Sweden is considered one of the most equitable countries in the world when it comes to gender. The country has long term political ambitions towards gender equality (https://sweden.se/society/gender-equality-in-sweden/), including such things as the world’s first “Feminist Foreign Policy” (https://www.government.se/government-policy/feminist-foreign-policy/). Even though the country has come a long way in striving towards gender equality, the daily experience is still one of multiple shortcomings, tensions and problems including gender equality in the workplace, transsexual rights, and unbalanced sharing of parental leave and subsequent responsibilities for child rearing. Overall, gender paradoxes seem to persist with public policies and legislations improving gender equality on the one hand, and gender struggles felt on a daily basis on the other hand. At the same time, we recognize that the Swedish position is still a rather privileged one. Gender struggles in other parts of the world typically involve even more experiences of violence, exclusion and precarity, among other social injustices. We find the Swedish context to be a useful backdrop to the connections between politics, marketing, and consumers’ lived lives as an introduction to the conference theme: Remaking Gender, Rewriting Rights.
This GENMAC Conference invites scholars to consider such gender paradoxes and struggles, challenge intersections of gender, politics and consumption, as well as articulate new possibilities for the debate against gender inequality. With this invitation, we want to foster debates regarding how gender is articulated, negotiated and politicized in order to contribute to a broader discussion regarding gender and social change. In other words, at this conference, our aim is not only to evoke academic debates interlinking gender, marketing and consumer behavior, but also rethink academic contribution to theory, practice and social change as it relates to gender.
(Text sourced from conference website)