Catrin Lundström

Three phases of hegemonic whiteness: understanding racial temporalities in Sweden

After the election in Sweden in 2010, the racist Sweden Democrats party entered parliament. Post-election reactions and discussions were largely preoccupied with the issue of how the presence of a racist party in the Swedish parliament disturbs the countrys exceptionalist image and privileged position – both in the West and in the non-Western world – as humanitys avant-garde and beacon for antiracism. This article aims to understand the current situation in Sweden from a critical race and whiteness studies perspective. We regard contemporary Sweden as a ‘white nation in crisis’, and diagnose Swedish society as suffering from a ‘white melancholia’. In order to disentangle and shed light upon what is perceived to be mourned and what is seen as being lost for the future, the article offers an historicised account of three principal phases, stages and moments of Swedish nation-building and whiteness; ‘white purity’ (1905–1968); ‘white solidarity’ (1968–2001); and ‘white melancholy’, from 2001 onwards. The analysis also takes into account how these three nation-building projects and hegemonic whiteness and racial grammar regimes are interrelated, and intersect with the different gender and class relations; racial formations; minority discourses; and various political ideologies and affective structures characterising these three periods.

White migrations: Swedish women, gender vulnerabilities and racial privileges:

This article examines Swedish migrant women to the United States. It asks how racially privileged European migrants adapt to US racial and gender hierarchies that require them to relinquish their economic security and gender autonomy in a neoliberal state? Drawing upon interviews and focus group discussions with 33 Swedish women and three of their spouses, and participant observation between 2006 and 2008 in a network for Swedish speaking women living in the US, the article discusses how a group of ‘white’ migrant women who arrive in the US with an ideology of gender egalitarianism negotiate a more socially conservative and economically vulnerable lifestyle, as the wives (and potential ex-wives) of upper-middle-class men. The article argues that while Swedish women benefit from their racial and social privileges in the US they lose their sense of economic security, acquiring new anxieties that make them reluctant to renounce their Swedish citizenship which they conceive of as a ‘flexible’ resource.

‘Concrete bodies’: young Latina women transgressing the boundaries of race and class in white inner-city Stockholm

This article examines young Latina womens interactions in the urban landscape of Stockholm, with a particular focus on white, middle-class areas, and how social difference and racial positioning are produced in and through the processes of urban segregation. Although Stockholm consists of different multiethnic and middle-class white suburbs, a discourse of sharp division between ‘the suburb’ and the inner-city is prevalent in the daily press. Here ‘the suburb’ is either portrayed as dangerous or exotic. This article is based on qualitative research with 29 young Latina women living and attending schools in both the suburban and inner-city areas. This approach facilitates an understanding of how gendered, racialized and classed aspects of segregation are embodied in multiple directions and how mechanisms of spatial exclusion prevail in predominantly white areas – often seen as ‘neutral’ or non-racialized areas. In conclusion, in order to capture the realities of young peoples lives within materialized discourses of race and space, I argue that it is crucial to include white settings in the analysis, and experiences of exclusion.

White ethnography : (un)comfortable conveniences and shared privileges in fieldwork with swedish migrant women

This article discusses methodological dilemmas in ethnographic research with first-generation Swedish migrant women living in the United States. From a (white) Swedish researcher perspective, it seeks to disentangle aspects of shared privileges between researcher and participants and constructions of white spaces in a non-Swedish context. What does it mean to pass as a white, middle-class Swede in research, and how are white privileges being upheld in such acting? How are class differences equalized when ethnography is conducted outside the national class system where internal hierarchies may be renegotiated? The article argues that the use of “methodological capital” (Gallagher 2000), such as embodied capital and passing strategies that might be necessary to reach specific groups of examination, may also reproduce structural privileges by not intervening into normative assumptions of race, class, gender, and sexuality. In these circumstances, the article inquires into what can be learned from studying privileged groups and, thereby, what may we fail to see.

Women with Class: Swedish Migrant Women's Class Positions in the USA

This paper examines gender- and nation-specific forms of capital through migration. It focuses on first-generation Swedish women moving to a new social and political landscape in the USA, typically from upper- and middle-class environments in Sweden. Their migratory experiences are used as a departure to analyse how former class positions are being re-enacted (or not) in the neo-liberal USA. The study, conducted from 2006 to 2008, is based on in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with 33 women and three of their spouses and participant observations in a support group for Swedish-speaking women in the Western region of the USA. Using an intersectional analysis, it is suggested that Swedish women are located in contradictory class positions in the USA in terms of the loss of social and cultural capital, access to the social democratic welfare state and a dependence on racialised labour in a different social geography. It is argued that the womens class privileges are shaped, transformed and reproduced through their capacities to re-invest their cultural and embodied forms of capital in marriage and by marking a distance to subordinated groups, often other migrant women, thereby mirroring the unequal relations between (migrating) women in a global arena.

