New Dimensions of Diversity in Nordic Culture and Society 1443885932, 9781443885935

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New Dimensions of Diversity in Nordic Culture and Society

New Dimensions of Diversity in Nordic Culture and Society Edited by

Jenny Björklund and Ursula Lindqvist

New Dimensions of Diversity in Nordic Culture and Society Edited by Jenny Björklund and Ursula Lindqvist This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Jenny Björklund, Ursula Lindqvist and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8593-2 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8593-5

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Editors’ Introduction ................................................................................ viii  Jenny Björklund & Ursula Lindqvist  I. Diversity in New Media and Popular Culture Cultural Amnesia and AIDS: Breaking the Silence in Sweden ................... 2 Timothy Ryan Warburton Diversity and Intimacy in Denmark: Regulations, Celebrations and Condemnation ................................................................ 22 Rikke Andreassen New Faces of a New Phase: The Politics of Visibility among Young Muslim Women in Sweden ................................................ 41 Pia Karlsson Minganti and Leila Karin Österlind The New Cradle of Western Civilization: Hypertexts, Global Networks, and the Finland-Swedish Novel Diva ........................... 61 Kristina Malmio The “Caspian Case” and Its Aftermath: Transgender People’s use of Facebook to Engage Discriminatory Mainstream News Coverage in Denmark ...................................................................... 79 Tobias Raun II. Diversity, Transnationalism, and National Belonging An Open Letter to Beatrice Ask .............................................................. 104 Jonas Hassen Khemiri The Swedish REVA Debate: An Interview with Jonas Hassen Khemiri ..................................................................... 111 Rachel Willson-Broyles

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Dancing With the Stállu of Diversity: A Sámi Perspective ..................... 114 Troy Storfjell Did Breivik Care about Race? Scandinavian Radical Nationalism in Transition ............................................................................................ 131 Benjamin R. Teitelbaum The Specter of Danish Empire: The Prophets of Eternal Fjord and the Writing of Danish-Greenlandic History ...................................... 151 Kirsten Thisted Statelessness and Belonging: Kurdish Youth in Sweden ........................ 174 Barzoo Eliassi III. Challenges for Twenty-First Century Nordic Welfare States From Diversity to Precarity: Reading Childhood in Ruben Östlund’s Film Play (2011) ...................................................... 192 Amanda Doxtater Class Revisited in Contemporary Swedish Literature ............................. 212 Anna Williams The Representation of Class in Post-Industrial and Multicultural Sweden: Aesthetic-Political Strategies in Kristian Lundberg’s Yarden ................. 230 Magnus Nilsson Caregiving Fathers in Norway: Fiction and Reality ................................ 247 Melissa Gjellstad “Still a Lot of Staring and Curiosity”: Racism and the Racialization of African Immigrants in Iceland ............................................................ 263 Kristín Loftsdóttir Contributors ............................................................................................. 283 Index ........................................................................................................ 290   

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has blossomed from a series of thought-provoking papers at the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study’s (SASS) annual meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, in May, 2012, to a rich and diverse volume of essays. We’d like first to express appreciation to SASS for welcoming a panel stream on this topic and providing a critical forum for us to talk through these ideas with participants in their earliest stages. Next, we’d like to thank all of you contributors who have been with us since the start of this project, responding to our initial call for papers, participating in a lively discussion over those two days at the conference, revising rough presentations into polished chapters, and demonstrating untold patience with a rigorous and time-consuming editing process. After Cambridge Scholars Publishing affirmed its interest in publishing an edited volume on this topic, we reached out to additional contributors around the world whose scholarly work represented critical areas we wanted covered in the volume. For those of you who joined us at this stage, we are so pleased you responded positively to our invitations! We are especially delighted that Johan Hassen Khemiri and his Englishlanguage translator, Rachel Willson-Broyles, agreed to allow us to publish a full translation of Khemiri’s open letter to Sweden’s then-Minister of Justice, Beatrice Ask. We also thank the team at Cambridge Scholars Publishing for their professionalism and patience, especially Carol Koulikourdi, Sam Baker, Sophie Edminson, Courtney Blades, Amanda Millar, and Anthony Wright. Elizabeth Lutz ’15, a student of English and Scandinavian Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College, provided invaluable language assistance in editing several of the essays, and there are no words to describe the accuracy and speed of our diligent copy editors Karin Lindeqvist and Rebecca Ahlfeldt. We are also grateful to the photographers who generously let us use their images in this volume, as well as to Swedish artist Annika Svenbro, whose work Ögat (The Eye), is on the cover. Special thanks are due to the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University, to the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, and to the Department of Scandinavian Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College for their logistical and financial support of this book. Last but certainly not least, we thank our students and colleagues for inspiration and support.

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION JENNY BJÖRKLUND AND URSULA LINDQVIST

“Diverse” is arguably not a term one would have used to describe Nordic society and culture prior to the immigration boom of the turn of the millennium. After all, the region’s modern welfare states, built up during the decades following the Second World War, assumed common sets of national values that varied only somewhat within the region as a whole. These include a commitment to social equality (with a particular focus on gender and economic class), political transparency, public support of arts and culture, a fundamental human right to access nature (along with the political, social and individual responsibilities to take care of it), a universal right to education and health care, a universal right to access the labor market (in the form of generous family leave policies, subsidized day care, and job training and placement services), and an expectation that labor unions and corporations cooperate on pay, benefits, and workers’ rights issues (Einhorn and Logue 2003; Rostgaard and Lehto 2005; Christiansen 2006). Under the auspices of the Nordic Council of Ministers in Copenhagen, the five Nordic nation states – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden – have cooperated since 1971 on a wide range of public policy issues, from work permits to sustainability initiatives to funding for artistic and scholarly endeavors. Furthermore, Nordic-“branded” social democratic values (Browning 2007, Lindqvist 2009) have been reinforced through international recognition of the Nordic countries’ stands on human rights issues, which have bolstered claims of Nordic exceptionalism and moral political leadership. For example, Nordic delegations took early and decisive stands against apartheid in Rhodesia (known today as Zimbabwe) and South Africa and have played roles in negotiating peace in armed conflicts from the Congo to the Balkans to the Middle East (Reddy 1986). Some Nordic countries also have contributed more foreign aid as a percentage of GDP than significantly larger industrial nations. Furthermore, in the decades leading up to the Syrian refugee crisis that began in 2015, Sweden,

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Denmark and Norway accepted more refugees per capita than other European nations under the United Nations Refugee Convention (Selbervik 2006, 1; UNHCR 2014; 2015), a move many have credited with destabilizing the Nordic welfare model. The resulting changes to Nordic societies and cultures have arguably rendered visible a significant and longstanding gap that has existed between the Nordic welfare societies’ lofty ideals and rhetoric on the one hand and their actual policies and practices on the other (Browning 2007; Lindqvist 2009; Kvist et al. 2012). The Nordic countries have for decades lingered at or near the top of global indexes on human development and gender equality (UN Human Development Reports 2015) – rankings that have attracted immigrants to the Nordic region in record numbers in recent decades. We believe it is this ever-widening gap between the Nordic region’s branded ideal and its sociopolitical realities that defines the dimensions of diversity in Nordic culture and society in the opening decades of the new millennium. This volume’s focus on “new dimensions” of diversity does not, therefore, contribute to a mythical account of once-homogenous Northern societies suddenly becoming “multicultural.” Indeed, a central premise of this volume is that the Nordic countries not only are remarkably diverse today, but also – Nordic branding aside – they have been so for quite some time. Indeed, for centuries prior to the Nordic region’s most recent immigration boom, Finland, Sweden and Norway have been home to thousands of indigenous Sámi, Europe’s only indigenous minority recognized by the European Union (see Storfjell, this volume). Similarly, Denmark’s colonial relationship with Greenland – an Arctic country located closer to North America than to Europe – dates back to the eighteenth century, bringing Greenlandic Inuit people and culture into the Nordic fold (see Thisted, this volume). The nomadic Romani people’s presence in Finland, Sweden and Norway similarly dates back centuries (and has even formed a distinct Norwegian ethnic group), and of course Jews, Walloons, Germans and Finns have long constituted significant ethnic minorities in certain Nordic countries. Language laws in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden have granted official status to historical minority languages spoken in these countries which, in addition to German and Finnish, include Romani chib, Yiddish, Meänkieli (spoken by Tornedalians on the Swedish/Finnish border), Sámi, Faroese (the Faroe Islands remain part of the Danish kingdom), Greenlandic, Kven (a Finnic language spoken by the Kven people in northernmost Norway), Rodi (a.k.a. “Norwegian Traveller”) and Sign Language. All told, the Nordic region is home to six official national languages, eleven national minority languages, and dozens of others, a list that continues to expand with



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continued migrations to the region. The fact that recent waves of immigration have included many so-called “visible” minorities from farflung places in the world have finally forced national and regional conversations about the conditions of social and political enfranchisement in the Nordic region that some would argue have been long overdue. The contributors to this volume were also asked to grapple with and provide new interpretations for the concept of “diversity” itself. Since the 1980s, “diversity” in the Nordic region has connoted ethnicity and national origin. However, discussions of diversity also have come to evoke race in the Nordic countries, where popular belief has long held that “race” and “racism” were phenomena that existed outside the borders of the region (Keskinen et al. 2009; Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2014; McEachrane 2014). This is in large part due to the ways in which radical nationalist political parties in these countries have conflated the categories of race and nation in ways not seen since the 1930s (e.g., the Danish People’s Party, the Sweden Democrats, the True Finns, and The Progress Party in Norway; see Jungar and Jupskås 2014). When such insider/outsider binaries prevail, “race” also becomes conflated with “culture” (Ehn, Frykman and Löfgren 1993; Pred 2000; 2004; Habel 2002). As a result, the popular Scandinavian term for “diversity,” mangfoldighed / mangfold / mångfald, is sometimes erroneously subsumed within the perimeters of “multiculturalism,” a politically fraught term that arguably confines diversity to the domain of ethnicity, race and national origin. This has also been the case in Nordic research on diversity. For example, two fine anthologies devoted to the study of diversity in Nordic culture and society, Litteraturens gränsland: Invandrar- och minoritetslitteratur i nordiskt perspektiv [Literature’s Borderland: Immigrant and Minority Literatures from a Nordic Perspective], edited by Satu Gröndahl (2002) and Diversity, Inclusion and Citizenship in Scandinavia, edited by Bo Bengtsson, Per Strömblad and Ann-Helén Bay (2010), assume “diversity” to apply narrowly to race, ethnicity, and national origin. We understand diversity to encompass a much broader – and richer – category in the social and cultural context of the Nordic region, one that necessarily demands intersectional approaches that also take into account, for example, gender, sexuality, citizenship status/statelessness, age, religion, language, (dis)ability, family structures, and last but certainly not least, socioeconomic class. The concept of intersectionality originates from the field of women, gender and sexuality studies, and it illuminates how distinct structures of power and privilege intersect in the formation of identities and identity categories. American scholars who introduced the concept used it to highlight how gender and race were intertwined in the



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marginalization of women of color (hooks 1984; Crenshaw 1991; Collins 2000). Intersectional approaches have spread rapidly in the Nordic countries, where their importance for Nordic gender and diversity studies are undeniable. When Nina Lykke (2003, 49) introduced the concept of intersectionality in the Swedish gender studies journal Kvinnovetenskaplig tidskrift in 2003, an Internet search for the English term resulted in 2,090 hits, while a search for the Scandinavian translation of the term, “intersektionalitet,” resulted in only seven. More than a decade later, a Google search in June 2015 generated 566,000 hits for the English term and 88,900 for the Scandinavian. Nordic gender scholars initially used intersectionality within a postcolonial theoretical framework to analyze how identity categories such as gender, ethnicity, and class intersect in the marginalization of immigrants (e.g. Reyes, Molina and Mulinari 2002; Mørck 2003; Staunæs 2003; Reyes and Martinsson 2005; Reyes and Mulinari 2005; Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012), but the concept has also been developed beyond this postcolonial framework to examine the intersection of other identity categories and/or to challenge the concept’s theoretical foundations (Lykke 2003; 2005; 2006; 2007; Kvinnovetenskaplig tidskrift 2005; Søndergaard 2005; Kvinder, køn & forskning 2006; Reyes and Gröndahl 2007; Gressgård 2008; Jensen and Elg 2010; Mattsson 2010; Hearn 2011). We believe that such intersectional approaches allow for nuanced readings of major developments that have been transforming the Nordic societies in recent decades. Among these are feminist and LGBTQ movements, the global indigenous rights movement, the increasing visibility of Islam as a minority religion in Europe, linguistic innovation and “global” slang alongside English incursions, global adoptions, new expectations for mediating family and work obligations, and the increased mobility of people, goods, and information (digital culture). Finland, whose history as part of the Swedish realm for hundreds of years caused it to codify the rights of its Swedish-language minority at the nation’s founding in 1918, has begun to consider the place of new minorities (as well as some established ones, such as the Roma and the Sámi) in a political climate that has given rise to the radical populist True Finns party. In 2009, Iceland elected the world’s first openly gay head of state – an act that was a non-event to Icelanders but made headlines globally, as many countries grapple with codifying a greatly expanded array of legal protections for sexual minorities. And of course – just as elsewhere in Europe, including the European Parliament – populist politicians hostile to immigrants, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ people, the European Union and globalization in general have been voted into the parliaments of Denmark,



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Finland, Norway and Sweden, a development that came as a shock to established social democratic parties which had dominated the region’s politics for most of the twentieth century. In July 2011, the entire region was deeply shaken by a terror attack in Norway by a Norwegian extremist who wanted to “save Europe from multiculturalism” (see Teitelbaum, this volume). The attack resulted in the deaths of seventy-seven people, and most horrifying was the fact that sixty-seven of them were youth members of Norway’s Labor Party attending an annual summer camp on the tranquil island of Utøya. The teenagers represented a rising generation of political leadership that included quite a few Norwegian-born children of immigrants to Norway. Questions of inclusion and integration have thus not been limited to new immigrants but, rather, continue on to subsequent generations. Another recent example of this is in Sweden, where police were accused of practicing racial profiling through an initiative called Project REVA, begun in 2009, which tasked police with finding and apprehending those who were in Sweden illegally. In 2013, their tactics came under severe scrutiny when they began stopping people of certain ethnic appearance in the Stockholm subways and asking for identification (mirroring similarly controversial policing practices in the U.S. state of Arizona that allegedly targeted Latinos). When then-Minister of Justice Beatrice Ask defended the practice, award-winning Swedish author Jonas Hassen Khemiri, who was born in Stockholm to a Swedish mother and a Tunisian father, wrote Ask an open letter inviting her to “trade skin” for a day (2013a). Khemiri’s letter, published in Sweden’s daily newspaper with the largest circulation, Dagens Nyheter, broke the newspaper’s all-time record of the most shared article on the day of publication. His letter was subsequently translated into English and published, in truncated form, in the opinion pages of the New York Times (Khemiri 2013b). We are pleased to provide in this volume the full-length English translation of Khemiri’s open letter, “Dear Beatrice Ask,” along with an original interview with the author by his translator, Rachel Willson-Broyles, in which Khemiri reflects on the letter’s impact and legacy. Recent decades have also seen the rise of an underemployed suburban underclass in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, where this development takes concrete, spatio-symbolic form. From 1965 to 1974, the Swedish Social Democratic government built more than a million new housing units, in new apartment complexes located in commuting distance from major urban centers, as part of an ambitious initiative called miljonprogrammet [the million program]. The immediate goals were to improve the overall standard of living and to alleviate pressure on the housing market, which was struggling to absorb new waves of workers –



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many from outside Sweden – who were migrating to Sweden’s work centers during the economic boom of the postwar period. Another, loftier goal was that of social integration: to bring together people of diverse backgrounds to share equitable urban living spaces. By the turn of the twenty-first century, however, these apartment complexes had become symbols of the disenfranchisement of the suburban underclass. Those whose economic circumstances improved moved out of the housing developments and were often replaced by immigrants who faced many barriers to the Swedish labor market. A few famous examples of such neighborhoods include Husby, on the outskirts of Stockholm (where the riots that broke out in May 2013 spread across Stockholm suburbs and became world news), Hammarkullen in Gothenburg, and Rosengård in Malmö, Sweden’s third-largest city. Similar housing polarization has occurred in and around other Nordic urban centers with substantial immigrant populations, such as Nørrebro in Copenhagen, Alna and Søndre Nordstrand in Oslo, and Espoo and Vantaa outside Helsinki. But as the essays in this volume by Amanda Doxtater, Magnus Nilsson and Anna Williams show us, we cannot limit our critical readings of such important social spaces to ethnicity, race and national origin. To begin to apprehend the politics at work, we must also read the narratives that emerge from such spaces as stories about class and the economic anxieties that inform and construct social identities in today’s Nordic region. Many of the chapters in this volume grew out of a two-day panel stream at the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study (SASS) Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, in May, 2012. The original call for papers explicitly invited contributions that not only took new approaches to studying well-known aspects of diversity in Nordic culture and society but also tackled dimensions of diversity that have been hiding in plain sight, so to speak. One example is LGBTQ issues, on which the Nordic countries are seen as progressive and proactive – and to a great extent, rightfully so. They have been in the political forefront in granting rights to gay people, for instance by introducing registered partnership laws and securing access to reproductive rights. This, too, has become part of the Nordic progressive “brand.” As Jens Rydström (2011, 21) has argued, while “[t]he integrated homosexual couple has become a symbol for the majority’s tolerance,” latent homophobia still thrives in the Nordic countries, and pro-gay politics often becomes intertwined with xenophobia in Nordic nationalist discourses. These tensions also merit exploration within the context of diversity in the Nordic region, as addressed in Timothy Warburton’s chapter in this volume (see also Björklund 2014). Queer theory had a somewhat early breakthrough in the Nordic region;



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indeed, the first major overview of queer theory appeared in 1996: the introduction to the Nordic academic journal lambda nordica’s special issue on queer theory (Kulick 1996). As Swedish gender scholar Ulrika Dahl (2011), among others, has documented, queer theory quickly established its home within women’s and gender studies in the Nordic countries, and the field has grown rapidly, especially in Sweden. Nordic transgender studies, in contrast, is a small but growing field, and recent research has addressed lived experiences and cultural representations as well as theoretical questions (e.g., Wickman 2001; Gårdfeldt 2005; Alm 2006; Bergström 2007; Kroon 2007; Berg 2008; Westerling 2008; Engdahl 2010; Bremer 2011; Raun 2012; lambda nordica 2013; Sørlie 2013; Olovsdotter Lööv 2014). Transgender studies is an interdisciplinary research field that focuses on phenomena that disrupt the connections generally assumed to exist between biological sex on the one hand and gender on the other, the latter which gender and sexuality studies scholars argue is socially and culturally constructed. Examples of such “transgender” phenomena include transsexualism, intersexuality, cross-dressing, intergender and gender diversity in general (Stryker 2006, 3). Transgender studies thus challenge the gender binary as well as the perceived cis norm (cis is Latin for “on the same side”), which prescribes that a person’s legal gender, biological sex, gender identity and gender expression should coincide, or be “on the same side” of the gender binary. The rights of transgender people have become a pressing political issue in the Nordic countries, which – as Tobias Raun documents in his chapter for this volume – have been far less progressive in this area than widely assumed. Another interdisciplinary field of utmost importance for any study of diversity is (dis)ability studies; within this field, an emerging body of so-called “crip theory” challenges the norm of able-bodiedness. As a field, Nordic (dis)ability studies has been concerned with empirical research as well as more theoretical approaches (e.g., Vehmas 2002, Kristiansen and Traustadóttir 2004, Malmberg and Färm 2008, lambda nordica 2012). While this field is rapidly gaining importance in academia worldwide, the number of Nordic scholars is, sadly, still limited, as exemplified by the fact that our vigorous efforts to find a Nordic disability studies scholar who was able to contribute to this volume ultimately failed. All of these categories need to be taken into account when we analyze diversity in Nordic culture and society. This is particularly important since different categories are sometimes played against each other in nationalist discourses. For example, assimilationist and homonormative representations of homosexuality are often included in narratives of the liberal and progressive Nordic countries, but these narratives rest upon an



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exclusion of an ethnic Other, which is posed as a threat to modern and tolerant “Nordic-ness” (Nebeling Petersen 2012). Another example is the fraught position of people of Kurdish or Palestinian origin, who are expected to demonstrate political fealty to the Nordic nation where they live even while imagining and advocating for a politically independent Kurdistan or Palestine. An intersectional approach to studying diversity is needed in order to account for these kinds of tensions. In the new millennium, categories of identity have become particularly destabilized with the emergence of a new generation of people in the Nordic region who demand more dynamic and fluid identities. The chapters in this volume, accordingly, reinvestigate the tired concept of “diversity” to make room for new realities as well as the ample new questions to which they give rise. Moreover, we believe the scholarship on diversity in the Nordic region tends to suffer from disciplinary segregation (e.g., political scientists writing for other political scientists), thus limiting the method(s) of analysis. The contributors to this volume are trained in a variety of fields, among them literary and cultural studies, film studies, ethnomusicology, anthropology, indigenous methodologies, gender and sexuality studies, history and folklore; we are connected through our common affiliation with the broad field of Nordic or Scandinavian area studies. The volume brings together examples from the region as a whole and from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and interrelated fields to contribute to important conversations about diversity today. Finally, this volume assumes diversity to be a fundamental feature of Nordic modernity. Given that the Nordic countries consistently rank among the world’s wealthiest, most educated, and most egalitarian, the case studies in the following chapters provide important counter-narratives to prevailing local and global discourses of “Nordic-ness.” Our expert contributors not only interrogate historical categories of diversity in a Nordic context, including gender, sex and class (Raun, Williams, Nilsson) and ethnicity and race (Andreassen, Khemiri and Willson-Broyles, Doxtater, Loftsdóttir); they also show how these categories intersect. They examine new forms of, and platforms for, diverse ideas and creative expression, including fluid masculinities, digital cultures, new media, and fashion (Warburton, Andreassen, Minganti and Österlind, Malmio, Raun, Gjellstad). They question the terms on which the Nordic region’s indigenous peoples, the Sámi and the Greenlandic Inuit, as well as stateless people such as the Kurds, are brought into Nordic discussions of diversity, citizenship, and agency (Storfjell, Thisted, Eliassi). And they analyze the implications of nationalist and patriarchal discourses that have emerged since the turn of this century (Andreassen, Teitelbaum). It is our



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hope that this rich – and indeed, diverse – collection of scholarly essays will spark productive and critical conversations, both in the classroom and among scholars, stakeholders and all who are interested in the national and regional cultures, subcultures and social dynamics that inform modern life in the Nordic region.

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Engdahl, Ulrica. 2010. “Att vara som/den ‘en’ är: En etisk diskussion om begreppen rättvisa, erkännande och identitet i en trans*kontext.” PhD diss., Linköping University. Gårdfeldt, Lars. 2005. Hatar Gud bögar?: Teologiska förståelser av homo-, bi- och transpersoner: En befrielseteologisk studie. Stockholm: Normal. Gressgård, Randi. 2008. “Mind the Gap: Intersectionality, Complexity and ‘the Event.’” Theory & Science, 10.1. http://theoryandscience.icaap.org/content/vol10.1/Gressgard.html. Gröndahl, Satu, ed. 2002. Litteraturens gränsland: Invandrar- och minoritetslitteratur i nordiskt perspektiv. Uppsala University: Centrum för multietnisk forskning. Habel, Ylva. 2002. “Modern Media, Modern Audiences: Mass Media and Social Engineering in the 1930s Swedish Welfare State.” PhD diss., Stockholm University. Hearn, Jeff. 2011. “Neglected Intersectionalities in Studying Men: Age(ing), Virtuality, Transnationality.” In Framing Intersectionality: Debates on a Multi-Faceted Concept in Gender Studies, edited by Helma Lutz, Maria Teresa Herrera Vivar and Linda Supik, 89–104. Farnham: Ashgate. hooks, bell. 1984. Feminist Theory from Margin to Center. Boston: South End. Jensen, Sune Qvotrup, and Camilla Elg. 2010. “Intersectionality as Embodiment.” Kvinder, køn & forskning, 19.2–3: 30–9. Jungar, Ann-Cathrin, and Anders Ravik Jupskås. 2014. “Populist Radical Right Parties in the Nordic Region: A New and Distinct Party Family?” Scandinavian Political Studies, 37.3: 215–38. doi: 10.1111/1467-9477.12024. Keskinen, Suvi, et al., eds. 2014. Complying with Colonialism: Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region. Farnham: Ashgate. Khemiri, Jonas Hassen. 2013a. “Bästa Beatrice Ask.” Dagens Nyheter, March 3. http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/basta-beatrice-ask/. —. 2013b. “Sweden’s Closet Racists.” Translated by Rachel WillsonBroyles. New York Times, April 20. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/opinion/sunday/swedens-closetracists.html?_r=0. Kristiansen, Kristjana, and Rannveig Traustadóttir, eds. 2004. Gender and Disability Research in the Nordic Countries. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Kroon, Ann. 2007. “FE/MALE Asymmetries of Gender and Sexuality.” PhD Diss., Uppsala University.



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Kulick, Don. 1996. “Queer Theory: Vad är det och vad är det bra för?” lambda nordica, 2.3–4: 5–22. Kvinder, køn & forskning. 2006. Special issue: “Intersektionalitet.” 15.2–3. Kvinnovetenskaplig tidskrift. 2005. Special issue: “Intersektionalitet.” 26.2–3. Kvist, Jon, et al., eds. 2012. Changing Social Equality: The Nordic Welfare Model in the 21st Century. Bristol: Policy. lambda nordica. 2012. Special issue: “Cripteori.” 17.1–2. lambda nordica. 2013. Special issue: “Trans Health (Care).” 18.3–4. Lindqvist, Ursula. 2009. “The Cultural Archive of the IKEA Store.” Space and Culture: International Journal of Social Spaces, 12.1: 43–62. Loftsdóttir, Kristín, and Lars Jensen, eds. 2012. Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region: Exceptionalism, Migrant Others and National Identities. Farnham: Ashgate. —. eds. 2014. Crisis in the Nordic Nations and Beyond: At the Intersection of Environment, Finance and Multiculturalism. Farnham: Ashgate. Lykke, Nina. 2003. “Intersektionalitet: Ett användbart begrepp för genusforskningen?” Kvinnovetenskaplig tidskrift, 24.1: 47–57. —. 2005. “Nya perspektiv på intersektionalitet: Problem och möjligheter.” Kvinnovetenskaplig tidskrift, 26.2–3: 7–17. —. 2006. “Intersectionality: A Useful Concept for Feminist Theory?” In Gender Studies: Trends/Tensions in Greece and Other European Countries, edited by Th.-S. Pavlidou, 151–60. Thessaloniki: University of Thessaloniki. —. 2007. “Intersektionalitet på svenska.” In Kulturstudier i Sverige, edited by Johan Fornäs and Bodil Axelsson, 129–47. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Malmberg, Denise, and Kerstin Färm. 2008. Dolda brottsoffer: Polismyndighetens och socialtjänstens hantering av brott och övergrepp mot personer med funktionshinder. Uppsala University, Centrum för genusvetenskap. Mattsson, Katarina. 2010. “Genus och vithet i den intersektionella vändningen.” Tidskrift för genusvetenskap, 1–2: 6–22. McEachrane, Michael, ed. 2014. Afro-Nordic Landscapes: Equality and Race in Northern Europe. New York: Routledge. Mørck, Yvonne. 2003. “Narratives of the Intersections of Masculinities and Ethnicities in a Danish High School Class.” NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 11. 2: 111–20. Nebeling Petersen, Michael. 2012. “Somewhere, over the rainbow: Biopolitiske rekonfigurationer af den homoseksuelle figur.” PhD diss., University of Copenhagen.



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Olovsdotter Lööv, Anna. 2014. “Maskulinitet i feminismens tjänst: Dragkingande som praktik, politik och begär.” PhD diss., Lund University. Pred, Allan. 2000. Even in Sweden: Racisms, Racialized Spaces, and the Popular Geographical Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press. —. 2004. The Past is Not Dead: Facts, Fictions, and Enduring Racial Stereotypes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Raun, Tobias. 2012. “Out Online: Trans Self-Representations and Community Building on YouTube.” PhD diss., Roskilde University. Reddy, E. S. 1986. International Action against Apartheid: The Nordic States and Nigeria. Lagos: NIIA. Nigerian Inst. of Intl. Affairs Monograph Ser. 11. Reyes, Paulina de los, and Satu Gröndahl, eds. 2007. Framtidens feminismer: Intersektionella interventioner i den feministiska debatten. Hägersten: Tankekraft. Reyes, Paulina de los, and Lena Martinsson, eds. 2005. Olikhetens paradigm: Intersektionella perspektiv på o(jäm)likhetsskapande. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Reyes, Paulina de los, Irene Molina, and Diana Mulinari, eds. 2002. Maktens (o)lika förklädnader: Kön, klass & etnicitet i det postkoloniala Sverige. Stockholm: Atlas. Reyes, Paulina de los, and Diana Mulinari. 2005. Intersektionalitet: Kritiska reflektioner över (o)jämlikhetens landskap. Malmö: Liber. Rostgaard, Tine, and Juhani Lehto. 2005. “Health and Social Care Systems: How Different is the Nordic Model?” In Nordic Welfare States in the European Context, edited by Mikko Kautto et al., 137–67. New York: Routledge. Rydström, Jens. 2011. Odd Couples: A History of Gay Marriage in Scandinavia. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Aksant. Selbervik, Hilde, with Knut Nygaard. 2006. Nordic Exceptionalism in Development Assistance?: Aid Policies and the Major Donors: The Nordic Countries. CMI Report R 2006: 8. Bergen: Chr. Michelsen Institute. Søndergaard, Dorte Marie. 2005. “Making Sense of Gender, Age, Power and Disciplinary Position: Intersecting Discourses in the Academy.” Feminism & Psychology, 15.2: 189–208. Sørlie, Anniken. 2013. “Retten til kjønnsidentitet som menneskerettighet: Kan norsk forvaltningspraksis’ krav om irreversibel sterilisering ved endring av fødelsenummer forsvares?” PhD diss., University of Oslo.



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Staunæs, Dorthe. 2003. “Where Have All the Subjects Gone?: Bringing Together the Concepts of Intersectionality and Subjectification.” NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 11.2: 101– 10. Stryker, Susan. 2006. ”(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies.” In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Wittle, 1–17. New York: Routledge. UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). 2014. Asylum Trends 2013: Levels and Trends in Industrialized Countries. Geneva: UNHCR. UNHCR. 2015. Asylum Trends 2014: Levels and Trends in Industrialized Countries. Geneva: UNHCR. United Nations Human Development Reports for Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. 2015. http://hdr.undp.org/en/countries (accessed June 20, 2015). Vehmas, Simo. 2002. “Deviance, Difference, and Human Variety: The Moral Significance of Disability in Modern Bioethics.” PhD diss., University of Turku. Westerling, Kalle. 2008. “Annorlundahetens potential: Dragshow och den politiska estetiken i att framträda annorlunda.” lambda nordica, 13.1– 2: 31–49. Wickman, Jan. 2001. “Transgender Politics: The Construction and Deconstruction of Binary Gender in the Finnish Transgender Community.” PhD diss., Åbo Akademi University.



I. DIVERSITY IN NEW MEDIA AND POPULAR CULTURE

CULTURAL AMNESIA AND AIDS: BREAKING THE SILENCE IN SWEDEN TIMOTHY RYAN WARBURTON

In the January 2008 1 issue of QX magazine, Sweden’s largest gay publication, openly gay Swedish pop star Andreas Lundstedt (Öhrman 2008, 16) confirmed media rumors that he was indeed HIV-positive. A member of the pop music group Alcazar and a frequent participant in Melodifestivalen,2 Lundstedt was the first public figure in Sweden to come out as HIV-positive since fashion designer Sighsten Herrgård did so in 1987. Although Lundstedt has described that through his “coming out” he hoped to end the silence around HIV/AIDS in Sweden, the rhetoric of his coming out campaign is one that, ironically, also promotes an image of wellness. Lundstedt’s confession of his HIV-positive status not only highlights certain homophobias that still exist concerning HIV/AIDS in Sweden but also illuminates the ways in which contemporary gay political discourses have either obfuscated or purposefully ignored this profoundly significant period in history until very recently. Since Lundstedt’s 2008 interview, he has published a memoir titled Mitt positiva liv [My Positive Life] in 2012. In 2012 and 2013, Swedish comedian Jonas Gardell began publishing a trilogy of novels, Torka aldrig tårar utan handskar [Never Dry Tears Without Gloves], that chronicle the difficult lives of a group of gay men in Stockholm during the late 1980s, when AIDS first appeared in Sweden. This trilogy also aired as a miniseries for a record 1.2 million viewers on Swedish television in 2012 (Voss 2012). This trilogy has sparked a widespread cultural debate about this moment in Sweden’s history, and Gardell, one of Sweden’s bestknown gay public figures, was named Årets homo [Gay Person of the Year] at the QX 2013 Gaygala, an award presented to Gardell by none other than the Swedish Crown Princess Victoria (Sveriges kungahus 2013). This trilogy has begun to interrupt the contemporary narrative of dominant gay cultural representations by emphasizing aspects of pre-AIDS gay male sexual culture that were essential to forging a gay community and have brought the important conversation initiated by Lundstedt to a wider audience. One of the most significant questions raised by the discourse

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surrounding Gardell’s trilogy is why Swedes today, queer or not, are so ignorant of this history and so shocked by the homophobia of 1980s Sweden. In my forthcoming analysis of Lundstedt’s coming out as HIVpositive, I claim that this shock is due to the active cultural amnesia perpetuated by gay rights discourses on the one hand, and Sweden’s unique legislation surrounding HIV/AIDS on the other – a legislation informed by public health concerns rather than the religious and moral panic of the AIDS crisis in the United States. Lundstedt’s interview references a number of historical realities yet also emphasizes two key factors that inform gay identity politics in Sweden today by refuting commonly held misconceptions about HIV/AIDS. The first is Lundstedt’s affirmation of his health and wellness. When asked by the interviewer how he is feeling, Lundstedt (Öhrman 2008, 17) responded enthusiastically: “I feel great. This isn’t anything that affects my daily life.”3 This appears to be a direct response to a lingering image in Western cultural memory of the diseased sodomite who indulges in promiscuous, anonymous sex in public spaces, who represents a threat to collective public health. This image has been informed by AIDS crisis political rhetoric, Bastuklubbslagen [the Bathhouse Law], which forcibly closed all Swedish gay saunas, as well as the stipulations of forced disclosure under Smittskyddslagen [the Infectious Diseases Law], both of which I examine later in this chapter. While there are millions of heterosexual people worldwide who are HIV-positive, there persists in Sweden, as elsewhere, a seemingly irrevocable cultural association between male homosexuality and public sex and HIV/AIDS, despite the fact that just under one quarter of all HIV cases diagnosed in Sweden are the result of homosexual contact (Folkhälsomyndigheten 2014). 4 This misinformed association is confirmed through Lundstedt’s addressing a gay public in QX. The media discourse upon his “coming out” with HIV, coupled with his status as an openly gay public figure in Sweden, reveals that the association of male homosexuality and AIDS still persists. At the same time, Lundstedt stresses that much misinformation and ignorance still surrounds HIV/AIDS in Sweden. In addition to emphasizing his wellness, he has also expressed in interviews that many are under the misconception that having HIV/AIDS means that you are going to die from the virus (Backlund 2008). The second misconception that Lundstedt refutes is the stigmatization of illness. He asserts: I want to show that you don’t need to look sick when you have this infection. You can look great and be successful, and I hope I can inspire others to have the courage to speak about it. (Öhrman 2008, 16)5

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Cultural Amnesia and AIDS: Breaking the Silence in Sweden

Lundstedt directly challenges the identity of a “diseased individual” that AIDS crisis rhetoric has furnished in Sweden by being a successful and healthy-looking public figure. In the above excerpt, it appears as if Lundstedt purposefully uses the word infektion [infection] rather than sjukdom [disease] (Öhrman 2008,17). “Disease” implies death and contagiousness, and it incites fear and panic, a curious rhetoric that Susan Sontag examined in AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989). This distinction has become common in the U.S. healthcare system, which now describes venereal diseases, formerly known as “sexually transmitted diseases” (STDs), as sexually transmitted infections (STIs). In Sweden, Venhälsan, a clinic for men who have sex with men (MSM) that was established at Södersjukhuset, a public hospital in south Stockholm, at the dawn of the AIDS crisis, likewise has begun using terminology that lessens the stigmatization of STIs and HIV/AIDS. While a statement of confidentiality is provided for Venhälsan patients, the statement also acknowledges that HIV/AIDS information must be recorded on the patient’s documents (Södersjukhuset 2015). Lundstedt’s interview explicitly addresses ignorance around HIV/AIDS, demonstrating that knowledge about the virus is either lacking or forgotten entirely in dominant cultural discourses. The Nordic countries and Sweden in particular often have been touted as pioneers of gay rights (Hekma 2006). However, the historical circumstances and the realities that have allowed sexual equality legislation to be implemented reveal a more complex causal relationship than Nordic societies’ emphasis on human rights as a central cultural value or an increasingly secularized welfare state. In this chapter I seek to accomplish two things: First, to engage Lundstedt’s coming out as HIVpositive as a point of departure that allows us to frame the AIDS crisis as a historical phenomenon, which has played a key role in the formation of contemporary gay rights discourses. Secondly, I wish to investigate the nebulous cultural memory of Sweden’s experience of the AIDS crisis and the unique legislation concerning HIV/AIDS in Sweden that persists as a legacy of this period.

The AIDS Crisis as a Historical Phenomenon But first, what was the initial impetus for this phenomenon of Western cultural amnesia as it pertains to the AIDS crisis? Marita Sturken (1997, 16–7) was the first to use this term specifically in the context of AIDS, characterizing our postmodern condition as “a context in which all sense of history is lost, amnesia reigns, and the past is vandalized by the pastiche

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forms of the present”. Sturken’s idea of “pastiche” is an important point of departure, as the cultural memory of AIDS has made ubiquitous such objects like the AIDS quilt and the red ribbon while, at the same time, having erased the memory of 1980s widespread homophobia for example. There is a previous phenomenon that facilitated this, a direct result of AIDS activism conducted largely via visual media. Much of the goal of later AIDS activism in the late 1980s and 1990s promoted the idea that AIDS is a disease that can affect anyone, regardless of sexuality, race or class (an idea that truly gained momentum in the United States with basketball superstar Magic Johnson’s admission in 1992 that he is HIVpositive, as well as Ryan White, Kimberly Bergalis and a few other heterosexual public figures). British scholar Gabrielle Griffin (2000) notes, however, that this idea that anybody can be infected began to have the opposite of its intended effects for those actually living with HIV/AIDS. It is true that positive tangible effects of this cultural shift came about, such as increased funding for AIDS research, healthcare clinics targeted specifically for MSM, and anti-discrimination legislation. However, in an effort to spread the word that HIV can infect anyone, Griffin describes that a cultural “complacency” has developed: [We] have learnt to live with HIV/AIDS in the sense that it is no longer “new” and therefore “noteworthy” to us. HIV/AIDS remains fraught with uncertainties but these have not affected white western heterosexual populations. (Griffin 2000, 193)

Instead, she notes, “the image of the person with HIV/AIDS remains firmly other” (Griffin 2000, 193). Griffin (2000, 179) continues that “this initial locating of HIV/AIDS in the gay community and the so-called Third World” has led to an “‘othering’ of HIV/AIDS among those affected,” a phenomenon, which has never been “superseded.” This idea is firmly supported by the demographics of HIV infection today, in which “the other” in Western society is still at greatest risk for infection (even at increasing rates), such as black women and MSM, and “the other” in a global context, namely sub-Saharan Africans.6 In the Western context, particularly in the case of the United States, government institutions were remarkably silent on the epidemic (the Reagan administration’s egregious neglect was described in the Oscarnominated ACT UP documentary How to Survive A Plague [2012]). Griffin (2000, 178) notes that specifically in the context of the United Kingdom, the gap between those directly affected by and fighting with HIV/AIDS and those whose information about HIV/AIDS is “derived solely from the mass media, has grown immeasurably since the early

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1990s. HIV/AIDS remains a major catastrophe for millions of people but the ‘general public’ is largely unaware of this.” Griffin (2000, 179) also asserts that this idea of AIDS as a “fringe” concern was brought about by the volunteer and philanthropic organizations that sought to address the crisis, which in turn thus generated a sense that AIDS is “taken care of,” a sentiment compounded by “the ‘failure’ of HIV/AIDS to take hold in mainstream communities as initially predicted.” It is quite easy to see how the average Swede might also consider HIV/AIDS to be “taken care of,” as sexual health and contraception have been handled and funded by the welfare state since 1933. The first AIDS case in Sweden was reported at Roslagstull hospital in Stockholm in 1982 (Svéd 2000, 229). Although the AIDS crisis broke the silence about a lively gay subculture in larger Scandinavian cities like Stockholm, the cultural visibility that gay people, particularly gay men, consequently began receiving was anything but positive (Sörberg 2008, 48). A “healthy” nation with universal healthcare for its citizens as a cornerstone of its folkhem 7 agenda, Sweden initially responded to the AIDS crisis as a public health concern and continues to do so today. The Swedish gay rights group RFSL, Riksförbundet för sexuellt likaberättigande [The Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights] was the first to respond to what was referred to as “the new plague” 8 in cooperation with various Swedish government organizations like Aidsdelegationen [the National Delegation on AIDS], formed in 1985 and headed by the Swedish Minister of Health, Gertrud Sigurdsen (Svéd 2000, 232). During Sigurdsen’s time as Minister of Health, two significant pieces of legislation came into effect. The first was the inclusion of HIV under the Infectious Diseases Law, which mandates that HIV- positive persons must regularly report sexual encounters and partners to a physician and may even be imprisoned if the physician suspects the patient will not inform sexual partners of his or her status and abide by safe-sex practices. The second was the Bathhouse Law, which forcibly closed all bathhouses designed to facilitate sexual contact in Sweden in 1987. The latter was repealed in 2004, but since then bathhouses have had little success in Sweden. A longtime Nordic cultural fixture, as well as a social space associated with health and vitality, critique of this law has focused on the fact that only spaces where men had sex with men were targeted by police, while heterosexual swingers’ parties and BDSM clubs were not (Jonsson 2001). George Svéd (2000) describes that this culture of panic blamed promiscuous homosexual sex as the culprit, and those who visited bathhouses were themselves considered “morally soiled” people who,

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without consideration, would spread AIDS “to innocent, unknowing, married and bisexual men thus infecting their wives and children. That’s why homosexuals were [seen as] a threat to the general public” (Svéd 2000, 239).9 This medical and cultural panic unequivocally informed the Bathhouse Law as well the inclusion of HIV under the Infectious Diseases Law, which remains in effect today. Svéd also notes in a later interview that at this time: [It was] easy to sacrifice this group’s rights on some sort of sacrificial public health altar. It was perceived as a safety measure that came at no cost to the heterosexual community. (Andersen 2008)10

While the closing of bathhouses during the early years of the AIDS crisis was certainly not specific to Sweden, the criminal laws surrounding infection and disclosure were unique. Today it is impossible to keep one’s HIV/AIDS status private in Sweden. And as mentioned above, physicians are legally required to report a positive status to healthcare authorities, and those who test positive are required to report sexual encounters and partners regularly to a doctor. Incarceration is even possible without a trial in the case that a doctor believes an HIV-positive patient is unwilling to inform his or her sexual partners of his or her status (Kulick 2004, 208). Because the National Delegation on AIDS responded relatively quickly first to focus on MSM as the most vulnerable demographic, this allowed the discourse to quickly shift once a number of measures had been taken that specifically targeted MSM. These measures included the distribution of information about the disease for MSM, but also specialized health clinics targeted toward MSM, and the recommendation that MSMs refrain from donating blood. And although the Bathhouse Law (passed in 1987) clearly targeted this demographic, David Thorsén (2013) describes that by 1985 in Sweden: [Homosexual] men were no longer at the center of the public debate and political interest. Instead the drug addict – and particularly the young female drug-using prostitute – was targeted as the main vehicle for the spread of the virus. (Thorsén 2013, 473)

The junkie and the prostitute still remained “the other” in many ways in Sweden, but this shift away from gay and bisexual men, who were the initial target audience of the National Delegation on AIDS’ focus and resources were, at least in dominant cultural discourses, considered to be “taken care of.” This phenomenon in which the general public thought of

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Cultural Amnesia and AIDS: Breaking the Silence in Sweden

AIDS as “taken care of” was also occurring on a larger Western scale as I described above. Despite the initial measures that the National Delegation on AIDS took to address this disease that infected a disproportionate number of Swedish MSM, the fear, panic, homophobia, and ignorance disseminated by the American discourse still dominated the discourse in Sweden. Thorsén (2013) describes that during the 1990s, AIDS began to grow as a media and popular cultural phenomenon, one which became increasingly Americanized to the point that “the American experiences through the press, science and popular culture often set the tone or acted as a reference point in even other countries’ perceptions of the epidemic” (Thorsén 2013, 18). 11 However, he also notes that the Swedish experience is unique among its European neighbors and the United States in that the public debate shifted away quite early from a focus on gay and bisexual men, as a number of measures were taken to initially respond to the disproportionate number of gay men that had been infected. Instead, Thorsén (2013, 468) describes that the prostitute and the junkie soon became the threat to the general public. Thorsén (2013, 473) observes that this shift had already occurred by the time the crisis had entered what he delineated as its second period, from 1985 to1989. The public health concerns surrounding the transmission of HIV are valid and arguably warrant state intervention to a certain extent. Yet Michel Foucault’s theories of bio-power and confession complicate this assertion and the relationship between the individual and the state with regard to the policing of sexuality. Foucault poses that: [T]he individual is not a pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces. (Foucault (1990, 74)

Consider this assertion in the context of Sweden. The cultural and political rhetoric of folkhemmet, informed by texts like Gunnar and Alva Myrdal’s Kris i befolkningsfrågan (1934) [Nation and Family], authored a Swedish national identity of strong, healthy individuals representing the secure future of the nation through responsible family planning and sexual hygiene. In their book, the Myrdals offered possible solutions to the declining Swedish birthrate, and they were influential in the discourse that established the Swedish welfare state. The book also marks an important sociopolitical moment in which the Swedish state became actively invested in sex and reproduction. This period in which the state, as an institution, became invested in statistics like birth rates and public health,

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is what Foucault, in The History of Sexuality (1990), refers to as the era of “bio-power,” one of the Western state’s “numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” (Foucault 1990, 140). In addition, Swedish artists at the time invested in the vitalist movement – Eugène Jansson, for example – arguably located this concept of healthy national productivity particularly on the white, working-class male body. Swedish art historian Patrik Steorn (2006, 67) notes that although the white heterosexual male body became coded as universal, images of the homosexual male body also began to circulate within this discourse. This exertion of bio-power in Sweden at this time, through institutions such as RFSU12 (which implemented enterprises such as family planning), thus produced this idea of the individual Swedish citizen as an active agent in this state-mandated project. Foucault’s idea that individuals are produced by institutions offers some explanation for the legislative and cultural response to AIDS in Sweden described above. The “sick” individual represents a blatant threat to the commonly shared identity of healthy Swedish nation builders. Homosexuality was first legalized in Sweden in 1944, but Socialstyrelsen [the National Board of Health and Welfare], considered it a psychological disease until 1979. In the early 1980s, although homosexuality was no longer officially considered a mental illness, the arrival of AIDS in Sweden offered the general public a way to pathologize homosexuality as a physical manifestation. The discourse of the institutions described above, including the Swedish legal system, the National Delegation on AIDS, and the Swedish healthcare system, produced a discursive identity for subjects infected with HIV/AIDS within Foucault’s framework in which identities are understood through institutional mandates. Through the implementation of a law that affected bathhouses frequented exclusively by men, Riksdagen, Sweden’s parliament, thus defined such bathhouses as sites of public homosexual sex and asserted that they were spaces where HIV was transmitted. The state thus endorsed a public health policy that perpetuated homophobia and gave Swedes with little or no access to homosexual people or gay culture an entire vocabulary to ascribe to homosexual men, their (allegedly public) sex lives, the dangers they pose, and the ways in which they are a threat to Swedish society. Through the closing of bathhouses, the Swedish healthcare authorities pathologized the figure of the homosexual male as someone who threatened the well-being of others. And through the infectious diseases law that effectively eliminated medical privacy for those infected, the Swedish state has pathologized individuals with HIV/AIDS as criminals who transmit HIV.

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These “bio-political” forces, as Foucault describes, specifically the healthcare authorities in Sweden, exert their power and influence on people living with HIV/AIDS in Sweden in elusive and profound ways. Foucault (1990,140) describes that statistics and records kept of the imagined realities of populations of people are “joined at the level of a speculative discourse, but in the form of concrete arrangements.” Therefore complicated and nebulous realities of male homosexuality and living with HIV/AIDS are filed neatly under politically authored identities like “gay,” and “HIV-positive.” In the case of AIDS in twenty-first century Sweden, the more “concrete arrangements” like “gay” and “HIV-positive” additionally act upon subjects within their discourse, as those that exist within those realities inhabit those spaces to a number of ends, including community building, relationships, sexual partners, and political clout. In the case of HIV/AIDS in Sweden, it is the recording, counting, and registering of Swedes infected with the virus that allows this distribution and maintenance of bio-power. The mandated disclosure of sexual partners and acts under the Infectious Diseases Law exerts power over subjects in direct and obvious ways, but it also results in more diffuse effects, such as the choosing of sexual partners and the specific sex acts in which one chooses to engage, as oral/anal sexual acts are assigned greater risk according to medical and public health discourses. Although Foucault originally referred to a shift from clerical to medical authority, in this discussion about Lundstedt the power and ubiquity of media as producers of knowledge appear also to serve this function, demonstrated by the talk show or the one-on-one interview format in which confessions often are elicited and sensationalized today. Lundstedt’s coming out as having HIV, admitting this secret that he has held for many years from the public, can also be described as a confession. Foucault (1990, 61) traces the ritual of confession as one that originated with Christian penance and continues today as a “privileged form of confession.” He explains that “the transformation of sex into a discourse” and “the dissemination and reinforcement of heterogeneous sexual identities” are two ways that are “linked together with the help of the central element of a confession that compels individuals to articulate their sexual peculiarity” (Foucault 1990, 61). Therefore Foucault’s expanding the commonly understood idea of religious confession is key here. Because unlike religious confession, the confession of sexual acts to a medical professional not only has ostensible criminal repercussions, but also the public health process of collecting and analyzing data thus influences the ways in which the patient will ultimately be handled within this discourse. Using the early years of the AIDS crisis as an example, confessions by

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MSM that they engage in unprotected anal sex thus contributed to the homophobic idea that reduced male homosexuality to buggery and nothing more. Thus, these sexual confessions had the double effect of authoring public knowledge of MSM but also in turn influencing public health and safe sex policies. Foucault’s concept of confession as a mechanism of bio-power helps us understand the importance of interpreting the state-mandated disclosure of all sexual encounters with an HIV-positive person as well as Lundstedt’s admission as confessions. These two phenomena generate what Foucault (1990, 62) describes as two “learned truths” about sex, specifically male homosexual sex. Although Foucault (1990, 63) notes that confession in the Christian context has “gradually lost its ritualistic and exclusive localization,” he also describes that it has in turn spread and employed new “series of relationships” outside the religious realm, including “students and educators, patients and psychiatrists, delinquents and experts.” In a highly secular nation like Sweden, informed more recently by a history of rational ethics rather than Christian morality, Foucault’s claim that the doctor/patient relationship has replaced the priest/confessor relationship has even greater resonance. The Infectious Diseases Law mandates that this confessional relationship between patient and doctor is maintained. In fact, it is one in which the healthcare officials and the Swedish state are the unequivocal authorities being confessed to. Swedes living with HIV/AIDS are forced by the healthcare system to confess their sexual partners, as well as all of their sexual encounters to their doctors. Individual identities are counted and labeled through this process, rather than obscured in a statistical compilation (Kulick 2004, 208). In addition, sexual details and practices obtained through these confessions inform a discourse or a “truth” about sexuality of the confessor. Under the Infectious Diseases Law, the sexuality of a person with HIV, here represented by Lundstedt, a tangible truth about what homosexual male sex actually is, is informed and authored through such confession. This collecting of data informs public health policy, which in turn informs the public discourse, thus providing the Swedish public, largely ignorant of the sexuality of MSM, with a statesanctioned and articulated definition of homosexual male sex. Furthermore, under the Infectious Diseases Law authorities straddle public and private boundaries in how the law exerts control over Swedes living with HIV/AIDS. Swedes that test positive for HIV are also legally required to inform their sexual partners of their status, including those with whom they engage in oral sex, and they are legally required to use a condom when engaging in anal or vaginal sex (Kulick 2004, 209). This

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mandate establishes a curious circular narrative of guilt that has obvious political and criminal implications, but it also introduces personal and sexual shame into the gay male sexual subconscious. The Infectious Diseases Law understands the HIV-positive person engaging in an unprotected sexual act with a partner as a criminal. This is not to argue legal nuances or semantics, but this complicated idea introduces yet another level of shame into gay male sexuality. This stipulation of the Infectious Diseases Law scripts and regulates the most intimate confessions between people and also represents a profoundly powerful instance of state control over bodies and sex.

Contemporary Gay Culture and AIDS The Foucauldian analysis above provides historical, political and legal context for the case of HIV/AIDS in Sweden. However, Lundstedt’s confession of his HIV-positive status in a gay publication implicates perhaps the most significant force acting upon this inquiry: the tenuous relationship between contemporary gay culture and AIDS. Although today’s representations of dominant gay culture encourage assimilation through monogamy, marriage, and family, Michael Warner (2000, 221) notes that contemporary lesbian and gay politics that inform media such as QX have grown out of post-AIDS discourse and “rel[y] on a framework of individual identity, community representation, and needs and rights discourses.” Many queer theorists advocate against the essentialization of a self that is discursively produced by this political rhetoric, as the false identities produced by political institutions reify hegemonic relationships. Although the strategic essentialism exercised by gay political groups today, who advocate for civil rights equal to those of heterosexuals, has managed to guarantee such rights for queer people, this strategy has had particularly devastating consequences with regards to the cultural memory of HIV/AIDS. Gay culture in Sweden, which has developed alongside and in conversation with the state discourses outlined above, has seen a great transformation since benchmarks like the removal of homosexuality from the National Board of Health and Welfare’s list of psychological diseases in 1979, the AIDS crisis, registered partnership, and eventually same-sex marriage. In the introduction to Bögjävlar [Faggots], a 2007 collection of essays by Swedish gay media personalities who resist hegemonic normativity within Swedish culture, editor Stefan Ingvarsson (2007, 7) notes that its contributing authors are “in agreement that today’s Swedish gay culture is self-limiting, infantile and simplistic.” 13 Ingvarsson also

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notes that the media images of gay men today are limited to the frivolous: the music genre of schlager, shopping, fancy galas, etc. Warner (1993) has argued that this one-dimensional, media-produced image of gay men that the contributors to Bögjävlar take issue with is due to historical reasons. He describes that gay activism and community building have been centered around market-mediated spaces from the early beginnings, including bars and urban commercial spaces and are thus limiting, exclusive, and class-based (Warner 1993, xvi–xvii). Another reason, argued by Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed (2012, 146), is that a number of neoconservative gay journalists and activists have purposely facilitated a break from earlier generations of gay men, those associated with public sex and the plague of AIDS, in order to construct an asexual, “healthy,” and normative political identity with the aim of gaining a place at the mainstream political table. This set of dominant gay cultural values produced by this political project is often referred to as homonormativity. My aim is not to criticize gay culture or belittle homonormative political, cultural and social values but rather to highlight the ways in which mediaand commercially-driven representations of them have the AIDS crisis to credit for their success. Contemporary gay culture has constructed its identity around the public relations campaigns undertaken by conservative gay activists and journalists in the 1990s that eschewed any association with the radical sexual culture of the 1970s and instead stressed assimilation and a sameness argument between homo- and heterosexual lifestyles and nuclear family units. AIDS was first given both a name and a face in 1987 when internationally known Swedish fashion designer Sighsten Herrgård came out as HIV-positive and dedicated the rest of his life to awareness surrounding the disease before his death in 1989. However following Herrgård’s original admission in 1987, the subject of AIDS experienced a notable public silence in Sweden, largely due to the “normalizing” social and cultural discourses described above. Swedish photographer Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin’s 1998 wildly controversial exhibit “Ecce Homo” depicted queer people in a number of biblical scenes. In a Pietà image, which proved to be one of the most controversial, Ohlson Wallin depicts a man dying from AIDS in the infectious diseases ward at Södersjukhuset. The national uproar and media controversy centered around the church and homosexuality and was notably absent of any mention of AIDS, despite the fact that Ohlson Wallin had been a volunteer for many years at the Swedish HIV/AIDS organization Noaks Ark, and she had been inspired to do the exhibition by the loss of personal friends to AIDS and the church’s failure to respond (Ahlström 1999, 89). Given the public silence

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Cultural Amnesia and AIDS: Breaking the Silence in Sweden

surrounding HIV/AIDS, Lundstedt’s choice to confirm the rumors of his HIV status to QX was a politically powerful one. Lundstedt’s admission that he is HIV-positive is situated within this gay “individual identity” discourse (produced through the post-Stonewall gay rights movement, “born this way” activism, etc.) as well as the superficial, commercially driven media representations of gay men that Ingvarsson (2007, 7) asserts began in the 1990s in the Swedish context. The Swedish media describe Lundstedt’s admission as his coming out as an HIV-positive person. He had already come out as a gay man some years earlier. This demonstrates how institutions – in this case, popular media – construct an individual or even the idea of an individual; society understands both “gay” and “HIV-positive” as identities that one inhabits and that define who and what one is, rather than a description of what one does or mere qualities attributed to them. Although the idea of a widely politicized gay identity has existed since New York City’s Stonewall Riots of 1969, and the idea of the HIV-positive gay male has existed since the AIDS crisis broke out in the late 1980s, by 2007 these identities had become so politically discordant in Sweden that a pop star’s admission of either incites a media frenzy. Lundstedt’s admission of his HIV-positive status to Sweden’s largest gay publication proved to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, this admission confirmed society’s homophobic assessment of gay men as AIDS-infected blemishes on the complexion of a healthy, modern society of individually self-accountable Swedes, with access to universal healthcare and the most advanced medical knowledge. Warner (2000) discusses shame as the greatest hindrance to the prevention of HIV/AIDS today, which works through supposed knowledge that everyone possesses about the disease. He asserts that contracting HIV through sex is no less shameful now than it was during the early years of the epidemic, as those who contract AIDS are still deemed “irrational” or “sexually addicted,” pronouncements that many gay men internalize (Warner 2000, 196). While access to healthcare is race- and class-based in the United States, this assertion holds even greater weight in Sweden, where healthcare is guaranteed universally and the privileged access argument is moot. With such vast public health resources at his disposal, the gay Swede who contracts HIV is easily stigmatized as someone who has failed to benefit from the universally inclusive system. However, the horrors and loss experienced during the AIDS crisis did produce two positive effects. The first is the sense of urgency of the gay rights movement, as people were actually dying in considerable numbers from AIDS.14 The second is that it legitimized and elevated the status of

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gay and lesbian organizations (Rydström 2011, 67). Although the public health panic of the 1980s, brought about by the epidemic, produced new fears and homophobia in Sweden, Jens Rydström (2011, 50) notes that in addition to these two effects, the state’s “wish to control gay men’s sexual behavior” also resulted in greater visibility of homosexuality overall. Again, few would argue that more equal recognition of same-sex couples by the state is a bad thing, as recognition in various public spheres improves the quality of life for many non-heterosexual people. But in the Swedish context, Rydström also notes that although same-sex partnership and marriage have increased the visibility of gay people, they have also confirmed queer critics’ fears that such developments would strengthen normative patriarchal family values and alienate and further marginalize those who inhabit non-normative sexualities and sexual identities. The gay rights discourse has shifted from radical sexual politics to taking the side of “the children” and traditional family values. It has populated a futurist narrative that seems to situate itself as the complete opposite of the image of the AIDS crisis sodomite, engaging in promiscuous public sex. Thus as families with same-sex parents have become assimilated, they have been reimagined through the same institutions as heterosexual couples, seen as contributing to the collective good through reproduction and nationbuilding. Warner has also described this profound change in the political project of gay rights as “cultural amnesia,” noting that this push toward normalization serves to obscure the cultural realities and the trauma of the disease that allowed for the original political viability of gay people (Warner 2002, 223). Similarly, Anna-Maria Sörberg (2008) notes that despite the implementation of the Bathhouse Law, public sex persisted in video clubs, bathrooms, parks, and other public spaces, yet the places were no longer politicized in the same way. However, in Sweden, she also notes that soon after: HIV was no longer a misfortune but instead for many became something dirty that no one wanted to be associated with, a stigma for gay men that furnished a new self-loathing. During the 1990s it resulted in the rise of a new culture of wellness as well as fear for anything remotely associated with the “old” culture that was all too often equated with disease. (Sörberg 2008, 55)15

Today, the rights afforded to queers in Sweden allow for many people to live their lives with greater access to, and recognition within, society, yet these rights have also allowed for many younger queers to dissociate their politics from those associated with sickness and alienation from the late

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Cultural Amnesia and AIDS: Breaking the Silence in Sweden

1980s. The politics of assimilation of gay people has certainly privileged the gay male experience in media representations and has further marginalized queer sexualities that do not fit into this newly created homonormative role, that more and more underscores the monogamous couple and the nuclear family as universal ideals. It is in this “post-AIDS” political and cultural context that Lundstedt confesses his HIV-positive status, haunting the squeaky clean project of homonormative assimilation. The curious way in which the confessional aspect that has come both to author and to challenge sexuality discourse is evident in Lundstedt’s coming out interview. Although his interview did not reveal specific details about how he contracted HIV, the media discourse that ensued continued to focus on topics like his health and whether or not he has infected his partner. Sörberg (2008, 133) notes that today in Sweden, HIV/AIDS is closely linked to social status and mostly associated with heterosexual, nonEuropean men and intravenous drug users, whereas gay male culture is associated with social and economic prosperity. Although HIV/AIDS may have a greater association with male homosexuality in the United States and a richer history of activism surrounding the epidemic when compared with Sweden, the group with the highest incidences of HIV infection still remains among MSM in both countries (Sörberg 2008, 160; CDC 2012). In addition, in both the United States and Sweden, new HIV infections had been steadily decreasing in this demographic for many years but have actually begun increasing again among gay men since 2007 (Sörberg 2008, 160). Lundstedt’s coming out as HIV-positive reminded Swedes that HIV is not just an epidemic ravaging Africa, and he admits in his interview that a friend actually admitted to him that: “I thought it was only children in Africa who had HIV” 16 (Öhrman 2008, 16). In addition, Lundstedt traveled to Zambia in 2009 with UNICEF to meet children suffering with AIDS, footage of which appeared on Swedish television (Börjesson 2009). While Lundstedt’s global activism is commendable, it also confirms the misconception that AIDS is an epidemic occurring outside of Sweden. In this article I have offered a brief history of HIV/AIDS in Sweden and shown how Andreas Lundstedt’s coming out as HIV-positive both challenges and reaffirms misconceptions about the virus and the institutional realities that have informed them. I have described the “othering” of those living with HIV/AIDS that has occurred and been perpetuated through the generalization of the subject infected with HIV/AIDS, compounded by the Swedish government’s shift of focus from bisexual and gay men to prostitutes and junkies. I have also highlighted how the profound change in gay rights discourses that has occurred since

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the 1990s has approached HIV/AIDS, first as the top public health priority and eventually with purposeful cultural amnesia. The cultural amnesia and misconceptions that Lundstedt addresses in his interview reveal that the contemporary project of gay rights characterized by assimilation and normalization has done a disservice to those it originally intended to benefit, demonstrated by the public shock and widespread ignorance about the history of Sweden’s AIDS crisis depicted in Gardell’s trilogy. And although the current LGBT political landscape is one that now promotes homonormativity and the nuclear family, this study of Lundstedt’s interview reminds us that queerness still offers a space of political viability if we unpack the cultural memory that has informed it.

Notes 1 An abridged version of this interview appeared on December 18, 2007, on QX’s website. See Öhrman (2007). 2 A national singing competition whose winner competes in the annual Eurovision Song Contest. 3 Jag mår toppen. Det här är inget som påverkar min vardag. 4 For additional Swedish and global statistics on HIV/AIDS, see Folkhälsomyndigheten (2014), Hiv 30 år i Sverige (2011) and UNAIDS (2013). 5 Jag vill visa att man inte behöver se sjuk ut när man har den här infektionen, man kan se bra ut och vara framgångsrik och jag önskar att jag kan inspirera andra att våga berätta. 6 In Sweden today, HIV transmission between MSM accounts for only 23% of new infections (Hiv 30 år i Sverige, 2012). 7 This term refers to the central vision of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, in which the Swedish welfare state is a collective project that exists for the purpose of caring for its citizens, and in which citizens have a duty toward the collective good. 8 Den nya pesten. 9 Moraliskt besudlade; till oskyldiga, ovetande, gifta, och bisexuella män och genom dessa smittar man familjefädernas fruar och barn. Därför är homosexuella ett hot mot allmänheten. 10 [Hade man] lätt att offra den här gruppens rättigheter på ett slags smittskyddsaltare. Man upplevde det som en räddningsaktion som inte kostade det heterosexuella samhället något. 11 De amerikanska erfarenheterna genom press, vetenskap, och populärkultur ofta gjordes till en grundton eller referenspunkt även i andra länders uppfattningar av epidemin. 12 An acronym which stands for Riksförbundet för sexuell upplysning [Swedish Association for Sexuality Education], founded in 1933. 13 Överens om att dagens svenska bögkultur är självbegränsande, infantil och enkelspårig.

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As of 2012, 2,182 people have died from AIDS in Sweden, and around 500 HIV infections occur in Sweden each year, most of which are through heterosexual contact or intravenous drug use. Nearly 6,000 people are living with HIV in Sweden, half of whom choose to keep their HIV-positive status a secret (Williams 2012). For U.S. statistics, see amfAR (2011). 15 Hiv var inte längre en olycka utan kom för många att betraktas som något smutsigt man inte ville associera sig med, ett brännmärke för bögar som gödde ett nytt självförakt. Under nittiotalet skulle detta resultera i framväxten av en friskhetskult och rädsla för det som förknippades med den “gamla” kulturen som alltför mycket sammankopplats med sjukdom. 16 Jag trodde bara att det var barnen i Afrika som hade hiv.

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References Ahlström, Gabriella. 1999. Ecce homo: Berättelsen om en utställning. Stockholm: Bonnier. amfAR, 2011.“Thirty Years of HIV/AIDS: Snapshots of an Epidemic.” http://www.amfar.org/thirty-years-of-hiv/aids-snapshots-of-anepidemic/ (accessed October 24, 2014). Andersen, Ivar. 2008. “Vem minns bastuklubbarna?” Fria Tidningen, October 9. http://www.fria.nu/artikel/75221. Backlund, Anders. 2008. “Andreas Lundstedt är trött på frågor om hiv.” QX, December 17. http://www.qx.se/noje/gaygalan/8884/andreaslundstedt-ar-trott-pa-fragor-om-hiv. Börjesson, Tore. 2009. “Hiv-smittan har gjort mig till en bättre människa.” Aftonbladet, April 27. http://www.aftonbladet.se/nojesbladet/article5007789.ab. Castiglia, Christopher, and Christopher Reed. 2012. If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). 2012. “Diagnoses of HIV Infection by Transmission Category.” Last modified December 19. http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/surveillance/basic.htm#exposure. Folkhälsomyndigheten. 2014. “Hivinfektion.” http://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/amnesomraden/statistik-ochundersokningar/sjukdomsstatistik/hivinfektion/ (accessed September 4, 2014). Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. New York: Random House. Griffin, Gabriele. 2000. Representations of HIV and AIDS: Visibility Blue/s. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hekma, Gert. 2006. “The Gay World: 1980 to the Present.” In Gay Life and Culture: A World History, edited by Robert Aldrich, 333–63. London: Thames and Hudson. Hiv 30 år i Sverige. 2012. “Hiv-statistik.” http://hivisverige.wordpress.com/hiv-statistik/ (accessed September 4, 2014). Ingvarsson, Stefan. 2007. “Äntligen en bitter bögbok!” In Bögjävlar, edited by Daniel Björk, 7–8. Stockholm: Atlas. Jonsson, Lars. 2001. “Bastuklubbslagen fyller inget syfte och bör avskaffas.” RFSL, May 31. http://www.rfsl.se/?p=3815&aid=6803 (accessed September 23, 2014).

