The disciplining and control of women and the feminine are intimately related to notions of cultural and racial purity. As a result, racist ideologies are almost always also misogynist and anti-feminist, says British philosopher Jane Clare Jones. She has analysed anti-feminism in the manifesto of Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik.

Internally displaced women in Colombia are organizing themselves to secure their rights to housing, education and health care. But along with this come threats, violence and dissatisfied husbands. Is it worth it?

Does state support for voluntary organisations curtail creativity and force activists to focus on what the government wants them to?

Gays and lesbians can now marry or register as partners in all the Nordic countries, with the exception of the Faroe Islands. Yet even within the gay movement there has been a long-standing resistance to marriage for same-sex couples.

A dedicated football player, a disciplined martial arts practitioner or a respected weightlifter? According to a recent Norwegian study, young girls are most concerned with their appearance as they become teenagers, but boys must do something to become young men. Their choice of activity is also a choice of masculine identity. 

A book on a shelf at the university bookstore in Lund was the start of a research career for Karin Widerberg, Professor of Sociology at the University of Oslo.

According to doctors during the interwar period, wide hips made women unsuitable for running long distances. In her recent doctoral thesis, Kerstin Bornholdt looks at how researchers reached conclusions like this.

Young Norwegian women today want to be self-confident, cool and relaxed – as well as pretty and well-dressed. This is the female ideal they find in the magazines they read.

A recent Norwegian report looks at young men from highly patriarchal immigrant families who are struggling with their lives and who have a rather complicated relationship to women.