Lucas Gottzén

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Stockholm University

Feelings are at the heart of interpersonal violence. Anger, resentment, rage, panic, tension and fear are all emotional states that victims or perpetrators of violence may experience. This chapter highlights the role of shame in intimate partner violence, which is of course not a new topic. Previous studies have, for instance, demonstrated how vict...

The aim of this special issue is to enable a dialogue between masculinity studies and transgender studies and attempt to find common areas of inquiry and mutual knowledge production in such conventionally divided arenas. The contributions to the issue explore a multiplicity of masculinities, which are seen as situational positions that can be deplo...

The concept of hegemonic masculinity has been used in gender studies since the early-1980s to explain men’s power over women. Stressing the legitimating power of consent (rather than crude physical or political power to ensure submission), it has been used to explain men’s health behaviours and the use of violence. Gender activists and others seeki...

Youth sports have been recognized as an arena for men to meet increased cultural expectations of being involved in their children’s lives. Indeed, in contrast to other child care practices, many men are eager to take part in their children’s organized sports. Drawing on an ethnographic study of middle-class families in the United States, this study...

Critical masculinity scholars have recently suggested that men recognizing their own vulnerability, as well as the vulnerability of others, could be a tool for feminist masculinity politics. These arguments are inspired by feminist debates, particularly the work of Judith Butler, who stresses the importance of recognizing a universally shared vulne...

This chapter explores fatherhood and adult masculinity in the Swedish children’s film series about Sune (1993–2021). The Sune films showcase a cultural shift towards child-centredness, where men are increasingly expected to be involved, emotionally present, and spend time with their children. However, fathers in the Sune films are depicted as fooli...

Research on men who have been violent against women has often shown how these men justify or excuse their violence, minimize their responsibility, as well as construct dominant forms of masculinity. However, as attitudes in support of intimate partner violence are declining around the world, we might expect perpetrators to become less self-righteou...

This article analyzes debates about online pornography filters and youth in the Swedish press between 2016 and 2020, focusing on the depiction of boys and young men. Critics of filtering software argued that boys could self-regulate if they were provided better sex education and if parents communicated with them about pornography. In contrast, advo...

In this article, the monstrous “woman batterer” is used as a figuration and made a point of departure in order to destabilise masculine ontology. The monster is here seen as a deviant figure that gives meaning to the normal, but also as a figure that blurs the borders between the strange/unfamiliar and the known/familiar due to its contingent ontol...

Male Peer Support Theory (MPST) is one of the few principal theories about masculinity and men’s violence against women. The theory foregrounds the role of social networks in encouraging violence. This article offers a critical discussion of MPST, particularly the assumption that social networks primarily support violence. Drawing on a qualitative...

Childhood adversities, such as abuse, neglect and parental alcohol and substance abuse, has been linked to higher rates of youth delinquency. Drawing on interviews with 33 young male offenders, incarcerated in Swedish prisons, this paper analyzes how they narrate their experiences of growing up, and particularly how they make sense of their childho...

This chapter provides a broad overview of the field by bringing in to focus the value of contemporary, critical masculinity studies to feminist work on intimate partner violence. It begins by providing an outline of feminist engagements with intimate partner violence, from its origins to more contemporary work that interrogate questions of differen...

Men, Masculinities and Intimate Partner Violence provides new insights into men as both perpetrators and victims of intimate partner violence, as well as on how to involve men and boys in anti-violence work. The chapters explore intimate partner violence from the perspectives of researchers, therapists, activists, organisations, media as well as me...

Queer criminology has primarily focused on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people as victims and perpetrators of crime, as well as on the criminalization of non-heterosexual practices. In this article, we contribute to the emerging discussions on how queer theory can be used in relation to criminological research by exploring desista...

This article explores the challenges that were detected in the first evaluation of the violence prevention programme Mentors in Violence Prevention at senior levels of compulsory schools and upper-secondary schools in Sweden. In particular, we analyse how the gender-transformative dimension and the bystander perspective aspect of the programme play...

In this article we explore the affectivity of the sexualized epithet ‘whore’ when employed by 150 young social media users in Sweden. By adopting a Deleuze-Guattarian inspired approach to affect we illustrate how ‘whore’ works to restrict and inhibit girls’ affective capacities within the online sexuality assemblage. We further explore targets’ and...

Despite significant work on family geographies in recent years, geographers have paid less attention to changes and challenges that may be considered 'family troubles' in diverse contexts. Through this editorial and the special section, we unpack time-space dynamics of ‘family troubles’ in diverse contexts, with a particular focus on care and relat...

When young people are studied in relation to citizenship and education, geographical location is not always considered. When the emplacement of youth is addressed, a disproportional focus on schools and civic youth practices in city settings further mirrors an unreflected urban norm within the field. There is however a burgeoning literature that ex...

The role of shame in feminist activism has been debated lately, where scholars particularly have discussed whether shame could enable individuals with privileged positions, such as heterosexual men, to align with vulnerable groups or prevent them from political action. Drawing on written stories submitted to a feminist anti-violence campaign, this...

Drawing on interviews with voluntary participants in intervention programmes for perpetrators of intimate partner violence in Sweden, the present article analyses violent men’s turning-point stories, that is, their narratives of deciding to start and starting treatment. Three types of turning-point stories are identified: narratives that describe m...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how a group of men relate to food celebrities in the contemporary Swedish food-media landscape, especially celebrity chefs on TV. Design/methodology/approach Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 31 men in Sweden (22–88 years of age), with different backgrounds and with a variety of intere...