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Kulick, Don. 2004. “Four Hundred Thousand Swedish Perverts.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 11.2: 205–35. Myrdal, Gunnar, and Alva Myrdal. 1934. Kris i befolkningsfrågan. Stockholm: Bonnier. Rydström, Jens. 2011. Odd Couples: A History of Gay Marriage in Scandinavia. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Aksant. Sontag, Susan. 1989. AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Steorn, Patrik. 2006. Nakna män: Maskulinitet och kreativitet i svensk bildkultur 1900–1915. Stockholm: Norstedts Akademiska. Sturken, Marita. 1997. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press. Svéd, George. 2000. “När aids kom till Sverige.” In Homo i folkhemmet: Homo- och bisexuella i Sverige 1950–2000, edited by Martin Andreasson, 226–43. Gothenburg: Anamma. Sveriges kungahus. 2013. “Kronprinsessan på QX Gaygalan.” http://www.kungahuset.se/kungafamiljen/aktuellahandelser/2013/aktue llt2013januarimars/kronprinsessanpaqxgaygalansefilmhar.5.4ea495e31 3c19c119aa19d7.html (accessed July 30, 2014). Södersjukhuset. 2015. “Venhälsan – Hiv-mottagning.” Last modified January 12. http://www.sodersjukhuset.se/Avdelningar--mottagningar/ Mottagningar/Venhalsan/Venhalsan-hivmottagning/. Sörberg, Anna-Maria. 2008. Det sjuka. Stockholm: Atlas. Thorsén, David. 2013. “Den svenska aidsepidemin: Ankomst, bemötande, innebörd.” PhD diss., Uppsala University. Voss, Jon. 2012. “Torka aldrig tårar… blir långfilm.” QX, October 29. http://www.qx.se/kultur/22266/torka-aldrig-tarar-blir-langfilm (accessed January 11, 2013). UNAIDS. 2013. “UNAIDS Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic 2013.” http://www.unaids.org/en/media/unaids/contentassets/documents/epide miology/2013/gr2013/UNAIDS_Global_Report_2013_en.pdf (accessed September 4, 2014). Warner, Michael. 1993. Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 2000 The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 2002. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books. Williams, Dylan. 2012. Smittad (film). Stockholm: SVT.

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Öhrman, Anders, 2007. “Andreas Lundstedt berättar: ‘Jag är hiv-positiv.’” QX, December 18. http://www.qx.se/5716/andreas-lundstedt-berattarjag-ar-hivpositiv. —. 2008. “Jag är hiv-positiv.” QX, January.

Further Reading Henriksson, Benny. 1995. “Risk Factor Love: Homosexuality, Sexual Interaction and HIV-Prevention.” PhD diss., University of Gothenburg. Kallings, Lars Olof. 2005. Den yttersta plågan: Boken om AIDS. Stockholm: Norstedt. Liljegren, Patrik. 2009. “Hiv i Sverige.” http://hiv.se/om-hiv/hiv-i-sverige/. Svensson, Ingeborg. 2007. Liket i garderoben: En studie av sexualitet, livsstil och begravning. Stockholm: Normal.

DIVERSITY AND INTIMACY IN DENMARK: REGULATIONS, CELEBRATIONS AND CONDEMNATIONS RIKKE ANDREASSEN

In 2012, the Danish national newspaper Politiken ran an article containing interviews with four young racial/ethnic minority women who explained their difficulties finding husbands as the level of education for racial/ethnic minority men is much lower than the level of education for racial/ethnic minority women (Omar 2012).1 This article, titled “We Don’t Want to Marry Poorly Educated New Danes” (nydanskere, or “new Danes,” being a euphemism for descendants of immigrants), sparked a series of debates. Nearly a hundred Internet comments were posted in response to the newspaper’s online version of the article, which caused Politiken to write follow-up articles, which sparked further online comments and debate. While the article initiating the debate focused on education, raising concerns about racial and ethnic minority men’s lack of formal education, the subsequent debate centered on the interviewed women’s presumed lack of desire to marry ethnically Danish, Christian men. In this article, I analyze the initial debate in Politiken to examine how gender, intimacy and social change are constructed, imagined and negotiated in the debate.2 Furthermore, I pay attention to how interracial and interethnic romantic and sexual relations are negotiated and regulated in relation to nationality and social cohesion. I interpret the newspaper article and the many Internet comments accompanying it as discursive practices, which are part of larger societal discourses on gender and nation (Yuval-Davis 1997), as well as on gender, race and sexuality (Lutz, Phoenix and Yuval-Davis 1995). In my analysis of the debate, I interpret the specific empirical material in relation to prior discourses and debates about interracial romance and sexual relations. I read the 2012 debate in the context of debates about interracial relations in the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as in the context of more recent debates about interracial relationships, which followed in the wake of the arrival of labor immigrants and refugees to

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Denmark in the 1970s and 1980s.3 By using these historically different cases I want to analyze and point to different situations, contemporary and historical, where interracial intimacies became a platform on which nationality, gender roles, class expectations and diversity are negotiated as well as challenged.

A Focus on the Women’s Presumed Choices of Partners The debate following the Politiken article, in which the four women expressed their difficulties finding well-educated husbands, manifested itself in a series of Internet comments criticizing the women’s choices of partners. The article was accompanied with photographs of the four women and carried their full names; the women were racial minorities, three of them were wearing hijabs (headscarves), and their names could all be associated with Middle Eastern/Western Asian origins. Despite the fact that the women neither talk about religion in the article nor argue that they only want to marry a racial/ethnic minority man or a Muslim man, this became the focus of the subsequent online debate. A large number of Internet comments criticize the women for ostensibly refusing to marry ethnically Danish, Christian men: The problem for these young well-educated new Danish girls is that they stubbornly maintain that they want to marry a Muslim man. (Hansen 2012)4 First of all, why do [the four women] absolutely have to marry a Muslim man? What is wrong with Christian or atheist men? (Christensen 2012) While it is overwhelmingly positive that Muslim women achieve higher education and want to spend their lives with a well-educated man, I do find it a problem – as do many other commentators here – that they apparently only want to spend their lives together with a Muslim man, and that a Christian, Protestant man like myself cannot be an alternative. (Buhl 2012)

As a consequence, the debate moved from the women’s concern about men’s, and especially racial/ethnic minority men’s, low level of education, to a debate about – and criticism of – the women and their presumed choices of partners and marriage practices. In the debate, the terms “Muslim,” “ethnic minority” and “immigrant” are used interchangeably, as it is often the case in Danish media debates about racial/ethnic minorities and/or migration (Andreassen 2007, 76). The debate therefore also became a debate about Islam and Muslim marriage practices, seeing that racial/ethnic minorities were associated with Islam.

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Interracial Marriage and Integration In the debate, the presumed marriage practice – where Muslim women only want to marry Muslim men and hence refuse to marry Christian, ethnically Danish men – is presented as harmful toward integration processes in Danish society. Two of the writers cited above concluded their comments by writing: We will not achieve integration before girls with a Muslim background can marry men with a Christian background, without any of them having to convert. (Buhl 2012) Most of the Jews who arrived [in Denmark] back a while ago have “mingled” with the original Danish population […]. I know that Islam prevents these girls from marrying “infidel” men but complete integration can only be achieved when most of our Muslim immigrants can agree to ignore this command. (Hansen 2012)

Here the women’s (religious) marriage patterns are interpreted as harmful to society as a whole. Their lack of marriages to ethnically Danish, Christian men causes a lack of integration; Muslim female immigrants are singled out as a group of immigrants who, unlike prior Jewish immigrants, do not contribute to the society’s social cohesion, seeing that they do not marry ethnically Danish men. Since the 1980s, “integration” has been presented as a goal in Danish migration policies, and integration and especially the lack of integration have been often debated topics in the news media. Integration itself has seldom been specifically defined in these debates; but often it has been associated with education, participation in the workforce and the ability to speak Danish (Andreassen 2005, 234260). In this 2012 debate, however, integration seems to equal interracial and interreligious marriages; hence, the women’s presumed marriage practices are seen as harmful to the national interest. The four women are integrated according to standards of education, participation in the workforce and language abilities, but in this case it seems like their intimate private choices of spouses disqualify them from being “integrated” into the Danish national community. More importantly, the women are blamed for the lack of integration and hence held responsible for the success – or failure – of national integration and social cohesion. Despite the fact that nationalism and nationality are among the most written upon topics within the academic fields of history, political science, and international relations, there is limited research connecting nationalism to gender and sexuality; for example, present canon theorists like Eric

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Hobsbawm (1990) and Benedict Anderson (1991), do not include gender or sexuality in their work. But this debate about interracial marriages and integration points to how nationality cannot fully be understood without looking at the gendered aspects of nationality. One reason why most traditional theories of nationality have excluded gender and sexuality in their descriptions of nation forming and nationality constructions is because they have drawn upon other (patriarchal) works, which have excluded gender and women from nation formations. Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are often drawn upon as founding fathers for theories on nationality. Both Hobbes and Rousseau portrayed a transition from an imagined state of nature into orderly society as exclusively male, which left women associated with being close to nature. Here the dichotomy of nature vs. culture became connected with women vs. men. Combining this with the public vs. private dichotomy, which similarly corresponds to a male vs. female dichotomy, men became associated with the formation of nations and nationality while women became excluded from this formation. Nira Yuval-Davis (1997, 5–6) argues that these dichotomies are fictional and states that the division between private and public is “a completely inadequate tool for analysing constructions of […] societies.” The empirical material for this present article similarly illustrates how an imagined division between “private” (here: romantic and sexual intimacy) and public (here: integration in society) makes no sense, as these two areas are intertwined. Anne McClintock (1995, 354) has argued that not only are all nationalisms gendered and invented but they are also constructed and imagined via gender differences. She further claims: All nations depend on powerful constructions of gender. Despite many nationalists’ ideological investment in the idea of popular unity, nations have historically amounted to the sanctioned institutionalization of gender difference […] the representation of male national power depends on the prior construction of gender difference. (McClintock 1995, 353)

The demand to marry interracially is therefore also a one-sided gendered demand directed toward the racial/ethnic minority women; there is no similar blame on ethnic Danes for not marrying racial/ethnic minorities. In Denmark, the level of endogamy – i.e., the practice of marrying within one’s own ethnic group – is very high; more than 95 percent of ethnic Danes marry other ethnic Danes. Compared to this number, racial/ethnic minorities seem to have a rather low level of endogamy; 20 percent of people whose parents migrated to Denmark from a non-Western country marry an ethnically Danish spouse, and several other descendants marry a

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spouse of a different origin than their own. In Denmark, it is not uncommon that descendants of immigrants marry other descendants of immigrants; i.e., it is common for a Dane of Pakistani origin to marry a Dane of Syrian origin, or a Dane of Afghani origin to marry a Dane of Moroccan origin. For descendants of ex-Yugoslavian immigrants, only a little more than one third marry a spouse with the same ethnicity; a little less than one third marry an ethnic Dane, and as many as 40 percent marry a spouse of another ethnicity (Nielsen, Laursen and Larsen 2011). The many interethnic marriages among descendants are not mentioned or discussed in the Internet comments about interracial/interethnic marriages. During the previous decades, a rather large group of immigrant women from Thailand, the Philippines and Eastern Europe have settled in Denmark in order to marry ethnically Danish men (Plambech 2010), but these marriage patterns do not figure significantly in the Internet debate either. Hence, while the debate seems to focus on marriage practices, it is actually limited to a focus on young racial/ethnic minority women and their presumed refusal to marry ethnically Danish men.

Blaming Muslim Men, Parents and Islam While the women’s actions are seen as detrimental to integration processes, others are often blamed for being the real actors behind the women’s marriage practices. Several commentators blame the women’s parents, Muslim men and Islam in general for preventing the women from marrying ethnically Danish men: I believe that if new Danish women of Muslim background enjoyed equal rights with their Muslim brothers we would see more of them choosing an ethnically Danish husband […]. There is pressure from their parents to find a Muslim husband. (Buhl 2012)

Here it is indicated that if Muslim women had free will to choose their future spouse, many of them would choose an ethnically Danish man. According to the writer, it is their parents who not only give them a sexist upbringing but also insist on them marrying a Muslim man. The insinuation is that if Muslim women had free choice they could ally themselves with the ethnically Danish men and not with their brothers or parents. A similar, yet more dramatic, explanation for the Muslim women’s lack of desire for ethnically Danish men as future husbands is found in the Internet comment below. Here it is indicated that the women might risk their lives if they marry a non-Muslim man:

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It is against their traditions and religion to marry a non-Muslim, and worst case scenario it can lead to honor killings. (Pedersen 2012)

Other commentators point to a perceived unequal gender structure within Muslim families: The source of the problem is the unequal treatment between the genders in your [Islamic] cultures. (Thomsen 2012) Unfortunately Muslims want to change the society toward the direction of the Middle Ages, and this is because of the non-educated parents. Muslim girls have great opportunities to return to their old countries and get a husband who is well-educated from a Quran school. (Jensen 2012)

In the comments, the parents – and with them “the Muslim family” – are presented as backward. They allegedly oppress their daughters who are treated unequally from their sons and risk death if they fail to marry a Muslim man. The last commenter draws upon an often-used argument in discussions about migration and integration, namely the claim that Muslims live “medieval lives.” This implicates a clear distinction between “their” lives and traditions – which apparently have not evolved since the Middle Ages but are seen as frozen in time – and “our” lives which in contrast appear progressive and modern (Andreassen 2007, 65–6). The commenter is ironically writing that the young Muslim women can marry well-educated men, but that these men will be educated only in Islam. Here, it is not the women themselves who are a hindrance to integration but rather their oppressive parents and religion, which force them to marry Muslim men, a force that harms the women as well as Danish society.

Historical Criticism of Women’s Engagements in Interracial Relations As shown, racial/ethnic minority women who refuse ethnic Danish men as spouses are accused of harming integration in Denmark. This accusation brings associations to the many accusations about harming the nation that Danish women historically have received when they have chosen a nonDanish, non-white partner. Denmark hosted a number of exhibitions of socalled exotic people around the turn of the twentieth century. Here men, women and children, often of African or Asian origin, were on display as mass entertainment and mass education for ordinary Danes (Andreassen 2015). Following in the wake of these exhibitions, a number of Danish

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women were involved romantically and sexually with the men on display. These relations received a series of criticisms: It is a rather sad fact that a certain kind of women has a peculiar weakness for everything exotic. While the Buffalo-Bill-Company was in Germany, many thoroughbred Indians [i.e. Native Americans] shared their wigwam with a Berlin woman suffering from an exotic tantrum. Now we see the same phenomenon repeating itself at the Berlin Industrial Fair, with our new black countrymen [from the German colonies in Africa] exhibited in the Colonial section and the Arabs at the Cairo section. […] Lately here in Aarhus [Denmark’s second-largest city], we have the opportunity to witness the same kind of “exotic tantrums” among several of our ladies. […] It is the Abyssinians at the Country exhibition who seem to have completely turned the heads of several women who spend every chance they get to gather around and rub themselves against the laughing black men […]. The phenomenon here is the exact same as the ones described above [examples from German exhibitions]. (Demokraten 1909)

The newspaper Demokraten reported from the so-called Country Exhibition in the city of Aarhus, which hosted an Abyssinian exhibition in 1909 (Abyssinia is an older name for parts of modern Ethiopia and Eritrea). During this exhibition, several local Danish women were involved with the Abyssinian men on display; leading to mixed-raced children born in Aarhus in 1910. With the label “exotic tantrum” the author suggests a condition characterized by emotional instability and emotional outbursts. The women attracted to and involved with foreign men appear as irrational – at the mercy of their emotions – as they cannot stop themselves from being physically close to the men of color. These descriptions of women and interracial relationships play into constructions of Danish nationality. Nationality cannot fully be understood without looking at the gendered aspects of nationality; as the categories of nationality, gender, sexuality and race are interrelated in the construction of nationhood and national identity (Warring 1998, 200–1). Helma Lutz, Ann Phoenix and Nira Yuval-Davis (1995) have argued that nationhood is constructed from specific notions of manhood and womanhood, where men traditionally represent the nation and women reproduce the nation. This national reproduction takes place in several forms; literally, women give birth to the nation’s children, and symbolically, they are the embodiment of the national collective and of national honor. Women often play important symbolic roles in nationalist and radicalised narratives, carrying in their bodies the collective love and honour of the

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nation. […] In general women are the symbols of the nation while men are its agents. (Lutz, Phoenix and Yuval-Davis 1995, 9)

Historically, this understanding of women functions within patriarchal societies where women are viewed as belonging to the men of the nation and race as well as to patriarchal society itself, and where women represent the boundary between “us” and “the other.” Women are the nation’s “symbolic border guards”; in order to keep the nation “pure,” women have been restricted to only reproduce with the nation’s men (Yuval-Davis 1997, 23). At different times in recent history, women have been called upon to have more children or less children, i.e., the women’s reproduction has been a part of both the national ideology and policy (Warring 1998). Such an understanding (of the women belonging to the nation’s men) is clearly expressed in the article describing Danish women’s involvement with the Abyssinian men at the Country Exhibition in 1909. The women criticized for being involved with the men are called “our ladies,” which indicates a perception of disloyalty toward “us,” i.e., the white, Danish men, when the women consort with foreign men. This criticism is not simply about Danish men romantically being let down but rather about a general disloyalty toward the Danish nation when the Danish women cross racial boundaries and hence “threaten” the future national population stock, as well as thwart their roles as symbolic reproducers of the nation. Another critic expressed this understanding of women even more directly in his description and condemnation of Danish women’s involvement with Chinese men on display during Tivoli’s Chinese exhibition in 1902: If one is near Tivoli’s Chinese village in the morning hours before it opens, one can see several young ladies and young women outside the locked gate. They communicate with the sons of the East in English or by using gestures or by means of a kiss […]. This is not much different from what we have seen repeatedly every time a group from distant countries has visited Tivoli. When there is a Bedouin or a Negro in the Danish landscape, a number of girls become unfaithful to the domestic ideals and happily give themselves to the unknown. However, there is one difference from the past. Previously, it was mainly girls with open-minded and cosmopolitan views who became voluntary victims of the invasion. This year it seems as though young ladies from high society have also lost their heads together with their hearts. (Moustache 1902)

Here the women’s relations with foreign men are labeled an “invasion,” emphasizing interracial relationships as a foreign and unwanted entry. The

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women are criticized for their interracial romances, but they are not simply held responsible for their own individual relations. Rather, they are held accountable for the national and racial effects of these relations because of their position as the biological and symbolic reproducers of the nation and the race. Because women were seen to be responsible for maintaining the imagined superiority of the white race and the Danish nation, their bodily and intimate involvement with “other” men risked undermining the superior status of their race and nation. While this historical situation where women were criticized for being involved with men of color might seem different from the contemporary situation where racial/ethnic minority women are criticized for not being involved with ethnically Danish men, I will argue that they are quite similar. Both are illustrations of how women – with their bodies – play important roles in national narratives. McClintock argues (1995, 354), “women are subsumed symbolically into the national body politics [and they] are typically constructed as the symbolic bearers of the nation.” This role that women – with their bodies and these bodies’ intimate engagements – play for the construction, maintenance and social cohesion of the nation causes the (patriarchal, national) view of them as belonging to the nation’s men and hence their condemnation if they reject these men.

Women as Agents of Social Change In the 2012 debate, the racial/ethnic minority women were positioned as agents of social change on behalf of the nation. Unlike their parents and brothers, the racial/ethnic minority women seemed to embody the capability for social change. They could, via their intimate relations, bring about the much-wanted integration. The racial/ethnic minority men were not called upon to marry ethnically Danish women in order to promote integration; rather they were seen as incapable of creating this social change. Instead, the racial/ethnic minority men and racial/ethnic minority parents represent “traditions” and “old-fashioned” ways of life. In this debate, it seems as if it is only the young women who can enable and affect integration. However, this change was not initiated by the young women themselves. Rather, it was older white men who (via their Internet comments) guided them and informed them about their proper choices and hence about using their intimate relations to create social change, social cohesion and integration. Hence, the “real” battle takes place between the “traditional” parents and racial/ethnic minority men on the one hand, and the “modern” Danish nation on the other; these groups fight about the young women whose actions will shape society to take one direction or

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another. One can argue that this battle might not be so much about the actual women in question but rather about the young women functioning as a window dressing for the national image of the Danish nation as modern, and hence female friendly and progressive in relation to gender roles (see also Lindqvist 2009). Despite the fact that the young women are positioned as the agents of potential change, it is a rather limited change they are imagined to perform. None of the many Internet comments question the institution of marriage or suggest that the women should not marry at all or raise the potential of them living alone or with another woman. It seems unimaginable to the Internet commentators that the women could have wishes beyond the traditional normative ideal of heterosexual marriage. The women might be presented as the embodiment of change. However, it is a rather limited change, as it challenges neither existing heteronormative family models nor spousal arrangements.

Female Agents in Literary Fiction This role, this position as agents of social change, also mirrors prior historical situations. During the 1970s, Denmark, like the other Nordic countries, witnessed a large increase in labor migration followed by refugee migration in the 1980s. This led to several debates about Danish women’s engagement with the recently arrived male immigrants. Phrases like “they steal our women,” used as accusations against male immigrants in the 1970s and 1980s, indicate how the turn-of-the-twentieth-century patriarchal view of women as objects belonging to the nation and hence nation’s men was still at play during the 1970s and 1980s. However, this period also witnessed some openings in these negative attitudes toward interracial intimacies and immigrant men; these openings were for instance expressed in literary fiction. Two novels, written for teenagers, namely Leif Esper Andersen’s Fremmed [Estranged] from 1975, and Aage Brandt’s Altid og for evigt [Always and Forever] from 1987 (1998), are good illustrations of this. Oscar Hemer (2012) argues in favor of using fiction as an empirical source when exploring tensions and potential conflicts in a social setting. He finds that literature engaging in these conflicts often can communicate a deeper understanding of reality than journalism and science about the same conflicts potentially can (Hemer 2012, 14). Hence, fictional literature should be seen as a source for knowledge, rather than simply fictitious entertainment (Hemer 2012, 30). Thus, using Andersen’s and Brandt’s novels can provide more complex and nuanced understandings of the meetings between Danish women and

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immigrant men than, for instance, newspaper reports would. In both novels, a young Danish woman falls in love with a young male immigrant, and they experience a very romantic, loving relationship, which is complicated by the racism and intolerance of the woman’s family and friends. Both relationships are characterized as “true” and “real love”; Brandt (1987, 187) describes how the relationship was “the truth and the meaning of life.” In the novels, the young women are tolerant and openminded, guided by their love and desire and not by prejudice, unlike their relatives and peers who all display racist attitudes and have been verbally as well as physically abusive. Both stories follow a classical dramatic narration where the internal love between the couple and their external conflicts become more and more intense, only to culminate in sexual intercourse, followed by the death of the immigrant (both novels have this plot). The authors show empathy with their characters, presenting the young lovers as appealing and the rest of the characters as violent, hypocritical, narrow-minded and intolerant. The female characters display an emotional cosmopolitanism (Nava 2007) that apparently only very small segments of their society possess. In the novels, the young women represent the potential and hope for social change; they embody, figuratively and literally in the sexual acts, the potential for inclusion and a harmonious multicultural society. Both novels focus on the sexual interracial relationship. In Fremmed, the young woman Hanne is called mær [bitch] because of her intimate relation with the immigrant Jozef. Hanne’s brother tells Jozef: “When we are done with you, you will wish that you had never looked at a white girl” (Andersen 1998, 94). A friend of the brother discovers that the couple has had intercourse: “What the fuck. He has fucked her, that pig! […] Now it is over for you, nigger […]. You don’t have a chance. We are going to castrate [you]” (Brandt 1987, 138). Similarly, the female character in Altid og for evigt, Mia, is called perkerluder [immigrant whore] (Brandt 1987, 138), and Yassi, the male refugee immigrant, is accused of not being a real refugee but just an immigrant “who wants some willing Danish meat” (Brandt 1987, 161). The death of the immigrant lover seems to indicate that while the interracial relationship might be beautiful, it is doomed to failure, as it cannot exist in these non-supportive surroundings. By letting the male characters die, it is possible for the authors to let the dream about interracial romance exist while not having to face the social reality of such a romance. The two novels were very popular during the previous decades, and still are; Altid og for evigt won the Ministry of Culture’s Initiative Prize in 1988, and Fremmed won the Ministry of Culture’s Prize for Children’s Literature in 1976. Both books have been included in Danish

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school curricula since their publication and well into the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, and they still figure in contemporary assignments and essays in Danish schools (Opgaver.com 2011; Studienet.dk 2011; Studieportalen.dk 2012). Hence, the message of interracial romance as a fatal affair has been transmitted to Danish school children for three decades. In a period (from the 1970s to the 2010s), when Danish society has become increasingly more racially and ethnically diverse, Danish school children have continued to read books which on the one hand fetishize interracial relations while on the other, communicate such relations as impossible and illegitimate. While it is the young women in the novels who are the agents of change, both novels demonstrate patterns of patriarchal thinking, and in the end the young women’s efforts to change their families as well as society are in vain.

Class Expectations and Moral Behavior Several of the historical condemnations of interracial relations connect these relations to class. The article cited above, about Danish women’s involvement with Chinese men, argues that it is has mainly been “petty girls,” i.e., urban working-class and lower-middle-class women, who tend to be involved with the men. The article was published in the newspaper Politiken, which was closely connected to Venstre, the political liberal party at the turn of the century; at that time both the party and Politiken represented mainly landowners and the bourgeoisie. Hence, the argument that it was mainly women from the lower social classes who engage with foreign men exempts the newspaper’s target audience from practices of interracial intimacies. Interracial relations become a practice reserved for the lower classes. This view corresponds with the contemporary class prejudice about the working classes not behaving as properly and respectably as the middle classes. Interestingly, the other newspaper Demokraten, which described Danish women’s involvement with the Abyssinians, also cited above, provides a different connection between class and interracial relations: As said before these [women involved with foreign men] are not Demimonde “ladies” [promiscuous women or prostitutes] […] rather, most of the women – married and unmarried – are from higher society, and the scandals that these twofold illegitimate relations cause are soon countless in numbers […]. Here in Aarhus, we have the opportunity to witness the same kind of “exotic tantrums” among several of our ladies. However – and they deserve praise – this is not happening to the wives and daughters of working-class men. (Demokraten1909)

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Unlike Politiken, Demokraten was a working-class newspaper, representing the Social Democratic Party. Differently from Politiken, this newspaper blamed upper- and middle-class women for the practice of the condemned interracial relations. The newspaper praises the working-class women for not participating in these, according to the paper, morally unjustifiable relations, or, rather, it praises the working-class men for not letting their wives and daughters engage in such illicit behavior. Here interracial romance and interracial sexual practices become markers of wrong behavior reserved for the upper and middle classes. Both newspapers condemn interracial relations and use them, or rather the lack of such relations, as a tool to construct a positive image of their own class as well as to discredit representatives from other classes than their own. Sexual behavior is here presented as a marker of class identity, and women are seen as either strengthening or weakening their class reputation by their behavior. The individual woman’s behavior thus has consequences for her whole class, just as it has for her nation and her race. While class behavior and class expectations played crucial roles at the turn of the century, class also plays a prominent, however different, role in the contemporary 2012 debate. The young women were not only criticized for not wanting to marry ethnically Danish men but also for not wanting to marry men belonging to social classes lower than their own. Several commentators accused the women of behaving arrogantly and being elitists. As one commenter wrote: “I sense an elitist arrogance in some of the[ir] statements.” (Bøgh 2012) In Denmark, the term elitist is often used as a derogatory term, and while it is positive to achieve higher education, it is not considered positive to strive for high social class status. Differently from other countries such as France and Great Britain, it is seldom a verbalized goal to belong to the most upper classes in the Nordic welfare states. Rather, the Nordic goal has been to create a society where “few have too much and fewer, too little,” as expressed by Danish author Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig, who contributed greatly to the constructions of Danish nationalism in the nineteenth century.5 The terms “elite” and “elitist” can therefore function as an insult, as they indicate a behavior, which potentially goes against the foundation of the national welfare state and, hence, Nordic nationalism. Another commenter also points negatively to the women’s aim of marrying a partner with the same educational level and, hence, the same middle-class position as themselves, as he writes: “Are they a group of social climbers, where love does not mean anything in the choice of husband?” (Nørager 2012). Here love and social class status are positioned as opposites, as if “true love” transgresses all potential class and educational barriers. This idea of “true love” both

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contributes to a romantic understanding of love, where love is a stronger force than money, class, race/ethnicity and religion, and to a maintenance of the idea that individuals in the welfare state do not need to consider class or financial needs, as class divisions (in theory) are so small that they play no important role in the formation of marriage and love. With their higher levels of education, the women can be defined as belonging to the middle classes, but they are not given the usual respect of the well-educated middle classes. One commenter accuses them of lacking dannelse [enculturation], despite their high level of formal education: Dear academic, new Danish women. It is fine that you get an education. Congratulations on that. But do not think that just because one is not an academic Muslim man, one is not any good. It is great with university education, but enculturation is something different. Apparently, you have not quite achieved that yet. (Christensen 2012)

According to this comment, being a person of education involves a certain – proper – behavior, which among other things involves the willingness to marry across class and racial/ethnic differences, as these are imagined as limited in the Danish welfare system. But the young women are accused of failing to perform this nationally idealized behavior. According to the writer, their formal education has not taught them how to behave properly, according to national values and norms, and therefore they do not deserve middle-class respectability. Class and class affiliation here are not simply a question of financial income and level of education; rather, class affiliation, belonging and recognition depend on certain forms of behavior and performance (Skeggs 1997). The primary reason that the women are accused of not displaying the correct behavior is that they do not want to marry ethnically Danish men; hence enculturation seems to depend more on intimate availability than formal education.

Physical Availability and Welfare State Benefits Both at the turn of the twentieth century and in the early twenty-first century, proper behavior is interlinked with intimacy. Where Danish women were expected to only engage with white, Danish men at the turn of the twentieth century and were accused of harming the nation, their class and its respectability when engaging with men of color, the contemporary racial/ethnic minority women are accused of improper behavior when only engaging with Muslim, racial/ethnic minority men. However, the two groups of women are criticized according to different standards. Where the ethnic Danish women were criticized for being too

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sexually active, too romantic, and too emotional, and hence not behaving respectably, the racial/ethnic minority women are faulted for being too respectable, and hence not being sexual, romantic or emotional enough. A certain intimate behavior, which becomes a moral behavior, is expected of the women. At the turn of the twentieth century, when the women did not follow these moral codes of conduct, they were excluded from the group of wellbehaved, respectable women, and hence indirectly excluded from their class. In 2012, the racial/ethnic minority women are similarly excluded from the middle classes, as they are accused of not behaving as women with education, i.e., middle-class women, are expected to. In both historical situations, the proper behavior is closely connected with being intimately available to, and engaging intimately with, the nation’s (white) men – and hence serving the betterment of the nation with one’s intimacy. Furthermore, in both situations the women risk exclusion from their classes and from the national community because of their intimate choices. In the debates about women’s intimate choices, a connection is established between being physically available and belonging to the national community. Similar connections have been shown in analyses of debates about Muslim women’s head and body coverings (hijab, niqab and burka); here the women’s physical availability to a masculine gaze and, likewise, touch plays a central role for their inclusion into or exclusion from the national community (Andreassen and Lettiga 2011). During the 2000s, women who refuse to shake hands with men or cover themselves fully in a niqab or burka have been verbally excluded from the Danish national community and practically excluded from national universal welfare benefits (Andreassen 2011). In the 2012 debate about interracial marriage, a similar exclusion seems to take place. Here the women who refuse, or are interpreted as refusing, to marry white, ethnic Danish men are seen as harming the national integration process, as well as being outside the proper middle class that they, because of their education, should belong to. One commenter also suggests that Danish universal welfare benefits, like free university education, should be reduced for those (female students) who do not wish to marry outside their religion, i.e., young women who do not wish to marry a white, Christian man should not have free access to university education: If it is because of a religion [Islam] that it is impossible to marry someone with a different philosophy of life, then I think that the host country [Denmark] should re-consider the requirements for university admission. (Thomsen 2012)

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Free education, including university education, is considered one of the cornerstones in the Danish welfare system. However, the universality of the welfare system is challenged in this comment, as it is argued that not all women should have access to these welfare benefits; only women who are perceived as being available for Danish men should benefit from the welfare system and hence be considered full members of the national community.

Final Remarks These contemporary and historical debates about interracial intimacies show how the condemnation and criticism of women’s choices of intimate partners are not only about whom the women choose to engage with, but rather about whom they presumably reject in this intimate encounter. Following the typical pattern of Internet debates, the absolute majority of Internet comments following the 2012 Politiken article are written by ethnically Danish men. This might explain the condemnation and criticism of the young women’s behavior, as it is those men who are being rejected – or rather, as they represent a category of men who might perceive themselves as being rejected – just as the newspaper articles at the turn of the twentieth century condemning white women’s engagement with men of color were written by white men. The social problem of racial/ethnic minority men’s lagging behind in formal education in Denmark, which sparked the initial article leading to the debate, is being ignored in favor of ethnic Danish men’s potential lack. It is not the intention here to suggest that these debates are only about white men being refused as intimate partners; rather they illustrate women’s role in national narratives. The women – with the bodies and intimate relations – function as the symbolic reproducers of the nation and hence their choices and practices are debated, policed and disciplined. However, noticing that those who raise the criticisms are also those who believe they are being rejected underscores that this criticism of women’s intimate choices and behavior might not be a general, all-embracing discourse in society – even though it unfolded in the national newspaper Politiken – but rather an expression of the discomfort felt by certain (white, male) people. This also points to who can speak for the nation; the criticism raised by these men is raised on behalf of the nation. It is a national criticism, as the young women’s behavior is interpreted as harming the nation. The historical cases and examples provided here demonstrate a historical trajectory of how interracial intimacies have raised concern and debate in modern Denmark. These debates provide insights into how

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nationality, race, gender and class are continuously constructed, negotiated and challenged. In these debates, women – and their intimate choices and practices – have been criticized and condemned. The examples illustrate a long tradition of positioning women as the symbolic reproducers of the nation as well as of their races and classes. As a consequence, the women’s intimate practices, i.e. sexual and romantic engagements and wishes, are object to scrutiny, speculation and discussion, and their actions are interpreted as causing potential damage to their races, classes and nation. At the same time, the young women are positioned as potential agents of social change, as their intimate behavior also can help and serve the nation; minority women’s potential intimate pairing with white, ethnically Danish men can promote integration in 2012. The women are invested with a certain form of hope; they can, via their intimate actions, change the direction of society. However, it is a patriarchal and heteronormative hope, as the women are guided by white men and serve the betterment of the nation instead of being allowed to narrate their own stories of intimacy, and these stories of intimacy never move beyond heterosexual ideals of reproduction.

Notes  1

I use the term racial/ethnic minority as a broad term for non-white, non-ethnic Danish migrants and descendants. In Denmark as well as the other Nordic countries, the term “race” is seldom used; instead “ethnicity” is applied. However, I want to use the term “race,” as the lack of a vocabulary including “race” and “racializations” might prevent us from addressing patterns of racial inclusion and exclusion. For a longer discussion about the use of “race” and “ethnicity” in the Nordic countries, see Andreassen (2014). 2 For a longer analysis of this debate, which includes different perspectives and foci than this article, see Andreassen (2013). 3 Due to the financial boom in the decades following the Second World War, Denmark, like other Western European countries, imported foreign labor during the 1960s and 1970s. The migrant workers came primarily from Turkey, the former Yugoslavia and Pakistan. During the mid-1960s, the numbers of migrant workers were less than 500 per year, but this had increased to more than 5,000 per year by 1970. During the 1970s and 1980s, several of the migrant workers were joined by spouses and children, who arrived in Denmark as “family unification” migrants. For further reading, see e.g., Coleman and Wadensjö (1999) and Østergaard (2007). 4 This citation, as well as all successive citations from Danish media, are translated by the author, unless otherwise stated. 5 For an English introduction to Grundtvig, see Allchin (1998).

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References Allchin, Arthur Macdonald. 1998. N. F. S. Grundtvig: An Introduction to his Life and Work. London: Darton, Longman and Todd. Andersen, Leif Esper. 1998. Fremmed [1975]. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso. Andreassen, Rikke. 2005. “The Mass Media’s Construction of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Nationality: An Analysis of the Danish News Media’s Communication about Visible Minorities from 1971–2004.” PhD diss., University of Toronto. —. 2007. Der er et yndigt land: Medier, minoriteter og danskhed. Copenhagen: Tiderne Skifter. —. 2011. “Burka og bryster: Debatter om tørklæder, tilgængelighed, ligestilling og nationalitet.” In Tørklædet som tegn: Tilsløring og demokrati i en globaliseret verden, edited by Inge Degn and Kirsten Molly Søholm, 80–95. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag. —. 2013. “Muslim Women and Interracial Intimacies.” Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 3.3: 117–25. —. 2014. “The Nordic Discomfort with ‘Race.’” Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 4.1: 42-44. —. 2015. Human Exhibitions. Race, Gender and Sexuality in Ethnic Displays. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Andreassen, Rikke and Doutje Lettiga. 2011. “Veiled Debates: Gender and Gender Equality in European National Narratives.” In Politics, Religion and Gender: Regulating the Muslim Headscarf, edited by Sieglinde Rosenberger and Birgit Sauer, 17–36. New York: Routledge. Brandt, Aage. 1987. Altid og for evigt. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Buhl, Kenneth Øhlenschlæger. 2012. Internet comment. Politiken, April 21. Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [1990]. New York: Routledge. Bøgh, Esben. 2012. Internet comment. Politiken, April 21. Christensen, Klavs Dahl. 2012. Internet comment. Politiken, April 21. Coleman, David, and Eskil Wadensjö. 1999. Immigration to Denmark: International and National Perspectives. Aarhus: The Rockwool Foundation Research Unit and Aarhus University Press. Demokraten. 1909. “Exotisk Kuller hos Damerne.” August 11. Hansen, Christian Kjellerup. 2012. Internet comment. Politiken, April 21. Hemer, Oscar. 2012. Fiction and Truth in Transition: Writing the Present Past in South Africa and Argentina. Münster: LIT Verlag.

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Hobsbawm, Eric. 1990. Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jensen, Søren. 2012. Internet comment. Politiken, April 23. Lindqvist, Ursula. 2009. “The Cultural Archive of the IKEA Store.” Space and Culture, 12.1: 43–62. Lutz, Helma, Ann Phoenix, and Nira Yuval-Davis, eds. 1995. Crossfires: Nationalism, Racism, and Gender in Europe. London: Pluto. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. London: Routledge. Moustache. 1902. “Det svage køn og Tivolis kinesere.” Politiken, July 31. Nava, Mica. 2007. Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender, Culture and the Normalisation of Difference. New York: Berg Publishers. Nielsen, Thomas Michael, Lisbeth Laursen, and Dorthe Larsen. 2011. Indvandrere i Danmark 2011. Copenhagen: Danmarks Statistik. Nørager, Helge Ebbe. 2012. Internet comment. Politiken, April 21. Omar, Tarek. 2012. “Vi vil da ikke giftes med dårligt uddannede nydanskere.” Politiken, April 20. Opgaver.com. 2011. Pedersen, Jakob. 2012. Internet comment. Politiken, April 21. Plambech. Sine. 2010. “From Thailand With Love: Transnational Marriage in the Global Care Economy.” In Sex Trafficking, Human Rights and Social Justice, edited by Tiantian Zheng, 47–61. London: Routledge. Skeggs, Beverley. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage. Studienet.dk. 2011. Studieportalen.dk. 2012. Thomsen, Johnny. 2012. Internet comment. Politiken, April 23. Warring, Anette. 1998. Tyskerpiger under besættelse og retsopgør. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1997. Gender and Nation. London: Sage. Østergaard, Bent. 2007. Indvandrerne i Danmarks historie: Kultur og religionsmøder. Odense: University of Southern Denmark.

NEW FACES OF A NEW PHASE: THE POLITICS OF VISIBILITY AMONG YOUNG MUSLIM WOMEN IN SWEDEN PIA KARLSSON MINGANTI AND LEILA KARIN ÖSTERLIND

In the post-September 11 climate, the category of “the Muslim” has become increasingly constructed in opposition to valued features of the Western citizen. Dissociated with modernity and democracy, the Muslim is portrayed as being determined by religious and cultural heritage (Runfors 2006; Bracke and Fadil 2012) and as having some “indefinable propensity to barbarism” (Morey and Yaqin 2011, 31). The stereotyping is gendered and portrays Muslim women as passive victims to patriarchal oppression and in need of help from non-Muslims to be set free from cultural, religious and familial attachments. This negative imagery has generated various governmental and non-governmental actions aiming at liberating Muslim women, and also the legitimizing of immigration-hostile politics and discrimination against Muslims generally (Hübinette and Lundström 2011; Andreassen, this volume). Thus, for many young Muslim women it appears particularly important to struggle for recognition as full subjects and citizens. For some this includes the decision to step into the realm of public visibility, particularly through media appearances. Gerdien Jonker and Valérie Amiraux (2006, 11) illuminate how the stigma of “Muslim” has led to a situation in which many people have “ceased to participate in public events that addressed Islam or the Muslim minorities in Europe.” However, in their seminal study the authors present a recent trend of Muslim actors entering various public spheres. Rather than elaborating on the “politics of stereotyping,” the authors investigate the “politics of visibility” among individuals who do not withdraw from public interaction or disidentify with Islam, but “insist on acting and speaking as Muslims” (Jonker and Amiraux 2006, 10). It is a heterogeneous body consisting of men and women, young and old, believers and non-believers, secular Muslims, traditionalists and modernists.

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This article studies young hijab-wearing women who act and speak publicly as self-identified Swedish Muslims, drawing on two distinct, yet interrelated case studies, that of collective engagement in Muslim youth organizations, and that of individuals promoting Islamic fashion (emic term, Moors and Tarlo 2013).1 Both cases reflect how women are simultaneously affected by, and actively making use of, various politics of visibility in the public sphere. The analysis is influenced by a theoretical framework suggested by Masooda Bano and Hilary Kalmbach in their edited volume Women, Leadership and Mosques (2011). It is a framework that helps explain the conditions behind women’s stepping up as religious front figures, that is, between “male invitation, state intervention, and female initiative” (Bano and Kalmbach 2011, 31). Two more dimensions will be added: the media and the market. The young women in our studies, born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, have grown up within contexts affected by a global Islamic revival where “new veiling” is encouraged as a personal choice (McLeod 1991; Moors 2009, 178). The worldwide Islamic revival has emerged since at least the 1970s and is manifested in greater religious piety, such as an “increase in attendance at mosques by both women and men, and in marked displays of religious sociability [...] including the adoption of the veil” (Mahmood 2005, 3í5). This revival implies a redistribution of power where women and youth are increasingly given (and taking) both representative and interpretative roles (Bano and Kalmbach 2011; Karlsson Minganti 2011), a development that is accelerated by the increase in religiously framed social media activity (Lewis 2013). While the revival initially encompassed an anti-consumerist orientation, which made an imprint on previous leaderships and front figures, what we see today is “a more individualized and fragmented reformist trend with identities increasingly produced through consumption” (Moors 2009, 179; see also Moors and Tarlo 2013; Österlind 2013). These changes have given new opportunities for young women to become inspiring faces of modern Islam and entrepreneurs in the market of Islamic fashion. In this article we show that there is a demand from both Muslim and non-Muslim audiences for young women to act as public representatives of a distinctly modern and Swedish Muslim identity. We argue that this is part of an ongoing generational shift away from the first-generation immigrant men and women converts, who formerly inhabited the front figure positions for Muslims in Sweden. Further, we discuss the implications of this recent call for young women’s accessibility to the media and the general public as we investigate their (re)negotiations of

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identity and belonging across perceived cultural, religious, gendered and generational boundaries.

Acting through Muslim Youth Organizations Muslim immigration to Sweden became significant after the Second World War. From fifteen people defining themselves as Muslims in a 1930 census, the estimated number is today 350,000–400,000 in a country with a total population of 9 million. Of these, approximately 100,000–150,000 are members of Islamic congregations entitled to receive state support (SST 2013).2 Initially the official representatives of Swedish Muslim organizations were almost exclusively men, but since the 1980s they have been supported by women converts (Roald 2004). Many of these female activists have been and still are involved in offering activities for women, children and adolescents. In this way, younger women have come to have several adult women role models showing that public engagement is both possible and worth striving for. In the early 1990s, some of these young women became pioneers in the emerging local Muslim youth associations and the Sunni-dominated national umbrella organization Sveriges Unga Muslimer (SUM) [Sweden’s Young Muslims]. Today SUM claims 2,800 members and over forty local youth associations in towns all over the country (SUM 2015). It receives operating and project grants from the state agency Myndigheten för ungdoms- och civilsamhällesfrågor [Swedish Agency for Youth and Civil Society], formerly known as Ungdomsstyrelsen [Swedish National Board for Youth Affairs]. The board works to “ensure that all young people between the ages of 13 and 25 have real access to influence and real access to welfare” and has among its target groups “organisations working with young people, women, homosexual, bisexual and transgender people, national minorities, ethnic minorities etc.” (Bohlin and Persson 2009). On its homepage SUM declares as one of its aims to promote the members’ “Swedish Muslim identity” and their “positive participation, responsibility and engagement in society” (SUM 2015). The members attracted are teenagers and young adults, of whom most are born and raised in Sweden. In fact, the organization reflects generational divergence and the sense of belonging to a “new generation” Swedish Muslims. The age span of the members is approximately 13 to 25, but many of those who come of age continue to identify with SUM and engage as leaders for the younger ones. A majority of the SUM members are claimed to be women, some have been appointed presidents, and the present board is constituted by an equal number of men and women.

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Figure 3.1: Participants in the 2011 SUM conference. (Photo by Ahmed Nuru)

In SUM the youths, women included, are presented with the opportunity to re-read Islamic texts and to reflectively choose what interpretations to adhere to and disseminate to others. The organization and its local associations offer courses in religious reasoning and are influenced by the enhancement of communication technology, which have increased both the quest and the opportunities for debates among peers, and helped new religious leaderships find their audiences. In the process, conventional authorities (e.g., theological scholars, men, parents) are potentially sidestepped, while interpretive authority increases among young people and women (Jonker and Amiraux 2006; Bano and Kalmbach 2011; Lewis 2013). In their youth movement the women are recognized as religious subjects with the right and the duty to attend Islamic forums in order to cultivate their piety and increase their knowledge of Islam. They are encouraged by their peers (male and female) to participate within both religious and secular spheres, and to show that Muslims – women included – can be represented at all levels of society. In fact, there is great demand from both Muslims and non-Muslims for the young women’s public Islamic activism. Within mosques and formal Muslim organizations, they are promoted as transmitters of Islam to the next generation and motivators for the young to identify with Islam. One of the women, whom we call Noor, tells about her assumed role as a youth leader: We felt that we wanted to do something for the young ones. Yes really, to help them feel proud to be Muslims. Then they need to know more about Islam, and… well, be educated in general. We arrange homework help for the smaller ones, and take them to museums and nature areas around here.

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For the older ones, we see that we can come together, especially on Friday and Saturday evenings when they might need an alternative to staying at home or ending up in bad company.3

Thus even while they are students, the young women take part in teaching Islam to children and peers. They act as leaders also in the sense of being decision-makers and organizers, taking part in arranging courses, seminars, conferences, camps and excursions. Further, they are engaged in boards and committees, also as chairpersons. Barlin Nuur was president of SUM between 2004 and 2008. She describes her desire to inform about Islam in order to correct misunderstandings and states that it is her duty as an immigrant to communicate her experiences in a way that people of Swedish background can understand (Kantor and Lerner 2006). In relations with broader Swedish society, the young women are requested by the Muslim community to act as public representatives or “ambassadors” for Islam. They are, as a young male peer from Noor’s local association phrased it, “super-sisters,” ideal representatives for Swedish Islam (Karlsson Minganti 2011, 378). This mind-set is also reflected in the views of formal, male-dominated Muslim organizations, such as the umbrella organization Sveriges Muslimska Råd (SMR) [Muslim Council of Sweden], of which SUM is a member. Thus the young women are invited to act as guides in mosques and as public speakers and debaters. Their Islamic activism is in many ways compatible with what could be defined as identity politics: they take action in favor of specific minority rights, they are committed to supervising representations of Islam and Muslims in the media and other public spheres and counteracting misrepresentations, and they engage as writers and editors for newsletters and homepages on the Internet. The young women’s commitment includes acting as participant citizens, and they cooperate with non-Muslim organizations, institutions and projects aiming at, for instance, interreligious dialogue, charity, antiracism and temperance. One of the most thriving spin-off organizations from SUM is Svenska Muslimer för Fred och Rättvisa (SMFR) [Swedish Muslims for Peace and Justice], founded by among others ex-president of SUM, Barlin Nuur. Another of SMFR’s front figures is Fazeela Selberg Zaib, who reflects on the development of women’s position in Muslim organizations and non-formal education in Sweden in the last decade: The women went from the back seat to the driver’s seat, and many Muslim associations got their first female presidents. [...] They refuse to take on a victim role but want to be initiators and independent parts of the society. (Selberg Zaib 2012)4

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Collaborative activities and women’s full participation match the requirements for receiving support from the Swedish National Board for Youth Affairs, that works for equality and against discrimination and to “ensure that all young people between the ages of 13 and 25 have real access to influence and real access to welfare” (Bohlin and Persson 2009). In fact, we interpret the support from the Board as a state intervention to appoint young Muslim women as mediators between religious communities and secular society, mediators who demonstrate that it is possible to simultaneously be a young woman, a Muslim believer and a dedicated Swedish citizen. Importantly, the positioning of these young women as public figures is not only depending on male invitation and state intervention, but certainly also on their own initiative. The experience of agency is strongly reflected in the women’s narratives on their faith and activism as a result of an individual choice. This experience of personal agency coincides with one of the women’s crucial ambitions, that is, to change the widespread image of Muslim women as passive victims to oppression. Noor illustrates her encounter with the stereotype in the following way: “When people see me in this [touches her hijab] they think that I cannot speak Swedish and that I’m not developed [she makes quotation marks with her fingers when uttering the word developed].”5 To counter this view she intends to “keep educating myself, but also educating Swedes about true Islam.”6 While criticizing cultural patterns of oppression among both Muslims and nonMuslims, Noor and the other young women call attention to Islam in terms of liberation, and to SUM and the local Muslim youth associations as platforms that enable women to express themselves as free subjects.

Acting through Fashion In the previous section we have described how young women act as public figures through Muslim organizations and we have stressed male invitation, state intervention and female initiative as important factors behind such a space for female authority (Bano and Kalmbach 2011). We have explained how peers and leaders within Muslim organizations invite young female members to act as representatives or “ambassadors for Islam.” Further, we have highlighted a form of state intervention to involve young Muslim women in public activities, that is, the support given to SUM through the Swedish National Board for Youth Affairs on condition that the organization works for the active participation and equal influence of women. Last but not least, we have illustrated how the young women’s public activism builds on their personal choice and effort. In this

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section we will add two more dimensions that help explain their stepping up as front figures in the public realm: the (social and conventional) media and the market. During the 1980s and 1990s, a few women converts were frequently visible in various media, sometimes in collaboration with the male leaders, sometimes independently (Roald 2004). When interviewed in national media, these representatives would explain Islam as a faith and discuss its practices. They would also figure in media when certain rights in relation to the freedom of religion were discussed, e.g., the establishment of mosques and independent schools with Muslim profiles, time off for prayer, or women-only public swimming (Karlsson Minganti 2013). Their clothes were sober and had an air of proper official representatives for a religious community. While male imams wore austere dark suits or “traditional” garb, the women were dressed in long, loose-fitting, unadorned skirts and jackets, or at times, an abaya.7 These outfits were combined with a plain hijab or khimar.8 The catchword was “modesty,” in the sense of downplaying both vanity and sexual attraction. With a new generation of Muslims growing up in Sweden, these formal, adult representatives seem to have become less interesting to the mainstream media. The last decade has brought new faces into the picture – young, female and fashionable. Among them are even a number of upcoming Muslim fashionistas, who display individual creativity and position themselves as entrepreneurs in fashion. These highly visible women do not only attain public interest with their counter-narrative to the victimization of Muslim women but follow an obvious market incitement – the hijab sells (issues as well as garments), and so do young goodlooking hijabis. Particularly two young women have become Swedish media’s hijabi darlings in the late 2000s and early 2010s, designer Iman Aldebe and her former colleague, artist and stylist Mejsa Jelloul (previously Chaaraoui).9 Both have chosen not to organize collectively around their Muslim identity, but rather to express themselves through fashion.10 Jelloul describes her personal view on hijab styling thus:11 When you go out in the city you see how people look at you. Then, why not give them something that really catches the eye? Style your headscarf and make it really beautiful in order to play it down a bit.12

According to Jelloul, being recognizably fashionable and Muslim makes the visible Muslimness less frightening and hence played down. Aldebe and Jelloul promote positive images of hijab in order to make Islam seem

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(more) attractive and less alarming to non-Muslims. About the motivation behind her choice to develop a career in fashion, Aldebe states that: Being politically active for years might not get you anywhere with issues such as integration or segregation, but through fashion you can make things less tense and reduce the fear of Islam.13

The generational shift includes a shift away from the emphasis of Muslim particularity. Young hijabis (both the fashionistas and the SUM-activists) increasingly stress their similarity to non-Muslim Swedes of their generation. Belonging has become the catchword. Aldebe and Jelloul elaborate on their belonging to the category of Swedishness and its normative ideal of a modern, empowered woman with her own ideas about how to live her life. The two fashionistas have figured in Swedish national media since 2006, when they first promoted hijabi styles in the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet (Bengtsson 2006). Their designs were more eyecatching than most hijab styles seen on Swedish streets at the time, and it required courage both to present them in public and to claim that wearing them could reverse negative stereotypes about Muslim women. Since their first Aftonbladet feature, Aldebe and Jelloul have developed their styles and made them public in close relation to conventional media. They have often prepared new looks for particular media appearances. Jelloul has shown her version of the latest hijab fashion trends on the Swedish commercial channel TV4 each spring for several years.14 Iman Aldebe had her major professional breakthrough as a designer in 2012, when her 2011–12-collection was well received and she was listed as one of Sweden’s most successful young entrepreneurs (number 19 out of 30) by online career community Shortcut’s quarterly Shortcut magazine (2011). Further, she was chosen to participate in the first edition of the TV program Project Runway Sweden, produced by the Swedish commercial channel TV3.

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Figure 3.2: Swedish designer Iman Aldebe with models and stylist after a fashion show in Stockholm 2009. (Photo by Leila Karin Österlind)

Aldebe also makes use of social media to market herself as a designer and entrepreneur. She continually publishes texts and images on her webpage, blog and public Facebook page. On May 2, 2011, the headline on the cover of the free daily paper Stockholm CITY established that Aldebe has managed to take the veil to Svampen [the Mushroom],15 a meeting point at Stureplan, a square in central Stockholm and also a symbol of economic power and the lifestyles of the richest people in the country. The cover confirms her contribution to shift focus from the political or religious issues usually associated with Muslim identity, to

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consumption and fashion commonly associated with modern capitalist societies. In 2012 Aldebe was asked by the Swedish National Police Agency to design the first Swedish police uniform hijab, an assignment that received much attention in national and international media. The initiative can be viewed as a state intervention in response to the emerging presence of Muslim female police officers (Grill 2012).16 Another example of how the fashionistas have been involved in a form of state intervention for making Muslim women publicly visible is a program by the state-owned public service television company SVT. In the program, called “Profetens döttrar – kvinna och muslim i Sverige” [The Daughters of the Prophet – Woman and Muslim in Sweden], Aldebe and Jelloul arranged and styled a minicatwalk.17 Present in the panel during this two-hour program, recorded live, was also one of the female representatives of a Muslim organization, former SMFR president Nejat Jaffer. The choice to develop and wear differentiated hijab styles can be seen as an attempt to resist perceptions of Muslim women, and hijab wearers in particular, as part of a submissive and homogenous mass. By presenting themselves within the context of fashion, Aldebe and Jelloul have managed to achieve recognition as both Muslims and creative individuals. They bring glamour and humor into play, with explicit allusions to sensitive matters such as sex, racism and suppressed minorities. When Aldebe opens her closet, saying: “Welcome to my closet, this is Sex and the City minus the sex!”18 it is typical of her way of playing with words and mainstream cultural references in order to present her identity. Her media strategy has been built around an intention to counter stereotypes by taking journalists and the public by surprise. The women in our studies are actively embracing their role as highly visible articulators of a Swedish Muslim identity. They deliberately make use of the increased visibility that the hijab gives them. Also, they make use of the (mis-)conception that all hijab wearers both can and should represent Islam and Muslims. The hijabis of our studies are not representative of Muslim women in general with regard to wearing the hijab, since most Swedish women of their generation with backgrounds in predominantly Muslim countries do not. The styles introduced by Aldebe and Jelloul have been influential among certain groups of Swedish hijabis, but there are also groups to whom other trends are more relevant. For instance, it is common among young women of Turkish descent to wear styles dictated from Istanbul. These differ from the styles of Aldebe’s and Jelloul’s, but are nonetheless eye-catching and fashionable.

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Also the women who act publicly through Muslim youth organizations are heterogeneous in style. Noor, for example, would, like Aldebe, “like to shock people” and stage “the Muslim woman” in unexpected manners – joking, studying, car-driving, giving a helping hand and dressing up in fashion (Karlsson Minganti 2007, 236). She would not criticize Aldebe’s creations, but decline her turban styles in favor of a hijab that covers her neck. The looks Aldebe introduces are new to Swedish Muslims, but with time also many of the most critical tend to adapt to these and other Islamic fashion trends. The variations in preference and style prove the failure of the stereotyping of Muslim women as a uniform mass. Simultaneously the gradual trendsetting by publicly visible Muslim women confirms the impact of fashion, media and marketing.

A Public Presence between Celebration and Fear The analysis of young Muslim women’s way into public visibility highlights the positive contribution of social media. A platform for the women to manage and control their own self-presentations, it constitutes a democratic tool. At the same time social media opens up for an increased amount of aggressive responses from so-called näthatare [Internet haters]: anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, racist and extreme-right activists. For instance, after the invitation from the Swedish National Police Agency to design a hijab for the standard police uniform, Iman Aldebe received hundreds of comments on her webpage describing potential ways for her to die (Ström 2012). Also conventional media give space to Internet haters and contribute to putting young, publicly visible Muslim women in a vulnerable position. In today’s mediascapes conventional media and social media are interlinked phenomena. Most newspapers, radio and TV channels invite readers to comment on their outputs directly online, an initiative which has resulted in the spread of hateful messages. Since the terror attacks in Norway in 2011 many such comment fields have been abolished. Those remaining are restricted and not possible to use anonymously anymore, yet they maintain a space where Islamophobic and racist ideas are disseminated. The Swedish conventional media on an overall level play into dominant liberal discourses and state policies in favor of equality but at the same time negatively represent and marginalize Muslims. In the following paragraphs we will demonstrate this situation with two cases. Both are illustrative of how young Swedish Muslim women are coping with their sense of belonging in a setting characterized by two intertwined frames of interpretation, one based on security issues and the association of the

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women with terrorism, and another based on their gendered position as reproducers of group boundaries (Maira 2009; Yuval-Davis 2011). The first case occurred in the fall of 2007 when Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s largest daily newspaper, contacted Aldebe about featuring her designs in their fashion pages. She accepted and began creating items for the photo shoot – in vain, as it turned out. After discussions internally and with Swedish Muslim leaders, the editorial staff decided that the representation of the hijab in a fashion context was too provocative and subsequently cancelled the spread. The cautious stance of Dagens Nyheter can be explained by a fear of representing Muslims in potentially provoking ways. The incident coincided with the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoon controversy (Hervik 2012), which might have increased such fear. Notably, the shift in the public image of Muslims away from migrant male and convert female adults, to the faces of young women is not an entirely welcome development among Swedish Muslims. In a minority situation, women’s bodies often become sites of signification and contestation. The collective maintenance of so-called ethnic roots tends to position women as symbolic reproducers of the group and its boundaries, which puts heavy demands on their modesty and chastity (Yuval-Davis 2011). Young women like Aldebe have to manage criticism from both Muslim and anti-Muslim forces, and when such intensive claim-making occurs about the way a woman should appear in the public sphere, conventional media can apparently waver in their commitment to these young women’s inclusion and equal influence. The second case occurred in the fall of 2008, when SVT launched a talk show called Halal-TV, with three hostesses all wearing hijab (Karlsson Minganti 2011; Lövheim and Axner 2011).19 It was broadcast at prime time with the explicit aim of giving voice to “women committed to Islam.”20 This category was left undefined but made it possible for young hijabis to be seen and heard in public. Borrowing the concept from the Dutch show De Meiden van Halal [Halal Girls], the Swedish version was hosted by Cherin Awad, Dalia Azzam Kassem and Khadiga El Khabiry, all three previously unknown to most of the viewers. They had university educations but no journalistic training. The show was not initiated by the young women themselves but rather was a product of SVT’s eagerness to showcase diversity and successful integration. Like public service television in many other European countries, SVT “has a designated task to be an arena for impartial journalism and to represent different parts of the population” (Horsti and Hultén 2011, 219í20; Lövheim and Axner 2011, 58). The program was

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meant to meet these expectations and to be thought-provoking with themes such as equality, alcohol, sex, class and racism. The hostesses did, for example, interview Jimmy Åkesson, the leader of the anti-immigration party Sverigedemokraterna [Sweden Democrats]. However, the program was cancelled after seven (out of eight) episodes following strong criticism not only from those opposed to the mere presence of Muslims in Sweden but also from those who initially liked the initiative but disliked how the show turned out. The hostesses were accused, among other things, of doublespeak and having an unclear agenda. The Halal-TV example sheds light on the failure of non-Muslim audiences to grasp the complexity of young women’s representations of Islam. There was profound confusion about the hostesses’ personal views and their references to various trends within Islam, that is, multifaceted debates and contests over interpretation and representative positioning. The critique was heavily targeting the problem surrounding the three women’s representativeness in relation to other Muslims. Rather than being associated with “good” Muslims (secular, modern, democratic) they were falling into the “bad” Muslim category (fanatic and anti-Western), according to a common categorization of Muslims living in the West created from outside Muslim communities (Maira 2009). Another polarized positioning affecting the conflict around Halal-TV is that of the women as symbolic reproducers of the Muslim ummah [nation] on the one side, and potential agents for integration into the non-Muslim larger society/nation on the other. As Rikke Andreassen (this volume) has illuminated, this double positioning impacts on – indeed, conflates – the women’s public and intimate realms. In fact, one of the most heated debates on Halal-TV followed after the refusal of the hostesses to shake hands with a male guest – writer and debater Carl Hamilton. This refusal of body contact with a man was interpreted as a rejection of the gender equality values that have become emblematic for today’s Sweden (Hübinette and Lundström 2011), and of the offered role as agents for integration. Hamilton reacted with indignation and left the show, but later reflected upon the conflict in terms of a scenario directed by the editors of the program; a successful attempt to use the hijabi hosts to create conflict and spark debates (Hamilton 2008). Andreassen (this volume) underscores how young Muslim/minority women are offered public visibility and voice on the condition of submitting to the guidance of white non-Muslims, predominantly elder men. Hence, Hamilton’s interpretation seems plausible but simultaneously maintains the downplaying of the young

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women’s subjective agency when describing them as merely being “sent out to create conflict” by “scheming men” (Hamilton 2008). In retrospect, the arrangement of Halal-TV seems to have put the hostesses in an impossible position, repeatedly left in tense situations where one could expect their subjectivity and Swedishness to be questioned. Young women’s attempts to present counter-narratives are often encouraged by Swedish conventional media, but this support is not unequivocal. Halal-TV might have seemed to fit the national dominant discourse of Muslims’ rights to equal inclusion in society but came to keep stereotypes about Swedish Muslim women alive and suppress their subjective agency.

Concluding Remarks In Sweden, Islam has been renegotiated in the public sphere through the media exposure of young hijab wearing women. Even if these new faces, looks and voices do not imply a complete shift of power within Islamic organizations (most are still dominated by an elder generation and by men), both the organized and the unorganized young women of this chapter are involved in what we see as a significant ongoing generational shift. The first-generation immigrant men and women converts, who previously inhabited the front figure position for Muslims in Sweden, tend to be replaced by young hijabis representing a new generation born and raised in Sweden. The change in Muslim representation implies a redistribution of power, where women and youth are increasingly given (and taking) both representative and interpretative roles, a development that is accelerated by the increase in religiously framed social media activity. Young, publicly active Muslim women give voices and faces to various ideas about how Muslims can and should act as well as what they can say or wear, when and where. In relation to the broader society they introduce experiences of belonging across perceived cultural, religious, gendered and generational boundaries. The young women’s public activities are encouraged by many, but they simultaneously evoke celebration and fear, recognition and hatred. Some individuals and groups (both Muslim and non-Muslim) resist the young women’s public participation with gendered and racialized counteractions. The interest from society and media is hence ambivalent; the women are not only offered the opportunity of visibility, but they are also put in a vulnerable situation when their appearances are framed in ways that create tension and cast doubt on their subjectivity and Swedishness.

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However, rather than emphasizing the vulnerability of Muslim women, we have highlighted the significance of their own agency along with positive encouragement from various actors, including men, state, media and market. The problem-oriented focus (common to youth research in general) needs to be redirected toward the recognition of young Muslim women as agents of change, creators and consumers of new technologies, trendsetters in the arts, music, fashion, and innovators of new forms of political organization and social movements toward greater social and economic justice. (Herrera 2005, 4)

In Sweden, dominant media discourses and state policies promote diversity, gender equality and equal representation, although they are contested by loud groups of far right-wing activists and Internet haters in social media as well as by the conventional media’s ambivalence. We understand the demand for the young Swedish Muslim women’s public activities as meeting the demand for positive images of a particular Swedish take on gender equality and diversity. The recent focus on young women as front figures has led to Islam being presented as more diverse and less foreign. These women take part in the repackaging of Islamic activism, from a strong focus on private and religious aspects of identity politics (e.g. alternative diets and burials), into issues such as anti-racism, gender equality, peace, temperance and fashion. The women members of SUM, the hijabi fashionistas, the Halal-TV hostesses, publicly renegotiate what it can mean to be a Muslim: an involved citizen, a stylish woman who loves shopping, a successful entrepreneur. The counter-stories that these young, outspoken and attractive Swedish hijabis present fit a desired and “selling” image of a country with equality and diversity as defining values. The public visibility of the young hijabis of this study and the dominant national discourse on equality and diversity hence become mutually reinforcing.

Notes 1

This article was made possible by support from The Swedish Research Council [grant number 2009-867; 2009-1345]. The method used is qualitative with observations, conversations and repeated in-depth interviews with women in the Sunni-dominated umbrella organization Sweden’s Young Muslims and five of its local youth associations in different towns (Karlsson Minganti), and with women engaged in Islamic fashion in Stockholm (Österlind). The period of Karlsson Minganti’s fieldwork is 1998 to 2002 with a follow-up from 2009 to date, and

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Österlind’s fieldwork dates from 2007 to 2012. While Karlsson Minganti anonymizes her interviewees, Österlind does not, as her project mainly involves semi-public figures. 2 The government support is intended to help faith-based communities to conduct religious services, education, and spiritual and pastoral care. The support is distributed by Nämnden för statligt stöd till trossamfund (SST) [The Swedish Commission for Government Support to Faith Communities], through six major umbrella organizations that organize the majority of local Muslim communities in Sweden. These are not clearly divided by ethnicity or religious affiliation but dominated by Sunni Islam (SST 2013). 3 Vi kände att vi ville göra något för de yngre. Ja verkligen, hjälpa dem att känna sig stolta över att vara muslimer. Då måste de veta mer om islam, och… ja, utbilda sig i största allmänhet. Vi arrangerar läxhjälp för de små, och tar med dem på museum och på utflykter häromkring. När det gäller de äldre så ser vi till att vi kan träffas, särskilt på fredagar och lördagar när de kan behöva alternativ till att bara stanna hemma eller hamna i dåligt sällskap. 4 Kvinnorna gick från baksätet till förarsätet och flertalet muslimska föreningar och förbund fick sina första kvinnliga ordföranden. […] Man vägrar inta en offerroll utan vill vara en initiativtagande och självständig del av samhället. 5 När folk ser mig i den här tror de inte att jag kan prata svenska och att jag inte är utvecklad. 6 Fortsätta utbilda mig själv, men även utbilda svenskar om sann islam. 7 Full length, long-sleeved dress or kaftan. 8 Longer headscarf that covers the wearer’s chest. 9 Aldebe has a pre-university degree in fashion design [gymnasieexamen] and in TV hosting, and is today a university student of law. Jelloul has attended art schools and is trained as a hairdresser. 10 Swedish Muslim contexts are comparatively small, and there is therefore a rather frequent interaction between the women organized in SUM and the non-organized Muslim fashionistas. Aldebe and Jelloul have links to SUM through friends and family, and have attended SUM activities in the Stockholm region. Aldebe has been a youth leader for younger Muslim “sisters.” SUM is a member of The Muslim Council of Sweden in which Aldebe’s father has served as vice president. 11 If no other reference is given, quotes from Mejsa Jelloul and Iman Aldebe are from interviews with Österlind from the period 2007 to 2012. 12 När man går ut på stan ser man hur folk tittar på en. Så varför inte ge dem något att verkligen titta på? Styla om sin slöja, liksom göra den riktigt fin så att det blir lite avdramatiserat. 13 Istället för att vara aktiv politiskt kanske i flera år, man kanske inte kommer någon vart med integrationsfrågor och segregationsfrågor. Men genom mode kan man ta bort så stor laddning av rädslan för islam. 14 See for example, http://www.tv4play.se/program/nyhetsmorgon?video_id=756891. 15 Hon tar slöjan till Svampen.

