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Hillevi Ganetz

About me

Hillevi Ganetz

Professor, Gender Studies, Stockholm University

Research interests: Media, gender and popular culture. In particular popular music, wildlife films, televised science (i.e. The Nobel Banquet), reality TV and popular literature. Also idols and fans, consumption and shopping, shopping centres and media as commodities.

I am a media researcher with a Cultural Studies perspective, focusing on gender and popular culture, mostly fiction in various forms. In 1997 I received a Ph.D. in Media and Communication Studies at Stockholm University with a dissertation on Swedish, female rock lyrics, focusing on popular music as a cultural and mediated form. Later I continued to work in this area in a larger project on gender and popular music, with three other researchers involved and funding by the Swedish Research Council. My study investigates how masculinity, femininity and sexuality are created in the process of ”becoming an artist", with material from the talent-reality series Fame Factory (see a summary of the project at the Swedish Research Council's website).

Another area of interest is representations of nature, which I have analyse in a project focusing Swedish nature programs on television. The project is funded by the Swedish Research Council and titled ‘How are Animals Made?’ The main objective is to explore how nature magazines in images, music and words represent nature, gender, 'race' and sexuality.

Last but not least, I participated in the steering group of the large project ‘Popular Passages: Media in the Modern Space of Consumption’ (funded by The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation). In this project, which had a big mall in northern Stockholm as ethnographic field, I have written about books as commodities, shopping as a social process, how a shopping centre’s body and soul can be interpreted, etc.

I have also previously been involved in youth research, but today I am most interested in the relationship between fans and idols.

Today, I am involved in a research project about the televised Nobel Banquet, trying to understand how science and the scientist are constructed there, examining the ambivalence found in the interdependence of media and science (funded by The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation).

Following my doctorate, I have worked as a lecturer at Södertörn University College, and as Assistant Professor at the Department of Gender Studies, Linköping University, where I became Associate Professor. I have also worked as lecturer and director of studies at the Centre for Gender Studies, Uppsala University. Now I am back at Stockholm University as Professor of Gender Studies. I want to continue our ongoing work to pursue teaching and research at a high academic level.

Research projects

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • The Nobel celebrity-scientist

    2016. Hillevi Ganetz. Celebrity Studies 7 (2), 234-248

    Article

    Scientists are a poorly covered area of research in the field of celebrity studies. This article attempts to rectify this issue by discussing representations of science and scientists in a televised Nobel Banquet on Swedish public-service television, SVT. The televised Nobel Banquet is a genre hybrid that consists of two genres; namely, science communication and award show. Drawing on cultural, media, and gender studies, this article examines the mediated persona of the scientist in the televised Nobel Banquet via contextualised textual analysis. The main questions of this article are as follows: in what ways do the media, the genre, and the idea of geniality affect the representation of the scientist? The article suggests that the increasing celebrification' of scientists is characteristic of the past several decades, and that, among other factors, this has been due to the entry of aspects of entertainment into banquet broadcasts. Through such processes, the celebrity-scientist' has emerged within the high-status sphere of science. However, a very specific type of celebrity is represented in the Nobel context: the celebrity-scientist is commonly a white man of high education whose fame has been reached through hard work in competition with others of the same kind. This representation of a scientist and its associated quality of genius will here be examined from a gender perspective.

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