Satu Venäläinen
Biographic Data
| ID | 116054 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Satu Venäläinen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Satu |
| FAMILY NAME | Venäläinen |
| SIGNATURE | VENÄLÄINEN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Helsinki |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3298-1336 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 40 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
You Get the Feeling That They Don’t Really Get it’
This paper explores the experiences of young LGBTQ+ people with mental health services in Finland. Drawing on collaboratively created focus group data, we apply minority stress theory and an intersectional lens to shed light on how LGBTQ+ young people's subjective and collective experiences with mental health services are shaped by various interlocking systems of oppression, including cisheteronormativity, ableism and racism. We analysed the data…
Omnipresence, Victim-Shaming and Non-Action
This study explores the views and experiences of sexual harassment among youth and young adults aged 15-29 years in the wake of the #metoo movement in Finland. The data were collected through a qualitative survey and interviews and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. The study contributes to the literature that foregrounds young people's own voices by shedding light on the participants' experience-based knowledge of sexual harassment. The…
Empowered and vulnerable? Analyzing affective–discursive practices and dilemmas in young people’s resistance to sexual harassment
Affect, gendered embodiment and sexual harassment
Sexual harassment is an affective, embodied and relational issue with distinctly gendered consequences for those who experience it. Despite a vast literature illuminating the gendered dynamics of sexual harassment, detailed analyses of the affective dimensions of such dynamics are scarce. This article analyses young women’s and nonbinary people’s experiences of sexual harassment from the perspective of affective embodiment. The analysis draws on …
The war in Ukraine and the ambivalent figure of ‘Babushka
In this article, we demonstrate how international social‐media discussions offer a platform for taking a stance on the war in Ukraine, redrawing national boundaries and legitimising their defence. We do so by analysing data that consist of comments triggered by a viral YouTube video depicting an encounter between an ageing civilian woman, labelled ‘Babushka Z’, and a Ukrainian soldier. Using a critical discursive psychological framework, we ident…
Lived Experience as the Basis of Collaborative Knowing. Inclusivity and Resistance to Stigma in Co-Research
Social scientific research has become increasingly aware of power asymmetries and the elitist and exclusive nature of scientific knowledge production. These debates have resulted in more inclusive and participatory research practices. In this article, we focus on co-research, which is a participatory and multi-perspective research strategy that invites the people whom the research concerns to participate as active and influential agents throughou…
Interpretative repertoires of long-term weight management
OBJECTIVE: Public health messages encourage maintaining a stable weight and are influential in shaping normative weight management discourses. We studied how individuals with different weight maintenance histories constructed relations to these discourses in their sense-making on weight management. DESIGN: Our study used critical discursive psychology (CDP) as a theoretical and methodological framework for examining the accounts of 20 lifelong we…
Gendered Self-Views Across 62 Countries
Social role theory posits that binary gender gaps in agency and communion should be larger in less egalitarian countries, reflecting these countries’ more pronounced sex-based power divisions. Conversely, evolutionary and self-construal theorists suggest that gender gaps in agency and communion should be larger in more egalitarian countries, reflecting the greater autonomy support and flexible self-construction processes present in these countrie…
Discursive analysis of intersectional moral exclusions in online discussions on women to be repatriated to Finland from the Al-Hol camp
In spring 2019, there was a heated debate in the media concerning the Al-Hol camp in Syria, where a number of women and children were detained.This article explores intersectional dynamics of exclusion in online comments on news items regarding the repatriation of women and children from Al-Hol to Finland.The analytical framework is based on critical discursive psychology combined with an intersectional lens.The analysis distinguished three inter…
Am I vulnerable? Researcher positionality and affect in research on gendered vulnerabilities
In this article, I draw on arts-based approaches and new materialist affect theory in order to explore possibilities to attune research outputs to researcher vulnerability. These approaches and theorisations challenge conventional research practices geared toward creating distance between the researcher and their research, and work towards dissolving hierarchical distinctions between assumedly invulnerable researchers and vulnerable participants.…