‘People take for granted that you know how to dance Salsa and Merengue’: transnational diasporas, visual discourses and racialized knowledge in Sweden's contemporary Latin music boom

In recent years US-based Latin culture has gained worldwide popularity through artists such as Jennifer Lopez, Shakira and Ricky Martin. Taking the national context as an emerging vantage point from which to consider globalization processes, this article explores the growing popularity of ‘Latin music’ as a specific contemporary expression of global popular culture and its impact on young Latina womens everyday lives and identity work in Sweden. Based on interviews and focus group discussions with 29 high school young Latina women between 14–20 years of age, born and/or brought up in Sweden, the article examines how musical arenas and their appeal to hybrid identities are construed in contemporary articulations of commodity cultures and representations. In the particular context of Sweden, the article looks at how young Latina women negotiate popular representations of latinidad through an intentional and unintentional embodiment of these images. It is argued that while visual discourses and representations of popular culture tend to fix young women in preconceived ideas of ethnicity, race and gender, the young women themselves find a myriad of ways of reconstructing stereotyping ideas and creating diasporic links with other Latino/a diasporas, especially in the United States.

The White Side of Migration: Reflections on race, citizenship and belonging in Sweden

Abstract The migrant’ tends to be imagined as a non-privileged, non-white, non-western subject in search of a better future in Europe or the United States and as such is a pre-constituted subject shaped by notions of marginalization and poverty. What kinds of stories are obscured by this recurrent image of ‘the migrant’ and how do such categorizations hamper the analysis of privilege, belonging and white normativity within studies of migration? Why are some individuals not regarded as migrants despite their migrant status? Why are other individuals seen as migrants and thus denied their national belonging in spite of their formal status as national citizens? The article develops analytical tools on migration, belonging and citizenship, with particular attention to (a) autochthony and belonging, (b) race and citizenship and (c) white capital.

Creating ‘international communities’ in southern Spain: Self-segregation and ‘institutional whiteness’ in Swedish lifestyle migration

This article examines intra-European relations in narratives of Swedish lifestyle migrants living permanently or part-time on the Spanish Sun Coast. It pays particular attention to the complexities of Swedish migrants’ cultural identities and patterns of self-segregation in the Spanish society by investigating the following questions: How do boundaries of social networks that Swedish lifestyle migrants participate in, or interrelate, with a sense of ‘likeness’? In what ways are the formation of these ‘international’ networks mediated through ideas of cultural similarity and parallel difference, and how do such notions both override and uphold boundaries tied to social, cultural and racial divisions? It is argued that the formation of so-called ‘international communities’ on the Spanish Sun Coast tend to cluster mainly north-western European lifestyle migrants, which calls for an analysis of ‘orientations’ towards a certain ‘likeness’, and the function of these spaces and communities as spaces of ‘institutional whiteness’ that work as a ‘meeting point’ where some bodies tend to feel comfortable as they already belong here. The social and cultural boundaries that surround these communities destabilises the idea of a common, culturally homogeneous European identity and display intra-European racial divisions mediated through discourses of cultural differences. What appears is a south–north divide built upon a deep Swedish postcolonial identification with Anglo Saxon and north-western European countries and cultures, and a parallel dis-identification with (the former colonial powers in) southern Europe.

Relocating Swedish whiteness : Review of White migrations: gender, whiteness and privilege by Stine H. Bang Svendsen

What can be learnt from following Swedish whiteness around the world, as it moves with white migrant women? A key insight in Catrin Lundström’s book White Migrations: Gender, Whiteness and Privilege in Transnational Migration (2014) is that whiteness is both transnational and contextual, and that it remains a privilege through its re-articulation in new racial formations. Furthermore, whiteness as “capital” takes on highly gendered forms. Lundström’s book is based on a multi-site ethnography including interviews and field-work in the south-western US, Singapore, and Spain. The sites are connected through the SWEA network, which organizes Swedish women abroad through social activities and volunteer work. In all three locations, Lundström investigates how white heterosexual Swedish women have settled into life abroad generally, and focuses on how Swedish whiteness plays into their migrant experiences. It is a solid study through which Lundström articulates significant insights into how whiteness travels with these women, and how it informs their migrant lives. In the case of Swedish women who migrate to the US, Lundström explains how Swedish whiteness translates into both an asset in heterosexual coupling and also an ability to land relatively good employment options for those who continue to work after their migration to the US. The intersection of whiteness, middle-class background, and gender also seems to facilitate a housewife lifestyle in the US, Lundström notes. Women who have been accustomed to a dual-career gender contract in Sweden tend to find it difficult to uphold the desire to work in a society where white middle-class female respectability is most easily achievable through becoming a housewife in relation to a comparatively rich husband. In Lundström’s account, it is evident that feelings of guilt and inadequacy in relation to the Swedish ideal of gender equality are negotiated by these women, who often have both higher education and professional experience. One woman who migrated with her Swedish family underlined the potential for happiness when leaving the dual earner model behind: “It’s wonderful to be a stay-at-home mum. That’s frowned on in Sweden. It’s wonderful to have time for your kids, and for yourself. I’m so much happier here. And so is my husband” (p. 58). In this quotation, the US complementary gender system was represented as an opportunity to liberate oneself from the demands ofRelocating Swedish whiteness : Review of White migrations: gender, whiteness and privilege by Stine H. Bang Svendsen

A Multi-Sited Ethnography of Whiteness

Swedes are not usually thought of as migrants. Despite this belief, between 250,000 and 550,000 Swedes, out of a population of 9.5 million, live abroad in roughly 150 countries.1 The majority of Swedes migrate to other Nordic countries, to other European countries or to the US. A majority of these migrants are women (Eriksson, 2008). In general, Swedes migrating ‘west-bound’ become settlers, while migration ‘east-bound’ is dominated by (male) expatriates living and working for a few years abroad and then later returning to Sweden (Skarman, 2009).