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Eftersom det nu finns en poliselev som bär huvudduk […] så nu inskaffar vi det som en del av uniformen. 17 The program was first broadcasted on November 3, 2008, but has since been rerun on four occasions. 18 Välkommen in i min garderob, det här är Sex and the City utan sex! Aldebe discusses this quote from 2008 in Österlind (2009). 19 Halal means “permitted,” and the name of the program refers to the hostesses’ wish to uphold Islamic standards. 20 The trailer for the show can be watched at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEd-SpdN5dM&feature=related.

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References Bano, Masooda, and Hilary Kalmbach, eds. 2011. Women, Leadership and Mosques: Changes in Contemporary Islamic Authority. Leiden: Brill. Bengtsson, Anna. 2006. “Slöja: Mode som vill synas.” Aftonbladet, March 16. Bohlin, Ingrid, and Anette Persson. 2009. About the Swedish National Board for Youth Affairs. Stockholm: Ungdomsstyrelsen. http://www.mucf.se/sites/default/files/publikationer_uploads/about-theswedish-national-board-for-youth-affairs.pdf. Bracke, Sarah, and Nadia Fadil. 2012. “‘Is the Headscarf Oppressive or Emancipatory?’: Field Notes from the Multicultural Debate.” Religion and Gender, 2.1: 35–56. Grill, Maja. 2012. “Hon designer den nya polisslöjan.” Svt.se, July 25. http://www.svt.se/nyheter/sverige/hon-designar-den-nya-polisslojan. Hamilton, Carl. 2008. “Är det rasistiskt att vilja skaka hand med en muslim?” Aftonbladet, April 11. http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/article11556467.ab. Herrera, Linda. 2005. “Editorial.” ISIM Review, 16: 4. Hervik, Peter. 2012. The Danish Muhammad Cartoon Conflict. Malmö: Malmö University. https://www.mah.se/upload/Forskningscentrum/MIM/CT/CT%2013.pdf. Horsti, Karina, and Gunilla Hultén. 2011. “Directing Diversity: Managing Cultural Diversity Media Policies in Finnish and Swedish Public Service Broadcasting.” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 14.2: 209í27. Hübinette, Tobias, and Catrin Lundström. 2011. “Sweden after the Recent Election: The Double-Binding Power of Swedish Whiteness through the Mourning of Loss of ‘Old Sweden’ and the Passing of ‘Good Sweden.’” NORA, 19.1: 42í52. Jonker, Gerdien, and Valérie Amiraux, eds. 2006. Politics of Visibility: Young Muslims in European Public Spaces. Bielefeld: Transcript. Kantor, Jan, and Thomas Lerner. 2006. “Båda sidor har rätt – och fel.” Dagens Nyheter, February 9. http://www.dn.se/insidan/bada-sidor-harratt-och-fel/. Karlsson Minganti, Pia. 2007. Muslima: Islamisk väckelse och unga muslimska kvinnors förhandlingar om genus i det samtida Sverige. Stockholm: Carlsson. —. 2011. “Challinging from Within: Youth Associations and Female Leadership in Swedish Mosques.” In Women, Leadership and Mosques: Changes in Contemporary Islamic Authority, edited by Masooda Bano and Hilary Kalmbach, 371í91. Leiden: Brill.

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—. 2013. “Burqinis, Bikinis and Bodies: Encounter in Public Pools in Italy and Sweden.” In Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion: New Perspectives from Europe and North America, edited by Annelies Moors and Emma Tarlo, 33í54. London: Bloomsbury. Lewis, Reina, ed. 2013. Modest Fashion: Styling Bodies, Mediating Faith. London: I.B. Tauris. Lövheim, Mia, and Marta Axner. 2011. “Halal-TV: Negotiating the Place of Religion in Swedish Public Discourse.” Nordic Journal of Religion and Society, 24.1: 57í74. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Maira, Sunaina. 2009. “‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Muslim Citizens: Feminists, Terrorists, and U.S. Orientalisms.” Feminist Studies, 35.3: 631í56. McLeod, Arlene. 1991. Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling, and Change in Cairo. New York: Columbia University Press. Moors, Annelies. 2009. “‘Islamic Fashion’ in Europe: Religious Conviction, Aesthetic Style and Creative Consumption.” Encounters 1. Moors, Annelies, and Emma Tarlo, eds. 2013. Islamic Fashion and AntiFashion: New Perspectives from Europe and North America. London: Bloomsbury. Morey, Peter, and Amina Yaqin. 2011. Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Roald, Anne Sofie. 2004. New Muslims in the European Context: The Experience of Scandinavian Converts. Boston: Brill. Runfors, Ann. 2009. “Avoiding Culture and Practicing Culturalism: Labeling Practices and Paradoxes in Swedish Schools.” In Paradoxes of Cultural Recognition: Perspectives from Northern Europe, edited by Sharam Alghasi, Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Halleh Ghorashi, 133í44. Farnham: Ashgate. Selberg Zaib, Fazeela. 2012. “Från baksätet till förarsätet: Krönika.” Folkbildningsförbundet, April 1. http://www.mynewsdesk.com/se/pressroom/folkbildningsforbundet/ne ws/view/fraan-baksaetet-till-foerarsaetet-kroenika-av-fazeela-selbergzaib-48212. Shortcut magazine. 2011. “Uppstickarna 2011: Topplistan 1–30.” http://shortcut.nu/artiklar/uppstickarna-2011-topplistan-1-30/. SST [Swedish Commission for Government Support to Faith Communities]. 2013. Statistik 2011.

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http://www.sst.a.se/statistik/statistik2011.4.4bf439da1355ecafdd2243b. html (accessed April 24, 2015). Ström, Christian. 2012. “‘Project Runaway’-stjärnan dödshotades för muslimskt mode.” Aftonbladet, 1 October. http://www.aftonbladet.se/nojesbladet/tv/article15531821.ab. SUM [Sweden’s Young Muslims]. 2015. Om oss. http://ungamuslimer.se/om-oss/ (accessed May 10, 2015). Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2011. Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations. London: Sage. Österlind, Leila Karin. 2009. I Need to Have a Peacock. A Film about a Fashion Show. —. 2013. “Made in France: Islamic Fashion Companies on Display.” In Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion: New Perspectives from Europe and North America, edited by Annelies Moors and Emma Tarlo, 168í80. London: Bloomsbury.

THE NEW CRADLE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION: HYPERTEXTS, GLOBAL NETWORKS, AND THE FINLAND-SWEDISH NOVEL DIVA KRISTINA MALMIO

In a 1995 interview in a major Swedish daily newspaper, Svenska Dagbladet, following the publication of her debut novel, Underbara kvinnor vid vatten from 1994 (transl. Wonderful Women by the Water, 1997), the Finland-Swedish 1 author Monika Fagerholm presented her views on the significant, yet intangible change that had taken place in Finland in a very short time, between the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and Finland’s accession to the European Union in 1995. For her, the most obvious examples of the new developments were to be found in culture in a broad sense; on Finnish television, self-assured, urbane and daring people had replaced the shy and timid people that previously had exemplified the Finnish character. Besides this new mentality, the digitalization had become so prevalent that, she argued, the ongoing 1990s, nittitalet, should be renamed internettitalet, or the Internet decade (Werkelid 1995). Three years later, Fagerholm published Diva, a novel with the intriguing subtitle: En uppväxts egna alfabet med docklaboratorium (en bonusberättelse ur framtiden) [The Alphabet of an Adolescence with a Laboratory of Dolls (A Bonus Tale from the Future)] (1998). Diva is a long tale, 445 pages in all, written from the perspective of its protagonist: a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl named Diva. The book depicts Diva’s life, family and friends in a suburb of Helsinki, Finland in the 1970s. The protagonist creates herself through her narration, and she does it in a language that combines the many discourses by which she is surrounded (see also Stenwall 2001, 200). Diva’s storytelling is characterized by a seemingly arbitrary and illogical flow of associations and allusions consisting of words, clichés and phrases from her mother, brothers and friends, the citations of her teachers, dialogues from films, as well as typographic experiments such as the use of bold type and capital letters and a vignette with a small dog at the beginning of each chapter. The novel

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is primarily written in the present tense, but even the past and the future are used as the protagonist moves back and forth freely between different times and story levels. The protagonist and storyteller, Diva, describes her own discourse as “babbling” and herself as a mathematical genius, very beautiful, and always hungry.2 In a highly self-reflexive manner the novel thematizes subjectivity, identity, sexuality, femininity, truth vs. fantasy and reality vs. fiction, topics that were prevalent in Finnish literature in the 1990s (see Ojajärvi 2006, 7௅20; Kurikka 2008; Sevänen 2013). The fragmented, mobile and multivalent identity of the protagonist of the novel, its heavy intertextuality referencing high and low culture and its consequent use of parody and irony aroused much interest among critics at the time it was published (Stenwall 2001, 229–34). It was called both a masterpiece and a disappointment, a modern classic and an interesting failure (Beckman 1998; Sundström 1998, 5; Kåreland 2004, 122), and the protagonist was hailed as something not seen before, an extraordinary girl character in the history of the novel (see e.g., Möller 1998). Two literary models were identified as particularly important for Diva, namely J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye from 1951 and the genre “books for girls,” both clues put forward by the novel itself. No Nordic works of literature or authors were alluded to in the reviews. 3 Instead, the postmodern context of the novel was emphasized (see e.g., Stenwall 2001, 221).4 Many of the features and literary strategies used by Fagerholm had by 1998 already been employed in contemporary postmodern culture, especially in international and national literature and film. This fact was pointed out by the reviewer Kaj Hedman (1998), who wrote, It [the novel] can be apprehended as up to date, written after a favorite recipe. It is, however, not that simple. Rather one thinks that Monika Fagerholm in a skillful manner makes use of an up-to-date phenomenon for her own purposes. (Hedman 1998)

On the whole, critics and scholars were united in their judgment that such a huge and experimental novel about a thirteen-year-old girl had never appeared before in Finland-Swedish, Finnish, or Swedish literature. What is most striking about this novel is the manifold multiplicity that it exhibits on a structural, discursive as well as thematic level. Words like “stocktaking,” “machine,” and “a total recall” have been used when scholars describe the curious structure, variety of discourses and vast knowledge of Diva and its protagonist (Haasjoki 2012, 109, 127–8; Malmio 2012). What has not yet been put forward are the structural and visual features Monika Fagerholm’s novel has in common with digital culture and the

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Internet. In my article I interpret Diva as a “hyperwork,” providing a new explanation of the structure and the diversity of the novel. Fagerholm’s depiction of the protagonist’s growing up is seen as an allegory of the Internet’s growth, as if the novel and its protagonist (see Witt-Brattström 1997, 15) were a picture or a portrayal of the Internet. I argue that the diversity of the novel becomes fully explained only after an analysis of Diva in the context of digital culture, a method that has its origin in Fagerholm’s earlier discussion of “Internetization.” Likewise, an analysis of this highly experimental novel shows the influence of new media on literature. What is more, Diva also casts light on Nordic society and culture in an age characterized by globalization and new communication technology. The questions posed here are, then, why Fagerholm uses a networklike, multisequential structure, and why it was written at the end of the 1990s in Finland? What kind of diversity does the novel offer, and how does it enter in a dialogue with the developments of the digital culture in Finland and in other Nordic countries? Reading the novel in relation to the ongoing Internetization opens a slightly more pessimistic interpretation of its discursive and thematic diversity than those put forward in earlier research. Fagerholm’s novel has repeatedly been interpreted as a utopian, feministic and queer novel, all about the transgression of limits and boundaries connected to hegemonic discourses on gender, sexuality and girlhood (see e.g., Stenwall 2001; Kåreland 2004; Kurikka 2005). What I argue, however, is that the novel and its thirteen-year-old girl protagonist’s repeatedly hailed freedom from limits and transgressive potential might actually represent the diversity of a search engine, on its conditions, and connected to the current development of networks as the prevalent mode of communication and knowledge in the global era.

The Diversity of Diva A structural, discursive and thematic diversity is at the heart of Diva. In the protagonist Diva’s universe, nothing exists as “neither-nor,” but always as “both/and,” as literary scholar Åsa Stenwall (2001, 208) has remarked. Even the subtitle – The Alphabet of an Adolescence with a Laboratory of Dolls (A Bonus Tale from the Future) – combines several heterogenic elements in a curious and highly personal style. “Diva” is the term for a praised and spoiled (female) artist; the story is about letters and growing up, scientific experiments with objects used for children’s games, dolls that eventually look like human beings but are lifeless products. Furthermore, the novel also introduces itself as A Bonus Tale from the

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Future, an extra story not yet seen, but about to come, a tale that includes an element of science fiction. The combinations are unexpected, abundant, all but conventional, and at times even parodic. In the subtitle, it is obvious, then, that difference is not only exhibited, but also thematized, and even played with. Similarly, the novel is ambivalent in its production of discursive and narrative excess and freedom; it not only hails excess, difference and diversity but also thematizes and parodies the same. In the continuation, the reader is confronted with not one or two but altogether five “prologues,” titled, in an ironic and self-reflexive manner, “The prologues,” and called as follows: “Phoenix-Marvel Girl”; “Klafs (en evig dag, kärleken föds)” [Klafs 5 (An Eternal Day, Love is Born)]; “Dagboken” [The Diary]; “Jag och mina vänner” [Me and My Friends]; and “Lilla döden” [The Small Death]. The names of the prologues evoke American popular culture, teen romances, adolescent girls’ fiction, and diaries. Sexuality is referenced too, as “The Small Death” is an allusion to an orgasm. Similarly wide-ranging are the novel’s section titles, which represent the domains of philosophy, science fiction and experimental music, among others. All in all, the novel embraces the discourses of popular culture, consumerism, adolescence, diaries, fairytales, philosophy and literature. Diva’s abundance creates a protagonist whose range of knowledge obviously is above that of an average thirteen-year-old schoolgirl, a feature that also puts forward questions about the actual identity of the protagonist. The richness and the diversity of the multiple discourses and the literary strategies used, such as parody, in imitating and transforming these discourses, combined with a continuous repetition of words, phrases and thoughts already used in the story, create a textual “web” typical of Fagerholm. This is a literary strategy she used earlier in her previous novel, Underbara kvinnor vid vatten and also developed in her novels, Den amerikanska flickan from 2005 (transl. The American Girl, 2010) and Glitterscenen: Och flickan hon går i dansen med röda gullband from 2009 (transl. The Glitter Scene, 2011). On the whole, Fagerholm’s literary project has been about finding the superior literary form for depictions of above all women and girls’ experiences. This is even boldly declared in the opening lines of Diva with the heading “Phoenix-Marvel Girl” (bold type in the original), which put forward the defining features of the novel’s narration, style and thematic: I am Diva, everything I tell is true. Shut your eyes, dream of the most beautiful thing in existence. Open your eyes again. See me. The Girlwoman. DivaLucia. Thirteen years, almost fourteen. BabyWonder. The girl you didn’t think existed. (Fagerholm 1998, 11)6

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Diva as a Hyperwork The novel’s dust cover, designed by Maria Appelberg, gives the first hint of Diva’s relation to digital culture. It is a stylized portrait of a young girl laughing, her image created with small dots in different colors. Only when the small dots, and their interrelation, are apprehended as a whole does the portrait of the protagonist emerge. Clearly, the cover image represents and imitates the fragmentary structure of the novel where all of the diverse parts and elements put together create a network of pieces that form Diva, the protagonist, as well as Diva, the novel. In fact, the small dots can also be read as pixels or as bytes – binary digits – that create digital “data in the form of discrete elements” (Gere 2002, 11).

Figure 4.1: Original cover of Monika Fagerholm’s 1998 novel Diva.

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Although the recent digitalization of culture has created many new forms of texts, there has always been “ergodic,” or interactive literature that possessed features similar to today’s digital texts. As the scholar Espen J. Aarseth explains in his seminal work on ergodic literature: Cybertext is not a “new,” “revolutionary” form of text, with capacities only made possible through the invention of the digital computer. Neither is it a radical break with old-fashioned textuality, although it would be easy to make it appear so. 7 (Aarseth 1997, 18)

Rather, he argues, it is a “broad textual media category” developed to describe the communication strategies of dynamic texts created both inside and outside the digital world (Aarseth 1997, 5). A cybertext is “a machine for the production of variety of expression,” and when you read from it, you are “constantly reminded of inaccessible strategies and paths not taken, voices not heard” (Aarseth 1997, 3; see also Ryan 2004, 329). Literary sociologist Johan Svedjedal (2000, 56) uses the concept “hypertext” to describe the dynamic, multisequential texts that can be found in both digital media and literature, on the Internet as well as in bound books. 8 He describes the characteristics of digital hypertexts in a similar manner as Aarseth and concludes: “They may be called non-linear, multilinear, nonsequential, multisequential or multicursal, the point always being that traditional literary works are nearly always linear or monosequential” (Svedjedal 2000, 60). While monosequential texts are meant to be read from beginning to end, multisequential texts consist of parts, each one monosequential but intended to be read in different sequences each time, sometimes even in random order (Svedjedal 2000, 54௅5). The ideas and concepts of the literary theorist and linguist Roland Barthes have been adopted by hypertheorists, and, consequently hypertexts have been seen as “writerly” texts, intertextual by their very nature, and linked to other texts in a vast web of connections (Koskimaa 1999, 117). Works of this kind have been described as open, fluid and interactive (Svedjedal 2000, 60).9 Of course, Diva is not a digital work but was originally written and published in codex format (although an e-book version now exists). It does not, accordingly, offer its reader the choices offered by a digital hypertext, which can be read in several different sequences (Koskimaa 1999, 117; Ryan 2004, 329; Page and Thomas 2011, 9௅10), but on several levels, it behaves like a hypertext. Diva is profoundly intertextual as well as fluid. It is a writerly, multisequential text. Scholars have called attention to these features even if they do not use these terms in their descriptions. As

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literary scholar Kaisa Kurikka (2005, 59) has noted, the narration of Diva consists entirely of an “indefinite, displaced middle.” One cannot draw a straight line through the novel’s narration; rather, one can enter at any point. Aside from the indicative page numbers and table of contents, the novel provides no clear beginning or ending. Similarly, literary scholar Pauliina Haasjoki (2012, 19, 127–8) has shown in her analysis how the text, in a variety of ways, invites the reader to read not only horizontally (i.e., in the direction of the plot, knowledge and control), but also vertically (toward openness and ambivalence). Other features of the novel that contribute to the multisequentiality of its structure and signal its hypertextual qualities are the visual markers and the spacing. Here the term “lexia,” or units of reading, coined by Barthes in S/Z (1975) and used in studies of hypertexts, is useful in order to apprehend and describe Diva’s weblike structure (Koskimaa 1999, 117). In the novel, the lexias are separated from one another spatially. The following is the final passage from the chapter titled “Franses at the edge of her fifth life (sixth, seventh, eighth?),”10 which is comprised of eleven lexias: “If you don’t tell me anything, Franses, then I will have to tell you.” I go to bed, crawl deep into the cradle of Western civilization, with my dog, with Texye. If you don’t tell me anything, Franses, I will tell. This is what I tell. The laboratory of dolls, the beginning of a tale from the future, a history forever buried within it, even though it has not yet happened. (Fagerholm 1998, 226)11

In this chapter, Diva sits at the kitchen table at her friend Franses’ house doing her homework when Franses arrives, sad and hostile, but she does not want to tell Diva what is bothering her. The chapter, altogether five pages, consists of eleven minor passages – lexias – that include Diva’s philosophical reasoning and her fantasies, her perceptions and descriptions of what she and Franses do, their dialogue, and several leaps in time and place. In the passage cited above, Diva talks to Franses (or, alternatively, is having an inner monologue). However, the lexias that make up the chapter, and all the other chapters as well, do not follow one another according to temporal, chronological structure but are ordered in the same “illogical”– that is, multisequential – way. This creates a story in which the reader follows the many paths of the protagonist and the story, so that even though the novel is read from beginning to end, it gives the impression that these multiple paths exist multisequentially and side by side. Kurikka borrowed the term “rhizome,” from Gilles Deleuze and Félix

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Guattari to describe the novel. A rhizome forms a root system and creates unexpected meetings, bringing seemingly different elements together (Kurikka 2005, 61, 70; see also Österholm 2012, 84). It clearly depicts a central quality of Fagerholm’s novel, the way in which the different lexias are connected to each other in multiple ways with no strict order. The word rhizome also frequently occurs in the current discourse of digital culture and has been used by many scholars to describe the Internet (Gere 2002, 158௅9). The multisequential structure of the novel, then, is similar to that of hypertexts. The use of the bold type enhances this impression. In a digital text, such as one published on the Internet, different lexias (in this case, pages of a site) are connected to each other by links and anchors. The link connects two lexias. An anchor is where the link attaches, that is, at the beginning or the end point of the link, and is marked with a different color and/or underlined (Koskimaa 1999, 117). The anchor makes it possible for the reader to acknowledge the existence of the link. In Diva, the words and sentences appearing in bold indicate that they exist on another level than the rest of the text. “The laboratory of dolls” in the passage above is but one of many citations repeatedly presented in bold type that the protagonist Diva (as well as the reader of the text) returns to repeatedly. The repetition and the bold type are, of course, used for emphasis, but the repeated and bolded words can also be read as a picture of the possibility to link to somewhere else in the text and to enter another lexia. The repeated words, sentences and citations in bold type in Diva, then, function similarly to anchors and links in a digital text. They are the places where the multisequential structure of the novel opens up, as they steer the reader to another place in the novel’s textual “web.” If one views the words and meanings written in bold type as links and anchors, one sees that the pages in Diva visually resemble pages on the Internet, where words are emphasized in order to signal their connection to other pages. The visual effect in Diva is enhanced by the fact that some of the words in bold type that are continuously repeated in the novel also occur as the headlines for the lexias that make up Diva’s storytelling. The repeated words and sentences in bold type function as if they were Diva’s own search words. The random logic of many of the words and citations in bold type also are similar to the outcomes of a search engine. One does get results containing the words given to the search engine, but they often occur in contexts and utterances unexpected and odd and combined in strange ways, though always visually marked. What is more, the novel also demonstrates its ability to combine text, sound and pictures,

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and shows a similar affinity for capital letters and abbreviations as digital culture does (Gere 2002, 8). Besides the bold type, the novel includes other visual elements, including vignettes of a small dog (possibly a picture or a symbol of Franses’ dog Texye), words in all capital letters and words representing sounds, such as, “däpp,” “klafs,” “rasp,” “BANG BANG,” “OINK OINK OINK OINK,” and “GAP.” Consequently, if Diva is apprehended not as a thirteen-year-old girl but rather as a cybertext – “a machine for the production of variety of expression” (Aarseth 1997, 3) – as well as a humorous, humanoid portrayal of the Internet, it is no longer astonishing that the protagonist is able to know all the facts and discourses she does, nor that she repeats words and sentences. It explains the novel’s network-like structure as well as its visual outlooks. This kind of allegorical reading of Diva can also be stretched to the depictions of the protagonist, time and place in the novel. “Do not ever become such a tomboy,” my mom tells me. […] “One can also exist in another way,” she continues. “In several other ways. There are hundreds of ways to be, one can be as one likes. ‘Surprise me,’ said Jean Cocteau to one of his friends, the name of whom I never pronounce right so it is no use to try. But it is a good motto.” “That is how I want you to be for me, Diva. New. Fantastic. Different.” (Fagerholm 1998, 33)12

Diva, as well as Diva, has the ambition to be extraordinary, and the novel was, at the time of its publication, received as such. The declaration “New. Fantastic. Different.” has been interpreted as a testimony of a queer identity, a female utopian wish and a utopian portrayal of being a girl (Stenwall 2001; Kurikka 2005; Haasjoki 2012; Österholm 2012), but the words have also been interpreted as an advertisement, and consequently as a declaration promoting consumerism within current global capitalism. Like a commodity Diva and Diva must live up to the always new demands of the consumer (Ojajärvi 2012, 62). Diva’s mother’s statement offers, however, yet another interpretation in line with my argument. The novel is a story about someone growing up. There are two timelines to take into account in discussing Fagerholm’s novel, that in which the novel is set, the 1970s, and the timeline when the novel was published, the late 1990s. The novel portrays an adolescent in the 1970s, which parallels what the Internet was at that time. The decade has been described as a crucial time for the development of the World Wide Web (www) in the form it is known today, starting with e-mail and role-playing games through the use of Multi-User Domains (MUDs)

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(Castells 2001, 9௅35; Gere 2002, 145–6; Creeber and Martin 2009b, 170௅8). During the 1990s, the Internet grew rapidly worldwide. The Nordic region saw the breakthrough of home multimedia personal computers for Internet surfing (see e.g., Svedjedal 2000, 24௅5). The development of digital culture has had immense consequences for the current understanding of time, space and identity, and created a new world of communication (see e.g., Castells 2001, 3; Creeber and Martin 2009a, 5). One could state, then, evoking the words of Diva’s mother, that the apprehension of time, space, identity and communication has, due to digital media and the Internet, become new, fantastic – in both its meanings, “strange” and “incredible”– and different. In this expansive phase of its development, the growth in the popularity and significance of the Internet in the Nordic region may be described in terms similar to the protagonist of Fagerholm’s novel: the one you thought did not exist, always hungry, filled with desire for everything in the world (Fagerholm 1998, 11, 25). This is also an explanation in line with the reading of Diva’s mother’s declaration as an incitement to consumerism (Ojajärvi 2012). Hand in hand with the development of new communicative technology goes the expansion of the global economy.

Zap Reading Diva The emergence of new technology and new media has always influenced literary production and book publishing, and produced novel forms of communication, textual structures and consequently also new readers. Scholars argue that ergodic hyperworks demand a new reading strategy, a “hyperliterary competence,” and a reader who is more active and participatory than previously. “The defining characteristics of this hyperliterary competence does not have so much to do with new ways of interpretation as with different ways of navigating texts,” Svedjedal (2000, 89) explains (see also Aarseth 1997, 20). He argues that older reading strategies, named by Rolf Engelsing as the intensive and extensive reading, will due to the digitization be followed by “zap reading” and an impatient reader “always on the move towards somewhere else in the textual universe” (Svedjedal 2000, 89௅90). Reading Diva certainly stresses the reader’s ability to navigate. Stenwall (2001, 238) asks if Diva actually demands a new, different kind of readiness of its reader, as the novel to an “extreme degree” activates the reader to find patterns and meanings under the mass of words. In conclusion, she declares that Diva does not demand a new kind of reading, but, rather, a revolution (Stenwall 2001, 241). I would like to modify her

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argument: Diva not only demands but also produces and exemplifies a new kind of reading, as its multisequential structure produces effects like that of the hypertextual zap reading. The novel’s portrayal of the protagonist’s state of mind is akin to a “zap”: the protagonist surfs from one thought, domain, discourse and piece of information to another, freely, and without boundaries, like a person surfing the Internet. The prophecy of the subtitle of Diva – presented as a bonus tale from the future – might also be a forecast of the novel’s (maybe young female) readers of the twenty-first century, (more) familiar with zap reading than the readers confronted with it in the 1990s. Literature has had its own tradition of multisequential texts, namely avant-garde literature, which has in many ways questioned and broadened the limits of literary expression and has offered its own hypertexts long before the Internet existed (see e.g., Koskimaa 1999, 121–2; Gere 2002, 87௅91). These texts have “seldom been more than freak experiments, thrusts at the borders of what book format offers,” Svedjedal (2000, 88) concludes. However, the situation has altered during the last thirty to forty years. Many of the strategies literary scholar Brian McHale has highlighted as typical of postmodern texts already have become everyday conventions in digital hypertexts (Eskelinen 1999, 135). Thus, Diva is a meeting point of two cultures, literary and digital. It belongs to a postmodern literary trend, but it also imitates and transforms the multisequential structure and visual elements of the new media that came of age in the 1990s. There are many possible forms of intermediality,13 such as the illusion that the presence of another type of media can in literature be created by imitating the structure of the other media. The structural and visual features that Diva has in common with the Internet can, then, be seen as forms of intermediality and signals of the presence of the Internet in a literary text. Similarly, the reading strategies put forward by the novel are reminiscent of the strategies of those navigating the World Wide Web. Fagerholm’s novel is certainly not unique in its intermedial relation to the Internet and digital media. In the Finnish literature of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, one can find several examples of literary works that enter into a dialogue with new media. A recent example from Finnish literature is Jaakko Yli-Juonikas’ novel Neuromaani [The New Novel] (2012), whose title might be a parodic allusion to William Gibson’s influential science fiction dystopia Neuromancer from 1984. Yli-Juonikas’ novel takes its relationship to hypertext and multisequentiality a step further; in this cybertext, the reader becomes a “player” and a user. In the

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novel, the reader regularly encounters instructions from the narrator to jump, for example, from page 23 to page 240, where the story continues. The influence and the presence of the Internet are also visible in the production of several young Finland-Swedish and Finnish poets, such as Ralf Andtbacka, Oscar Rossi and Harry Salmenniemi. What is characteristic of their collections of poems is a literary technique with which the author collects (seemingly) arbitrary words, meanings and phrases from the Internet, which are then brought together. Discourses are the ready-made material of the authors who have maybe become more of collectors than creators. In this development in Finnish literature, Diva was an early forerunner.

Girls, Networks and Knowledge: Diversity in the Age of Globalization In Fagerholm’s literary world, the networks are the utmost form of communication and are explicitly connected to the female protagonists. In spite of that, the cultural significance of networks is ambivalent: on the one hand, the discursive, narrative and thematic diversity of the novel with its affinities to the www opens up a depiction of a fluid and free subjectivity, sexuality and identity. Presuming that this is a story about a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl, it offers utopian possibilities of identification, powers and spaces, much grander and freer than those traditionally prescribed for young girls in the society. These might even be the possibilities offered by the Internet to its young, female users. On the other hand, if the diversity found in the novel is seen as a depiction of the heterogeneity of the Internet, readers are confronted with a “protagonist” that is but an imitation and repetition of the discourses of the digital world. In this case, the novel might be read as a dystopian depiction of an “empty” subject, with only a “freedom” to imitate, but without an ability to separate between the trivial and the important. Is Diva, then, finally also a parodic comment upon the transformation of knowledge in the time of digital communication technology? Is it a statement that both depicts and critically revaluates the knowledge offered by global networks? These questions of knowledge and hierarchies of knowledge could be approached through the phrase, “the new cradle of the Western civilization,” Diva’s words for her bed and sleeping bag. This idiom is, of course, usually used to describe or indicate the thoughts and ideas produced by male philosophers in Ancient Greece, highly valued and appreciated, and the basis of all Western knowledge. In Fagerholm’s parodic use of the phrase, the metaphorical aspects (knowledge, general,

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abstract, highly valued and male) are replaced by the concrete, everyday piece of furniture in which a “baby”– a young girl – sleeps. However, obviously and metaphorically speaking, the “new cradle of Western civilization” today is the Internet. In the “supertext” – the global flow created by computer networks – [e]very cultural expression, from the worst to the best, from the most elitist to the most popular, comes together in this digital universe that links up in a giant, a historical supertext, past, present and future manifestations of the communicative mind. (Castells 1996, 372)

What is of importance here is the transformation of knowledge, in the sense of facts that are of importance in the society. In the supertext and in Diva, the hierarchies of knowledge are dissolved, and new subjects have entered the arenas of knowledge and speech. The old male “experts” have been substituted by “ordinary” people, in this case by a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl, with her culturally less valued knowledge. This is, of course, a master revolution. According to the sociologists, a major change took place at the end of the 1980s and at the beginning of the 1990s, when Finland turned rapidly from a state-centered nation into a competition society characterized by a new liberalist economy. Later, it became, to a higher degree than before, a part of the Western world and of global capitalism. The nation-state borders and the economic and political barriers were lowered, and the society opened up and developed in a multicultural direction. Not only did people’s values change, but a discursive transformation also took place: a discourse on freedom and competition replaced an earlier one on security and continuity in predominant speech (Heiskala 2006, 35௅6; Sevänen 2013). Similar kinds of economic, social and discursive developments had already been taking place for a while elsewhere in the Western world. It is not a coincidence, then, that Diva occurs as late as at the end of the 1990s. By that time, Finland had finally become a part of the social, economic and cultural developments that has brought about postmodernity elsewhere. A discursive, thematic and narrative diversity had entered the former, relatively uniform Finnish culture and literature and the apprehensions of time, place and identity lost their former anchorage in the nation-state. Postmodernism has been read as the cultural expression of globalization (see e.g., Connell and Marsh 2011, 94) and Diva is a postmodern text. As has been pointed out, the poststructuralist ideas of literature as an endless web of citations and allusions to other texts, comes very near the ideas of hypertext as “non-linear” writing. Svedjedal (2000,

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12) concludes, “In some ways, the Internet is the redemption of post structuralism.” However, many other, parallel lines of thought centering on webs have also developed simultaneously in the humanities, social sciences and arts, side by side with the digital culture and the World Wide Web. The network has become the model of reality when scholars and writers grasp the world of the late modernity. Simultaneously, the status of networks has changed during the last thirty to forty years. In history, networks were preserved for the private sphere, and “centralized hierarchies were the fiefdoms of power and production,” Manuel Castells (2001, 2) writes. According to him, global capitalism, the development of computing and telecommunications and the societies in which individual freedom and open communication were in high demand made the networks the supreme form in all domains of economy and society, “outcompeting and outperforming vertically organized corporations and centralized bureaucracies” (Castells 2001, 1). The network is associated with flexibility and adaptability, capacities of central importance in order to survive in a rapidly changing world (Castells 2001, 1௅2). Seen from this perspective, diversity, as it is found in Diva or in the Nordic “reality” is not just neutral, good and correct; it has its roots in both economic and social conditions.

Notes 1

There is a population of approximately 300,000 people in Finland who speak Swedish as their mother tongue. Besides Finnish, Swedish is the official language of Finland, and it was not until the nineteenth century that Finnish became the most important language. Before that Swedish was for centuries the language of administration, education and culture in Finland. Finland-Swedish literature is the literature by Finnish authors who write in Swedish. 2 All English translations of Diva are mine. 3 There is however one novel that is similar to Diva: Vera Winkelvir by the Danish author Kirsten Hammann (1993); see Hermansson (2010). 4 In an interview by Marie Petersen (2005), Fagerholm listed her literary “household gods” as the following: Inger Edelfeldt, Kerstin Ekman, Jenny Diski, Janet Frame, Edmund White and Marcel Proust. 5 A word that depicts the sound of boots. 6 Jag är Diva, allt jag berättar är sant. Slut ögonen, dröm om det vackraste som finns. Öppna ögonen igen. Se mig. Flickkvinnan. DivaLucia. Tretton år, strax fjorton. BabyWonder. Hon man trodde att inte fanns. The festival of Lucia is celebrated annually in Sweden and other Nordic countries on December 13, when a young, often blonde, girl dressed in a long, white dress with candles in her hair, appears in public as Saint Lucia, a martyr who died in Italy in the fourth century.

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The festival celebrates the returning of daylight on, according to an older calendar, the 13th of December. 7 Ergodic literature is by definition interactive, and hypertext is a type of digital ergodic text (Aarseth 1997, 12). 8 The use of terms varies in the books written about digital culture and literature. At times cybertext and hypertext seem to be used as synonymous words; see e.g., Aarseth (1997) and Eskelinen (1999). According to David Bell (2009, 32), cyberspace and cyberculture were the terms used in the 1990s. 9 The difference between hypertexts and “usual,” monosequential literature is, as both Aarseth and Svedjedal emphasize, of course a question of level and quality, not of an ontological difference. See e.g., Svedjedal (2000, 84). 10 Franses på randen av sitt femte liv (sitt sjätte, sjunde, åttonde?). 11 “Om du inte berättar något för mig, Franses, så får jag lov att berätta för dig.”/ Jag går i säng, kryper djupt ner i den västerländska kulturens vagga, med hunden min, med Texye. Om du inte berättar något för mig, Franses, så ska jag berätta./ Detta är vad jag berättar./ Docklaboratoriet, början på en historia ur framtiden, en historia för evigt nerlagd i den, fast den inte än har hänt. 12 “Bli aldrig en sådan där pojkflicka,” säger min mamma till mig. […] Man kan också vara på ett annat sätt,” fortsätter min mamma. “På flera andra sätt. Det finns hundra sätt att vara på, man kan vara som man vill. ‘Överraska mig,’ sa Jean Cocteau till en av sina vänner vars namn jag aldrig uttalar rätt så det är onödigt att försöka. Men det är en bra devis.”/ “Så vill jag att du ska vara för mig, Diva. Ny. Fantastisk. Annorlunda.” 13 Intermediality is a subdivision of intertextuality and means the presence of another media in a media, e.g., literary texts that include references to photographs, films, paintings, music, and so on (Wolf 1999, 37௅44).

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References Aarseth, Espen J. 1997. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1975. S/Z: Essä. Staffanstorp: Cavefors. Beckman, Åsa. 1998. “Skapa ett eget alfabet.” Dagens Nyheter, October 23. Bell, David. 2009. “On the Net: Navigating the World Wide Web.” In Digital Cultures: Understanding New Media, edited by Glen Creeber and Royston Martin, 30௅8. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Castells, Manuel. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. —. 2001. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Connell, Liam, and Nicky Marsh. 2011. Literature and Globalization: A Reader. London: Routledge. Creeber, Glen, and Royston Martin. 2009a. “Introduction.” In Digital Cultures: Understanding New Media, edited by Glen Creeber and Royston Martin, 1–10. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Creeber, Glen, and Royston Martin. 2009b. “Appendix: New Media: A Timeline.” In Digital Cultures: Understanding New Media, edited by Glen Creeber and Royston Martin, 170–8. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Eskelinen, Markku. 1999. “Digitaalinen dominantti, bioteksti ja psykosomaattinen käyttöliittymä.” In Johdatus digitaaliseen kulttuuriin, edited by Aki Järvinen and Ilkka Mäyrä, 129–43. Tampere: Vastapaino. Fagerholm, Monika. 1998. Diva: En uppväxts egna alfabet med docklaboratorium (en bonusberättelse ur framtiden). Helsinki: Söderström. Gere, Charlie. 2002. Digital Culture. London: Reaktion Books. Haasjoki, Pauliina. 2012. “Häilyvyyden liittolaiset: Kerronnan ja seksuaalisuuden ambivalenssit.” PhD diss., Turun yliopiston julkaisuja, Annales Universitatis Turkuensis Sarja C – Ser. C Osa – Tom. 343, Scripta lingua Fennica edita. Turku: Turun yliopisto. (http://www.doria.fi/handle/10024/78758). Hedman, Kaj. 1998. “Fagerholm ser allt ur ‘Divas’ synvinkel.” Österbottningen, November 11. Heiskala, Risto. 2006. “Kansainvälisen toimintaympäristön muutos ja Suomen yhteiskunnallinen murros.” In Uusi jako: Miten Suomesta tuli kilpailukyky-yhteiskunta?, edited by Risto Heiskala and Eeva Luhtakallio, 14௅42. Helsinki: Gaudeamus.

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Hermansson, Kristina. 2010. Ett rum för sig: Subjektsframställning vid 1900-talets slut: Ninni Holmqvist, Hanne Ørstavik, Jon Fosse, Magnus Dahlström och Kirsten Hammann. Gothenburg: Makadam. Koskimaa, Raine. 1999. “Digitaaliset tekstit ja kirjallisuus.” In Johdatus digitaaliseen kulttuuriin, edited by Aki Järvinen and Ilkka Mäyrä, 113– 28. Tampere: Vastapaino. Kurikka, Kaisa. 2005. “Tytöksitulemisen tilat: Monika Fagerholmin Diva utopistisena tekstinä.” In PoMon tila: Kirjoituksia kirjallisuuden postmodernismista, edited by Anna Helle and Katriina Kajannes, 56– 72. Jyväskylän ylioppilaskunnan julkaisusarja numero 74. Jyväskylä: Kampus Kustannus. Kurikka, Kaisa. 2008. “To Use and Abuse, to Write and Rewrite: Metafictional Trends in Contemporary Finnish Prose.” In Metaliterary Layers in Finnish Literature, edited by Samuli Hägg, Erkki Sevänen and Risto Turunen, 48–63. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Kåreland, Lena. 2004. “Flickbokens nya kläder: Om Monika Fagerholms Diva.” In Omklädningsrum: Könsöverskridanden och rollbyten från Tintomara till Tant Blomma, edited by Eva Heggestad and Anna Williams, 121–37. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Malmio, Kristina. 2012. “Phoenix-Marvel Girl in the Age of fin de siècle: Popular Culture as a Vehicle to Postmodernism in Diva by FinlandSwedish Author, Monika Fagerholm.” In Nodes of Contemporary Finnish Literature, edited by Leena Kirstinä, 72–95. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Möller, Anna-Lena. 1998. “En finlandssvensk Diva.” Vasabladet, October 23. Ojajärvi, Jussi. 2006. “Supermarketin valossa: Kapitalismi, subjekti ja minuus Mari Mörön romaanissa Kiltin yön lahjat ja Juha Seppälän novellissa Supermarket.” PhD diss., Helsinki: Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura. —. 2012. “‘Benson & Hedges-sytyttimellä’: Kulutustavaroiden ja tavaramerkkikerronnan ulottuvuuksia vuosituhannen vaihteen suomalaisessa romaanissa.” Kirjallisuudentutkimuksen aikakausilehti Avain 2: 52–75. Page, Ruth, and Bronwen Thomas. 2011. “Introduction.” In New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age, edited by Ruth Page and Bronwen Thomas, 1௅16. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Petersen, Marie. 2005. “Monika Fagerholm – flickornas försvarare.” Dagens Nyheter, March 1. http://www.dn.se/dnbok/monika-fagerholmflickornas-forsvarare/.

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Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2004. “Digital Media.” In Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, 329–35. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Sevänen, Erkki. 2013. “Nykykirjallisuuden yhteiskunnallinen kehys.” In Suomen nykykirjallisuus 2: Kirjallinen elämä ja yhteiskunta edited by Mika Hallila et al., 11–34. Helsinki: Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura. Stenwall, Åsa. 2001. Portföljen i skogen: Kvinnor och modernitet i det sena 1900-talets finlandssvenska litteratur. Esbo: Schildt. Sundström, Charlotte. 1998. “Babbligt och experimentellt om henne man trodde att inte fanns.” Ny Tid, 45. Svedjedal, Johan. 2000. The Literary Web: Literature and Publishing in the Age of Digital Production: A Study in the Sociology of Literature. Stockholm: Kungliga biblioteket. Werkelid, Carl Otto. 1995. “‘Mellanfallarna’ får upprättelse.” Svenska Dagbladet, May 15. Witt-Brattström, Ebba. 1997. Ediths jag: Edith Södergran och modernismens födelse. Stockholm: Norstedt. Wolf, Werner. 1999. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality. Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 35. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Yli-Juonikas, Jaakko. 2012. Neuromaani. Helsinki: Otava. Österholm, Maria Margareta. 2012. Ett flicklaboratorium i valda bitar: Skeva flickor i svenskspråkig prosa från 1980 till 2005. Stockholm: Rosenlarv.

THE “CASPIAN CASE” AND ITS AFTERMATH: TRANSGENDER PEOPLE’S USE OF FACEBOOK TO ENGAGE DISCRIMINATORY MAINSTREAM NEWS COVERAGE IN DENMARK TOBIAS RAUN

Denmark tends to be thought of as one of the most sexually liberated countries in Scandinavia, a region known for egalitarian politics and policy. As a gay Norwegian friend once told me, when he moved to Denmark seven years ago, he expected to be moving to a kind of “Dionysian” country that celebrates, acknowledges and even encourages diversity, especially in gender and sexuality. The circulating trope of Denmark as a liberal country is based in part on its pioneering history as the first country to legalize pornographic texts and images in 1967 and 1969 and the first to introduce civil partnership laws for homosexuals in 1989. Denmark also cultivates its national identity, both at home and abroad, as a tolerant and liberal country, and the country’s alleged sexual liberalism is an essential component of Danes’ self-conception (Hvenegaard-Lassen and Maurer 2012; Nebeling Petersen 2012). Gender equality in conjunction with tolerant attitudes toward homosexuals is claimed as a national character trait that helps define Danish modernity (Hvenegaard-Lassen and Maurer 2012). As then-newly elected Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt said in her 2013 New Years Eve speech: A generation ago, people would frown on two men or two women wanting to share a life together. But we have decided that in Denmark we will not judge people by whom they love. We became the first country in the world to allow civil partnership. And last year it became possible for a homosexual couple to be married in the church. Our solidarity with and care for one another become stronger when we make room for new ways of living. (Statsministeriet 2013)1

Thorning-Schmidt describes Denmark as a country that once was marked by prejudice but has now evolved into a more tolerant society. She

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emphasizes an increase in equal rights as well as a changed mindset allowing for greater diversity. As she stated, “Denmark is a country with pronounced equality” (Statsministeriet 2013).2 Since 2009, issues of sexual equality and rights in Denmark have typically circulated under the heading LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender).3 In Denmark as well as worldwide, “LGBT” has with time been naturalized as an umbrella grouping, despite the facts that “transgender” denotes a gender minority rather than a sexual one and the social and political conditions for trans people differ substantially from those of LGB people. When I lived in the United States for six months in 2011, my American transgender friends tended to think that Denmark was “the promised land” for transgender people. They imagined that transgender people get all the medical and legal support they need in Denmark – and for free, thanks to the Scandinavian model of social welfare.4 This image of Denmark as a trans-friendly country likely stems from the celebrated role the country has had in the history of sex reassignment surgeries. Danish artist Lili Elbe (1882–1931) has become known as one of the first recipients of the sex reassignment surgeries performed by German doctors in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Several years later, the first such surgery to capture global media coverage was performed in Denmark. This was in 1952, when former American GI Christine Jorgensen became a media sensation, appearing on the front page of New York Daily News when she returned home after her surgeries. Newsreel images of Jorgensen arriving from Copenhagen at the Idlewind airport in New York were shown all over Europe and the United States, earning Denmark the reputation of being a pioneer in transgender medical care. But while Denmark might be the provenance of remarkable transrelated histories, current-day social and political conditions for trans people in Denmark are hardly as desirable as often projected. ThorningSchmidt’s story of progression and equal rights thus glossed over currentday civil rights abuses against transgender people in Denmark, as Amnesty International’s 2014 report The State Decides Who I Am articulated. The report concluded: Denmark violates the rights of transgender people to the highest attainable standard of health and to be free from inhuman, cruel and degrading treatments by requiring them to undergo unnecessary medical treatments such as surgeries and sterilization in order to obtain legal recognition of their gender. The extensive length of time required for transgender people to complete the process to obtain documents that reflect their gender identity, and the exclusion from that process of transgender people who are not diagnosed with “transsexualism” violates their rights to private and

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family life and to recognition before the law. Psychiatric diagnosis is stigmatizing and should not be a precondition for accessing health treatments and legal gender recognition. (Amnesty International 2014, 39)

Before this report, media coverage of the discrimination transgender people face in Denmark had been scarce. It is only since roughly 2010 that the media have touched upon this at all, and it is only since 2012 that the media have started to frame transgender legislation and health care practices as discriminatory and a potential human rights issue. In this article, I begin by discussing a case from November, 2012, two years prior to Amnesty International’s report, which exemplifies some of the issues raised in it. In this case, Sundhedsstyrelsen [the Danish Ministry of Health] instituted sanctions against medical professionals who provided genderconfirming treatment to transgender people outside the purview of the state-funded and licensed Sexological Clinic in Copenhagen. Trans policy in Denmark falls under the domain of the Ministry of Health, which has assigned the Sexological Clinic the role of implementing its regulations. The clinic was founded in 1986 to treat people with sexual problems, and the state views transgender people as belonging to this category.5 In the case of trans patients, a team of psychiatrists and psychologists act first and foremost as evaluators before any treatment is provided. They determine through numerous conversations and psychological testing whether the trans patient suffers from the so-called “gender identity disorder” that is a prerequisite for medical intervention. The Sexological Clinic thus plays an extremely powerful role as gatekeeper, which transgender people have aggressively criticized – particularly because of the clinic’s lengthy and pathologizing evaluation criteria and procedures. The Ministry’s sanctions in 2012 effectively affirmed the Sexological Clinic’s monopoly as the sole authority that could refer transgender people to any kind of medical treatment. Consequently, it became impossible to receive hormone replacement therapy and gender confirming surgery in Denmark without going through the evaluation processes at the Sexological Clinic. In the remainder of this article, I investigate the role of conventional news media in framing the 2012 case and contrast it with transgender people’s use of social media – Facebook in particular – as a forum for responding to the media coverage. This article raises the following questions: How do Denmark’s established news media represent and frame the 2012 case? How do transgender people engage with this news coverage – sharing articles, commenting, and discussing new developments – on Facebook? How do they use Facebook as a platform

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for sharing information within the trans community and articulating concerns about the case and its broader implications?

News Media Coverage of the “Caspian Case” As several researchers argue, the news media’s agenda- and frame-setting role has consequences for individuals as well as the societies in which they live (McCombs and Shaw 1972, 177; de Vreese 2005, 52). In other words, news media inhabit a symbolic power in reflecting and constructing worldviews (Couldry 2012, 91–2). My method here is to analyze the Danish news media’s framing of the 2012 case through their uses of certain keywords, stock phrases, stereotypical images, sources of information, and sentences that provide thematically reinforcing clusters of facts and judgments (de Vreese 2005, 54). A “frame” is thus “an invitation or an incentive to read a news story in a particular way” (van Gorp 2007, 63). My investigation focuses on the primary news week for the case: November 10-16, 2012. The search terms I used – rendered in English as “transgen*” and “transsex*,” and the name “Caspian Drumm,” – resulted in 43, 23 and 36 hits, respectively, including repetitions and stories irrelevant to the case.6 Altogether there were 34 news stories, but 27 of these were essentially the same story circulating (so-called “shovelware”) across different media (typically digital news publications) and with slightly different framing. This story, which in most cases originated from the Danish news agency Ritzau, typically appeared under the headline: “EL: Fifteen-year-old should be able to have a sex change.”7 (EL here refers to Enhedslisten, a socialist and green political party in Denmark also known as the Red-Green Alliance.) In other versions of the story, the leftleaning Danish newspaper Information was quoted as the main source. The fifteen-year-old in question is Caspian Drumm, who was thrust into the media spotlight in October 2011 after it was reported that he had had a self-funded double mastectomy at a private clinic in Denmark in order to remove his breasts and create a flat, masculine chest. After the initial story broke, the previous Minister of Health, Astrid Krag of the Socialist People’s Party,8 instructed her agency to investigate existing trans healthcare practices and legislation and determine whether the private hospital “acted responsibly” in performing this procedure on Drumm (TV2 Nyhederne 2011). Two things characterized the media coverage of the initial story in 2011. First, coverage focused exclusively on the question of medical intervention for trans people under the age of 18, never addressing trans-

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related healthcare practices more generally. And second, the media framed the debate in binary terms, of being either for or against such surgical procedures for underaged transgender people. For example, the online edition of the newspaper Politiken urged readers to weigh in under the headline: “Is it okay to remove the breasts of a fifteen-year-old?” and encouraged them to cast votes on the question. The article resulted in 4,003 votes – most of them “No” – and numerous comments (Politiken 2011a; 2011b).9 In November, 2012, when the question of surgical procedures and similar medical intervention for transgender people reemerged in mainstream media, it continued the debate and terms generated by the initial “Caspian case,” but what was new was the occasional framing of the case as discriminatory. On November 1, the disciplinary Board of the Ministry of Health released a critique of the surgeon Jens Pilegaard Bjarnesen, who performed the surgery on Drumm. He was convicted of violating the Authorization Act § 17 and was strongly advised to “exercise greater care in his future work” (Patientombuddet 2012). The surgeon was thereby warned against performing surgeries on transgender people, especially those under the age of 18, and would risk losing his license if he continued to do so. The release of this judgment was followed by a stream of news stories that perpetuated the binary framing of the 2011 story as well as an incorrect – and problematic – use of gendered pronouns and characterizations to describe the transgender person involved. On November 16, the tabloid newspaper BT invited readers to share opinions on the following question: “Is it a good idea to let a fifteen-year-old have a sex change?” (BT.dk 2012b). In the newspaper Jyllands-Posten on November 9, Drumm was referred to numerous times as a fifteen-year-old “girl” who “felt transgender” or “intersexed” or “like a boy.”10 Drumm is consistently referred to as “she,” and the article encouraged its readers to debate whether it was wrong to remove “her breasts” (Jyllands-Posten.dk 2012). This resulted in an official statement from Drumm on November 12, 2012, on the left-wing Internet news portal Modkraft.dk that was addressed to the Ministry of Health and to the journalists covering the case. He objected that the Disciplinary Board of the Ministry of Health had not taken his opinion into consideration, and he defined the board’s ruling against surgeon Bjarnesen as “an extreme obstruction of the right to have authority over one’s own life,” as there were now no legal means of accessing transgender surgery in Denmark without the approval of the Sexological Clinic. He also criticized the media for its gendered labeling

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of him and made clear that he should be referred to as a “boy” and as “he” which is “the least degree of decency toward an already highly discriminated-against group.” Furthermore, he requested that future articles refer to him by his current age (in November, 2012) of 17 years old, and not perpetually as a fifteen-year-old, and that journalists use the updated photos – which he attached – depicting “how I actually look today” instead of reproducing two-year-old photos if “you want to write about the results of the surgery and the work of Jens Pilegaard” (Modkraft.dk 2012). His statement critiqued how trans people like himself had been, and continued to be, represented in Danish media with disrespectful gendered labeling and pronouns as well as objectified as a stigmatized “other.” Nonetheless, the tabloid press BT continued a sensationalized framing of the complex issues of medical intervention for transgender people: “Sixteen-Year-Old Transgender: Give Hormone Pills to Eight-Year-Old Girls” (BT.dk 2012a). The most elaborate coverage of the debate appeared in the left-leaning newspaper Information, which ran a story under the headline, “Politicians: Young People Should Be Able to Have a Sex Change” (Information 2012a).11 The article raises several questions not taken up by other, shorter versions of the story, and it also frames them differently. The article takes as its point of departure the critique of the surgeon and claims that the Ministry of Health was limiting transgender people’s access not only to surgeries but also to hormones. Stine Brix, spokesperson for the RedGreen Alliance, and Flemming Møller Mortensen, spokesperson for the Social Democrats, both call for a solution that would make it possible for transgender people under the age of 18 to access treatment.12 Brix, the main speaker in the article, criticizes the established healthcare system at the Sexological Clinic as not “sufficient” and “not a real option” because clinic staff are “relatively conservative in their approach to transgender people,” making it “too difficult to access treatment.” Brix suggests that young transgender people should be offered gender-confirming healthcare on the basis of “informed consent” and asserts that they “should be allowed to decide what to do with their own bodies” with the “consent of their parents and not society” (Information 2012a). The Information article brought more voices into the debate, particularly that of Vibe Grevsen, LGBT Danmark’s spokesperson on transgender issues.13 In addition, Vibe Grevsen was given as much space for expressing her views as any of the others quoted aside from Brix. The article was framed through the lens of a rights-based and discriminatory discourse, describing existing transgender healthcare as inadequate and problematic, advocating for a degree of self-empowerment for trans

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people. However, like the media discourses in 2011, the article framed these issues as pertaining exclusively to young, i.e., underage, transgender people such as Drumm. There was no general discussion of the health and welfare of transgender people as a group. As other media outlets picked up the story (typically as “shovelware” from Ritzau) only Brix from the Red-Green Alliance was featured, cutting out Møller Mortensen. The palette of voices was thus reduced and the story was reframed as a political story generated by the Red-Green Alliance, the most left-leaning party in the Danish parliament. The headline also changed from, “Politicians: Young People Should Be Able to Have a Sex Change” to “EL: Fifteen-Year-Old Should Be Able to Have a Sex Change” (See e.g., Børsen.dk 2012; DR.dk 2012; EkstraBladet.dk 2012; HorsensFolkeblad.dk 2012; Kristeligt-Dagblad.dk 2012; Nordjydske.dk 2012; SkiveFolkeblad.dk 2012). Using “fifteen-year-old” instead of “young people” enabled and produced a different set of connotations, such as “underage” and “child.” Furthermore, while the “fifteen-year-old” in the headline clearly referred to Drumm, he is not named, rendering him a representative, non-specific, and perpetual fifteenyear-old. Isolating the Red-Green Alliance as the allegedly sole speaker of this message also implied that transgender rights belonged to the politics of a left-wing party with a particular agenda, whereas the general term “politicians” had made the assertion seem more balanced, valid and germane to a broader constituency. In all of the Danish news media coverage I analyzed, the term “sex change” circulated as the intelligible, naturalized, and sole purpose of transgender medical intervention. Several papers also referred to the RedGreen Alliance’s assertion as advocating for young transgender people to have a “sex change performed” (B.dk 2012; BT.dk 2012b; Jv.dk 2012) or for allowing “a sex change surgery” (DR P3 2012). However, not only was this a misleading way to describe the numerous and complex social, medical and legal processes many transgender people undergo in order to change their gender appearance and obtain juridical gender reclassification, but it also mischaracterized the issues raised by the Drumm case. Prior to the release of Amnesty International’s report in 2014, news articles did not raise the question of whether transgender people should be allowed easier access to legal reclassification (and only here does a sex change makes sense as a singular event), but rather focused on whether young transgender people should be able to access transitioning technologies such as hormones and surgery (not including genital surgery). “Sex change” is also a spectacular trope that ties into a reservoir of

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cultural meanings and images connoting a wondrous, overnight, Frankenstein-like transformation, which is how mainstream media long have portrayed it (Phillips 2006). For example, one of the first major media stories about a successful sex reassignment surgery was the 1952 front-page article in the New York Daily News about Christine Jorgensen, which was headlined “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty.” Changing the headline in the 2012 Danish news story thus tapped into the loaded history of the term “sex change” as a spectacular signifier, amplifying its effect by invoking a “fifteen-year-old.” Finally, the altered headline implies that transgender rights are promoted exclusively by the Red-Green Alliance, which many Danes consider to be an extreme left-wing party with unrealistic political goals. Thus many of the news articles covering the 2012 case drew on sensational preexisting discourses, especially in their headlines, and often employed debate-like framing, even though the original news story had advanced a rights-based discourse. That these two discourses co-existed in the circulation of a single news event signaled a battle between a longtime hegemonic discourse that “othered” transgender people and a new and evolving discourse that highlighted discrimination and human rights.

“Omfg!!!!”: The “Caspian Case” on Facebook Facebook is not only the most dominant social network site in Denmark (Jensen and Tække 2013, 10–1), but it is also the main online platform for Danish transgender people to “meet” and communicate. In this section, I examine the interaction that took place in the public Facebook group TGRUPPEN [the T-Group], of which one needed to be a member in order to post and comment.14 During the news weeks analyzed in this article, the T-Group had the largest membership of all trans-related Danish Facebook groups (and continues to have, with 777 members as of June 2015). It is officially hosted by a national LGBT organization called LGBT Danmark, and it reaches out to transgender people and their allies in the broadest sense.15 My investigation of how the Caspian Drumm case emerges and develops in the T-Group Facebook discussion thread focuses on a twoweek time span from Wednesday, November 7 to Wednesday, November 21, 2012, starting just before the news week examined in the previous section and concluding just after. The “story” emerges on Facebook prior to its mention in the mainstream media with posts that quote from the homepage of Dr. Peter Bagger, a Danish gynecologist who was among the health professionals supplying transgender people with hormones outside the Sexological Clinic’s domain. The quote reads:

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After a friendly request from the Ministry of Health, our clinic, as of June 11, 2012, is ceasing to provide any form of treatment for patients with transsexualism. All patients will instead be referred to the Sexological Clinic at the Danish National Hospital, which will contact them.16

Bagger’s official warning from the Ministry of Health is not mentioned in the established news media’s coverage of the case – here the focus is exclusively on the sanction against the surgeon Bjarnesen. The person who quotes the clinic’s announcement on Facebook adds the comment: “I am thinking that we all have to fucking do something” (November 7, 2012).17 This post opens a flood of other posts and comments on the implications of this request from the Ministry of Health and how trans people should respond, both individually and collectively. The comments on the initial posts express intense frustration: “NO, NO, NO, this is NOT happening!,” “omfg!!!!” and “fuck” (November 7, 2012). In the following section, I will examine how the Facebook T-Group interacted with established news media coverage of the Ministry of Health’s sanctions of trans-related health treatment outside of the Sexological Clinic in 2012, as well as the role the T-Group served in the transgender community during this period.

Facebook as a Platform Social media platforms – and Facebook in particular – are playing an increasingly important role in finding news (Kleist Nielsen and Schrøder 2013, 20). However, there has been limited research on the particular ways in which people – particularly those belonging to minority groups – use social media to find, share and comment on news (Bødker 2013; Holmgaard Christensen 2013). Investigating how a minority group such as Danish transgender people uses social media platforms is thus timely and needed, because trans people increasingly use these sites to educate themselves, organize their community and stage protests, as shown in some limited research on this issue in a global context (Whittle 1998; Gauthier and Chaudoir 2004; Shapiro 2004; Hill 2005; Raun 2012; 2015; 2016). Facebook as a site has certain “affordances.”18 It offers certain possibilities for communication such as the ability to create or join common interest user groups or events and easily share files, links, and videos as well as the ability to comment on all of these things. These are all behaviors that trans people engaged in during this period. By mapping and coding all of the posts and comments on the T-Group’s page during this period, I was able to extrapolate three dominant and intersecting

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tendencies for how the group’s members used the site: as a news channel, as a site for exchanging everyday experiences and knowledge, and as a forum for political mobilization. I will now explore the characteristics of each of these and how they relate to one another.

Talking With, and Back to, Established News Media The T-Group is primarily a channel for distributing trans-related news and information to a specialized Facebook audience, and links are provided to national and international news stories dealing with transgender. During the two weeks of posts to the group page that I studied, members linked to seven news articles and one radio program related to the Caspian Drumm case. Three articles from different news outlets, had the headline “FifteenYear-Old Should Be Able to Have a Sex Change” (B.dk 2012; DR.dk 2012; Politiken.dk 2012). Other linked articles included the Information story with the headline “Politicians: Young People Should Be Able to Have a Sex Change,” the BT article headlined “Sixteen-Year-Old Transgender: Give Hormone Pills to Eight-Year-Old Girls,” an online oped column by Karen M. Larsen (Information 2012b) titled, “We Are Letting Transgender People Down,” and Drumm’s blog post on Modkraft.dk. The linked articles that were shared the most (three times each) during this period were the Information news story and Drumm’s blog post. The first time Drumm’s statement was posted, it met with affirmative comments such as “Bravo,” “excellent, Caspian,” and “Well roared, young lion.” But it also caused self-reflection within the group. One member posted the following: I hope that you will also tell us off if we cross the line in the never-ending discussion that your situation has caused. It’s hard to avoid talking about you completely when personal matters interfere with overall political images. (November 11, 2012)19

As this quote highlights, the Caspian Drumm case had become so important to the trans community that even transgender people themselves risked forgetting that Drumm was a person and not just a media persona. Drumm’s official statement from the blog was also posted later as a comment in a discussion thread. In that case, it functioned as a response to a post by a group member who tried to explain what caused the Ministry of Health’s sanction against surgeon Bjarnesen. As the poster wrote, the sanction was due to “the fifteen-year-old girl who had her breasts removed” (November 14, 2012). The poster was immediately corrected by

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a group member who posted Drumm’s statement and wrote: “The fifteenyear-old is a trans man/boy – not a girl. If we want changes to happen we need to stop using the oppressive language the system uses” (November 14, 2012).20 This response signaled an awareness of the ways in which language enables and disables our lived realities. Further, it demonstrated that in this forum, there were rules about what should and should not be said. Respecting a trans person’s self-identifying gender labels was not open to negotiation but rather a fundamental premise for being part of the group; one was not to reproduce established media’s labeling of trans men as “girls” or use the pronouns “she/hers” in reference to trans men. The correction also highlighted how this online group is – as online groups generally are – governed by certain community norms that prescribe implicitly and explicitly what kind of communication is appropriate and welcomed (Baym 2010, 78). Failure to adhere to these norms results in immediate critical comments or corrections from other group members. Following the initial correction, other members began to weigh in on the thread with questions and comments implying that the offending person’s incorrect use of gender labeling had broader implications. One member asked whether the person believed that it was okay that the Sexological Clinic refused to supply Drumm with hormones and surgeries, while another tried to mediate: “I think she means well and is just trying to explain what the Ministry of Health has said” (November 14, 2012).21 As the discussion continued, it became clear that the group consensus was that the person’s use of incorrect gendered language and labeling was not acceptable and that transgender people should be allowed access to hormones and surgeries, even if they are under the age of 18. People in the group seemed vigilant and on guard against non-trans people’s labeling of, and attitudes toward, trans people, at least if they collided with the norms of the group. The person who made the offending post was even asked about her transgender status. Another group member who knew her affirmed her identity as a trans person (November 14, 2012). Such vigilance is linked to longstanding medical and psychological discourses in which transgender people “were compelled to be referents in the language games of other senders and addressees” (Stryker 2006, 12). Since the early diagnostic literature on transgender issues in the nineteenth century and continuing in later psychological and gender theoretical studies – including current, pathologizing health procedures and practices – other “experts” have spoken on behalf of transgender people and prevented them from having a say or developing a voice themselves (Califia 1997; Amnesty International 2014). This history, combined with current Danish media’s persistent use of disrespectful gender labels and

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pronouns and stigmatizing or sensationalizing framing, demonstrates why there was a need for the T-Group in the first place. This also accounts for why group members are watchful, especially toward non-trans people’s presence in the group. The thread discussed above suggests that one’s legitimacy to speak in the group is based partly on one’s self-identification as a trans person. It also depends on the ability and willingness of other group members to vouch for the person doing the posting. What ultimately “saved” the person in question in the 2012 thread was that the mediator confirmed that she was indeed a trans person (thus “one of us”) and that her intentions were good. Another Facebook “share” of Drumm’s statement also included a link to the BT article, “Sixteen-Year-Old Transgender: Give Hormone Pills to Eight-Year-Old-Girls” (BT.dk 2012a) in the comment thread. The link to the BT article was followed by two comments that focused on what Drumm was saying: “He is perfectly right!” and “Of course it would be better to get hormone blockers before puberty sets in, but unfortunately this is not the case yet” (November 12, 2012).22 Tellingly, no one commented on BT’s framing of the story. This begs the following question: Was the sensationalism so obvious to group members that they did not feel the need to point it out? Or was the group so used to sensational framing that they simply read past it and focused instead on the things that transgender people actually were able to say? As research conducted by psychology scholar Darryl Hills (2005, 37–8) shows, mainstream media’s sensational representation of celebrity Christine Jorgensen, for example, was an important part of many trans people’s identity formation, no matter the stigmatizing and sensationalized character of this representation.23 In this vein, support for transgender people who participate in mainstream media discourses is much more important for T-Group members to express within the group than critiques of how news media frame their coverage. One exception, however, occurred when the Information article was shared, eliciting this comment: Nice article and great framing. But why is it that we as a collective transgender community accept that the fight for transgender rights is limited to a certain age group? Isn’t the purpose of the fight for transgender rights to focus on the generally poor conditions for all transgender people???24 (November 16, 2012)

As this post underscores, the age question takes up the most discursive space in the established news media’s coverage of the story, giving the impression that the Ministry of Health’s sanctions were directed only toward transgender people under the age of 18. But as numerous Facebook

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posts made clear, transgender people older than 18 also were negatively affected. The post above holds both mainstream media and the transgender community responsible for failing to make the general public aware of the broader implications for the rights of all trans people.

