| 1. |
- Tornhill, Sofie, 1974-
(författare)
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Capital Visions : The Politics of Transnational Production in Nicaragua
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In processes of economic integration, neoliberal discourse and corresponding notions of development comprise some of the most readily available imaginaries of political and social interaction and change. However, these processes are always also locally produced and negotiated. Engaging with discourse theory, Marxism and postcolonial feminist theory, this dissertation brings together “macro” and “micro” aspects of globalization. The aim is to interrogate discursive reinforcements of and challenges to global orders of production and divisions of labor. With a focus on representations of Free Trade Zones (FTZs), which are tax-exempted enclaves for export production, the study explores competing meanings attributed to the operation of transnational capital in Nicaragua. Based on policy documents, political speeches, promotional videotapes and interviews, the political rhetoric of two governments with competing agendas is analyzed: the neoliberal/conservative government of the Liberal Constitutionalist Party (2002–2007), which framed the FTZs in terms of national progress, and the leftist government of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (2007– ), which attempts to reconnect to the country’s revolutionary past. In this way efforts to formulate legitimate political agendas in the context of shifting relations between states and markets are detailed, together with constructions of citizens and workers along differentiations of class and gender. Relying on interviews with FTZ workers, the study examines ways to interpret, inhabit or resist imperative subject positions at the intersections of contending projects of nation-building and transnational orders of production, in conjunction with a discussion of the uneasy distinction between representation and appropriation that troubles transnational feminist research projects.
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| 2. |
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| 3. |
- Carbin, Maria, 1972-
(författare)
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Mellan tystnad och tal : Flickor och hedersvåld i svensk offentlig politik
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis examines the contestations around the question of how violence against young women from ethnic minorities was articulated in Swedish public policy debates from 1995-2008. One core question investigated in this study is how the “new” problem of co called honour killings is categorised and understood within gender equality policies against violence and policies of immigrant integration. The thesis explores how different discourses compete and negotiate to make sense of the violence and try to stabilise meaning. Another aim of the thesis concerns the construction of available subject positions for young women, and the potential effects in terms of possibilities and restrictions for subjects to speak politically. The research material consists of parliamentary debates, major government documents, official government inquiries into integration and gender equality, as well as documents from the Swedish Integration Board and the County Administrative Boards. The analysis draws upon discourse theory and feminist postcolonial theory to explore what positions are made available to young women in policy discourses. Four competing discourses are identified: a multicultural discourse, a discourse of value-clashes, a discourse of structural discrimination and finally a gender power-discourse. However, in policies against honour related violence the violence is primarily understood as originating in a cultural and value-based heritage of certain immigrant communities. This study furthermore illustrates how girls are required to speak and make testimonies on their situation. The ways the stories of the girls are used make them into boundary markers between Swedish and non-Swedish. It is argued that letting the girls speak and listen to them might make it possible to understand some of the potential problems they face. Nevertheless, it might not form an agenda for changing the bigger political picture.
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| 4. |
- Eduards, Maud, 1944-, et al.
(författare)
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Kön, heterosexualitet och (o)trygghet : En feministisk analys av svenska säkerhetsdebatter i skuggan av kriget i Ukraina
- 2023
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Ingår i: Tidskrift för Genusvetenskap. - 1654-5443 .- 2001-1377. ; 43:2-3, s. 37-60
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article examines how the war in Ukraine and the subsequent re-orientation of Swedish security and defense policy leading up to a NATO-application, has been discussed in Swedish public debate. We ask what work gender does in the sense-making of the war and the changes in security policy. Departing from feminist theories of security and gendered protection, the study discusses the ambiva-lent ways in which gender and the trope of Sweden as a gender equal nation is negotiated in the media (print media and television) and by policy makers. The gendered imaginaries of masculinist protection and the vulnerability of women and children legitimize violence as the most adequate way to respond to this new situation. Gender is used to depoliticize security politics and to frame militarization as unavoidable. In this context, gender equality is both seen as a value worthy of protection and as an internal threat weakening men, and inclining women to object to the military responses suggested. We argue that the production of masculinity and militarization promotes a security ideology imbued with violence, hierarchies, and control.
