In recent years, gamification has been widely implemented for sharing knowledge about, making sense of, and imaging futures. This article considers how gamification could be mobilised as a feminist method of futures. It presents a case study of making the idle game Square Cat in which a cat destroys and devours the entire earth. Much of the existing work on gamification examines games and gamified apps that have already been produced. The case study offers different insights into gamification practices by providing an account of the process of designing and developing an experimental game. Square Cat makes visible and bodily felt the ambiguous affective dynamics of the asset-driven logic of late capitalism, and how it shapes human-environment relations. It parodies the embodied habituation of repetition and reward feedback, dramatises idle games' structure of accumulation, and rejects the narrative of linear progress. In so doing, it reworks the binary logic of game and asks to entertain a form of play where the relation between winning and losing, subject and object, becomes confounded, and where futures are multiple even as the game's beginning and end appear predetermined.

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are environmental toxicants found in a wide variety of materials and items. They include pesticides (e.g. DDT, DDE), herbicides (e.g. atrazine), plasticizers (bisphenol A and other phthalates) and PCBs (Dominguez 2019), among others. Everyday household items such as non-biodegradable detergents and personal care products can contain EDCs (Khetan 2014). For instance, phthalate BPA (bisphenol A) and similar substances are widely used as softeners (‘plasticizers’) to create flexibility in PVC items such as plastic bags, shower curtains, cables and Tupperware containers. They are also used in liners for food cans, Teflon pans, baby bottles and a variety of cosmetics. These chemical compounds enter the food chain, for example, through plastic breakages, spurred on by heat, frost or age, off-gassing into household air, or through manufacturing effluents. They enter human and animal bodies, where they disrupt endocrine signalling pathways. Consequently, EDCs affect the well-being of aquatic, aerial and terrestrial ecosystems....

 Democratic education is an important way to work with social sustainability in Early Childhood Education (ECE). This ongoing collaborative project aims to connect research and practice by using different models of cooperation between a university and a local preschool. Research in the area is vast. The overarching challenge is how democracy can be made concrete and how it can be implemented (Thuresson & Quennerstedt, 2020). Preschool teachers express problems defining the concept, tending to discuss the obstacles, more than the possibilities. A theoretical model (Institutional events of democracy), focusing on the democratic actions of children and teachers (Ribaeus, 2014), is tested and further developed resulting in e.g an observation protocol. Documents were collected and focus group interviews were carried out with teachers at one preschool. The research design was inspired by Plowright's (2021) Frameworks for an Integrated Methodology within a qualitative paradigm. A democratic approach was used where the researchers catered for everyone's voices and created opportunities for participation. The project was initiated by the teachers themselves, to improve their ECE and to reduce the gap between research and ECE. Consent was obtained from the teachers before data was collected. The teachers have tried out new tools to discover expressions of democracy among the children. Preliminary results show that certain spaces as well as the youngest children in the ECE have to be focused to enhance the ECE’s democratic education. This study contributes to new democratic models and tools to use in preschool, higher education as well as research.

This paper presents findings from a qualitative research project examining the dating narratives of single migrant men residing in Sweden and Italy. The study, analyzing 48 interviews with individuals from Syrian, Polish, Bangladeshi and Romanian backgrounds, along with ethnographic observations, employs a theoretical framework rooted in sexual capital theory and critical studies on men and masculinities. The analysis sheds light on the challenges faced by heterosexual single migrant men in their pursuit of intimate partners, attributing these difficulties to lower levels of social, economic and cultural capital, as well as the influence of their specific masculinities, which may be perceived as less attractive within the host societies. The paper argues that the migrant experience can be viewed as a distinctive sexual field wherein individuals encounter unique dynamics and obstacles in the realm of intimate relationships. The implications of these findings extend beyond the personal experiences of migrant men, offering insights into the broader socio-cultural landscape of host societies and the complex interplay between migration, masculinity and intimate relationships. 

