ABSTRACT
This chapter explores why configurations of environmentally friendly transport and gender are vital in policy-making. We will demonstrate how such alignments have unfolded in Denmark by examining a range of communicative events related to gender and the enhancement of more climate-friendly transport practices. Using digital media archives and drawing on a recent network analysis of the Danish political elite, this chapter analyses how the car-centred society have been constantly re-constituted and maintained in both society and in the particular culture of transport policy. We show how there appears to be a certain institutional path-dependency in transport policy-making and culture reconstituting existing norms around car-centrism and masculine dominance. Through the analysis of a paradigmatic case of Danish transport policy, both potentials and limitations of change are considered. The chapter demonstrates how the longstanding alliances of car culture and hegemonic masculine norms were performed at a critical moment in the development of Danish transport policy. The chapter also locates the gendered and cross-political character of these alliances and hegemonies. It shows how gender – various femininities and masculinities – have been shaped and nurtured within these institutional and hegemonic structures and cultures.
