classificatory power of socially constructed identity categories. Meanwhile, feminist new materialisms have foregrounded the agency of matter and argued for the relational becoming of human bodies, subjectivities, and differences beyond predefined classifications of identity. In this article we reach beyond understanding theories of intersectionality and new materialisms as mutually oppositional or exclusive. Expanding on the efforts of several feminist theorists to consider intersectionality in increasingly processual and relational terms, we propose a way of intersecting the concept of intersectionality with new materialisms. This approach 1) foregrounds the situated emergence and relatedness of embodied subjectivities and social differences and 2) draws increasing attention to the material and other-than-human elements involved in the relational emergence of intersectional differences and power relations. Our specific contribution to considering intersectionality in terms of processes and co-constitutive relations is the concept of “the middle”, drawn mostly from Erin Manning and Brian Massumi. We examine social differences as resulting from repeated middles of relationally re-forming elements in connection to data gathered during an experimental embroidery study-circle organized for gender studies students at a Finnish university.

This study investigates views and experiences described by Swedish preschool teachers regarding inappropriate and unprofessional physical touching between educators and children. The empirical material consists of semi-structured interviews with 30 preschool teachers. The interviews were analysed with thematic analysis, and further examined in the light of the concepts ‘becoming’ and ’being’. The results show that educators consider it inappropriate and unprofessional for staff to grab or restrain a child, or to touch a child without observing the child’s signals, as doing so violates the child’s integrity. It is also deemed wrong to carry or ‘help’ a capable child, as this is considered undermining the child’s agency. Further, to kiss a child is also deemed inappropriate and unprofessional. The informants have, however, slightly different approaches and experiences regarding kissing. The results show that preschool teachers struggle with these issues. The boundaries between appropriate and inappropriate touching may be difficult to draw up. And in concrete situations, the concepts ‘becoming’ and ‘being’ are not always easy to separate. The study concludes that both preschool teacher education and workplaces should pay attention to the subtle, but culturally and socially permeated, issues of touch.

This introduction to the Queer Death Studies special issue explores an emerging transdisciplinary field of research. This field critically, (self-)reflexively and affirmatively investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions, expectations, and regimes of truths that are brought to life and made evident by current planetary scale necropolitics and its framing of death, dying and mourning in the contemporary world. It is set against the background of traditional engagements with the question of death, often grounded in Western hegemonic and normative ideas of dying, dead and mourning subjects and bodies, on the one hand; and on the other contemporary discourses on human and nonhuman death and extinction, directly linked to the environmental crisis, capitalist and post/colonial extractivist necropolitics, material and symbolic violence, oppression and inequalities, and socio-economic, political and ecological unsustainabilities. By bringing together conceptual and analytical tools grounded in feminist materialisms and feminist theorising broadly speaking, queer theory and decolonial critique, the contributions in this special issue strive to advance queerfeminist methodologies and ontological, ethical and political understandings that critically and creatively attend to the problem of death, dying and mourning in the current environmental, cultural, and socio-political contexts.

Turning to the experiences of Danish sperm donors, I argue that the conception of sperm donation as selfish pleasure and commodified practice offers only a limited understanding of what it means to provide semen samples for reproductive donation. Framing masturbation at sperm banks only in light of selfishness, since it involves sexual pleasure and monetary compensation, ignores the intricate interplay between biomedical regulation, modes of production, and men’s gender performativity. As the accounts by Danish men of masturbation at sperm banks show, reproductive donation as both a moral and economic endeavor relies on the control of male masturbation. Rather than only being a selfish undertaking, providing semen samples becomes understandable as a site of biopolitics altering men’s gender identity. The global supply of donor semen is enabled by regulating the affective spaces of male masturbation in which men remake their masculine self-images.

In this article, I suggest the performative effects of diagnosis as an analytical tool to explore the transformations in people’s intimate lives that being diagnosed brings with it. As an analytical term, I understand the performative effects of diagnosis to describe trajectories in people’s intimate lives that emerge in the interplay between a person’s intimate sense of self, that is, their gendered and sexualed self-perceptions, and the logics and norms contained in medical diagnoses. I develop this term in the context of ethnographic research on Danish war veterans’ understandings of and experiences with intimacy and extrapolate it conceptually in this article through scholarship in feminist theory, trans studies, STS, and medical anthropology and sociology. The argument that I make throughout is that the performative effects of diagnosis allows scholars to explore transformations in people’s intimate lives without a foreclosure about the normative dimensions of these transformations. In that sense, rather than only asking how biopolitical and cis- and heteronormative normalcy constitutes itself, the performative effects of diagnosis provide the opportunity to explore how these dimensions are (re)configured and (un)done in and through medicalized intimacies.

Physical touch between educators and children in preschool settings is a sensitive issue in many countries. The aim of the study is to examine how future and newly graduated preschool teachers relate to touch between preschool teachers and children in the Swedish preschool context. The study was conducted using: 1) a questionnaire study (n = 204) and 2) semi-structured interviews (n = 20). The results illustrate the informants’ desire to combine physical care of children with awareness of and respect for children’s bodily integrity.

Kroppslig kontakt är ett vardagligt inslag i förskoleverksamhet. Fysisk beröring kan ske i situationer som blöjbyten, hälsnings- och avskedssituationer, för att avstyra bråk, för att förebygga olyckshändelser, för att ge tröst, likväl som i mer planerade lärandesituationer som till exempel massageaktiviteter eller rörelselekar. I sådana vardagliga situationer skapas och återskapas normerade gränser för vad som uppfattas som lämplig respektive olämplig beröring.