During the last decades, several European gambling markets have been reregulated. In 2019, it was Sweden’s turn; the former oligopoly was replaced by a licensing system. In this article, the governmental inquiry in which the new system was proposed, outlined, and justified is studied using discourse analysis. Medical, public health, and free market discourses have been shown to dominate articulations of gambling in several national contexts, but the ways in which these discourses interact, overlap, and differ is crucial to understand better in order to appreciate the production and legitimation of meanings around gambling. Moreover, the 2019 reregulation has not yet been studied from discursive perspectives; thus, the article makes both theoretical and empirical contributions. The article demonstrates that market and medical discourses structure the inquiry. While they sometimes overlap and merge, their co-existence also causes tensions, for instance regarding whether an increase in gambling is acceptable or not. The article points to a strengthening of market and medical discourses and a weakening of public health discussion within Swedish gambling debates. 

Hormones are molecular messengers in the body?s metabolism. They regulate, for instance, reproduction, digestion, organ systems and gene expression. The past century brought with it a proliferation of synthetic substances and other industrial chemical compounds, generally referred to as endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs). These chemicals interfere with the hormonal systems of human and animal bodies alike and are able to, among other things, fundamentally disrupt, mimic or block the functioning of the hormonal system. In this article I investigate the forces of chemical toxicity and its impact on all living bodies on this planet from a queer and trans perspective. EDCs and specifically EDC discourses have a particular effect on queer- and transness. Applying queer reading and autoethnography, I want to think here with two performances by Finnish artist Teo Ala-Ruona about the impact of EDCs on our human bodies, our planet and the relations and imaginaries that emerge in Ala-Ruona?s work, blending transness and endocrine disruptors in ways different to those currently being suggested by life science and populist discourses. In my engagement with Ala-Ruona?s work I consider that his work not only materializes a new imaginary of embodiment but also demonstrates a multi-molecular, rebellious becoming with and through toxins that intervenes in the risk narratives commonly flanking EDC discourses.

Within gambling debates and research, emotions are associated with irrationality, loss of control, and problem gambling. Simultaneously, they have a complex relationship to masculine positions, which are said to be connected to both stoicism and aggressivity. Using interviews with Swedish men gamblers and feminist and critical theorisations of emotions, this article discusses experiences, negotiations, and performances of emotions within men’s gambling. The article demonstrates that emotions and control were entangled themes in the research, but discussed as separate by the interviewees, who used emotion work in order to navigate their own experiences in relation to larger discourses about gender, health, and ‘sovereignty’ in relation to gambling. The article expands feminist research about gender and emotions by providing in-depth, detailed discussions about men’s emotionalities. It also contributes to gambling research by integrating problematising perspectives on emotions and to research about the production of gendered emotionalities under capitalism.

This article engages with the installation of the Iranian artist Minoosh Zomorodinia, Knots and Ripples (2017), through what we call "unsettling intimacies". This concept is inspired by philosopher Mariana Ortega's notion of "aesthetic unsettlement". In our reworked application of the concept, we argue that in this mixed-media installation, an unsettling intimacy emerges that connects different tropes of Otherness (migrant and nature) in the context of global climate change. Through our engagement with the installation and conversations with the artist, we suggest that Knots and Ripples enacts a complex, posthuman, affective space of response-ability that draws on poetics, ethics and politics of affective communality beyond the boundaries of human and nonhuman. Following the artist's conceptual metaphor of dakhil (tying a knot into a string for a wish to come true), and connecting it to unsettling intimacies, we engage with water as a posthuman figuration, one that connects an Iranian cultural practice, Islam, a hijab-wearing female artist, water vulnerabilities and more in hopes of liveable futures. Dakhil becomes a collective approach to the idea of thinking the world otherwise, that is to say a world-making practice.

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 reviews empirical and theoretical work within critical studies on men and masculinities (CSMM), drawing on extensive empirical and theoretical studies relevant to psychology and social psychology. The chapter focuses on gender relations and power dynamics, social structures, intersectionality, bodies, practices, and identities, both individual and collective. The chapter first maps the key theoretical developments of CSMM, historically and conceptually, before moving to focus on two important contemporary issues: first, the development of more egalitarian masculinities, and, second, the explanations for various non-egalitarian masculinities, such those linked to incel and Alt-Right movements, both online and offline.

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.

