This post is part of the series “Gender and Atlantic Ocean Environments,” co-edited with Written in the Waves journal, for their special issue Soil and Sea. It appears in French as “Au-Delà Du Sacrifice Héroïque : Repenser La Pétro-Masculinité Et L’extractivisme Dans Les Récits Norvégiens De La Mer Du Nord.”
‘But tell me about Norway instead, Harry. I’ve read that it’s supposed to be so beautiful there…’
Harry told. […] About the country […] that considered itself an industrious and forward-looking people […] That had forests […] when the Dutch and English needed timber, that had waterfalls when electricity was invented, and which, on top of everything, found oil right outside the living room door.
‘We’ve never made a Volvo or a Tuborg,’ Harry said. ‘We’ve just exported our nature and avoided having to think. We’re a nation with golden hair up our assholes.’ 1
In Flaggermusmannen (The Bat), Norwegian crime author Jo Nesbø lets his troubled detective, Harry Hole, reflect critically on his home country. While the Nordic Noir genre frequently toys with tropes of institutional and societal failure in supposedly well-governed Scandinavian nations, here Hole rants about another rupture in Norwegian identity: a self-image that denies the deep history of ruthless extraction and its long-term ecological consequences.
Since the 1969 discovery of offshore petroleum, Norway’s wealth has been tied to the stormy waters of the North Sea. Extracting this fossil resource involves incredibly dangerous labour that has yielded immense wealth. Yet, as Nesbø’s character observes, the marine environment and the seabed from which these toxic riches are pulled remain largely out of mind. Like other rich democracies, Norway exhibits a “socially organized denial” regarding the planetary consequences of its fossil fuel dependency. 2
Instead of grappling with the economic pitfalls of oil dependence and its ecological consequences,3 Norwegian cultural memory has traditionally focused on the offshore workers. Divers who faced physical risks have been memorialized as national heroes who sacrificed their bodies for the welfare state (image 1). While this narrative rightly recognizes labour exploitation, a resulting side effect is that any critique of extractivism is easily dismissed as a disrespect to the memory of workers and the nation’s industrial heritage.4 Using Nesbø’s cynical detective as a prologue, this essay traces Norwegian cultural production across media, art, and literature. It moves from narratives that heroize extractive labour toward contemporary voices that dismantle petro-masculinity to confront broader colonial and ecological roots and realities of Norwegian North Sea oil.
Heroizing the Offshore Worker
The physical danger faced by male offshore divers has been a central trope in Norwegian screen dramatizations of the oil industry. Films like Dykket (The Dive, 1989) and Pionér (Pioneer, 2013) and the TV series Lykkeland (State of Happiness, 2018), use submarine extraction as a setting to generate life-threatening stakes.5 This genre relies on the physiological realities of deep-sea pressure, where a slow, controlled ascent is necessary to survive, rendering the nearby surface fatally out of reach. The suspense in Dykket specifically hinges on claustrophobia in the diving bell, portraying the ordeal as “not just a fight to stay alive, but also a fight to keep the madness at bay”.6 Even in more land-focused stories like Pionér and Lykkeland, the North Sea is consistently depicted as a hostile environment overcome only by the heroic endurance of men.
In “Nordsjødykkeren” (“The North Sea Diver,” 2006), the Norwegian poet Thorvald Steen similarly centres the male diving worker, critiquing the sacrifice of physical and mental health for national economic gain. Steen captures the tension between seabed wealth and individual despair: “I do my job, for the country. / Not everyone thinks about illness while working. / I do it.” Experiencing the sea as a marble-black grave rather than a site of societal prosperity, the diver exposes the toll of extraction: “The production manager on shore is calculating profits. / I am not calculating anything. Anxiety cannot be summed up in the number of letters.”7
In the same vein, Fin Serck-Hanssen’s photographic portrait series Pionérdykkerne fra Nordsjøen (“Pioneer divers from the North Sea”, 2006) visually challenges the abstraction of oil wealth by documenting its medical consequences. As seen in image 2 – which features a stark, intimate close-up of a weathered face – the portraits offer an unsparing look at the severe physical toll of extractive work. During the 2025 exhibition of the series at the Central Library in Stavanger – a city whose economy and job market are built on this very extraction – the accompanying text noted: “There are 65 verified deaths among divers on the Norwegian and British sides in the North Sea… In addition, 20 of the pioneer divers have so far chosen to take their own lives.”8 In 2024, when the exhibition was displayed in the Storting (the Norwegian Parliament) after their acquisition by the state, Art Committee chair Torstein Tvedt Solberg framed the portraits as a historical warning, stating they “will act as a reminder to us as MPs that we must never again make the same mistake of prioritizing the nation’s development over the health of individuals.”9
These cultural representations actively reinforced the workers’ fight for compensation and public recognition. In 1999, the Nordsjødykker Alliansen (the North Sea Divers Alliance)mobilized to demand acknowledgment for their crucial role in the industry and restitution for their resulting health injuries. By dubbing themselves “vår tids krigsseilere” (“the navy sailors of our time”), the divers framed offshore extraction as a heroic, martial struggle against a hostile environment.10 This masculine heroization of petroleum extraction sparked a protracted legal and political battle lasting over a decade, going all the way to the European Court of Human Rights in 2013 before final state compensation was secured in 2014. Reflecting on this legacy when Serck-Hanssen’s portraits were exhibited in 2024, Stortinget (the Norwegian Parliament) underscored the foundational nature of their sacrifice: “Were it not for the outstanding efforts of these divers, the Norwegian welfare state as we know it wouldn’t have come into being. We owe these divers a genuine thank you.”11
