This paper is a revised version of my article "Being Finnish as a Context for Gender - a Case Study on Sociological texts" published in "Inescapable Horizon. Culture and Context", ed. by Sirpa Leppänen and Joel Kuortti, Publications of the Research Unit for Contemporary Culture 64/2000, University of Jyväskylä; p. 87-111. It may not be further published without permission.

 

The Fourth European Feminist  Research Conference in Bologna 2000.

Working group Epistemology, Subjectivity and Gender, chaired

by Eva Bahovec and Gabriele Griffin

 

Kirsti Lempiäinen:

 

 

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO SEXUAL DIFFERENCE?

One story of genderless gender in the context of being Finnish

 

Gender and sexual difference are conceptualized differently in different time-spaces. The aim of my study is to find out how being Finnish, ’Finnishness’, and gender are produced in sociological texts. I assume Finnishness to be a context in which the female subjectivity gets various figures in the texts. Nationality is a system which generalizes and puts together some features of us, of a we-subject, and differentiates at the same time between the features of others, of a they-subject. The Finnish gender (system) can be understood, then, as a familiarity by which we recognize the general characteristics of signifying women and men, femininities and masculinites within the Finnish society. My purpose is to problematize this familiarity and ask, what does Finnishness mean as a context for gender. What kind of a social construction is Finnish gender?

 

An important aspect of contextuality is the question of politics and reality. ”Without suggesting that reality is transparently available to the scholar, or speaks directly to her as it were, I do believe that we all understand that the context within which we live – as scholars – makes multiple political struggles available to us”, Grossberg (1998) says. Here I want to emphasize the feminist nature of my study. It aims to show what kind of subject positions the constructed Finnish gender system creates for women in sociological texts and hopefully to valorize some ideas about the possible positions still to come.

 

The material of this article is sociology textbooks in the curriculum at the University of Tampere in 1969-1999. The starting point is 1969 because the first sociologial study which combined gender perspective and Finnish nationality, namely Elina Haavio-Mannila’s Suomalainen sukupuoli (”The Finnish Gender System”) was published in 1968 and taken into the programme of undergraduate studies in sociology the following year at the University of Tampere. I have chosen the programme of sociology at the University of Tampere because the university has a strong tradition in social sciences in Finland. Besides this I want to ’find out’ what I have learnt about Finnishness and gender when studying sociology in Tampere where also feminist research and Women’s Studies started relatively early, in social sciences in particular (for example in research on working life).  I call this a case study because it does not give an overall picture of the Finnish gender system in sociology but one very particular picture. What I will construct is a metanarrative of Finnishness and gender.

 

This article is connected to my thesis in which I am analyzing female subjectivity by the means of two idealized theoretical ”families” – the gender theory and the theory of sexual difference. I am asking how, by the means of these theories, female subjectivity in Finnish sociology is constructed and what kind of a picture of female subjectivity the sociological texts draw. Are the women presented as subjects, doers or actors, in these texts? These theories are sets of ideas through which I read sociological texts from different decades. While in many previous studies equality is seen as an important feature in the Finnish gender system, I ask, what kind of female subjectivities equality has made possible and what has it perhaps cut out. I will use the notion of sociological texts although the concept implies that there are texts which can be defined sociological and texts which should be defined as not sociological. This is, of course, not my meaning, and in this article by sociological texts I simply mean the texts in the undergraduate programmes of the discipline.

 

I am aware that my reading gives only one side of gender ideology or order, I may see it only partly (if at all). But this is at the same time a part of my method: to try not to read into the texts all the possible contradictory and conflicting relationships that can be found but to only try to follow one (gender) logic of the text which the writer has implied. I believe that there is, at least, one message that the writer wants to tell the reader as important sociology and I want to know how the Finnish gender system is or is not a part (or is almost a part) of that sociology.  I will reflect my reading against feminist theories, especially the cartography of female subjectivity which is based on sexual difference (Braidotti 1994). The map of sexual difference is the theoretical framework from where I look at the Finnish gender order. The notion of sexual difference has three overlapping and differentiating levels: firstly, there are differences between women and men; secondly, there are differences between women (men), and thirdly, there are differences inside each woman (man). The important fact is that sexual difference is not essential in the sense that it is changing and mobile all the time. In my reading, I am tracing for the differences but also similarities between/inside sexes in the texts in context of Finnishness.

