@article{2026:wilhelmsen:we_like,
title = {“We like to provoke the ladies” – A qualitative study of climate change skepticism as masculinity expression in Southern Norway},
year = {2026},
note = {This article examines how climate change skepticism (CCS) intersects
with sexism and masculinity in Southern Norway. It reveals how CCS can
serve as a tactic to reject the perceived feminized and moralizing
power of climate attitudes. Drawing on three years of ethnographic
fieldwork (2022–2025) and qualitative interviews, this article
explores how participants mobilized skepticism as a form of identity
work and defense to protect threatened masculinity and justified
patriarchal privilege. Using frameworks of system justification and
aggrieved entitlement, the research demonstrates how participants
framed climate policies as feminized and moralizing threats and used
CCS to signal rebelliousness, rationality, and group belonging. CCS
thus operated not merely as scientific doubt but as a cultural
strategy for maintaining patriarchal privilege. Conducted in Norway, a
country celebrated for egalitarian and gender equal values, the
findings demonstrate how gendered narratives shaped climate attitudes.
By engaging with skeptics who typically distrust researchers, this
paper examines how CCS served as a tool for expressing masculinity.
Climate communication that is sensitive to identity, avoids gendered
framing, and engages masculine norms may reduce defensive resistance
and open more inclusive dialogue.},
journal = {Culture, Practice & Europeanization},
pages = {84--104},
author = {Wilhelmsen, Marthe Elden},
volume = {11},
number = {1}
}