‘The right man in the right place’ – the consequences of gender-coding of place and occupation in collaboration processes

Society needs to find new ways to utilise its resources in the best possible way in order to enable satisfactory services for its citizens in the long term. This is particularly important in sparsely populated areas, and in cities and municipalities with a declining population. This study contributes to this field by analysing a project for collaboration between the rescue service and the home-care service that has been introduced in a number of Swedish municipalities. The collaboration is intended to ensure welfare and safety for citizens, to guarantee a more efficient use of municipal resources, and to contribute to improved emergency management and civil protection. The rescue service and the home-care service are two clearly gender-coded occupations that also operate on gender-coded work places and places of work. An overarching aim has therefore been to study gendered obstacles and possibilities of the collaboration. In our analysis of the empirical data – interviews with persons involved in the collaboration – place emerged as an important aspect of the collaboration processes, and is therefore elaborated in this article to contribute with knowledge of how conceptions and gender-coding of places and occupations affect sustainable and well-functioning collaboration processes. The results show that collaboration processes between municipal services are complex and challenge ideals of the organisation, content and responsibility of work and who should perform certain work tasks. Notions of gender and gender differences are reproduced through the collaboration, which affect the efforts of municipalities to ensure welfare and safety for citizens.

Gender and Cartoons from Theaters to Television: Feminist Critique on the Early Years of Cartoons

From adults to children, from theaters to television, cartoons are one of the few major popular art forms that have been able to consistently redefine their audience as they experiment and change and, as such, have proved their importance in culture and society. This article discusses the social critique that originated with cartoons’ theatrical beginnings, which were met with substantial praise from the intellectual and art community of their time. An exploration into the massification of the medium reveals its role in the marginalization of women in the animation industry as underpaid and unrecognized labor. This article also explores the industry’s creation of a compulsory gender coding associated with the animated female form by investigating Disney’s and Warner Bros.’ competing portrayals of women as a ‘madonna–whore’ duality, and further looks into Disney’s feminine triptych perpetuating heteronormative gender coding in the form of the princess, the witch and the fairy godmother. The massification of the medium, as television programming shaped the industry into children’s programming, was led by Hanna-Barbera who did not consider girl cartoons a priority and continued to marginalize women in the workforce.