Diana Mulinari

We are Sweden Democrats because we care for others: Exploring racisms in the Swedish extreme right

During the last decades there has been an upsurge in research on xenophobic populist parties, mirroring their political successes. In the Swedish context, characterised by neoliberal restructuring, issues of ‘race’, citizenship and belonging have been important elements of the public debate. These issues have unfolded in parallel with the presence of a neo-Nazi social movement and the emergence of two new parliamentary parties in which cultural racism has been central. Research has especially focused on the xenophobic content and how to relate these parties to the wider research on party politics in western liberal democracies. While there have been some studies focusing on gendered differences in voting and activism highlighting the peripheral role of women, there are still very few studies analysing the worldview of women active in these parties, and the role of gender as metaphor, identity and policy within these parties. Inspired by feminist, postcolonial and Marxist research, the authors of this article are interested in analysing the worldview of women activists. The material is composed of 20 in-depth interviews with female Sweden Democrat politicians complemented by party texts and participant observation. The aim of the article is to explore how women within a Swedish version of these parties, the Sweden Democrats, name and reflect upon their experiences, especially focusing on how a care rhetoric is used in their narratives. These women have chosen to represent a racist party (although they do not see themselves or the party as racist). What inspires them? What visions of gender evolve from their worldview?

‘Black skull’ consciousness: the new Swedish working class

Many of the immigrant workers who came to Sweden from the sixties onwards, and their children, are stereotyped as ‘black skulls’. They are seen as silent, passive and mired in ‘traditional’ cultures, a stereotype that also pervades the trade union bureaucracies which are closely tied to the dominant Social Democratic Party. But interviews with activists in the FAI, a network of immigrant union activists, reveal a new ‘black skull’ consciousness in which the stereotype and insult of passivity have been turned on their heads. A new consciousness and analysis of Swedish racism has emerged — one which ultimately seeks to transform the whole way in which trade unions operate.

Violence, racism and the political arena : a Scandinavian dilemma

Over the last thirty years, issues of citizenship and belonging have been at the core of Scandinavian politics (Razack 2004). There has also been a resurgence of extreme right-wing and racistmovements and political parties (Deland et al. 2010;Hübinette& Lundström 2011). Hegemonic understandings that create boundaries between enemy and friend, as well as hegemonic notions and representations of who the enemy really is, are often easily found when societies are in crisis. An illustration of this was the quick media reaction following the bombing and massacre in Oslo, Norway, on 22 July 2011. Almost all fingers (of political analysts, “terrorist” experts, journalists, academic scholars) pointed towards different constructions that began with al-Qaida terrorists and ended in a continuum on the presence of communities/citizens with Muslim backgrounds in Norway. A considerable time before it was widely recognized, and often with minor reservations and doubts, the responsibility was firmly placed upon the Muslim Other. The interpretations on offer were diverse, from Norway’s involvement in Afghanistan to the inability of the Norwegian Social Democratic government seriously to acknowledge the threat of terrorism (read “Muslim” terrorism) and to the Muslim-Norwegian community itself. These explanations, systematically presented by the media, began with references to September 11 in their emphasis on the clash of civilizations thesis. The news that the Oslo terrorist was not of Muslim origin forced “experts” rapidly to switch tracks. How could anybody do such a thing? It can be argued that it is human nature to respond to what is generally classified as evil (genocide, mass murder, etc.) with such a question, a question that is a form of resistance to

A feminist re-reading of theories of late modernity: Beck, Giddens and the location of gender

This article is a critical reappraisal of the understandings of gender and the location of women within theories of late modernity. These theories, as articulated by Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, have gained a wide use, not the least since they claim to account for changes in intimate relations. We will use four major feminist interventions for our argument — the problematization of the public-private divide, feminist theorizing of kinship, feminist understandings of labour, and the heterosexual matrix. We argue that the late-modern story is made through violently created presences — of the reinvention of the heterosexual matrix, the private sphere as the location of women/gender, reproduction coupled to biology, and gender as an intimate relation between women and men — and absences of analysis of reproductive and productive labour, of the role of the state, and of gender as a social relation constituted through and within other social inequalities.