Politicizing Personal Experience, Mobilizing the Community In the T-Group, the personal goes hand-in-hand with the political. As one group member wrote in a post, the Ministry of Health required that transgender people be screened by a psychiatrist, but she herself had never consulted one and instead consulted a gynecologist in order to receive hormone treatment. She wrote, “Why would I, as a mentally healthy person, be in need of assessment from a psychiatrist?” (November 14, 2012).25 Taking her own experiences as a point of departure, she questioned the Ministry of Health’s sanctions against doctors who treat transgender people outside of the Sexological Clinic as well as the pathologizing of “transsexuality” as a mental disorder that requires diagnosis by a psychiatrist. In the comments that followed, several others shared their gender transitional experiences and processes – and many recounted being rejected by the system (i.e., the Sexological Clinic), forcing them to seek treatment elsewhere. This led to an offer from one of the group members to take legal action on behalf of those who had been rejected within the last two years (November 14, 2012).26 This shows that the sharing of personal experiences can potentially lead to lawsuits, which have political impacts far beyond the individual trans person. The T-Group thus functions as a forum where personal experiences and political mobilization intersect. Expressions of support and recognition circulate among group members through the mutual sharing of experiences and through the continuous acknowledgement of personal or institutionalized discrimination in regard to legislation and healthcare practices. Each member is supported in his/her/their experiences with discrimination. Thus individual members’ political and emotional lives are interwoven with the community’s political and therapeutic cultures within the Facebook group. The first signs of mobilization in November, 2012, occurred immediately after the notification that the Ministry of Health had issued sanctions. T-Group members sought to organize themselves to determine whether doctors were prohibited from prescribing hormones without the approval of the Sexological Clinic and whether the sanctions would affect people who already were in treatment or who wanted to start treatment.

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This was followed by a flurry of suggestions: Maybe someone could formulate a standard letter that we could all send to the spokespeople for public health within our political parties? People who have contacts within the media could maybe have them take up the case? (November 8, 2012)27

Also discussed were the challenges of sharing information on a group forum that is visible to the public. As one member wrote: Incidentally, I am sorry, maybe I am being paranoid, but I suggest that we either stop discussing this case publicly or that we are very careful with mentioning names in here as it can have consequences for the people whose doctors have not yet been bulldozed by the Ministry of Health. (November 7, 2012)28

In these initial postings and debates, doubt and insecurity about the consequences of the sanctions took up the most space. One member labeled the case “The Hormone Panic” and tried to calm people down by reassuring them that the T-Group as a collective would offer advice on personal issues concerning hormones and also contact politicians on their behalf (November 11, 2012). Facebook was thus heavily used by T-Group members during this period to clarify what possibilities for hormone treatment remained for individual transgender people. It was clear from the numerous posts and comments to the group page that many transgender people did not feel that established news media kept them sufficiently informed and updated and were therefore using Facebook as a way to share knowledge and information. Recent studies have shown that for a growing number of Danes – especially those between the ages of 18 to 24 – social media has become an important way to find news, and Facebook in particular is an often used “digital intermediary” (Kleist Nielsen and Schrøder 2013, 9, 20). However, only 3 percent considered social media their primary source of online news (Kleist Nielsen and Schrøder 2013, 22). In this particular case, Facebook did not function merely as a supplement or a “digital intermediary,” but rather became for many trans people the primary source of knowledge and information. Also often shared in the T-Group during this period were letters and emails written to and from public authorities and politicians. This included letters written to the Ministry of Health requesting clarification of the situation concerning hormone treatment for transgender people, as well as the Ministry’s responses (November 16, 2012). Such sharing became a way to exchange information communicated by the authorities involved. It

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also showed group members that it was both possible and legitimate to contact authorities directly and ask them to address the problems that transgender people face. These postings could then motivate and encourage others to do the same. Furthermore, this process became simplified for members when not only specific arguments but also actual correspondence were shared on the group page, so that others could model their own letters on, or copy wording from, the sample correspondence posted on Facebook and email their own letters to the relevant authorities. In-person meetings to assist or politically mobilize members of the trans community politically also were organized, and information was disseminated about them through Facebook. A November 10, 2012, post, “My doctor has stopped hormone treatment, what do I do?” announced an offline meeting two days later to discuss individual and collective strategies for action (November 10–12, 2012). Other political actions included online petitions such as one titled, “Don’t Take Hormones Away from Trans People,” which members were encouraged to circulate in their networks (November 10, 2012). Calls for demonstrations also circulated: Is there anybody who wants to demonstrate VISIBLY, with banners and all, against the degrading conditions for transgender people right now? […] It is not harmless to your health to stop taking hormones from one day to the next, and I think that the media and the public need to be made aware of the state of limbo we are currently in. I agree that we need to prioritize finding solutions for the people in our community who are temporarily losing their hormones but I also think that it is just as important to make the public aware that the state has failed us as patients […]. I am of the opinion that if we continue to find “alternatives” in a calm and orderly manner without making a fuss, then we are sustaining and feeding the Ministry of Health’s argument and providing proof that we are feeble creatures, a minority group unable to claim our rights! Come on dear transgender friends. The time is now! (November 12, 2012)29

Articulated in this post was the notion of a collective “we” who must act and demand rights, and through this articulation a transgender community is both assumed and constructed. The rhetoric is revolutionary, and the poster advocates for visible protest in order to call attention to, and validate, feelings of dissatisfaction and discrimination pervading the trans community.

Exit: Continued Mobilization and the Fight for Changes Trans people in Denmark have organized themselves within various factions since the late 1980s (Jöhnk 2012, 13), but the transgender

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movement is larger and more visible today. The Internet has opened up new possibilities for trans people to achieve higher levels of visibility and form a greater range of communities, as research has shown (Whittle 1998; Shapiro 2004; Hill 2005; Raun 2010; 2012; 2015; 2016). Sociologist Eva Shapiro (2004, 170) argues that the Internet has been central to empowering trans subjects: “Prior to the Internet, it was possible for trans people to have no knowledge of anyone else like themselves” and they were therefore “reliant on the medical profession and the few trans support organizations for information.” This was indeed the case in Denmark, where transgender people were scattered, unaware of one another’s existence, often disconnected from any community, and unable to communicate as a group. Thus they were often reluctant to speak up when faced with discrimination both within and outside of the health care system. I would argue that Facebook’s T-Group forum has helped trans people to self-educate, self-empower and mobilize as a group. The group’s function has been vital to raising awareness, both internally within the group and externally in the greater society, about the discriminatory nature of Danish trans legislation and the healthcare practices and procedures of the Sexological Clinic. This resulted in the 2014 Amnesty International report, which is based in part on statements from and experiences shared by transgender people. The report attracted massive media coverage in Denmark when it came out in February, 2014, and in the aftermath, several politicians spoke of the need to revise existing trans legislation. This demonstrates yet again that it matters who is doing the speaking; in this case, an internationally recognized human rights organization was able to speak on behalf of Danish trans people with far greater authority than the trans people could themselves. Amnesty International’s role as an agent of change is thus far more likely to change the discourse of the debate and the framing of trans-related media coverage. Following the report’s release, on June 12, 2014, the Danish law on sterilization as a requirement for a juridical gender reclassification was changed. This means that transgender people over the age of 18 could, starting September 1, 2014, have their gender reclassified without medical intervention after a “reflection period” of six months, after which one has to confirm the choice of gender (CPR 2014). The system still, however, upholds a binary gender system within which there is no juridical recognition for people who identify as inbetween, or beyond, “male” or “female.” Amnesty International, LGBT Danmark and various transgender organizations have expressed great satisfaction with the new legislation, but the procedures for accessing transgender healthcare are under revision. As of June, 2014, the Ministry of Health still required transgender people to undergo psychiatric

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assessment and receive a psychiatric diagnosis in order to access any gender-confirming medical intervention. Furthermore, the Ministry in 2014 reaffirmed the Sexological Clinic’s authority on the grounds that it was the only facility to possess the requisite expertise for treating transgender people (Sundhedsstyrelsen 2014). The Ministry also sent a second and final warning to doctors practicing outside of the clinic, who supplied transgender people with hormones, advising them that they risked losing their licenses to practice medicine if they continued to do so. This once again caused transgender people to gather online and distribute information and petitions (Elvin and Magnild 2014). While Danish transgender people won an important battle in 2014 with regard to judicial gender classification, many fights remain – both online and offline – within the area of trans-related healthcare in order to end the perpetual pathologization of trans people. Mainstream Danish news media may well play an important role in this ongoing struggle. While they have started to write about transgender people from the perspective of human rights and discrimination, they also continue to use stigmatizing and sensationalized framing in their reporting on trans issues. Facebook continues to provide an important forum that Danish transgender people use to meet, communicate, connect, and mobilize. As a platform where individuals can gather to share everyday experiences of transphobia, and where people can reflect and self-educate individually and collectively, Facebook has become an important news channel for many forms of trans knowledge.

Notes  1 This translation and all others from Danish are my own. For en generation siden blev der set skævt til, at to mænd eller to kvinder ville leve sammen. Men i Danmark har vi besluttet, at vi ikke dømmer nogen på, hvem de elsker. Vi blev det første land i verden, som gav adgang til registrerede partnerskaber. Og sidste år blev det muligt for et homoseksuelt par at blive viet i folkekirken. Vores fællesskab og omsorg for hinanden bliver stærkere, når vi giver plads til at leve på nye måder. 2 Danmark er et land med stor lighed. 3 The main Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual (LGB) rights organization in Denmark changed its name in 2009 to include a “T” for trans and became LGBT Danmark, signaling that transgender people were welcomed and included in their politics. Sometimes “Q” is added to denote “queer,” articulating a reluctance among some within this umbrella community to identify with the established labels for gender and sexuality. 4 Transgender is an umbrella term encompassing claims of gender identity that involve a “movement across a socially imposed boundary away from an unchosen

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 starting place” (Stryker 2008, 1; italics in original). Thus the term “transgender” embraces gender variant people, identifying across, beyond, or in between fixed categories of male and female. However, it also includes transsexual people, who make use of hormones and/or various kinds of surgery to physically alter their bodies and who seek judicial gender reclassification. It varies from country to country whether these medical interventions are covered by public or private health insurance; however, in most countries it does de facto involve a large degree of self-funding, which is extremely costly. As “transgender” includes such a wide variety of people – both gender variant people who specifically dis-identify with a binary gender system, and transsexual people who dis-identify with their assigned gender at birth to identify with the other fixed category, male or female – it is hardly surprising that there are ongoing debates about how inclusive the term “transgender” should be and what a transgender political movement should fight for. 5 Aside from transgender people, who constitute a fraction of their patients, the Sexological Clinic also treats people suffering from erectile dysfunction or vaginism, sexual assault offenders and survivors, pedophiles, and adult survivors of child abuse. 6 The original Danish search terms I used were transkøn* and transsek*. 7 EL: 15-årig skal kunne skifte køn. The Danish language does not distinguish between sex and gender, so there is only one word, køn, encompassing and labeling both the physical body – including genitalia – and the gender that one identifies as and/or presents oneself as. In my translation of the word køn I have therefore chosen “sex” because of the context of the word and the way in which kønsskifte/skifte køn is normally used in mainstream Danish media and the general public. 8 The Socialist People’s Party (in Danish, Socialistisk Folkeparti or SF) is historically a green and socialist democratic party. In recent years it has faced strong critique for not being socialist enough, and some voters have embraced the Red-Green Alliance, EL, instead. 9 Politiken is one of the three largest Danish morning newspapers along with Jyllands-Posten and Berlingske. But whereas Jyllands-Posten and Berlingske cater to a right-leaning readership, Politiken has a more progressive political agenda, and its readers are typically left-leaning. Politiken is often accused of being very Copenhagen-focused and brands itself as intellectually hip and stimulating. 10 Jyllands-Posten is an independent newspaper that caters both to a right-leaning national readership and residents of the large Danish peninsula of Jutland, a predominately rural area. 11 Information is an independent Danish newspaper that caters to a politically leftleaning readership. Based in Copenhagen, it is considered to be Denmark’s most intellectual and leftist newspaper. 12 The Social Democrats were originally considered to be a political party for the working class, and the party was instrumental in laying the foundation of Denmark’s welfare state. However, in recent years the party’s profile has become

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 less clear, and many believe the party has taken a turn to the right, catering to a lower-middle class concerned primarily with financial security. 13 LGBT Danmark, the Danish national organization for gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people, is the country’s main LGBT rights organization. LGBT Danmark works to secure LGBT people’s political, social, cultural and workplace equality, prevent discrimination, and lobby lawmakers on LGBT issues (see http://lgbt.dk/). 14 I have asked for, and received, permission to write about and quote from TGroup posts. However, I have chosen not to name the individuals posting or commenting because this is a study of transgender people’s use of Facebook as a collective, not as individuals. I also believe that while the group may be open, “researchers need to consider the effects of ‘bringing the public’ to a particular online site, community, and venue which, because of the sheer size of the Internet, might otherwise have remained unnoticed” (McKee and Porter 2009, 89). 15 The group encompasses self-identified trans and gender variant people who are transitioning medically and non-medically. The stated purpose is to welcome “everybody who feels that they have a relationship to the trans community” (quoted from the group description). 16 Efter venlig henstilling fra Sundhedsstyrelsen indstiller klinikken pr. 6.11.2012 enhver form for behandling af patienter med transsexualisme. Alle patienter bliver i stedet henvist til sexologisk klinik på Rigshospitalet, hvorfra de vil modtage en indkaldelse. 17 Tænker at nu bliver vi sgu nød til at gøre noget alle sammen. 18 The concept of “affordance” is widely used within the studies of social media. It focuses on the contextualized actions that a technology makes qualitatively easier, “not as latent capability innate to the technology, but as a potentiality that only exists when leveraged within a specific domain and set of actions” (Majchrzak et al. 2013, 39). 19 Jeg håber, du også giver os andre en opsang, hvis vi kommer til at træde over stregen i den evindelige diskussion, din situation har medført. Det er svært når personforhold blander sig med det overordnede politiske billede helt at undgå at snakke om dig. 20 Den 15-årige er en transmand/dreng – ikke en pige. Hvis vi vil have forandringer skal vi ikke benytte os af systemets undertrykkende sprogbrug. 21 Jeg tror hun mener det godt og prøver bare at fortælle hvad sundhedsstyrelsen har sagt. 22 Han har jo fuldkommen ret!/Selvfølgelig ville det være bedst at få hormonblokkere allerede når puberteten indtræffer, men desværre forholder det sig ikke sådan endnu. 23 Hill has conducted life-story interviews with twenty-eight members of Toronto’s trans community, collecting data from 1996 to 2001. 24 Fin artikel og dejlig med fokus. Men hvordan kan det være vi som et samlet transkønnet miljø billigere i at begrænse transrettigheds kampen til en bestemt alders gruppe. Er meningen med transrettigheds kampen ikke at der skal være fokus på de generelle dårlige forhold for alle transkønnet???

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 Hvorfor skulle jeg som sund og rask have en udredning fra en psykiater? 26 There is a three-year statute of limitations on patient complaints from the time the damage is discovered to the date the notification is filed. 27 Måske nogen kunne udarbejde et standartbrev man kunne sende til ens partis sundhedsordfører? Folk der har kontakter til medierne kunne måske prøve at få dem til at tage sagen op? 28 I øvrigt – og beklager, måske er jeg paranoid – vil jeg foreslå at vi enten stopper med at diskutere denne sag offentligt eller er meget forsigtige med, hvad der bliver nævnt herinde, da det kan have konsekvenser for folk hvis læger endnu ikke er blevet tromlet af Sundhedsstyrelsen. 29 Er der nogen som vil være med til at demonstrere SYNLIGT, med bannere og hele molevitten imod de forringelser af vilkår, vi som transkønnede gennemgår i denne tid ?! […] Det er ikke helbredsmæssigt ufarligt at stoppe med at tage så alvorlige sager som kønshormoner, fra den ene dag til den anden, og jeg synes at medier og offentlighed skal gøres opmærksom på, det limbo vi befinder os i. Jeg er enig i, at vi skal prioritere at finde løsninger for dem som på kort sigt, mister deres hormonbehandling internt i miljøet, men jeg synes det er ligeså vigtigt, at få gjort offentligheden opmærksom på det patientsvigt staten byder os […] Jeg er af den overbevisning, at hvis vi bliver ved med at finde “alternativer” i det stille, uden at gøre noget større væsen ud af situationen, så fastholder og fodrer vi sundhedsstyrelsens argumentation og bevisførelse af, at vi er skrøbelige existenser, at vi er en minoritet som ikke evner at kræve vores ret! Kom nu, Kære transkønnede venner. Det er nu! 25

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References Amnesty International. 2014. The State Decides Who I Am: Lack of Legal Gender Recognition for Transgender People in Europe. https://www.es.amnesty.org/uploads/media/The_state_decide_who_I_a m._Febrero_2014.pdf. Baym, Nancy K. 2010. Personal Connections in the Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity. Bødker, Henrik. 2013. “Sociale medier som journalistisk kommentarfilter.” In Facebook: Fra socialt netværk til metamedie, edited by Jakob Linaa Jensen and Jesper Tække, 211–28. Fredriksberg: Samfundslitteratur. Califia, Patrick. 1997. Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism. San Francisco: Cleis. Couldry, Nick. 2012. Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice. Cambridge: Polity. CPR (Det Centrale Personregister). 2014. “Transkønnede får mulighed for at få tildelt nyt personnummer.” June 12. https://cpr.dk/service/nyheder/2014/jun/transkoennede-faar-mulighedfor-at-faa-tildelt-nyt-personnummer/ (accessed June 19, 2015). de Vreese, Claes H. 2005. “News Framing: Theory and Typology.” Information Design Journal + Document Design, 13.1: 51–62. Elvin, and Magnild. 2014. “Til kamp for informeret samtykke.” Modkraft.dk, September 29. http://modkraft.dk/artikel/til-kampinformeret-samtykke. Hill, Daryl B. 2005. “Coming to Terms: Using Technology to Know Identity.” Sexuality and Culture, 9.3: 24–52. Holmgaard Christensen, Lars. 2013. “Facebook som nyhedskanal: Det sociales nyhedsværdi.” In Facebook: Fra socialt netværk til metamedie, edited by Jakob Linaa Jensen and Jesper Tække, 229–44. Fredriksberg: Samfundslitteratur. Hvenegaard-Lassen, Kirsten, and Serena Maurer. 2012. “Bodies and Boundaries.” In Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region: Exceptionalism, Migrant Others and National Identities, edited by Kristín Loftsdóttir and Lars Jensen, 119–39. Farnham: Ashgate. Jensen, Jakob Linaa, and Jesper Tække. 2013. “Indledning: Facebook i den danske hverdag fra socialt netværk til metamedie.” In Facebook: Fra socialt netværk til metamedie, edited by Jakob Linaa Jensen and Jesper Tække, 9–14. Fredriksberg: Samfundslitteratur. Jöhnk, Erwin Maria. 2012. Transkønnet informationer: En opslagsbog for alle, der vil vide mere. Vivild: EMJ-forlaget.

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Kleist Nielsen, Rasmus, and Kim Schrøder. 2013. Danskernes brug af nyhedsmedier 2013. Center for Magt, Medier og Kommunikation. Roskilde University. McCombs, Maxwell E., and Donald L. Shaw. 1972. “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media.” Public Opinion Quarterly, 36.2: 176–87. McKee, Heidi A., and James E. Porter. 2009. The Ethics of Internet Research: A Rhetorical, Case-Based Process. New York: Peter Lang. Majchrzak, Ann, et al. 2013. “The Contradictory Influence of Social Media Affordances on Online Communal Knowledge Sharing.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19.1: 38–55. Nebeling Petersen, Michael. 2012. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Biopolitiske rekonfigurationer af den homoseksuelle figure.” PhD diss., University of Copenhagen. Patientombuddet. 2012. “Afgørelser – Sundhed: Speciallæge i plastikkirurgi Jens Pilegaard Bjarnesen.” November 1. http://sundhed.etikportalen.dk/afg_relser/decision_panel/68// (accessed June 19, 2015). Phillips, John. 2006. Transgender on Screen. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Raun, Tobias. 2010. “Screen-Births: Exploring the Transformative Potential in Trans Video Blogs on YouTube.” GJSS, Graduate Journal of Social Science, 7.2: 113–30. —. 2012. “DIY Therapy: Exploring Affective Self-Representations in Trans Video Blogs on YouTube.” In Digital Cultures and the Politics of Emotion: Feelings, Affect and Technological Change, edited by Athina Karatzogianni and Adi Kuntsman, 165–80. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. —. 2015. “Video Blogging as a Vehicle of Transformation: Exploring the Intersection between Trans Identity and Information Technology.” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 18.3: 365–78. —. 2016. (forthcoming). Out Online: Trans Self-Representation and Community Building on YouTube. Farnham: Ashgate. Shapiro, Eva. 2004. “Trans’cending Barriers: Transgender Organising on the Internet.” Journal of Gay and Lesbian Social Services, 16.3–4: 165–79. Statsministeriet. 2013. “Statsministerens nytårstale den 1. januar 2013.” http://www.stm.dk/_p_13793.html (accessed June 19, 2015). Stryker, Susan. 2006. ”(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies.” In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 1–18. New York: Routledge. —. 2008. Transgender History. Berkeley: Seal.

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Sundhedsstyrelsen. 2014. “UDKAST – Høringsversion: Vejledning om udredning og behandling af transkønnede.” June 2. http://www.ft.dk/samling/20131/lovforslag/l189/bilag/8/1376608/index .htm (accessed June 19, 2015). Van Gorp, Baldwin. 2007. “The Constructionist Approach to Framing: Bringing Culture Back In.” Journal of Communication, 57.1: 60–78. Whittle, Stephen. 1998. “The Trans-Cyberian Mail Way.” Social & Legal Studies, 7.3: 389–408.

News Media Coverage 2011 Politiken. 2011a. “SKRIV: Er det i orden at fjerne brysterne på en 15årig?” October 14. —. “15-årige Caspians brystoperation deler læserne.” October 15. TV2 Nyhederne. 2011. “Minister går nu ind i Caspian-sag.” October 15. 2012 B.dk. 2012. “Politikere: 15-årige skal kunne skifte køn.” November 16. BT.dk. 2012a. “16-årig transkønnet: Giv 8-årige piger hormon-piller.” November 12. BT.dk. 2012b. “Politikere: 15-årige skal kunne skifte køn.” November 16. Børsen.dk. 2012. “EL: 15-årig skal kunne skifte køn.” November 16. DR P3. 2012. “Fokus på unge transkønnede.” November 16. DR.dk. 2012. “EL: 15-årig skal kunne skifte køn.” November 16. Ekstrabladet.dk. 2012. “EL: 15-årig skal kunne skifte køn.” November 16. HorsensFolkeblad.dk. 2012. “EL: 15-årig skal kunne skifte køn.” November 16. Information. 2012a. “Politikere: Unge skal kunne skifte køn”. November 16, section 1: 4. —. “Debat: Vi svigter de transkønnede.” November 16, section 1: 19. Jv.dk. 2012. “Politikere: 15-årige skal kunne skifte køn.” November 16. Jyllands-Posten.dk. 2012. “Nævn: Forkert at fjerne Caspians bryster.” November 9. Kristeligt-Dagblad.dk. 2012. “EL: 15-årig skal kunne skifte køn.” November 16. Modkraft.dk. 2012. “Caspian D svarer Sundhedsstyrelsen igen!” November 12. —. “EL: 15-årig skal kunne skifte køn.” November 16. SkiveFolkeblad.dk. 2012. “EL: 15-årig skal kunne skifte køn.” November 16.

II. DIVERSITY, TRANSNATIONALISM, AND NATIONAL BELONGING

AN OPEN LETTER TO BEATRICE ASK JONAS HASSEN KHEMIRI

In 2009, the Swedish government, along with law enforcement and the Swedish Migration Board, implemented Project REVA, a program meant to expedite cases dealing with people who are in Sweden illegally. This program has only recently been implemented in Stockholm, where police have begun to check IDs of anyone who they suspect does not have proper papers. Despite the fact that the police are not to ask for ID solely on the basis of appearance, many say they have been questioned because they do not “look Swedish,” raising concerns that police are practicing racial profiling in an attempt to increase deportations. Not surprisingly, this created an uproar, but when Minister for Justice Beatrice Ask was asked in a radio interview whether she was concerned by this apparent profiling, she brushed off any concerns, saying that what people thought was racial profiling was just a matter of “personal experience,” and she indicated that she did not intend to take any specific measures to address the matter. The writer Jonas Hassen Khemiri wrote the open letter below in response to Ask’s comments. It ran in the Stockholm paper Dagens Nyheter on March 13, 2013. By the end of that day it had broken the record for the most shared DN.se article on social media. According to an article in Dagens Nyheter about the story, it was shared on Twitter enough times to theoretically have reached every Swede with a Twitter account. It is now the most linked text in Swedish history. Rachel Willson-Broyles Dear Beatrice Ask, There are a lot of things that make us different. You were born in the mid-1950s; I was born in the late 1970s. You are a woman; I’m a man. You’re a politician; I’m an author. But there are some things we have in common. We’ve both studied international economics (without graduating). We have almost the same hairstyle (even if our hair color is different). And we’re both full citizens of this country, born within its borders, joined by language, flag, history, infrastructure. We are both equal before the Law.

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So I was surprised last Thursday when the radio program P1 Morgon asked you whether, as the Minister for Justice, you are concerned that people (citizens, taxpayers, voters) claim they have been stopped by the police and asked for ID solely because of their (dark, non-blond, blackhaired) appearances. And you answered: One’s experience of “why someone has questioned me” can of course be very personal. There are some who have been previously convicted and feel that they are always being questioned, even though you can’t tell by looking at a person that they have committed a crime [...]. In order to judge whether the police are acting in accordance with laws and rules, one has to look at the big picture.

Interesting choice of words: “previously convicted.” Because that’s exactly what we are. All of us who are guilty until we prove otherwise. When does a personal experience become a structure of racism? When does it become discrimination, oppression, violence? And how can looking at “the big picture” rule out so many personal experiences of citizens?

Figure 6.1: Jonas Hassen Khemiri (Photo by Thron Ullberg) and Figure 6.2: Former Minister of Justice Beatrice Ask (Photo by Mats Holmström; Source: Wikimedia Commons)

I am writing to you with a simple request, Beatrice Ask. I want us to trade our skins and our experiences. Come on. Let’s just do it. You’ve never been averse to slightly wacky ideas (I still remember your

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controversial suggestion that anyone who buys sex ought to be sent a notice in a lavender envelope). For twenty-four hours we’ll borrow each other’s bodies. First I’ll be in your body to understand what it’s like to be a woman in the patriarchal world of politics. Then you can borrow my skin to understand that when you go out into the street, down into the subway, into the shopping center, and see the policeman standing there, with the Law on his side, with the right to approach you and ask you to prove your innocence, it brings back memories. Other abuses, other uniforms, other looks. And no, we don’t need to go as far back as Second World War Germany or South Africa in the 1980s. Our recent Swedish history is enough, a series of random experiences that our mutual body suddenly recalls. Being 6 years old and landing at Arlanda in our common homeland. We walk toward customs with a dad who has sweaty hands, who clears his throat, who fixes his hair and shines up his shoes on top of his knees. Two times he checks that his Swedish passport is in the correct inner pocket. All the pink-colored people are let by. But our dad is stopped. And we think. Maybe it was by chance. Being 10 years old and seeing the same scene repeat itself. Maybe it was his accent. Being 12 and seeing the same scene. Maybe it was his holey bag with the broken zipper. Being 14, 16, 18. Being 7 and starting school and being given an introduction to society by a dad who was already, even then, terrified that his outsiderness would be inherited by his children. He says: “When you look like we do, you must always be a thousand times better than everyone else if you don’t want to be denied.” “Why?” “Because everyone is a racist.” “Are you a racist?” “Everyone but me.” Because that’s exactly how racism works. It is never part of our guilt, our history, our DNA. It’s always somewhere else, never here, in me, in us. Being 8 and watching action films where dark men rape, swear gutturally, strike their women, kidnap their children, manipulate and lie and steal and abuse. Being 16, 19, 20, 32, and seeing the same onedimensional characters being used over and over again. Being 9 and deciding to become the class’s most studious nerd, the world’s biggest brownnoser. Everything goes according to plan, and it’s only when we have a substitute that someone automatically assumes that we’re the class troublemaker.

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Being 10 and being chased by skinheads for the first, but not the last, time. They catch sight of our mutual body by the wino bench down by Högalidskyrkan, they roar, we run, we hide in a doorway, the taste of blood in our mouth, our common heart beating like a rabbit’s all the way home. Being 11 and reading cartoons where Orientals are mystically exotic, beautifully brown-eyed, sensual (but also deceitful). Being 12 and going into Mega Skivakademien to listen to CDs, and every time we go there the security guards circle like sharks, they talk into walkie-talkies, they follow us at a distance of only a few meters. And we try to act normal; we strive to make our body language maximally noncriminal. Walk normally, Beatrice. Breathe as usual. Walk up to that shelf of CDs and reach for that Tupac album in a way that indicates you are not planning to steal it. But the security guards keep spying, and somewhere, way in here, deep in our mutual body, there’s probably a shame-filled pleasure in getting a taste of that structure that entrapped our dads, in finding an explanation for why our dads never succeeded here, why their dreams died in a sea of returned letters of application. Being 13 and starting to hang out at the youth center and hearing stories. A friend’s older brother who talked back to the Norrmalm police and was tossed into a police van and then dumped in Nacka with a bloody nose. A friend’s cousin who was dragged in and knocked around by security in that little room on the subway platform at Slussen (telephone books against his thighs so it wouldn’t leave bruises). Dad’s friend N who was found by a police patrol and locked up in the drunk tank because he was slurring, and the police didn’t notice until the next day that something was wrong and in the ER they found the aneurysm and at his funeral his girlfriend said: “If only they had called me, I could have told them that he didn’t drink alcohol.” Being 13 and a half and living in a city besieged by a man with a rifle and a laser sight, a person who shoots eleven black-haired men in seven months without the police stepping in. And our mutual brain starts to think that it’s always the Muslims who have it worst, always those with Arabic names who have the least power (and completely represses the times when other structures were in power – like when the guy in school whom everyone called “the Jew” was chained to a fence by his jeans, with a lock through his belt loop, and everyone just laughed when he tried to get loose; he laughed too, he tried to laugh; did we laugh?). Being 14 and coming out of McDonald’s on Hornsgatan and being asked for ID by two police officers. Being 15 and sitting outside an Expert

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store when a police van pulls up, two officers get out, ask for ID, ask what’s up tonight. Then they hop back into the van. And all the time, a fight inside. One voice says: They have no fucking right to prejudge us. They can’t fucking cordon off the city with their uniforms. They are forbidden to make us feel insecure in our own neighborhoods. But the other voice says: What if it was our fault. We were probably talking too loudly. We were wearing hoodies and sneakers. Our jeans were too big and had a suspicious number of pockets. We made the mistake of having a villainous hair color. We could have chosen to have less melanin in our skin. We happened to have last names that reminded this small country that it is part of a larger world. We were young. Everything would definitely be different when we got older. And our mutual body grew, Beatrice Ask. We stopped hanging at the youth center; we replaced the hoodie with a black coat, the cap with a scarf. We stopped playing basketball and started studying at the Stockholm School of Economics. One day we were standing outside Central Station in Stockholm, jotting something down in a notebook (because even though we were studying economics we had a secret dream of becoming an author). Suddenly someone came up on our right side, a broad man with an earpiece. “How’s it going?” He asked for ID and then he pushed our arms up in a police grip and transported us toward the police van, where we apparently were supposed to sit while waiting for him to receive confirmation that we were who we said we were. Apparently we matched a description. Apparently we looked like someone else. We sat in the police van for twenty minutes. Alone. But not really alone. Because a hundred people were walking by. And they looked in at us with a look that whispered: “There. One more. Yet another one who is acting in complete accordance with our prejudices.” And I wish you had been with me in the police van, Beatrice Ask. But you weren’t. I sat there alone. And I met all the eyes walking by and tried to show them that I wasn’t guilty, that I had just been standing in a place and looking a particular way. But it’s hard to argue your innocence in the back seat of a police van. And it’s impossible to be part of a community when Power continually assumes that you are an Other. After twenty minutes we were released from the police van, no apology, no explanation. Instead: “You can go now.” And our adrenalinepumping body left the place and our brain thought: “I ought to write about this.” But our fingers knew that it wouldn’t happen. Because our

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experiences, Beatrice Ask, are nothing in comparison with what happens to others; our body grew up on this side of customs, our mom is from Sweden, our reality is like a cozy room full of pillows in comparison with what happens to those who are truly without power, without resources, without papers. We are not threatened with deportation. We do not risk imprisonment if we return. And in the knowledge that others have it much worse, we chose silence instead of words and the years went by and much later came the introduction of REVA, “the lawful and effective implementation project.” The police started searching through shopping centers and stood outside clinics that helped those without papers, and families with Swedish-born children were deported to countries that the children had never been to, and Swedish citizens were forced to show their passports to prove they belonged, and a certain Minister for Justice explained that this had nothing to do with racial profiling but rather “personal experiences.” The routines of power. The practices of violence. Everyone was just doing their job. The security guards, the police, the customs officials, the politicians, the people. And here you interrupt me and say: “But why is it so difficult to understand? Everyone has to follow the Law.” And we answer: “But what if the Law is unlawful?” And you say: “It’s all a matter of priorities, and we just don’t have infinite resources.” And we answer: “How come there’s always money when those with few resources are to be persecuted, but never money when those with few resources are to be defended?” And you say: “But how can we simultaneously combine a broad social safety net with welcoming everyone?” And we shuffle our feet and clear our throats, because to be completely honest we don’t have a clear answer to that. But we know that a person can never be illegal and that something must be done when uniforms spread insecurity and the Law turns against its own citizens, and now you’ve had enough, Beatrice Ask, you try to leave our body, just like the readers you think that this has gone on too long, it’s just a lot of repetition, it’s not getting to the point, and you’re right, there’s never any end, there’s no solution, no emergency exit, everything just keeps repeating, because the structures aren’t going to disappear just because we vote down REVA; REVA is a logical extension of constant, low intensity oppression, REVA lives on in our inability to reformulate our set national self-image, and tonight in a bar line near you, non-white people systematically spread themselves out so as not to be stopped by the bouncer, and tomorrow in your housing queue those with foreign names are using their partners’ last names so as not to be dropped, and just now, in a job application, a completely average Swede wrote

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“BORN AND RAISED IN SWEDEN” in capital letters just because she knows what will happen otherwise. Everyone knows what will happen otherwise. But no one does anything. Instead we focus on locating people who have moved here in search of the security that we’re so proud of being able to offer (some of) our citizens. And I write “we” because we are a part of this whole, this societal body, this we. You can go now. Translated from the Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles

THE SWEDISH REVA DEBATE: AN INTERVIEW WITH JONAS HASSEN KHEMIRI RACHEL WILLSON-BROYLES

RWB: What led you to write your “Open Letter to Beatrice Ask”? JHK: It started when the Swedish police initiated a project called REVA, which was a push to find undocumented immigrants in Sweden that basically involved targeting people who they thought did not look “Swedish enough” and asking these people for ID. This created a harsh counter-reaction from people who felt racially profiled. What led me to write the open letter was the inability of both politicians and police representatives to understand that this kind of feeling of not belonging or being profiled as the Other has a history, so to speak, and many of us in Sweden have memories and experiences of both big and small consequences of discrimination. And when our Minister for Justice was questioned about this she claimed that those of us who voiced our concern about this issue were basically paranoid and that this was not a question of racial profiling – she compared us to previously convicted felons who felt that they were followed by police after having been let out of jail and that quote from our Minister for Justice led me to write this open letter. I wanted to write something about discrimination but also about the difficulty of updating a nation’s self-image. RWB: What was your immediate reaction to the letter being shared so widely across Sweden and becoming the most linked article ever in Sweden? JHK: I felt less alone with my experiences – in a way, that is the magic of fiction, you know, normally that is what happens when I read, no matter if it is an Angolan novel or an Iranian play; one of the beauties of fiction is that it can reduce [the reader’s] feeling of loneliness, and once the text was so widely linked I realized that there were a lot of people who could relate to the feeling of seeing uniforms and not feeling secure. And I think that the most powerful thing for me was to see the hashtag on Twitter called

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#BästaBeatrice where people started sharing their own experiences of discrimination. So my text became a baton that was passed on to hundreds or thousands of people who shared their stories of not feeling secure in their own country. But I have never published anything where I have had this feeling of having started a forest fire; it was fascinating and slightly scary when it was happening. RWB: What other responses (both positive and negative) came out of the publication and widespread sharing of the letter? JHK: After the letter I was invited to TV studios to debate Beatrice Ask, but I declined because I felt I had said what I wanted to say in the letter, and I thought it was important that the media did not succeed in making this into Khemiri vs. Ask, because it is not; it is people vs. Politicians or maybe people vs. Police, or maybe more so people vs. Power, actually. And one interesting thing was that the initial response was very positive, but then when a number of politicians started answering I received my share of very negative and also aggressive e-mails and letters; what I found fascinating was that it was not until politicians came out against me that the letter writers started contacting me. When they felt they had official power on their side it was as if they suddenly felt they could air their grievances. It was interesting on a personal level – I have received negative letters before, but these ones were much harsher, and I think that it came from the fact that so much of their legitimacy is based on their belief that they are a silent majority, but here I got the feeling that they became scared that they were actually maybe not as many as they had hoped. It was published on a Wednesday, and by Sunday night the Prime Minister was in a TV studio being forced to answer questions about it. Which felt very weird. RWB: Now that nearly two years have passed, how do you feel about all the attention the letter received? JHK: I think what it did create was a more nuanced debate about contemporary Sweden. For a long time I felt that the debate was oversimplified. But I think what the letter tried, and in some ways managed to do, was to show that we all need to take responsibility for the present state – it is not a letter that ends with pointing out a simple enemy, because that way of reasoning is what got us here. So I think what I wanted to do was write something where I recognize the complexities of these issues. Because it is important to say there is a link between the fact

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that police ask certain members for proof of their membership or citizenship and other structural problems that we have, and I was also trying to remind us of that. We live in a deeply segregated society with huge discrimination problems in both housing and job markets, and these things are all linked. But then, you know, I do not think I could have imagined that it would spread outside of Sweden and that it would be translated in so many countries. It was published in France, Japan, the United States and many other countries. I think the reason for that is that there are so many countries where globalization forces people to revisit their self-images. So many countries have to realize that their nationalistic myth is a construction. And it is a huge democratic problem when a large portion of the population does not feel represented by the people in power, who can be police officers, politicians, or writers for that matter. RWB: Currently, in 2014, the Swedish government is experiencing a bit of upheaval after the recent parliamentary elections in September. What might this mean for the issues you raise in the letter to Beatrice Ask? JHK: In the last election one could say that the not-so-immigrant-friendly party got 13 percent and I think that it is pretty easy to find proof that we live in a contemporary Europe where fascism is on the rise, but on a good day one could also see this movement rising as a sign that these views are no longer accepted within the established parties. And I am not sure... the research shows that tolerance is growing; we are moving in a direction where myths about nationalistic unity are being squashed and questioned, so on a good day I have a very hopeful feeling that we are moving in the right direction. Editors’ Note: This interview was conducted in December 2014 specifically for publication in this volume.

DANCING WITH THE STÁLLU OF DIVERSITY: A SÁMI PERSPECTIVE TROY STORFJELL

There’s a story about a Sámi girl who is captured by a stállu, managing to carve little flecks into the bark of the birch trees as she is taken to his goahti. An observant Sámi man notices the trail of marked trees and follows them to the stállu’s dwelling, where the girl is tending house while the stállu is away. She hides the man before the evil stállu returns, and then, having fed the stállu and given him something to drink, the girl tricks him into revealing where he’s buried his treasure. With the hiding man’s help she kills the stállu, and the two Sámi dig up the treasure and go home together, wealthy and happy (Sikko 1997, 352–3). Johan Turi tells a story of a good Christian Sámi man who was forced by a stállu into promising his daughter in marriage to the evil being’s son. Fortunately this man knew where the secretive ulddat lived, and he consulted with these subterranean folk to find a way to save his girl from the terrible fate of marrying a stállu. A wise old ulda woman gave him good advice, and the Sámi family was able to outwit the stállu and his family. They travelled to the stállu’s home, passing Goartovárri Mountain on the north side –though they kept this route secret from the stállu, since he knew that anyone approaching his home on the shores of Stálojávri Lake by that path would bring danger with them. The bride tricked her groom into burning himself to death with boiling fat, the men tricked the stállu into a pit trap in the snow and beat him to death, and the Sámi women tricked the stállu’s wife, thrusting the iron straw she used to suck out people’s souls into the fire, so that when she sucked on it, she scorched her throat and lungs, killing herself. The pious Sámi man’s knowledge of the ulddat and his respect for their knowledge gave him an advantage, and as is so often the case, brains beat brawn (Turi 2011, 143–5). The stálut (sing. stállu) are prominent figures in Sámi oral tradition. Possessing great size and superhuman strength, they are also bearers of

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special knowledge and can be powerful enchanters. Yet even though they may know things that could be useful to the Sámi in the stories (such as when they know the hidden location of trees of gold), the stálut are generally hostile to the Sámi. As Turi writes: Stálut were beings that are part human and part mánnelaš or beargalat (demons). It was strong and a diehtti [possessor of secret knowledge]. And the jiehtanas (giant) was much the same, but it did not hate people the way that the stállu did. The stállu killed people and ate them. The jiehtanas was strong and also large, and was also a noaidi [shaman]. And these two creatures were often in competition, but they also roamed about together as well. (Turi 2011, 141)

While there are some tales of men so strong they could wrestle a stállu to the ground and kill it (making sure not to use the stállu’s own enchanted knife for that task), in most of the stories the Sámi have to resort to outwitting the stálut, who are simply too big and powerful for them. But where brute strength may be lacking, cleverness and quick thinking can usually win the day. There is the story of the boy who tricked the stállu by filling his sack with rocks to replace the captured children he had helped escape (Manker 1972, 212), the tale of a Sámi man who is able to win the stállu’s gold from him through a fishing contest victory (Trollvik 1997, 361–2), and the story of the elderly Sámi man who tricked Luhtatáhkku – the stállu’s quarrelsome wife – into giving him her farm before outmaneuvering and slaying both stállu and wife (Jonsdatter 1997, 372–3) The stálut have also been used prominently in contemporary Sámi society to personify the colonizers and their various tactics. The Beaivváš Sámi Teáhter play Váikko þuoÿi stálu [Even if a Hundred Ogres] (Gaup 1985), which was performed on an outdoor stage in Lillehammer during the 1994 Winter Olympic Games, features the stálut as stand-ins for kings, priests, strong drinks and other colonizing forces that the Sámi have had to resist and subvert over the long centuries of colonization. And it is quite common today to hear Sámi referring to meddling state regulations and racist policies and authorities as stálut that clever Sámi have to outsmart.

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Figure 7.1: Swedish and Danish stálut quarrel over Sápmi in the Beaivaš Sámi Teáhter’s play Vaikko þuoÿi stálu. (Photo by Troy Storfjell, 1994)

The stálut are cunning too, though, and can sometimes trick the Sámi, presenting themselves in the guise of helpers or friends. One of the cleverest of these stálut is the Stállu of Diversity (sometimes going by the name of Multiculturalism), whose flowery words promise inclusion and tolerance, and sometimes succeed in lulling us to inattentiveness and complacency. It may take a visit to the hidden, magical and knowledgeable ulddat folk to alert us to the true nature of this stállu as a cleverly disguised liberal colonizing strategy – a strategy for managing difference while maintaining existing hierarchies and power relations. “Tenk! Et helt folk som ikke har opplevd modernitet.” Imagine, an entire people that hasn’t experienced modernity! he said, shaking his head. I was talking to an older professor of Nordic literature from the University of Oslo, a leading figure in the field. I myself was a young assistant professor of Norwegian at a small, Midwestern college at the time, and we were at a seminar for Norwegian teachers sponsored by the Norwegian Foreign Ministry. Making small talk in a rather bored tone, he had asked me what my research areas were. I had answered that I was working on representations of the Sámi in literature, on colonial discourse and the Sámi, which was when he had pronounced his judgment of the Sámi nation and modernity.

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Mon lean okta sápmeláš. I am a Sámi. But I haven’t done very many sorts of Sámi work, and I don’t know everything about Sámi conditions. Although I’ve spent a number of years in Sápmi, most of my life has been lived outside my homeland – much of that time in the United States. Perhaps because of this distance and separation, and perhaps also because of the racist reactions I had sometimes experienced from Dážat (Norwegians) in the past, when my ethnicity had come out, I didn’t always announce that I was Sámi in those days – though I never denied it either. Sometimes it was just easier to avoid that whole discussion. As I stared at the wind-blown rain outside the window, I wondered how anyone could think that I hadn’t experienced modernity. I thought about Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Maori) (1999, 19) who argues that colonization IS Indigenous peoples’ experience of modernity, and that our modernity is inextricably interwoven with the modernity of the great metropolitan centers of Europe, centers whose urban modernities in fact depend on our colonization. I wondered what the respected professor would say if I mentioned these things to him. But I didn’t say anything. I had learned to keep quiet. It’s important for me to say these things now, though, to contextualize my work here. Indigenous methodologies teach us to situate ourselves in our work, to reject the illusions of imagined objectivity, to acknowledge our relationships and the obligations they entail, and to draw on personal experiences as well as other types of research. Mon lean okta sápmeláš, and I write from my position as such – and as someone who has studied and worked in Nordic or Scandinavian studies programs at universities in Norway and the United States, and who has already danced with the Stállu of Diversity on both continents. And also as someone who’s not nearly as young now as I was at that seminar those many years ago. When viewed from a Sámi perspective, the idea and practice of diversity can appear ambivalent. For instance, when the states that have colonized us decide to acknowledge and make room for perspectives and peoples other than those of the privileged mainstream, we stand to gain. Being acknowledged and heard certainly beats the alternative. And there are many reasons for us, as Sámi, to feel a sense of solidarity with other groups that have been marginalized by dominant power structures and discourses. We can understand the pain of discrimination, silencing and judgment faced by immigrants and members of the national minorities. We can empathize with victims of racist violence as well as with those who face the more subtle, but equally profound, challenges of institutional and everyday racism. And we certainly know what it is like to live in a society

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where the taken-for-granted, commonsensical assumptions are grounded in the cultural values and norms of ethnic Norwegians, Swedes or Finns, and where our own values and norms, whether hidden or explained, can only rarely be taken for granted. Talk of diversity and tolerance can be very welcome in these contexts. On the other hand, we have learned that the rhetoric and practice of diversity cannot always be trusted. One of the things we have come to view warily is the way that diversity – especially in the guise of multiculturalism – can often function as a fig leaf for ongoing marginalization, through tokenist gestures of inclusion that assume that, as long as one Sámi perspective is included in the mix (on the panel, in the anthology, at the conference or on the reading list) the rest of the speakers can continue as before, without any pause for critical self-reflection or reaction to our views. If we are lucky enough to be invited to participate in the first place, we have learned that what we have to say is not likely to affect what others say. In other words, diversity may give us occasional chances to speak but often falls short of including us in meaningful collaboration. And what is worse is that our participation can then be used to legitimate the entire event, regardless of how little we were listened to. The conference, seminar, anthology or course as a whole is deemed diverse and culturally sensitive, even if all the other participants continue to give voice to colonizing ideologies and ways of knowing. The fact that we were included at all is seen as a badge of honor for the mainstream hosts. Multiculturalist diversity, as practiced both in our Nordic home states and within Scandinavian studies in North America, also tends to focus on issues of cultural expression or form, while paying less attention to relationships of power and resistance, to questions of material relations, or to questions of exploitation, marginalization or colonialism. So even on those occasions when investigation moves beyond a tokenist inclusion of something like yoik as an exotic spectacle in an undergraduate class or at an international conference and actually discusses how this music form of ours fits into Sámi worldviews or how it has been used in cultural revitalization efforts over the past forty years or so, less attention is generally focused on things like historical and current resource expropriation, infrastructure disparity, systemic racism and exclusion, or even on the politics of colonization and oppression that have made yoik and Sámi culture something in need of revitalization and defense in the first place. Diversity, as it is generally practiced, is more concerned with inclusion of diverse forms than it is with issues of oppression, resistance and social justice. And, while we are generally quite happy to have our

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culture and our art forms taken seriously and included, that may not be enough when our kids are still being beaten up at school (Greiner 2012), our health and quality of life are still well below national averages (Hansen 2011) and even the sponsorship of our important cultural festivals where things like yoik can be performed and renewed is cut by large corporations like Telenor who still fear being tainted by association with the Sámi (Rensberg 2014). These things are devastatingly important for the people who have to live through them, but when multiculturalist diversity ignores such problems while investigating some of our more exotic forms of cultural expression, it effectively obscures them. Smiling faces in colorful gávtit (traditional dress) are more palatable than the grim realities of oppression. They also draw less attention to the gazer’s own position of privilege. This is one of the stállu’s tactics. Another way in which the Stállu of Diversity can work against our interests is in his tendency to stress inclusive integration over autonomy and self-determination. We are welcomed by our liberal colleagues, if not by our conservative or reactionary ones, to pull up a chair at the table and join the party. Whether it is the table of national inclusion or the table of Scandinavianist scholarship, liberal humanism is happy to offer us the privilege of joining – as long as we behave ourselves and follow the rules. But for many Sámi, as for many other Indigenous peoples, what we want is not so much to sit at the masters’ table as to have our own table, where we can follow our own rules. As a student in Nordic Studies at Romssa universitehta in the early 1990s, I noticed something interesting but frustrating. Most of my fellow students in the Nordic grunnfag were Dážat. And I got along well with them. Several of them became good friends, and we had a lot of fun together. There were some really open-minded and progressive people in that group, too. At the same time, I had another circle of friends: Sámi students at the university, studying in a variety of fields. I had a lot of good friends in that group, too, and we also had a lot of fun together. Some of us are still close friends these many years later. Something puzzled me, though. If I happened to be sitting at a table at one of the university’s canteens or cafés with a bunch of my Dážat friends, and one of my Sámi friends walked by, he or she would gladly join us and, after introductions, would soon be laughing and telling jokes with the Norwegians. The Sámi student could fit right in. But if the situation was reversed, and one of my Dážat friends happened by when I was sitting at a table with a bunch of Sámi students, things were different. Often my

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Norwegian friends wouldn’t even sit down; they’d just stand talking to me briefly before moving on. And if they did sit down (something more likely for those who were stronger advocates of diversity and multiculturalism), they would sit there nervously, not saying much after the introductions, and quickly find excuses to leave. The Sámi were used to operating according to Dáža social premises, but for the Dážat this was something completely new and threatening. The Stállu of Diversity hadn’t prepared them to sit at our table; it only went so far as allowing us to sit at theirs. It appears that things have gotten a little better at Romssa universitehta. The young people there tell me that the sort of ethnically polarized cliques that we had in my student days are largely absent. At the same time, though, racism is still felt there. So we still need somewhere where we can be ourselves. In writing this, of course, I have to be very careful, because it is not just my liberal and radical colleagues who will read this. One of the standard tropes of anti-Sámi rhetoric on the Norwegian side is the assertion that we will not be satisfied until we have our own state. Whenever we make any sort of mention of self-determination or aboriginal rights to land and water, the specter of a Sámi secession from the kingdom is raised. So let me be clear – that is not what I am talking about. That is not what any Sámi are talking about. What I am talking about is autonomy, about not having to conform to Norwegian or Swedish or Finnish cultural norms in order to have access to a meaningful and respectable life, about being free to be different while being accorded equal value. I am talking about egalitarianism – not a “colorblind,” technical equality that refuses to acknowledge our distinct historical, material and cultural situations or to allow us to thrive in them without surrendering our Sáminess. I am talking about the right for us to be Sámi, and to have the ability to decide for ourselves what that means and how we will do it. To have access to (and control over) our traditional lands and resources without ceasing to be citizens of our democratic state societies. This is somewhat akin to the concept of sovereignty as it is used by our North American Indigenous brothers and sisters. Perhaps one of the most insidious moves that the Stállu of Diversity can make, though, is in lumping us together with all other minorities and then discussing our rights simply in terms of general minority rights. And that is actually more of a best-case scenario, because once the discussion moves away from Indigenous rights to minority rights, we Sámi often tend to be forgotten as attention shifts to more numerous minorities, and minorities that are more visible in the metropolitan centers of the south.

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We are outnumbered by other minorities and are generally pushed to the margins of any discussion of diversity grounded in the rhetoric of minority – if not overlooked completely. (Just think of how many times you have heard someone claim that Norway was a homogeneous society until nonWestern immigration began to take off in the late twentieth century, for instance. Sámi on the Norwegian side find it hard to recognize themselves in that imagined homogeneity.) Torjer A. Olsen (2014) has commented on how discussions of diversity and multiculturalism in Norway tend to focus exclusively on recent immigrants and their descendants. In particular he critiques the 2014 anthology Forskjeller i klassen: Nye perspektiver på kjønn, klasse og etnisitet i skolen [Differences in Class: New Perspectives on Gender, Class and Ethnicity in School] (Nielsen ed. 2014) for not once mentioning either the Sámi or the kingdom’s five national minorities – the Kven, the Roma, the Romani, the Jews and the Forest Finns – and for treating diversity as exclusively synonymous with recent immigration. Olsen (2014) goes on to find similar fault with Norges forskningsråd [Research Council of Norway], noting that, in its 2013 call for research grant applications for projects related to multicultural and minority topics, “[i]t became clear that minorities and multiculturalism were to be understood as first and foremost tied to immigrants. The Research Council too was blind to Sámi and the like, it would seem.”1 Again, I hope I am not misunderstood. Minority rights are an important issue. Immigrants as well as members of national minorities face tremendous challenges in the Nordic region, and it is up to all of us to scrutinize our own practices to purge them of any collaboration in the marginalization of minorities. This is something that Sámi scholars can and should support. As I mentioned before, it is quite easy for us to feel a sense of solidarity with others who are marginalized by the often quite racist mainstream Nordic societies. And, moreover, any arguments against discrimination that are grounded in a general appeal to human rights and human dignity apply to us too. We support and encourage a willful, thoughtful and respectful inclusion of immigrant groups in any consideration or study of Nordic societies. But what focusing on more numerous minorities to the exclusion of the Sámi does is maintain the logic of numbers, that is, of relative population size determining the value of a culture or people, while appearing to question exactly that in respect to the mainstream majority. In other words, while the Stállu of Diversity begins by admitting the need to focus some attention on minority cultures and groups, suggesting that the logic of numbers may be flawed, and that having more members does not

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automatically make an ethnic group more worthy of acknowledgement or privilege, he then goes on to focus exclusively, or almost exclusively, on the more numerous immigrant minority groups. In doing this the Stállu of Diversity resuscitates the seemingly abandoned logic of numbers. Having more people does make an ethnic group more worthy of attention, he implicitly asserts. Which, if followed to its logical conclusion, might lead people to question why they should spend time on any minority groups at all. (And if we take an honest look at how Scandinavian studies, skandinavistikk and nordiske studier are sometimes practiced on both sides of the Atlantic, we can see that this does appear to be the de facto view of at least some of our colleagues.) If the Stállu of Diversity were actually concerned with diversity instead of relative population size, you would think that Indigenous peoples would figure quite high on his list of priorities. As Dennis Martinez (O’odham) (2012, 23) writes: “Indigenous peoples presently occupy 22 percent of the Earth’s land surface, are stewards of 80 percent of remaining biodiversity, and compose 90 percent of cultural diversity.” Indeed, it is estimated that there are approximately 6,000 Indigenous peoples or nations on the planet (Engle 2010, 51), speaking at least 5,000 Indigenous languages – out of a total of approximately 6,000 to 7,000 languages (First Peoples Worldwide 2013). In the Nordic region linguistic diversity is not as overwhelmingly slanted toward Indigenous peoples, yet there are still ten Indigenous languages in the Nordic region – seven Sámi languages and three Greenlandic. If by diversity we mean an appreciation of difference, rather than a grudging and superficial acknowledgement of a few of the most numerous minority groups, then we really ought to be paying more attention to the Indigenous than is currently the case in either Nordic diversity discourse or North American Scandinavianist circles. Which is not to say that things are one-sidedly bad in either of those arenas. Diversity discourse has provided some space for Sámi points of view in the Nordic region, and we need to use those openings when they are available. And there are some good things happening in the discipline of Scandinavian studies, too. I have seen a genuine interest in including Sámi perspectives in Nordic studies curricula in both Norway and the United States, for instance, as well as a genuine commitment by some to make room for Sámi perspectives and knowledge under our disciplinary umbrella, particularly in the United States, where Sámi scholars have been invited to add flavor to conferences and seminars for some years now, and where lately there have been some glimpses of attempts to take Sámi concerns and perspectives even more seriously, in a few cases to the point of challenging Scandinavianist business-as-usual. The North American-

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based Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study even selected “Indigenous Discourses, Methodologies, and Histories in the Nordic Region and Beyond,” as the presidential theme for its 2015 annual conference, which we must regard as a welcome gesture. At the same time, though, these positive efforts exist in the context of an institutionally sanctioned ignorance when it comes to Sámi history, culture, social and political conditions and especially to Sámi perspectives. Sanctioned ignorance is a term that refers to an ignorance that is endorsed by an institution or academic discipline, and we can point to its presence in the field of Scandinavian studies as it currently exists in North America, for instance, by noting how unremarkable it is that one can earn a PhD in Scandinavian studies and even be appointed as a professor of Finnish, Norwegian or Swedish literature or culture, without knowing the first thing about the Sámi. The same is not true, for instance, about the Old Norse. However much one’s own area of expertise might be removed from the Viking Age, complete ignorance of it is not sanctioned by our discipline. And there are probably good reasons for this. But when we stop to ask why everyone in our field should be expected to be able to carry on a moderately well-informed conversation about the Hávamál, while no one needs to know how many Sámi languages there are or what Læstadianism is, the answers we come up with ultimately indicate a choice to regard one body of knowledge about the Nordic region as central and another as marginal and relatively unimportant. Sanctioned ignorance functions to maintain the status quo and its continuing oppressions, and it does so by managing to appear normal and not worth questioning. Then there are the other kinds of experiences, the ones that go beyond ignorance – things like the casually racist jokes of liberal colleagues in Norway and Norwegian diplomats in the United States, and the wellmeaning American colleagues who’ve worried that I was limiting my career by focusing on such marginal material. There are the rejection letters stating that my research areas weren’t a good match for what the department was looking for, and the colleagues at several institutions who’ve told me that I should include more canonical texts in my teaching, and not try to include the Sámi – even as just one voice among many – in more than a few courses at most. People have asked my advice on Scandinavian guest speakers, only to add that we’ve had enough Sámi in the past and don’t need any more at this time (even though that past was many years earlier). And I’ve even had to sit and listen while non-Sámi “experts” assert that discrimination and oppression are things of the past, and that we Sámi have it pretty good these days, despite all our

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complaining. One tends to notice these things, especially as they repeat themselves over time. The really key thing, beyond exclusion and sanctioned ignorance, though, is that treating us as just another minority erases our claims to prior rights based on our Indigeneity. Indigenous rights are grounded in something beyond minority rights. Our claims to autonomy and self-determination are based on our status as an Indigenous people, that is, on the fact that we form a land-based society2 that has been colonized and marginalized in our homeland and that currently resides in states created by outsiders and governed according to the customs of those colonizers. Internationally these are recognized as claims that go beyond simple minority status and that require particular protection by state authorities. When scholars and teachers, well intentioned as they may be, treat the Sámi as simply a minority, they undermine the ground for these claims. They reduce us to begging for tolerance from the mainstream majority with nothing more than an appeal to human rights as an argument. Liberal diversity becomes just another colonizing move, just another threatening face of the Stállu of Diversity. Another of Diversity’s flaws, according to Homi K. Bhabha, lies in the very way it attempts to know the other. In his essay “The Commitment to Theory” (1994) the South Asian-American critic writes (1994, 31) of a “strategy of containment where the Other text is forever the exegetical horizon of difference, never the active agent of articulation.” He complains that, in this move, “[t]he Other is cited, quoted, framed, illuminated, encased in the shot/reverse-shot strategy of a serial enlightenment.” In other words, the other is treated as a foil or mirror for the telling of the story of the self. However impeccably the content of an “other” culture may be known, however anti-ethnocentrically it is represented, it is its location as the closure of grand theories, the demand that, in analytic terms, it always be the good object of knowledge, the docile body of difference, that reproduces a relation of domination and is the most serious indictment of the institutional powers of critical theory. (Bhabha 1994, 31)

Representing “other” cultures as objects of knowledge reinforces hegemonic power relations by continuing to inscribe the Western scholar as the one with the agency to know and speak the truth of that other. The other is known as other, known in terms laid out by the academy, corresponding with the grand theories whose limits it demarks. Indeed, the other culture, nation or people thus known is mastered by the scholar, and

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the unknown and different is reduced to the known, which, because it is known in the same way, is ultimately reduced to just another aspect of the same. Diversity is, in fact, not that diverse. Bhabha continues: Cultural diversity is an epistemological object – culture as an object of empirical knowledge – whereas cultural difference is the process of the enunciation of culture as “knowledgeable,” authoritative, adequate to the construction of systems of cultural identification. If cultural diversity is a category of comparative ethics, aesthetics or ethnology, cultural difference is a process of signification through which statements of culture or on culture differentiate, discriminate and authorize the production of fields of force, reference, applicability and capacity. Cultural diversity is the recognition of pre-given cultural contents and customs; held in a timeframe of relativism it gives rise to liberal notions of multiculturalism, cultural exchange or the culture of humanity. (Bhabha 1994, 34)

Bhabha goes on to use this insight to argue for the validity of cultural hybridity for which he is so well known, and this is a valid point. Difference and hybridity do, in fact, inhabit all of us, so that none of us belongs to a closed and stable cultural system. We are all both one thing and another (and maybe another and another and yet another). Hybridity, in fact, allows me to draw on Bhabha’s comments while simultaneously performing my own, Indigenist Sámi reading of diversity, even as it also compels me to acknowledge that I am very much informed by the Western university and disciplined by its traditions and structures of power. But there is another point to Bhabha’s essay, I think, and one to which I would like to turn now. When he writes, “cultural difference is the process of the enunciation of culture as ‘knowledgeable,’ authoritative, adequate to the construction of systems of cultural identification,” Bhabha indicates that difference, unlike diversity, acknowledges the agency of culture – all culture – and its ability to know and produce systems of knowledge. In this, I would argue, he anticipates Indigenous methodologies and Indigenist criticism, both of which assert the legitimacy of Indigenous ways of knowing and intellectual traditions. If the Stállu of Diversity seeks to know and understand all “diverse” others according to the same privileged ontological and epistemological order, difference allows for cultures to produce their own knowledge and to organize it in their own ways. I know that when I refer to Indigenous peoples’ own ways of knowing, there are some who will immediately suspect a whiff of essentialism. But I am not suggesting any mystical, inborn nature exclusive to Indigenous peoples. What I am referring to is the epistemes of Indigenous cultures, the ways of knowing and systems of knowledge developed and maintained by

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Indigenous peoples, including the Sámi. As Rauna Kuokkanen (Sámi) (2007) so succinctly explains, this need not be an essentializing assertion: Just as it is possible to discuss the Renaissance, classical, and modern epistemes, I contend that it is equally possible to talk about indigenous epistemes in a way that does not imply essentialism, especially if we recognize that no episteme is a fixed, sealed, or self-contained entity but always is, to varying degrees, in contact with and influenced by other epistemes. Equally importantly, no episteme is ever isomorphous within itself – there are always internal lines of difference within an episteme. (Kuokkanen 2007, 58)

Nor is an Indigenous episteme something reserved exclusively for those who have been raised in traditional Indigenous cultural settings. Bhabha’s arguments about hybridity and its extensive reach are pertinent here in helping us to acknowledge that, for many Indigenous peoples, there is no “traditional” setting that is not also shaped by colonial epistemes to which Indigenous epistemes have had to adapt, and with which they must coexist. Moreover, epistemes can be learned. Indeed, that is part of what the university is all about. And as Kuokkanen (2007, 59) goes on to point out, “[e]pisteme is not something in which one must be fully versed (whatever that might mean) in order to be able to know the world, and think and speak through it.” What she describes, and what I am writing about here, are Sámi ontological and epistemological horizons, Sámi intellectual and philosophical traditions, and the necessity of acknowledging them – and their difference – within the university, in ways that the Stállu of Diversity tends to ignore. Rather than being satisfied with being yet another cataloged object of Eurocentric academic knowledge, I am arguing that we should strive to win recognition of our difference and acceptance of the validity of our own epistemes, both within the academy and otherwise. I chose “A Sámi Perspective” as the subtitle for this essay deliberately; this is a Sámi perspective, not the Sámi perspective. There are other Sámi perspectives too, and the question of Indigenous methodologies and Indigenist criticism is not one on which there is any sort of Sámi unanimity. There are a variety of perspectives on this among us, as there are on most things. Yet it is clear, at this point, that a growing number of Sámi scholars are working toward making a space for Sámi epistemes and intellectual traditions within the academy, and that in doing this we are joining with other Indigenous scholars around the world in the context of Indigenous methodologies and Indigenist criticism.3

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But that may be material for another time. Here I would like to bring my attention back to the Stállu of Diversity, and to how we should deal with it. Diversity is too widespread and too well entrenched to simply ignore. And, as I have already pointed out, there are many things this stállu has to offer us. If we indiscriminately oppose diversity, we risk shutting down institutional attempts to acknowledge our existence and at least some of our rights. And we risk losing our invitation to a seat at the table.

Figure 7.2: Some Sámi can dance: Sámi youth in Bijjie Spidtjes. (Photo by Troy Storfjell, 1996)

So instead we need to learn to dance. We need to accept the tokenist invitation, sidestepping and letting the Stállu of Diversity take a couple of steps forward to acknowledge our existence and ask us to join the discussion. We need to turn the stállu from time to time, allowing him to talk about general human rights and minority rights, for instance, before then taking a leading step to the side, pointing out the peculiarities of Indigenous rights and the specifics of Sámi claims and grievances. When the Stállu of Diversity comments on our exotic yoiks and gávtit, we need to turn that comment into a discussion of the material colonial dynamics that have led to the suppression of yoik and the devaluing of the gákti. And then, and at the right moment, we need to step forward to challenge Diversity’s understanding of us as another object in the field of the same,

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pushing instead for a recognition of our agency and difference, of our ability to know on our own ontological and epistemological terms. Instead of wrestling the Stállu of Diversity to the ground (something we cannot do), or running away from him (something that will not help us), we need to use and out-dance him; we need to, once again, outwit another stállu. Each of us needs to be a clever ófelaš, a pathfinder subverting and cheating the powerful when we can (Jernsletten 2011, 178), while still practicing the sly civility (Bhabha 1994, 93–101) that keeps us at the table. It’s pretty well known on much of the Norwegian side that for many Sámi, and especially for many Sámi men, dancing doesn’t come very easily. It’s usually far more tempting to stay seated than to venture out onto the floor – so much so that it’s become an oft-repeated stereotype. But I’ll never forget how impressed I was by the South Sámi youth from the Swedish side during the Fourth World Indigenous Youth Conference at Bijjie Spädtja back in 1996. Those guys (and girls) could really dance! Perhaps the rest of us can learn from them.

Notes 1 Kom det imidlertid klart fram at det minoriteter og flerkultur først og fremst skulle forstås som [var] å være knytta til innvandrere. Samer og sånt var også forskningsrådet blinde for, kunne det se ut til. 2 For a powerful exploration of the significance of landscape and place for Sámi society, see Bergman (2008). For accounts of action-oriented research in defense of Sámi places against the destruction of transnational capitalist expropriation, see Larsson (2014) and Tuorda (2014). 3 See, for instance, Gaski (2000), Kuokkanen (2007), Jernsletten (2011) and Porsanger (2011) for Sámi approaches to Indigenous methodologies and Indigenist criticism, and Smith (1999; 2012), Wilson (2008), Kovach (2009) and Fermantez (2013) for approaches by other Indigenous scholars.