Making Sense of Sexual Harassment Over Time
The #metoo movement and various other social media campaigns have made sexual harassment increasingly visible in recent years. Such collective practices of naming and thereby resisting sexual harassment have been made possible by feminist discourses that have enabled the linking of personal experiences to gendered social structures. In this paper, we examine temporal shifts in young people’s accounts of sexual harassment based on two datasets gen…
Gendering and Degendering
The notion of intimate partner violence (IPV) as gender-based has been widely questioned by advocates of antifeminist men's rights movements, who have claimed that societal disregard for men's victimization in intimate relations is a central component of discrimination against men in contemporary societies. Similar views have been expressed by researchers as part of a gender-neutral discourse articulated in opposition to feminist, or gender-sensi…
More-than-Human Dynamics of Inequality in the Governance of Pandemic Threats
In responding to ongoing viral outbreak emergencies, decision-makers constantly face the need to deploy governance measures to meet uncertain scenarios. One of the key aspects of such work is to identify different sources of threat, assess the risk that they pose, and to act in consequence. In this paper, we aim to direct attention toward ways in which science-based international governance practices reproduce various social inequalities by enact…
Psychometric Properties and Correlates of Precarious Manhood Beliefs in 62 Nations
Precarious manhood beliefs portray manhood, relative to womanhood, as a social status that is hard to earn, easy to lose, and proven via public action. Here, we present cross-cultural data on a brief measure of precarious manhood beliefs (the Precarious Manhood Beliefs scale [PMB]) that covaries meaningfully with other cross-culturally validated gender ideologies and with country-level indices of gender equality and human development. Using data …
Nobody cares for men anymore
Men’s victimisation is a central topic in online discussions, particularly in the manosphere, where its emphasis is often combined with a strong anti-feminist stance. This article examines the interplay of affects and discourse in meaning-making around men’s victimisation both in online discussions and among social and crisis workers asked to comment upon meanings circulating online. By using the concept of affective-discursive practice, the anal…
Affective (re)orientations in online discussions on the threat of violence posed by migrants
Online discussions are rife with fear-evoking images and meaning making that highlight a perceived threat to the security of European nations and their inhabitants posed by migrants’ violence in the wake of increased immigration. This paper examines the role of emotions in shaping anti-immigration views as a response to the threat of violence attached to migrants in online conversations. Using a dataset of Finnish online discussion threads from 2…
What about men?”
Whether intimate partner violence (IPV) is a gendered phenomenon or not is a question that continuously arouses debate both among scholars and the general public. This article analyses meaning-making around IPV and gender in online discussions that focus on IPV committed by women. The analysis draws upon critical discursive psychology, and identifies ideological dilemmas, interpretative repertoires and subject positions related in the discussions…
Struggles for moral value and the reproduction of gendered and racialised hierarchies in online discussions of violence
The article examines online discussions in Finland that focus on violence committed by Finnish women, on one hand, and non-white migrant men, on the other. Drawing on the perspective of sociology of value, the article illustrates how these discussions function as sites of struggles over moral worth in a contemporary context characterised by crises of both male and white hegemony. The authors suggest that, through the discussions, these current cr…
Reversing Positions
Discussions about men’s victimization by their female intimate partners have gained increased visibility in the last two decades. These discussions put victim positions on offer for men that stand in stark contrast to more widespread associations between masculinity and perpetration of violence. This article examines how these contradictory positionings play out and are discursively negotiated in Finnish online discussions of female-inflicted int…
Vulnerability in Narratives of Women Imprisoned for Violent Crimes
This paper focuses on ways in which vulnerability is given meaning and related to in narratives of women serving a prison sentence for violent crimes. These women can be seen as inhabiting specifically vulnerable social positions in many respects, while at the same time their vulnerability is often denied. In my analysis I view the past, present, and future vulnerabilities of these women in a dialectical relation with the narratives they tell and…
