Placing Nordic men and masculinities

Lucas Gottzén

Although not a special call, the articles in the current issue of NORMA: Nordic Journal for Masculinity Studies could be read as contributing to spatial aspects of men and masculinities. This is perhaps not that surprising since all individuals, including men, live their lives in different places. It is however not self-evident that researchers explore men’s places and spaces, neither as physical environments nor as dimensions of men’s subjective and lived experiences. On the contrary, in Western culture men have most often been seen as transcendent, as not restricted to their bodies and physical surroundings, while women have been more or less ‘doomed’ to their immanence (Ferguson 1993). Spatiality has at the same time been defined by the gender order, where men have been able to move relatively freely and which has contributed to the production of Man as an unmarked norm and men’s relation to place and space as being at once evident and invisible. Read more

NORMA: Nordic Journal for Masculinity Studies 8(1), 1-6.