Critiquing Petro-Masculinity
https://kunsthalloslo.no/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/DSC00721-scaled.jpg
However, the cultural understanding of extractive offshore labour is shifting. In 2024, while Stortinget was engaging in the workers’ sacrifice by staging Serck-Hanssen’s divers’ portraits, Oslo’s Kunsthall hosted an exhibition by Lars Holdhus. Titled Where Oil Is First Found Is in the Minds of Men, the show explicitly engages with Cara Daggett’s concept of petro-masculinity, describing it as “a complex of identities and ideologies linking fossil fuels, technology, neo-colonial exploitation and patriarchal power.”12 The installation features fifteen sculptures – figures constructed from toxic, creosote-soaked wood – that represent various archetypes of petro-masculinity, ranging from the tech bro to the frequent-flying art enthusiast. These figures are situated on a gallery floor sketched with a map of the global economic system (Image 3).
Margrete Hestenes observes that this masculine framework is deeply familiar within the Norwegian context, where oil extraction has long been narrated as a masculine endeavour: spectacular national wealth made possible by the toughness of the “Great White Man.”13 However, mounted onto wooden sticks, these prototypes become hollow stereotypes. Through this aesthetic subversion, Holdhus engages in a critical intervention into labour memory, moving beyond the traditional hero’s tale. He highlights that the violence of extractivism is manifold: it not only subjects men to brutal working conditions that are rationalized by the trope of sacrifice but simultaneously degrades the global environment and drives a systemic ecological crisis.
Holdhus’s work points toward a broader movement to reframe Norwegian extractive labour – and its accompanying iconography of petro-masculinity – in critical terms. Katie Ritson identifies a parallel evolution within recent literary reflections on oil history. While older representations in poetry, photography, and film largely revolved around sudden catastrophe and the exposure of the male body to the elemental forces of the sea, contemporary narratives are expanding their scope. For decades, official state memory – such as the exhibits at the Norwegian Petroleum Museum in Stavanger – has centered its labour history on acute tragedies like the 1980 Alexander L. Kielland disaster, where a structural failure killed 123 offshore workers. New literary responses articulate a “double trauma,” linking such accidents to the ongoing, slow-motion ecological crisis. Examining novels such as Puslingar by Atle Berge (2020) and The Waves Burn Bright by Ian Maloney (2016), Ritson observes that “a kind of double trauma starts to become visible” as the threat of an uninhabitable globe looms larger. She argues that “the human suffering in the offshore accidents of the 1980s finds a long shadow in the specter of human and ecological suffering on a much longer timescale and across a much larger scope.”14
Reframing Memory and Heritage
Marjam Idriss’s 2024 novel Halvt connects the extractive histories of North Sea oil and sugar in the Atlantic World.15 The narrative follows a multiracial lesbian couple who compromise their principles to work for Equinor – Norway’s majority-state-owned energy giant. Driven by financial need and the desire to build a family, Inge accepts a position as a diversity consultant and is dispatched to St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands.
Like her protagonist, Idriss grew up in the Stavanger region, the capital of Norwegian oil. The novel imagines a catastrophic accident during Equinor’s fictional extraction operations in the Caribbean – an event that resonates with the trauma of the Kielland disaster. Although Equinor does not actually operate on St. Croix, the island is inextricably linked to Norwegian history through the transatlantic slave trade and the brutality of plantation slavery. Under Danish-Norwegian rule in the eighteenth century, the island was the site of a 1759 massacre overseen by the Danish-Norwegian official Engebret Hesselberg. Reflecting on this colonial legacy, Idriss observes the structural hypocrisy of the era: “Engebret is the man of the Enlightenment who betrays his own progressive ideas… He manages to hold two thoughts in his head at the same time. He manages to see [the enslaved] as humans, yet still oppress them.”16
In Halvt, Idriss captures the profound contradictions of attempting to lead a moral life within the realities of petroculture and perpetuated global inequality. In a striking parallel to her protagonist, when Idriss needed funding to research St. Croix for the novel, she received a grant from the Sola municipality. Asked by a reporter if she had effectively received funding from “Oil,” she replied: “Hehe, yes. Oil with the best of intentions!”17
If Norwegian memory culture is to break free from the “socially organized denial” voiced so eloquently by Nesbø’s protagonist, it must look beyond the petro-masculine hero. Rather than resting in cynical resignation, newer cultural narratives demand a profound reckoning – forcing a confrontation with the violence inflicted upon both offshore workers and the more-than-human environment. To truly face the extractive roots of petroleum wealth, this memory culture must bridge land and ocean, situating Norway’s North Sea heritage within the wider labour, colonial, and ecological histories of the Atlantic World.
