Klara Goedecke

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Karlstads Universitet

As a critical studies of men and masculinities (henceforth: CSMM) scholar, I have long been puzzled by the silence around ethics in the subfield. The profound engagement with ethics within feminist theory, including feminist poststructuralist, STS (science and technology studies), and posthumanist thought, focused on the ethics of knowledge product...

Within gambling debates and research, emotions are associated with irrationality, loss of control, and problem gambling. Simultaneously, they have a complex relationship to masculine positions, which are said to be connected to both stoicism and aggressivity. Using interviews with Swedish men gamblers and feminist and critical theorisations of emot...

Poker, a million-dollar industry and a leisure activity, is played between close-knit friends, at casinos, and online. It is gendered; masculine positions are produced between players, often in competitive, aggressive, and sexist ways. However, the (homo)social relationships of poker have hardly been studied. Using interviews with Swedish men poker...

Within Critical studies of men and masculinities (henceforth: CSMM), the concepts masculinity and masculinities have been tenacious to the point of ubiquity. The last decades have seen a tendency to identify an ever-growing number of different masculinities: flexible, inclusive, caring, toxic, etc (e.g. Anderson, 2005; Elliott, 2016; Gee, 2014). An...

During the last decades, several European gambling markets have been reregulated. In 2019, it was Sweden’s turn; the former oligopoly was replaced by a licensing system. In this article, the governmental inquiry in which the new system was proposed, outlined, and justified is studied using discourse analysis. Medical, public health, and free market...

This chapter reviews empirical and theoretical work within critical studies on men and masculinities (CSMM), drawing on extensive empirical and theoretical studies relevant to psychology and social psychology. The chapter focuses on gender relations and power dynamics, social structures, intersectionality, bodies, practices, and identities, both in...

About 50,000 people are daily gamblers in Sweden (Spelinspektionen 2021), and while the turnover of gambling companies amounted to 26 billion SEK in 2021, the average Swede loses almost 3,000 SEK/year gambling (Folk hälsomyndigheten 2022). Nowadays, gambling is seldom discussed as sinful. Instead, it is seen as a commodity like any other on the one...

In 2018, a follow-up study of a 2015 study on the prevalence of gambling in Sweden indicated that women were in the majority among problem gamblers. This suggests a change in the gendering of gambling in Sweden. However, no such change is recognized in help-seeking data. This raises questions: are women in the majority among problem gamblers? If so...

Using research on emotion work, interviewing, and feminist killjoys, this chapter deepens the understanding of friendship and gendered positions by scrutinising interview interactions. It draws on data from 21 individuals, the 20 interviewees and the researcher, and presents various approaches to and performances during the interviews. This chapter...

This chapter discusses masculine positions, men’s friendships, and touch between male friends, and it shows that friendship was intimately linked to men’s politics and gender politics. The interviewees rejected “laddishness” and what they saw as laddish and homophobic friendships. The chapter demonstrates that masculine positions were produced and...

This concluding chapter discusses the political potential of the interviewees’ friendship politics, composed of explicitly politicised as well as implicit and taken-for-granted notions of friendship expressed during the interviews. The chapter scrutinises genealogies and implications of how men, masculine positions, and friendship were politicised,...

In this chapter, friendship temporalities, both over the life course and in day-to-day adult life, are scrutinised. This chapter presents interview narratives about the beginning, continuation, and present of friendships, particularly how friendships were sustained despite suffering from a lack of time and being deprioritised compared to work, the...

This chapter explores intimacy ideals and shows that disclosing intimacy and therapeutic discourses were used to make sense of the interviewees’ friendships. Friendship conversations and personal development were celebrated aspects of “real” friendship, and in some cases became conditions for it. Other research points to competitiveness and stoicis...

This book discusses men’s friendships in relation to queer, discursive, and intersectional feminist theories. It analyses stories of intimacy, touch, hugs, and conversations, connecting these with current discussions within feminism and critical masculinity studies on “new” men, men’s political activism, and how friendships are lived and conceptual...

Gambling advertising is often permeated by stereotypical portrayals of gender, including those of male gamblers as tough and successful. Simultaneously, representations of men in other advertising has become increasingly diverse, including emotional and sexualized, heroic and muscular portrayals. This article uses both these bodies of research to d...

Questions about, and definitions of, close relations often raise heated debate, for they concern fundamental ideas about personal and collective identities and experiences. Understandings of close relations and the specific positions and situations they entail have ideational and practical – or, differently put, epistemological and ontological – ef...

Gambling advertising usually draws heavily on gendered stereotypes, including portrayals of male gamblers as tough and successful. Meanwhile, representations of men in advertising have grown increasingly diverse, with emotional and sexualized men accompanying heroic, muscular portrayals. In this article, both these bodies of research are drawn upon...

Postfeminist cultural representations have shown men as bumbling anti-heroes, and as sensitive and supportive of feminism. Research on postfeminist men has mainly been based on UK and US cultural representations, while other contexts have received little attention. In this article, I deepen the understanding of postfeminist portrayals of men by foc...

Fatherhood ideals have been changing over the last decades, and Sweden has often been seen as a fore-runner when it comes to both fatherhood policies and gender equality. In this article, we investigate how discourses about engaged, Swedish fathers and various formulations of gender equality are linked to and used in the discursive production of Sw...

This article explores two Swedish TV shows centred on close, emotional friendships between men, Våra vänners liv (2010) [Our friends’ lives] and Boys (2015), as examples of postfeminism with a Swedish twist, inspired by Swedish ideologies of gender equality. Explicitly referring to feminism and gender equality, both shows explore what can be consid...

The overarching aim of this thesis is to deepen the understanding of men’s friendships, in relation to gender, sexuality, power, masculine positions, feminisms and gender equality. The thesis draws upon in-depth interviews conducted individually and with pairs of men, between 25 and 49 years old, predominantly well-educated, white, straight and wor...

Friendship is an undertheorized but increasingly important relationship in late modernity. In this article, the authors present findings from two ongoing research projects about friendship, gender and age in contemporary Sweden. They argue that discourses about gender and friendship are highly relevant for how friendship is conceptualized both amon...

Feminist researchers have an ambivalent relation to friendships between men. They have been seen as both threatening and promising, as relationships in which gendered power relations can be either reproduced or challenged. This article draws upon interviews with heterosexual men about their friendships with other men, and the role of emotional and...

Many facets of relationality are explored in this chapter, which highlights meaning-makings around men’s friendships, processes of change – relating a perceived “new” self to an “old” one – and the relationship between interviewer and interviewee. The author explores narratives of friendship among a group of young men involved in exit processes, le...