 

Next,  I will shortly describe my data and reading method which is loosely connected to critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1995). After the short section of data and methods, I will construct a picture of Finnish gender system. I have an assumption that the way Finnishness is applied as a notion in texts is not quite so clear as it tends to be, it is present but not telling anything about the gender system that would add to our comprehension. There are, of course, important things about being Finnish that are not explicitly present in the texts but I will try to get hold of them and describe them into my picture anyway. Finally, I will theorize a bit further on gender and nationality, and also reflect my own analysis.

 

READING FINNISHNESS AND THE GENDER SYSTEM

 

In this article, I study two orders of discourse in the sociological texts simultaneously: the constructions of Finnishness and the gender order (or system). In this task, Norman Fairclough’s methodology offers me an approach with which the text and textual practices, which also include my reading of the texts, do not just inform of the sociological knowledge, but at the same time also create and construct the society, in this case a certain kind of Finnishness and certain gendered order(s). Fairclough (1995, 73) explains this by stating that the relationship of discourse is constitutive, not just representational. Sociological texts and their analysis are more than namings and renamings, more than ideas confronted with other ideas, they are always contextualized with the hegemonic, normative projects and structures. This Gramscian conception can be broadened to also include feminist projects. Following Fairclough (ibid., 43) I call my enterprise critical because I am also concerned with the effects that go beyond the immediate textual body I am analyzing. In other words, I will valorize the intertwining relationships between gender and nationality. This analysis could also be called intertextual analysis (ibid., 3) because I study how the discourses of gender and nationality are drawn upon and combined in the texts.1

The critical discourse analysis as I have understood it puts the reader of a text into a powerful position. It is up to the reader to decide what kind of textual order s/he wants to favour and what s/he wants to read into the texts, for example whether s/he reads or not the texts from a feminist perspective; whether s/he sees holes and gaps in the texts which imply that something is missing or that something is cut out, and so forth. Although the texts persuade and suggest meanings, they only persuade, they cannot force. Nonetheless, I will take the presumptions and the introductory parts of my data seriously, and I am as faithful as possible to the terminology in the chosen texts. (See Parvikko 1990; cf. Keränen 1993.) In addition, to study scholarly texts is grateful in a sense that they not only provide material but also theories and methodologies how to read the material. In other words, the data partly includes the frames of interpretation.

 

The keywords in gathering the material are: Finnishness or other nationalities expressed in any possible formations, family, kinship, woman, man, mother, father, girl, boy, gender, gender system and also other variations of the notion of gender. Because of many keywords there are only few books restricted out of the data. I am convinced that I need a relatively wide data to show general tendencies. On the other hand this means that I cannot do textual analysis going through the texts sentence by sentence. In addition to the above mentioned Haavio-Mannila’s book I have included 39 books in my analysis (the texts are marked with * in the list of references). All of them have been used in the examinations and in seminars in sociology at the University of Tampere. 2  All these texts mention Finnishness and the idea of gender in one way or another. I have interpreted that if the author has mentioned that the purpose of the book is to somehow valorize the Finnish society, those parts that deal with gender are contextualized into Finnish society, although there would be no mention of Finnishness in the same sentence together with gender. This solution is partly contraversial but also justifiable especially with those texts which mention nationality in their title.

 

The books that I have chosen are from the basic and intermediate level in sociology and so, many students, not just those of the major subject, read them. There is only on Swedish and one English book in the data. Without a doubt it can be said that these textbooks aim at giving a good and wide general picture of sociology and they include information that is seen necessary or important to all of their audience, that is to those who continue further and those who just want to get acquainted with the subject. These texts are a way in into the discourse of sociology. From this point of view the texts can be called normative. However, there are not many actual textbooks in the data. Some textbooks do not mention gender in anyway and I have restricted them out of the analysis. Instead, there are many studies on specific themes, like pub, gypsies, families and so on. (This is connected to the fact that the methods have an important role in teaching at the Department of Sociology in Tampere.)

