Page 101 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

MIRJA LIIKKANEN

institutional spaces of the public domain, and it is in these public spaces that
men and women are sorted into hierarchies. Yet it is also precisely in the public
spaces – when I am traveling or shopping, for instance, or when I attend an art
exhibition or go to a theater – where I can feel free, where I am coasting
(without a body?), that I am safe (from what?). Are these truly the moments
when I forget the restricting marks that culture has imprinted on my body,
when I feel I part of a universal humanity, when I am a free and autonomous
individual?
And what about home, the private spaces? Is that the domain where women
have the necessary and appropriate ‘cultural competence’, where we can escape
the critical evaluations we face elsewhere? Or is the private space really just the
‘golden cage’ that history inscribes as ‘the female domain’, where we again feel
guilty and inadequate?
Generations of women everywhere have shared, and continue to share,
common experience. Almost everywhere in the world women remain sub-
ordinated in their social groups. But to understand the phenomenon more
deeply, we must also take into account how culture mediates gender as well as
the different histories between groups of women according to race, ethnicity,
age, and social class.
Everything in culture – geographical places, social institutions, work set-
tings, everyday habits, leisure-time hobbies, and all the rest – is gendered. In
most societies, everything connected to the feminine carries certain negative
qualities, while the masculine is embedded with numerous positive qualities.
This troubling, systemic complex of discrimination derives from the fact
that, while gender is a structural and ideological question, it also exists as a
highly personalized, intimate system of everyday practises in public and in
private, to which every one of us has a personal position and relationship.
Gender articulates deeply into our emotions, love, affection, dependency, and
sexuality.
In this chapter I take up two main themes: how gender is represented and
lived in Western culture, especially in my cultural homeland, Finland, and,
second, how gender has been evaluated and theorized in women’s research.
Gender as a public discourse is created in concrete professional practices and
discussions. That is why this chapter will deal rather extensively with the
politics of knowing about gender and culture, in particular the practices of
research on gender, and the representations of gender that such research
produces. (See also Widerberg 1995.)
I will stress the central point that, despite having a biological appearance,
gender as a sociocultural phenomenon is an ideological issue that is directly
connected to questions of dominance and power in society – both in the
symbolic and in the more formal senses.
Moreover, like gender itself, research on gender is greatly in fluenced by the
cultures that produce it. Consequently, when research and theory on gender
travels around the world it does not necessarily harmonize with the cultural

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