Kvinnors försörjningsrum : Hegemonins förvaltare och murbräckor

Sammanfattning: This thesis deals with questions concerning the different strategies women adopt in order to support themselves when they become unemployed in rural areas. One strategy is to start a business of one's one, a strategy supported and called for by the Swedish Government, especially during the 1990s economic recession. Another important factor was the Swedish membership in the EU that demanded cutbacks in public spending. Still, the membership gave opportunities in terms of structural funds. One of these was the Objective 5b. In the Southeast of Sweden a region of 20 municipalities from four different counties was demarked as an objective 5b-region for structural change. In this region interviews were conducted with individual women,civil servants, and business advisors in order to understand what option women identify and what space women might occupy when working for livelihood strategies and local and regional development. Besides interviews, the thesis is a discourse analysis of regional development documents and bills of regional development policies. Concepts from time-geography, gender studies and the concept of "space" and "place" are used in order to analyse the material. As a result of the study: regional development policy is concerned with large-scale structures. The issues of everyday life and livelihood are not taken into consideration; relations, sexuality and various ways of putting different economic strategies together in order to create a living are not defined as a policy of interest. Gender mainstreaming is pronounced in these texts but not concretised. Geography is an important tool in understanding variations of women's self-supporting strategies. In the region where this study has been located, traditional male labour markets dominate. The gender contract, regulating women and men's relation to each other, might be classified as traditional. This becomes evident in comparison of political and economic power between the sexes as well as studying cultural symbols and norms in the local society. In terms of their own businesses, women in this study, tried to occupy the in-between spaces in the local labour market. At that place, they would not challenge the traditional norm of the "businessman", or what business, traditionally in this region, is all about. In this sense, the turn down of women's businesses is a rational choice, even if it is seen as a failure by traditional business advisors and norms related to business.