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| 5. |
- Jansson, Maria, 1968-
(författare)
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Livets dubbla vedermödor : Om moderskap och arbete
- 2001
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- There are conflicts between waged labour and motherhood that make it difficult for women to seize independence as workers and at the same time be mothers. These conflicts manifest themselves in women’s everyday practices as well as in feminist theory and in the women’s movement. The purpose of the thesis is to study the construction of motherhood and labour, and how the meanings attributed to motherhood and labour uphold women’s subordination. It is a study of how motherhood and labour are used to naturalise the gender order and make it legitimate. This is done by analysing texts on childminders encompassing the period 1967 to 1999.In Sweden, childminders are often perceived as solving the conflict between waged work and motherhood in a specific way. Employed by the municipal authorities, childminders work at home, taking care of other people’s children as well as their own. However, solving one dilemma, they find themselves in another. Working with children in the confinement of the home is not seen as a “real job” as long as it is connected to motherhood.The struggle of the childminders to count as “real” workers is a tale of their separation from motherhood. In the study, perceptions of motherhood and labour are seen as expressions of gender relations, which means that motherhood and labour are seen as equally gendered and structured.In political theory, labour is seen as the key to property in the person, as well as representing labourers’ contribution to society. This understanding of work renders it crucial to theories of democracy, as it legitimises the worker’s political participation. The dissertation shows how this theoretical function of labour rests on constructing motherhood as the other, and mothers as incapable and illegitimate political subjects. Three key distinctions between motherhood and labour are distinguished and analysed. The first deals with the perception of motherhood as “being” and labour as “doing”. The second focuses on the conception that labour is a goal-oriented, rational activity whilst motherhood is seen as biologically determined with its own intrinsic values. In this view, motherhood can therefore not be understood as an activity that aims to transform. The third distinction is the opposition between the irreplaceability of the mother and the replaceability of labour power.The thesis concludes that strategies defining mother-like activities as labour presume that these activities are distinguished from motherhood. Paradoxically, when women in general become working mothers, leaving children at day-care, the biological aspect of motherhood is stressed, upholding motherhood as an institution.The differences construed between motherhood and labour are often naturalised and ascribed to women’s biology and double hardships: that they need to be both mothers and workers. This formulation makes it possible to manoeuvre and control women. Labour and motherhood can be used against each other in ways that grant men control over women, and at the same time deprive women of their power to act. Patriarchal power seems to be necessary to maintain the present underpinnings of democratic theory.
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| 6. |
- Tinnerholm Ljungberg, Helena, 1983-
(författare)
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Omöjliga familjen : Ideologi och fantasi i svensk reproduktionspolitik
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The relationship between the state and the people is a central theme in political theory. Discussions in this field have often centered on how a people can come to constitute a state. Less attention, however, has been directed toward the state’s role in constituting and recreating its people. This book examines the Swedish state’s role in forming the people by regulating the use of reproductive techniques: insemination, in vitro fertilization (IVF), and donations of sperm and eggs.The study focuses on how the issue of assisted reproduction was handled and problematized in Swedish policymaking between 1981 and 2005. What problem representations dominated the political debates and decision-making processes surrounding assisted reproduction? How was conflict expressed within the field of reproductive politics (i.e., what aspects caused conflict or political disagreement)? How did collective fantasies play into the political treatment of reproductive technologies? Using historical government and Riksdag material, four major policy debates have been analyzed, from the first legal regulation of assisted reproduction in Sweden in the 1980s up until the inclusion of lesbian couples as beneficiaries of gamete donation.Theoretically, the study is inspired by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s political discourse theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the “logics approach” developed by Jason Glynos and David Howarth. This combination of perspectives allows for a dual focus on both the form of political articulations and their affective force. Thus, the analysis tries to capture what was taken for granted within the discourse on reproduction (social logics), what arose as points of political conflict or contention (political logics), as well as the affective underpinnings of these social constructions and struggles (fantasmatic logics).The main result of the study is that even though the period saw a quite revolutionary development of new reproductive technologies, the reproduction policies under study took on much more moderate and hesitant character. Throughout the analyzed period there was a more or less consensual view that new reproductive technologies should only be allowed if they did not go against the “child’s best interest.” At the same time, there was significant political conflict over what constituted this interest. Moreover, the reforms that were made never fully embraced the radical implications of the new technologies. Rather, they clung on to previously established patterns of what a “real” family looked like. Thus, every move to allow a new technology or include another category of people as legitimate users of that technology was contingent upon the articulation of a discursive equivalence with previously naturalized methods of reproduction, ultimately taking the heterosexual, nuclear family as an implicit model. Finally, I argue that the production of “sense” in this terrain of radical undecidability was dependent on the mobilization of a series of collective fantasies about “natural life processes,” “nature’s imperfections,” “a humanist view of mankind,” “the stable, original nuclear family”, and so on.
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| 7. |
- Tollin, Katharina, 1974-
(författare)
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Sida vid sida : En studie av jämställdhetspolitikens genealogi 1971-2006
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The history of gender equality policies is part of the modern heritage in Sweden. The contemporary narrative contains milestones such as female suffrage, anti-discrimination legislation, equal representation and parental leave. And yet, ambivalences also imbue this modern contemporary saga. While all political parties from left to right claims to be in favor of gender equality, it seems as if the goal is never fully attained. This thesis examines the conditions for gender equality policies in the Swedish parliamentary debates during the period from 1971 to 2006. The ambition is to trace the (historical) agreements, conflicts and erasures upon which our contemporary understandings of the gender equality policies are based. What political actions are favored when the contemporary history seems enigmatic and incomprehensible? What forces and power relations are obscured by our current historiography? The theoretical framework is informed by genealogy, feminist theory and discourse theory. Rather then representing the struggle for women’s interests the analysis seeks to investigate the historical present and emergence of gender in this specific political context. The main contribution is a reworked understanding of contemporary history with an emphasis on how neoliberalism and class politics constitute the political space for gender equality. One overall conclusion of the analysis is that a confined narrative on feminist waves as showdowns between male resistance and women’s struggle or party political competitions tends to obscure the fact that the political process in relation to gender equality policy has evolved closely with neoliberalism.
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