Page 106 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

THE QUESTION OF CULTURAL GENDER

Hilkka Pietilä (sixty-eight years old, former Secretary General of the UN
Association, active in international women’s networks): How can you tell
from how I lead my life that I am a feminist? Nowadays it’s from the
fact that I prefer to work with other women, in women’s movements,
in women’s studies, in women’s networks. In joint projects with men
over the past decades I have time and time again run into a glass wall.
No one has wanted to listen to my thoughts and suggestions, regardless
of whether or not they have been sensible.

The great diversity of female identities and definitions of womanhood can be
seen clearly in these few excerpts. One can find in these passages many levels of
the overall problematic: how the public sphere and expertise are gendered, the
hierarchy of gender in culture, and how gender manifests in the emotions. The
passages show how gender is produced as a personal identity, but is also
constructed through political action. Furthermore, we can see how vulnerable
we are with our gender in the most private and intimate sphere – at home with
our families.
The excerpts also illustrate how these women have incorporated different
elements from the highly visible international debates on womanhood and
gender into their own identities. The excerpts manifest a vague, shared sense of
some external cultural force which continues to define ‘woman’ as a ‘gender’,
the category of woman as non-neutral and non-autonomous. Although there is
a clear and firm commitment to women’s unity in just the last excerpt, a
universal experience of some external force with restrictive or preventive
power pervades the assumptions which underlie the women’s comments. The
possibility of what could be considered a culturally ‘feminine’ voice is reduced
to a quiet whimper. Gender de finition becomes interwoven within the
suppressed female body.
One element that is particularly Finnish in these diary excerpts is the
importance attached to waged employment as a natural, self-evident, building
block of identity. Closely related to this is the fear or lived reality that work will
be, or already is, infected by ‘womanhood’, relegating the central public activity
in society to the lowest end of the gendered social hierarchy. As I will describe
in more detail later, it is precisely to the importance of work in the Nordic
region that a strong ambivalence about womanhood is attached, creating a
severe pain of ultimate injustice.
We find striking differences when we compare the image of the male, made-
for-television sociologist who appeared earlier in this chapter and the women
whose diary extracts were printed in the same newspaper. The coherent, self-
evident, and universal scholar appears as a male bodily figure. In contrast, female
subjectivity appears in the diary excerpts as ambivalent and contradictory, even
painful. Matters of such subjectivities – women’s subjectivities in particular –
have been discussed quite extensively in women’s studies and feminist research.
As Pulkkinen (1998: 230) observes, the search within different disciplines for

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