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References Bergman, Ingela. 2008. “Remembering Landscapes: Sami History Beyond Written Records.” In L’Image du Sápmi, Humanistica Oerebroensia, Artes et linguae no 15, edited by Kajsa Andersson, 14–25. Örebro: Örebro University Press. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Engle, Karen. 2010. The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy. Durham: Duke University Press. First Peoples Worldwide. 2013. “Celebrating and Preserving Indigenous Language!” http://firstpeoples.org/wp/celebrating-and-preservingindigenous-language/ (accessed January 5, 2015). Fermantez, Kali. 2013. “Rocking the Boat: Indigenous Geography at Home in Hawai’i.” In A Deeper Sense of Place: Stories and Journeys of Indigenous-Academic Collaboration, edited by Jay T. Johnson and Soren C. Larsen, 103–26. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press. Gaski, Harald. 2000. “The Secretive Text: Yoik Lyrics as Literature and Tradition.” In Sami Folkloristics, edited by Juha Pentikäinen, 191–214. Turku: Åbo Akademi. http://www.hum.uit.no/nordlit/5/gaski.html. Gaski, Harald. 2014. “Indigenism and Cosmopolitanism: A Pan-Sami View of the Indigenous Perspective in Sami Culture and Research.” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 9.2: 113– 24. Gaup, Iƾgor Ántte Áilu, and Beaivváš Sámi Teáhter. 1985. Váikko þuoÿi stálu. Greiner, Robert. 2012. “Samiske barn blir slått og hetset.” NRK Nordnytt, March 23. Hansen, Ketil Lenert. 2011. “Ethnic Discrimination and Bullying in Relation to Self-Reported Physical and Mental Health in Sami Settlement Areas in Norway.” PhD diss., University of Tromsø. Jernsletten, Kristin. 2011. “The Hidden Children of Eve: Sámi Poetics: Guovtti ilmmi gaskkas.” PhD diss., University of Tromsø. Jonsdatter, Risten. 1997. “Stállu og Luhtatáhkku blir drept.” In Samiske beretninger: I udvalg fra J.K. Qvigstads samiske eventyr og sagn I-IV, 1927–1929, edited by Brita Pollan, 372–3. Oslo: Aschehoug. Kovach, Margaret. 2009. Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Kuokkanen, Rauna. 2007. Reshaping the University: Responsibility, Indigenous Epistemes, and the Logic of the Gift. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

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Larsson, Gunilla. 2014. “Protecting Our Memory from Being Blasted Away: Archaeological Supradisciplinary Research Retracing Sámi History in Gállok/Kallak.” In Re:Mindings: Co-Constituting Indigenous/Academic/Artistic Knowledges, edited by Johan Gärdebo, May-Britt Öhman and Hiroshi Maruyama, 41–54. Uppsala: Hugo Valentin Centre, Uppsala University. Manker, Ernst. 1972. People of Eight Seasons. New York: Crescent Books. Martinez, Dennis. 2012. “Land Grab on a Global Scale.” In Asserting Native Resilience: Pacific Rim Indigenous Nations Face the Climate Crisis, edited by Zoltán Grossman and Alan Parker, 23–4. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press. Nielsen, Harriet Bjerrum, ed. 2014. Forskjeller i klassen: Nye perspektiver på kjønn, klasse og etnisitet i skolen. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Olsen, Torjer A. 2014. “Hva forskere (ikke) ser.” Sesam (blog). Forskning.no, November 25. http://forskning.no/blogg/sesam/hvaforskere-ikke-ser. Porsanger, Jelena. 2011. “The Problematisation of the Dichotomy of Modernity and Tradition in Indigenous and Sami Contexts.” Dieÿut, 1: 225–52. http://brage.bibsys.no/xmlui/bitstream/id/165658/Diedut-12011-JelenaPorsanger.pdf. Rensberg, Vaino Natasha. 2014. “Ber om redegjørelse fra Telenor.” NRK Sápmi, March 10. http://www.nrk.no/sapmi/ber-om-redegjorelse-fratelenor-1.11966436. Sikko, Johan. 1997. “Stállu lures av en pike.” In Samiske beretninger: I udvalg fra J.K. Qvigstads samiske eventyr og sagn I-IV, 1927–1929, edited by Brita Pollan, 352–3. Oslo: Aschehoug. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. New York: Zed. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2nd ed. New York: Zed. Trollvik, Erik Persen. 1997. “Stállu og fjellsamen.” In Samiske beretninger: I udvalg fra J.K. Qvigstads samiske eventyr og sagn I-IV, 1927–1929, edited by Brita Pollan, 361–2. Oslo: Aschehoug. Tuorda, Tor Lundberg. 2014. “Life as a Sami Activist: My Struggle for a Mining-Free Gállok–Jokkmokk and Kvikkjokk.” In In Re:Mindings: Co-Constituting Indigenous/Academic/Artistic Knowledges, edited by Johan Gärdebo, May-Britt Öhman and Hiroshi Maruyama, 201–13. Uppsala: Hugo Valentin Centre, Uppsala University. Turi, Johan. 2011. An Account of the Sámi. Chicago: Nordic Studies. Wilson, Shawn. 2008. Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Halifax: Fernwood.

DID BREIVIK CARE ABOUT RACE? A STUDY OF SCANDINAVIAN RADICAL NATIONALISM BENJAMIN R. TEITELBAUM

The greatest race to ever walk the earth, dying a slow death with insane mirth. The tomb has been prepared, a race betrayed. White man, fight the flight toward the grave.

These lines come from the song “Ode to a Dying People,” written by Canadian George Burdi and famously performed by Swedish singer Saga. I came to know Saga while conducting ethnographic fieldwork for my PhD dissertation from 2010 to 2012. Having had frequent formal and informal contact with her for years, I consider her something of a friend today, and this despite considerable differences in our worldviews. Saga is arguably the most celebrated living performer and recording artist in the greater white nationalist and neo-Nazi world today. A standout in the white power music scene because of her gender, light-pop style, relatively refined musical skill, charismatic appearance and stage performance, she has toured throughout the Nordic countries, the United States, Great Britain, Germany and Hungary. The lyrics to most of her songs describe whites as a threatened race, one oppressed by hate crime laws, Affirmative Action policies and non-whites. Today she has nearly 10,000 fans on Facebook.com, and her songs on youtube.com, especially “Ode to a Dying People,” have received upwards of one million views – numbers that, while small compared with mainstream pop artists, far surpass those of other white nationalist acts. Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik – perpetrator of a mass shooting and bombing that left sixty-nine people dead on July 22, 2011 – was one of those fans. Prior to carrying out his attacks in Oslo and Utøya, Breivik released his manifesto, 2083: A Declaration of European Independence (Breivik 2011). In this massive document Breivik outlines a

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justification for his murderous actions, claiming that Marxism, immigration and Islam constitute an existential threat to Norway and Western Europe as a whole. But in between extended sections that detail the philosophical underpinnings of Marxism or methods for constructing bombs, Breivik reflects on his past and his musical tastes. Here, though he praises mainstream European pop artists like Helene Bøksle and Armin van Buuren, he devotes most attention to Saga, who he calls “the best and most talented patriotic musician in the English speaking [sic] world” (Breivik 2011, 847). He goes on to list the lyrics to twelve of her songs and encourages all of his followers to listen to her tracks and memorize her lyrics as a means of preparing to commit attacks. Doing so, he says, “has worked brilliantly for me and it will likely work just as well for you” (Breivik 2011, 847). I was surprised by Breivik’s regard for Saga. I came across the relevant sections of the manifesto four days after the attack and his obvious appreciation for Saga did not resonate with his image in Scandinavian media. According to expert analysts, Breivik was a nationalist, an individual who opposed immigration to Norway and the other Nordic countries as well as the doctrine of multiculturalism. But he was a particular kind of nationalist – he belonged to a rising branch of this ideological field that rejected racism, that aimed to protect and promote a national people defined by shared culture rather than shared blood. That may have been true, I thought. But Saga was no such “cultural nationalist.” Her music, including the songs Breivik dwelled upon in his manifesto, speaks of protecting and promoting a white racial community. It is not uncommon for individuals to appreciate music that directly contradicts their political values and moral convictions. Likewise, listeners may selectively dismiss some aspects of a song’s political message while celebrating others. But Breivik’s admiration for Saga was not of this kind. Rather, his writings on her were but one expression of a theme stretching throughout his manifesto. Contrary to expert commentary, Breivik, like Saga, sought to rally behind and defend a racial community. In this article I examine the disjuncture between Breivik’s ideology and its interpretation by journalistic and scholarly commentators. This disjuncture, I claim, is a symptom of a problematic tendency whereby most experts on radical nationalism in Scandinavia double as anti-racist activists. Their drive to undermine radical nationalism prevents these commentators from gaining key insights into the anti-immigrant scene and leads them to pursue politically advantageous interpretations even when supporting evidence is thin. Here I argue that failures in the coverage of Breivik highlight the urgent need for new research models, as journalists

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and scholars seek to understand radical nationalism’s rapid rise in the Nordic countries. I begin by mapping contemporary radical nationalist ideology, particularly the divide between ethno- and cultural nationalism. Following this, I trace the efforts of scholarly and journalistic commentators to classify Breivik as a cultural nationalist. I then move to question this classification via a review of Breivik’s manifesto, statements he made to state-appointed psychologists, public communications given through his lawyers, and testimony during his trial in the spring of 2012.

Ethno- and Cultural Nationalism in Scandinavia Self-identified nationalists in Scandinavia share a commitment to chosen national peoples – to communities they believe are facing existential threats brought on by immigration and multiculturalism. Nationalists differ, however, in their understanding of the boundaries and defining features of these communities. Individuals and organizations may posit a transnational people of “Scandinavians,” “Nordics,” “Aryans,” “Europeans,” or “Whites.” They may instead conceive of communities in strictly national terms and claim to fight on behalf of “Norwegians,” “Swedes,” or “Danes.” Some even rally to the defense of alleged subnational peoples. But the largest split within Scandinavia’s nationalist scene stems from the varied understandings about membership in these communities – regardless of whether such communities are conceived of as transnational, national, or subnational. Specifically, insiders disagree as to whether one belongs to the said people based on inherited biological features or cultural traits. In other words, while some think that being “European” or “Swedish” stems from blood, others argue that these identities derive from assimilating particular behaviors and values, that one can become “European” or “Swedish” regardless of where or to whom one was born. Insiders call these two positions ethnonationalism and cultural nationalism respectively. Contemporary Scandinavian ethnonationalism has shifted during the past decade. Though these forces still endorse various forms of racial determinism and anti-Semitism, they have also embraced rhetorical and ideological reforms. Increasing numbers of ethnonationalists today are adopting a model known as ethnopluralism – a school of thought positing the inherent value in ethnic diversity and calling for an allegedly nonchauvinistic, non-hierarchical separatism. The less hate-filled, incendiary rhetoric emanating from ethnopluralist organizations has spread in various forms throughout the wider nationalist scene in Scandinavia, constituting in large part what I have called “the New Nationalism” (Teitelbaum 2013).

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In contrast with ethnonationalist groups, cultural nationalists claim disinterest in the ethnic and racial composite of the communities they fight for. Though these forces also foresee existential threats to Swedes, Norwegians and Danes, they do so referring to a weakening of shared beliefs, social habits and cultural traditions in these countries. It is when the citizens of these nations stop thinking and behaving in accordance with their national culture that Swedes, Norwegians and Danes will be no more. What these forces advocate, accordingly, is the strengthening of a national consciousness and pride, a renewed emphasis on assimilation as the prevailing model for integrating outsiders and, so that assimilation may be aided, a major reduction in immigration. This ostensibly non-racist anti-immigrant activism has experienced political success in Scandinavia. Today the parliaments of Norway, Denmark, Finland and Sweden all contain parties that qualify as cultural nationalist. Norway’s Progress Party and Denmark’s Danish People’s Party are established players in their countries’ political scenes, whereas the Sweden Democrats and the True Finns gained power in 2010 and 2011 respectively. Out of the four, these latter two groups are more likely to identify as nationalists. This is especially true of the Sweden Democrats, who first emerged during the 1980s from neo-Nazi circles, only to reject racial nationalism outright during the mid-1990s (Orrenius 2010). Like ethnopluralists, cultural nationalist groups may frame their effort as one to preserve “diversity” throughout the world – albeit diversity in terms of cultural practices rather than ethnicities. But unlike ethnonationalists, these groups tend not to be anti-Semitic. Instead, the foreign Other deemed most threatening are those whose culture these nationalists claim is least reconcilable with Nordic society: Muslims. Islam, according to these critics, has imported into Scandinavia attitudes toward secularism, gender and violence that conflict with local values. Many also seem to replace the antiSemitic theory of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy with claims that global jihad is on the verge of swallowing Western civilization in its charge toward total domination of the planet. Along these lines, all cultural nationalist political parties in Nordic parliaments are pro-Israel. Few scholarly works examine in detail the dualism of cultural and ethnonationalism in contemporary Europe, and among those that do, most commit themselves to framing the boundary between the two ideologies as illusory. In particular, scholars and other commentators tend to regard cultural nationalism as nothing other than a veiled form of ethnonationalism, an attempt to render racist activism more acceptable to a mainstream disinclined to policy-making based explicitly on race. Tracing cultural nationalism in France, Pierre-André Taguieff (2001, 261) uses the

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term “cultural racism” to make this case. Journalists and scholars in Sweden, such as Mikael Ekman and Daniel Poohl (2010), have instead focused on various instances where self-declared non-racist nationalists congregated with neo-Nazis and consumed these groups’ expressive culture and intellectual output. And Jens Rydgren (2006, 109) goes as far as to call the Sweden Democrats ethnopluralists. Such analyses typically involve a degree of mindreading, of scholars declaring themselves privy to others’ unspoken beliefs and are problematic for that reason. But regardless of the private, unarticulated beliefs of individual nationalists, indications are that the divide between ethno- and cultural nationalism is a social reality. The boundary between these two ideologies is real to nationalists themselves. It is based on perceptions of each other as cultural or ethnonationalists that they form their social interactions and political alliances.

Breivik as Anti-Racist Breivik attempted to portray himself as a cultural nationalist in his public writings. For instance, he frequently refers to himself as an “anti-racist” in his manifesto, 2083: A Declaration of European Independence (henceforth 2083) (Breivik 2011). In step with such a claim, the manifesto – more than 1,500 pages long – focuses on Islam and its threat to Europe, while repeatedly expressing sympathy with Jews and Israel. To support the notion that Breivik is a cultural nationalist, he often juxtaposes himself with forces of ethnonationalism. Toward the end of 2083, in a section where Breivik interviews himself about his past, he describes the emergence of his political convictions and the problem he faced finding like-minded individuals to align with. He writes of himself: I decided I wanted to join the resistance movement. However, the main problem then was that there weren’t any alternatives for me at all. There weren’t any known armed cultural conservative, or Christian, antiJihad movements. An NS [National Socialist] or racist/anti Jewish movement was completely out of the question, as they represented much of what I oppose. (Breivik 2011,1378)

Here, the categories he links with his own thinking – cultural conservatism, Christianity, anti-jihad – center on culture and religion, whereas the forces he opposes – particularly Nazism and racism – are race-based. Breivik leaves some longer meditations on the subject, including the following

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where he describes the organization to which he claims to belong, and which he believes will carry on his cause after his death/incarceration: Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici (PCCTS), or the Knights Templar. He says of this likely fictitious group and its future struggle: Know that we, the PCCTS, Knights Templar, are not a racist organization. Individuals of all races, providing that they are Christian, can join and fight for the Knights Templar as Justiciar Knights. Your contribution for the conservative cause will guarantee you and the loyal members of your family permanent residency in Europe. You will be embraced as a fellow citizen if you shed blood with us, have no doubt about that. The future of all minorities in Europe will depend on where their loyalty is and will NOT be based on their skin color or ethnic origin. (Breivik 2011, 1167)

Writings beyond the manifesto also suggested that Breivik did not belong to the race ideological wing of Scandinavian radical nationalism. For example, in his postings on the ultraconservative Norwegian online forum, dokument.no, he criticizes “ethno centric” political parties – naming the British National Party and Front National in France as two examples – on the grounds that “you cannot fight racism (multiculturalism) with racism” (Document.no. 2015).1

Interpreting Breivik In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, journalistic and scholarly commentators in Scandinavia – of which many also identified as antiracist activists – moved to distance Breivik from Nazism and race ideology. In an apparent reaction to statements like those above, these commentators framed the terrorist as a cultural nationalist. Though this designation could be seen as softening Breivik’s image somewhat, it also made him more useful for the anti-racist cause. On July 24, 2011, two days after the shooting and bombing, political science professor Torbjørn Knutsen offered the following analysis of Breivik in an interview with the newspaper Adressa: It is Islam that he is against, and he thinks that multiculturalism in Norway helps Islam establish itself in Norway. He is also a nationalist, and wants every country to be able to have its own culture, and will accordingly fight everything that threatens that. But he can just as well be an anti-racist. (Sved 2011)2

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Knutsen did not specify how Breivik could qualify as an anti-racist, but his understanding that the suspected shooter fought to preserve the cultural uniqueness of each country seems to motivate this claim. That same day, commentators in Sweden – home to most experts on radical nationalism in the Nordic region – would use the same claim to link Breivik with their country’s leading cultural nationalist party, the Sweden Democrats. Lisa Bjurwald (2011) of the anti-fascist organization Expo wrote in the Swedish evening paper Expressen: “It will soon be apparent that the suspected mass-murderer’s views are identical with those of leading Sweden Democrats, not extreme neo-Nazis.”3 Breivik’s thinking, Bjurwald argued, was not that of perpetually marginalized, hooligan, race ideologues. Rather, it belonged to a more moderate form of nationalism, one represented, via the Sweden Democrats, in the country’s parliament. Commentators, particularly those in Sweden, would express this message in interviews and writings during the following weeks. Jonathan Leman, who also works for Expo, furthered Bjurwald’s efforts to distance Breivik from ethnonationalism in a radio interview on the Swedish Radio P1 program Studio Ett. In that interview, he sought to describe the worldview, or ideological “milieu” that he believed Breivik’s thinking derived from: It is important to remember that it is not a Nazi milieu. Instead it is a milieu that can be found in right-wing populist parties [...] where anti-Muslim attitudes are central. And the difference with other right-wing extremism is that, if you take the white power milieu or the Nazi milieu, then it is antidemocratic sentiments, a race ideology – dividing people up into different biological races – and a Jewish world conspiracy. (“Den anti-muslimska extremhögern” 2011)4

And on August 8, writer Rasmus Fleischer (2011) added to this narrative in an article in Sweden’s largest evening paper, Aftonbladet. Referring to an op-ed by Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt in Dagens Nyheter on August 5, Fleischer writes: The administration asserts in their op-ed that Breivik should be placed in the “white power milieu,” which, according to the security police (SÄPO) is defined by a “strong race ideological” worldview. They say this, despite the fact that Anders Behring Breivik did not want to defend “the white race,” but instead, “the Christian West.” (Fleischer 2011)5 

The notion that Breivik was not fighting to protect an imagined racial or ethnic community received further reinforcement from an academic expert,

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Mattias Gardell. Gardell (2011) declared that Breivik “is noticeably ambivalent on the race issue.” He used the word “ambivalent” again in his testimony at the Breivik trial on April 6, 2012 (Verdens Gang 2012). In sum, whether juxtaposing him with “racism,” “Nazism,” or a “white power milieu,” leading commentators in Scandinavia initially framed Breivik as a cultural nationalist. 6 These classifications appear to have grown from Breivik’s presentation of himself in his writings and possibly because the terrorist’s intense focus on Islam signaled a corresponding distance from anti-Semitism and race ideology. But a closer reading of Breivik’s manifesto discredits the notion that his nationalism does not impinge on race.

Breivik Beneath the Surface I have always been terrified of the prospect of being labeled as a racist, to such a degree that I have put significant restrictions on myself, not only verbally but concerning all aspects of my social image. (Breivik 2011, 761)

Sections of 2083 indicate that the terrorist’s overtures to anti-racism – those that led some commentators to declare him a cultural nationalist – were part of a public façade. Consider, for example, the following section where he addresses directly the issue of racial and cultural nationalism, here presented in terms of “racial conservatism” and the contrasting ideology that he claims to embrace, “cultural conservatism”: Racial Conservatism is dead and should not IN ANY WAY be linked rhetorically to Cultural Conservatism (Racial Conservatism died in WW2). Our battle on the other hand involves Cultural Conservatism, our duty and right to resist Cultural genocide and Islamic demographic warfare. Cultural Conservatism has NOTHING to do with Racial Conservatism. Learn from past mistakes and exercise rhetorical containment. (Breivik 2011, 664; capitals in the original)

At first glance, this statement would seem to be an additional reinforcement of expert commentators’ analysis of the terrorist. Here, Breivik appears to banish racial nationalism from his cause. However, in the final sentence, he provides a clue as to why and how he seeks such rejection when he urges those following in his footsteps to “exercise rhetorical containment.” Indeed, he continues this section by describing how his followers should treat racial nationalism, and in doing so, he reveals himself to be most worried about the public presentations of ideology. He writes:

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An individual using “flagged” rhetoric such as “race”, “race war”, white people, black people, Jews (in the same sentence as race f [sic] example), ethnic (in the same sentence as Jews) – are triggering every imaginable mine put up for him which in turn will completely obliterate his [reputation] (if he ever had one). Therefore he is not only undermining his own efforts, but he risks pushing other “moderate conservatives” away. (Breivik 2011, 665)

Building on the end of the previous lines, Breivik specifies the dangers of using the language of racial nationalism. The social stigmatization attached to such expressions renders them counter-productive in the pursuit of a large-scale popular uprising. But after describing the drawbacks of racial nationalist language, Breivik clarifies that he is not opposed to the ideas and values these expressions communicate. Rounding off his exposition of the claim that “Racial Conservatism is dead,” he states abruptly: So even though ethnicity and race still are relevant, it is not in our best interest to talk about it. If we do, we are only increasing the risk of destroying our own credibility which is lethal for individuals aspiring to reach a large audience (politicians etc). (Breivik 2011, 666)

Breivik thus indicates that his political philosophy includes a concern for ethnicity and race, but he aims to hide this concern by avoiding reference to it in public. Alongside scrubbing words like “ethnicity” and “race” from his language, Breivik also contests prevailing understandings of racism: The cultural Marxists/multiculturalists have gone to great lengths to change the very definition of the word racist. Europeans having African slaves on a plantation WAS racist, the apartheid system WAS racist (deportation and a two-state solution would have been the right way to go). However, loving your ethnic group and fighting for the interests of your tribe is NOT and will never be racist. (Breivik 2011, 1155)

Racism, for Breivik, appears to be a practice whereby one pursues the subordination of one race for the benefit of another – a practice born of a worldview observing hierarchies between races. In contrast, what the terrorist seems to advocate is activism born out of a non-hierarchical love of self rather than a disregard for the other. Though such a position does not qualify as racism in his mind, it certainly should in the minds of most expert Swedish commentators, those who would classify these same ideas under their more common heading – ethnopluralism – as one of the

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leading ideological schools of contemporary ethnonationalism in the region. Breivik’s reflections on labels, ideology and propaganda thus qualify his own claims to anti-racism. Additionally, these writings suggest that the lack of racial nationalist rhetoric elsewhere in his manifesto may be derived from a goal to render his ideology more marketable to mainstream audiences. But the content, if not the language in 2083, signals that Breivik fought to preserve an imagined racial community. In his discussions of music, Breivik celebrates leading white nationalist Swedish singer Saga, calling on his followers to use her music, as he did, as a source of inspiration (Breivik 2011, 847–8). His description of her music was focused on her polished musical abilities, her rejection of hard rock and heavy metal instrumental styles (which Breivik despised), and, most of all, her lyrics. Breivik called upon other “revolutionary conservatives” to memorize these lyrics. To support them in this task he includes the text to twelve songs that Saga recorded, seven in English and five in Swedish. Of the English-language songs, only two were written by Saga.7 Others came from classic British white power band Skrewdriver, Canadian white power band RaHoWa (short for Racial Holy War), and the poetry of late American white nationalist David Lane. In step with these sources, the lyrics to the songs Breivik includes are unequivocal in their racial nationalism, such as in the second song listed, “Black Bannered Legion”: Black is the colour of midnight which the tyrant shall learn to dread As we honour fallen martyrs with steel and fire and lead The ancient Aryan symbol is also drawn in black So underneath that colour we will take our nations back

These lyrics, based on a poem by David Lane, speak with nostalgia about Nazi Germany and go on to celebrate militant white nationalists in America. Other tracks portray whites as a victimized race facing an existential threat, such as Saga’s most famous song, “Ode to a Dying People” – originally performed by RaHoWa. The chorus to this track says: If this is the way it ends, if this is the way my race ends, if this is the way it ends, I can’t bear to witness. Don’t let it end this way [...] I can’t bear to witness.

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Saga’s own lyrics are equally devoted to a racialized understanding of national identity. Consider her track, “Krigarens själ” [The Warrior’s Soul]: Courageous – with the bravery of a hundred lions Swedish – with the purest of blood Proud – will never be a slave Warrior – with a soul.8

These lyrics, which Breivik asks his followers to dwell upon and memorize, do not sing of cultural or religious communities in the first instance. Rather, they sing about race. Breivik’s status as a cultural nationalist is also undermined by a section of his manifesto that describes threats to the “Nordic genotype.” The Nordic genotype, he claims, will disappear from the global population in 200 years because of intermarriage between Nordics and non-Nordics – a development allegedly orchestrated by Marxist and multiculturalist forces. His efforts to frame the problem of the Nordic genotype’s decline bear unmistakable resemblance to the language of contemporary racial and ethnic separatism in Europe: Politically correct individuals will say: “Who cares if blonde people with blue eyes are extinct? We are all going to be dark skinned in the future anyway.” Wrong. We are only going to allow the indigenous peoples of Europe to be indirectly exterminated if we allow it, which we have no intention of allowing. The hypocritical thing is that the same individuals stating this are likely to support animals that are facing extinction, the preservation of rare species in the animal kingdom etc. Why should we preserve the polar bears, when we have brown bears? According to the logic of the cultural Marxist – blonde, blue-eyed people have lesser value than animals. (Breivik 2011, 1191–2)

To remedy the situation, Breivik calls for a program of “reprogenetics,” one where the government provides economic incentives for white couples to have children.9 He further seeks: The usage of large-scale surrogacy facilities as a secondary reproduction option for countries to compensate for non-sustainable fertility rates. The donors of eggs and sperm will then exclusively carry the Nordic genotypes. (Breivik 2011, 1192)

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The agenda Breivik articulates here, one of mass mobilization for the protection and revitalization of a racial community, places him firmly outside the intellectual sphere of cultural nationalism. Were he, as commentators like Rasmus Fleischer (2011) suggest, acting only for the interests of an imagined “Christian West,” than the terrorist’s interest in “reprogenetics” becomes unintelligible. Taken as a whole, 2083 cannot be regarded as an expression of rigid, race-blind cultural nationalism. Nor, however, is it a resounding endorsement of orthodox ethnonationalism. Breivik’s discussion of the decline of the Nordic genotype and future breeding centers, it should be noted, never mentions nations and national belonging. Never does he indicate that one’s identity as a Norwegian depends on racial integrity. His frequent denunciation of racism, and earlier remarks that individuals of varying race and skin color are welcome in the Knights Templar, could suggest that he envisions a multiethnic Norway, albeit one where the government intervenes to ensure that those with the Nordic genotype remain a distinct racial group. Alternately, the terrorist could be maintaining two worldviews that he has yet to reconcile with one another. But though Breivik appears at times to hold contradictory stances on race and ethnicity in his manifesto, this conflict receded in his subsequent communications.

Breivik, Post-Manifesto Since his arrest the day of the attacks, Breivik has communicated to the public through his lawyers and through statements during his trial in the spring of 2012. Additionally, two psychiatric studies – one in the fall of 2011 and one in January, 2012 – relayed further information about the terrorist’s thinking. If calls for the protection of Norwegians as a racial and ethnic community were obscured in the terrorist’s manifesto, they have been blatant and frequent in his more recent expressions. Psychiatrists Torgeir Husby and Synne Sørheim began a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation of Breivik in the fall of 2011. To complete this work, they interviewed Breivik extensively. The psychiatrists concluded – much to the displeasure of families of the victims at Utøya and Oslo – that the terrorist was paranoid schizophrenic, a designation that could have prohibited a prison sentence. In their final written report, Husby and Sørheim (Rettspsykiatrisk erklæring 2011) dwell on Breivik’s values and worldview. And in the declassified sections of that report, racial nationalism appears to be Breivik’s prevailing concern, overshadowing issues of religion or culture in a mirror image of 2083. The psychiatrists write:

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The observed thinks that ethnic cleansing is taking place in Norway, and that he lives in fear of being killed. [...] The observed is working on suggested solutions that should improve our Norwegian ethnic genetic pool, eradicate illness, and reduce the divorce rate. He envisions reservations (for “indigenous Norwegians”), DNA-testing, and mass factories for birthing. (Rettspsykiatrisk erklæring 2011, 225–6; italics and parentheses in the original)10

Thus, while Breivik devoted only a small portion of his manifesto to birthing centers and racial engineering, these topics appear to have occupied appreciably larger space in his discussions with psychiatrists. Husby and Sørheim continue to summarize the terrorist’s thinking: The observed has admitted to carrying out the deeds he is accused of. The deeds are seen to stand in direct relation with the delusional world situation he experiences himself to be a part of, with civil war, threats of the extermination of his own race, and fear of violence and murder directed at what he calls my people. (Rettspsykiatrisk erklæring 2011, 234)11

Breivik thus framed his “people” as a racial community during his meetings with Husby and Sørheim. Subsequent expressions leading up to and during his criminal trial in 2012 would showcase this same thinking. While answering questions from reporters on February 5, 2012, Breivik’s lawyer Vibeke Hein Bæra offered the following account of her client’s thinking: He sees [Norwegians] as an indigenous people that he will save from multiculturalism and Islamification, and says that the Norwegian people will disappear and be diluted if this war is not waged. (Quoted in Andersen, Vikås and Grøttum 2012)12

Bæra added that her client said, “I am not a racist, but I think that different ethnic groups should be where they originate from” (quoted in Andersen, Vikås and Grøttum 2012).13 Likewise, when Breivik was able to make a public statement during his trial in the spring of the same year, he again stressed the importance of maintaining Norway’s racial and ethnic integrity. When he was allowed to make his own statement on April 17, 2012, he said: Our ethnic group is itself the heart of our culture. Our culture cannot survive without a strong heart. To preserve this ethnic group, our culture, in addition to our freedom and independence, is what our forefathers dedicated their lives to. And what hundreds of thousands of our people throughout the ages have sacrificed their lives for. Our ethnic group, our

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These statements appeared to convince some commentators to change their interpretation of Breivik. One such individual was president and chief editor of Expo in Sweden, Daniel Poohl. On April 16, 2012 – the day before Brevik made the above remarks in court, Poohl co-authored an oped with Martha Hannus on Swedish Television’s online magazine, stating, “[Breivik] drew his ideals from the counter-jihad movement” (Poohl and Hannus 2012). On April 18, 2012 – a day following Breivik’s remarks in court – Poohl issued a second op-ed through Dagens Nyheter. And in this second portrayal, he abandons his earlier classification. Rather than linking the terrorist exclusively with counter-jihad, and thereby cultural nationalism, Poohl wrote: Breivik is a hybrid; he extends over the extreme right’s fault lines. On the one hand he fights against Marxist and liberal conspiracies that, according to him, are causing an ethnic cleansing of the Norwegian people through Muslim immigration. On the other hand, his declaration of war deals with the defense of a Norwegian “indigenous people” from annihilation, an idea that can be found in Nazi ideology. (Poohl 2012)15

This turn in reporting by one of Sweden’s leading commentators on radical nationalism seemed to slip by the public eye unnoticed. Today, following Breivik’s psychiatric examinations, his statements through his lawyers and his testimony in courts, the prominence of ethnonationalism in his thinking is undeniable. However, my analysis here shows that a close reading of Breivik’s manifesto would have been sufficient to deem the terrorist a type of racial nationalist, one who simply jumbled standard positions on Jews and Islam. With this in mind, the initial presentation of Breivik by journalistic and academic experts raises a troubling prospect. It suggests that various prominent Swedish commentators on radical nationalism issued analyses of Breivik’s worldview prior to having thoroughly read the terrorist’s most in-depth presentation of that worldview: his manifesto. The relatively widespread rush to present Breivik as a cultural nationalist highlights an additional, structural problem with research on radical nationalism in Scandinavia: the bulk of journalists and scholars who study this scene are actively involved in subverting it. They often double as political players who compete amongst themselves to be the most prominent voice against racism in the political sphere.

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The academic community – anthropology in particular – has increasingly distanced itself from research methodologies whereby scholars of contemporary social and cultural life engage in opposition to the people they study. This stance emerges from both ethical and epistemological concerns. Recognizing that scholars of human social and cultural life have frequently functioned as instruments of colonialist regimes, anthropologists and other social scientists today often aspire to reciprocal relationships that will benefit those they study. Additionally, scholars argued that our representation of those we study will be more accurate when produced in the context of long-term, collaborative interaction – the type of interaction founded on transparency and trust. With a collaborative relationship in place, researchers can enjoy access to the scrutiny of the foremost experts on their subject: their research subjects themselves. But such relationships are unthinkable between the commentators described here and radical nationalists. This was demonstrated recently when long-time author and researcher of radical nationalism in Sweden, Anna-Lena Lodenius, attempted to establish a collaborative relationship with members of the militant neo-Nazi organization, Svenska motståndsrörelsen [The Swedish Resistance Movement]. Lodenius contacted the organization in the winter of 2012 to ask for their input on a government-funded study about recruitment techniques in radical nationalist organizations. The e-mail response from one of the Resistance Movement’s leaders, Pär Öberg, was predictable: Hello, Anna-Lena! The question is whether we would like to participate in a government study where we would explain details about how we recruit. Details that then would of course be used to try to stop our recruiting. It is quite strange that you even took the time to ask us. How dumb do you think we are, really? (Öberg 2012)16

Lodenius’ outreach efforts to The Swedish Resistance Movement appeared to end without any success. The lack of direct contact between expert commentators and radical nationalists raises concerns about the accuracy of our understanding of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and white nationalism in the Nordic countries. Nearly all mainstream academic and journalistic reporting on these circles is produced without any input from insiders. And attempts to find methodological substitutes for fieldwork, interviews and collaboration – such as Mathias Wåg’s study (2010), which is based on hacked e-mails – have nonetheless contained factual errors (see Teitelbaum 2013).

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Just as the activist character of research on radical nationalism prohibits appreciable collaboration between scholars and those they study, it can also drive commentators to prioritize political agendas over careful analysis. Swedish commentators’ designation of Breivik as a cultural nationalist may have been an example of the latter. For activist journalists and scholars, there were political dividends to be reaped from associating Breivik with more mild forms of anti-immigrant sentiment – forms that have also enjoyed the most political success. Breivik’s attacks came less than one year after the Sweden Democrats became the first self-identifying nationalist party to win seats in Sweden’s national parliament. The party sought to legitimize itself in part by rejecting its racial nationalist past and instead advocating assimilationism and a concept of “open Swedishness” that would be grounded in shared cultural traits and ostensibly blind to race. Whereas ethno- and racial nationalist organizations in Sweden have been relegated to electoral irrelevance, cultural nationalism is poised to reshape the country’s political landscape. Indeed, since entering parliament with 5.7% of the vote, the Sweden Democrats’ take in national opinion polls has grown steadily. The fight against radical nationalism, it would seem, is a fight against those actors who are combining antiimmigrant and anti-Islam sentiment with a rejection of race ideology. Journalism and scholarship presenting Breivik as a cultural nationalist have often been explicit in linking the terrorist to the Sweden Democrats and similar parties. Lisa Bjurwald’s July 24, 2011, article in Expressen, for example, was titled “Views identical with SD’s” (Bjurwald 2011). Likewise, Daniel Poohl’s April 16, 2012, article in Sveriges Television – published just before Breivik testified in court – was titled, “Jimmie Åkesson, admit that you and Breivik are driven by the same ideology” (Poohl 2012). Jimmie Åkesson is the soft-spoken, boyish and wholesomelooking leader of the Sweden Democrats. One of the most developed and far-reaching efforts to link Breivik with cultural nationalist parties comes from popular author Magnus Linton and his book De hatade [The Hated] (2012), where he declares: Anders Behring Breivik’s manifesto is striking, not because of its monomaniac craziness, but because its analysis of the world is mainstream. All Islamophobia’s clichés [...] are weaved together time and time again, and the worldview is totally in line with party platforms the authors of which sit in many European parliaments today. (Linton 2012, 68)17

Making such accusations would have been more difficult were Breivik presented as a figure who, as Poohl would later state, was a hybrid of various forms of radical nationalism, an individual who combined

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Islamophobia with a belief in preserving the racial purity of white Norwegians, one who combined the language of anti-racism with fears that the “Nordic genotype” faced an existential threat, and that “ethnic groups should be where they originate from.” A less ideologically deviant Breivik is a figure far more useful to those looking to affect changes in Sweden’s mainstream political discourse. Such voices can and have used this image of Breivik to claim that the worst terrorist attack in post-war Scandinavia was committed based on ideas no more eccentric than what can be found in Sweden’s parliament. Having an introspective, large-scale conversation following the gruesome attacks on July 22, 2011, may be urgent, likewise the continued critical examination of the Sweden Democrats and their worldview. But engaging these processes requires better insight into the ideas, organizations and individuals driving the rise of radical nationalism in the North – insight that activist scholarship and journalism may not be positioned to provide.

Notes  1 Man kan ikke bekjempe rasisme (multikulti) med rasisme. 2 Det er islam han er imot, og han mener multikulturalismen i Norge hjelper islam med å få fotfeste i Norge. Han er også nasjonalist, og vil at hvert eget land kun skal ha sin egen kultur, og vil således bekjempe alt som truer dette. Men han kan likeså godt være en antiracist […]. 3 Det framgår snart att den misstänkte massmördarens åsikter är identiska med dem hos ledande sverigedemokrater, inte extrema nynazister. 4 Det är viktigt att komma ihåg att det inte är en nazistisk miljö. Utan det det handlar om är en miljö som ofta finns i högerpopulistiska partier [...] där den antimuslimska är centralt. Och skillnaden mot annat högerextremistiska är att, om man tar vit-makt miljön eller den nazistiska miljön, så är det en anti-demokrati, en rasideologi – indelning av människan i olika biologiska raser – och en judisk världskonspiration. 5 Regeringen gör i debattartikeln gällande att Breivik bör räknas till “vit maktmiljön”, vilken enligt Säpos definition kännetecknas av en “starkt rasideologisk världsåskådning”. Detta trots att Anders Behring Breivik inte ville försvara “den vita rasen” utan “det kristna västerlandet”. 6 One, perhaps unintentional exception is journalist Per Gudmundson (2011), who made the bizarre suggestion that Breivik should be called identitär [an identitarian] – referring to a small, murky, often misunderstood field of European radical nationalists who advocate various forms of racial separatism, (see Teitelbaum 2013). 7 There is little indication that Breivik was aware of the fact that Saga did not write the texts to all of her songs.

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 Tapper – med hundra lejons mod/Svensk – med det renaste blod/Stolt – Aldrig bli en träl/Krigare – med en själ. 9 Breivik’s use of the term “reprogenetics” clashes somewhat with that of Lee Silver. Silver (1997) intended for the term to refer to future technologies that would allow private citizens to control the genetic make-up of their children, whereas he uses the more inflammatory term “eugenics” to describe stateorchestrated programs of mass DNA manipulation. 10 Observanden mener det foregår etnisk rensing i Norge, og at han lever i frukt for å bli drept. […] Observanden arbeider med løsningsforslag som skal forbedre vår norsk-etniske, genetiske pool, utrydde sykdom, og redusere skilsmisseraten. Han ser for seg reservater (for “urfolket nordmenn”), DNA-testing, og massefabrikker for fødsler. 11 Observanden erkjenner å ha utørt de påklagede handlinger. Handlingene anses å stå i direkte sammenheng med den vrangforestillingsverden han opplever å være i med borgerkrig, trussel om utryddelse av egen rase, og frykt for vold og drap på det han beskriver som mitt folk. 12 Han ser på Norge som et urfolk som han vil redde fra multikulturalismen og islamifiseringen, og sier at det norske folk vil forsvinne og bli utvannet hvis ikke denne krigen kjempes. 13 Jeg er ingen rasist, men jeg mener at ulike etniske grupper skal være der de har sitt opphav. 14 Vår etniske gruppe er selve hjertet i vår kultur. Kulturen vår kan ikke overleve uten et sterkt hjerte. Å ivareta denne etniske gruppen, vår kultur, i tillegg til vår frihet og vår uavhengighet er det våre forfedre dedikerte sine liv til. Og det som hundretusener av vårt folk opp gjennom tidene har ofret livet for. Vår etniske gruppe, vår kultur, vår identitet, vår kristendom, vår nasjon og vår frihet og uavhengighet er selve fruktene fra århundrer, til og med årtusener av kollektivt strev og hardt arbeid. 15 Breivik är en hybrid, han ställer sig över extremhögerns skiljelinjer. Å ena sidan bekämpar han den marxistiska och liberala konspirationen, som enligt honom själv genomför en etnisk rensning av det norska folket genom muslimsk invandring. Å andra sidan handlar hans krigföring om att försvara den norska “urbefolkningen” från utrotning, en idé som går att hitta i den nazistiska idévärlden. 16 Hej, Anna-Lena! Frågan lyder alltså om vi vill medverka i en statlig utredning där vi ska förklara detaljer om hur vi rekryterar. Detaljer som då självklart kommer användas för att försöka stoppa vår rekrytering. Det känns väldigt konstigt att du överhuvudtaget bemödade dig med att fråga oss. Hur dumma tror du egentligen att vi är? 17 Det slående med Anders Behring Breiviks manifest är inte dess monomana galenskap utan dess mainstreama omvärldsanalys. Islamofobins alla schabloner [...] vevas om och om igen och världsbilden ligger helt i linje med de partiprogram vars författare i dag sitter i flera europeiska parlament. 8

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References Aftenposten. 2012. “Dette sa Breivik – ord for ord.” April 17. http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/22juli/Dette-sa-Breivik---ordfor-ord-6807324.html. Andersen, Mads A., Marianne Vikås, and Eva-Therese Grøttum. 2012 “Dette vil Breivik snakke om i retten.” Verdens Gang, February 5. http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/terrorangrepet-22-juli-andersbehring-breivik/dette-vil-breivik-snakke-om-i-retten/a/10077674/. Bjurwald, Lisa. 2011. “Åsikterna identiska med SD:s.” Expressen, July 24. http://www.expressen.se/debatt/lisa-bjurwald-asikterna-identiska-medsds/. Breivik, Anders [pseud. Andrew Berwick]. 2011. 2083: A Declaration of European Independence. London: N.p. https://archive.org/stream/2083_A_European_Declaration_of_Indepen dence#page/n0/mode/2up (accessed February 6, 2015). “Den anti-muslimska extremhögern” (radio program). 2011. In Studio Ett, aired July 25, Sveriges Radio P1. http://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=1637&artikel=461 6193 (accessed February 13, 2015). Document.no. 2015. “Anders Behring Breiviks kommentarer hos Document.no.” Post 2009-12-06. http://www.document.no/andersbehring-breivik/ (accessed February 6, 2015). Ekman, Mikael, and Daniel Poohl. 2010. Ut ur skuggan: En kritisk granskning av Sverigedemokraterna. Stockholm: Natur & Kultur. Fleischer, Rasmus. 2011. “Europas två extremhögrar.” Aftonbladet, August 9. http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article13438253.ab. Gardell, Mattias. 2011. “The Roots of Breivik’s Ideology: Where Does the Romantic Male Warrior Ideal Come from Today?” Open Democracy, August 1. http://www.opendemocracy.net/mattias-gardell/roots-ofbreiviks-ideology-where-does-romantic-male-warrior-ideal-comefrom-today (accessed February 6, 2015). Gudmundson. 2011. “Islamofobi på steroider.” Gudmudson (blog). July 25. http://gudmundson.blogspot.com/2011/07/islamofobi-pa-steroider.html (accessed December 1, 2011). Linton, Magnus. 2012. De hatade: Om radikalhögerns måltavlor. Stockholm: Atlas. Orrenius, Niklas. 2010. Jag är inte rabiat, jag äter pizza: En bok om Sverigedemokraterna. Stockholm: Månpocket. Poohl, Daniel. 2012. “Anders Behring Breivik är en hybrid som ställer sig över extremhögerns skiljelinjer.” Dagens Nyheter, April 18.

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http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/kulturdebatt/daniel-poohl-andersbehring-breivik-ar-en-hybrid-som-staller-sig-over-extremhogernsskiljelinjer/. Poohl, Daniel, and Martha Hannus. 2012. “Jimmie Åkesson, erkänn att du och Breivik drivs av samma ideology.” SVT/Opinion, April 16. http://www.svt.se/opinion/jimmie-akesson-erkann-att-du-och-breivikdrivs-av-samma-ideologi (accessed 2015-02-09). Rettspsykiatrisk erklæring. 2011. Breivik, Anders Behring. f.130279xxxxxx. Avgitt 29.11.11 til Oslo tingrett. http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/22-juli/psykiatrisk_vurdering/ (accessed February 9, 2015). Rydgren, Jens. 2006. From Tax Populism to Ethnic Nationalism: Radical Right-Wing Populism in Sweden. New York: Berghahn Books. Silver, Lee. 1997 Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World. New York: Avon. Sved, Børge. 2011. “Han er ikke nynazist.” Adressa, July 24. http://www.adressa.no/nyheter/innenriks/article1666414.ece. Taguieff, Pierre-André. 2001. Force of Prejudice: On Racism and Its Doubles [1987]. Translated by Hassan Melehy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Teitelbaum, Benjamin R. 2013. “‘Come Hear Our Merry Song’: Shifts in the Sound of Contemporary Swedish Radical Nationalism.” PhD diss., Brown University. Verdens Gang. 2012. “Ord for ord, dag 30, del 1: Breivik snakket om ‘lavkvalitetsmuslimer.’” http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/22juli/rettssaken/artikkel.php?artid=10065934. Wåg, Mathias. 2010. “Nationell kulturkamp: Från vit maktmusik till metapolitik.” In Det vita fältet: Samtida forskning om högerextremism, edited by Mats Deland, Fredrik Hertzberg and Thomas Hvitfeldt. Uppsala: University of Uppsala Department of History. Öberg, Pär. 2012. “‘Nazistexpert’ kontaktar Motståndsrörelsen.” Nordfront, December 14. https://www.nordfront.se/nazistexpert-kon taktar-motstandsrorelsen-om-statlig-utredning.smr (accessed February 7, 2013).

THE SPECTER OF DANISH EMPIRE: THE PROPHETS OF ETERNAL FJORD AND THE WRITING OF DANISH-GREENLANDIC HISTORY KIRSTEN THISTED

While the official Denmark has declined to take part in the reconciliation process that Greenland has initiated to examine and address its colonial legacy (Naalakkersuisut 2014; Thisted 2014a), a large literary audience in Denmark has embraced the work of novelist Kim Leine, who has put colonial history and Danish-Greenlandic power relations on the public agenda. Originally published in 2012, his novel Profeterne i Evighedsfjorden (transl. The Prophets of Eternal Fjord, 2015) has received huge attention as well as several prestigious literary awards, including the 2013 Nordic Council Literature Prize. The novel has also been criticized, however, for painting a distorted picture of Denmark’s conduct in Greenland, which was colonized by Danish missionaries in the eighteenth century and whose political relationship with Denmark has since undergone many stages. The issue of the past is relevant, because the way we frame our past influences the space of possibility for our conception of the future. Therefore, this article examines how Leine’s novel engages with common narratives about Danish colonialism in Greenland and how it contributes to the ongoing negotiation of the unity of the Danish realm and the framing of Danish-Greenlandic history. Since 1842, when the Danish poet B. S. Ingemann (1789–1862) published Kunuk og Naja eller Grønlænderne: Fortælling i tre Bøger [Kunuk and Naja or the Greenlanders: A Story in Three Books] (1913), Greenland has been a recurring theme in Danish literature. Most writers have made Greenland the topic of a single work (e.g. Peter Hoeg’s Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne, 1992; Smilla’s Sense of Snow, 1993). A few have made it a recurring theme in their writings, but this latter group has been regarded primarily as authors of “popular” fiction, who are rarely included in literary history reviews or studies. Of these, Peter Freuchen

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(1886–1957) and Jørn Riel (born 1931) are still commonly associated with Greenland, but many others, while popular in their time, have been forgotten. Danish interest in Greenland has come in waves, peaking when Denmark’s position vis-à-vis Greenland seemed to be under threat. This was the case after the sale of the Danish West Indies in 1917, when there were fears that Denmark might lose Greenland, too; in the early 1930s, when Norway laid claim to northeastern Greenland; during and just after the Second World War, when the link with Denmark was disrupted and the Americans moved in; around 1979, when Greenland got Home Rule; and again following the introduction of Greenlandic Self-Government in 2009. The latter coincided with a heightened international focus on the Arctic in connection with global climate change and the prospect of new Arctic sea routes and commercial opportunities – which has led to virtually explosive growth in the interest in Greenland in the new millennium.

Background and Plot Since his debut novel, Kalak, in 2007, Leine (born in 1961) has become an important voice in Denmark, where the general public views him as a cultural translator of contemporary Greenlandic conditions. His status is based on his firsthand experiences working as a nurse for fifteen years in various locations in Greenland, from the capital, Nuuk, in western Greenland to small, remote settlements in eastern Greenland. While he writes in Danish, Leine is among few Danes to have mastered Greenlandic. His debut novel portrays an incestuous relationship between father and son and the son’s subsequent experiences with alcohol, drug and sexual abuse in Greenland. This resembles a story the author has recounted as his own in other contexts, and the novel is therefore widely considered autofiction or performative biographism (Thisted 2011; Haarder 2014). From the outset, the Danish literary audience welcomed Leine as a long-awaited postcolonial voice. Initially, he seemed somewhat unprepared to play this role, but he has gradually come to embrace it and has increasingly turned the focus of his writing to postcolonial issues. For example, the dedication at the beginning of The Prophets of Eternal Fjord places the novel squarely into a political context: “Dedicated to the Government of Greenland (1979–2009) and its pioneers” (Leine 2015).1 Although the events in The Prophets of Eternal Fjord take place in the 1700s, many of the conflict themes from his debut novel are revisited here: the protagonist’s rootless “triangulation” between Norway, Denmark and Greenland, his attraction to the repressed and marginalized, and his

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profoundly self-destructive behavior, which culminates in complete collapse, physically as well as mentally, before he can begin to reconstruct himself. Neither of his protagonists – Kim of Kalak or Morten Falck of The Prophets of Eternal Fjord – seem particularly likeable. They are driven primarily by a dangerous cocktail of naiveté and opportunism, combined with a lack of willpower and responsibility, leaving them open to manipulation and to being roped into other people’s projects – especially by strong-willed women, including, particularly, strong-willed Greenlandic women. The Greenlanders are not portrayed as victims in Leine’s writing. Although they are subjected to a (post)colonial system, their individual successes vary with their abilities to navigate in the cultural encounters and manipulate the self-absorbed Europeans, who are often fatally slow to recognize how feeble their grasp of the Greenlandic environment really is. The Prophets of Eternal Fjord opens with Morten’s arrival in Copenhagen from his birth town in Norway in 1782. (Norway was part of the Danish realm from 1536 to 1814). Morten’s father has dictated that Morten study theology, although he would much prefer medicine. He therefore gives his theological studies short shrift, devoting most of his energy to studying Rousseau – and observing the autopsies at the surgical academy in Bredgade. In encounters with prostitutes and other marginalized individuals in the seedy underbelly of the city, he pursues another form of anatomical studies. Thus, he leads two parallel lives, one in which he manages, despite himself, to graduate as a theologian and become engaged to a young woman from a middle-class background, and one in which he procures dead bodies for autopsies and develops a passion for warm squirts of hermaphrodite sperm. When he is offered a posting in Greenland, he seizes the opportunity and departs in the summer of 1787, without his fiancée. The second chapter of part one describes the sea voyage; it ends with Morten in his cabin as the ship arrives at the Greenlandic trading post Sukkertoppen. The third and final chapter of part one skips abruptly to 1793. It is clear that things have gone terribly wrong for Morten. His body is in an abysmal state, he is facing dishonorable discharge and returning to Denmark, and he is haunted by a certain widow, whom we met in the novel’s prologue, as she is thrown into the sea at her own request. There are strong indications that it was Morten’s booted foot that kicked her off the tall cliff. Morten has far from lived up to the requirements for a civil servant in the service of the Danish king and church. Most importantly, he has allowed himself to be manipulated by the prophets Habakuk and Maria Magdalene, two Greenlanders who have recently been baptized and given their new, biblical names. Now they have

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proclaimed themselves prophets, turned their back on the Danes, and set up their own community in the fjord that the Danes call Evighedsfjorden, Eternal Fjord. The second and longest part of the novel, “Colony & Catechism,” returns in time to the point of Morten’s arrival and tells the story of the prophets and Morten’s encounter with them. In Greenland, Morten again leads two parallel lives. In one, he preaches equality between Danes and Greenlanders, yet complies with colonial Danish regulations and never makes any real effort to aid the Greenlanders. In the other, completely different life, he loses himself in the local grocer’s brandy casks and in the spiritual world that opens itself up to him in Eternal Fjord. Life at the trading post is portrayed as brutal and hypocritical. The Greenlanders rightly wonder about the distinct discrepancy between what the Danes preach and what they do. While life in the prophets’ settlement is not free of personal conflict, the hypocrisy is not nearly as pronounced there. The third and final part of the novel portrays Morten’s return to Denmark via Norway. His arrival in Copenhagen coincides with the great Copenhagen fire of 1795, which conveniently destroys the paperwork that would have forever ruined both his personal finances and his reputation. The slate is wiped clean, and Morten is free to return for a second posting in Greenland. In its basic structure, the novel is thus reminiscent of Henrik Pontoppidan’s (1857–1943) novella Isbjørnen: Et portræt [The Polar Bear: A Portrait] (1961) published in 1887 – a canonical text in Danish literature about Greenland. Pontoppidan’s protagonist also falls afoul of the norms in Copenhagen; like Morten, he is attracted more to life among the Greenlanders in the settlements than among the Danes at the trading post; and he, too, returns to Denmark, yet eventually ends his life in Greenland. That is as far as the similarities go, however. Pontoppidan had never been to Greenland, and the notion of a Greenlandic revolution driven by Greenlanders who were the intellectual equals of their Danish counterparts was beyond the scope of his imagination.

Narratives about Danish Colonialism Historically, two basic narratives have competed for the right to tell the story of Danish involvement in Greenland. One is the story about Denmark as a benign colonial power, a protective “mother nation” that made it their mission to elevate Greenlanders from their primitive condition as nomadic hunters, which they allegedly were when the Europeans first arrived. This story has its roots in the nineteenth century but received its finishing touches in the early twentieth century. Although

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this obviously resembles a garden variety “white man’s burden,” Denmark still cultivates a self-perception as a particularly caring and gentle colonial power compared to big, brutal ones (Olwig 2003; Thisted 2009). As this story goes, the colonizers have always had the Greenlanders’ best interest at heart, with special consideration for their situation as a fragile indigenous people, then called “primitive people” or “people of nature” (Thisted 2012; 2014b). A central feature in this narrative is the notion of mutual love and respect between Greenlanders and Danes, by virtue of which Greenlanders’ inclusion in the unity of the Danish realm has always been voluntary. The other narrative, which casts Denmark as a malignant colonial power, rejects this former narrative as nothing but a smoke screen intended to cover up the fact that Denmark has been an imperial power like all other imperial powers, primarily looking out for its own needs to expand its political power and reap economic benefits. The power of the empire was synonymous with the oppression of the Greenlanders, physically as well as mentally. This narrative was first articulated in connection with international anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist trends in the 1960s and 1970s. A core element of this narrative is a critique of the Danes’ disrespectful and condescending view of Greenlandic language and culture, combined with a sympathy and understanding for any anger, perhaps even hatred, toward the Danes that colonial rule may have bred among the Greenlanders. According to this narrative, oppression is expected to continue even after Greenland adopted the Self-Government Act in 2009 because the act retains the Danish state as the sovereign power on key issues such as foreign policy and national security (Jensen 2012; Thisted 2014b). It is striking how similar today’s arguments endorsing these narratives are to the ones first articulated a century and a half-century ago, respectively. While these two narratives may appear to be opposites, they have a key feature in common: both focus on Denmark’s actions and role. Denmark and the Danes are positioned as the acting subject of history, while the Greenlanders are positioned as its voiceless object. Obviously, there is a need for a new and more open narrative about Danish-Greenlandic history, one that does not lock Denmark into a role as either benefactor or exploiter, and – most importantly – that allows for Greenlandic agency. Indeed, the two tired historical narratives are now being challenged. In The Prophets of Eternal Fjord, this is manifest in the attempt to include Greenlandic sources and to assign Greenlanders real agency in the historical process. Similarly, the ambivalence that characterizes the novel’s view of the Danes and the colonial project reflect

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Leine’s attempt at eluding the default narratives about Danish colonialism in Greenland.

Leine’s Use of Historical Sources The story about the prophets Habakuk and Maria Magdalene is based on fairly extensive historical source material, including Greenlandic stories that have been told and retold in the area for several generations before eventually being committed to paper. The earliest written accounts come from the Greenlandic trade manager Jens Kreutzmann (1828–1899), who in 1859 wrote down all the information he could find in connection with inspector H. J. Rink’s (1819–1893) efforts to collect Greenlandic stories (Rink 1866; Thisted 1997). Another source is the reports and letters that were exchanged between the local officials, especially the local missionary, pastor Niels Hveyssel (1752–1829), and the Danish authorities. The events were treated in depth by the Danish theologian Mads Lidegaard (1925–2006) (1986). 2 Leine refers to Lidegaard’s article in the “Author’s Afterword.” Leine stays fairly close to the historical sources in his depiction of Maria Magdalene’s early visions and some of the customs attributed to the movement. He takes joy in the fact that all the movement’s own written accounts appear to have been lost. This leaves the author free to indulge his imagination (Leine 2015, 562). And Leine has clearly given his imagination free rein, particularly in his description of Habakuk’s passionate political speeches about the Greenlanders as an independent people under occupation by a foreign power (e.g., 267). The sources suggest nothing of this kind, although the fiercely independent nature of the movement is clearly a challenge to the Danish establishment. That the Danes in fact saw it as such is evident in the consternation caused by the movement. At the time, it was fairly common for Greenlanders to have visions, and as long as they did not attempt to bypass the missionaries, these sorts of experiences were in fact welcomed, perhaps especially among the Moravian Brethren, who do not appear to have had any doubts that this was a way for divine powers to promote their cause. The Moravian Brethren was a German Evangelical movement that came to Greenland a few years after the Danish mission, at the request of the king. At an early stage, the two missions had run afoul of one another, which created many problems for the Greenlanders, who were divided into two groups according to which mission they affiliated with. The Moravian Brethren were only active missionaries in southern Greenland, but some of their ideas travelled north with the missionary Berthel Laersen (1722–

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1782). Laersen belonged to the Danish mission, but when he first came to Greenland as a very young man, he was very inspired by the Moravian Brethren, and he had married a girl from their congregation. When Laersen died, his son, Frederik Berthelsen (1750–1828), took charge of the mission until the arrival of the new missionary, the aforementioned pastor Hveyssel. Berthelsen had the status of a catechist, a sort of assistant priest and teacher, who did not have the same mandate and certainly not the same authority as the clergymen. On the other hand, his insight into two cultures enabled him to take charge. According to all the available sources, including the mission’s own, Laersen knew how to undermine the prophets’ authority over the population, after which the movement fell apart. Leine has left out this part of the story, and in another modification, his character Bertel is the result of an extramarital affair. That has crucial consequences for both the plot and the characters, as discussed below. In 1815, Berthelsen became the first person of Greenlandic heritage to be ordained into the priesthood. Leine takes similar artistic license with his character Morten in relation to the historical figure Hveyssel. With regard to their rotten teeth, the suffering they go through because of scurvy, and their personal insecurities and indecisiveness, the two men clearly resemble one another. The fictional missionary’s miserable housing conditions are also comparable to those described in historical sources. Before leaving Denmark, however, Hveyssel married the daughter of an outpost manager in northern Greenland. Thus he had a wife who was familiar with the local conditions and who offered the support and connection to the land that Leine’s Morten so sorely lacks. That did not make Hveyssel immune to the lure of the religious visions that it was his sworn duty to stamp out; however, he never crossed the line, as Morten does. Lidegaard (1986) points out a difference between the Danish and the Greenlandic sources, as the Danish sources focus on Maria Magdalene and consider Habakuk a follower. The Greenlandic sources, however, focus on Habakuk. In Lidegaard’s analysis (1986, 205), this is partly due to a Greenlandic view of women as inferior beings and partly because Maria Magdalene’s visions did not hold the same “appeal for the popular imagination” as the stories about Habakuk’s actions and behavior. The latter explanation is not convincing. Visions and dreams were, and are, extremely popular in Greenlandic storytelling, and the Greenlandic sources never cast any doubt about the veracity of Maria Magdalene’s visions. Rather, the Greenlandic sources repudiate Habakuk’s behavior, casting him in the role that was typically assigned the villain in the old narrative tradition. He lords over others, tells them what to do with their catch and

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their lifestyle, and helps himself to other men’s wives and daughters (Thisted 1997, 87). However, each of the many accounts of the character of the new community in Eternal Fjord probably contains a kernel of truth. Lidegaard believes that the prophets may have been inspired by the stories in the New Testament about communal ownership in the original Christian community, just as the Moravian Brethren had a form of a communal household for the entire community. Leine takes this idea one step further, describing something akin to a welfare state in the Eternal Fjord community: Maria Magdalene dreams […]. She dreams a school, and Habakuk says to the people: The Lord has said there must be a school for our children so that they may learn to read and write. And so they build a school, and the children learn to read and write. And Maria Magdalene dreams of a hospital for the old and sick, and Habakuk passes it on, and they devote a house at the top of the plateau to those who are infirmed, and employ some elderly women to look after them. And Maria Magdalene dreams, or perhaps merely has the idea, of a communal store and a list of those who have plenty and those who are in need, and all of it is carried out; and a widow’s pension is set up for those who are left on their own, and a sickbenefit scheme for those who for a time find themselves unable to work, and a fund for those who lack the aptitude to go on the hunt, but who are able to carve figures out of driftwood and soapstone. And Maria Magdalene dreams of a church […]. What have you dreamt this night? Habakuk asks his wife. I dreamt that we are to live in peace and tolerance with one another, she says. He seems disappointed. Is that all? It is the greatest of all dreams, she says. (Leine 2015, 189–90)3

While the historical sources depict Habakuk’s settlement as a reign of terror that might spark associations with Joseph Conrad’s famous Heart of Darkness from 1899 (1988), Leine chooses to draw out what might have been the movement’s own intention. He bases this on the notion that all of the existing accounts of the settlement are from the perspective of the opposition and thus may well seek to demonize the community and distort its aims. In a play on Conrad’s text, Leine references Marlow’s trip up the Congo in Morten’s first visit to the fjord, where he arrives on official business, accompanied by a Danish assistant, as the representative of the authorities. A thick fog settles, a sense of unreality sets in, and a visit to the deserted settlement where all the residents starved to death, brings the ominous mood to a peak. At the end of the journey in Conrad’s text, we find Kurtz, the white man who has gone over the edge, disclosing the brutality behind the pretty words about the European civilization project in

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its purest, most horrifying form (Bhabha 1994). In Leine’s book, however, it is the colonized subjects themselves who have taken the outsiders’ words about brotherly love at face value and sought to make them a reality by their own interpretation. What the fjord holds is therefore, in a sense, a “heart of light.” The aptness of Leine’s interpretation and whether Maria Magdalene’s vision is a conceivable image of the Greenlanders’ true yearnings at the time is highly debatable. However, the sources do lend some support to the claim that the Greenlanders staged their own little revolution, in the sense that they made an attempt to reclaim responsibility for their own belief system and their community from the Danes. That this occurred around 1789, the year of the French revolution, is the sort of coincidence that is a gift to any novelist. Even if this takes the material in a direction that strains it beyond what a strictly historical analysis would support, the incident is indisputably a crucial event in this early period of Danish-Greenlandic history.

Narrative Modes In the discussion about Danish colonialism in Greenland, The Prophets of Eternal Fjord has been cited as reference for the narrative about Denmark as a malignant colonial power. In particular, this view has been put forth the historian Thorkild Kjærgaard, the most ardent advocate of the opposing narrative of Denmark as a benign colonizer (Kjærgaard 2013; 2014). In fact, Kjærgaard argues that the Danes have acted with such a degree of gentleness and selflessness in Greenland that the relationship cannot even be properly characterized as colonial. He therefore considers Leine’s portrayal both ahistorical and untruthful. It is true, of course, that life at the trading post in Leine’s depiction is far from ideal; the grocer has set himself up as a local lord of the manor and cares only for his own finances, and the administration is incompetent, in part due to the glacial pace of communication with Copenhagen and in part due to conflicts of interest between trade and mission – all of this exacerbated by personal conflicts among the resident Danes. However, this depiction does not deviate much from the impression one gets when reading reports and correspondence from the time. That drinking, whoring and intrigue were widespread at the Danish trading posts is beyond doubt. There is also no denying that some missionaries despaired to the degree that they resorted to suicide, as Morten’s predecessor did. It could be argued that the scene in which a Danish assistant vents his own sense of humiliation and frustration by flogging a Greenlander might give the

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impression that this was commonplace at the Danish trading stations. The scene is in fact borrowed from Danish author Karen Blixen’s canonical novel Out of Africa, “Kitosch’s story” in Part IV, “From an Immigrant’s Notebook” from 1937 (Blixen 2001, 238–43). This kind of incident seems more suitable to a colonial Kenyan context than in a Greenlandic one; the Danes preferred to avoid corporal punishment of Greenlanders in favor of more indirect means, since brute force was considered bad for business. Thus the armed attack on the community in Eternal Fjord is also strictly a product of Leine’s imagination; by all accounts, the movement fell apart on its own. However, Leine shows a keen understanding of the hybrid culture that the prophets create, and which Lidegaard focuses on, with a special interest in the spiritual dimension. Leine portrays eighteenth-century Greenland as a contact zone that is also an arena for the clashes between tradition and modernity that emerged with the age of enlightenment. The Prophets of Eternal Fjord does not follow the template of heroic romance, as it might have been written a few decades ago, but instead approaches the tragic perspective of history and the human condition. The historian Hayden White (1973) has pointed out the importance of the narrative modes that we choose to apply to history and to our telling of a given series of historical events. Subsequently, the historian David Scott has applied White’s studies to anti-colonialism and the question of where we stand in relation to this movement today. Poststructuralist research has criticized the essentialism of anti-colonialism – but, Scott argues, without fundamentally altering the questions we raise and thus the issues we are able to discover. Most importantly, poststructuralism has uncritically adopted the anti-colonialist view of colonialism as an unequivocally malignant, totalizing structure of brutality, violence, objectification, racism and exclusion. This view of colonialism fuels a desire to confront the malignant power – what the political theorist Bernard Yack in his book of the same name termed “a longing for total revolution” (1986). Romance offers a narrative form that is capable of meeting this call for justice. The literary theorist Northrop Frye, from whom White takes his terminology, characterizes romance as “nearest of all literary forms to the wishfulfillment dream” (1957, 186). Romance progresses in the direction of an end already in some sense known in advance (Scott 2004, 70). The plot takes the form of a quest, a search for the Holy Grail, here in the form of liberation for the people. The moment of epiphany in a revolutionary romance is thus the revolution, as the oppressed shake off their yoke and establish their own nation.