A poem about studying women as perpetrators of violence that is not
The following poem crystallizes some of the core dilemmas and affects I have encountered in my research on the challenging and complex topic of women as perpetrators of violence. It engages, in particular, with the topic of emotions in research (e.g., Dickson-Swift et al. 2009); relations among research topics, theories, and methodologies; the possibilities for fluidity in these relations (see, e.g., Childers 2014); and the dilemmas in researchin…
Conversations with otherness
Widely circulated cultural conceptions about women who have committed violence recurrently place them in positions of otherness in relation to what is considered as being normal, valuable womanhood. This article explores ways in which Finnish women imprisoned for violent crimes grapple with this troubled relation between womanhood and violence in their enactments of gendered identities. The analysis is based on a novel, discursive-affective appro…
I No Longer Let Anyone Hit Me for Free”
This article explores the ways in which Finnish women serving prison sentences for violent crimes attach meaning to their violence and to themselves in relation to it. The analysis is based on a study involving 20 imprisoned women, who either sent a written account or were interviewed. The analysis draws upon critical discursive psychology and Sara Ahmed’s theorization of emotions. Hence, it focuses on the affective and discursive processes throu…
She must be an odd kind of woman”
This article explores the ways in which lethal intimate partner violence perpetrated by both men and women is made sense of in news reports in Finnish tabloids. An analytical approach drawing upon critical discursive psychology, complemented with tools from membership categorization analysis, was adopted for distinguishing recurring patterns in accounting for violence and use of gendered categorizations in the news. Two recurring interpretative r…
What are true women not made of? Agency and identities of “violent” women in tabloids in Finland
This article examines how Finnish tabloids portray women who have used violence. The aim is to look at the ways in which violence committed by women is made sense of in relation to culturally shared conceptions and expectations regarding the relations between gender categories and violence. The analysis of the data draws on socio-semiotics and distinguishes modalities as discursive devices that attach meanings and different levels of agency to vi…
Reversing Positions
Discussions about men’s victimization by their female intimate partners have gained increased visibility in the last two decades. These discussions put victim positions on offer for men that stand in stark contrast to more widespread associations between masculinity and perpetration of violence. This article examines how these contradictory positionings play out and are discursively negotiated in Finnish online discussions of female-inflicted int…
Nobody cares for men anymore
Men’s victimisation is a central topic in online discussions, particularly in the manosphere, where its emphasis is often combined with a strong anti-feminist stance. This article examines the interplay of affects and discourse in meaning-making around men’s victimisation both in online discussions and among social and crisis workers asked to comment upon meanings circulating online. By using the concept of affective-discursive practice, the anal…
Struggles for moral value and the reproduction of gendered and racialised hierarchies in online discussions of violence
The article examines online discussions in Finland that focus on violence committed by Finnish women, on one hand, and non-white migrant men, on the other. Drawing on the perspective of sociology of value, the article illustrates how these discussions function as sites of struggles over moral worth in a contemporary context characterised by crises of both male and white hegemony. The authors suggest that, through the discussions, these current cr…
Lived Experience as the Basis of Collaborative Knowing. Inclusivity and Resistance to Stigma in Co-Research
Social scientific research has become increasingly aware of power asymmetries and the elitist and exclusive nature of scientific knowledge production. These debates have resulted in more inclusive and participatory research practices. In this article, we focus on co-research, which is a participatory and multi-perspective research strategy that invites the people whom the research concerns to participate as active and influential agents throughou…
Am I vulnerable? Researcher positionality and affect in research on gendered vulnerabilities
In this article, I draw on arts-based approaches and new materialist affect theory in order to explore possibilities to attune research outputs to researcher vulnerability. These approaches and theorisations challenge conventional research practices geared toward creating distance between the researcher and their research, and work towards dissolving hierarchical distinctions between assumedly invulnerable researchers and vulnerable participants.…
What about men?”