 

Tuija Parvikko (1990) has analyzed the concept of equality in Finland from the 1950’s to the end of the 1980’s. Although she is not particularly interested in nationality and she writes in the field of political science, her task resembles mine. This is how she describes her method which I have tried to apply into my own analysis:

- I have chosen such texts that discuss explicitly the concept of equality and give an explicit definition of it. By comparing different definitions from different years I have outlined the conceptual changes, as well as conceptual permanencies...I have tried to keep in mind the general social contexts in which the concept of equality was discussed in order to avoid being wise after the event.

 

My own faithfulness to the texts is not quite sincere because I am interested in the constructions of Finnishness and gender despite of the fact that the writers of the texts have perhaps put totally different tasks to their articles and studies. The process of doing discourse analysis is balancing oneself between ”what can be said” and ”what should be said” (or what cannot be said). I am also interested in the dialectic of presence and absence and implicity and explicity in the texts, namely, in which context Finnishness and gender are mentioned and where do they seem to vanish. As Fairclough (1995, 5) suggests ”the contrast between presence in and absence from the texts is not a sharp one”.  Next I will describe the results of my reading.

 

THE FRAMES FOR UNDERSTANDING FINNISH GENDER

 

In my data, certain hegemonic features or normative characteristics of the Finnish gender system are apparent. Firstly, Finnishness is considered as self-evident except for the regional differences that are valorized. Otherwise, it appears in the texts as if the reader would immediately understand what Finnishness is. When something is considered unproblematic or clear or is taken for granted, this taken for grantedness can be read as a sign of ideological power (e.g. Fairclough 1995; Althusser 1984; see also Zizek 1989). The ”certainty” in the texts, the certainty that Finnishness is something that can be stated crystal clear, could be interpreted as normativity. Most textbooks and other sociological texts either start or end (or in some cases both) by the notion of Finland, or Finnish (e.g. Alapuro & al. 1973; Grönfors 1981; Karisto & al. 1984; Silius 1992), or Finnishness in one form or another may appear in the title 3. A typical beginning for a book concerning nationality would then be:

- The purpose of this book is to describe suburb restaurant in the Finnish society from the point of view of cultural studies and with the instruments it offers (Sulkunen & al. 1985, 9).

 

My first impression was that by mentioning nationality, the study tries to gain more value. Claming that something concerns Finland or Finnishness simultaneously gives credibility to the argumentation, in the sense that the results of the study can be applied quite widely, or from another angle it avoids universal claims by localizing the data. But this kind of localization can create an image of a fish bowl: Finnishness starts to look closed and fusty. 4 Yet more important point is that gender rarely appears in the beginnings or ends.

 

In many texts Finnishness refers the quality of being a Finn and living in Finland. In the next quotation the author is questioning the ”fish bowl”, too:

- The sex roles of the Finns and the gender system differentiating social life apparently has to be dealt within universal frames, too; at this stage it has been restricted to describe our country as an individual case (Haavio-Mannila 1968, 263).

 

When Finnishness is problematized, it is categorized in regional notions, like the differences between people (including the sexual difference) living in the countryside or in the towns; Helsinki vs. other parts of Finland and so on. Industrialization, the fled from country to cities (towns) and a rapid technological and economical development are unseparable from Finnishness and the way sociologists understand this radical change in Finnish society has also affected the way the Finnish gender system is seen (Jallinoja 1980; Kortteinen 1982; Nätkin 1986).

 

In this article, I am not specifically going through the different decades from the point of view of historical changes in the problematizing of gender and sexual difference because there are so few texts that do problematize gender. However, there are certain tendencies that I want to locate in time. In many studies, men and women are two groups, and gender is treated as a demographic variable, and in most of them, the differences inside the groups (e.g. age, place of birth, and social, marital, economical status and so on) are illuminated. In the 1970’s and in the early 1980’s texts the main conceptual tools for studying Finnish gender were: boy, girl, man, wife/woman, mother, father, family, sex, sex roles. According to Mirja Tolkki-Nikkonen (1990, 24-25) the scholars start to speak about sex roles especially in the 1960's but also in the 1970's.

 

In Rantalaiho’s text (1984, 187) sex and gender are differentiated and conceptualized first time explicitly: 5

  - The differentiation between sex and gender has come to the common language of social sciences in the few last years. (...to translate the latter into Finnish is problematic, and the notion may not have got its final form). By this differentiation we want to emphasize that the biological sex does not in a natural way seal what it means to be a woman or a man socially, in society.