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The underlying rationale in anti-colonial thinking, therefore, is the national logic that every people constitutes an independent organism with its own unique destiny, which is disrupted by colonial intervention. The anti-colonial project aspires to return the people to its rightful path. As the bearer of this project, the revolutionary romance presents a hero whose character incarnates all the positive values that were trampled by colonialism, which make him or her worthy of vindication. Moral indignation and outrage therefore set the tone for the anti-colonial discourse (Scott 2004, 83). Because postcolonialism still relies on the anticolonialist image of colonialism, it also takes over its longing for an anticolonial revolution (Scott 2004, 6–7). As a solution to contemporary problems, however, this model has outplayed its role, particularly in light of the many anti-colonial revolutions that are now in the past. Therefore, Scott finds the tragic mode a more apt choice for a contemporary confrontation with the colonial legacy. While romance promises the triumph of good over evil, virtue over vice, light over darkness, tragedy is characterized by an absolute absence of such lofty promises. In tragedy, there is no celebration at the end, and the plot concludes with a division between man and state more terrible than that which incited the tragic agon at the beginning of the drama (White 1973, 9; Scott 2004, 47). On the other hand, the protagonist’s downfall produces a benefit in terms of increased insight for all who survive the drama. The end goal of tragedy is not given in advance, as it is with romance – at least, not goals that people have any direct influence over. When the tragedy is over, the plot has typically thwarted the hopes of the protagonists because the gods, nature, chance, or whatever controls our lives wanted it differently. Thus, a tragic narrative follows a very different rhythm and has a very different outcome than a narrative framed by a romantic, revolutionary mode: Where the epic revolutionary narrative charts a steadily rising curve in which the end is already foreclosed by a horizon available through an act of rational, self-transparent will, in the tragic narrative the rhythm is more tentative, its direction less determinative, more recursive, and its meaning less transparent. (Scott 2004, 135)

With his unreserved support for the dream of an independent Greenlandic nation state, Leine clearly shares a key premise with the anti-colonial basic narrative, as seen in the novel’s dedication and Morten’s secret hope that one day in the future the movement will revive and the Greenlanders become a “free people” (Leine 2015, 438). None of the characters in the book, however, whether Maria Magdalene, Habakuk, Morten or anyone

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else, are the stuff of romantic revolutionary heroes. They are all deeply complex characters, and the same, for that matter, can be said of the colonizers. The assistant who beats the wrongly convicted man is not inherently a bad person. This is where Leine’s presentation differs from Blixen’s, as he lets us see the incident through the assistant’s eyes, too, sensing the frustration that fuels his hatred. Even the missionary Oxbøl, the novel’s virtual “heart of darkness” and cast as a true incarnation of the devil, is regarded by Maria Magdalene with a certain tenderness. His power is only upheld because people flock to him, living in his house and eating his food, and this implicates them as co-creators of the situation. Only the portrayal of the fat, self-absorbed, greedy grocer, the representative of raw capitalistic power, appears to be completely without mitigating circumstances. How fundamentally different The Prophets of Eternal Fjord unfolds, compared to what one might have expected a few decades ago, when the revolutionary romance was in vogue, becomes clear if it is compared to the texts that were produced by Danish writers when Greenlandic Home Rule was introduced. Consider, for example, Sven Holm’s play Hans Egede eller Guds ord for en halv tønde spæk [Hans Egede, or The Word of God for Half a Barrel of Blubber] (1979), which has the Danes returning home after failing their mission, having harvested nothing but death, precisely because they did not succeed in creating a hybrid culture. Or Jørn Riel’s trilogy Sangen for livet [The Song of Life], Heq (1983), Arluk (1984) and Soré (1985), in which the heroine, after being raped and violated by Danish men, turns her back on European culture and literally walks in the footsteps of her women ancestors before she regains her strength as a representative of her people. The trilogy describes Greenlandic history over several centuries, with the rule that mixing blood with foreign tribes leads to stronger and stronger offspring – except for the marriages between Danes and Greenlanders, which, remarkably, remain barren. This stands in stark contrast to Leine’s description, where there is no way back from colonization – in part because the Danes scatter their seed indiscriminately.

Natives and Mixtures When Morten arrives in Greenland, he is unsure what to make of the original population, reflecting the duality of modernity and the enlightenment. His first encounter with the “slothfulness of the mixtures” in Godthåb (the Danish name for Nuuk), the center of colonial power, is disheartening, because Morten’s readings of Rousseau have instilled in

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him a longing to meet “true savages.” On the other hand, he embraces the missionary project and is equally excited about the prospect of guiding them in their conversion to the “salvation and freedom in Jesus Christ, the Lord” (Leine 2015, 89). Morten is too late, however; the encounter with Christianity has already left its indelible imprint on Greenlandic culture. As an outsider, Morten never fully grasps this. Until the end, he is convinced that the widow, with whom he has entered into a sexual relationship, is “a heathen through and through, vivacious, steeped in carefree heathen sin” (Leine 2015, 338–9).4 The reader, who is allowed to penetrate into corners of society that Morten is barred from, knows better. So little does Morten know the woman he spends so much time with that he never suspects that his assumption of her widowhood is due to a mistake (Leine 2015, 202). The father of her child is the aforementioned missionary Oxbøl, who is also her own father and the father of Bertel. Thus, not a word of what Morten thinks he knows about the heathen Inuit is to be believed. Nor can we believe Habakuk when his sermons depict the new Christian paradise as a sort of “primeval Greenland” teeming with wildlife and “quite purged of Danes” (Leine 2015, 416). Maria Magdalene’s words carry far more weight when she says that Christianity has led to an entirely new emotional life and thus a transformation of the Greenlandic mind: It was as if the three dashes of water with which the priest wetted one’s forehead imparted a whole new set of emotions. They listened to the stories about Jesus and learned from the catechist to burst into tears. And the tears created the emotion that lay behind the tears, as though in reverse and by delay. They had not existed before. But now they occurred in any conceivable situation. Laughter belonged to the heathen life, tears to the Christian. (Leine 2015,173)5

What is described here is a fall from grace into an awareness of sin. Leine has borrowed his crucial words about laughter as a characteristic of heathen life, and tears as a feature of Christianity, from Lidegaard. Lidegaard (1986, 209) conveys a fairly romantic view of the non-Christian past, which he finds is still alive today, expressed for example in the Greenlanders’ geniality and “unfeigned” mirth. He views this as a reflection of “the great pagan mirth,” which Lidegaard refers to as a concept in ethnological studies. Whatever the case is with this pagan mirth, Leine’s powerful image of “the three dashes of water” makes it clear that the cultural encounter marks a point of no return. The people of mixed blood in the novel despise themselves for their pale skin and the European element in their mind –

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but if we take Maria Magdalene’s words at face value, the evidence of the biological parentage is merely an outward sign of the transformation that is reshaping the entire society. Thus, it is also significant that the novel does not include any portrayals of unbaptized individuals. The natives hide behind an indifferent absence, “a dense, heathen darkness,” which Morten instantly recognizes upon his return to Copenhagen, where he sees the copperplate engraving of two Greenlanders who were abducted and carried to Denmark during the first missionary activity led by Hans Egede in the eighteenth century (Leine 2015, 512). Morten only has access to Greenlanders who are in contact with the mission. Nevertheless, he continues to associate the Greenland he knows with a heathen darkness, and seeing the engraving triggers a yearning in him to return to that darkness – a yearning that the reader knows can never be satisfied. The pagan natives are not Morten’s “kinsmen,”6 as he deludes himself into believing. What Morten knows and longs for is the contact zone. All the Greenlanders to whom Morten has become attached stand in an intimate relationship with the Danish colonialists, either as (sex) partners, as progeny, or both. This leads to a powerful ambivalence whereby love and hate can be difficult to tell apart. “Mixtures” was the term used by the colonial administration, which initially sought to regulate interracial liaisons (Seiding 2013). Over time, however, it proved unfeasible to keep track of everyone’s origins, and people of mixed ancestry were simply considered Greenlanders. Over the years, Greenland saw numerous children who were, in a strictly legal sense, “fatherless” (Heinrich, Nexø and Nielsen 2011). By casting Bertel as the result of an illegitimate relationship, Leine underscores the tension between Danish dominance and Greenlandic inferiority, making it an intrinsic personality feature in the novel’s characters of mixed ancestry. The image of the copulating Oxbøl as an incarnation of “the Devil himself” (Leine 2015, 471),7 “a reptile with arched back and a tail swishing from side to side” (Leine 2015, 470),8 becomes a carnal expression of the demonic and unbearable burden of carrying the oppressor inside oneself, identifying with him and recognizing oneself in him – albeit without ever encountering any reciprocal recognition or acceptance. The patricide that Bertel and the widow eventually commit therefore fails to set them free. For the widow, the only escape is the suicide that we witness in the book’s opening scene, and Bertel is headed the same way before he chooses, instead, to embrace his destiny. What are Bertel’s dreams for his own son? That he may enter the priesthood! On the one hand, the goal is to evict the Danes and take over their positions. On the other hand, it is also to achieve approval on the terms defined by the Danes. This is also true of Habakuk and Maria

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Magdalene, who, although they have formally seized power for themselves, still need a “proper” pastor and the authority that he represents. Power and counter-power are intricately linked, and the awareness of this issue constitutes the key theme of the novel, which is far more significant than exploring and depicting the dark sides of colonialism.

Conscripts of Modernity Bertel may share his historical predecessor’s name and office – and, in some regards, his situation – but Leine based the actual character on a much later source. Leine mentions Peter Gundel in his afterword: Of the Greenlandic writers, mention must be made of the catechist Peter Gundel, whose book Jeg danser af glæde [I Dance with Joy] provides insight into the plight of an intelligent and gifted Greenlander afflicted by illness in an isolated settlement during colonial days, though much later than events described here. (Leine 2015, 562)9

Peter Gundel (1895–1931) did not live in an isolated settlement, but at Illumiut, just outside the trading station of Jakobshavn, or Ilulissat in Greenlandic (Thisted 2004). And he was not a catechist. He had attended Godthåb College but was expelled for stealing. This relegated him to a miserable life at the bottom of society. If Leine paid little attention to the details in Peter Gundel’s biography, he did capture the ambivalence that characterized his view of the Danes. On the one hand, Gundel was not afraid to compare the Danes’ conduct toward the Greenlanders with the treatment meted out to black slaves. On the other hand, the Danish community was his inspiration, and it was their approval he aspired to gain. Therefore, he strove constantly to master Danish well enough to be able to write in Danish, realizing that that was the only way he might hope to have his voice heard. The reason why we know so much about Peter Gundel today is his friendship with the Danish doctor Jørgen Hvam (1893–1964). The two men met in 1919 in Ilulissat, where Gundel worked as a jack-of-all trades on the doctor’s boat. When Hvam departed for Denmark after just two years in Greenland, the two engaged in a rather intense correspondence, which lasted until Gundel passed away. This correspondence was later published (Tølbøll 2004). The two men fell out several times during this exchange, and Gundel was eventually terribly disappointed with Hvam. In Hvam, Gundel thought he had found a true ally in his criticism of the Danish reign in Greenland – only to find, once again, that at the end of the

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day, the Danes stick together. Nevertheless, Gundel maintained the friendship, just as Bertel maintains his friendship with Morten. It is Peter Gundel’s ambition that burns in the Bertel character, his secret insistence on being an equal in a system where he is forced to act inferior and submissive, accompanied by the shame and resentment that is the result of this duality. Gundel was well aware of the cultural capital that the past had bestowed on the Greenlanders (Thisted 2004, 102). In particular, the writings of the celebrated Arctic explorer Knud Rasmussen (1879–1933) helped elevate the outside world’s respect for the Eskimos, as they were known then. Gundel, however, was not someone who yearned for the “good old days.” He was fully committed to modernity – his grievance with the Danes was that they talked and talked about all the advances that were required but were far too slow in bringing them about. Conditions in Greenland were miserable, and even though Gundel was aware that people died of tuberculosis in Denmark too, he took the Danes at their word when they spoke of Denmark as a progressive country. Gundel insisted that Greenland be brought to the same level. The link between modernity and colonialism is thoroughly documented. Colonialism was not something reserved for the dark continents, while Europe was on the path of light and progress. Europe was lit up because of what was happening on other continents. Moreover, many of the factors we view as characteristic of modernity emerged earlier in the colonies than they did in Europe – in stark contrast to the common European perception of the traditional “others.” David Scott (2004) describes how life in the sugarcane plantations presaged the life that the industrial proletariat would come to live, as the cane was harvested, processed and shipped out for consumption elsewhere by workers who knew neither the destination of the product, nor the origins of the clothes on their backs or the food on their plates. Even though colonialism brought significant changes, developments in Greenland were much less radical in comparison, and it might therefore be tempting to speak of “multiple” or “alternative” modernities. Neither term would find acceptance, however, with Scott or with the anthropologist Talal Asad, who is Scott’s primary theoretical inspiration. Asad (1992, 333) acknowledges that the notion of assigning agency to the colonized by identifying how they shape their own versions of modernity has its appeal but argues that it ignores the fact that European colonialism caused such extensive upheaval and had such a powerful impact that all societies today co-exist “in a single, shared world, brought into being by European conquest.” With reference to Foucault, Asad asserts that new historical conditions do not emerge as the result of new

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choices; rather, new conditions lead to new choices and – as a consequence – new subjectivities. This admonishes us not to focus so much on alternative or “subaltern” choices that we lose sight of what is essential, “the story of transformations that have reshaped those conditions which are not of people’s choosing but within which they must make their history” (Asad 1987, 607). It is this idea that is reflected in the title of Scott’s book, Conscripts of Modernity (2004), a paraphrase of the title of Asad’s 1992 article, “Conscripts of Western Civilization.” While the notion of alternative or multiple modernities works fine in conjunction with the romantic narrative mode, Asad’s perspective suggests tragedy instead. Texts based on the underlying premise that the colonial uprising must be driven by “authentic” conditions must by necessity place the colonized and the colonizer in separate worlds, like the Greenlandic heroine in Jørn Riel’s trilogy who realizes that the journey to Denmark can only ever be a temporary detour in her life, while the journey back to Canada in the steps of her foremothers puts her on the right path. It therefore has crucial consequences for the novel that Leine bases his story on Greenlandic sources from the colonial era. These sources offer no basis for a nostalgic or romantic view of the past, since at the time, people were still embroiled in the struggle to get their share of the benefits of modernity. This leads to a tragic mode, where Greenlanders and Danes coexist in the same universe, regardless of their unequal positions in the colonial power hierarchy.

Conclusion Casting the Danish-Greenlandic meeting in a tragic light is not new in Danish literary history. In a sense, it resembles the view of the cultural encounter between European civilization and the primitive peoples in the early twentieth century, a meeting that many were convinced would lead to the lamentable but inevitable destruction of the latter. Essentially, this was the perspective that guided such influential writers as the previously mentioned Peter Freuchen and Knud Rasmussen. Both assumed, however, that under Denmark’s protection, the Greenlanders would be able to adapt and adjust to modernity, meaning that it would not be the Greenlandic people per se who succumbed but instead the traditional Eskimo culture. Rasmussen (1920) described how western Greenland had already gone so far down that path that the encounter between the Eskimo race and the white race had produced a new mixed race that was ready to take on the new times, and for whom the old culture would soon be the stuff of memories and cultural legacy (Thisted 2006). In a sense, this point of view

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aligns with Asad’s (1987) point that although it may be possible to recall and preserve the pre-colonial rationales and subjectivities at a later stage, the old paths nevertheless constitute dead ends, as they will inevitably appear irrelevant compared to rationales and subjectivities that prevail as a result of the influence of European culture. What sets Freuchen’s and Rasmussen’s era apart from our time, thus distinguishing their stories from a story such as Leine’s, is what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2000) has described with the metaphors “solid” vs. “fluid” modernity. In the early twentieth century, we saw how everything changed in the wake of modernity and technological advances; however, the belief in these phenomena provided a solid frame of reference that rendered our world meaningful. Today, we perceive change as a fundamental condition in itself, and modernity is no longer automatically expected to lead to progress and prosperity – at least not for everybody. Even the notion of democracy as the end goal that all humanity strives for and will eventually achieve, does not go unchallenged. While Freuchen’s and Rasmussen’s Greenlanders were headed for a well-defined end goal, mimicking and adapting to a European model, Leine’s characters lack any firm rootedness in established ideologies or consolidated social communities. Thus, it is no coincidence that Morten keeps returning to Rousseau’s statement that “man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” – with particular emphasis on the use of “and” rather than “but” (Leine 2015, 82). Every time Morten thinks that he has found a way to break free from his chains, his escape is revealed to be an illusion – or, in keeping with the tragedy genre, hubris. Therefore, the novel’s declared solidarity with the Greenlandic endeavor for independence cannot be seen as the promise of a happy ending sometime in the future. Maria Magdalene may dream up a utopian society, but she cannot bring it about, even if living conditions are better for the Greenlanders in Eternal Fjord than they are at the trading posts. Rousseau’s statement therefore stands unchallenged, even if the vision of an independent Greenlandic state were to become reality. It is precisely because of this unresolved stance and the absence of any final conclusions that The Prophets of Eternal Fjord can help suggest new conditions for the narrative about Danish-Greenlandic history. A crucial feature is the shift in focus from the emphasis on the dark sides of colonialism, with the inevitable longing for the revolution, toward a description of a shared colonial space where power and counter-power are closely linked. With this, the novel enters into the debate about what view of history should be applied in a contemporary effort to address and resolve the colonial past.

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There is no doubt that the overwhelming interest in this novel should be seen in the context of the current focus on the Arctic – aided, of course, by the novel’s outstanding literary qualities. The Danes have begun to rediscover the role that Greenland plays in the nation’s global status as well as in the Danish self-conception. However, the novel also reflects the current transformation of the Danish-Greenlandic relationship. In political negotiations, scientific work and, in particular, in media coverage, Denmark and Greenland are incorporating new language of equality and partnership that is found in the Greenlandic Self-Government Act. The novel’s portrayals of Greenlanders and Danes meeting at eye level and in a shared universe reflect this process and invite readers to reconsider and reframe their understanding of the relationship. As such, the novel may be read as a significant contribution to the Danish-Greenlandic reconciliation process in which the official Denmark has so far declined to engage.

Notes 1

Tilegnet Greenlands Hjemmestyre (1979–2009) og dets pionérer (Leine 2012, 5). For a discussion of Hveyssel’s reports to the Missionary Department, see also Petterson (2012). 3 Mary Magdalene drømmer. […]. Hun drømmer en skole, og Habakkuk siger til folkene: Herren har sagt, at der skal være en skole til vores børn, så de kan lære at læse og skrive. Og så bygger de en skole, og børnene lærer at læse og skrive. Og Mary Magdalene drømmer om et hospital for gamle og syge, og Habakkuk giver det videre, og de indretter et hus oppe på toppen til folk, der skranter, og ansætter nogle ældre kvinder til at passe dem. Og Mary Magdalene drømmer, eller også får hun bare ideen, om et fællesdepot og en liste over hvem der har rigeligt, og hvem der trænger, og det bliver alt sammen iværksat, og der laves en enkekasse til dem der er blevet alene, og en sygekasse til dem der i en periode er uarbejdsdygtige, og en fond til dem der ikke duer til at tage på fangst, men er dygtige til at skære figurer i drivtømmer og fedtsten. Og Mary Magdalene drømmer om en kirke. […] [H]vad har du drømt i nat? spørger Habakkuk sin kone. I nat har jeg drømt at vi skal leve i fred og fordragelighed med hinanden, siger hun. Han virker skuffet. Er det det hele? Det er den største af alle drømme, siger hun (Leine 2012, 181–2). 4 En hedning fra inderst til yderst, sprællevende og gennemtrukket af hedningernes glade og sorgløse syndefuldhed (Leine 2012, 318). 5 Det var som om de tre sjatter vand præsten hældte i hovedet på én, udstyrede én med et helt nyt følelsesliv. De fik fortalt historierne om Jesus Kristus og lærte af kateketen at briste i gråd. Og gråden skabte den følelse, der lå bag gråden, ligesom med tilbagevirkende kraft. Den havde ikke været der tidligere. Men nu meldte den sig i alle mulige situationer. Latteren tilhørte hedningelivet, gråden det kristne liv (Leine 2012, 167). 6 The original text uses the word frænder, or “kinsmen” (Leine 2012, 479), in the translation changed to “friends” (Leine 2015, 512). 2

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The Danish text reads den onde selv (Leine 2012, 441). The English translation extends it to “the Devil himself, Lucifer, the Dane.” 8 En øgle med svungen ryg og en hale der bugter sig fra side til side (Leine 2012, 440). 9 Af grønlandske skribenter må jeg nævne kateketen Peter Gundel som i bogen Jeg danser af glæde giver et indblik i en intelligent, begavet – og sygdomsramt – grønlænders skæbne i en isoleret bygd under kolonitiden, dog langt senere end handlingen i denne roman (Leine 2012, 526).

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References Asad, Talal. 1987. “Are There Histories of Peoples without Europe?: A Review Article.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 29.3: 594–607. Asad, Talal. 1992. “Conscripts of Western Civilization.” In Dialectical Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Stanley Diamond, Vol. 1, Civilization in Crisis, edited by Christine Gailey, 333–51. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. “How Newness Enters the World: Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Times and the Trial of Cultural Translation.” In The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Blixen, Karen. 2001. Out of Africa [1937]. London: Penguin Classics. Conrad, Joseph. 1988. Heart of Darkness [1899]: A Norton Critical Edition, 3rd ed., edited by Robert Kimbrough. New York: Norton. Frye, Northrop. 1957. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Haarder, Jon Helt. 2014. Performativ biografisme: En hovedstrømning i det senmodernes skandinaviske litteratur. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Heinrich, Jens, Sniff Andersen Nexø, and Linda Nielsen. 2011. Historisk udredning om retsstillingen for børn født uden for ægteskab i Grønland 1914–1974. Copenhagen: Statsministeriet. Holm, Sven. 1979. Hans Egede eller Guds ord for en halv tønde spæk. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Ingemann, B.S. 1913. Kunuk og Naja eller Grønlænderne: Fortælling i tre Bøger: Samlede Eventyr og Fortællinger IV.–V. Bind [1842], 287–400. Copenhagen: Kunstforlaget “Danmark.” Jensen, Lars. 2012. Danmark: Rigsfællesskab, tropekolonier og den postkoloniale arv. Copenhagen: Reitzel. Kjærgaard, Thorkild. 2013. “Prisvindende Propaganda.” Kristeligt Dagblad, February 9. http://www.kristeligt-dagblad.dk/kultur/prisvindende-propaganda. —. 2014. “Landsmænd.” Politiken, January 12. http://www.martinbreum.dk/artikler/Landsmænd%20essay%20af%20T horkild%20Kjærgaard.pdf Leine, Kim. 2007. Kalak. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. —. 2012. Profeterne i Evighedsfjorden. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. —. 2015. The Prophets of Eternal Fjord. Translated by Martin Aitken. London: Atlantic Books.

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Lidegaard, Mads. 1986. “Profeterne i Evighedsfjorden: Habakuk og Maria Magdalena.” Tidsskriftet Grønland, 86.6–7: 177–244. http://www.tidsskriftetgronland.dk/archive/1986-6-Artikel01.pdf. Naalakkersuisut. 2014. Kommissorium for Forsoningskommissionen i Grønland. www.ft.dk/samling/20131/almdel/gru/bilag/69/1393521.pdf Olwig, Karen Fog. 2003. “Narrating Deglobalization: Danish Perceptions of a Lost Empire.” Global Networks, 3.3: 207–22. Pettersen, Christina. 2012. “Colonialism and Orthodoxy in Greenland.” Postcolonial Studies, 15.1: 69–86. Pontoppidan, Henrik. 1961. Isbjørnen: Et portræt [1887]. Med indledning og oplysninger ved Svend Norrild. Udgivet af Dansklærerforeningen. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Rasmussen, Knud. 1920. “Tanker om Grønlænderne i Fortid og Nutid.” Danmarksposten, January: 17–20; February: 48–52; June: 183–4. Riel, Jørn. 1983. Sangen for livet: Heq. Copenhagen: Lindhardt og Ringhof. —. 1984. Sangen for livet: Arluk. Copenhagen: Lindhardt og Ringhof. —. 1985. Sangen for livet: Soré. Copenhagen: Lindhardt og Ringhof. Rink, H. J. 1866. Eskimoiske Eventyr og Sagn: Oversatte efter de Indfødte Fortælleres Opskrifter og Meddelelser. Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Boghandel. Scott, David. 2004. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham: Duke University Press. Seiding, Inge. 2013. “‘Married to the Daughters of the Country’: Intermarriage and Intimacy in Northwest Greenland ca.1750 to 1850.” PhD diss., University of Greenland. Thisted, Kirsten. 1997. Jens Kreutzmann: Fortællinger og akvareller. Nuuk: Atuakkiorfik. —. 2004. “Peter Gundel: Dagbogsbreve til læge Jørgen Hvam 1923–1930.” Tidsskriftet Grønland, 3–4: 81–128. —. 2006. “‘Over deres egen races lig’: Om Knud Rasmussens syn på kulturmødet og slægtskabet mellem grønlændere og danskere.” Tidsskriftet Antropologi, 50: 131–48. —. 2009. “Where Once Dannebrog Waved for More Than 200 years.” Review of Development and Change, 14.1–2: 147–72. —. 2011. “‘Gir du en øl dansker’: Kim Leine og de danske stereotyper om Grønland.” In Reiser og ekspedisjoner i det litterære Arktis, edited by Johan Schimansky, Henning Wærp and Cathrine Theodorsen, 263–90. Trondheim: Tapir Akademisk. —. 2012. “Grønland i hverdag og fest: Kolonialisme, nationalisme og folkelig oplysning i mellemkrigstidens Danmark.” In Malunar Mót,

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edited by Eydun Andreassen et al., 460–78. Tórshavn: Faroe University Press. —. 2014a. “Kolonialisme og forsoning: Dansk-grønlandske relationer i en selvstyretid.” Tidsskriftet Grønland, 3: 161–72. —. 2014b. “Imperial Ghosts in the North Atlantic: Old and New Narratives About the Colonial Relations Between Greenland and Denmark.” In Colonialism Across Europe: Transcultural History and National Memory, edited by Dirk Göttsche and Axel Dunker, 107–34. Bielefeld: Aisthesis. Tølbøll, Gudrun. 2004. Jeg danser af glæde: Peter Gundel: Dagbogsbreve 1923–1930. Copenhagen: Det Grønlandske Selskab. Yack, Bernard. 1992. The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophical Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche [1986]. Berkeley: University of California Press. White, Hayden. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

STATELESSNESS AND BELONGING: KURDISH YOUTH IN SWEDEN BARZOO ELIASSI

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss how statelessness is conceived and experienced by young Swedish-Kurdish men and women in relation to their positions within the national hierarchies in the Middle East and Sweden. Likewise, the article engages with the various ways members of the second-generation Kurdish diaspora construct their identities through narratives and experiences of statelessness and dislocations in the context of migration. It is widely argued that the Kurdish diaspora in Sweden constitutes one of the best organized diasporas in Europe and it is becoming increasingly involved in the politics of the country of settlement and is attempting to influence politics for the Kurds in the Middle East who are politically, culturally and economically subordinated. Sweden has become home for more than 70,000 Kurds from all four parts of Kurdistan 1 and is considered, along with Germany, as one of the most important destinations for political and cultural activities of the Kurdish diaspora (Alinia 2004; Khayati 2008; Eliassi 2013). Since the 1970s Sweden has been internationally regarded as a model for endorsing egalitarian, welfare and multiculturalist policies. Consequently, the Kurdish diaspora has benefited immensly from the political freedom and favorable political arrangements in Sweden. While Kurdish identity has been suppressed across the Middle East, Kurdish immigrants in Sweden have been able to organize themselves ethnically and culturally in order to enhance their collective interests. Whereas the Kurdish language has been banned or suppressed in the Middle Eastern countries of origin, in Sweden immigrant students with Kurdish backgrounds are given the right to receive lessons in Kurdish until upper secondary school. Thus a major contributing factor to the revitilization of the main Kurdish dialect Kurmanji, since its banning in Turkey, has been Sweden’s supportive multiculturalism (Ahmadzadeh 2003). For instance, Stockholm hosts one of the largest Kurdish libraries in the world and functions as a national library for Kurdish immigrants. When it comes to political representation,



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there are seven parliamentarians with Kurdish backgrounds in the Swedish parliament. These facts suggest that Sweden has played the role of “an extended Kurdistan” and has partly compensated for the absence of a Kurdish state and citizenship rights for Kurdish people in the Middle East (Eliassi 2013). While Sweden has fostered the development of this Kurdish diaspora identity, it is important to note that perceptions of statelessness do not miraculously disappear once Kurdish immigrants become official citizens in Sweden. In addition, experiences of discriminatory practices in the Swedish society that target immigrants contribute to a reactive identity formation and strengthen ethnic boundaries. This chapter is based on extensive fieldwork among Kurdish immigrants in Sweden (Eliassi 2013). The empirical data is comprised of fifty semi-structured interviews with young Kurdish men and women. All interviews were conducted in Swedish and translated into English by the author. While analyzing identity formation among diasporas, it is important to distinguish between state-linked diasporas and stateless diasporas such as Kurds, as well as Tamils, Tibetans and Palestinians. Members of stateless diasporas may live outside of their traditional homelands because of such events as forced migration, political oppression, economic deprivation and religious persecution. This distinction between different diasporas is important to consider in regard to the group position of immigrants and national contexts in the country of origin and settlement prior to and after immigration. While the national contexts which Kurds inhabit in the Middle East are characterized, although in different forms and scales, by authoritarian and undemocratic political arrangements, Sweden is a world-leading democracy and often celebrated for its extensive welfare and multiculturalist policies. Yet, Kurds like many non-European immigrants suffer from ethnic discrimination in labor market, housing, mass media, education, etc. (Schierup and Ålund 2011). In contrast to other immigrant groups from the Middle East, such as Persians, Turks and Arabs, for Kurds, immigration to Sweden involves again occupying a minoritized position not only as Kurds but also as gendered and racialized categories, often loaded with negative associations, such as immigrants, “svartskallar” [“wogs”], Muslims and Middle Easterners within the contemporary political arrangements of the Swedish society.



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Narratives of Kurdish Suffering and Victimhood When asked about their identities, the Kurdish youth frame their narratives in three stages: First, how they related to the political situation of the Kurds in the Middle East in contrast to Sweden; secondly, how they experienced their positions as Kurds, Muslims, Middle Easterners and non-white immigrants in Sweden; and thirdly, how they framed statelessness as a social stigma in a world of nation-states. Consider the following passage as a young man articulates his Kurdishness in relation to his experiences of suffering in Iraq and Turkey: Kurds and Kurdistan mean everything to me. That is why I have ended up here in Sweden. We Kurds have experienced a lot of difficulty and oppression and I have not come to Sweden to become Swedish but to continue being Kurdish. It is true. You cannot forget your origin and where you are from. We have experienced a lot of mass murder campaigns in Iraq by the Arabs and when we fled to Turkey, during our stay in the refugee camp there, we were assaulted and poisoned by the Turks. […] You take this with you from your childhood. (Man, age 24)2

Memories and experiences of individual and collective sufferings constitute an important repertoire for Kurdish youth to define the politicized nature of the Kurdish identity. Leaving Kurdistan is not about giving up a Kurdish identity but is perceived by Kurdish youth as a strategy of cultural and political survival. However, this is not to say that young Kurds do not want to be part of the Swedish society or that they choose self-exclusion. Although there are recurring demands on immigrants to assimilate and contain their ethnic differences in Western European societies, the passage above illustrates why preserving a distinctive identity is an important strategy for stateless and minoritized groups, who have escaped political subjugation in their erstwhile countries. This victim-based discourse that many Kurdish youth speak of in their accounts represents assimilation or dissolving Kurdish identity as a threat to the political aspiration of the Kurds with regard to establishing a Kurdish nation-state. Claiming experiences of victimhood and oppression is framed by a large part of the interviewees as a form of epistemic privilege that is deployed to justify the right of Kurds to have political and cultural rights. Yet the discourse of victimhood has not prevented the Kurds from participating in Swedish society. For the majority of the interviewees, discrimination and experiences of oppression are viewed as supplying the subordinated Kurdish identity with a fighting spirit. This spirit has gained Kurds positive public visibility in Swedish media. Two



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interviewees highlight how subordination and victimhood can create productive identities: Kurds have in recent years succeeded, and these famous Kurds are important positive role models for young Kurds. The existence and identity of the Kurds have always been questioned, and therefore they develop a personality with a strong will to succeed. (Man, age 25)3 We Kurds have no state and we are oppressed. It is good that they show everybody that we can also achieve good things – that we can become authors, journalists and politicians. (Woman, age 26)4

These accounts show how success and achievement are ethnicized as underlying qualities that Kurds inherit but have not been allowed to express due to oppressive and unequal relations in the Middle East. Another important aspect of achieving positive public visibility is framed in regard to an assumed privileged position for the Kurds in the national ranking of immigrant groups in Sweden. However, the young men and women assert that ethnic discrimination is a common feature in their everyday life.

Experiences of Citizenship and Belonging in Sweden Despite positive depictions of the Swedish society as democratic, the majority of the interviewed Kurdish youth say that their Swedish citizenship is not enough to give them an equal place in Swedish society. I feel Swedish and I am Swedish if I am allowed to say that. […] Because people become suspicious when I say that I am Swedish as though I have said something wrong. And if I say Swedish, they always ask: “But from the beginning?” What beginning? I was born here in Sweden. But they see me only as “Swedish on paper” and not as ”Swedish-Swedish.” (Man, age 19)5

Skin color, culture, history, hair color, language, religion, whiteness and geographical origin are defined as important criteria for establishing boundaries of inclusion and exclusion with regard to the Swedish citizenship and belonging. In this view, Swedishness is regarded as inherited rather than acquired through voluntary application. In other words, Swedish citizenship is defined and experienced as a birthright citizenship that cannot be accessed through the naturalization processes that immigrants undergo when they obtain Swedish citizenship. The difference between the so-called native Swedes and immigrants is situated



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in the fact that immigrants make a commitment and choice when they apply for Swedish citizenship, while natural-born citizens passively receive a citizenship as soon as they are born within a given territory (Isin 2012, 451). The youth also speak about being reminded that they are living in Sweden as guests and should therefore not criticize the deficiencies in Swedish society. If they do not feel comfortable with it, many young people have been told they can choose to leave. This leads us to issues of universality and boundedness of citizenship in rhetoric and in practice. Linda Bosniak (2006) maintains that nationally bounded citizenship is often conceived as being hard on the outside and soft on the inside, given that citizenship is assumed to be applied universally within the national boundary and asserting its exclusiveness toward those who are situated at the community’s edges. However, Bosniak refutes this approach and underscores: [C]itizenship’s exclusionary commitments are not always confined to the state’s territorial perimeter but are often brought to bear even within the nation’s territory. When this happens, principles of universal citizenship and bounded citizenship occupy the same (internal) terrain. (Bosniak 2006, 99)

An illustrative example is the case of Western Europeans who might not share Swedish citizenship but occupy a much more privileged societal position than Swedish citizens with Middle Eastern/Muslim or African backgrounds. A formal or a nominal Swedish citizenship can thus conceal social exclusion and domination that non-European or non-white immigrant groups can experience in the wider society. The interviewees are also worried about the recent developments and debates in Sweden that blamed immigrants for not being able to fully integrate within Swedish society. The state and the wider society pressure immigrants socially to show their willingness to integrate: I can adapt myself and I am fluent in the Swedish language that everybody complains about when they speak about integration and the importance of the Swedish language for successful integration. Integration for me is when I adapt myself to Swedish society, the society must also adapt itself to us. It is us who all the time must adapt to Swedish society and it is us who all the time must make more efforts. It must be a mutual process. (Woman, age 26)6

One of the most contentious debates about immigration in Sweden concerns the subject and the object of integration policy. Swedish identity has explicitly become a normative point of comparison to which



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immigrants are assessed and hierarchized according to the degree they display cultural nearness or remoteness to a Swedishness that is never defined. Kurds like other Middle Eastern immigrants are viewed as culturally incompatible with a Western identity that assumedly embodies enlightenment values, tolerance, human rights, democracy and gender equality. If Swedes occupy a subject position and immigrants are assigned an object position, then it is not feasible to speak about integration as a reciprocal process but as unequally arranged relations of domination and subordination. This inequality is related to the power and the privilege of defining the subject and object of integration but also who constructs the discourse and its framework. This mutual process as it is often underscored in the context of integration of immigrants is based on the idea that the dominant society is the “host” and does not need to adapt while it is the task of immigrants as “guests” to assimilate into Swedish society. Consequently, integration is reduced to an immigrant issue and a cultural deviation from a normative Swedishness, an approach that reduces immigrants into a social policy problem.

Experiences of Denial in the Middle East and in Sweden A major part of academic work on the Kurds in the Middle East engages with the strained relationship between the Kurds and the states of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. In connection with this, the following section explores everyday politics of belonging among Kurdish youth with regard to questions of national recognition and experiences of statelessness, but also the encounter between Kurds and their dominant others, Arabs, Turks and Persians. These encounters involve both verbal and physical violence when Kurdish youth reject Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey as their states and instead claim a Kurdish identity, culture and history. While asked when their Kurdish identities become important in Sweden, the interviewees refer to Turkish, Arab and Persian youths who deny the right of Kurds to have a national identity: Arabs, Turks and Iranians try to push you down because of your Kurdishness. There was an Iranian guy in our class during secondary school that tried to push us down when we said that we were Kurds from Kurdistan. We were three Kurdish girls, and a Kurdish boy, and we jumped on him and wanted to show him that he had no chance against us. It was only discussions and no violence involved. He harassed us for not having a homeland. He said that we lied about our country and we have nothing. He said Kurds from Rojhalat [Eastern Kurdistan] are Iranians, Kurds from



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Although it is easy for the dominant groups to reject this claim made by the young woman above, it is worth mentioning that the emergence of the Kurdistan Regional Government within the framework of a federal Iraq has materialized Kurdistan as a political formation and a geographical reality under Kurdish jurisdiction, which now functions for Kurdish diaspora youth as a response to the persistent annoying and ridiculing questions of dominant groups: “Where is Kurdistan?” “Show us Kurdistan on the map!” While many Kurds still talk about Kurdistan of Iran, Syria and Turkey in relation to the current state identities in which these Kurdish regions are integrated, many Kurds refuse to talk about Iraq or Iraqi Kurdistan and have replaced it with Kurdistan or Southern Kurdistan. Although dominant nationals of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey define Kurdish claims mainly in terms of separatism or secessionism, Kurdish youth argue for the reunification of Kurdish territories that are, according to them, under occupation. This strategy is not only about creating a Kurdish identity but also a Kurdistani identity.

Figure 10.1: Map of Kurdistan. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)



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Kurdish youth highlight the question of security and safety that Kurds, according to them, lack in the Middle East where Kurdish lives are treated as a low valued and depoliticized form of life that can be subordinated by the state institutions and dominant nationals in arbitrary ways. This reveals why the question of statelessness is so intimately tied to security, safety and protection that many Kurds lack in the states they inhabit across the Middle East. Based on her personal experiences, a young woman told a story of political inequality that she experienced at different levels: In Eastern Kurdistan [Iran], when I was eight years old, I knew many Kurdish poems by heart and wanted to share them with my class and teacher, but one of the teachers who was Kurdish told me to be careful since it could lead to problems for my parents. […] When we fled to Turkey, I was asked by a few Turks why I was not thankful to live in an Islamic state like Iran and wanted to go to Europe. […] I was working in a factory where I was one of the few Kurds and the employer asked me why I did not wear the veil and whether I was not considering changing my Kurdish name since we were in Turkey. (Woman, age 22)8

As the young woman above illustrates, Kurdishness is politically and culturally stigmatized in Iran and Turkey where the Kurdish identity is contained through various assimilationist practices. Yet, she shows that Kurdishness is not sufficient to explain her subjugated position since differentiating categories such as gender, refugee status, religion and ethnicity intersect in assigning her a subordinated position. Her identity is also regarded as subversive since she refuses to wear the veil and her very escape from Iran and the will to immigrate to Europe is indirectly defined as an act of “anti-Islamic” activity. Since Turkey has for several decades forbidden Kurdish names, carrying a Kurdish name is viewed as an act of self-affirmation and existence, but also as an undesired public display of the repressed Kurdish identity. Many of the interviewees portray Sweden in a positive light and argue that Sweden has assigned Kurds important political and cultural rights in stark contrast to their earlier experiences in the Middle East. It is not a coincidence that many Kurds view Sweden as an “extended Kurdistan” where Kurds can organize themselves politically and culturally in order to champion Kurdish rights in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Others argue that in Sweden, Kurds can live their Kurdishness culturally and politically without state harassments: I have a two-meter long Kurdish flag on my balcony in Sweden and I would not have been able to have that in Turkey, regardless of what formal laws they have about democracy and human rights. (Man, age 23)9



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One of the interviewees goes so far in his positive portrayal of Sweden that he states that “it was in Sweden I became a human being” due to his enjoyment of political and social rights that he was denied in his “original” homeland. This stance clearly confirms Hannah Arendt’s (2004) understanding of citizenship as the right to have rights. Sweden is thus regarded as a safe haven where Kurds can live their ethnic and national identity.

Figure 10.2: Kurdish flag. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Homeland and Desiring a Kurdish State An important issue that the Kurdish youth recall when they talk about belonging, citizenship and statehood is the question of homeland. They refer to the complexity of homemaking following immigration and exclusionary practices that they have experienced. This young man was confident that Sweden could never become his homeland: I have been discriminated against and I have heard several Swedes telling me: “Wog, go back home to your homeland, what are you doing here?” This is not good. This is why you feel lonely in Sweden. This is why you feel you are not Swedish. (Man, age 24)10



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One of the immediate ways to disqualify the claims of the Kurdish youth in Sweden or the Swedish identity is through the imperative: “Go back home to your homeland.” It is clear that place and belonging still constitute the boundary of the Swedish identity in everyday life despite theoretical amplifications about post-nationalism and a borderless world or a non-place identity. It is in this context, that some of the research participants learn to refrain from claiming Sweden as their homelands and often refer to Kurdistan as their place of belonging despite the fact that many of them have no lived experiences of this place. Several of the interviewees talk about travelling back to Kurdistan to reclaim their Kurdish identity. Nonetheless, the lack of security and persistence of political violence in the Kurdish region are major problems for these youth who cannot visit their places of origin. The identity projects of Kurdish youth are shuttled between different places and identities due to the liminal space they occupy relating to their experiences and positions in the Middle East and in Sweden. Hence, the uncertainty of Sweden as a potential homeland reinforces the idea of having or envisioning an independent Kurdish state. Lack of awareness among certain ethnic Swedes and a reluctance to acknowledge the diversity of experiences and backgrounds of non-European immigrants in racist representations neglect the experiences of Kurds as a stateless group that has been unwillingly integrated into those states that are called “homelands” to which they are asked to return. Interestingly, Kurds are mainly categorized as citizens of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey while statelessness is used more consistently in the case of Palestinians in Western Europe. This provides Palestinians with a status as lacking or in need of attaining a position of statehood. Conversely, for the Kurds it is difficult to be recognized as a distinct national group when they aspire to communicate their specific experiences and political positions in the Middle East. It is partly in this regard that the pertinence of statehood was evoked among Kurdish youth as a solution to end their political homelessness. One of the young men compared statelessness to orphanhood: “To be stateless means that you are an orphan and you wait for charity or someone who can take care of you.” (Man, age 23)11 Statelessness as a political orphanhood entails a social and political vulnerability, where the state is ascribed a paternalistic function that is expected to be caring and empowering. Likewise, in Kurdish novels, as Hashem Ahmadzadeh (2003) has demonstrated, the absence of a Kurdish state is often associated with a passive and deprived mother that cannot take care of her children. This gendered discourse shows that a “weak” mother in Kurdish cultural imaginations symbolizes statelessness or lack of a homeland. Drawing a parallel to the Swedish state, folkhemmet [the



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people’s home], has been a central political concept in the politics of the Social Democrats, implying a strong welfare state based on universalism and class equality that assumedly shoulders the responsibility of taking care of everyone within its borders. The state thus takes a paternalist function in many nationalist projects, assumedly providing its citizens with a safety net. According to one of the young women, statelessness is socially and politically stigmatizing in a world where state belonging is a central part of human identity: If you don’t have a homeland or a state, it sends a lot of negative associations to people who want you to tell you that you really should have a state to which you should belong. Statelessness makes you suffer from an inferiority complex when you meet people who have a state. When they ask you where you are from, you don’t know what to answer since saying Kurdistan or Sweden seem to be wrong answers and we need to explain more about who we are and where we are from because we don’t have an internationally recognized state. (Woman, age 19)12

Statelessness is widely regarded by Kurdish youth as a human condition beyond political and moral order. This motivates Kurdish movements and the diaspora to strive for a Kurdish state in order to inscribe themselves within a normative order of humanity that entails the possession of a state. The recurring questions that Kurdish youth encounter about where they are from (place/state) and who they are (national and ethnic identity) are regarded as painful questions and force Kurdish youth to claim a place like Kurdistan as their country and a Kurdish national identity, although not recognized internationally and continuously disputed and refuted by dominant nationals in the Middle East. Casting the net wider, when Edward Said (1995) discussed the statelessness and political homelessness of Palestinians, he maintained: [Palestinians] feel they have been excluded and denied the right to have a history of their own. When you continually hear people say: “Well, who are you?” you have to keep asserting the fact that you do have a history, however uninteresting it may appear in the very sophisticated world. (Said 1995, 126)

Kurds are coming from a political geography that is afflicted by political disaster and the shared tragedy of political homelessness. The Kurdish national movements have been preoccupied with creating a space for Kurds where they can live their identities, languages, religions and cultures without state harassments and exposure to assimilation policies of the dominant nationals in the Middle East. Kurdish youth suggest several



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discursive strategies to justify the creation of a Kurdish national identity and a Kurdish state: It is important for the Kurds to have something that we can associate with. We have our culture and history that extends itself further back in history than many other groups. The international community will never accept us as a people if we don’t have a state, a Kurdistan, where we can live our values and beliefs and culture. Then we can show the world what we are. I don’t want to be associated with a vagrant people like “Gypsies” [“zigenare”] because it is so disparaging: a people who steal and rob and are tramping around and have no state. I don’t want to be associated with a people like them because we Kurds have good values. Just look how people look at “Gypsies” [“zigenare”] because they don’t have a state and a homeland, and I am sure that has an effect on their lives. I don’t want people to understand Kurds in a negative way. We want to participate in the World Cup when it comes to soccer and other sports tournaments because it sends positive signals to people around us. (Man, age 21)13

For several interviewees, it is important to distance themselves from inferiorized groups like the Roma. Deploying a racist discourse about the so-called cultural deficiency of the Roma, the interviewee above refers to the Roma to indicate what can happen to a group when it lacks a state or is deprived from having a homeland. Although the mobility and the transnational identities of the Roma defy the political boundaries of nation-states and create a rupture between identity and territory that nation-states attempt to construct as natural bonds, their lived experiences of racism and oppression around the world show the resistance they encounter in living a cosmopolitan or a transnational identity (Kofman 2005). In the same vein, Sara Ahmed provides a critique of nomadism that is prevalent among Western liberal narratives and underscores that the: …subject who has chosen to be homeless, rather than is homeless due to the contingency of “external” circumstances, is certainly a subject who is privileged, and someone for whom having or not having a home does not affect its ability to occupy a given space. Is the subject who chooses homelessness and a nomadic life-style, or a nomadic way of thinking, one that can do so, because the world is already constituted as its home? (Ahmed 1999, 335; italics in the original)

Accordingly, it is a treacherous deconstructive rhetoric to dismiss place as a central site of belonging in the face of stateless groups like the Roma or the Kurds since it is easy for privileged nationals or groups to claim a postnational or a cosmopolitan identity when their identities are not challenged or questioned in the same way as the identities of homeless or stateless



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peoples. Statelessness entails that one’s political existence is contested or has low value in comparison to dominant sovereign subjects’. However, the youth forewarned that attaining statehood does not necessarily lead to liberation and lack of oppression or accomplishing the dream of a horizontal comradeship within the boundary of a Kurdish state. The Kurdish youth envisioned a state where Kurds and non-Kurds could enjoy full citizenship rights, democracy and political freedom.

Terms of Political Belonging When Kurds immigrated to Sweden, they found a favorable political environment that was shaped by discourses of multiculturalism and welfare policies. These policies provided the Kurdish immigrants with a political ground that they lacked in the Middle East. In Sweden, Kurds could organize themselves on the basis of their ethnic affiliation although they are often registered as citizens of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, which enable the Kurds to communicate a common Kurdish identity despite being citizens of different states. For the Kurds, it has historically been important to address themselves as a people without a state. This process has been strengthened in the Kurdish diaspora since Kurds face denial and subordination in the Middle East as well as in Sweden as non-European immigrants. This encourages projects that aim to end the political homelessness in the world via creating a Kurdish state since the international system is permeated by a global apartheid that has differentiated the world into two categories: “stateful nations” and “stateless nations,” where the former stands for a privileged position in a world of unequal citizenships, while the latter (the stateless) represents a superfluous identity. Since the Kurds do not have a high position in the international citizenship hierarchy, following immigration, they find themselves also in a low position in national hierarchies and scales of the Swedish society (Castles 2005). Stateless diasporas cannot represent their collective interests without being jettisoned and associated with destabilizing political claims (e.g., separatism and secession). Since there are no embassies around the world that can represent a Kurdish identity, the stateless subject is transformed into a political outcast for lacking a sovereign political identity and medium to pursue its right and establish its presence (Vali 1998). Relatedly, Arendt (2004) argued that the experiences of stateless people are characterized by losing their political homes, government protection and political rights. Yet, due to a combination of a democratic political culture in Sweden and a dynamic Kurdish diaspora, Kurds have been able to achieve certain



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rights in Sweden that were, and continue to be, relatively unthinkable in the Middle East and have communicated their Kurdish identity successfully to the wider Swedish society. The strong presence of Kurds within the Swedish public sphere as politicians, authors, debaters and journalists indicates that Sweden is becoming a central site of Kurdish national identity and political activism. While Kurds are equally disadvantaged as other non-European immigrants, Kurds might be better prepared to assimilate into Swedish society since they have considerable experiences living as a minoritized group in the Middle East prior to immigration. Yet, despite the extensive citizenship rights that Kurds enjoy in Sweden, Kurds continue to hail themselves as a stateless nation. It is not easy for Kurdish youth to claim Sweden as their permanent home since they are reminded of their Otherness and non-belonging to Sweden in different societal spheres when they encounter obstacles in translating their citizenship into the right to have rights but also the right to belong to Sweden. Despite globalization processes that limit and redefine the power of the nation-state, the nation, as this study has demonstrated, retains its importance as a vital source of political belonging.

Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Jenny Björklund, Ursula Lindqvist, Darcy Thompson, Karin Lindeqvist and Rebecca Ahlfeldt for their invaluable comments and for proofreading the chapter.

Notes 1

Kurdistan means the land of the Kurds. Although Kurdistan lacks internationally recognized borders, it was turned into an administrative unit by the Seljuq monarch (1086 to 1157), Sultan Sanjar. Kurdish emirates enjoyed autonomy in varying degrees during the Ottoman Empire until the first half of nineteenth century and were later dismantled by the same empire (Hassanpour and Mojab 2005). Following the division of Kurdistan after the First World War, Kurds are now living under the national jurisdiction of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. This division has led to a fragmentation of Kurdish identity and politics as well as an absence of political unity and cultural cohesion (Vali 1998, 82). 2 Kurder och Kurdistan betyder allt för mig. Det är därför jag har hamnat i Sverige. Vi kurder har erfarit mycket svårigheter och förtryck och jag har inte kommit till Sverige för att bli svensk utan att fortsätta vara kurd. Det är sant. Du kan inte glömma bort ditt ursprung och var du kommer ifrån. Vi har utsatts för mycket massmordskampanjer i Irak och när vi flydde till Turkiet, under vår vistelse i



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flyktinglägret blev vi slagna och förgiftade. [...] Du tar med dig detta från barndomen. 3 Kurder har på senare år lyckats och dessa kända kurder är viktiga förebilder för unga kurder. Kurdernas existens och identitet har alltid varit ifrågasatt och det gör att kurder utvecklar en personlighet med stark vilja att lyckas. 4 Vi kurder har ingen stat och vi är förtryckta. Det är bra att de kan visa att vi kan uppnå bra saker – att vi kan bli författare, journalister och politiker. 5 Jag känner mig svensk och jag är svensk om jag tillåts säga det. [...] [E]ftersom folk blir misstänksamma när jag säger att jag är svensk som om jag har begått något misstag. Om jag säger att jag är svensk, de frågar nästa alltid: “Men från början?” Vilken början? Jag är född i Sverige. De ser mig endast som svensk på pappret och inte som svensksvensk. 6 Jag kan anpassa mig och pratar flytande svenska som alla klagar så mycket på när de pratar om integration och vikten av det svenska språket för en lyckad integration. För mig innebär integration att när jag anpassar mig så måste också samhället anpassa sig till oss. Det är hela tiden vi som ska anpassa oss till det svenska samhället och det är vi som måste anstränga oss. Det måste vara en ömsesidig process. 7 Araber, turkar och iranier försöker trycka ner dig på grund din kurdiskhet. Det var en iransk kille i vår klass under gymnasiet som försökte trycka ner oss när vi sa att vi är kurder och att vi var kurder från Kurdistan. Vi var tre kurdiska tjejer och en kurdisk kille och vi hoppade på honom och visade honom att han inte hade någon chans mot oss. Det var bara diskussioner och inget fysiskt våld. Han trakasserade oss för att inte ha ett hemland. Han sa att vi ljög om vårt land och att vi inte hade någonting. Han sa att kurder från Östra Kurdistan var iranier, kurder från Södra Kurdistan var irakier, och så vidare. Det finns självklart kurder och Kurdistan. 8 I Östra Kurdistan [Iran], när jag var åtta år så kunde jag många kurdiska dikter utantill och ville dela dem med mina klasskamrater och lärare men en av mina lärare sa till mig att jag skulle vara försiktig för att inte skapa problem för mina föräldrar. [...] När vi flydde till Turkiet, jag blev tillfrågad av vissa turkar varför jag inte var så tacksam över att leva i en islamisk stat som Iran och ville åka till Europa. [...] Jag arbetade på en fabrik och jag var en av de få kurder där och arbetsgivaren frågade mig varför jag inte bar slöja och om jag inte ville byta mitt kurdiska namn med tanke på att vi var i Turkiet. 9 Jag har en två meter lång kurdisk flagga på min balkong i Sverige och jag skulle aldrig kunna ha den flaggan i Turkiet oavsett vilka formella lagar de än har om demokrati och mänskliga rättigheter. 10 Jag har utsatts för diskriminering och jag har hört flera svenskar säga till mig: “Svartskalle, åk hem till ditt hemland, vad gör du här?” Det här är inte bra. Det är detta som gör att du känner dig ensam i Sverige. Det är därför du inte kan känna dig svensk. 11 Att vara statslös betyder att du är föräldralös och att du väntar på välgörenhet eller någon som ska ta hand om dig. 12 När du inte har något hemland eller en stat, ger det många människor negativa associationer och de säger att du verkligen borde ha en egen stat att tillhöra.



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Statslöshet gör att du lider av mindervärdeskomplex när du möter folk som har en egen stat. När de frågar dig var du kommer ifrån, du vet inte vad du ska svara eftersom att säga Kurdistan eller Sverige låter som fel svar och vi behöver förklara mer om vilka vi är och var vi kommer ifrån eftersom vi inte har en internationellt erkänd stat. 13 Det är viktigt för kurder att ha något att associera sig med. Vi har vår kultur och historia som går längre tillbaka i historien än många andra gruppers. Det internationella samfundet kommer aldrig att acceptera oss som ett folk om vi inte har en egen stat, ett Kurdistan, där vi kan leva i enlighet med våra värden, tro och kultur. Då kan vi visa världen vilka vi är. Jag vill inte bli associerad med ett kringresande folk som “zigenare” eftersom det är så nedsättande, ett folk som stjäl och rånar och vandrar runt utan att ha någon stat. Jag vill inte bli associerad med ett sådant folk eftersom vi kurder har goda värden. Det är bara att titta på hur folk ser på “zigenare” eftersom de inte har någon stat eller ett hemland och jag är säker på att det påverkar deras liv. Jag vill inte att folk ska se på kurder på ett negativt sätt. Vi vill också delta i VM när det kommer till fotboll och andra sporter eftersom det skickar positiva signaler till människor runt omkring oss.



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References Ahmadzadeh, Hashem. 2003. “Nation and Novel: A study of Persian and Kurdish Narrative Discourse.” PhD diss., Uppsala University. Ahmed, Sara. 1999. “Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement.” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2.3: 329–47. Alinia, Minoo. 2004. “Spaces of Diasporas: Kurdish Identities, Experiences of Otherness and Politics of Belonging.” PhD diss., University of Gothenburg. Arendt, Hannah. 2004. The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951]. New York: Schocken Books. Bosniak, Linda. 2006. The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Castles, Stephen. 2005. “Nation and Empire: Hierarchies of Citizenship in the New Global Order.” International Politics, 42.2: 203–24. Eliassi, Barzoo. 2013. Contesting Kurdish Identities in Sweden: Quest for Belonging among Middle Eastern Youth. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hassanpour, Amir, and Shahrzad Mojab. 2005. “Kurdish diaspora.” In Encyclopedia of Diasporas: Immigrant and Refugee Cultures Around the World, edited by Melvin Ember, Carol R. Ember and Ian Skoggard, 214–24. New York: Springer. Isin, Engin F. 2012. “Citizens without nations.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30.3: 450–67. Khayati, Khalid. 2008. “From Victim Diaspora to Transborder Citizenship?: Diaspora Formation and Transnational Relations among Kurds in France and Sweden.” PhD diss., Linköping University. http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:18336/FULLTEXT01.pdf. Kofman, Eleonore. 2005. “Figures of the Cosmopolitan: Privileged Nationals and National Outsiders.” Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science, 18.1: 83–97. Said, Edward. 1995. The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969–1994. London: Vintage. Schierup, Carl-Ulrik, and Aleksandra Ålund. 2011. “The End of the Swedish Exceptionalism?: Citizenship, Neoliberalism and Politics of Exclusion.” Race & Class, 53.1: 45–64. Vali, Abbas. 1998. “The Kurds and Their ‘Others’: Fragmented Identity and Fragmented Politics.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 18.2: 83–95. http://www.academia.edu/6012940/Abbas_Vali_The_Kurds_and_Thei r_Others.



III. CHALLENGES FOR TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NORDIC WELFARE STATES

FROM DIVERSITY TO PRECARITY: READING CHILDHOOD IN RUBEN ÖSTLUND’S FILM PLAY (2011) AMANDA DOXTATER

On the face of it, Ruben Östlund’s film Play (Sweden, 2011) depicts a subtle, manipulative theft perpetrated by a group of black children between 12 and 14 years old, aimed at three middle- to upper-class children – two white and one of Asian descent – of about the same age. The black characters, Anas, Yannick, Abdi, Nana and Kevin, are marked as Swedes from immigrant backgrounds. They speak fluent Swedish with an accent and at times switch to Arabic. The warm-up suits that they wear, a vague reference to urban street culture, mark them as less affluent than the other children, Alex, Sebastian and John, who wear designer jeans and jackets and carry fancier phones. The intrigue commences with the so-called brorsatricket (“the brother trick”) in which the black protagonists, having selected their unwitting, affluent targets in a shopping mall, approach and ask them for the time. When they produce their cell phones, one of the thieves remarks that it looks exactly like the one that was recently stolen from his brother. The group thus sets out to bring the phone to the brother to settle the matter. The location of this brother keeps shifting, however, propelling the group into an extended afternoon, migrating from the populated center of Gothenburg into the increasingly vacant outskirts of the city. Acutely aware that they might be perceived as a threat because of their skin color, the clothes they wear and their accented Swedish, the black protagonists exploit this perceived otherness into the game of good cop/bad cop that they use to coax the group on. Eventually they reach a desolate field where the white children surrender their valuables after losing a foot race that has been rigged. The unsettling image of childhood in Play is anything but playful. In interviews, Östlund discussed being inspired – or perhaps provoked – to make Play after reading a newspaper article about numerous actual cases like the one featured in the film. The film’s reception in the Swedish media often referred to the fact that Östlund had consulted official court documents and interviewed actual participants. This imbued the project

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with an aura of documentary verisimilitude, and many critics consequently treated the film as a faithful depiction of race relations in contemporary Sweden. 1 In the months following the film’s release, an unprecedented debate ensued among cultural critics in the Swedish media including celebrated author Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s editorial “47 Reasons Why I Cried When I Saw Play” (2011). The “Play-debate,” as it came to be called, revolved largely around whether the film represented racist stereotypes and clichés of “dangerous black criminality” and therefore perpetuated them, or whether it challenged these stereotypes by drawing attention to them.2 Östlund himself participated in the debate; his article “Don’t look away!” (2011) defended the film from charges of racism by arguing that it illuminates deep-seated attitudes in Swedish society and inequalities that many willfully ignore. What made this statement provocative, as Khemiri later pointed out, was that the “we” Östlund addressed was a white, ethnically Swedish, privileged “we” that failed to include those very Swedes who experience discrimination on a daily basis, people for whom looking away simply is not an option. Throughout this debate, the question of how Play might reflect diversity in Sweden was implicitly raised in relation to race and criminality (and to a lesser extent class difference). This marks a discursive shift away from how earlier Swedish films featuring protagonists or directed by directors who were not ethnically Swedish typically instigated discussions about multiculturalism, immigration or assimilation. Sweden does not have the kind of large-minority, unified migration history or film culture that make categories like Turkish-German Cinema in Germany or British-Asian Film in the United Kingdom possible. In lieu of such identities, beginning in the 1970s, films made by “diverse” film workers (including scriptwriters, producers, directors and actors) as well as the multiplicity of perspectives conveyed by them have been collected – somewhat superficially – under generic labels such as invandrarfilm (“immigrant film”) or multicultural film. Such labels basically referred to films that featured at least one prominent non-white character or were made by a director whose story reflected an experience marked as not ethnically Swedish. Rochelle Wright (2005) uses the term to denote a generation of directors like Susan Taslimi, Josef Fares and Reza Bagher who made films in the 1990s and 2000s that reflected their own experiences of life in Sweden. Although they resisted being ghettoized as “immigrant directors” their feature films were often read as more invested in sociohistorical reality than those made by their white, ethnically Swedish counterparts.3

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Terms like “immigrant film” have now fallen out of parlance. Östlund belongs to a new field of Swedish filmmakers working as diversity is being reimagined in the Nordic countries. Diversity appears, for instance, as one of the Swedish Film Institute’s funding priorities, though the institute does not provide a concrete definition of what that term entails.4 Play offers an interesting take on the applicability of diversity as a category in that its formal and atmospheric eccentricities often overshadow depictions of racial differences that come across at the level of plot. Neither plot synopsis nor analysis of racial difference can fully account for the normal-yet-ominous mood that pervades the film. To argue that Play is simply about a robbery – a discrete moment of crisis – is to sharpen it to a point that the bulk of the film works incessantly and provocatively to dull. While not dismissing the important discussions the film has instigated, I argue that Play’s non-eventness and unnerving mood need to be read as an attempt to contend with a contemporary moment of historical change that is felt but is not yet fully cognizable. In what follows, I read Play as depicting precariousness, or a historical moment of precarity. In doing so, I try to shift the focus from diversity to broader questions concerning the experience of globalization in which diversity is embedded. I read the unsettling “present” depicted in the film as an indication that the promises of Swedish welfare state reciprocity – the configuration of the individual and the collective – are shifting in an unsettling way. My reading draws upon Lauren Berlant’s work Cruel Optimism (2011), which examines how aesthetic texts deal with a “now” infused with a chronic sense of uncertainty (or “crisis ordinariness”). Akin to the filmic texts comprising what Berlant terms “Cinema of Precarity,” Play addresses what Sweden’s participation in global redistributions of labor and capital might feel like to some of its most symbolically important individuals: children. Play offers a Swedish (or perhaps Nordic) take on this Cinema of Precarity by using a stylized, art cinema aesthetic to refigure established genres that are prominent in Swedish cinema, including that of the “autonomous child,” epitomized by Astrid Lindgren’s iconic figure, Pippi Longstocking, as well as a more recent iteration, the autonomous immigrant child. When Play’s eight protagonists, regardless of their backgrounds, fail to live up to the heroic, neoliberal individualism that Pippi has come to represent, they suffer. Not exclusively pessimistic, however, Play’s depiction of precarious childhood also signals possibilities for new solidarities and new patterns of living that can come into play.

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Cruel Optimism: Globalization, Consumption and Meritocracy at Play Arguing that Play engages with precarity raises the question of what precarity looks like in the Nordic region. British economist Guy Standing’s work, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2014) posits precarity as a global phenomenon. The Nordic countries are part of an emerging social movement and class of people around the world who find themselves sharing experiences of insecurity, uncertainty, debt and humiliation and who are losing the cultural, civil, social, political and economic rights that were built up over generations. The employed precariat are expected to work at a lower level than the schooling they typically acquire and generally experience society to be increasingly unequal (Standing 2011, vii). A recent program that aired on Swedish Radio (“Prekariatet” 2013) invited a panel of experts to discuss in particular how Standing’s analysis might relate to the Swedish welfare state, or in other words whether, as an immensely diverse group, the precariat might actually unite migrant berry pickers from Thailand working seasonally in northern Sweden, unemployed members of rightwing organizations, highly educated academic laborers, and “neobohemians” working from contract to contract in IT and related fields.5 The panel agreed that Standing’s work raised interesting questions for Sweden and suggested that, at the very least, considering the precariat sheds light on the need for Swedish welfare institutions to adapt to changing labor conditions in a global economy. At the inception of the modern Swedish welfare state in the 1930s, for example, unemployment subsidies were designed to cover intermittent periods of unemployment with full employment being the assumed ideal upon which policy was predicated. More recently, however, this has shifted. For an increasingly greater segment of the population, unemployment (or chronic underemployment) with intermittent periods of employment has become the norm. For Standing, the precariat is in the process of understanding itself as a class. Much of what currently unites it is an opposition to the pervasive, if ambiguous, feeling of insecurity resulting from neoliberal policies developed in the 1970s that have allowed market principles to permeate all aspects of life. Without referring to precarity as such, Andrew Nestingen (2008) analyzes how texts of crime and fantasy from the Nordic region reflect and respond to the same instabilities – instabilities instigated by a perceived crisis of legitimacy in the Nordic nation-states in the 1980s and 1990s. The works of popular culture he analyzes respond to substantial transformations that social and political institutions have

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undergone in terms of a crisis stemming from “a contradiction between neoliberalism and welfare-state corporatism” (Nestingen 2008, 10). Play engages with this post-1980s reality in which the expansion of a global economy and the implementation of neoliberalist policies have subtly eroded social-democratic promises of the postwar period in Europe. The brorsatrick allegorizes a life that has become precarious, i.e., subtly, and almost imperceptibly, unlivable in the face of deteriorating social, economic and environmental conditions. Like the archive of literary and filmic texts from the United States and Belgium that Berlant (2011, 3) draws upon in Cruel Optimism, Play charts out an approach to surviving this contradictory moment when the dreams of “upward mobility, job security, political and social equality and lively, durable intimacy” persist, despite the rapid erosion of assurances that “meritocracy, the sense that liberal-capitalist society will reliably provide opportunities for individuals to carve out relations of reciprocity that seem fair and that foster life as a project of adding up to something and constructing cushions for enjoyment.” One prominent survival strategy that Berlant traces involves clinging to fantasies of the neoliberal “good life” even when such attachments ultimately prove detrimental to one’s ability to flourish. This is the structural relationship of “cruel optimism” that can feel anything but optimistic in the common sense of the word. The children in Play have a cruelly optimistic attachment to mobile phones; this attachment motivates the entire brorsatrick of the film. These phones function as a visual correlate for the “clusters of promises” (Berlant 2011, 23) of “the good life”: financial security and economic status, as well as the human intimacy and reciprocity that Berlant outlines. Both for those boys who start out with more expensive phones and those who ultimately acquire them, they symbolize an illusory promise. The phone enables the parents of the upper-middle-class boys to be fundamentally unavailable and absent. For the boys who acquire them, the phone reflects the fleeting experience of power in a society in which they are actually disenfranchised. A late scene in a pizzeria where the four remaining black protagonists use Sebastian’s phone to deliver a homophobic rant to his mother encapsulates the potentially dehumanizing effect of the attachment. Acquiring a fancy phone does nothing to help these children flourish. Play opens with a scene which functions as a kind of prologue that establishes the “Sweden” through which the protagonists wander to be embedded in a global context of consumption and loss that accompany the fantasy of “the good life.” Positioned two floors above the encounter it will eventually record in the atrium of a shopping center, the camera

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captures a space of anonymous, familiar capitalism. The shopping mall might be anywhere. Figures move about in miniature, largely indistinguishable from the myriad of glassy storefronts and escalators as if under the impersonal gaze of a surveillance camera. Visually, the extreme long shot establishes a sense of distance that is accentuated by the cold bluish light of the image. The shot vibrates and pulses with vacuous (and vacuumlike) ambient noise. Globalization’s pedestrian presence is figured as a vast, ominous space dwarfing the children. At the same time, the spectator becomes privy to a conversation heard clearly, closely and intimately, almost as if in voiceover, since the conversation (between two young kids) cannot immediately be attributed to any of the bodies seen walking about. Their unremarkable conversation conveys how their everyday reality is saturated with globally circulating culture and commodities. One boy, referring to decorations he has seen displayed in the window, remarks that Halloween is his favorite “Swedish” tradition. Halloween is as Swedish as the film’s English title is; this Swedish film is primed to “play” in global markets. The global performance and consumption of culture is reiterated elsewhere in the film during interludes in which South American Indian pan flutists perform on the street wearing headdresses and are later seen sharing a “Swedish” lunch at McDonald’s. The Sweden depicted in Play is a globalizing Sweden. Toward the end of the prologue, two affluent white boys are framed so that we can recognize them as conversing. One has lost a 500-krona banknote, something more irritating than dismaying. Their negotiation of this “loss” (the loss of the ability to consume, a loss made lighthearted by their privilege) is spatialized onto the several stores they mention as they verbally recount their steps. At one store, they purchased a mobile phone charger, instigating the circulation, exchange and loss of mobile phones at the symbolic heart of “the good life.” Play presents the possibility that, structurally, the brorsatrick is simply another iteration of free trade, the exchange of goods or labor reorganization, in other words, something not categorically different from neoliberalism. As Anas, the youngest of the boys performing the brorsatrick will periodically reiterate: “We’re not robbing you, we’re just solving a problem.” The brorsatrick involving John, Sebastian and Alex will repeatedly demonstrate various aspects of meritocracy, the cornerstone of neoliberal ideology, to be just as perverse. The film’s horizontal composition symbolically precludes vertical mobility. The camera rarely captures the protagonists moving on the vertical register and in one key scene where it does, when the boys have reached an open field outside of town and Sebastian peels off from the group on the pretense of

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peeing, the camera tracks back to show him climbing, unprofitably, to the top of a tree – a dead end. Advancement (or escaping the game) is out of the question. Several other scenes show the black protagonists arranging impossible tasks for the white protagonists to perform or establishing potential rewards for merit that are never actually conferred. In one scene, Alex attempts to do one hundred push-ups, the quota that will allow him to go home. When he completes only eighty-six, with each exertion carefully tallied and cheered, the boy’s exhausted whimper tells a different story. Advancement becomes another illusory promise; meritocracy actually only wears you out. The ultimate rehearsal of this will be the race scene – the literal culmination of the brorsatrick (though not the film) – in which valuables finally change hands. The rules of the game are invented anew. The boys put all of their valuables in a pile and then a representative from each side is to race to the top of a hill. The winner takes all. Although the game appears to rest on an equal playing field (“Everyone has an equal chance,” Abdi announces), actually the rules of the game are infinitely flexible. They shift again midrace and Yannick wins by taking a shortcut to the top. The broken promises in Play capture the insidious effects that come with demanding that labor be constantly adaptable, infinitely flexible. The children in Play perform the role of symbolic adults trying to live “a good life” as its foundations are constantly shifted and undermined.