The aim of this special issue is to create a greater dialogue between affect studies and masculinity studies. The contributions to the issue explore how affect functions as non-discursive intensities that may enable new forms of gendered subjectivities that subvert core tenets of masculinity, as well as how affect may be channeled into masculinitie...

While grandparenting literature has primarily discussed intergenerational relations in families with ‘normal’ everyday problems, such as childcare, it has largely neglected more troublesome issues, such as domestic violence. Based on interviews with ten children and teens, this article explores grandchildren’s experiences of how their grandparents...

From its origins in the LGBTQ community, coming out has become a narrative genre describing the experiences of recognizing and disclosing a variety of other stigmatized positions, including that of male perpetrators of intimate partner violence. Drawing on interviews with forty-four partner-violent men in Sweden, this paper explores how closets and...

This article explores how 31 Swedish men (22–88 years old) talk about the sociality of domestic cooking in everyday life. We demonstrate how domestic cooking – for oneself, for others and with others – is part of the understanding of contemporary Swedish men and how the expressed sociality of cooking is intertwined with accomplishments of masculini...

Artikeln analyserar hur män som utövat våld mot kvinnor berättar om sitt våld för andra. Männen upplever våldet som skambelagt och är rädda för det sociala nätverkets respons. För att hantera ett förmodat förskjutande använder de sig av narrativa strategier som fördömer våldet samtidigt som mannen därigenom gör sig själv begriplig.

This article discusses how qualitative research with children exposed to intimate partner violence deals with methodological issues of children’s voices. Violence researchers argue for the need to see children as competent social actors, differentiate between groups of children, attending to adult–child asymmetry in research and acknowledging child...

Feminist food studies have repeatedly identified a dichotomy of ‘masculine’ self-oriented cooking as leisure and ‘feminine’ other and care-oriented foodwork (meal planning, grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning up after meals). However, recent research suggests that there is a great deal of variety and contradiction in men’s accounts of their cook...

Sociologi är studiet av samhället och människan i samhället. Med sociologins hjälp kan vi förstå hur människor ser på sig själva, hur de relaterar till varandra, hur de organiserar sig och hur samhället förändras. Vi kan också lära oss hur sociala problem skapas och hur ojämlikhet och förtryck reproduceras. Att studera sociologi innebär att hela ti...

As a graduate student at an interdisciplinary research institute, I learned two essential methodological approaches in qualitative research. Ethnomethodologists said that the task of research is to make the familiar strange, while anthropologists argued that the aim of ethnography is to make the strange familiar. The idea of making the familiar str...

As a graduate student at an interdisciplinary research institute, I learned two essential methodological approaches in qualitative research. Ethnomethodologists said that the task of research is to make the familiar strange, while anthropologists argued that the aim of ethnography is to make the strange familiar.

This article discusses the status of the concept of hegemonic masculinity in research on men and boys in Sweden, and how it has been used and developed. Sweden has a relatively long history of public debate, research, and policy intervention in gender issues and gender equality. This has meant, in sheer quantitative terms, a relatively sizeable cor...

Sverige är världens mest jämställda land, med världens mest jämställda män. Åtminstone framställs det ofta så, både i offentlig debatt och i vardagliga samtal. Denna bild av den normale svenska mannen upprätthålls dock genom att något annat – eller någon annan – skapas som avvikande, annorlunda, obegriplig eller sjuk. I den här antologin diskutera...

This article concerns generation and food morality, drawing on video recordings of dinners in Swedish middle-class families. A detailed analysis of affect displays during one family dinner extends prior work on food morality (Ochs, Pontecorvo, & Fasulo 1996; Grieshaber 1997; Bourdieu 2003; Wiggins 2004), documenting ways in which participants may s...

The present paper explores middle‐class fathers’ educational work by studying how they and their partners are involved in their children’s education at home, in school, and how they investigate school options and make decisions about educational issues. Drawing on data from an ethnographic study of 30 dual‐earner couples in the Greater Los Angeles...

The present article analyzes how young self-injuring women and men construct themselves as ‘cutters.’ The study draws on observations of a Swedish Internet community connected to self-injurious behavior and departs from a poststructuralist framework in order to analyze how members position themselves and others in relation to cultural discourses on...

This article discusses the use of video cameras in participant observation drawing on approximately 300 hours of video data from an ethnographic study of Swedish family life. Departing from Karen Barad’s post-humanistic perspective on scientific practices, the aim is to critically analyse how researchers, research participants and technology produc...

This ethnographic study explores parenthood ideals and practices among eight Swedish middle-class couples. A pivotal term in the analysis is involved par- enthood, which is understood as a cultural norm prescribing that parents are responsible for their children, that they should spend much time with them, and develop close relationships to them. T...

This study analyzes parent involvement by employing ethnographic methods and discourse analysis of parent–child talk about homework. We juxtapose what is often presented as a straightforward and unproblematic concept of parent involvement in education policy and research with actual instances of the day-to-day practices and reported experiences of...

The article documents how dual-earner families employ different household strategies when managing time and childcare in everyday life. In particular, the focus is the unforeseen consequences of household strategies, that is, novel emerging problems, cultural ideals and subjectivities. In this ethnographic study of eight middle-class couples in Swe...

The present article explores home–school relations by analyzing how Swedish teachers and parents negotiate responsibility for children's education and rearing through school letters. It draws on participant observations using a video camera in families, interviews with parents, and analysis of school letters written by teachers to parents. The divi...

Most previous research on parental involvement in children's homework has focused on the pedagogical advantages or disadvantages of school assignments while neglecting the practice in its social context, family life. By studying parent–child homework negotiations in Swedish families, this paper examines how family members position themselves and ea...