 

Thereafter, the idea of a Finnish expression of gender has haunted, if not sociologists, the feminist sociologists at least. So, in feminist texts ”Finnishness” does not remain opaque although some of the texts celebrate mostly ”international” theories (Rantalaiho 1986; Koivunen & Liljeström 1996; Jokinen 1997). A plausible explanation to this celebration could be that for instance the questions of equality or more generally the power relations between the sexes have been seen as a universal problematics. In addition, feminist studies or Women’s Studies is a young research area in Finland and it has to relate to international debates, and it has related, mostly to American discussions as was the case with sociology after the Second World War until the beginning of 1960’s (cf. Alapuro & al. 1990, 16).

 

Above I have used the notion of feminist text. I do not want to define once and for all what  feminism is, nor do I want to define what sociology is. By feminist texts I simply mean texts that problematize gender in one way or another and which also suggest that the social relations of power suppress women. The feminist texts are not necessarily written by women, for instance Raimo Blom (1970) valorizes women’s lesser part in Finnish society and claims that the cause for this can be traced down to the role expectancies which are not easily changeable. It should also be kept in mind that the texts have many, even contradictory elements in them and the question of gender is not necessarily present all the time, and this is true with Finnishness as a theme as well.

 

What seems to be almost totally absent in the conceptualizations of  Finnish sexual difference is the question of what is feminine and what is masculine (cf. Parvikko 1990). A plausible explanation to this lack of interest could be that family is considered to be a more important unit than women and men and so the sexual differences as well. There are also studies which try to combine these two aspects but in a closer reading they usually put more emphasis on families. Women without children, people living alone, and one-parent families are not much discussed in sociology, although the feminist practice has denaturalized the status of family in sociology. (Ahponen & Järvelä 1983; Haavio-Mannila & al. 1984; Rantalaiho 1986.) Despite the fact that in the late 1980’s and 1990’s published texts there are several notions of sexual and gender orders, the hegemonic Finnish gender system is strongly heterosexual. Heterosexuality is not questioned but nor are bodies and sexualities. The absence of bodies has to do with the overall theoretical trends in sociology. The time for bodies and multiple sexualities is now, but the time is still strictly limited in sociological corpus as we can already see from the titles of the books. This paradigmatic change can also be traced in the Anglo-US contexts and in other Nordic countries as well, so this is not a particularly Finnish phenomenon.

 

Equality politics was often constructed as the goal of feminist politics and linked with the problematizing of gender in the context of Finnishness in the texts (e.g. Jallinoja 1980; Rantalaiho 1986; Lehto 1991). The theory of sexual difference which is the starting point for my analysis emphasizes that although equal politics is important in many sense, in working life, politics and so forth, it does tend to hide the differences between women. It kind of assumes that women and men can somehow be graded, e.g. as if one could compare women and men as such. (Of course they can be compared if we want know something about the ”human nature” of them, something that is common to all, whatever that would be.) In my data, only in the 1990’s it is permissible to – if not celebrate but regard sexual differences between women and men as positive (Koivunen & Liljeström 1996; Jokinen & al. 1997). – My purpose here is of course not to minimize the value of equal politics. In my opinion, it has paved the way for other feminist constructions to come.

 

In my data, there are differing subject positions offered for women in the texts but the most often offered position is working mother. In Women’s Studies this position of a woman who is able to combine working life and take responsibility of home and children as well has been called a strong Finnish woman. Her roots are in the rural society where she worked hard together with her husband in their farm. After the Second World War she can be found in urban environments with a family and a full-time job. But how is she present in the texts?

- Generally, Finnish women started relatively early to participate into activities outside home (Jallinoja 1980, 228).

 

- The Finnish sociological women’s studies has emphasized work, especially wage work. This emphasis har structural, historical and cultural reasons. One structural reason is that women in Finland have been employed longer time and more widely than in other western world in general. (Silius 1992, 13).

 

 

As other scholars have claimed (see Peltonen 1998; Juntti 1998) the idea of ”a strong woman” is one of the hegemonic feminist ways to understand Finnish female subjectivity. There are a few examples that would back up the idea of the strong Finnish (Nordic) woman, but this remains to be investigated with a larger data. 6

 

FINNISH GENDER – GENDERLESS GENDER?