Play-Time and the Embodied Aesthetics of Crisis Ordinariness Play’s narrative and temporal eccentricities convey an environment in which crisis has become a constant rather than an extraordinary event. The film repeatedly subverts narrative conventions by undermining the idea that the film is about a discrete event, a theft. In one scene when Sebastian and Alex go into a café to ask for help from the two women behind the counter they are told that the police cannot be called because, “nothing has actually happened.”

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Figure 11.1: “Nothing has actually happened.” (framegrab)

Alternatively, what has happened is unclear and inexpressible precisely because it is in the process of happening. When Sebastian leaves a message on his mother’s phone saying: “Something happened,” it remains only an ambiguous utterance; his experience cannot yet be expressed in terms of a discrete event. Play cannot easily be called goal-oriented. Had stealing mobile phones been the real goal then the game (and the film) might have ended when Sebastian offered his up saying: “Just take the phone.” Instead, cause and effect maintain an obscure status in the world depicted. The brorsatrick is only superficially premeditated; its endgame is open to endless revision. Play’s long deferral of narrative resolution is strangely devoid of suspense; it delivers instead an arduous, wearing flatness. The film exudes what Berlant (2011) calls “crisis ordinariness.” Crisis, in other words, pervades the present moment; it has ceased to be the exception and has become the rule. My claim is that most such happenings that force people to adapt to an unfolding change are better described by a notion of systematic crisis or “crisis ordinariness” […]. Crisis is not exceptional to history or consciousness but a process embedded in the ordinary that unfolds in stories about navigating what’s overwhelming. (Berlant 2011, 10)

Play’s aesthetic is thus organized to capture the wearing effects of crisis ordinariness as they unfold upon the bodies of its protagonists. At the level of the image, Play pushes its protagonists off-center, toward the edge of the frame, into compositions that accentuate an imposing emptiness rather than any specific purpose. Frequent extreme long shots similarly dwarf the boys, diminishing them as the exclusive source of action; the overwhelming horizontality of these shots creates the sensation of heavy

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immobility. The main interaction takes place over the course of one day, using neither flashbacks nor forwards. Although we learn the names of these eight children, none of them ever becomes a character with distinct psychological motivations. The film evacuates both past and future. We know little about the boys’ home lives; they undergo no conventional character development. The film demonstrates an acute awareness of bodily experience, drawing attention to the present as an ongoing experience of exhaustion, fear, boredom, betrayal and disenfranchisement. The present is made manifest as physical reactions. This can look striking, such as when John is so frightened by the strange, slow displacements to which he and his friends are subjected (punctuated by the sight of his friend receiving a slap) that he soils himself and rushes off to a garbagestrewn lot to evacuate his bowels. John’s physical reaction appears in graphic, extended, real-time detail. Over and over again the film refrains from editing out duration so as to move the narrative forward. As with Sebastian’s eighty-six individual push-ups, the spectator’s experience watching coincides with the experience filmed. The effect is to involve spectators and characters fully in an ongoing experience, animating a central claim motivating Cruel Optimism that “the present is perceived, first affectively: the present is what makes itself present to us before it becomes anything else, such as an orchestrated collective event or an epoch on which we can look back” (Berlant 2011, 4). Play uses the body to slow experience down and make evident the lugubrious wearing effect that the game has on its participants. Numerous scenes show the boys waiting, bored. At one point the protagonists sit silently together on a bench and lift up their feet as a custodian methodically sweeps trash from underneath their bench.

Figure 11.2: Collective non-action. (framegrab)

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Such scenes of collective non-action unite the protagonists and reinforce their similarities rather than their differences. All of them have to withstand an everyday that has become arduous and enervating. Devoid of information needed to propel the narrative forward, these scenes foreground bodies as such. Importantly, crisis ordinariness unites both groups of boys. Visual parallels establish the game as draining to all involved and demonstrate solidarities between the would-be antagonists even as they play off one another. In a frontal, medium shot of Sebastian riding home on the streetcar after being berated by the ticket takers for having no ticket, his face looks pale with dark rings under his eyes.

Figure 11.3: Sebastian deflated. (framegrab)

To either side of him the dark, reflective voids of the tram window mirror isolation and the humiliation at failing to have enjoyed a carefree day of shopping. His friends, similarly wilted, lean their heads against the windows. The film does not end with this deflation of Alex, Sebastian and John but continues instead with what might be considered a substantial epilogue following Anas’s own ordeal. We see him, reserved, quietly observing a clown perform at his cousin’s birthday party. Later, holding his brother by the hand, he takes him home. And in a shot that parallels the deflation of the other protagonists, Anas sits, similarly isolated, on another streetcar, potentially contemplating other failures: the ephemeral thrill of a stolen phone.

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Figure 11.4: Anas isolated. (framegrab)

The journey will eventually deliver him to his own humiliating encounter with a pair of upset fathers who, after accusing him of stealing their sons’ phones, shove him and steal his phone from him. The brother-trick turns into the father-trick. Play also draws attention to the body by unsettling it as a coherent sensorium over which these boys have mastery. The film dissociates bodies from voice. Dialogue is often muffled as figures are shot through panes of transparent-yet-impenetrable surfaces like glass doors and closed windows. The dialogue through which Sebastian, Alex and John are first introduced is barely audible through the closed glass doors of his mother’s office, and their figures are completely withheld from view. (Pictured instead is a school of guppy-like business associates wafting back and forth in the hallway, trying to find their way out.) Alternatively, voices are brought close via mic’d actors while the bodies from which they emanate are seen in long shot, at a distance. On several occasions, characters that are initially framed in a shot leave the frame without a corresponding cut in the soundtrack, producing a visual promise of intimacy that is not upheld. As the sound rolls, the spectator is allowed access to dialogue but not to the body producing it. The most vivid, violent example of this is when Nana, one of the black protagonists, leaves the game and is beaten up for it. Though the blows dealt to his body land out of frame (Nana lies on the floor of the bus), they are vividly audible. The closely mic’d sound of his weeping, alone and abandoned afterward, is unbearable in part because it is extremely intimate. We do not see him. Leaving the frame

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empty of actors expands what is “normal” to include sometimes violent, sometimes subtle dehumanization.

Autonomous Children Perhaps Play’s most decisive intervention in Swedish cinema is its depiction of the autonomous child as surviving, rather than conquering precariousness. The film has been underread as being about children on their own, yet the film’s protagonists roam through a world more or less void of adult or parental influence. When parents are represented in the film they are made visually or aurally distant. The voice of Sebastian’s mother, who identifies herself as the “cash machine” funding his afternoon out with friends, remains muffled behind the glass wall of her office. Anas’s aunt and uncle are similarly reduced by framings that show them as only headless bodies bickering softly about whether or not their apartment is being kept clean. The scenes depicting the brorsatrick are intercut with enigmatic shots of an unattended, unclaimed wooden cradle improperly stowed in the aisle of a commuter train traveling from Malmö to Gothenburg. The peculiar appearance of this abandoned cradle provides a visual corollary for children roaming without parents. The cumulative wearing down of the child protagonists in Play is more striking when considered against the backdrop of Sweden’s investment in representing children as autonomous individuals. In Swedish (and Nordic) culture, especially since Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking books in the 1940s, discussions about self-realization, autonomy, agency and the relationship of the individual to the group have often been conveyed through the figure of the child. Living without parental figures, Pippi symbolizes the possibility of autonomy and self-reliance in the face of social norms. Along with the institution of the family, she disregards authority figures like teachers and police officers that represent social institutions that reproduce collective values. Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh (2010) suggest that Pippi explains Sweden’s seemingly paradoxical support of individualism and its simultaneous strong, statesupported collective. 6 Autonomy is only possible through important relationships of reciprocity, in this case, the promise of the welfare state to protect the individual from relationships of dependence like the family. At the same time, readers also identify with the secure collectivity of Tommy and Annika, Pippi’s rule-following, sweetly obedient neighbors. Like Tommy and Annika, readers can partake in Pippi’s antics yet still come home every night to sleep calmly and normatively in their beds.

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The interactions between Play’s child protagonists and the public sphere suggest that the reciprocity between the individual and the welfare state, as Berggren and Trägårdh (2010) posit it, has come unhinged. None of the autonomous children depicted in Play returns home safely, unscathed, after a day playing at performing social norms. Instead, scenes in which the children interact with “authorities” symbolize a failure of collective reciprocity to support the individual. This is true of the moralizing ticket controllers who chide the white kids for riding without tickets, of the fathers who accost and humiliate Anas in the park, and also of the women who then accost them for taking the law into their own hands. These women only “defend” Anas by making him helpless and doubly pitiable, as both an immigrant and a child. The collective in Östlund’s films becomes a hyper-ineffectual collection of bystanders and witnesses who meekly offer up their contact information after confrontations have passed. They are bus drivers who do not intervene when fights break out on their busses, and ineffectual proprietors of cafés who cannot respond to a request for help. This deterioration of supportive networks suggests that welfare reciprocity is shifting or undermined in Play. The collective no longer cushions individuals impervious to social norms and conventions. In more recent incarnations, Pippi has been enlisted as a poster child for neoliberal exceptionalism rather than bolstering traditional conceptions of Swedish welfare state security. Eva Söderberg (2011) tracks the many subject positions Pippi has occupied over the years, ranging from a symbol of child pathology in the 1940s, to feminist role model in the 1970s, to her latest iteration, a symbol of Swedish, neoliberal (postfeminist) exceptionalism. Drawing on Pippi’s global popularity, recent political discourse has cast Sweden’s “Pippi Economy” as a neoliberal miracle, combining economic growth while enhancing social welfare. But coming to be the “front figure of a neo-liberal exemplary story”(Söderberg 2011, 101) has meant shifting responsibility for well-being from public institutions unfairly onto the individual. Pippi-like exceptionalism then becomes normative and problematic. Söderberg writes: Maybe her playing with different positionings and her “experimental self,” her way of looking after herself, have easily slipped into the neo-liberal song of praise to individual freedom or choice and responsibility for one’s own welfare and happiness? (Söderberg 2011, 101)

This Pippi-like exceptionalism functions as an implicit norm to be upheld even in Malena Janson’s (2011) astute reading of Play as a provocative alternative to romanticized depictions of childhood in Swedish children’s

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culture. Although initially “dispossessed of their individuality and […] viewed solely as exchangeable parts of collectives with set features” (Janson 2011),7 ultimately, the child protagonists in Play see through the restrictive, socially assigned roles (roles informed by intersecting social categories of race, gender, family structure and ethnicity) that stifle their independence. Play then allows its child protagonists to act out a “fantasy of omnipotence that helps them live out frustrations with their own powerlessness” (Janson 2011).8 Play stands in marked contrast to the way that Nordic cinema has mapped Pippi-like exceptionalism onto depictions of child protagonists who are immigrants, refugees seeking asylum, or not ethnically Swedish. The Pippi-like powers of these children allow them to remake themselves against all odds, in the face of trauma, often in relation to the loss of a parent, and within and against social institutions. In Zozo by Josef Fares from 2005 the child protagonist who loses parents in the civil war in Lebanon remakes his life with his grandparents in Sweden. In Elina – som om jag inte fanns [Elina – As If I Wasn’t There] by Klaus Härö from 2002, the eponymous protagonist, a young member of a Finnish-speaking minority in northern Sweden in the 1950s, comes to the rescue of a persecuted Finnish-speaking boy and instigates a schoolwide rebellion against a teacher who is determined to assimilate her into mainstream Swedish culture. This coincides with coming to terms with her rebellious dead father. In Ett öga rött [One Eye Red] by Daniel Wallentin from 2007, a film based on the breakthrough novel by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, the child writer Halim is a self-proclaimed tankesultan [thought sultan] who brilliantly code-switches between standard Swedish and urban, “immigrant” dialect to remake the world in which his mother has died. The kid’s musical Förortsungar [Kidz in da Hood] by Ylva Gustavsson and Catti Edfeldt from 2006 stars Amina, a political refuge who recovers quickly from the death of all her loved ones and then turns her callow-butloveable Swedish foster dad into a real father. Förortsungar makes the Pippi connection explicit when it shows Amina reading Lindgren’s book in her new Swedish home. Another iteration of Pippi-exceptionalism (a grown Pippi, as it were) can be found in interethnic marriage narratives in which young women (often Muslim) select romantic partners in defiance of traditional values, exemplified usually by their intransigent fathers. Individual autonomy is intertwined with romantic choice and then asserted through intergenerational conflict. Jalla jalla by Josef Fares from 2000, Vingar av glas [Wings of Glass] by Reza Bagher from 2000, and Hus i helvete [All Hell Let Loose] by Susan Taslimi from 2002, exemplify this.9 While illustrating the potential for the Swedish welfare state to facilitate

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self-determination and choice, such narratives also reproduce a kind of Swedish exceptionalism.

Reimagining Genre Play’s heavy exhaustion, on the other hand, slowly deflates the fantasy of Pippi-like omnipotence; its child protagonists are (movingly) unexceptional. The film shows the exceptionalism of the autonomous child to be an inadequate response to crisis ordinariness, to the obscure and overwhelming aspects of the lived reality of its protagonists. Play documents the experience of enduring what Berlant calls “the impasse,” or: [A] stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things, maintain one’s sea legs, and coordinate the standard melodramatic crises with those processes that have not yet found their genre of event. (Berlant 2011, 4)

Impasse can signal the inadequacy of old genres defined as the aesthetic and affective patterns for day-to-day living that make life comprehensible; it can also signal that new genres and new modes of living might be emerging. And while Berlant’s discussion of the films she treats in her book focus largely on plot, Play’s take on Cinema of Precarity conveys the feeling of globalization through stylistic choices as much as through plot. Its use of estrangement without shock aligns it with a deliberate, stylized branch of Scandinavian art film, something visually different from the overt political critique sometimes associated with Cinema of Precarity. Play’s version of crisis ordinariness evokes the kind of aesthetic political engagement seen in films by Swedish director Roy Andersson, for instance. Both Andersson and Östlund’s films showcase washed-out bystanders staring blankly and interrogatingly into the camera, violating conventions of realism. A far cry from a gritty neorealist aesthetic, both feature highly stylized, tableaux-like mise-en-scène, long takes, and minimal camera movement, eschewing conventions of Hollywood continuity editing to explore the individual, the collective and the welfare state in a crisis phase of late capitalism. Assessing precarity through cinematic style means that genre appears different from the way Berlant reads Cinema of Precarity largely through the analysis of plot. In other words, if Berlant’s work opens up new readings of Swedish cinema,

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Swedish cinema also expands Berlant’s Cinema of Precarity by inviting an assessment of precarity through cinematic style.10 Play’s intervention in discussions of diversity is varied. On one hand, the film frames a persisting lack of diversity in Swedish cinema; AfroSwedish characters are still underrepresented both in front of and behind the camera, and when they are represented, they are disproportionately cast as criminals. Except for the black characters, Play’s cast and crew were largely white. The intense focus in the Play debate on how to interpret markers of race and class differences in the film reflected this lack of diversity. The debate implicitly confirmed that Swedish cinema, like Hollywood as well as other European national cinemas, still constructs whiteness as a normative backdrop against which racial diversity is foregrounded. 11 At the same time, Play sets itself up as engaging with diversity in ways that complicate the truism that “films reflect our time.” When the black protagonists incorporate stereotypes of black criminality into the brorsatrick they do it in ways that unsettle the claim that the film simply reproduces racial stereotypes. Their blunt use of derogatory language can verge on ironic. Playing the personable good cop, Abdi chides Sebastian for being dumb enough to show his phone to five black kids in the first place. At other times, the black kids knowingly uphold stereotypes in a brutal, uncomfortable way. Evoking the stereotype of the “dangerous black man” actually makes these black protagonists dangerous. Yet Play also engages with a kind of stereotypical white “Swedishness” that Östlund explores in his earlier films like De ofrivilliga [Involuntary] from 2008, which, like Play, features scenes in which ethnic Swedes go to great lengths to avoid confronting strangers who are antagonizing them and would rather endure humiliation and shame than draw attention to themselves. In De ofrivilliga, white characters antagonize strangers in public in the same manner as the black protagonists do in Play. The pressure to account for behavior in terms of racial difference, in other words, trumped reading Play as part of Östlund’s larger project exploring individual and group volition. Considered in light of Östlund’s earlier films, one could argue that instead of presenting diversity in terms of antagonism (black vs. white, or non-Swedish vs. Swedish), Play makes an uncomfortable iteration of “Swedishness” more diverse by including AfroSwedes.12 Play’s most compelling interventions, however, lie in its portrayal of crisis ordinariness, the wearing feelings of globalization, and its revision of the trope of the autonomous child, which shows the trope’s neoliberal iteration to be too immersed in individualism and exceptionalism. Not exclusively pessimistic, though, the film reveals strange connections

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between supposed perpetrators and supposed victims. Crisis ordinariness deflates absolute antagonisms between black and white, upper and lower class, ethnic Swede and immigrant. Grasping, let alone representing, precarity is no straightforward endeavor. A full-fledged Cinema of Precarity in Sweden (or the Nordic countries) will likely incorporate new dimensions of diversity. Play’s precarious vision of childhood asks us to consider what these new solidarities and forms of collective intimacy might look like.13

Notes 1 Play was screened at the Copenhagen documentary film festival CPH:DOX in 2011. Some critics, including Mark Adams writing for Screen International, questioned whether the film actually belonged there. 2 For an analysis of the contours of the debate, see Stigsdotter (2013). 3 For a reading of representations of ethnicity in what Rochelle Wright (2005) calls “immigrant films” in Sweden from the 1990s and 2000s as aesthetic rather than sociological texts, see Doxtater (2005). 4 Page 2 of “The 2013 Film Agreement between the Swedish ministry of culture, television companies and film distribution, production and exhibition associations” reads, “funding shall be given based on the perspective of diversity.” Interestingly, the agreement clearly defines other terms like “feature film,” “gender equality,” “Swedish film” and “Swedish producer.” A copy of this document can be ordered from the Ministry of Culture: [email protected]. 5 This panel was comprised of sociologist Bo Isenberg, philosopher and social scientist Jeanette Emt and expert in poverty studies Tapio Salonen. 6 World Values Surveys regularly indicate that Sweden, not the United States, leads the world in modernization in terms of individualization, see Berggren and Trägårdh (2010, 59). 7 Ungarna fråntas sin individualitet och ses enbart som utbytbara delar av kollektiv med fixerade särdrag. 8 Barn kan här besitta en makt och handlingsfrihet som skulle vara otänkbar i verkligheten, gärna bestämma över till exempel föräldrar och lärare, och på så vis fungerar barnfiktionen som en ventil, en omnipotent fantasi med vars hjälp de kan leva ut frustrationen över sin maktlöshet. 9 For a discussion of Lisbeth Salander as a similarly postfeminist, neoliberal heroine, see Westerståhl Stenport and Ovesdotter Alm (2009). 10 The Cinema of Precarity as Berlant (2011) defines it combines French “New Realism” of the 1990s with melodrama and politics to track “the volatile here and now of that porous domain of hyperexploitive entrepreneurial atomism that has been variously dubbed globalization, liberal sovereignty, late capitalism, postFordism, or neoliberalism” (Berlant 2011, 167). In the Swedish context, Gabriela Pichler’s critically acclaimed Äta, sova, dö [Eat, Sleep, Die] from 2012, which depicts immigrant or migrant workers struggling to keep their low-paying jobs in

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the face of global competition and lay offs, closely resembles the films that Berlant reads in Cruel Optimism, the Belgian films La Promesse from 1996, and Rosetta from 1999, directed by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. For an analysis of contemporary European Cinema of Precarity including its connections to activism work and political critique, see Bardan (2013). 11 For an analysis of the construction of whiteness in recent Swedish cinema (in Swedish), see Pallas (2011). 12 For a discussion of how “immigrant” affect in Norwegian cinema bolsters aspects of normative “Norwegian” identity, see Dancus (2011). 13 I wish to express my gratitude to SOCE for its insightful feedback and support through every stage of this project.

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References Bardan, Alice. 2013. “The New European Cinema of Precarity: A Transnational Perspective.” In Work in Cinema: Labor and the Human Condition, edited by Ewa Mazierska, 69–90. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Berggren, Henrik, and Lars Trägårdh. 2010. “Pippi Longstocking: The Autonomous Child and the Moral Logic of the Swedish Welfare State.” In Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State, edited by Helena Mattsson and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, 50–65. London: Black Dog. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press. Dancus, Adriana Margareta. 2011. “Diasporic Feeling and Displaced Nostalgia: A Case Study: Import-eksport and Blodsbånd.” Scandinavian Studies, 83.2: 247–66. Doxtater, Amanda, 2005. “Bodies in Elevators: The Conveyance of Ethnicity in Recent Swedish Films.” In Northern Constellations: New Readings in Nordic Cinema, edited by C. Claire Thomson, 59–77. Norwich: Norvik. Janson, Malena. 2011. “Spel för galleriet.” FLM, 13–14. http://www.flm.nu/2011/11/spel-for-galleriet/. Khemiri, Jonas Hassen. 2011. “47 anledningar till att . . .” Dagens Nyheter, November 18. http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/film-tv/47anledningar-till-att/. Nestingen, Andrew. 2008. Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia: Fiction, Film, and Social Change. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Pallas, Hynek. 2011. Vithet i svensk spelfilm 1989–2010. Gothenburg: Filmkonst. “Prekariatet: En ny global underklass?” (radio program). 2013. In Filosofiska rummet, aired December 22, Sveriges Radio P1. http://sverigesradio.se/sida/avsnitt/299297?programid=793. Standing, Guy. 2014. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury. Stigsdotter, Ingrid. 2013. “‘When to Push Stop or Play’: The Swedish Reception of Ruben Östlund’s Play (2011).” Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, 3.1: 41–8. DOI:10.1386/jsca.3.1.41_1. Söderberg, Eva. 2011. “‘The Pippi-Attitude’ as a Critique of Norms and as a Means of Normalization: From Modernist Negativity to Neoliberal Individualism.” In Normalization And “Outsiderhood”: Feminist Readings of a Neoliberal Welfare State, edited by Siv Fahlgren, Anders

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Johansson and Diana Mulinari, 91–104. UAE: Bentham eBooks. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10506540. Westerståhl Stenport, Anna, and Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm. 2009. “Corporations, Crime, and Gender Construction in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Exploring Twenty-first Century Neoliberalism in Swedish Culture.” Scandinavian Studies, 81.2: 156– 78. Wright, Rochelle. 2005. “‘Immigrant Film’ in Sweden at the Millennium.” In Transnational Cinema in a Global North: Nordic Cinema in Transition, edited by Andrew Nestingen and Trevor G. Elkington, 55– 72. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Östlund, Ruben. 2011. “Vänd inte bort blicken!” Dagens Nyheter, November 29. http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/kulturdebatt/vand-intebort-blicken/.

CLASS REVISITED IN CONTEMPORARY SWEDISH LITERATURE ANNA WILLIAMS

In the mid-1990s, the Swedish socialist writer and critic Göran Greider argued that neoconservatism in politics and political thinking had left visible traces in contemporary Swedish cultural life and literature. “It is no coincidence,” he wrote, “that the concepts of realism and the socially conscious writer disappeared at the same time as political discourses took a right turn ideologically” (Greider 1994, 9).1 According to Greider, the literary “aesthetic turn” of the 1980s, with its focus on language, form and structure, was a direct consequence of this ideological shift and came at the expense of socially anchored, realist literature that featured the living conditions, work environments and struggles of ordinary people – in short, the main features of the traditional Swedish working-class literature that was born during the same interwar era as Sweden’s welfare state. But Greider made this claim more than twenty years ago, and much has changed since then. In the past two decades, a number of novels with a significant focus on class have appeared, and many of them have attracted considerable popular and critical attention. Writers are again preoccupied with depicting class-related changes in contemporary society, refocusing on the link between literature and sociopolitical discourse. The shift emerges from a renewed awareness of the alienation of the individual in Sweden, a country that had formed a distinctive national identity rooted in its welfare state during the twentieth century only to see this transformed by a globalizing society and economy going into the twenty-first century. The Swedish welfare model has long been associated with the Social Democratic Party (Socialdemokraterna), whose parliamentary win in 1932 ushered in decades of welfare reforms, and the party continued to dominate Swedish politics for most of the next six decades. Since the turn of the millennium, however, support has decreased markedly for the Social Democratic Party and the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (Landsorganisationen i Sverige, or LO), the country’s largest umbrella organization for workers’ unions. Between 2006 and 2014, Sweden was governed by a center-right

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coalition, the Alliance, which implemented neoliberal political reforms such as lower taxes and extensive privatization.2 In this article, I argue that class consciousness has become crucial once again to contemporary Swedish literature. There is a clear thematic connection among a number of novels published around the turn of the century, which motivates a claim for a new generation of Swedish working-class literature. The novels are linked by how they explore ways of narrating and making visible the experiences of living in a rapidly changing capitalist society where traditional class politics are no longer articulated in public discourse. I argue that the novels are oriented toward the individual, delineating a society in which the meanings of concepts such as community, solidarity, compassion and democratic influence must be reinvented. Although the focus is on the individual, the narrative is loaded with social critique. Thus in addition to examining the characteristic features of exemplary works of prose fiction, I parse their connections to an established tradition of working-class literature, to significant political developments in Sweden in recent decades, and to the much-changed sociopolitical context of the new millennium. Let me briefly introduce some examples. Susanna Alakoski’s Svinalängorna [The Swine Rows] and Tomas Bannerhed’s Korparna [The Ravens] each won the prestigious August Prize from the Swedish Publishers’ Association for the best book of fiction in 2006 and 2011, respectively.3 Svinalängorna deals with the survival strategies of a young girl of Finnish descent who grows up poor in a socially stigmatized smalltown district nicknamed “the swine rows.” Korparna places the young, alienated boy, Klas, in a rural environment where his father’s traditional farming methods are driven out of competition by an increasingly globalized agriculture market. Eija Hetekivi Olsson’s Ingenbarnsland [No Child’s Land] (2012) delineates in excruciating detail the circumstances of a young suburban girl in material and existential destitution.4 Hassan Loo Sattarvandi’s novel Still (2008) depicts a group of alienated, unemployed young people of immigrant backgrounds, drifting and self-medicating in suburban Stockholm. And Kristian Lundberg’s much-acclaimed Yarden [The Yard] (2009) deals with dockworkers in the Malmö harbor on the verge of unemployment, at the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy. Scholars and critics in Scandinavia and elsewhere have already brought attention to the fact that socioeconomic class has fallen out of focus in scholarly research and public debate in recent decades. Magnus Nilsson (2010; also in this volume) claims that class has been replaced by ethnicity and gender as primary tools for political and cultural analysis. Class, he argues, is today a concept reserved for the past, for the industrialized society

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or the Swedish welfare model of the twentieth century. The economic perspectives that once were an integral part of traditional class analysis have been neglected and must be reclaimed, insists Nilsson (2010, 18, 54–61, 74– 9, 221; see also Ahrne 1995, 14–25). The current Swedish situation is described in a book by journalist Rebecka Bohlin, De osynliga: Om Europas fattiga arbetarklass [The Invisible: The Working Poor in Europe] (2012). She gives an account of unacceptable, inhuman working conditions among the poorly paid in Sweden and Europe, often immigrant employees and young people. Collective bargaining agreements are insufficient and the obstacles for social mobility insurmountable (Bohlin 2012, 54). Europe is undergoing structural changes in which industrial society has been replaced by an expanding workforce of service jobs: cleaners, restaurant workers, cashiers and home helpers (Bohlin 2012, 99). Although Sweden, with its welfare model, differs in many respects from the development of other European countries, recent figures provide cause for concern. A growing number of Swedes live on the verge of poverty, despite the fact that incomes have risen faster there than elsewhere in Europe. Those at risk are primarily young people, the unemployed, and those who have not finished high school (Statistics Sweden 2012). From a more general perspective, literary theorist Walter Benn Michaels (2006, 5–12) argues that a narrow focus on cultural diversity and difference in prevailing political discourse tends to mask the neglect of growing socioeconomic inequality (see also Amanda Doxtater’s article in this volume).5 Class consciousness is crucial to the literary depiction of a society in which the famous “Swedish model” has been successively abandoned due to political reforms of deregulation and privatization of the public sector. However, it seems impossible to separate class from categories such as gender, ethnicity and race. But Åsa Arping (2011) argues that rather than obscuring class, intersections with these other categories can deepen our understanding of both diversified modern literature and society.6 As I show in the following, class is frequently intertwined with, for example, gender and ethnicity in recent class-conscious literature. In Lundberg’s novels, Swedes and immigrants share class experiences, as Nilsson explains in his contribution to this volume. In Alakoski’s writings, gender is an inseparable aspect of the protagonists’ class experience. Many of the issues these novels bring to light also dominate contemporary sociopolitical debates in Sweden. The novels deal with the alienation of young people who are out of work and their acute feelings of powerlessness due to poverty and social subordination. European political discussions have used the term “social exclusion” for highlighting the concern for growing segregation due to unemployment and poverty

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(Rothstein 1995, 11; Atkinson and Davoudi 2008, 348–9; Dahlstedt 2009, 50–1, 59–60; Bauman 2011). Moreover, a Swedish government report about new civic challenges stresses the importance of “the influence of the citizen on his/her everyday life” (Dahlstedt 2009, 55).7 Most of the characters depicted in the novels discussed here belong to the working class, defined here as people with relatively low income who work for others and have little power over their own work (Jones 2011, 144–5). Writers have responded promptly to – and indeed, anticipated – the political rhetoric and sociological concerns. Literature is of course never an immediate social reflection of existing conditions; rather, it presents imagined worlds and challenges perceptions of reality. The novels create a distancing effect, illuminating habitual language and behavior and offering fresh perspectives on class, democracy and individual power.

In Dialogue with Tradition Swedish working-class literature had its breakthrough in the 1920s and 1930s and made an unprecedented impact, leading to its integration into the literary canon – something not found many other national literary traditions.8 An obvious explanation can be found in this literature’s ideological correspondence with the platform of the Social Democratic Party, which came to power in 1932. Referencing this established tradition, some critics have called for similar narratives in the new millennium that are situated in working environments such as hospitals and health care, the building trade and the service industry (Jönsson 2011, 14–6). Such stories certainly do exist, although their narrative foci differ. To a great extent, they are narrated from individual perspectives.9 Around the turn of the last century, before the establishment of the welfare state, writers were occupied with calling attention to the struggle for freedom from oppression and to unacceptable working and living conditions, parallel to political movements of the time. The Social Democratic Party was founded in 1889 and was closely linked to the Swedish Trade Union Confederation founded nine years later, in 1898. As the Social Democrats came to power, they implemented welfare reforms for modern housing, universal health care, and universal education. Starting in the 1920s and 1930s, working-class writers began to narrate a collective experience, highlighting structural inequalities in Swedish society. These themes, evident in novels by canonical writers such as Ivar Lo-Johansson, Moa Martinson, Maria Sandel, and Rudolf Värnlund, to mention only a few, created individual working-class protagonists set in environments familiar to working-class readers. These successful literary

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incursions contributed to a sense of collective impact and confidence that paralleled the significant influence of trade unions in the Swedish labor market, particularly during the decades following the Second World War, when Sweden’s economy was expanding. In contrast, the fiction of the new millennium neither forges nor acknowledges such common ground. Significant social and political changes, such as the weakening of organized labor and the privatization of the public sector, are made visible through language and critical reflection, providing interesting points of comparison with the aesthetic and social aims of millennial working-class authors’ predecessors. As Nilsson argues in this volume, Lundberg explores new narrative ways of dealing with class struggle in a society in which the worker’s voice is weakened. Olsson applies the vulnerable perspective of a young working-class girl to speak of the disappearing welfare model. Today’s working-class protagonist is keenly aware of living in a society in which social democratic values such as equal opportunity, common welfare, and solidarity have been co-opted by neoliberal principles such as every man for himself, free market solutions, and individual industriousness. This turn has radically permeated public debates on national identity in Sweden. Political scientist Leif Lewin (2012) has argued that the neoliberal alliance has taken charge not only politically, but also intellectually, affecting how people think and reason. For more than half a century, the governing Social Democrats influenced Swedes’ ways of thinking by developing an ambitious agenda of social engineering that formed the basis of the Swedish social welfare state.10 The Social Democrats’ “pro-worker” ideology formed the core of social welfare policy in the twentieth century and thus became a fundamental component of modern Swedish national identity.11 Today, the bourgeois party that long has been the Social Democrats’ primary opposition, the Moderates (Moderaterna), bills itself as “the workers’ party” in its political advertising and public discourse, cleverly hijacking a nationalist political identity that had been associated with the Social Democrats for more than half a century. Owen Jones (2011) has discerned a comparable change in British politics and public debate. In the 1980s, “Thatcherism” managed to change the way class was defined, individualizing the concepts of community and prosperity: All were now encouraged to scramble up the social ladder, and be defined by how much they owned. Those who were poor or unemployed had no one to blame but themselves. The traditional pillars of working-class Britain had been smashed to the ground. To be working class was no longer something to be proud of, never mind to celebrate. Old working-class values, like solidarity, were replaced by dog-eat-dog individualism. (Jones 2011, 71)

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In Sweden, the Moderates had a brief term in power from 1991-1994 before the Social Democrats regained control. Then in 2006, when a center-right Alliance took charge in the Swedish Riksdag (parliament), led by the Moderates, introduced the neoliberal concept of arbetslinjen, which roughly translates as “the path to work,” into public policy. This concept reflects a political orientation that prioritizes job creation over extending benefits to the unemployed (and in Sweden, these taxpayer-supported benefits are typically administered by labor unions). This new model, the Moderates claimed, was a “pro-worker” politics for the new millennium. While contemporary working-class literature tends to reflect the alienation of the individual worker in such a society, rather than the themes of solidarity that characterized its precursors, in some ways this new body of literature has come full circle; it is, after all, driven by the same realist urge to recount lived experiences. “I have to describe what I observe,” claims the narrator in Lundberg’s novel Och allt skall vara kärlek [And everything shall be love] (2011). “That I must describe what I see. That what happens in society right now must not go on without me talking about it. That I cannot be silent” (Lundberg 2011, 99–100).13 A common feature of today’s Swedish labor market is private employment agencies, which allow employers to evade the laws that protect workers. These intermediaries undermine any potential solidarity among workers since they lack a common relationship with a steady employer. It is no coincidence that the dockworkers in Malmö harbor in Lundberg’s two novels from 2009 and 2011 are hired through such an agency. There are no contracts of employment; the workers – many of them illegal immigrants with insufficient mastery of the Swedish language – do not know from one day to the next if they have a job, and the conditions are hard with long hours and outdoor work in cold weather. Worst of all is the anonymity and alienation, originating from a tenuous relationship with the employer and a lack of solidarity among the workers. When the protagonist, Kristian, in Och allt skall vara kärlek finally quits, it makes no difference at all: “I disappeared as unnoticeably as I had arrived, completely replaceable, not even a cog in the machinery” (Lundberg 2011, 32).14 Class struggle has been a structuring and symbolic element in the history of the Swedish worker movement. It is comprised of such fundamental things as organized labor and the building of a welfare state to care for citizens’ basic needs “from the cradle to the grave.” The dismantled worker solidarity that has been the primary effect of new, neoliberal paradigms therefore marks a radical change in Swedish national identity. The protagonist in Lundberg’s Yarden reflects on the term

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klasskamp (class struggle), and finds it complicated. In his world, the system is built on the gap between people who have property and people who don’t. He asks himself if solidarity is possible when those who protest are immediately replaced with others willing to work under the same conditions. The novel addresses the problem of growing individualism and the lack of a sense of community, conveying to the reader the feeling of a new alienation in a country with a history characterized by common struggle and collective agreements: I just wonder where all the others are. I just wonder why it is so quiet? I burn a flare in the night, a rocket of stars and colored lights toward the blackened sky to say that here I am, you can come now, let us reassemble. (Lundberg 2009, 54)15

Many working-class writers of the interwar period were preoccupied with leaving their humble origins behind and dealing with mixed feelings of relief, guilt and confusion. However, the protagonist in Lundberg’s autobiographical novels makes a class journey in reverse, from a middleclass life as a writer and critic back to his proletarian origins. It is a necessary move – he needs a job and money – but it is also a search for identity, which has become a common theme in contemporary classconscious literature. I believe this theme to be connected to the systematic dismantling of the working-class movement in Sweden; the protagonists of these novels are striving to create, or recuperate, a sense of belonging to a collective. Arping (2011) observes that Yarden raises the question of what happens to one’s identity when the worker is rendered invisible. Is today’s working-class fiction about reconstruction or deconstruction? (Arping 2011, 194) Lundberg’s protagonist realizes that no one is there to welcome him back. In Och allt skall vara kärlek, Lundberg describes a lack of visibility that symbolizes the loneliness of the modern worker: One must not get the idea that a person who makes a reversed class journey is received with a special kind of love. On the contrary. Suspicion. He who falls, falls without a sound. He whirls away like a dry leaf. That is what happened. We could agree on that already from the start: keeping silent. The loneliness. That our shared despair was wider and deeper than anyone outside the walls could grasp. (Lundberg 2011, 33)16

Yet despite their “shared despair,” new structural and systemic insecurities provide no platform for workers to organize collectively. In this latter novel, the narrator recounts an episode in which he visits a library to talk about the challenges of modern working-class literature. But his thoughts are elsewhere, occupied with the despairing memory of the

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woman he loved and abandoned (Lundberg 2011, 69). It is a metafictional comment, as the novel at hand is an attempt to emphasize the existential, inner dimension of one single person’s life story. Like many other working-class narratives of the new millennium, the individual experience reflects deep concern for a society in which the value of responsibility to, and care for, others must be rearticulated in a vastly changed ideological climate. The dockworkers are forced into being objects without a voice or human qualities: “And it was here that I truly experienced that he who owns the language also gets to define the world” (Lundberg 2011, 107).17 Here the protagonist, and presumably Lundberg, acknowledge the importance of language skills in political struggle – a fundamental idea in the history of Sweden’s working-class movement and one implemented via the country’s folkhögskolor (“folk high schools,” or community education) which were frequented by working-class writers (Furuland 1971). But this statement on language also speaks to the relevance of literature as an important voice in the ideological climate of the twentyfirst century. Autobiographical working-class fiction is an internationally established tradition. Classic novels in this tradition frequently depict a hero or heroine engaged with both individual quest and collective identity and draw on the Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel, as well as the desire to reveal a culturally overlooked social reality.18 An example of such a writer from the Swedish tradition is the internationally renowned author Vilhelm Moberg (1898–1973). In the 1930s, he published a semiautobiographical trilogy about Knut Toring, the dissatisfied son of a farmer from southern Sweden. Like Lundberg’s main character, Knut Toring makes a class journey in reverse. Well-established as an editor in Stockholm, he leaves his urban life and settles in the village of his childhood to realize a wish to combine the life of a farmer and a writer.19 In Moberg’s novel, as well, the writer conveys the idea that the narrative process is necessary to comprehend interrelationships between class, society, and identity. Class-conscious Swedish writers today who carry on this tradition thus both connect with and deviate from the narrative strategies of their predecessors. Olsson’s novel Ingenbarnsland (2012) engenders the same narrative urgency as its predecessors in the working-class canon: this is a story that needs to be told. The novel, set in the 1980s, depicts life in a Gothenburg suburb in southwestern Sweden where children are left without adult supervision or care in a world of abuse, poverty and shame. In a Swedish context, the word for “suburb,” förort, has a symbolic and material association with distinctly working-class and multicultural spaces located

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outside urban centers, and the word also features in significant compound words such as förortssvenska, or “suburban Swedish,” a creolized version of Swedish spoken in marginalized communities. In a television interview (Västnytt 2012), Olsson stated that one purpose of her novel is to give children the right to speak and the ability to express their opinions. It is a political statement, and with increasing narrative speed, the novel depicts the downfall of a society from the perspective of its young people – the next generation. Society’s spiritual and material destruction is made tangible through protagonist Miira’s physical wounds, her attempt to burn down the school, and the worn-down and vandalized tenement housing where she lives (Olsson 2012, 65–7, 82– 3, 94, 105). The narrator describes the abominable cleaning job passed on from mother to daughter (Olsson 2012, 292–3, 303). It is a disturbingly dark picture, although not without glimmers of hope. Miira is keenly aware that she needs education to escape her economic subordination. Sattarvandi’s novel Still (2008) is set in a suburb north of Stockholm. The main character, Nemo, who has lost his girlfriend and mourns his deceased mother, kills time with drug abuse, assault, and aimless rambling together with other unemployed male companions of Swedish and immigrant backgrounds. The monotony is overwhelming, conveyed through a flowing narrative mode with sparse punctuation. The novel showcases an existential dimension of new class-conscious literature through which the spiritual consequences of social inequality are observed. British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2010) have argued that the consequences of inequality for the individual in an unequal society manifest themselves in increased anxiety, depression, drug addiction and criminality (31–45). Their conclusions are based on statistics from more than a dozen of the richest countries in the world, including Scandinavia. The way this statistical reality “gets under the skin,” as Wilkinson and Pickett put it, is conveyed perhaps most tangibly in literature. Unlike statistics and social reports, literature holds complex dimensions in which emotional and intellectual reflection merge, facilitating empathy for the characters and critique of their life conditions. This process arguably expands the linguistic and aesthetic scope of a society’s self-understanding. The underlying message of the novel Still is the harmful spiritual consequences of social inequality. Class is once again the heart of the matter. Money, and being able to afford things, forms the discriminating line between the “us” of the suburban ghetto and the “them” of the prosperous inner-city middle class. Nemo, the protagonist, responds thus to his friend who declares that they have been erased by the middle class:

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”[W]e have lost, we do not exist and they do – that means everything and it is more and more true the older we get” (Sattarvandi 2008, 172; italics in the original).20 The obscuring process is rooted in class and economic divides, which the novel nonetheless render clearly visible to the reader. In contrast to the more urban working-class literature of other traditions, Sweden – still today rich in agriculture and natural resources – has a strong tradition of rural working-class narratives. In the early twentieth century, migrant farmworkers known as statare were depicted in sharply critical novels by writers such as Ivar Lo-Johansson and Moa Martinson. The statare lived under dire conditions; they were paid in kind and tied to their employers by almost slavery-like agreements. This system was abolished in Sweden in 1945. A twenty-first century reader realizes that these novels serve as fascinating narratives rooted in moments in history. In a sense, they contribute to the preservation of an important aspect of Sweden’s national past. They are rich in detail about daily life and material things, and they were published on the verge of Sweden’s shift into an industrial and large-scale production economy. Today’s class-conscious literature depicts a new stage in Sweden’s socioeconomic development. Katarina Fägerskiöld’s Åsen [The Ridge] (2012) and Bannerhed’s Korparna concur in their depictions of social subordination but differ in their introverted perspectives. Åsen relates the life of a young farmhand mired in hard labor, boredom and listlessness, unable to free herself: She was the most loyal of all dogs. Went home after a day’s work, licking her wounds. Washed off what came off. Lay down in a red chair, her head resting in her hand. Sat close to the radiator. Put her feet on it. Let the hours pass by. (Fägerskiöld 2012, 54)21

In Korparna, the protagonist Klas grows up in the province of Småland in southern Sweden in the 1970s. It is a province historically marked by mass emigration (including to the Midwestern United States in the late nineteenth century), depopulation, and small-scale tenant farmers who were overwhelmed by Sweden’s shift to large-scale production. Klas’s father reluctantly realizes that he will not be able to provide for his family in the long run, and most importantly, that his son will not take over the farm’s operations. The farm that has been passed down through generations of his family will disappear. He gives in to insanity, and the ending is tragic. The father is an archetype of twentieth-century Swedish rural literature: the stubborn, self-sufficient and brooding farmer. His son is a sensitive loner who occupies himself with reading, bird watching, and fearing his moody father. The story is set in an environment marked by

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class, skillfully captured in the dialogue in the description of habits, body language and social interaction. It is clear that the father’s extensive knowledge of farming techniques, the local landscape, and the history of the village will die with him (Bannerhed 2011, 224). In its consistent focus on alienated individuals (father and son, respectively), the novel amplifies the absence of a spirit of community and class consciousness.

Autobiography as a Critical Genre As an undercurrent – and at times, a highly visible stream – in today’s Swedish working-class literature runs the conviction that social inequality is a structural problem, aggravated by the fundamental political reconfiguration of society since the 1980s. As a result, a significant number of writers have chosen the genre of the autobiographical novel, or narratives with autobiographical features, to articulate urgency and unrest. One example is Alakoski’s Oktober i Fattigsverige [October in Impoverished Sweden] (2012). The semi-autobiographical story, recounted as a diary, foregrounds her previous novel Svinalängorna. In Oktober, Alakoski traces the terms of impoverishment and social exclusion, underscoring the need for solidarity, democratic awareness and political responsibility. Recurring motifs are the concerns about homeless people, families with children evicted from their apartments and deteriorating public health due to poverty: “I see before me again the homeless Annika, what does she look like after the first severe frost night?” (Alakoski 2012, 261).22 Alakoski’s own family history includes violence, poverty and shame, and she depicts modern Swedish society through the lens of her experiences of growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. Her book joins with other representatives of the genre in contesting the neoliberal ideology that states that the responsibility for changing unfavorable social conditions rests with the individual. This shifting of responsibility from society as a whole to its individual members is hardly unique to Sweden; in fact, Jones (2011) claims this view is likewise gaining ground in British society: “More and more of us are choosing to believe that the victims of social problems are, in large part, responsible for causing them” (37). Alakoski, like many class conscious writers of her generation, articulates social critique through the perspective of a working-class individual, depicting in great detail a person who, through no fault of her own, has been deprived of fundamental human needs since early childhood. The book associates with the biographical tradition of the 1930s, citing canonical writers Lo-Johansson and Martinson as peers in the experience

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of poverty. In a perceptive paragraph, she merges individual experience and social consequence into an inseparable unity, charting the downside of Sweden’s welfare state. Her narration illuminates how human beings are, as sociologist Joan Acker (2006) put it, not merely elements in theoretical structures, but rather “enmeshed” in class and gender relations (46-47). Alakoski writes in Oktober: Poverty burns, aches, has a smell and a taste. It throbs. It shows in our life choices, occupation and education, in our paycheck, in our working conditions, at school, in our style of dress and eating habits. It appears as sleep deprivation, stooping, shows in housing, holiday customs, the extent of education, sick leave, worry, anxiety, agony, sports habits, economic and tangible heritages. And when we who climb the social ladder have climbed high enough, we notice class, for the simple reason that we are able to. (Alakoski 2012, 238)23

Being poor, an immigrant and female are her three main disabilities, states Alakoski somewhat ironically, applying an intersectional approach that demonstrates how class, ethnicity and gender are interwoven. When asked by her readers (as related in the novel) what the most important difference was between her childhood and her current situation as a celebrated author, her answer is money. It is a political statement, and she elaborates on it with an artistic narrative about social inequality: I cannot express in words the difference between being able and not being able to afford things. [---] Not being able to buy decent shoes, go to the dentist, afford a computer, go on vacation, own a car, buy something nice for the kids. There are no words. Money makes it all possible. Not least, the relief of pressure. (Alakoski 2012, 314)24

The statement is not merely about money but rather demonstrates how structural inequality gets under the skin, is written on the body, and shapes the self. The experience is truly individual – with explicitly social consequences.

Democracy Revisited Imagining and examining the consequences of a reconfigured social welfare state has become an urgent theme in Swedish literature of the new millennium. The scope of article is limited to prose fiction; however, such class perspectives are also abundant in contemporary poetry.25 It is, accordingly, highly appropriate to talk about an important renewal of Swedish working-class literature, one that builds on the legacy of workingclass pioneers in the interwar period and the genre’s politically radicalized

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revival in the 1960s and 1970s. Given the critical acclaim that has met this new body of work, it is already well integrated in the field of literary production, yielding valuable symbolic and cultural capital. Nilsson (2011, 188) has posed the critical question as to whether this integration is compatible with a political desire to abolish the exploitation that is founded on class divisions. This is, to a large extent, a question about the function and purpose of literature. Through aesthetic revelations of the class and power dynamics that recent political discourses had obscured, such literature is contributing to a greater understanding of contemporary Swedish society. In their keen focus on social change, the novels furthermore adhere to a phenomenon observed by literary scholar Lauren Berlant (see also Doxtater, this volume). In her suggestive book Cruel Optimism (2011), she examines the optimism that has prevailed in contemporary narratives around the turn of the century to the postwar social democratic promises of a better life in Europe and the United States. Despite the fact that social equality, upward mobility and job security cannot be provided in an era of neoliberal restructuring, our attachment to fantasies of a better life remains (Berlant 2011, 2–16). We certainly find similar attachments to unstable fantasies in the literature discussed here. Paradoxically, then, the individualistic focus of Sweden’s new body of class conscious literature is staged from a point of view of social awareness and a deeply felt concern about what it means to be human in a globalized, postmodern society. The novels seem to corroborate sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s (2010) definition of the welfare state as being obliged to guarantee not only the survival of its subjects but also survival with “dignity” (45). The only legitimate way to measure the human quality of a society, writes Bauman, is “by the quality of its weakest members.” He continues: “And since the essence of all morality is the responsibility which people take for the humanity of others, this is also the measure of a society’s ethical standard” (Bauman 2001, 79). The novels locate individual members of a society in transition, immerse them in a context of class, and insist on their social interdependence.

Notes 1

All translations from Swedish are my own unless otherwise noted. Det är ingen slump att idéerna om den engagerade författaren och realismen försvann under samma period som den politiska idédebatten styrde mot höger. 2 In the 2014 general election, a coalition of left-leaning parties led by the Social Democrats prevailed over the center-right Alliance. The left block won 159 seats, and the Alliance, 141 out of 349 seats in the Riksdag. The far-right, nationalist Sweden Democrats, which shocked the nation when they won enough seats to

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enter the Riksdag in 2010, more than doubled their representation with 49 seats. See Sveriges Riksdag (2015). 3 This is considered Sweden’s top literary prize. See Augustpriset (2015). 4 For a survey of research on class analysis from a gender perspective, see Arping (2008, 21–42). 5 See also the British sociologist Beverley Skeggs (1997; 2004, 87–91) who offers inspiring perspectives from research that looks for accounts about identity that are underrepresented within the middle-class norms of contemporary scholarship. 6 In response to Nilsson, Arping (2011, 196) argues that a multifaceted, intersectional approach offers possibilities rather than restraints. 7 [M]edborgarens makt över sin vardag. The prevalent discourse is converted into compelling statistics in Wilkinson and Pickett (2010). The conclusive message is that the level of social and economic equality in a society is directly related to the well-being of its citizens. The more material equality, the fewer social problems. 8 For an analysis of the integration of Swedish working-class literature into the national heritage, see Nilsson (2011, 178–91). 9 The individual perspective has been addressed by Arping (2008, 25). 10 The Social Democratic Party led the government during the years 1932–1976, 1982–1991 and 1994–2006. 11 The same process has been observed in Great Britain during the Thatcher era; Jones (2011); see also Bohlin (2012, 133). 13 Att jag måste beskriva det jag ser. Att det som nu sker i samtiden omöjligen kan få fortgå utan att jag talar om det. Att jag inte kan tiga. 14 Jag försvann lika omärkligt som jag hade kommit dit, helt utbytbar, inte ens ett kugghjul i maskineriet. 15 Jag undrar bara var alla ni andra är. Jag undrar bara varför det är så tyst. Jag sänder ut detta som ett nödbloss i natten, en raket av stjärnor och färgade ljus mot den svärtade himlen för att säga att jag är här, att ni kan komma nu, att vi kan samla oss. 16 Man skall inte inbilla sig att den som företar en omvänd klassresa tas emot med en speciell kärlek. Tvärtom. Misstänksamhet. Den som störtar gör det ljudlöst. Han virvlar bort som ett torkat löv. Det var så det blev. Det kunde vi enas om redan från början: tigandet. Ensamheten. Att vi delade en förtvivlan som var större och djupare än vad man kunde förstå utanför inhägnaden. 17 Och det var också här jag på allvar såg att den som äger språket också blir den som definierar världen. 18 Barbara Foley (1993, 284–6) traces the characteristics of the American proletarian autobiographical tradition. 19 For an analysis of Moberg’s trilogy, see Williams (2002, 138–76). For an analysis of the relationship between class and drug abuse in Swedish working-class literature with focus on Yarden, see Forssberg Malm (2011, 97–100). 20 Vi har förlorat, vi finns inte och det gör de – det betyder allt och det blir mer och mer sant ju äldre vi blir.

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Hon var den lojalaste av alla hundar. Gick hem efter dagens slut och slickade sina sår. Tvättade bort det som gick bort. Lade sig i en röd stol, hängde med huvudet i handen. Satt nära elementet. Lade fötterna på det. Lät timmarna flyta på. 22 Jag ser den hemlösa, Annika, framför mig igen, hur ser hon ut efter den första frostnatten? 23 Fattigdom svider, värker, luktar, smakar. Den bultar. Den syns i våra livsval; yrken och utbildning; i lönekuvertet, på arbetsförhållandena; i skolsituationen; i klädsmak och matvanor. Den syns i form av sömnbrist, kutiga ryggar, boende, semestervanor, utbildningslängd; sjukfrånvaro, ängslan, oro, ångest, idrottsvanor, ekonomiskt och materiellt arv. Och när vi som gör våra klassresor rest tillräckligt långt ser vi klass, helt enkelt för att vi kan se det. 24 Jag kan inte i ord beskriva vilken skillnad det är på att ha råd och att inte ha råd. [---] Att inte kunna köpa riktiga skor, gå till tandläkaren, ha råd till en dator, åka på semester, äga en bil, köpa något fint till sina barn. Det finns inte ord. Pengar öppnar upp till allt. Inte minst till avlastning. 25 Åsa Arping (2011, 196–7) mentions poets like Emil Boss, Johan Jönson, Helen Rådberg and Jenny Wrangborg. Another notable poet is Johannes Anyuru.

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References Acker, Joan. 2006. Class Questions: Feminist Answers. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Ahrne, Göran. 1995. “Olika klassbegrepp.” In Klassamhällets förändring, edited by Göran Ahrne, Hedvig Ekerwald and Håkon Leiulfsrud, 14– 25. Lund: Arkiv. Alakoski, Susanna. 2012. Oktober i Fattigsverige: Dagbok. Stockholm: Bonnier. Arping, Åsa. 2008. “Folkhemmet tur och retur: Om klass, kön och utanförskap i tre svenska 2000-talsromaner.” In Moderniteter: Text, bild, kön: En vänbok till Ingrid Holmquist, edited by Åsa Arping, Anna Nordenstam and Kajsa Widegren, 21–42. Gothenburg: Makadam. —. 2011. “Att göra skillnad: Klass, kön och etnicitet i några av det nya seklets svenska uppväxtskildringar.” In Från Nexø till Alakoski: Aspekter på nordisk arbetarlitteratur, edited by Bibi Jonsson, Magnus Nilsson, Birthe Sjöberg and Jimmy Vulovic, 189–98. Lund: Absalon. Atkinson, Rob, and Simin Davoudi. 2008. “The Concept of Social Exclusion in the European Union: Context, Development and Possibilities.” In Social Exclusion: Critical Concepts in Sociology, Vol. 1, Social Exclusion: The History and Use of a Concept, edited by David Byrne, 348–69. London: Routledge. Augustpriset. 2015. http://www.augustpriset.se/english. Bannerhed, Tomas. 2011. Korparna. Stockholm: Weyler. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2001. The Individualized Society. Cambridge: Polity. —. 2010. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor. 2nd ed. Berkshire: Open University Press. —. 2011. Collateral Damage: Social Inequality in a Global Age. Cambridge: Polity. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press. Bohlin, Rebecka. 2012. De osynliga: Om Europas fattiga arbetarklass. Stockholm: Atlas. Dahlstedt, Magnus. 2009. Aktiveringens politik: Demokrati och medborgarskap för ett nytt millennium. Stockholm: Liber. Foley, Barbara. 1993. Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941. Durham: Duke University Press. Forssberg Malm, Anna. 2011. “Solidaritet, identifikation eller gudomlig vrede?: Om retoriska utgångspunkter i arbetarlitteratur.” In Från Nexø till Alakoski: Aspekter på nordisk arbetarlitteratur, edited by Bibi Jonsson, Magnus Nilsson, Birthe Sjöberg and Jimmy Vulovic, 91–102. Lund: Absalon.

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Furuland, Lars. 1971. Folkhögskolan: En bildningsväg för svenska författare. Stockholm: Utbildningsförlaget. Fägerskiöld, Katarina. 2012. Åsen. Stockholm: Bonnier. Greider, Göran. 1994. Det levande löftet: Om realismen, demokratin och folkhemmet. Stockholm: Bonnier. Hetekivi Olsson, Eija. 2012. Ingenbarnsland. Stockholm: Norstedt. Jones, Owen. 2011. Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. London: Verso. Jönsson, Dan. 2011. “Romanens stängda arbetsrum.” 10-tal, 5: 14–6. Lewin, Leif. 2012. “Vi bevittnar nu slutet på partiets hegemoniska makt.” Dagens Nyheter, January 21. http://www.dn.se/debatt/vi-bevittnar-nuslutet-pa-partiets-hegemoniska-makt/. Lundberg, Kristian. 2009. Yarden: En berättelse. Stockholm: Symposion. —. 2011. Och allt skall vara kärlek. Stockholm: Ordfront. Michaels, Walter Benn. 2006. The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. New York: Metropolitan Books. Nilsson, Magnus. 2010. Den föreställda mångkulturen: Klass och etnicitet i svensk samtidsprosa. Hedemora: Gidlund. —. 2011. “Swedish Working Class Literature and the Class Politics of Heritage.” In Heritage, Labour and the Working Classes, edited by Laurajane Smith, Paul A. Shackel and Gary Campbell, 178–91. London: Routledge. Rothstein, Bo, ed. 1995. Demokratirådets rapport 1995: Demokrati som dialog. Stockholm: SNS. Sattarvandi, Hassan Loo. 2008. Still. Stockholm: Bonnier. Skeggs, Beverley. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage. —. 2004. “Exchange, Value and Affect: Bourdieu and ‘the Self.’” In Feminism after Bourdieu, edited by Lisa Adkins and Beverley Skeggs, 75–95. Oxford: Blackwell. Statistics Sweden. 2012. “Living Standards in Europe: Incomes Up but so Is Risk for Poverty.” November 19. http://www.scb.se/en_/Findingstatistics/Statistics-by-subject-area/Living-conditions/Livingconditions/Living-Conditions-Surveys-ULFSILC/AktuellPong/12209/Behallare-for-Press/Living-standards-in-Europe/ Sveriges Riksdag. 2015. “The 2014 Election.” http://www.riksdagen.se/en/Home/Election-2014/ (accessed October 2, 2014). Västnytt (TV program). 2012. Aired March 26.

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Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. 2010. The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone. London: Penguin. Williams, Anna. 2002. Tillträde till den nya tiden: Fem berättelser om när Sverige blev modernt. Stockholm: Symposion.

THE REPRESENTATION OF CLASS IN POSTINDUSTRIAL AND MULTICULTURAL SWEDEN: AESTHETIC-POLITICAL STRATEGIES IN KRISTIAN LUNDBERG’S YARDEN MAGNUS NILSSON

Kristian Lundberg’s Yarden from 2009 is one of the most important literary works about contemporary Swedish class society and one of the most significant contributions to the new wave of working-class literature emerging in Sweden in recent years.1 It tells – in a self-reflexive, and often highly poetic way – the story of a writer and critic from a working-class background who, because of a tax debt, is forced to start working as a manual laborer at a transshipment hub for cars in the city of Malmö, known as “the yard.” The aim of this article is to analyze how Yarden’s representation of the class injustices, suffered by manual laborers in contemporary Sweden, and Lundberg’s aesthetic-political strategies are conditioned both by the general ideological changes accompanying Sweden’s transformation in recent decades from a social democratic welfare state into a multicultural and post-industrial society and by ideological conditions specific to the realm of literature.

Unrepresentable Class Injustices In Yarden the narrator gives a dark description of his experiences of manual labor. Because of constant threats of immediate dismissal, he is at the mercy of his employers, and however much he works, he remains poor (Lundberg 2009, 26, 41, 71, 115, 125). At the same time, however, he finds it difficult to describe these experiences. A good example of this can be found in the following passage, where he tries to illustrate his situation as a manual laborer by comparing it to that of some sailors from the Philippines:

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They tell me about the violence in the Philippines. That you need three or four jobs to manage. That everything is work. I say that I understand what he is saying. He laughs and says: “I don’t think so.” Of course he is right. His world isn’t mine. (Lundberg 2009, 45)2

Immediately after establishing a similarity between him and the sailors, the narrator realizes that the differences outweigh the likenesses. Thus he thematizes a representational failure, and this failure is just one of many. “I am testing my address,” the narrator says in the book’s prologue (Lundberg 2009, 10).3 But however hard he tries, he never quite succeeds in finding adequate forms for the representation of his experiences from the world of manual labor, as indicated, for example, by his vague description of his workplace as “the underworld” (Lundberg 2009, 52).4 The narrator connects these difficulties to what he experiences as the emergence of a new class reality, characterized both by real economic and political change and by the advent of an ideological climate that obscures class injustice. His inability to apprehend and interpret the world of labor is a result of it having undergone real changes, which is underscored in the following passage: [D]uring the fifteen years that have passed since I last worked with my body, the conditions have changed considerably. If, in my youth, I could bounce back and forth like a pinball in search for jobs that always materialized, I was now like a round ball trying to squeeze through a square opening. There was no place for me; I was like a prisoner for life, who had suddenly been released from his cell and could now no longer interpret the world. (Lundberg 2009, 85–6)5

When finally beginning to regain his ability to understand the world of labor, the narrator underscores that the mismatch between his expectations and his experiences is not only because the world of labor has been transformed, but also because it is consequently misrepresented in the public sphere. Between the representational realm that he has inhabited as a writer and critic and the world of manual labor that he encounters at the yard there is an almost unbridgeable gap: The difference between what’s happening on the surface – cultural pages in newspapers, op-eds, motions, letters to the editor – and what’s going on in the underworld is gigantic. It is a cleft that’s almost unfathomable. (Lundberg 2009, 51–2)6

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A similar argument is put forward in the narrator’s discussion of poverty. Poverty, he argues, is different now than it was when he was young. Then, there was a welfare state that could sometimes alleviate its consequences: “There was housing policy. There was social policy. It didn’t always work, but often enough it did” (Lundberg 2009, 81).7 But the new class reality experienced by the narrator is not just a product of the dismantling of the social democratic welfare state. It is also a consequence of class injustices such as poverty being obscured and misrepresented in the public sphere. Poverty, the narrator claims, is a phenomenon defined by “those who have preferential right of interpretation” (Lundberg 2009, 54).8 And this right seems to be used to make the poor invisible: [T]hose who are poor and made invisible are only glimpsed in passing, late at night, early in the morning, in movement – constantly in movement between their jobs. Sometimes I can catch a glimpse of them in an article, an editorial, a blog – as alive as butterflies behind glass and within a frame, an alien species that can be studied at a distance. (Lundeberg 2009, 55)9

Because of this obscuring of the poor in the realm of representation, the narrator cannot write about them. He cannot even write about his own poverty: “I’m poor. And when I try to write about it, it disappears immediately” (Lundberg 2009, 54).10

Writing about Class in Multicultural and Post-Industrial Sweden The self-reflexive questioning in Yarden of the possibilities of representing class injustice brings to the forefront – through what Anna Williams in her contribution to this anthology calls “a distancing effect” – the ideological climate in the era of globally triumphant capitalism that has been described by, among others, Walter Benn Michaels (2004) and Nancy Fraser (1997). Michaels (2004, 12) uses the concept of “posthistoricism” to describe present times as a “moment in history,” in which questions about cultural difference emerge as fundamental in political discourse and questions about class conflict become almost impossible to articulate. Fraser (1997, 2), on the other hand, proposes the concept of “the ‘postsocialist’ condition” for describing the new world-historical epoch emerging after the collapse of Soviet communism, in which claims for the recognition of identities all but eclipse traditional class politics, aiming at economic redistribution. This new ideological climate is described in Yarden, for example, in the following comment by the narrator:

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Class struggle is being waged all the time; it is another class that slowly and sometimes quickly forces us farther and farther away. How will I be able to tell my son who I am – where I come from? (Lundberg 2009, 35)11

By connecting the claim that his situation is conditioned by class struggle with a questioning of whether it is at all possible to describe it, the narrator argues that his class identity and his experiences of class injustice have become almost unrepresentable. But Yarden does not just thematize the fact that the class injustices experienced by the narrator are made invisible; rather, the narrative also constitutes an attempt to fight back against this obscuring of class. One aspect of this fighting back consists of the mobilizing of a very traditional political discourse on class, namely Marxism. “The bourgeoisie,” Marx and Engels write in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1976, 486–7), “has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked selfinterest, than callous ‘cash payment’ […] It has resolved personal worth into exchange value.” This argument resonates in Yarden through the depiction of the relationship between the narrator and his employers. One example of this can be found in the following description of a job interview: The job interview at the yard resembles a cynical joke. A collection of high-sounding phrases. We both know what it is about. There are hundreds like me, just waiting for a place. Here, nobody is unique. We are just cogs. (Lundberg 2009, 33)12

Other examples are the narrator’s claims that as a worker he is not “even a name, only a number” (Lundberg 2009, 27), or that his value is determined by an “anonymous market” (42). 13 He also characterizes himself as someone who “comes and goes, and whose name one doesn’t have to learn – a ghostlike creature, a replaceable cog, a spring that never breaks” (Lundberg 2009, 49).14

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Figure 13.1: The transhipment hub for cars in Malmö known as Yarden (Swedish for “The Yard”). (Photo by Lajos Varhegyi)

In Yarden, the relationship between worker and employer is thus described in the same way as in the Manifesto of the Communist Party: as a depersonalized relationship between a buyer and a seller of the commodity of labor power. This mobilization of a Marxist understanding of capitalist class relations constitutes a direct and total rejection of “posthistoricism” or “the postsocialist condition.” For texts aspiring to have political effects, however, ignoring hegemonic ideology is impossible. Therefore Yarden must also engage in dialogue with the very idea that Sweden can no longer be characterized as a class society. A fundamental feature of the new ideological world order described by Fraser and Michaels is a radical shift in political discourse away from questions about class and class injustice to questions about identity, and – above all – ethnicity. This shift has been rather drastic in Sweden, where the emergence in recent years of a new national self-understanding of Sweden as a multicultural society has given ethnic difference the status of a key code for understanding society, thereby marginalizing the concept of class, or turning it in to an identity category analogous with that of ethnicity (Nilsson 2010a, 55–60). Another ideological process that has contributed to the marginalization of class issues in recent years is the promotion of the idea that Sweden has become a post-industrial society in which the class antagonisms characteristic of industrial capitalism are no longer considered to be fundamental to the social structure (Nilsson 2010a, 60–5).

