Centre for Gender Research at the University of Oslo found itself in the middle of the gender debates. Not only is it located only a stone’s throw away from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, it is also currently the largest gender research centre in the Nordic countries.

Approximately one third of the current researchers at the centre arrived there from universities overseas. To explain to the non-Norwegian speakers what all the stir was about was no easy deal.

First, I had to explain to Americans, Italians, Brits and Germans what I tried to convey in my previous posting: that the sheer volume of their respective higher education AND media sectors means that something similar could never have happened in their homelands. Secondly, I needed to convey to them the terminological root of the problem: the Scandinavian term “kjønn”/”kön”.  The Anglophone world have for the last 50 years operated with the dual concept of sex and gender: Sex refers to the biological “facts”, gender refers to the socio-cultural roles and characteristics associated with the different body and sexuality types. Thus most centres of gender studies in the Anglophone world do research on gender roles, identities and cultural representations. No one expects them to include those natural scientists who do research to find out what sex “is”, although many include medical researchers and biologists who analyse critically how cultural notions of gender influence the work that natural scientists do even on biological sex and reproduction. Epistemologically, such research is important in order to remove sexist assumptions in natural science research, and hence, contribute to its even greater objectivity.

The distinction between sex and gender has been criticised by the so-called “poststructuralists” (see later posting) for the last 20 years, but even so the distinction has proved itself so useful that it has been imported into German (where now in many cases the English term “Gender Studies” has taken over from the German “Geschlechterstudien”) and into other Scandinavian languages as “genus” as opposed to the inclusive “kön”/”kjønn”. This means that centres that call themselves centres of “genus studies” would never be met with the expectation that they should perform natural scientist research to find out what is sex.

One cannot easily distinguish between sex and gender – this has been the argument both from the poststructuralist side (Judith Butler) and from later critics (Toril Moi). In a Norwegian context the inclusive term “kjønn” has therefore been perceived as more accurate in that it grasps the totality of how a human being appears in the world – hence this term rather than “genus”/”gender” has been chosen to designate our research centres. However, recent debates have provided all the arguments against retaining the term “kjønn” as the label of the research going on at our centre.

In other words: what in Norwegian context was a bold and ambitious terminological choice, has come back to haunt the next generation of scholars.