Män - finns de?

Abstract

This article takes up the basic question whether - and how - women can be named in a liberating way. The discussion has its starting point in two concrete issues debated in the course of the 1998 election campaign in Sweden. The first is the problem of gender and competence and the second is the question of strategic and organisational nioves. Both examples demonstrate that men and women are named differently in politics, the main point being that women always have to reläte to the fact that they are defined as women. Men, on the other hand, dominate politics while at the same time indicating that they are not there as men but as individuals. Hence, my question: Men - do they exist? I maintain that an important aspect of feminist theory and practice is to point out men as a category, as actors in terms of male norms and interests. Basically, this is a political struggle over who has the power to name gender and gender relations. Through collective action, women claim for themselves part of the right of definition. Those who act cannot be encircled. However, by making common cause, women also construct men as their opponents and thereby breach the boundaries of what is entailed in being a man. Men are challenged as an unrestricted, fluid, 'human' category. The concluding argument is that the liberating link between women's 'difference' (read: denied agency) and men's power, in theory as well as in practice, is to be found in woraens collective actions, their active and conscious naming of themselves as a political category.