Röster som gjorde skillnad : korsande identifikationer i det unga folkhemmets populärkultur

• -Voices making difference: Crossing identifications in Swedish popular culture 1920-1950- starts and ends with reflections on the concept of intersectionality and its uses in recent debates. Its potentials to open dialogues between different perspectives on identity orders such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, age and generation need to be nourished and protected against divisive ways of transforming it into a means to dig trenches between such perspectives. It is argued that there is no a priori given set of identity dimensions, but that the choice of which orders to focus is always context-dependent and needs to be decided for each particular study. It is also emphasised that both crossings and boundaries between dimensions need to be reconstructed in empirical interpretations, since both links and differences are produced in specific cultural practices and texts, even though the connecting -inter-- may analytically and politically be privileged over the dividing --sect-. A further observation is that while in some texts, identity orders may line up or prismatically reinforce each other in clear patterns, they do as often combine in much more diffuse, ambiguous and contradictory ways. The central sections of the article present an example of an intersectional and also intermedial analysis of song lyrics, novels, films and other identity texts that were triggered by the advent and assimilation of jazz music in the Swedish welfare society of the 1920-1950 period. Examples of primitivist polarisations of white/black and male/female are juxtaposed to more openly subject positions. An example of the former is the author Artur Lundkvist, who in his book Negerkust (Negro Coast, 1933) exploited black women as both racially and sexually -Others-. The teenage jazz star Alice Babs exemplifies the hybridising option, when she in songs and films around 1940 transgressed and redefined borders in the age, class, gender and ethnic dimensions.

Nyckelord

jazz

history

Sweden

politics

identity

intersectionality

popular music

popular culture

culture

discourse

song lyrics

gender

sexuality

Musikhistoria

Populärkultur

Sverige: historia

Social identitet

Kulturstudier

Kulturforskning

Forskning

Folkhemmet

Intersektionalitet

Jazz

Musik

Musiksociologi

Sociologi

Musik

SOCIAL SCIENCES

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)