Are feminist coalitions magical enough to survive and endure while questioning and shaking the colonial/racist foundations of Swedish academic knowledge production and the overall Swedish society? Can feminist bridging and collective writing remain a magical process even when grappling with diffi cult ex-periences and memories of Othering and racialization? This is a creatively and collectively written article on feminist coalition building, and its importance in thinking, articulating and deconstructing race, racial-ization and racist structures. More than two years ago, seven interdisciplinary gender studies scholars of mixed ethnic and racial origins, came together to explore our differently situated experiences of disidenti-fying with Swedish academia and society in a collective we call Loving Coalitions (capital initials). Against the background of Swedish exceptionalism, historical amnesia of Sweden’s colonial past and present, and the deafening silence on Swedish whiteness and racism, we are sharing our poems, letters, texts and testimonies of racist interactions in Swedish academia and society. While doing so, we discuss how moving away from conventional ways of doing research and experimenting with creative methodological alternatives allow us to acknowledge and embrace our different life backgrounds and academic trajecto-ries as a mode of knowledge production. We hope and believe that our experiences, reflections and ways to resist racism and Othering in Sweden and Swedish academia through alternative coalition building, based on mutual care and love, can be relevant in a Danish context as well.

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. 

Tillgången till könsbekräftande vård i Sverige är begränsad på grund av långa väntetider (2 - 3 år) för kontakt med könsdysforiutredningsteam och det är ofta en lång och komplex utredningsprocess. Många personer som söker vård känner sig maktlösa och ifrågasatta under hälso- och sjukvårdsprocessen. Dessa brister kan ha en negativ påverkan på den vårdsökandes psykiska hälsa. Minoritetsstress och dess negativa inverkan på psykisk och fysisk hälsa utgör ytterligare en faktor och ökar risken för suicid samt misstro gentemot hälso- och sjukvårdssystemet.

Rapportens syfte är att utforska transpersoners erfarenheter av vård i Värmland med särskilt fokus på funktionen Samordnare transvård. Analysen baseras på erfarenheter från personer som har kommit i kontakt med Samordnare transvård. Erfarenheterna samlades in dels genom en kvantitativ enkät med vårdsökande samt genom kvalitativa, semistrukturerade intervjuer med vårdtagare. Intervjuerna genomfördes i juni 2022, och enkäten var öppen för svar mellan december 2022 och februari 2023. Rapporten syftar till att belysa styrkor och svagheter i vården för transpersoner inom regionen och avslutas med rekommendationer för framtida förbättringar.

Resultaten presenteras inom fyra teman: Tema 1: Psykisk(o)hälsa och Samordnare transvård, Tema 2: Bemötande, kontakt och stöd av Samordnare transvård, Tema 3: Övriga vårdkontakter inom Region Värmland, Tema 4: Ytterligare behov och områden för förbättring.

Sammanfattningsvis visar studien att Samordnare transvård är en uppskattad och i många avseenden välfungerande vårdfunktion. Deltagarna upplever att den har god tillgänglighet, ger bra information, är ett viktigt psykosocialt stöd och många uppskattar att den är oberoende av psykiatri. Många söker sig till denna funktion för remiss till könsdysforiutredningsmottagningar vilket respondenterna upplever fungerar bra. Samordnare transvård ska erbjuda stöd och uppföljningsmöten före, under och efterutredningsprocessen, vilket funktionen i viss mån gör men detta är också något som kan förbättras. De som arbetar inom Samordnare transvård upplevs ha god kunskap om könsbekräftande vård, minoritetsstress och utmaningar som transpersoner möter i ett cisnormativt samhälle. Vidare upplever många att Samordnare transvård har givit dem psykosocialt stöd och rådgivning, vilket varit hjälpsamt. Studien visar också att Samordnare transvård kan öka förtroendet för vården och, som många uttrycker det, ger en känsla av att bli sedd och hörd för första gången inom vården.

Denna studie baseras delvis på tidigare forskning som vi genomförde mellan 2021 och 2022 och som publicerades i en rapport år 2022. I den tidigare studien fokuserade vi på att analysera vårdgivarnas erfarenheter av den nya funktionen att samordna transvård på detta sätt, till exempel hälso- och sjukvårdspersonal, chefer och strateger inom Region Värmland, samt de två samordnarnas erfarenheter av sina arbetsförhållanden och utmaningar genom kvalitativa, semistrukturerade intervjuer (Straube & Linander, 2022).

