Trends and Challenges in Nordic Gender Geography

Abstract

AbstractThe development of Nordic gender geography is closely related to societal transformation. The way the gendered labour market is structured and re-structured is a recurrent theme for investigation. In this chapter, we discuss Nordic gender geography since its establishment in the 1980s, with the aim of scrutinising long-term and contemporary trends and challenges. We discern an engagement in issues based on socio-spatial conditions, where agency, identity and intersectional perspectives work together with materiality, institutions and structures. Nordic gender geography thereby contributes with a contextual gender theory, emphasising space as both a designer and an interpreter of gender relations. Regional and local gender relations become a player in the structure-agency relationship, and we argue that socio-spatial gender theorising can modify the idea of universal and all-embracing theoretical explanation of how gender is constructed. Nordic gender geography constitutes a prevailing and growing potential for a significant contribution to gender theory and to socio-spatial analysis of power.