Genus och landskap. Om femininiteter i Stockholms skärgård

Abstract

Gender and Landscape This article discusses how women’s experiences of their daily life in the Stockholm archipelago (re)produces different femininities, ruralities and landscapes. The landscape of the Stockholm archipelago, like all landscape, are gendered and experienced through norms and ideals about men and women. And they are dialectically interrelated to genderconstructions. Life in the archipelago in the past demanded different skills and qualities than women needs today. Through improved technology and increased communications the daily life now is more comfortable and the standard of living higher. Because of these facts none of my informants wanted to define themselves as ”real” women of the archipelago. I found obvious norms that stated the responsibility for both men and women about domestic work as well as economic income. It was not the man as breadwinner and the wife as the one in the household taking care of the children that constructed gender identities on the archipelago island. The women I talked to referred in their answers both to a traditional image of an archipelago woman and the modern Scandinavian norm of equality. Thereby they can be described as cultural poly-sighted in that sense that they where consciously combining modern and traditional, rural and urban values about work and home. Men and women on the island moved in the landscape in different ways. Most of the women, who unlike most men on the island didn’t share any obvious working-fellowship, met each other for walks once a week. Although women in the archipelago always have been dependent on boats for moving between the islands, female boat-driving has not been common. The women I talked to who drove their own boat, lived single or part-time without a man. Through these gendered places for men and women, new experiences and interpretations of the landscape were constructed, at the same time as the traditional division between masculinities and femininities in the Stockholm archipelago was reproduced. The specific nature of the archipelago affected the women in their way of organizing their daily lives and their interpretations of the landscape they lived in. In the same way that the archipelago landscapes get their values from the women’s experiences, these experiences of being a woman in the archipelago (re)produces constructions of femininities. This process is taking place in the dialectic between past and present, in the interaction between nature and culture and in the mutual relation between place and gender.