Vi avslutar denna rapport med en lista över rekommendationer som vi hoppas kan vara till hjälp för regionen att förbättra denna funktion, liksom för andra regioner som redan har börjat etablera liknande strukturer eller överväger detta.

En central rekommendation är att andra regioner bör överväga en liknande vårdfunktion för att säkerställa bästa möjliga stöd för transpersoner, särskilt med tanke på den könsbekräftande vårdens bristande tillgänglighet samt transpersoners erfarenheter av minoritetsstress. Denna vårdfunktion i Värmland är framgångsrik eftersom den är lättillgänglig, är placerad utanför den psykiatriska vården och ger psykosocialt stöd tillvårdsökande av transkompetent personal. Andra framgångsfaktorer är personal som har insikt i transcommunityt, ett gott bemötande, professionell yrkeskunskap i form av rådgivare/kuratorer och/eller terapeuter, samt djupgående kunskap om processerna inom den könsbekräftande vården och vårdkedjan i Sverige.

Studien genomfördes på uppdrag av RegionVärmland. Det tvärvetenskapliga forskarteamet består av Wibke Straube (genusvetenskap, Karlstads universitet), Ida Linander (folkhälsovetenskap, Umeå universitet) och Andreas Henriksson (sociologi, Karlstads universitet). Forskningsprojektet och rapporten har finansierats av det regionala nätverket för suicidprevention i Värmland.

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.

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.

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.

Denna rapport presenterar och diskuterar en intervjustudie som gjordes 2021 med

olika grupper av anställda, chefer och strateger inom hälso- och sjukvården i Region

Värmland. Studiens fokus är att analysera Region Värmlands projekt Samordnare

transvård som har pågått sedan april 2020.

Värmland har valt att organisera remisser och stöd till transpersoner utanför

psykiatrin. Projektet Samordnare transvård fungerar som en självständig funktion med

rådgivning för vårdsökande transpersoner och har möjlighet att skriva remisser till

könsdysforiutredningen som sedan utreder den vårdsökandes eventuella könsdysfori

och ställer diagnos. Under tiden som intervjustudien pågick utökades projektet med

ytterligare en funktion inom regionen, en kurator, med uppdrag att fokusera särskilt på

stöd till unga vårdsökande.

Rapporten presenterar analysen av projektet Samordnare transvård, diskuterar dess

styrkor och svagheter, samt belyser hur den gängse vårdkedjan ser ut och redogör

för statistiska data gällande vårdsökande från regionen. Resultaten presenteras inom

olika teman. Temat ”Unik funktion för stöd och remiss” som beskriver projektets

exceptionalitet följs av ”Kunskapsluckor och problem” där deltagarna pratar om

kompetens kring transpersoners vård och hälsa, etiska aspekter av patientkontakt, och

olikheter mellan kollegor inom samma mottagning. Vidare framstod ”Utmaningar och

förbättringsbehov” som ett centralt tema med flera underkategorier som belyser brist

på resurser och rutiner samt behov av ytterligare kompetenser.

Rapporten avslutas med en rad rekommendationer som syftar till framtida förbättringar,

till exempel ett förstärkt uppföljande stöd, ökad ledning och styrning, förbättrad

administrativ och personell infrastruktur, ökad tillgänglighet och tydliga rutiner för

alla verksamheter (speciellt nyckelmottagningar som psykiatri, gynekologi och

endokrinologi) samt regelbundna möten mellan projektets olika funktioner och

specialister för att öka kunskapen om patientgruppen och tryggheten i vårdkedjan.

Studien utfördes på uppdrag av Region Värmland av Wibke Straube (Universitetslektor),

Institutionen för sociala och psykologiska studier, Centrum för genusforskning,

Karlstads Universitet och Ida Linander (Postdoktor), Institutionen för epidemiologi och

global hälsa, Umeå Universitet. Forskningsprojektet och rapporten har fått stöd från

det regionala nätverket för suicidprevention i Värmland.

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.