Browsing by Subject "Suuri Käsityö -lehti"

The purpose of this study was to examine the ways genders are represented in Suuri Käsityö magazine and how those have changed over time. The divide between what kind of crafts are considered as men’s work and what women’s work has been clear, and even though nowadays gender roles are less strict than before, traditional gender stereotypes still exist in modern society. Gender in relation to handicrafts has been studied previously especially in the context of craft education in schools, but the way genders are presented in craft magazines hasn’t been studied before. Media has a big influence on people’s thoughts and Suuri käsityö is one of the most popular craft magazines in Finland, which makes it an interesting subject for this study. The questions this study focuses on are 1.) How genders are repre-sented in Suuri Käsityö magazine? 2.) What kind of changes have happened in these repre-sentations when comparing year 2001 and 2017 magazines? The study has a qualitative approach on the subject and the data used consist of the entire 2001 and 2017 volumes of the Suuri Käsityö magazine. There were 11 issues published in 2001 and 10 issues published in 20017. So the entire data consisted of the written texts in 21 issues, and the representations of gender were analyzed using the method of discourse analysis. The compared volumes were chosen so that noticeable changes in gender repre-sentations could be distinguished from the data. The study showed that in the older issues woman was often described in very traditional and stereotypical ways as a mother and a wife, who does handicrafts for others, but rarely for herself. Children and men were rarely portrayed making handicrafts. Usually their role was to wear the clothes that someone else made for them, or in some cases help the mother in her craft projects. Nowadays the language used in the magazine has become less gendered, and overall the focus of the texts has shifted from describing the person making the product to describing the product itself. The old gender roles can still be found in the magazine’s con-tents, but they aren’t as evident as before, which follows the general changes that have happened in the ways how we understand men’s and women’s roles in today's society.