 

What I have learned about methodology by reading the ”sociological story” from 1969 to 1999 is that Finnishness is a narrative which most often creates one coherent identity to gender in the texts (cf. Bhabha 1995). Finnishness is a process rather than a place or a situation, it is a process of telling the gendered stories in sociology. So, as such Finnishness and gender do not explain anything, they are not the origin but the consequence (c.f. Komulainen 1998). We could say also, that being a Finnish woman or a Finnish man does not have only one (or two) fixed meaning but the meaning of Finnishness is linked into the discourse where it is stated or written. To add a feminist angle into the picture I argue that the notion of Finnishness, nationality, includes a power dimension. In other words, there must also be something else going on in signifying Finnish gender system than ”just telling stories” or tracing texts or describing cultural elements (cf. Yuval-Davis 1997, 125-132). This something else is about hierarchies, values and norms. Finnishness positions gender ideologically into a certain frame of thought, and in that way it stops the flow of gendered meanings. What I have argued is that it creates an area of Sameness, one system instead of two areas. In other words, the sexual difference, the idea of two different worlds, is understood with one logic, through one template.

 

Finnishness and gender both share the idea of Sameness 7 which creates ”genderless

gender” into the Finnish gender order. By genderless gender I mean that there is a frontier of equality and sameness in the Finnish gender system which treats women and men in the same way as the picture above tries to illustrate. If genderless gender were a genre what facts would be constitutive to it? What I have argued here is that Finnishness and gender are often dealt with separately; Finnishness is mostly linked to places and and gender in the context of Finnishness is often treated as a demographic variable, like age, and its quality is rarely questioned. In other words, genderless gender is kept alive by not problematizing gender; or vice versa, because Finnish gender is genderless there is no need to problematize in many words the different positions of women and men; they are more eagerly explained by other factors than the power relations between the sexes.

 

It could be argued that the sameness comes from Finnishness, from the Hegelian citizenship which is also an educational position (Pulkkinen 1996; see Gordon & Lahelma 1999; Silius 1995). To be a full member of the society one has to study, work and raise a family and this does not depend on gender. This hegemonic discourse is disembodied and not sexualized and it affects the constructed Finnish gender system. There is also a strong heterosexual emphasis no matter what the object of the study may be. Already, the Finnish word for gender, ”sukupuoli” implies the heterosexual family system where women and men are seen as halves of one entity. The word ”suku” means relatives or kinship, and ”puoli” means half, so put together the concept the word meaning  gender in Finnish is ”half of kinship” (see Kinnunen 1995).

 

The idea of genderless gender is discussed by Matti Kortteinen (1992, 76) when he illustrates the national ethos in Finland through Väinö Linna’s texts:

- ...(O)ne cannot but wonder where is the sexuality of people described in here. It seems to be totally missing from the relationships between sexes. Instead there are different kind of formations. As if the question were about the common battleground against the evil world, about battle in which the other has to push and the other has to push. It is more of a question of partnership, working together than a sexual relation...

 

What I want to argue here is that a part of this ethos is mediated to the reader in my data.

 

 As I have mentioned before, there are many parallel and contradictory tendencies in the texts. For instance, the notions of male and female appear in some texts (e.g. Grönfors 1981; Hoikkala 1993) but these studies tend to have a cultural phenomena as their research object and so they also are closer to cultural studies in which the problematizing of gender is common. In ”orthodox sociology” which can be traced to textbooks like Allardt’s Sosiologia I (Sociology I) gender is limited to the questions of work and home in the context of social classes. A simple explanation to the system oriented model of gender which hides different subjectivities would be that it is because of sociology itself, sociology as a discipline studying the relationship between structures and individuals and not being interested in the questions of subjectivity. The idea of the Same subject positions seems to disappear only partly with the emergence of critique on the notion of gender. Finnishness as a context for gender makes the gender order an area of the Gemeinschaft, undiffered and uniting.