Whether intimate partner violence (IPV) is a gendered phenomenon or not is a question that continuously arouses debate both among scholars and the general public. This article analyses meaning-making around IPV and gender in online discussions that focus on IPV committed by women. The analysis draws upon critical discursive psychology, and identifies ideological dilemmas, interpretative repertoires and subject positions related in the discussions…
She must be an odd kind of woman”
This article explores the ways in which lethal intimate partner violence perpetrated by both men and women is made sense of in news reports in Finnish tabloids. An analytical approach drawing upon critical discursive psychology, complemented with tools from membership categorization analysis, was adopted for distinguishing recurring patterns in accounting for violence and use of gendered categorizations in the news. Two recurring interpretative r…
Discursive analysis of intersectional moral exclusions in online discussions on women to be repatriated to Finland from the Al-Hol camp
In spring 2019, there was a heated debate in the media concerning the Al-Hol camp in Syria, where a number of women and children were detained.This article explores intersectional dynamics of exclusion in online comments on news items regarding the repatriation of women and children from Al-Hol to Finland.The analytical framework is based on critical discursive psychology combined with an intersectional lens.The analysis distinguished three inter…
Making Sense of Sexual Harassment Over Time
The #metoo movement and various other social media campaigns have made sexual harassment increasingly visible in recent years. Such collective practices of naming and thereby resisting sexual harassment have been made possible by feminist discourses that have enabled the linking of personal experiences to gendered social structures. In this paper, we examine temporal shifts in young people’s accounts of sexual harassment based on two datasets gen…
Gendering and Degendering
The notion of intimate partner violence (IPV) as gender-based has been widely questioned by advocates of antifeminist men's rights movements, who have claimed that societal disregard for men's victimization in intimate relations is a central component of discrimination against men in contemporary societies. Similar views have been expressed by researchers as part of a gender-neutral discourse articulated in opposition to feminist, or gender-sensi…
I No Longer Let Anyone Hit Me for Free”
This article explores the ways in which Finnish women serving prison sentences for violent crimes attach meaning to their violence and to themselves in relation to it. The analysis is based on a study involving 20 imprisoned women, who either sent a written account or were interviewed. The analysis draws upon critical discursive psychology and Sara Ahmed’s theorization of emotions. Hence, it focuses on the affective and discursive processes throu…
What are true women not made of? Agency and identities of “violent” women in tabloids in Finland
This article examines how Finnish tabloids portray women who have used violence. The aim is to look at the ways in which violence committed by women is made sense of in relation to culturally shared conceptions and expectations regarding the relations between gender categories and violence. The analysis of the data draws on socio-semiotics and distinguishes modalities as discursive devices that attach meanings and different levels of agency to vi…
She must be an odd kind of woman”
This article explores the ways in which lethal intimate partner violence perpetrated by both men and women is made sense of in news reports in Finnish tabloids. An analytical approach drawing upon critical discursive psychology, complemented with tools from membership categorization analysis, was adopted for distinguishing recurring patterns in accounting for violence and use of gendered categorizations in the news. Two recurring interpretative r…
Conversations with otherness
Widely circulated cultural conceptions about women who have committed violence recurrently place them in positions of otherness in relation to what is considered as being normal, valuable womanhood. This article explores ways in which Finnish women imprisoned for violent crimes grapple with this troubled relation between womanhood and violence in their enactments of gendered identities. The analysis is based on a novel, discursive-affective appro…
I No Longer Let Anyone Hit Me for Free”
This article explores the ways in which Finnish women serving prison sentences for violent crimes attach meaning to their violence and to themselves in relation to it. The analysis is based on a study involving 20 imprisoned women, who either sent a written account or were interviewed. The analysis draws upon critical discursive psychology and Sara Ahmed’s theorization of emotions. Hence, it focuses on the affective and discursive processes throu…
A poem about studying women as perpetrators of violence that is not
