New collection explores gender across Scandinavian music education

The volume Gender Issues in Scandinavian Education: From Stereotypes to Multiple Possibilities, edited by Silje Valde Onsrud, Hilde Synnøve Blix, and Ingeborg Lunde Vestad, brings together researchers who have examined gender and music education across Scandinavia since the early 2000s. Published by Routledge, the collection gathers influential voices who have shaped this subfield and presents both older and newer research projects in English — and even in Scandinavian languages — for the first time in a single volume.

Editor's note: Sam de Boise, School of Music, Theatre and Art, Örebro University, Sweden, reviewed this collection for Nordic Research in Music Education.

The collection does more than offer regional insights. Scandinavia enjoys a global reputation for gender equality policies and culturally democratic approaches, and the book unpacks the contradictions, challenges, and possibilities within those frameworks. Rather than stopping at critique, the authors explore productive tensions between political rhetoric and lived experience.

The editors frame the project around "gender issues" rather than simply "gender equality," signalling that understanding equality requires examining how gender is produced and how it might be done in different ways. They outline the paradox at the heart of the Scandinavian region: despite widespread assumptions about progressive gender attitudes, the same stubborn problems surface here as in English-speaking countries. The introductory chapter surveys definitions of gender, drawing from Simone de Beauvoir, Margaret Mead, Judith Butler, and — notably — Allan G. Johnson's The Gender Knot (2014), a less-familiar U.S. text, to address the tension between solidifying gender categories in trying to solve them.

Mapping strategies against inequality

Cecilia Björck's chapter, "Music, Gender and Social Change," maps approaches for tackling gender inequalities through a systematic review of literature from 2015 to 2018, supplemented by broader searches spanning back to the 1990s. Björck emphasises Sweden while examining diagnostic approaches to the problem alongside solutions at individual, collective, and state levels. Importantly, she highlights the wave of grassroots mobilisations after #MeToo throughout music education institutions and the wider music sector.

Voices, instruments, and performance gaps

Eirik Askerøi and Ingeborg Lunde Vestad look at "transgressive girlhood" in Chapter 3, studying a single child in a Norwegian music classroom and historical shifts in gendered perceptions of children's voices. They find that ideals around girls' singing are constructed through teachers' implicit discourse, reflecting both traditional femininity and more emancipatory notions of gender equality. The voice, they demonstrate, does not simply inherit gender conventions — it actively builds them even as it is constrained by them.

Carina Borgström Källén's Chapter 4, "Binary Oppositions and Third Spaces," adopts a deconstructionist perspective rooted in Derrida, Butler, Bourdieu, and Connell. She traces how binary divisions reinforce themselves through micro-interactions in Swedish classrooms. The chapter shows how aesthetic traditions of different genres — individuality in rock versus relative erasure in choir — carry embedded gendered assumptions, and that when pupils rub against unfamiliar aesthetic norms (as in jazz), binary boundaries destabilise.

Policy meets practice

Linn Hentschel and Cecilia Ferm Almqvist focus on implementation of gender equality policies in Swedish classrooms. Using Beauvoir's concepts of transcendence and immanence, they examine girls' experiences. Their chapter gives space to two teachers at a music summer camp for girls and non-binary people, connecting macro-level policy with micro-level teaching strategies and student reactions.

Mikael Persson's "Positioning in a Swedish Music Profiled School" departs from the others: it avoids assuming gender's automatic significance as a category, following Butler's notion of performativity alongside social psychological positioning theory. This approach uses discourse analysis to examine competitive positioning within more selective schools in a neoliberal environment where students see themselves as consumers vying for places. The chapter tries to reconcile debates between conversation analysts and discourse analysts about how to handle gender empirically.

Queer approaches and online pop tools

Silje Valde Onsrud's Chapter 7 critiques "queer pedagogy" in music education via the Norwegian artist Girl in Red (Marie Ulven) and her song Girls. Onsrud shows how the lyrics, visuals, and music combined expose and challenge binary classroom assumptions. She argues for connecting queer pedagogy from theorists like Gould to popular music studio practices, echoing longstanding traditions of challenging conventions with pop.

Hilde Synnøve Blix and Live Weider Ellefsen, in Chapter 8, target gendered instrument norms through large-scale data from Norwegian schools. Using web content, administrator surveys, and policy documents, they replicate many patterns familiar from earlier studies by Abeles and Porter (1978). The "citational chains" of gendered instrument choice persist unbroken, though the authors propose — with careful caveats about unintended consequences — concrete ideas using role modelling and non-normative messaging.

Lilli Mittner and Hilde Synnøve Blix close in Chapter 9 with "Career paths in higher music education: Challenges for gender equality in the arts," part of Norway's National Research Council-funded Gender Balance in Arts Education project. Using vertical and horizontal segregation frameworks, they show an anxious picture of Norwegian Higher Music Education: intense vertical stratification by seniority decade after decade (2009–2017 data), alongside uneven cultural prestige tied to gendered disciplinary domains.

Theoretical coherence — and gaps

Most chapters build from Butler's performativity, with some poststructuralist and discourse-based work aligned with Foucault or Derrida. Few develop "second-wave" materialist approaches. The editors note this theoretical constraint reflects the actual field of Scandinavian music education rather than broader feminist theory's push toward new materialist and posthuman thinking. At times it can feel at odds with other contemporary feminist work, but the chosen great theorists offer an honest picture of one region's scholarship.

A potential shortcoming is the geographic load-bearing of the collection: the term "Scandinavian" effectively means Swedish and Norwegian perspectives since no chapter takes Denmark as primary, even though similar workshops named "Music and Gender in Balance" do frame conversations regionally. The conference GeMus in Örebro was explicitly international but dominated by Swedes and Norwegians. Denmark's voice is missing because the wider research landscape has long been quieter from the kingdom.

What is not about gender equality?

The editors admit two significant under-examined facets. Boys and masculinity attract considerably less scholarship than girls and femininity. Queerness is grossly under-explored: chapter 7 provides only one angle of LGBTQ+ youth experience, trans* and non-binary individuals appear near-invisible. The rigid double-binary of Scandinavian personal numbers stresses experiences beyond topics explored here—a transitory reality visible only as policy gap in most classrooms described. The same applies to intersections with racialization; few projects probe ethnicity compounding Scandinavian educational inequalities by gender. These absences ultimately index current field constraints rather than editorial omissions.

The accumulation shows repeatedly: equality sits more as declarative plane than felt practice in structural interplay.

— from the reviewer's invited reflection

Their aim is not merely to diagnose “gender issues” or point out what is wrong with the current state of affairs. Instead, they seek opportunities to disrupt and destabilise, proposing possibilities for something better. In times when gender studies and a commitment to social justice face sustained attacks in many countries, I find myself questioning how much of this is a deliberate strategy and how much reflects a genuine encouragement of pluralism within the field. Still, research on gender—particularly gender equality—finds itself in a precarious moment. Those of us in Scandinavia are not shielded from the backlash mounted by forces that seek to dismiss such perspectives as outdated or as favouring women over men. This precariousness is precisely why thinking critically about gender issues in music education today has never been more essential.