 

I suggest that the Finnish gender system is not just self evident but a kind of natural order. As Homi Bhabha (1995, 311) states, ”being obliged to forget becomes the basis for remembering the nation”. It is as if one must forget that nationality is socially constructed and assume that it is something permanent. When this assuming is repeated over and over again it becomes self-evident, everyday-like and it is itself creating and enforcing the understanding of Finnish gender system. It is as if we all had the same fantasy which is lived true and this fantasy becomes a gender ideology, which in Finnish case emphasizes the similarities between sexes and puts the differences into the background. (See Zizek 1989, 32-33; Althusser 1984.)

 

FURTHER THEORIZING

 

Nationality is something to be explained, it is not itself an explanation, says Otto Bauer (1996, 41). In the same way gender is not an explanation, it has to be problematized. I have tried to combine these two concepts into one, Finnishness and gender,  which is a background for my analysis of female subjectivity in my dissertation. I have argued that Finnishness and sexual difference are both silent in the ”we-subject” whilst constituting it. The most important processes and practices of constructing this kind of we-subject are exclusions in the texts. Either gender is excluded or it is put to a lesser place. When Finnish gender is presented,  it values the strong position of woman in our society and leaves the question of femininities and masculinities out. Finnishness is a quality of ”man” or place, it has nothing to do with sexualities and little with gendered meanings.

 

Nationality comes close to the idea of a community, and nation to the conceptualization of society. Similarly, as one cannot see society with bare eyes because society is made in many places and positions simultaneously, nationality is not easily exposed, or perhaps only in stereotyped iconographies. (Compare Anderson 1991.) Yet, this is no reason to think that nationality should have only little defining potential for instance in problematizing gender. On the contrary, I am claiming that the ”power” of Finnishness lies exactly in the silent context as if staying in the background and not producing anything. An important task for further research is to find out which ”things”, that is what kind of female subjectivities, are acceptable and which are not in Finnish sociological texts. Like Stuart Hall (1992, 335) has said, the hegemonic ideas grasp little by little symbolic power and more and more people start to categorize the world through them. They are not only captivating other ways to think but they also turn into something like habits, into a permanent horizon for understanding society. What I have argued is that the Finnish gender system seems to be this kind of horizon which does not allow contradictory ways of problematizing gender in sociological texts.

 

I have tried to avoid placing Finnishness into one coherent set of explanations. I have called into question the already existing ways of giving meanings to Finnishness as a context for gender that almost by themselves seem to arise from historical facts: women’s right to vote (1906), women’s early and extensive participation in working life, the strong position of equality politics and equality studies in the Finnish society to name but a few. These facts often come up automatically when women’s subject positions in the Finnish gender system are talked about and when the idea of ”the strong Finnish woman” is exported elsewhere.

 

My focus here has been on sociological texts. If I broaden the constructed metanarrative to cover our society, Finnishness could be described as a mental context or level, where certain ideas of gender are born. This context is also linked to experience. For example, Kathrine Verdery (1996, 229) writes about experience, and suggests that we cannot presume that there is only one form of self-experience of nationality. In other words, when we speak about experiencing Finnishness, we cannot reach it with one signifier with a number of experiences. (See also Gordon and Lahelma 1999.) Keeping this in mind, I trace various subject positions in the sociological discourse.

 

On the basis of this material, I presume that the strong position of equality studies in social sciences and also in Women’s Studies produces ”same-subject-positions” for women and men cutting out many possible female and male subject positions. Finnish gender system seems to create such a social space where the differences between and among men and women stay in the background while the foreground is filled by genderless equality in which the most important task is to guarantee the same rights for both ”groups of people”. Like Braidotti (1996) argues, gender combined with nationality is one of the axes of negative differentiation and positive standardization. This may explain why ”the strong Finnish woman” has such a hegemonic place. The importance of equality issues, on the other hand, has made it necessary to compare differences between men and women which simultaneously has constructed a certain sameness, one subject position for women.

 

The 1990s’ is the era of differences, of simultaneous propinquity and distance, deferred and virtual interpersonal relations. In feminist research the theory of sexual difference (Braidotti 1991; 1994) comes to challenge the Anglo-US gender theories which base on the division of biological sex and gender. The goal of the politics of this ”sexual difference doctrine” is to make many alternative subject positions possible, that is not just one subject position for the heterosexual woman, who is working and has a family. The theory of sexual difference assumes from the beginning that one can not necessarily compare women to men (or vice versa), or women to women, and that subjectivity is not either one and coherent but that there are differences inside each woman. Here I totally agree with Caryn McTighe Musil on the difficulties that this creates for postmodern feminist epistemology:

- The challenge of the nineties is to hold on simultaneously to these two contradictory truths: as women, we are the same and we are different. The bridges, power, alliances and social changes possible will be determined by how well we define ourselves through a matrix that encompasses our gendered particularities while not losing sight of our unity (ref. Yuval-Davis 1997, 126).