The following poem crystallizes some of the core dilemmas and affects I have encountered in my research on the challenging and complex topic of women as perpetrators of violence. It engages, in particular, with the topic of emotions in research (e.g., Dickson-Swift et al. 2009); relations among research topics, theories, and methodologies; the possibilities for fluidity in these relations (see, e.g., Childers 2014); and the dilemmas in researchin…
Struggles for moral value and the reproduction of gendered and racialised hierarchies in online discussions of violence
The article examines online discussions in Finland that focus on violence committed by Finnish women, on one hand, and non-white migrant men, on the other. Drawing on the perspective of sociology of value, the article illustrates how these discussions function as sites of struggles over moral worth in a contemporary context characterised by crises of both male and white hegemony. The authors suggest that, through the discussions, these current cr…
Reversing Positions
Discussions about men’s victimization by their female intimate partners have gained increased visibility in the last two decades. These discussions put victim positions on offer for men that stand in stark contrast to more widespread associations between masculinity and perpetration of violence. This article examines how these contradictory positionings play out and are discursively negotiated in Finnish online discussions of female-inflicted int…
Vulnerability in Narratives of Women Imprisoned for Violent Crimes
This paper focuses on ways in which vulnerability is given meaning and related to in narratives of women serving a prison sentence for violent crimes. These women can be seen as inhabiting specifically vulnerable social positions in many respects, while at the same time their vulnerability is often denied. In my analysis I view the past, present, and future vulnerabilities of these women in a dialectical relation with the narratives they tell and…
Affective (re)orientations in online discussions on the threat of violence posed by migrants
Online discussions are rife with fear-evoking images and meaning making that highlight a perceived threat to the security of European nations and their inhabitants posed by migrants’ violence in the wake of increased immigration. This paper examines the role of emotions in shaping anti-immigration views as a response to the threat of violence attached to migrants in online conversations. Using a dataset of Finnish online discussion threads from 2…
What about men?”
Whether intimate partner violence (IPV) is a gendered phenomenon or not is a question that continuously arouses debate both among scholars and the general public. This article analyses meaning-making around IPV and gender in online discussions that focus on IPV committed by women. The analysis draws upon critical discursive psychology, and identifies ideological dilemmas, interpretative repertoires and subject positions related in the discussions…
Psychometric Properties and Correlates of Precarious Manhood Beliefs in 62 Nations
Precarious manhood beliefs portray manhood, relative to womanhood, as a social status that is hard to earn, easy to lose, and proven via public action. Here, we present cross-cultural data on a brief measure of precarious manhood beliefs (the Precarious Manhood Beliefs scale [PMB]) that covaries meaningfully with other cross-culturally validated gender ideologies and with country-level indices of gender equality and human development. Using data …
Nobody cares for men anymore
Men’s victimisation is a central topic in online discussions, particularly in the manosphere, where its emphasis is often combined with a strong anti-feminist stance. This article examines the interplay of affects and discourse in meaning-making around men’s victimisation both in online discussions and among social and crisis workers asked to comment upon meanings circulating online. By using the concept of affective-discursive practice, the anal…
More-than-Human Dynamics of Inequality in the Governance of Pandemic Threats
In responding to ongoing viral outbreak emergencies, decision-makers constantly face the need to deploy governance measures to meet uncertain scenarios. One of the key aspects of such work is to identify different sources of threat, assess the risk that they pose, and to act in consequence. In this paper, we aim to direct attention toward ways in which science-based international governance practices reproduce various social inequalities by enact…
Interpretative repertoires of long-term weight management
OBJECTIVE: Public health messages encourage maintaining a stable weight and are influential in shaping normative weight management discourses. We studied how individuals with different weight maintenance histories constructed relations to these discourses in their sense-making on weight management. DESIGN: Our study used critical discursive psychology (CDP) as a theoretical and methodological framework for examining the accounts of 20 lifelong we…
Gendered Self-Views Across 62 Countries
Social role theory posits that binary gender gaps in agency and communion should be larger in less egalitarian countries, reflecting these countries’ more pronounced sex-based power divisions. Conversely, evolutionary and self-construal theorists suggest that gender gaps in agency and communion should be larger in more egalitarian countries, reflecting the greater autonomy support and flexible self-construction processes present in these countrie…
