Page 114 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

THE QUESTION OF CULTURAL GENDER

offered for this egalitarian profile: a tradition of separate, equal, autonomous
lifeworlds for women and men, the autonomic traditions of peasantry, the
legacy system, welfare arrangements which offer a wide range of work
opportunities for women, and the wake of the Enlightenment period are
among them. Clearly, Nordic social structures and sex/gender systems di ffer
greatly from Anglo-American traditions, and this greatly influences our
understanding of ‘woman’, ‘gender’, and ‘gender relations’. 1
I do not believe in theories which proclaim deterministic, genetic explan-
ations for differing female and male modes of thought and behavior. However,
the gender system and the cultural memory of our bodies persists longer than
we imagine. The cultural sphere where I come from – situated geographically
as it is between East and West – draws its heritage from both sides. When I
watch a television program on Karelian lamenters, or when I go to an
exhibition on Siberian women shamans, for instance, deep memories are
evoked in my body and I once again know that I belong not only to a Western
but also to an ancient Eastern cultural circle of women (Apo 1999).
Perhaps we don’t take seriously enough the power of the emotions and the
mental pictures we produce. Through them perhaps we can better understand,
after all, why things change so slowly, or how the gendered ‘hierarchical iron
cage’ (Heiskanen and Rantalaiho 1997) intertwines so closely with the ‘golden
cages’ of everyday life – our emotions and privacy.
In trying to understand the processes of ‘doing gender’, many different levels
must be taken into consideration: the deep memory of culture, traditional cul-
tural beliefs with their gendered, hierarchical dualities, formal gender structures
that are visible in societal institutions (such as legal systems, the division of
labor, and so on), and, of course, the wide variety of vital personal and micro-
social contexts and experiences. And, too, it must be made clear that, in the era
of globalization, cultural images of gender and gendered practises, like all cul-
turally loaded representations, travel very fast and enter new surroundings with
unpredictable results. All these cultural processes are negotiated thorough the
matrices of human emotionality and rationality, and take empirical shape in the
range of gendered social processes and choices that people make in the routine
undertakings of their everyday lives.

Notes
Special thanks to Lotta Kratz, Liisa Rantalaiho, and Anna-Maija Lehto for very useful
comments on previous drafts of this chapter, and to James Lull for his careful editing and
support throughout the project.
1 A surprising fact, however, emerges from the Nordic countries. Despite the fact that
Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark have reached what many consider to be the
world’s highest standards of gender equality, occupational segregation is extremely
high in the Nordic countries, and persists mightily today (Lehto 1999: 8). A gender
hierarchy tends to be reproduced again and again in working life (Heiskanen and
Rantalaiho 1997). Paradoxically, the national ideology of gender equality tends to

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