Den här artikeln söker besvara två forskningsfrågor: 1) Hur konstrueras normer om beröring i förskollärares utsagor om vardagshändelser i förskolan? 2) Hur kan dessa utsagor förstås i relation till de normerade perspektiv på beröring som uttrycks genom förskolans och förskollärarutbildningens tidigare och samtida styrdokument? För att besvara forskningsfråga 1) har 40 semistrukturerade intervjuer genomförts med yrkesverksamma och blivande förskollärare. För forskningsfråga 2) har en dokumentanalys av förskolans och förskollärarutbildningens tidigare och samtida styrdokument genomförts. Studien visar att synen på den fysiska kontakten mellan förskollärare och barn har förändrats. Analysen av styrdokument visar att beröring under 1970-talet sågs som en pedagogisk resurs för lärarna, medan fokus idag i högre grad läggs på värnandet om barnens kroppsliga integritet. Hela denna spännvidd återfinns också i de synsätt på beröring som uttrycks av dagens nyutbildade och erfarna förskollärare.

Bering a sperm donor is often framed as an easy job. Men only have to masturbate into acup and receive money in return, at least that’s what many people assume. Turning to theexperiences of Danish sperm donors, I argue that this conception of sperm donation asselfish pleasure and commodified practice offers only a limited understanding of what itmeans to provide semen samples for reproductive donation. While sperm donors’affective investments are most of the time taken for granted and not discussed, they areactually important to consider analytically if biosocial subjectivation—the persistentinvocation of the subject in terms of biomedical registers and biopolitical valuations—is tobe understood properly. Attending to masturbation as important in its own right, I will lookat the making of sperm donors as biosocial subjects through their affective investmentswhen producing semen samples. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at Danish spermbanks and interviews with Danish sperm donors, I will thus explore how men performatively (re)constitute their gendered and sexualised subjectivity in terms ofbiomedical registers and biopolitical valuations through masturbation.

Reaching beyond the media portrayals of 'dangerous migrant men', we ask what bachelorhood entails for migrated men within the European union. Using ethnographic data from Italy and interviews from Sweden, and drawing on previous research, we suggest that critical masculinity studies can be combined with the transnational family framework to situate the single men in a relational and transnational context. Our results indicate that bachelorhood is experienced as both freedom and a challenge to build a life that stretches across cultures and nationalities. In this context, masculinity is construed as both freedom from relations and as (conflicting) loyalties. Considering some differences between Italy and Sweden, we suggest ways in which to further examine transnational bachelorhood across Europe and across groups of migrating men.

In this article, we will discuss different entanglements of technology and masculinity with a special focus on (automated) vehicles. Starting from a cyborg- epistemology formulated as 'thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis, prosthesis' (Gray 2001: 189), we will, in three sections, entangle and disentangle different discourses and practices around how masculinity has been constructed around intimacy, technology, and cyborgisation. Historically, this points in both destructive directions and emancipatory hopes of transcendence through cyborgisation. Cyborgs are thus political technologies, and we argue that a history of masculinity as well as the future of masculinity, in a western context and beyond, can be understood in relation to cyborgisation and intimacy with technological artefacts. It is argued that cyborgs are possibly the tricksters of the future posthuman masculinity but they are also a tool to understand the 'leitmotif' of male transcendence in the history of masculinity. To illustrate our point, we will use different forms of technologies of movement and other man-machine relations as our "objects-to-think-with", considering gendered power relations and emancipatory potentials (Haraway 2004: 321).

Many countries call for more men to be teachers in early child-hood education and care (ECEC). In Sweden, the issue has beendiscussed since the early 1970s, but despite these discussionsthere is little Swedish research that examines the notions andexpectations associated with male teachers. International researchhas found that perceptions of men in ECEC can be very ambivalentand that physical contact between the male educator and childrenis a sensitive issue. By focusing on the interaction between edu-cators and children, the purpose of this study is to investigategender-specific beliefs about male preschool teachers. The empiri-cal material consists of interviews with 50 informants. Of these, 17are men and 33 are women. The results show that“the fun guy”and“the possible perpetrator”are two gender-specific positionsthat male informants are subjected to. The article discusses howmen take up and resist the two positions, and argues for the needto further challenge gendered stereotypes in preschools

The term gay is often associated with a certain gender-dichotomous, liberalising paradigm. As such, it is juxtaposed to the term queer understood as open to gender and sexual fluidity, as well as critical of liberation in the name of identities. Yet the experiences of being gay in (queer) academia do not fit neatly into any of these paradigms. Based on biographical reflections on our academic trajectories as openly gay scholars in gender and queer studies, anthropology, and sociology, in this presentation we want to explore the everyday institutional politics (Ahmed 2012) of being gay in (queer) academia and the affective dissonances (Hemmings 2012) that they lay bare. Difficulties fitting into homosocial groupings of any gender as well as problematizations of gay identity in contemporary gender and queer studies speak to the inherent in-determinability of ’gayness’ and point to the normative frameworks of contemporary (queer) academia. Thus in this presentation, we will suggest to understand gayness as immutably fluid in order to investigate the onto-epistemological boundary work of contemporary (queer) academia and to explore the analytic potentials of gayness as a form of situated knowledges (Haraway 1988).