Exploring the Notion of Experience in Feminist Thought

Why is the notion of experience so relevant for feminist theory? How has the concept been used and by whom? What are the theoretical and political implications of postmodern theory for a re-thinking of the concept? In these pages we will explore the uses and abuses of the concept of experience in contemporary feminist thought through the works of influential feminist intellectuals. This article has two aims. The first is to create a theoretical space for reflection and re-appraisal of the concept of experience inspired by Dorothy Smiths contribution to feminist sociology. The second is to shift these debates from the periphery to the centre of sociology by taking into account the centrality of the concept for the discipline.

politicizing biographies : the forming of transnational subjectivities as insiders outside

We take our own life stories as points of departure to look at some of the ways in which women were politicized in Argentina and West Germany (our respective countries of origin), focusing on similarities as well as differences in our politicization processes. We aim at putting present discussions about global political movements into a historical perspective. We want also to illuminate the centrality of political identities in the construction of specific (gendered) subjectivities. Our focus lies on theorizing the ways through which privileged (gendered) identities critically re-read their own position and transform their own understanding of themselves and the world through the field of the political. Methodologically, we want to contribute to ways of re-thinking Feminist methodologies by experimenting with a form of analysis in which we are alternately the subject and the object of our research process. The aim of this intervention is to transgress the binary oppositions between researcher/researched and challenge traditional understanding of social science where researchers provide analysis and informants have ‘experience’. One of our conclusions is that the 68 movement provided subject positions for living alternative normalities as an ‘insider-outside’, that is, for those who belonged to normalized groups in their respective societies, but for different reasons (of which we analyse some concerning our formation as ‘women’) could not identify with the dominant normalities offered to them. At the same time, the dominant male instrumentality of the movement estranged (some) women and allowed them (or forced them into) a kind of distanced engagement that, perhaps paradoxically, provided a basis for sustaining their political subjectivities through transformative experiences of defeat.

Theorising Racism : Exploring the Swedish racial regime

Abstract Sociologists Bonilla-Silva and Baiocchi (2001) assert that sociologists, protected by a myth of neutrality and objectivity, follow the understandings of racism in their analysis of inequality as relegated to a secondary status, either according to the Marxist tradition as the superstructure or within a Weberian framework as a form of status difference. The aim of the article is to put the study of racism, a fundamental principle of social organisation in modern society, at the centre of social theory. The aim is also to develop a productive dialogue with the traditions of Critical Race Theory (CRT), neo-Marxism and Black feminism; traditions that we will argue are highly relevant for the analysis of the Swedish racial regime.

Normalization And "Outsiderhood" Feminist Readings of a Neoliberal Welfare State

This volume presents an illuminating analysis of the ways in which normalization processes and practices operate in a welfare state in an age of neoliberalism. This informative book problematize the meaning of the phrase ‘normalization processes and practices’, that for an Anglophone audience may smacks of functionalism. The historical context of the adoption of normalization processes and practices in Sweden in the post-World War II era was, in the first instance, an expression of the inclusivity designed to decrease inequalities and to achieve social justice. However all the contributors to this volume, show very clearly how notions of normalcy, of normalization, in a neoliberal time operate not only to create an integrating and equalizing context but also, and much more critically, how these processes and practices serve to exclude certain groups of people, and produce a structural inequality that in recent years has been discussed under the term of ‘utanforskap’ or outsiderhood. Critiquing these interventions, the contributors to this volume show how diverse groups of people - immigrants, families considered ‘at risk’ by social services, pregnant women, young girls – are variously the objects of context-specific normalization processes and practices that make any resistance to such interventions difficult, if not impossible. What people ‘normally do’, cloaks that ‘normal doing’ into a fog of invisibilization that suffocates any form of protest. Normalization thus takes on specific forms of repression in particular circumstances, for instance through the ethnocentric imposition of norms of behaviour on migrants where that ethnocentricity is neither made evident nor acknowledged. This system of normalization also operates in schools, resulting in the reproduction of inequalities and discrimination from an early age. In such normalization processes ‘the normal’ or ‘the usual’ becomes a means for re-interpreting structural inequalities in terms of individual choice, and for displacing the responsibilities for change onto those positioned as outsiders. Worryingly, the individual chapters highlight how the operations of normalizing processes work to obscure their functioning, thus making any critique of both the underlying assumptions and their operationalization almost impossible.

Invisible, Burdensome and Threatening. The location of Migrant Women in the Swedish welfare state.

The causes of and solutions to juvenile delinquency and social unrest amongthe youth in so-called Swedish multi-ethnic urban areas are frequently represented inpublic-institutional discourse as rel ...

Human Rights in Argentina: Between Family Memories and Political Identities

Abstract Scholarship has identified the centrality of civil society organizations in the cultural/political debate over what should be remembered and why. The article analyses the narratives of 25 human rights activists from Argentina organized in response to the 1976–1983 military regime. Inspired by gender and postcolonial scholarship, the article explores how notions of family are named and dilemmas regarding who and what to be remembered are understood in the struggle for ‘Memory, Truth, and Justice’.