 

There has to be some sense of unity or unifying qualities between women and at the same time the differences between them must be taken seriously. 8 Gender is understood here as process, something which is changing all the time, which is sometimes apparent but in other times in the background.

 

Are the sociological texts then important or are they in some way stopping or putting obstacles to women’s access to female subjectivity? In my opinion, it is not irrelevant how sociologists write about gender and nationality, which both are certain orders or manifestations of social structures. Underlining this there is a concern for what kind of a we-subject is being built and what kind of a space this construction is leaving for others. In other words, we could ask what kind of a society is constructed by the ”experts of society”, by those whose job it is to conceptualize society. 9

 

It would be foolish to suggest that the texts I have been reading have proved to be ”wrong” in some way. It is easy – and pointless – to criticize the 1960’s conceptualizations such as sex roles from the 1990’s perspective in a post-something frame of reference like the Braidottian theories of female subjectivity and sexual difference. The idea of sexual difference, of course, is not new but it has been differently understood at different times. Many so called classics in sociology have already pondered the significance of the two sexes. Simirlaly, in my material, in the influential book for feminist studies Suomalainen nainen ja mies, Elina Haavio-Mannila also discusses whether it is important to hang on to sexual differences or not. However, what hat has drawn my attention is whether sexual difference is debated or not. It seems to me that the discussion of what is the feminine area and what is the masculine area in society, or what belongs to the female subjectivity and what to the male subjectivity has never received much space in sociological discourse. As Tuija Parvikko (1990) illustrates, it is as if feminine/masculine or female/male are not parts of the Finnish gender, or that sexuality and the embodied nature of subjectivity were less important things to think about (see also Braidotti 1994). There are now studies made in sociology (Veijola 1998; Huuska 1998) where alternative visions are put forth but these works are not yet in the study programmes.

 

The Finnish gender system that emphasizes the genderless gender has been investigated here like a metanarrative. This narrative is giving some possible frames from which one can further elaborate the social order of gender, even if it is not worth trying to explain every detail of the story. Many more sociological texts dealing with gender and Finnishness have to be studied in order that one can say that this metanarrative is valid in Finnish sociology in general. What does the constructed metanarrative tell about the Finnish society, then? Has it any touching points to reality? If we believe that this construction actually is a  picture of  Finnish society it would mean that in the Finnish society femininities and masculinities stay in marginalized positions in relation to the production of genderless gender. It looks like that in the official politics this one image of equal gender order based on sameness is manifestated but then again for instance commercials celebrate many kind of differences, also subordinating ones, between genders. The former kind of  ”denial of femininities and masculinities” has been traced in the former Soviet Union, for instance in Russia and Estonia (Haavio-Mannila & Kauppinen-Toropainen 1993). When I interviewed Estonian women in 1991 at the University of Tarto for newspaper articles and women's magazines, one of  the most irritating aspects of their lives according to them was that "they were not treated like women". It would be interesting to find out how women in Finland would respond to my idea of genderless gender.

 

 

EPILOGUE

 

I have to emphasize that my intrest in feminist studies started in studying sociology in Tampere. There were many seminars dealing with gender issues and also theoretical discussions about how to problematize gender. It was always easy to choose books for the examinations so that the student could read almost whatever s/he found interesting. Despite the books in the official programmes it was possible for the student to learn a lot about gender and feminism in sociology. Finnishness I learnt to problematize in Liisa Rantalaiho's seminar where we tried to find out what the Finnish equivalent to gender would be. The debatte continues.

 

 

 

References:

 

Ahponen, Pirkkoliisa ja Järvelä, Marja (1983): Maalta kaupunkiin, pientilalta tehtaaseen. Tehdastyöläisten elämäntavan muutos * (”>From country to city, from small farm to factory. The change of lifestyle of industrial workers”). Helsinki: WSOY.

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