Discursive analysis of intersectional moral exclusions in online discussions on women to be repatriated to Finland from the Al-Hol camp
In spring 2019, there was a heated debate in the media concerning the Al-Hol camp in Syria, where a number of women and children were detained.This article explores intersectional dynamics of exclusion in online comments on news items regarding the repatriation of women and children from Al-Hol to Finland.The analytical framework is based on critical discursive psychology combined with an intersectional lens.The analysis distinguished three inter…
Am I vulnerable? Researcher positionality and affect in research on gendered vulnerabilities
In this article, I draw on arts-based approaches and new materialist affect theory in order to explore possibilities to attune research outputs to researcher vulnerability. These approaches and theorisations challenge conventional research practices geared toward creating distance between the researcher and their research, and work towards dissolving hierarchical distinctions between assumedly invulnerable researchers and vulnerable participants.…
Making Sense of Sexual Harassment Over Time
The #metoo movement and various other social media campaigns have made sexual harassment increasingly visible in recent years. Such collective practices of naming and thereby resisting sexual harassment have been made possible by feminist discourses that have enabled the linking of personal experiences to gendered social structures. In this paper, we examine temporal shifts in young people’s accounts of sexual harassment based on two datasets gen…
Gendering and Degendering
The notion of intimate partner violence (IPV) as gender-based has been widely questioned by advocates of antifeminist men's rights movements, who have claimed that societal disregard for men's victimization in intimate relations is a central component of discrimination against men in contemporary societies. Similar views have been expressed by researchers as part of a gender-neutral discourse articulated in opposition to feminist, or gender-sensi…
Empowered and vulnerable? Analyzing affective–discursive practices and dilemmas in young people’s resistance to sexual harassment
Affect, gendered embodiment and sexual harassment
Sexual harassment is an affective, embodied and relational issue with distinctly gendered consequences for those who experience it. Despite a vast literature illuminating the gendered dynamics of sexual harassment, detailed analyses of the affective dimensions of such dynamics are scarce. This article analyses young women’s and nonbinary people’s experiences of sexual harassment from the perspective of affective embodiment. The analysis draws on …
The war in Ukraine and the ambivalent figure of ‘Babushka
In this article, we demonstrate how international social‐media discussions offer a platform for taking a stance on the war in Ukraine, redrawing national boundaries and legitimising their defence. We do so by analysing data that consist of comments triggered by a viral YouTube video depicting an encounter between an ageing civilian woman, labelled ‘Babushka Z’, and a Ukrainian soldier. Using a critical discursive psychological framework, we ident…
Lived Experience as the Basis of Collaborative Knowing. Inclusivity and Resistance to Stigma in Co-Research
Social scientific research has become increasingly aware of power asymmetries and the elitist and exclusive nature of scientific knowledge production. These debates have resulted in more inclusive and participatory research practices. In this article, we focus on co-research, which is a participatory and multi-perspective research strategy that invites the people whom the research concerns to participate as active and influential agents throughou…
Omnipresence, Victim-Shaming and Non-Action
This study explores the views and experiences of sexual harassment among youth and young adults aged 15-29 years in the wake of the #metoo movement in Finland. The data were collected through a qualitative survey and interviews and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. The study contributes to the literature that foregrounds young people's own voices by shedding light on the participants' experience-based knowledge of sexual harassment. The…
You Get the Feeling That They Don’t Really Get it’
This paper explores the experiences of young LGBTQ+ people with mental health services in Finland. Drawing on collaboratively created focus group data, we apply minority stress theory and an intersectional lens to shed light on how LGBTQ+ young people's subjective and collective experiences with mental health services are shaped by various interlocking systems of oppression, including cisheteronormativity, ableism and racism. We analysed the data…
Sociology (22 works) · Psychology (21 works) · Social Psychology (19 works) · Gender Studies (16 works) · Political science (15 works) · Social Psychology (14 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (11 works) · Gender, Security, and Conflict (10 works) · Law (10 works)