Featured Image: Photo from Lars Holdhus’ exhibition “Here Oil Is First Found Is In The Minds Of Men” at Kunsthall Osla (September 28-October 27) (with permission from Oslo Kunsthall), https://kunsthalloslo.no/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/DSC00721-scaled.jpg
Series Header Image: Digital Painting by Emily Button.
Notes
This research was funded by the EU supported research project PITCH (Petroculture’s Intersection with The Cultural Heritage sector in the context of the green transition), https://pitch-horizon.eu
[1] All translations by the authors. Jo Nesbø, Flaggermusmannen (Aschehoug, 1997), 148–149.
[2] Kari Marie Norgaard, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life (MIT Press 2011), 208.
[3] Helge Ryggvik, Til siste dråpe. Om oljens økonomi (Aschehoug, 2010).
[4] Marion Grau, “‘State of Happiness’? Petroreligion and Petromelancholia in Norway,” Dialog 62, no. 2 (2023): 179, https://doi.org/10.1111/dial.12803.
[5] Dykket, film directed by Tristan DeVere Cole, Filmeffekt A/S, 1989, 99 min; Pionér, film directed by Erik Skjoldbjærg, Film i Väst, 2013, 1 h., 51 min; Lykkeland, TV series directed by Petter Næss and Pål Jackman, NRK and Maipo Film, 2018.
[6] Pål Frostad, “Anmeldelse av Dykket – Film (1989),” Filmkikk, May, 13, 2014, https://filmkikk.no/anmeldelse.php?id=4865.
[7] Thorvald Steen, “Nordsjødykkeren,” in Pionérdykkerne fra Nordsjøen: fotoutstiling av Fin Serck-Hanssen, Kulturtorget, Sølvberget, 28. september – 03. desember 2006, ed. Hildegunn Birkeland (Sølvberget 2006), n.p.
[8] Karen Haugsgjerd Reme-Stigel, “Utstilling: Oppreisning for oljepionerene,” January 20, 2025 on the homepage of Stavanger’s city library Sølvberget, https://www.solvberget.no/artikler/utstilling-oppreisning-for-oljepionerene.
[9] “‘The Pioneer Divers from the North Sea’ – a Photo Exhibition in the Storting,” press release by Stortinget (the Norwegian parliament), October 29, 2024, https://www.stortinget.no/en/In-English/About-the-Storting/News-archive/Front-page-news/2024-2025/the-pioneer-divers-from-the-north-sea—a-photo-exhibition-in-the-storting/.
[10] Frode Fanebust and Marie Smith-Solbakken, “Nordsjødykkerne,” Store norske leksikon, July 6, 2026, https://snl.no/nordsj%C3%B8dykkerne.
[11] Stortinget, “‘The Pioneer Divers from the North Sea’ – a Photo Exhibition in the Storting.”
[12] “Lars Holdhus – Where Oil Is First Found Is in the Minds of Men,” press release by Kunsthall Oslo 2024, https://kunsthalloslo.no/?p=16207&lang=en.
[13] Margrete Hestenes, “Exhibition Visit: Where Oil Is First Found Is in the Minds of Men,” TOIL Blog, January 21, 2025, https://www.hf.uio.no/iln/english/research/projects/translatability-of-oil/toilblog/exhibition-visit-where-oil-is-first-found-is-in-th.html.
[14] Katie Ritson, “Sentimentality, Sacrifice, and Oil: Reckoning with Offshore Extractive Trauma,” in To the Last Drop – Affective Economies of Extraction and Sentimentality, ed. Axelle Germanaz, Daniela Gutiérrez Fuentes, Sarah Marak, and Heike Paul (Transcript, 2023), 166, https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783839464106-009/html.
[15] Marjam Idriss, Halvt (Gyldenal, 2024).
[16] Marjam Idriss, “Å stirre manfoldskonsulenten I hvitøyet,” interview by Vilde Sagstad Imeland, Morgenbladet, March 7, 2024, 42.
[17] Idriss, interview.
Eike-Christian Heine and Agathe Four-Moret