This article examines how consent is negotiated, handled, and understood within everyday rehearsal work in the Swedish performing arts. Drawing on ninety hours of video‑recorded rehearsals, three interactions involving intimacy, sexuality, and violence are analyzed to identify how practitioners navigate when consent is ambiguous, assumed, or contested. Using a multimodal discourse analytical approach, we show how consent operates as a situated knowledge practice shaped by ideas of artistic freedom, embodied interactions, and organizational power relations. Three distinct strategies—irony and laughter, exploratory questioning, and affirmation—define how actors and directors mobilize cultural resources to manage uncertainty, regulate conduct, and sustain professional norms. The findings highlight the paradoxical interplay between autonomy and control in creative work, demonstrating how consent functions as a mechanism of ethical self‑governance and subject formation. We argue that understanding consent as a technology of subject formation and as a relational and discursive practice offers important insights into organizational life of the performing arts, challenging technocratic approaches to risk management in favor of dialogical and reflective forms of workplace ethics.

This article examines the role of leadership for preventing abuses of power through harassment and bullying in the Swedish performing arts, highlighting the significance of feminist and anti-oppressive leadership. Previous studies of harassment and bullying in workplaces across sectors have identified the role of leadership as central. For example, passive leadership has been found to increase the likelihood of sexual harassment, work cultures of bullying have been found to begin at the top of an organization, and leadership has been found to be the best opportunity to prevent sexual harassment and assault. The article aims to understand the impact of leadership on prevention strategies against harassment and bullying. It is based on interviews with leaders, recorded observations of rehearsals and written policies from two Swedish performing arts institutions. Understanding organizational structures and processes as always already gendered and shaped by inequality regimes of gender, class, and race, we focus here on how harassment and bullying is approached in practice and on paper. Our conclusions are that feminist and anti-oppressive leadership is highly significant for the institutional ability to live up to the written policies in practice, and the analysis describes successful ways of working to prevent harassment and bullying.

Att arbeta för inkludering i scenkonstbranschen, så att alla blir behandlade väl, är att arbeta för högkvalitativ konst! En utgångspunkt i den här texten är att trygghet på arbetsplatsen leder till konstnärlig kvalitet när alla vågar satsa på konsten och ingen oroar sig över trakasserier. Därför är aktiva åtgärder för en god organisatorisk och sociala arbetsmiljö en fråga som är central för scenkonstnärer och för konstnärlig kvalitet. Den här rapporten presenterar de viktigaste resultaten och förslagen från ett forskningsprojekt (Tystnadskulturens logik) som undersökt scenkonstbranschens tystnadskultur och aktiva åtgärder för att skapa god arbetsmiljö efter #metoo. I rapporten beskrivs förändringsmetoder som branschen har använt med framgång. 

Rapporten är baserad på forskning vid fyra scenkonstinstitutioner i Sverige och på återrapportering av forskning i workshopar på de fyra institutionerna, på Scenkonstbiennalen och i samarbete med Teateralliansen. 

What could create more displeasure in the performing arts than silence about power, sexual harassment, bullying, and discrimination? Swedish performing arts has been described as a place where a code of silence rules, a code that has been challenged after the Swedish #MeToo movement of 2017 in film and performing arts. In this article, we aim to theoretically and empirically examine what silence around sexual harassment in the performing arts is, using feminist theory.¹ And further, we discuss how it creates negative affect² in the performing arts work environment. Silence or “theatre without action” as described by Rancière,³ has traditionally been regarded as a valuable creative tool in rehearsal work. However, the #MeToo movements have shone a light on how silence contributes to the prevalence of sexual harassment, bullying, and discrimination in film and the performing arts. Building on discourse analysis of qualitative individual interviews and recordings of rehearsals with employees of four performing arts institutions in Sweden, we examine the discursive and affective shape of silence in the performing arts today. Challenging the idea that great art comes out of suffering, we discuss how silence in the performing arts has consequences that risk being harmful, not only for the employees, but for art itself, as well as the audiences experiencing it.

Through #MeToo social media feminist digital grassroot activism, in tweets, threads, and groups, in petitions and in the intermedial debates following the hashtag, a girl took shape. This girl was constructed as vulnerable, ambitious, naïve, or duped and was central for bringing on feminist social change in policy and practice in the 2010’s. The figure faced intra-feminist critical questions about whiteness, heteronormativity, cis femininity, class, ability, and Western-ness. A few years later, this girl has magically disappeared from public debate. This article poses the question; Who was she, and what does her disappearance mean for future feminist activist struggles against sexism, sexual harassment, sexual violence, and rape, other discrimination and bullying in the workplace? The girl is analysed by considering the Swedish #MeToo petition #NärMusikenTystnar (#WhenThe MusicStops), a petition and hashtag that gathered narratives of sexism, sexual harassment, sexual violence, and rape on social media and presented them in the daily press in 2017. The article draws out both strengths and weaknesses of the girl as a figure for feminist digital activism. In the conclusion the case of the missing girl in 2023, and the possible impacts her disappearance may have on feminist digital activism, is discussed.