Page 113 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

MIRJA LIIKKANEN

to assert gender over and above class and race; instead the emphasis has been on
thinking through these relations of difference’ (McRobbie 1997: 175).
As the different debates drift from one country and culture to the next, they
land in different intellectual fields of force; a critique that in its original context
and discipline had a clearly identifiable target may suddenly lose that objective
altogether. Within the Scandinavian and Finnish context, for example, hege-
monic masculinity and femininity no doubt have created a story of gender
relations that differs from those in the United States or Britain, though many
hegemonic and less hegemonic femininities and masculinities exist in the
Nordic region as well. And what about the relationship between center and
margin; is that as clear as it used to be?
Feminist research arrived in Finland partly as a counterforce to Marxist
structuralist research and was not directly attached to any political movement.
To the contrary, it was specifically stressed that the feminist movement would
be kept separate from women’s studies, a turn of events which served to set
feminism apart from the orthodox political Marxism of the 1970s. Feminist
research in fact became depoliticized in Finland. Still, feminist media and cul-
tural studies were imported to Finland and the other Nordic countries. The
international debates concentrated mainly on forms of ‘women’s entertain-
ment’, which is not a big issue in the Nordic region, where women have been
historically involved in cultural politics that carry a distinct ethos of enlighten-
ment (Liikkanen 1996a and 1999). Womanhood and highbrow culture, man-
hood and popular culture, have gone hand and hand in Finland. High culture,
however, does not signify only ‘high-class culture’ in Finland, and does not
carry the same strong discriminatory meanings as it does in many other
Western countries.
In the Nordic countries, then, feminist research on the use of media and
culture helped deconstruct the literary, intellectual, highbrow atmosphere
while it freed middle-class women, intellectual women, and feminists alike to
enjoy and study popular culture without their having to feel guilty. However,
this development did not produce an ‘other’ category of ‘ordinary woman’ as
Charlotte Brunsdon claims took place in the Anglo-American context. In add-
ition to enjoying ‘female’ media genres, Finnish women from all social classes
read newspapers on a daily basis, follow news and information programs as
often as men, read fiction and non-fiction to a far greater extent than men,
don’t watch much television overall, go out to the theater and other cultural
events alone or with female friends, and constitute the majority of public
audiences for cultural fare generally (Liikkanen 1996b, Eskola 1999). Certain
public spaces traditionally have been more open to Finnish women than
elsewhere.
There is a long tradition of gender neutrality in Finnish culture. It can be
seen, for instance, in the Finnish language, which has just one non-gendered
pronoun for ‘she’ or ‘he.’ Nouns likewise have no gender in Finnish, and the
terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ are not differentiated. Several explanations have been

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