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The city in which Yarden is set – Malmö, Sweden’s third-largest city – is in many ways a perfect metonymy for the developments described above. It used to be a classic industrial town but is today going through a process of economic restructuring, in which the manufacturing industry is being replaced by higher education and high-tech and service producing businesses. Malmö is also home to one of the largest immigrant populations in Sweden, and therefore often functions as a symbol for the new, ethnically diverse Sweden. The world of labor described in Yarden is populated mainly by immigrants and the narrator acknowledges that the fact that he is Swedish makes him well favored in comparison with his non-Swedish workmates: “I belong, I will soon learn, to the fortunate ones. I am Swedish” (Lundberg 2009, 69). 15 Because of this, Åsa Arping (2011, 194) has argued that ethnicity is one of the fundamental distinctions by means of which the narrator in Yarden constructs his identity: “It is in relation to the undocumented migrants, the Muslim workmates, and the Philippine sailors that the white, Swedish, Malmö-born, Christian first-person narrator situates himself.” At the same time as he recognizes the importance of ethnicity in the contemporary world of labor, however, the narrator also tries to show how ethnic categories obscure experiences of class injustice, particularly through the insistence that workers’ economic and social conditions create an underlying homogeneity that counters ethnic divisions. A good example of this is the following depiction of the narrator’s relationship to his immigrant workmates, in which ethnic divisions are ridiculed and shared class experiences described as the foundation for a possible solidarity that transcends ethnic differences: Here, I’m the immigrant. We make jokes about that. That I take their jobs, destroying the market for honest wogs. The work is in itself so meaningless that it is hard not to develop a feeling of solidarity with each other. We are of equal worth, speak the same language, live with the same fatigue and worries. (Lundberg 2009, 98)16

The narrator thus recognizes that the world he describes is one characterized by ethnic divisions. At the same time, however, he insists that these divisions exist side by side with class experiences shared by both Swedes and immigrants, thus criticizing the idea that the emergence of multicultural Sweden has made the category of class obsolete. A similar critique is directed at the idea of Sweden’s transformation into a post-industrial society, as in the following description of the narrator’s path to work:

236 The Representation of Class in Post-Industrial and Multicultural Sweden I’m strolling along the road between the Western Harbor and the Middle Harbor, passing the Turning Torso, the skateboard ramps, turning into and passing through the residential area The Dock, and exiting by the little bascule bridge. […] I’m the only one awake in this neighborhood. Further down the block, a car from a security company is parked. Everything is darkness. It is a strange neighborhood; everything rests on labor that is now made invisible. On the other side of the bascule bridge you still see parts of the shutdown shipyard; the docks. […] Only a short time ago, both my father and my grandfather probably walked around here. My grandfather worked at the shipyard, as did my father for a short while, and I. The third generation, with labor handed down in the body. Malmö is a city suffering from phantom pain. Then, Malmö was a different kind of city. The Western Harbor was called Siberia; as far as I understand it was used as a sort of dump. Now it’s an exclusive residential area. There’s irony in that. (Lundberg 2009, 34)17

The Western Harbor used to be the heart of industrial Malmö, home of the Kockums shipyard. Today it is an exclusive residential area, with a skyline dominated by Santiago Calavatra’s famous skyscraper Turning Torso.

Figure 13.2: What used to be a dock at the shipbuilding yard in Malmö has now been converted into a residential area with a marina. (Photo by Lajos Varhegyi)

The Western Harbor also houses parts of Malmö University, as well as numerous cafés and restaurants, IT companies, and other businesses associated with the new economy. Thus, it is hardly surprising that it has

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become a symbol for the new, post-industrial Malmö (Nilsson 2010b, 4– 7). Lundberg’s description of the Western Harbor draws on, but also subverts, this symbolism. His pointing out the irony that when the Western Harbor constituted Malmö’s economic center, it occupied a peripheral position in the city’s symbolic economy – a status symbolized by the name “Siberia” – is followed by the claim that the Western Harbor’s contemporary status as a symbol for the new, post-industrial Malmö rests on the obscuring of the economy proper. For the post-industrial Western Harbor, the narrator argues, is built on labor “made invisible.” One aspect of this obscuring of labor concerns the past, the labor performed at the shipyard by the narrator and his father and grandfather. In the Western Harbor, what used to be a place for work has now become a place for leisure; what used to be a dock has been turned into an exclusive residential area; where ships used to be built there are now skateboard ramps. This transformation makes past labor invisible. Another aspect of the obscuring of labor concerns the present: the labor performed by the narrator. When walking through the Western Harbor he is on his way to work – but he is not seen. All the people living in the exclusive residential area are still asleep, and the whole neighborhood is dark. Not only is the narrator invisible; he also represents something alien and possibly even threatening. The only ones to whom the narrator may be visible are the security guards, and their task is not to see him but to observe him. Thus, the Western Harbor not only obscures past labor; the narrator’s invisibility indicates that the contemporary labor on which the Western Harbor rests – the surplus labor making possible the very existence of exclusive residential areas, posh restaurants, skateboard ramps, the university, etc., which is performed by the narrator and by others like him in other parts of Malmö – is also obscured. Malmö’s transformation into a post-industrial city is thus not denied in Yarden, but the argument that post-industrialism has made the concept of class obsolete is countered by the insistence that it has above all made the experience of class invisible.

Working-Class Literature and Literary Class Politics in Contemporary Sweden Lundberg is one of the most important representatives of the new wave of working-class literature emerging in Sweden since the turn of the twentyfirst century (Nilsson 2011, 184). 18 One thing supporting this categorization is that Yarden shares important themes and motifs with

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several other works by contemporary working-class writers. Its critique of how the understanding of Sweden as a multicultural and post-industrial society has made the phenomenon of class virtually invisible, for example, resembles those formulated by Susanna Alakoski in her novel Svinalängorna [The Swine Rows] from 2006 and by Åsa Linderborg in the novel Mig äger ingen [I Am Owned by No One] from 2007 (Nilsson 2010a, 160–70, 188–92). Furthermore, Yarden’s dark picture of the present-day world of labor shares many similarities with the ones found in the works of such contemporary working-class writers as Jenny Wrangborg, Emil Boss and Johan Jönsson. Another reason for placing Yarden in the tradition of working-class literature is that its narrator several times makes positive remarks about older working-class literature, as when he describes how he “recognizes” his own experiences in the working-class literature from the 1930s that today holds an honored place in the canon of Swedish literature (Lundberg 2009, 123).19 At the same time, however, the mode of narration in Yarden deviates substantially from the realism often considered to be the aesthetic backbone of Swedish working-class literature. This is, at least to some extent, a product of the fact that Lundberg’s attempt to use literature as a means for criticizing class injustice takes place in a political and literary context that is very different from the one in which older working-class writers were writing. The paradigmatic example of a Swedish working-class writer whose works have had a substantial impact in the sphere of politics is Ivar LoJohansson (1901–1990). His novels, short stories and reportages about the statare – a class of farm workers living under almost feudal conditions – are often considered to have contributed to the abolishment of the statare system in 1945. 20 One of the reasons Lo-Johansson’s depictions of the class injustices suffered by the statare had such strong political effects was their impact within the labor movement. His first novel about the statare, Godnatt, jord from 1933 (published in English under the title Breaking Free in 1990), as well as many of his short stories, were published in the trade union’s newspaper for farm workers, thereby reaching large numbers of unionized workers and union activists (Furuland 1976, 186). The imagery Lo-Johansson created for criticizing the class injustices suffered by the statare also made its way into the labor movement’s political rhetoric. His description of the duty of the female statare to milk the cows early in the morning and late in the evening every day as “the white whip,” for example, was used in countless political speeches and articles by trade union activists (Furuland 1976, 190).

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This collaboration between Lo-Johansson and the labor movement took place in a specific political context that has been described by the Danish ethnologist Niels Jul Nielsen (2004). During much of the twentieth century, Nielsen (2004, 11–3) argues, labor was considered to be “a key factor” in “world affairs,” because of the fear that workers may be won for communism and open up a revolutionary front within the capitalist states. One consequence of this was the emergence of a speaking position from which it was possible to articulate political demands as a member of the working class. Lo-Johansson’s critical depictions of class injustice were formulated from the worker’s speaking position. Firstly, they were articulated from a working-class speaking position in literature, namely that of the workingclass writer, and secondly, they were disseminated in the sphere of politics from a similar position, namely that of organized labor. It was this position that gave them their political force. In recent years, however, the worker has “lost entirely its strategic role” in politics, Nielsen (2004, 325) claims. Today, workers are no longer viewed as having any “specific interests within the social organization” (Nielsen 2004, 11), and the word “‘worker’ sounds anachronistic, even for describing people transporting garbage, attending a turning-lathe, or sitting at an assembly line” (Nielsen 2004, 325). Thus, the “speaking position, that was earlier connected to being a ‘worker’ – implicitly meaning that one was a worker-with-the-potential-to-be-mobilized-as-part-of-themasses – has almost disappeared” (Nielsen 2004, 325). The weakening of the worker’s speaking position in Swedish politics can be illustrated with the decline of the Swedish labor movement in recent years. In the 1991 elections, the Social Democratic Party, which for decades had dominated Swedish politics and sometimes received more than 50 percent of the votes, for the first time received less than 40 percent of the votes, and in the following elections in 2010 the party only received 30.7 percent. Since the mid-1990s the percentage of workers being organized in the social democratic trade union confederation, LO, has also dropped from 85 to 70. This decline for organized labor as a force in Swedish politics has gone hand in hand with the shift in political discourse described above. Previously, remedying class injustices through welfare-state reforms was the central goal for Swedish politics. Today, however, questions about gender equality and integration of immigrants receive much more attention than class politics, and the traditional Swedish welfare-state politics has been challenged by a neoliberal politics promoting economic deregulation and privatizations.

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The weakening of the worker’s speaking position constitutes a serious challenge to the literary-political strategies developed within the tradition of Swedish working-class literature. Articulating workers’ experiences of class injustices in a rhetorically effective way makes little sense, since neither the workers experiencing these injustices nor their political representatives in the labor movement have access to a speaking position in the sphere of politics. Their demands that these injustices be remedied thus have little political force. That Lundberg’s representation of class injustices is not oriented toward the sphere of politics is obvious. His selfreflexive and often highly poetic prose is ill suited as a template for political rhetoric, and it is thus not at all surprising that Yarden, apart from being serialized in the syndicalist weekly newspaper Arbetaren [The Worker] – whose readership does not exceed 3,000 – has not attracted much attention within the labor movement. Instead of representing class injustice in a way that would make these representations useful in political discourse, Lundberg represents it in a highly literary (self-reflexive and poetic) fashion. This could, of course, be seen as a withdrawal from, or an aestheticizing of, politics. But it could also be viewed as an attempt to develop new strategies for literary working-class politics after the disappearance of the worker’s speaking position from the sphere of politics.21 In this direction points, above all, the Yarden narrator’s insistence on the possibility of using literature as a means for class struggle. The descriptions of class injustice in Yarden are not only formulated in critical dialogue with hegemonic ideological ideas about Sweden’s transformation into a post-industrial and multicultural society but also with dominant ideals in the site of literature. This is thematized, for example, when the narrator asks if it is not “ridiculous” for a “middle-aged poet” to use a concept such as “class struggle” (Lundberg 2009, 52).22 The implicit answer to this (rhetorical) question is affirmative. Direct engagement in political questions concerning class is a violation of the hegemonic rules of literature. In literature, the narrator notes when reading his local newspaper, other battles than those between capital and labor are fought: “On the cultural page in the local newspaper I read that a conflict is going on, a literary battle between the adherents of the romanticist league and a more language-oriented group” (Lundberg 2009, 94). 23 Thus, literature trying to play a role in class struggle is indeed rendered ridiculous. The narrator in Yarden sometimes expresses doubts regarding the possibility to use literature as a means for class politics. One example of this is found in the following passage:

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And after a few months within the system I no longer have the strength to think about having to summarize my experiences, having to write about what needs to be verbalized. More and more often I think instead that the answer to the question never posed to us by the power is to stop turning the other cheek, to instead pick up the stone from the ground and to throw it, hard and mercilessly. (Lundberg 2009, 53)24

But instead of abandoning literature, the narrator challenges the hegemonic literary ideals by arguing that poetry only has “value when it is telling a story; when it wants to abandon its form” (Lundberg 2009, 30), and that “poetry that isn’t a credible testimony of our conditions is just meaningless mumbles” (94). 25 This is a frontal attack on a literary ideology that forbids the thematization of the narrator’s experiences – which are experiences of class injustice – and on writers and critics of literature who fight “battles” about form while ignoring the struggle between the classes. Lundberg’s challenging of hegemonic literary ideals and his advocating literary interventions into class politics are made, not from the worker’s speaking position in politics, but from the working-class writer’s speaking position in literature. In Sweden, working-class literature has traditionally enjoyed a higher status than in other capitalist countries (Furuland and Svedjedal 2006, 25). At least since the 1930s, it has been consecrated as a central strand in Swedish literature, as evidenced, for example, by the fact that several working-class writers have been members of the Swedish Academy and that two of them – Harry Martinson and Eyvind Johnson – have been awarded the Nobel Prize (Nilsson 2011, 183–4).26 This strong position for working-class writers in Swedish literature has, at least in part, been made possible by the strong position of organized labor in Swedish politics. The first breakthrough for working-class literature early in the twentieth century, for example, coincided with the general strike of 1909, which was a manifestation of the labor movement’s newly won status as a key actor in Swedish politics (Nilsson 2006, 53–4), and its definite breakthrough in the 1930s has often been viewed as a parallel in literature to the social democratic labor movement’s rise to hegemony in politics (Forser et al. 1972, 173; Holmgren 1982, 65–6, 69; Therborn 1985, 586; Forser 1993, 148). Literary developments are, however, not passive products of political or economic conditions. This is particularly indicated by the fact that working-class writers have continued to enjoy relatively strong positions in Swedish literature even during periods when the working class has been on the defensive in politics, perhaps the best example being the

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contemporary revival of working-class literature to which Lundberg’s Yarden belongs. The working-class writer’s speaking position in literature is, in other words, relatively autonomous from the worker’s speaking position in politics. It is a product not only of the political strength of organized labor but also of the high status enjoyed by working-class writing in the realm of literature. This means that while the worker’s speaking position in the sphere of politics may no longer exist in contemporary post-industrial and multicultural Sweden, it may very well still remain in Swedish literature as the working-class writer’s speaking position. The fact that the critical representation of class injustice in Yarden, particularly through its selfreflexive and poetical traits, is orientated toward the literary could thus be seen as an attempt by Lundberg to claim a speaking position within this realm – the speaking position of the working-class writer – as a platform for literary class politics. In Yarden, the narrator describes how, since the last time he was a manual laborer, the unions have lost much of their power: It is more than twenty years since the last time I worked in the harbor. […] The collective agreement in the harbor was advantageous, just like it is today. […] I was, for a short while, a member of the trade union and was impressed by its library. […] Seriously speaking: most of us are not even members of a trade union, since it doesn’t pay off. (Lundberg 2009, 65)27

That the narrator views union membership as something that does not “pay off,” is not surprising. Because of the disappearance of the worker’s speaking position in Swedish politics, unions have lost much of their political force. But in literature, the narrator sees the possibility of creating a platform for class politics: I ought to write. I ought to send out one letter after the other, I ought to create a space where all those who have no language were given a chance to speak – where it no longer is too late. (Lundberg 2009, 62).28

In multicultural and post-industrial Sweden, workers may no longer have a voice in politics. Because of the canonization of working-class literature as a central strand in modern Swedish literature, however, working-class writers still have access to a speaking position from which class injustice can be described and criticized. It is from this position that the narrator in Yarden tells his story about his experiences of manual labor in contemporary Sweden, and it is in order to keep this position open that he gives his narrative a decidedly literary form.

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Notes 1

For a description of this “third wave” of Swedish working-class literature, see Williams in this volume. 2 This translation and all other translations into English are my own unless otherwise noted. De berättar om våldet på Filippinerna. Att man måste ha tre, fyra jobb för att klara sig. Att allt är arbete. Jag säger att jag förstår vad han menar. Han skrattar och säger: “Det tror jag inte.” Han har naturligtvis rätt. Hans värld är inte min. 3 Jag prövar mitt tilltal. 4 Underjorden. 5 Under de femton år som förflutit sedan jag senast arbetade med kroppen har förutsättningarna förändrats avsevärt. Om jag i min ungdom kunde studsa fram och tillbaka som en flipperkula, på jakt efter jobb som alltid infann sig, så var jag nu som en rund boll som försökte trycka sig igenom ett fyrkantigt hål. Det fanns ingen plats för mig; jag var som en livstidsfånge som plötsligt släppts ur sin cell och nu inte längre kunde tolka omvärlden. 6 Skillnaden mellan det som pågår på ytan – kultursidor, debattartiklar, motioner, insändare – och det som sker i underjorden är gigantisk. Det är en klyfta som i det närmaste är ogripbar. 7 Det fanns en bostadspolitik. Det fanns en socialpolitik. Den fungerade inte alltid, men tillräckligt ofta. 8 Dem som har tolkningsföreträde. 9 De osynliggjorda och fattiga skymtar man bara till som hastigast, sent på natten, tidigt på morgonen, i rörelse – ständigt i rörelse mellan sina arbeten. Ibland kan jag se dem skymta förbi i en artikel, ett ledaruppslag, en blogg – lika levande som fjärilar bakom glas och ram, en främmande art som man kan studera på avstånd. 10 Jag är fattig. Och när jag ska försöka skriva om det så tar det direkt slut. 11 Klasskampen förs hela tiden; det är en annan klass som långsamt och ibland snabbt tvingar oss längre och längre bort. Hur ska jag kunna berätta för min son vem jag är – varifrån jag kommer? 12 Anställningsintervjun till Yarden blir som ett cyniskt skämt. En samling av floskler. Vi vet bägge vad det handlar om. Det finns hundratals sådana som jag som bara väntar på att få ta plats. Här är ingen unik. Vi är bara kuggar. 13 Ens ett namn; bara ett nummer. Anonym marknad. 14 Kommer och går och som man aldrig behöver lära sig namnet på – en spöklik vålnad, en utbytbar kugge, en fjäder som aldrig brister. 15 Jag tillhör, kommer jag snart att förstå, de lyckligt lottade. Jag är svensk. 16 Här är det jag som är invandraren. Vi skämtar om det. Att jag kommer och tar deras jobb, att jag förstör marknaden för hederliga blattar. Arbetet är i sig så meningslöst att det är svårt att inte solidarisera sig med varandra. Vi är lika värda, talar samma språk, lever med samma trötthet och oro. 17 Jag promenerar längs med vägen som går mellan Västra Hamnen och Mellersta Hamnen, passerar Turning Torso, skateboardramperna, svänger in genom bostadsområdet Dockan och kommer ut vid den lilla klaffbron. […] Det är bara jag vaken i dessa kvarter. Längre ner i kvarteret står det en parkerad bevakningsbil.

244 The Representation of Class in Post-Industrial and Multicultural Sweden  Allt är mörker. Det är ett märkligt område; allt vilar på ett arbete som nu är osynliggjort. På andra sidan klaffbron finns fortfarande delar av det nedlagda varvet kvar; hamnbassängerna. […] För bara en kort tid sedan gick säkert både min far och hans far före honom i just dessa kvarter. Min farfar arbetade på Kockums, precis som min far ett kort tag, och jag. I tredje generation; med arbetet nedärvt i kroppen. Malmö är en stad med fantomsmärtor. Då var Malmö en annan slags stad. Området Västra Hamnen kallades för Sibirien; efter vad jag kan förstå fungerade det som ett slags avstjälpningsplats. Nu är det ett exklusivt bostadsområde. Det finns en ironi i det. 18 For a discussion of Lundberg’s relationship to the tradition of Swedish workingclass literature, see Williams in this volume. 19 Känner igen. 20 For an overview of the Swedish labor movement’s struggle against the statare system, see Back (1961). For an analysis of Lo-Johansson’s contribution to this struggle, see Furuland (1976). 21 This is hinted at by Arping (2011, 194), who argues that Yarden brings to the forefront questions about “what happens to working-class subjectivity and working-class identity when the worker is made invisible” and about which “new paths” Swedish working-class literature should explore. 22 Löjeväckande. Medelålders centrallyriker. Klasskamp. 23 På kultursidan i den lokala dagstidningen kan jag läsa att det pågår en konflikt, en litterär strid, mellan anhängarna av romantiska förbundet och en mer språkorienterad grupp. 24 Och efter ett par månader i systemet orkar jag inte längre tänka på att jag ska sammanfatta mina erfarenheter; att jag ska skriva om det som måste uttalas. Allt oftare tanker jag istället att svaret på den fråga som makten aldrig ställer till oss blir att sluta vända den andra kinden till; att istället ta upp stenen från marken och kasta den, hårt och skoningslöst. 25 Värde när den berättar; när den vill lämna sin form. Den dikt som inte är ett trovärdigt vittnesbörd om våra förhållanden är bara meningslöst mummel. 26 See also Williams in this volume. 27 Det är mer än tjugo år sedan jag arbetade i hamnen senast. […] Hamnavtalet var fördelaktigt, precis som det är nu. […] Jag tillhörde också, ett kort tag, fackförbundet – och imponerades över arbetsplatsbiblioteket som fanns där. […] Ärligt talat: de flesta av oss tillhör inte ens ett fackförbund, eftersom det inte är lönt. 28 Jag borde skriva. Jag borde sända ut brev efter brev, jag borde skapa en plats där alla de språklösa fick möjlighet att tala – där det inte längre är för sent.

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References Arping, Åsa. 2011. “Att göra skillnad: Klass, kön och etnicitet i några av det nya seklets svenska uppväxtskildringar.” In Från Nexø till Alakoski: Aspekter på nordisk arbetarlitteratur, edited by Bibi Jonsson, Magnus Nilsson, Birthe Sjöberg and Jimmy Vulovic, 189–98. Lund: Absalon. Back, Pär-Erik. 1961. En klass i uppbrott: Den fackliga lantarbetarrörelsens uppkomst och utveckling. Malmö: Framtiden. Forser, Tomas. 1993. “Oavhängiga kulturradikaler och reformradikala socialdemokrater: Utopi och besinning i folkhemmet.” In Kulturradikalismen: Det moderna genombrottets andra fas, edited by Bertil Nolin, 135–56. Stockholm: Symposion. Forser, Tomas, et al. 1972. Klartext: Marxistisk litteraturkritik. Gothenburg: Författarförlaget. Furuland, Lars. 1976. Statarnas ombudsman i dikten: En bok om Ivar LoJohansson. Stockholm: LT. Furuland, Lars, and Johan Svedjedal. 2006. Svensk arbetarlitteratur. Stockholm: Atlas. Fraser, Nancy. 1997. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition. New York: Routledge. Holmgren, Ola. 1982. “Proletärförfattarna och den litterära institutionen.” Kultur & Klasse, 11.2: 61–9. Lundberg, Kristian. 2009. Yarden: En berättelse. Stockholm: Symposion. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1976. Collected Works, Vol. 6. Moscow: Progress. Michaels, Walter Benn. 2004. The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nielsen, Niels Jul. 2004. Mellem storpolitik og værkstedsgulv: Den danske arbejder: Før, under og efter den kolde krig. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum. Nilsson, Magnus. 2006. Arbetarlitteratur. Lund: Studentlitteratur. —. 2010a. Den föreställda mångkulturen: Klass och etnicitet i svensk samtidsprosa. Hedemora: Gidlund. —. 2010b. From Industrial to Colorful. Malmö: MIM. —. 2011. “Swedish Working Class Literature and the Class Politics of Heritage.” In Heritage Labour and the Working Classes, edited by Laurajane Smith, Paul A. Shackel and Gary Campbell, 178–91. London: Routledge.

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Therborn, Göran. 1985. “The Coming of Swedish Social Democracy.” In L’Internazionale operaia e socialista tra le due guerre, edited by Enzo Collotti, 527–93. Milano: Feltrinelli.

CAREGIVING FATHERS IN NORWAY: FICTION AND REALITY MELISSA GJELLSTAD

Tore Renberg’s protagonist Jarle Klepp is one compelling literary example of a man’s identity construction as he aspires to attain the new norm in Norwegian society, the caregiving father. In the five novels to date about his family, Jarle levels devastating critiques about his father’s failures while he himself falls short of his own expectations as a parent. Jarle’s journey to compassionate fathering permeates three of Renberg’s novels, which I investigate here to show how the narrator Jarle gives a voice to men as fathers. The interplay between sociological fact and literary fiction that this chapter presents illuminates Jarle’s desire to be an equal partner in the parenting process and the factors that work against him. As such, Renberg’s male protagonist mirrors men’s growing pains during the implementation of paternity leave legislation in Norway, where the desired outcome was for men to become competent caregivers. By employing various tropes of the failed father image within the bumbling figure of Jarle Klepp, Renberg propagates a broader injustice toward men in the field of caregiving, particularly in his portrayal of men’s inabilities to be recognized as competent fathers. This chapter maps a literary trajectory of three pivotal moments of Jarle’s evolution: his early days as a father, his encounters with the pressures of ideal fatherhood, and his frustrations with being a caregiving father. In 1993 Norway introduced a mandatory paternal leave quota; the goal was to increase fathers’ participation at home and mothers’ contributions in the work force to equalize involvement of both genders where they were most disadvantaged.1 In a history of Norwegian fatherhood, masculinities scholar Jørgen Lorentzen (2012, 119) names this project the democratization of intimacy and pinpoints the 1970s as the moment men’s visibility as fathers and their acceptance as caregivers started to grow; in 1985 the government established a committee to evaluate men as actors in gender equality, and the attention to men’s roles as fathers led to the national paternity leave in 1993. Statistics show that

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90 percent of the population of men eligible to take these “daddy days” opted to do so in 2004 (Ot.prp. no. 98, 2004–5). Today, according to the Ministry of Children, Equality and Social Inclusion, the majority of fathers that qualified to take paternal leave do so (Bringedal and Lappegård 2012, 15).2 Staying at home with their children meant fathers were also expected to assume primary caregiving responsibilities. The opportunity to spend more time alone with the children, in order to learn to know them and their needs, often builds stronger relationships because it allows the father to negotiate fathering – the act of caregiving as a father – on his own terms. Sociologist Helene Aarseth (2011, 12) has identified the national model of parenting as “the gender equality oriented family”3 or families with dual career parents who both are gainfully employed and share caregiving and domestic responsibilities.4 This model defines the caregiving expectations for parents at the outset of the twenty-first century and sets an ideal that has become the hegemonic norm in Norway. Pressure to conform to the new middle-class ideal of the caregiving father has been intense, and ideologies of the good father permeate society. As more men access their rights to be caregivers, so too increases the diversity of the kind of fathering occurring. However, the transition to this overwhelmingly high percentage of men who actively parent has not been an easy change. Literature has kept pace with these developments, investigating men’s identity formations as fathers. Norwegian author Tore Renberg has paralleled these changes by focusing on the tensions within the triad of the mother, father and child in the majority of his literary texts. Renberg debuted in 1995 with a book of short prose that garnered him a prize from his peers in the Norwegian Authors’ Union for the best first work of fiction published that year.5 Renberg’s sustained engagement with the narrating father demands that attention be given to ideologies of fathering and masculinities layered within his texts. His fathers’ foibles expose the raw emotion that accompanies the journey of the new father and thereby creates a space to probe its depths. Renberg’s trademark is as mentioned the character Jarle Klepp, whom readers first met in Mannen som elsket Yngve [The Man who Loved Yngve] in 2003. Having now appeared in five novels and three critically acclaimed films to date, the free spirit who cut his teeth on 1990s pop culture in the oil capital city of Stavanger has fumbled his way through the major taboos of the gender equality project ongoing in Norway. In an earlier article I questioned Renberg’s treatment of homophobia in his first novel about Jarle (Gjellstad 2004). Under investigation here is the institutionalization of the caregiving father as represented in Renberg’s fiction. Jarle has lived

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the tensions of the men of his generation. The offspring of parents who divorced in the 1980s, Jarle was born in 1972 (as was his creator) and grew up with the changing parenting norms that unfolded as the second wave of feminism spread through Norwegian society. He came of age at the watershed moment of the paternal quota legislation, and thus becomes a literary litmus test for the incorporation of men into a fathering plot. The three novels discussed here present a snapshot of Jarle from ages 25 to 37, as he discovers the degree to which fathering influences his identity formation. I intentionally separate Jarle’s reflections on fathers into two groups, a son’s critiques of his father and a man’s self-reflective critique of his own behavior as a father. I will not address the former here. In those novels that perform the latter, the first two undermine Jarle as a father so much that his complete conversion to a caregiving father by the third nearly appears disingenuous. Charlotte Isabel Hansen (2008) is the tale of Jarle’s university years, exclusively focused on the discovery that he is the father of a seven-year-old girl. Jarle confronts his daughter’s maturation from teenager to adult in Pixley Mapogo (2009).6 Dette er mine gamle dager [These Are My Old Days] (2011), melds many of these timeframes together; confronted with a woman from his past, Jarle learns of a new, darker side of his father Terje that derails Jarle’s own fathering project with his new wife and kids. Read most optimistically, Jarle strives to prove his mettle as a caregiving parent, to puncture clichés of the incompetent father, and to grapple with the golden standard of “the close, compassionate father” as he negotiates the role for himself (Brandth and Kvande 2003, 170). On the other hand, Jarle shirks present duties to wallow in past wrongs, leaves his parental responsibilities for others to shoulder, and finds little value in the energy required to establish relationships with his children. My larger research project focuses on millennial Norwegian novels where caregiving parents struggle to flesh out a new understanding of the terms “father” and “mother” in order to reinstate them with meaning. It has proven more difficult to locate novels from this era where fathering features as prominently as did mothering in the 1990s. Many authors cast a historical glance back at fatherhood, decrying the institution and the emotional disconnect of individuals in the previous generation. However, some narratives such as Renberg’s began to surface in the 2000s, where the father’s voice was finally heard. This reluctance to showcase men’s emotion as fathers is not unique to literature. As Swedish sociologist Barbara Hobson (2002) recognized, there is a general deficit in men’s caregiving. As redress Hobson establishes a theoretical framework to approach the dual claims of work and care on men’s time, particularly as

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fathers.7 Hobson also incorporates the triad of father-fatherhood-fathering terminology, which I also employ, first outlined by David Morgan (1996) to delineate the interplay between theory and practice. Fatherhood is the cultural institution that codes the good and the bad father as a member of society, especially when referencing work, care, or divorce cases. Fathering is the verb (fedring in Norwegian) that encapsulates the action of being a father, giving care and following a set of practices for child-rearing (Hobson 2002, 11). Fathers come in many variations, and these scholars are sensitive to the tendency to privilege the biological father over the social (or household) father (Hobson 2002, 10).

The Transition to New Father: Charlotte Isabel Hansen When a child does not live with his/her biological father, the logistics and pressure to involve him can be intensely emotional; this is the crux of this novel’s plot. Charlotte Isabel Hansen is Jarle’s initiation into Hobson’s paternal triad, wrought with the humorous and painful missteps of a college student forced overnight into a caregiver. Jarle is now a serious, twenty-five-year-old comparative literature student at the University of Bergen, and his life revolves around philosophy, literary theory, beer, women and friends – in no particular order. Into this heady academic universe tumbles seven-year-old Charlotte Isabel, Lotte for short, a capricious little girl who has just learned that Jarle is her biological father. This was also news to Jarle, whose police-ordered blood test verified a vague memory of the bumbled sexual debut at a wild party in Stavanger in 1990 that produced this child. Already disadvantaged because the mother had withheld this secret for seven years, Jarle contends with the shocking discovery. “Every day that passed, every studying day and every alcoholladen night throughout his entire academic 1990s, he had been a father” (Renberg 2008, 33).8 Lotte turns Jarle’s world upside-down; the novel is Jarle’s experience of Lotte’s first week-long visit with her dad in Bergen and his debut into fathering. On the day of Princess Diana’s funeral, Lotte flies to Bergen and meets Jarle. Lotte discovers that she lives in a world where princesses do not really want to be princesses, and fathers do not really want to be fathers; she experiences both in her dramatic week in Bergen in 1997. The novel is a case of “father-light” – that is, Jarle is not shouldered with permanent caregiving and he calls for the reinforcements from his ever-supportive mother (an instantly competent grandma). He is made aware that he fathered a child and has a stressful week of getting to know and assuming responsibility for his young daughter while she visits, but the novel ends as

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he puts his daughter and her mother on a plane bound for their home in Skien. The promise of future visits, trips and time spent together lingers, but this relationship will be long-distance fatherhood, bound only by biology. Like a princess who can decide her degree of royal participation, this father is only required to do fathering on occasions when it suits him; he can choose to contribute at his whim while resting securely in the fact that he is a father at heart. Personal struggles aside, being a father does have its benefits on the campus social scene, to Jarle’s surprise. Out partying at “The Garage” with the boys to celebrate his new status, Jarle notices that women who had never given him the time of day now were hanging on him: “Now when he sat here and was tarred to the earth with the iron cuffs of fatherhood, now they showed loads of interest, as if he were rich or famous or incurably sick” (Renberg 2008, 169).9 The iron handcuffs of fatherhood he admits feeling tethered by have not shackled his lifestyle much at this point; on this night, Lotte’s second in Bergen, Jarle leaves her alone with the neighbor who he thinks is called “Grete” so that he can go out with the boys. Charlotte Isabel is the catalyst that begins Jarle’s transformation to fathering, but the going is tough. The wizened narrator admits as much just moments after Lotte steps off the plane into Jarle’s life: If Jarle in the weeks after learning that he had fathered a daughter, had had some of the perspective that we attribute to the birds, then he would’ve done many things otherwise. But he did not. (Renberg 2008, 55)10

His overall performance ranks him among a long line of failed fathers – the men too overcommitted to, or overwhelmed by, work. Murray Pomerance (2008, 180) has identified this father plot in American cinema, citing George Banks in Mary Poppins as a prime example of the broken promises so prevalent in fathers from Hollywood.11 Jarle is not bound to a blue- or white-collar job that provides a necessary income but is instead going in to debt as an eternal student living on student loans. Still Jarle takes this academic work very seriously, and fathering is certainly not on his radar as a budding scholar. Jarle considers himself an academic, a thinker; ergo, he has no desire to stray from the rational life. No miracles occur that week, but Jarle’s pressing academic career takes on new relevance in the big picture as he begins to discover how time, intimacy, communication and participation may help him as a new father to build a relationship with his daughter.12 These four elements are namely the most critical in a father’s relationship with his child according to Berit Brandth and Elin Kvande

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(2003, 129), the leading names in fatherhood research in Norway. Their study, the first assessment of the impact of the paternal leave policy published ten years after the legislation, focuses exclusively on the fathers who have served as primary caregivers and concludes that to obtain the ideal of “the close/compassionate father” (Brandth and Kvande 2003, 170),13 the father needs time to become acquainted with the child and the ability to set boundaries at work in order to enable that shared time. Based on their research data, they state that there is no standard formula for how to be a compassionate father, only that men must prioritize time with children – and away from work. While fathering and masculinity have often been thought of as contradictory spheres, these two scholars argue the inverse – that fathering has enormous meaning for the identity construction of the masculine subject.

Expectations for the Good Father: Pixley Mapogo Although he has not been his daughter’s social father, Jarle argues that he has done his best to cultivate their relationship. Denied the opportunity to share the everyday with Lotte and her mother Anette, to “be her dad for real” (Renberg 2009, 195),14 Jarle still strongly self-identifies as a father when readers meet him ten years later in Pixley Mapogo. The fathers in Brandth and Kvande’s study define that feeling as: [T]o be mentally and physically involved in the children, that means to use time with the children, to “be there,” to be able to “read” them and be emotionally engaged. It also means to give them attention, to raise them, be a friend and playmate. (Brandth and Kvande 2003, 204)15

Chaos ensues when Jarle becomes emotionally engaged in his teenage daughter’s behavior. Opinions about parental best practices collide when Jarle attempts a reprise of the close and compassionate father. Now a thirty-five-year-old man in the narrative time of 2007, Jarle has traveled to Oslo to write a review of the reunion concert of The Smiths, his all-time favorite band, at the Øya Music Festival. The mysterious title is the crux of the plot. Pixley Mapogo is the name of the son of the South African Consul. Originally from Cape Town but a citizen of the world (now Oslo) thanks to his father’s job, Pixley has become Lotte’s boyfriend. Jarle first learns of the pair by unintentionally spying them having sex outdoors at the Øya Festival. Spotting a black man and a white woman having sex in public unleashed a host of prejudiced feelings in Jarle; when he recognizes one of the partners as his “little girl” Charlotte Isabel, the offhanded observations turn instantaneously to raw emotions of

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prejudice that trigger an authoritarian “protective father” response that consumes Jarle for the remainder of the novel. The displacement of his status as “the man” in her life by someone so visually other threatens every tie Jarle imagined he shared with his daughter. Illusions of her innocence shattered, Jarle berates himself for his failure at fathering and its negative impact on his daughter. He admits in his irrational reaction to the scene that he had “many times feared that Lotte would be damaged somehow by growing up with a weekend and vacation dad such as himself” (Renberg 2009, 77).16 Jarle is not the only man in this novel grappling with pressures to be a good father. Prior to the discovery of Pixley and Lotte, Jarle had been in place in front of the stage with buddies Helge Ombo and Hasse Ognatun as they chatted and waited impatiently for the concert to begin. Their conversation establishes the crux of the problem for these three friends – how fathering has differently affected their lives. Jarle’s buddies appear to have mastered the new parenting roles with aplomb. As a complete foil to his comrades, Jarle has not been the resident caregiving father. Hasse, father of four, falls more deeply in love with his wife Hilde every day and continually finds new ways to fawn over his children. Helge, father to “children” that are never clarified by name or number, no longer lives with his love Katrine and their kids. Helge later confesses to Jarle that he abused Katrine and threatened the children, yelled that he never wanted to see them again, and moved to the mountains. Crying in a cemetery after the dramatic night at the concert, Helge confesses that his lost investment as a caregiving father is the source of his breakdown: I have built everything for her and the kids, I stayed home with the kids when they were young, I allowed her to go to college, I stopped cultivating my own interests, I’ve fuckin’ – I – and then she has the nerve to – it is over, do you understand? (Renberg 2009, 157)17

Reaping the benefits of compassionate fathering for years, Helge had gambled everything and lost; being the caregiver, adapting his lifestyle to family life and, in his words, sacrificing himself for his partner and children meant nothing when she decided to end their relationship. In keeping with the statistical data, Helge loses the children as the relationship dissolves and joins the ranks of men not residing with their biological children.18 Jarle blends his frustrations with Helge’s anguish to articulate how it feels to be thwarted while trying to be a good father.

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The juxtaposition of these two friends and their pain at being denied the opportunity to be a good father is tangible. Compounding their helplessness is the impression that, despite their best efforts, the rules change arbitrarily to prevent them from winning. This makes betting everything on the new “good father” a dangerous and risky business for them as men. Reciting a list of the financial contributions that he has made to fund Lotte’s childhood in his physical absence, Jarle justifies his worth as a part-time dad on economic measures. Because he has not been able to supply emotional capital, he grasps for any traditional understanding of his connection to his daughter – but that holds little value anymore. This emotional/economic distinction is clearly made by Lorentzen (2012, 11), who argues a “father’s revolution” has occurred since 1980 that has transitioned from in his words “fathers for” the family, earning the family’s paycheck away from the home, to “fathers in” the family as caregivers. Despite overall positive changes, some scholars argue that the policy ignores an element of society. Because the parental leave schemata is predicated on the mother’s employment history, the distribution of caregiving time and benefits advantage the working mother. As the report “Right Home Daddy” (Andbo et al. 2008, 78) concludes, couples in the population that already have more gender equality gain more privilege than those the state might consider more traditional, thus widening the gap. Income, education and geography all stand as influential factors that determine how equally families share caregiving and breadwinning responsibilities. The belief in shared norms is strong across all subsets of Norwegian society, but complementary parenting supersedes gender-equal parenting in some of Norway’s minority populations. Men’s identity construction as husbands and fathers is more closely linked to employment and financial health of the family than staying home to assume primary parenting responsibilities. Researchers expressed their desire not to forward one good “Norwegian” model of family life on the population targeted in this study, but the interviewed fathers themselves articulated a feeling of inferiority in the eyes of the majority population. The stigma of not being a “good enough” father drove them to excel as compensation. Lorentzen (2012, 144) identifies another group disserviced by this cultural breakthrough that often does not get considered in questions of intersectionality; in his opinion, it has increased the societal “lifestyle gap

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between men with and without children.”20 Work done to enable fathers’ increased participation at home and the opportunity to experience a more compassionate fathering in the daily care of children must continue, in Lorentzen’s opinion, for fatherhood in general is on the decline. Statistician Kari Skrede (2004) coined the term “multiple partner fathers,” referring to the decreasing numbers of Norwegian men who choose to be fathers. In sum, “[M]en have children later, fewer men have children at all, and an increasing percentage of men do not live with their children”21 (Lorentzen 2012, 145–6). The combination of Lorentzen’s delineation and Skrede’s data help illuminate the emotion Jarle and Helge so painfully display in this novel as they face the short- and long-term consequences of not fulfilling the expectations of good fathers.

The Demands on the Caregiving Father: Dette er mine gamle dager Despite all of the strikes against him, Jarle rallies again to give fathering a second chance. Jarle is now a multiple partner father in this novel, safely on the other side of Lorentzen’s father gap. Just three years of narrative time later, Jarle and his wife Iselin have two children – Åshild (6) and Sven (2) – and he has a steady job teaching literature at a local high school.22 Jarle Klepp has grown older but is not “at peace with himself” as his wife challenges him to be. His mom still lives at her home, his dad and brother are dead and his oldest daughter Lotte drops in on occasion to see her father, grandmother and stepfamily. Lotte has a new boyfriend now, and the father-daughter relationship appears non-problematic after the fiasco in Oslo. Superficially Jarle has finally attained the societal golden standard of the gender-equal family. To complicate this external harmony, Renberg juxtaposes this rosy life with Jarle’s childhood memories of his violent, alcoholic father in the 1970s. Although he recalls plenty of episodes that track his father’s drinking and subsequent behavior at home, the question plaguing Jarle in this novel is what his father did when he was not home – particularly, those weekend nights where he would escape to a friend’s house to drink. Who was he there, and why could he not tolerate staying home with his own wife and child? And what did the wife and child of his father’s friend and drinking buddy think about all this? These memories and speculations distract Jarle from his wife and young children. He appears to tackle the everyday demands of the caregiving father by searching for clues to justify why his father despised the job so and felt compelled to escape those same pressures. He admits

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that his priorities might be skewed: “My life, what is it? It is to sit here and think about Dad” (Renberg 2011, 21).23 Indeed, the first mention of Jarle’s current family does not happen until page 66 of the novel. When it appears, the caring father figure portrayed here is hardly recognizable as the Jarle Klepp of the past four novels. This quote, which I cite at length, illustrates the utter transformation Jarle has undergone to become a compassionate father. In this scene on the morning of New Year’s Eve, Jarle has just volunteered to take the kids on a last-minute trip to buy sparklers for the evening’s celebration: And the kids cheered there in our bed. For that’s exactly the kind of dad kids like to have, the kind of dad that I sometimes manage to be when things are going good and my sleep has been deep, when there is a good feeling both in and around me, when I manage to get up for the day and feel like I’m on top of it all. […] It was that kind of feeling that we had on the morning of New Year’s Eve day. It felt liberating. It is all too rare that family life is like that. It is too seldom that it is that way, small and crazy and distracted, but good heavens how wonderful it is when it happens. (Renberg 2011, 84, 85–6)24

The narrator Jarle hastens to inform the reader that this event did not happen that long ago – the reported event happened in the same winter that the narrative is being composed. Again the older narrator Jarle reflects on fathering in his prose, allowing his ruminations to come in the now of the writing and seldom in the moment of action. This distancing allows Jarle to measure his performance to the unstated ideal of the compassionate father, to nurse the still-festering wounds he harbors from perceptions of his own father’s failures and recapture some of the joy he becomes too ensconced to feel in the moment. The narrator Jarle celebrates that he has finally “made it” as a man in a gender-equal couple with a beautiful family – and that there is a gratifying level of comfort in the attainment. He recounts in great detail the children’s reactions while playing games, their bedtime routines, their interactions with each sibling and parent but admits the conformity of it all is stifling. A perfect example is the family Saturday night routine, a ritual of tranquil home life that he finds exhausting and exhilarating: On the one hand I think it is painful to live a regulated life, to have become a representative for my time and my social class; on the other hand I love it, to be able to serve a pizza-infused normality I myself didn’t experience as a child. (Renberg 2011, 192)25

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The woman selling fireworks that same day turns out to be the daughter of his father’s drinking buddy. Narrator Jarle again checks out for a moment, pushes pause to halt his uncomfortable meeting and prolonged chat with this woman, and reflects on Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea where the fisher pines for his son: I understand the old man well, even though I am neither old nor a fisherman. He should’ve had his son with him. I believe that was the very same feeling that overcame me as I stood there in front of the girl from my past, for now I lifted Sven back into my arms, I, who contrary to Hemingway’s old fisherman had my son at my fingertips. I lifted him up, held him close to me, and felt how he protected me, not just against that which stood before me, but also against that which I had deep inside of me. (Renberg 2011, 114)26

New to this novel is not only that Jarle confronts himself with raw honesty and pure emotion about his own shortcomings as a father but also that he seriously grapples with the ambiguities of fathering. Forced to come to terms with the harbored anger from his past toward his father Terje and missteps in his relationship with Lotte, Jarle – the narrating father – finds his voice anew. Bolstered by his children, Jarle realizes his fathering opportunities more fully than ever before. Jarle embodies two traits that are often read as antagonistic but that Aarseth (2011) maintains are complementary: men’s dual desires to become equal partners with their wives at home (caregiving and sharing domestic responsibilities), and to increase their self-realization and personal development in the process. This is made possible by a welfare state that enables residents to realize individual dreams and to incorporate that as an element of a family life (Aarseth 2011, 24). Aarseth (2011, 72) argues this characterizes the last twenty years of development in behaviors of the new Norwegian fathers, as reflected in her research subjects who described themselves as modern and competent in contrast to their own physically and emotionally distant fathers. Many of the men in her study expressed fears of ending up like their fathers (judged as incompetent caregivers) or of becoming absent fathers if the relationship with the child’s mother would crumble. Both elements opened a vulnerability that compounded men’s desire to belong to a family unit and attain an emotional competence now required in our postmodern society (Aarseth 2011, 75). As this article has shown, Tore Renberg has explored these very tensions within men’s roles as fathers in a variety of nuclear family constellations. He defended his penchant for the familial subject matter in

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his writing at the millennium shift in a lecture to North American scholars of Scandinavian Studies early in his career, stating why the topic riveted him and many of his contemporaries in the late 1990s: We are writing in the ruins of the nuclear family. Family structures have been through enormous changes in the last decades, and it is only natural that this materializes in the literature. (Renberg 1999, 7)27

Renberg’s storyline on the Klepp family embodies that enormous change and stands as a literary case study of the parenting debates that have infused Norwegian society in recent decades, confronting societal expectations and changing roles for fathers within the aspirational genderequal family. While the ideal in Norwegian society remains the totally gender-equal family, it is the partial realization of that goal that according to Aarseth dominates the everyday of most Norwegians: The idea of the gender-equal family, where both participate on an equal plane in the family and at the workplace, is only partially realized. It is the partially gender-equal family that appears to be the most extensive family model. (Aarseth 2011, 13)28

Renberg and his characters have been spiraling through these morphing parental roles for a decade, grappling with the changing face of society amid the literature of the millennium shift. Back in 1999, Renberg (1999, 7) characterized his fiction as probing “responsibility, compassion … a common theme is the seriousness. The ethical demands, even the imperatives. They give no answers, but set forth the problems.”29 Renberg has given voice to the narrating father to probe the fictions and realities of the men who confront and aspire to attain the new norms of the caregiving father.

Notes 1

Norwegian fathers first earned the right to take up to eighteen weeks of paid parental leave in 1978. They received their own quota of four weeks (twenty days) in 1993; the number had grown to twelve weeks (sixty days) by 2011 and fourteen weeks (seventy days) by 2013. Paternal and maternal leave were reduced to ten weeks each in 2014. See NAV (2015) data. 2 NAV data published in 2012 reported that 50,051 men claimed parental leave monies, an eight-percent increase from 2011. Little analysis has been done of fathers’ use of the new twelve-week quota that started in 2011 (Bringedal and

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Lappegård 2012, 15). This article has not incorporated analysis of the 2014 changes implemented in the paternity leave program. 3 Den likestillingsorienterte familien. 4 All translations from Norwegian are my own. 5 With that dramatic entrance, Renberg began his literary career at age 23. Now over 40, Renberg has published at least one book per year (2007 is the exception), primarily novels but also children’s books, collages, musicals and film manuscripts. Renberg has also worked as a literary critic and essayist. 6 These two volumes share many unspoken comparisons with fatherhood portrayals of Jarle’s father, as presented in Kompani Orheim [Company Orheim] and in Mannen som elsket Yngve. Published in reverse chronological order, the former is a novel about Jarle’s own childhood that lays the foundation for the journey from a working-class home in suburban Stavanger to his later life as an intellectual of the urban middle class, while the latter is Jarle’s adult account (narrated at the age of 30) of his teenage love for his classmate Yngve. 7 The two general trends in the study are an increase in familial state support and a decrease in relationship stability (Hobson 2002, 26). 8 Hver dag som hadde gått, hver studerende dag og hver alkoholtunge natt gjennom hele hans akademiske nittitall, hadde han vært far. 9 Nå da han satt her og var tjoret til jorden med farskapets smijernslenker, nå viste de mengder av interesse, som om han skulle være rik eller berømt eller uhelbredelig syk. 10 Hvis Jarle i ukene etter at han fikk beskjed om at han var far til en datter, hadde hatt noe av det perspektivet vi tilskriver fuglene, var det mye han ville gjort annerledes. Men det hadde han ikke. 11 “Male parents are frequently presented as failing their children as a result of an unhealthy commitment to paid labour (as does George Banks in Mary Poppins). Broken promises are the stock-in-trade of fathers in Hollywood films of the 1990s and since” (Pomerance 2008, 180). 12 Lorentzen (2012, 147) offers a thought-provoking analogy that Charlotte Isabel Hansen is a modern sequel to Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House, where the ignorant father suddenly becomes the primary caregiver of his children. 13 Den nærværende/omsorgsfulle far. 14 Være pappaen hennes på ordentlig. 15 Å være mentalt og fysisk involvert i barna, det innebærer å bruke tid på barna, å “være der”, å kunne “lese” dem og være følelsesmessig engasjert. Det innebærer også å gi dem oppmerksomhet, å oppdra dem, være venn og lekekamerat. 16 Mange ganger fryktet at Lotte skulle ha tatt en eller annen skade av å vokse opp med en helge- og feriepappa som han selv. 17 Jeg har bygget alt for henne og ungene, jeg har gått hjemme med småbarn, jeg har latt henne studere, jeg har latt være å dyrke mine egne ting, jeg har faen – jeg – og så går hun hen og – det er over, forstår du? 18 Seventy-five percent of forty-year-old men born in 1940 lived with their kids. The percentage dropped to sixty-three percent for men born in 1960. Additionally,

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forty percent of men ages 25 to 34 have never lived with their biological children (Skrede 2004, 63). 19 Så merkelig denne følelsen var. Tigge om lov til å se sin egen datter. Ja vel. Sårt var det at han ikke hadde fått være hos henne, som en skikkelig pappa gjennom alle dagene, men når det såret var åpent og saltstrødd, var det faen innlysende at han hadde gjort sitt beste. Og hvor mye lenger enn det kan et menneske strekke seg – lenger enn sitt eget beste? 20 Livsstilsgap mellom menn med og uten barn. 21 Menn får barn senere, færre menn får barn overhodet, og en økende andel menn lever ikke sammen med barna sine. 22 Åshild cannot be Jarle’s biological child unless she was left unmentioned in all the other novels. Sven is likely to be Jarle’s second biological child, but the text never clarifies. 23 Mitt liv, hva er det? Det er å sitte her og tenke på pappa. 24 Og ungene jublet der i sengen. For det er akkurat en sånn pappa unger liker å ha, en sånn pappa som jeg noen ganger klarer å være når flyten er god og søvnen har vært rik, når det er god stemning både inni meg og omkring meg, når jeg klarer å stå opp til dagen og kjenne det som om jeg er ovenpå den. […] Det var den typen morgenstemning vi hadde på nyttårsaften. Det føltes befriende. Det er så sjelden familielivet er sånn. Det er så altfor sjelden det er sånn, smått og tullete og vimsete og enkelt, men du all verden så herlig det er når det skjer. 25 På den ene siden synes jeg det er vondt å leve et regelmessig liv, å ha blitt en representant for min tid og min klasse, på den andre siden elsker jeg det, å kunne servere en pizzaduftende normalitet jeg selv ikke fikk oppleve som barn. 26 Jeg forstår den gamle godt, selv om jeg verken er gammel eller fisker. Han skulle hatt gutten hos seg. Jeg tror det var en sånn følelse som steg i meg der jeg sto foran jenta fra fortiden, for nå løftet jeg Sven tilbake i armene, jeg, som motsatt Hemingways gamle fisker hadde en gutt for hånden. Jeg løftet ham, holdt ham inntil meg og kjente hvordan han beskyttet meg, ikke bare mot det jeg hadde foran meg, men også mot det jeg hadde inni meg. 27 Vi skriver i ruinene av kjernefamilien, familiestrukturene har vært i enorm forandring i de siste tiårene, og det er bare naturlig at dette nedfeller seg i litteraturen. 28 Ideen om den likestilte familien der begge deltar på lik linje både i familien og i arbeidslivet, er bare delvis realisert. Det er den delvis likestilte familien som ser ut til å være den mest utbredte familemodellen. 29 Ansvar, omsorg ... et fellestrekk er alvoret. De etiske fordringene, til og med imperativene. De gir ingen svar, men legger problemene frem.

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References Aarseth, Helene. 2011. Moderne familieliv: Den likestilte familiens motivasjonsformer. Oslo: Cappelen Damm. Andbo, Emilie Joner, Marte Knutsson, Anja Emilie Kruse, Kjetil N. Stenvik, and Frida Tømmerdal. 2008. ”Rett-hjem-pappa”: En kvalitativ studie av farskap blant menn med etnisk minoritetsbakgrunn i Norge. Oslo: University of Oslo Humanistisk Prosjektsemester. https://www.duo.uio.no/bitstream/handle/10852/24441/Duo_rapport2.p df?sequence=2. Brandth, Berit, and Elin Kvande. 2003. Fleksible fedre: Maskulinitet, arbeid, velferdsstat. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Bringedal, Kristin Horn, and Trude Lappegård. 2012. “Likere deling av foreldrepermisjonen.” Samfunnsspeilet, 1:13–8. http://www.ssb.no/befolkning/artikler-og-publikasjoner/likere-delingav-foreldrepermisjonen. Gjellstad, Melissa. 2004. “Homoerotic or Homophobic?: Teenage Bodies in Mannen som elsket Yngve.” Edda, 4: 341–51. Hobson, Barbara, ed. 2002. Making Men into Fathers: Men, Masculinities, and the Social Politics of Fatherhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lorentzen, Jørgen. 2012. Fra farskapets historie i Norge, 1850–2012. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Morgan, David. 2006. Family Connections: An Introduction to Family Studies. Cambridge: Polity. NAV. 2012. “Foreldrepenger, engangsstønad og svangerskapspenger.” http://www.nav.no/Om+NAV/Tall+og+analyse/Familie+og+omsorg/F oreldrepenger (accessed September 30, 2012). —. “Foreldrepenger, engangsstønad og svangerskapspenger.” https://www.nav.no/no/NAV+og+samfunn/Statistikk/Familie++statistikk/Foreldrepenger,+engangsst%C3%B8nad+og+svangerskaps penger (accessed May 26, 2015). Odelstingsproposisjonen (Ot.prp.) nr. 98. 2004–5. “Om lov om endringer i folketrygdloven og kontantstøtteloven (utvidelse av fedrekvoten, utvidet rett til kontantstøtte for adopterte barn).” http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/bld/dok/regpubl/otprp/20042005/otp rp-nr-98-2004-2005-.html?id=400902. Norges offentlige utredninger: Politikk for likestilling. 2012. Oslo: Departementenes servicesenter Informasjonsforvaltningen. https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/dcf92db57c0542c1996b9f82 1b13ebbe/no/pdfs/nou201220120015000dddpdfs.pdf

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Pomerance, Murray. 2008. A Family Affair: Cinema Calls Home. London: Wallflower. Renberg, Tore. 1999. “Tale for den samtidige norske romankunsten.” Vinduet, 1–13. http://arkiv.vinduet.no/tekst.asp?id=166. —. 2003. Mannen som elsket Yngve. Oslo: Oktober. —. 2005. Kompani Orheim. Oslo: Oktober. —. 2008. Charlotte Isabel Hansen. Oslo: Oktober. —. 2009. Pixley Mapogo. Oslo: Oktober. —. 2011. Dette er mine gamle dager. Oslo: Oktober. Skrede, Kari. 2004. “Færre menn blir fedre.” Økonomiske analyser, 6. http://www.ssb.no/a/publikasjoner/pdf/oa_200406/skrede.pdf. Stortingsmelding (St.meld.) nr. 8. 2008–9. “Om menn, mannsroller og likestilling.” https://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dokumenter/stmeld-nr-82008-2009-/id539104/

“STILL A LOT OF STARING AND CURIOSITY”: RACISM AND THE RACIALIZATION OF AFRICAN IMMIGRANTS IN ICELAND KRISTÍN LOFTSDÓTTIR

When Susanne was asked in an interview to talk about her experiences of racism in Iceland as a black1 woman, she explains that there is “still a lot of staring and curiosity.” She is a woman in her thirties that has lived for almost a decade in Iceland, and it is easy to sense the bafflement in her words. In this chapter, I focus on racism and racialization in Iceland as experienced by African immigrants, based upon interviews I conducted with people immigrating to Iceland from various African countries, as well as a previous analysis of written and visual material. Like Susanne, many of those I interviewed described Icelanders as not very knowledgeable or well-informed about the topic of cultural diversity or the world in general. This is somewhat ironic considering that Icelandic people often pride themselves on being exceptionally well-educated and as a Nordic nation, are generally associated with rationality and high levels of education (Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012). This emphasis on lack of education can be seen as an attempt by these individuals to try to reconcile the experience of regularly hearing racist remarks and labels while not generally experiencing more violent forms of racism. Moreover, interviewing people of African origins about their personal experiences complicated my own analysis in which I have shown that visual and textual representations of African people in Iceland are quite often based on racist images (Loftsdóttir 2013). Most individuals that I interviewed did not agree that racism was extensive in Iceland. My theoretical approach benefits from the work of critical whiteness scholars who have drawn attention to the importance of contextualizing whiteness in the European context as to some extent distinct from the American one in which the distinction of black and white have been essential elements, as well as its history of slavery and racial segregation (e.g., Garner 2006; Essed and Trienekens 2008). These insights draw attention to the need to contextualize racism in Iceland not only as

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revolving around the contrasting color binary of black and white but also as emerging within wider understandings of Iceland’s history and position in the world. While racist ideas in Iceland have been shaped by its colonial past and ideas of civilized and non-civilized bodies (Loftsdóttir 2012), my discussion here pays particular attention to nationalistic ideas that sharply distinguish between foreigners and locals. These ideas are both important to the experiences of those I interviewed and significant historically in Iceland. In highlighting this distinction, I do not indicate that other variables, such as class and gender, are irrelevant. Certainly these variables, as scholars have shown, are quite significant to racism in the Nordic countries and elsewhere (see e.g. Keskinen 2012).2 Steve Garner’s (2009, 19) emphasis on racialization, that is, the process by which race becomes meaningful in a particular context, draws attention to the need to look at how ideas of race are created in particular sociocultural contexts. While scholars have stressed the structural aspects of racism, emphasizing that racism is not only about images of others and “belief” in races (Bonilla-Silva 1997) or individual intentions of hurting (Blauner 1992), it is also important, as Garner (2009) points out, to avoid placing too fixed of an emphasis on “race relations,” which is often characteristic of sociological approaches and tends to presuppose “race” as a category of difference. It has to be asked how racism becomes meaningful through processes of racialization, making it “functional and sustained” (Garner 2009, 32). As Garner (2009, 19) also reminds us, race has no fixed meaning as it is not fixed in nature, but the meaning is rather “dependent on the historical, social and political context.” The same can be said about racism. Even though increased official acknowledgement of racism as harmful and unjust has created a platform for “formal equality” (Crenshaw 2000, 552), scholars have stressed for some time now that racism in the present has increasingly become coded under different labels, such as culture and religion, making it more difficult to target (Balibar 1988; Jackson 2008, 8–9). Still, we should not forget that racism has always been muddy in the sense of mixing together notions of culture and biology, never being “only” about biological differences, even though the relationships between biology and “culture” are articulated in different ways in the present. When emphasizing the European context as different from the American one, it has to be recognized that some European countries have had extensive engagement with colonial practices while others were on the margins. In addition, Europe’s history is characterized by internal power dynamics within different populations and nation-states. Focusing on the local context of racism does not imply that the nation-states without

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colonies can in any way be absolved of the evils of colonialism and racism. Their engagement often took forms other than direct involvement by state agents, such as in Norway where Norwegians had important business interests in Africa during the colonial era (Kjerland and Rio 2009, 6). The focus rather points attention to the importance of looking at these localized contexts and how racism and engagement with colonialism in one form or another can be better understood when seen as entangled within particular histories and identities. As I have shown in my other publications, Icelanders during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries maintained racist and stereotypical views toward colonized people as they simultaneously attempted to justify why they should be granted independence from Denmark. They portrayed themselves as being a part of a European civilized population. They also asserted that their unique characteristics set them apart from the other European countries as the noblest part of a “Nordic stock” (Loftsdóttir 2012). In the first part of the paper, I give a brief discussion of methodology and then turn toward the historical contextualization of Iceland in a geopolitical environment and Iceland’s relationship with the outside world. I point out that “foreigners” in Iceland have been ambiguously positioned, which is intensified by Iceland’s position of dependency and the smallness of the country. The discussion then moves toward individuals of African origins in contemporary Iceland, discussing their experiences of racism and racialization in Iceland.

Methodology The data informing this discussion is based on an analysis of a specific event, the 2007 re-publication of the book Negrastrákarnir [Negro Boys].3 The book is an Icelandic translation of the American nursery rhyme “The Ten Little Negros,” originally from 1860, which vividly reflects racism toward black people at that time. It has been re-published many times and translated into other languages as well (Pietersen 1992, 167). The republication of the book in 2007 with the original Icelandic illustrations from the 1922 edition caused an enormous public debate in Iceland, creating an interesting platform from which to analyze Icelandic racialized identity.

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Figure 15.1: Original Icelandic cover illustration from the 1922 publication of the nursery rhyme Negrastrákarnir [Negroboys].

Anthropologists often analyze specific events to explore racialized identity (Hartigan 1997), a method similar to the extended case method studies they have used for decades (Englund 2002). In relation to the republication, I analyzed media discussions – particularly blogs – and interviewed different groups of people. I have discussed elsewhere the media debate about the re-publication and what it says about the articulation of racism and nationalism in Iceland and will not reiterate that here (most extensively in Loftsdóttir 2013). My primary material for this article is interviews with twenty-two individuals, all originating from different African countries with the exception of one African-American woman. Of those interviewed, nine are women and thirteen, men. In addition, I interviewed, in relation to the re-publication of the book, twenty-seven Icelanders without immigrant backgrounds (mostly interviewed in focus group interviews) and seven immigrants from Europe or North America (interviewed in a focus group). I also interviewed specialists in immigration and racism in Iceland, working for local and international NGOs and governmental institutions. In this discussion, I focus mainly on the voices of immigrants from Africa; the interviews primarily concerned their experiences of living in Iceland, and in particular their perspectives and experiences of racism. All of those interviewed have been given pseudonyms, and due to Iceland’s small population and the very small number of people immigrating to Iceland from certain African countries, their countries of origin are not specified in order to preserve their anonymity. Those I spoke with decided whether the interview was to

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be conducted in English or Icelandic, and in some cases people moved back and forth between these two languages, even though predominantly preferring to speak in English. The interviews quoted here were carried out in English unless otherwise indicated.

Icelandic Society and the Outside World In understanding the wider context of racialization in Iceland it should be noted that Iceland was a Danish dependency until the mid-twentieth century. Throughout the centuries, Iceland had been the destination of explorations and exotic voyages made by more affluent Europeans, and Icelanders were often presented in Europe as backward semi-savages. Icelandic intellectuals had for a long time considered it necessary to attempt to correct what they saw as misrepresentations of the country in European writings (Pálsson and Durrenberger 1989). After 1850 when Icelandic intellectuals started demanding independence, it became important to emphasize that Iceland deserved to become a sovereign nation. Often they did this in Icelandic texts by positioning Icelanders with the “civilized” Europeans by producing racist representations of nonEuropean people (Loftsdóttir 2010). In the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries, the conceptualization of the foreigner was thus an ambiguous one. Icelanders sought the recognition of other nations of Iceland as a potential sovereign state, and furthermore the foreigner symbolized modernization and progress. But, as expressed in major school books at the time such as in Íslandssaga [Iceland’s History] by Jónas Jónsson (1966) from 1915, the foreigner as a category was in some sense simultaneously seen as a threat to Iceland and as the reason for Iceland’s poverty. Icelandic school books in the beginning of the twentieth century drew a sharp distinction between Icelanders and foreigners, seeing the Icelandic nation as shaped by the harshness of their country (Loftsdóttir 2010). The international eugenics movement, advocating racial purity, was well known in Iceland in the early-twentieth century and advocated by important figures in Iceland, such as scholars at Iceland’s only university and medical doctors. According to Unnur Karlsdóttir’s (1998) research on the influence of the eugenics movement in Iceland, it did not manage to gain popular support despite having these influential followers and in many ways resonating with the Icelandic nationalistic view of Icelanders as a unique breed of people. As Karlsdóttir (1998, 153) points out, one reason for this could be that unlike in many other countries there was little sense of class division in Iceland, and more emphasis placed on the oneness of the Icelandic nation, which was reinforced by the relatively

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small number of immigrants. However, as in the other Nordic countries, the sterilization of disabled or mentally ill people was legalized in Iceland in the late 1930s (Karlsdóttir 1998, 153–4). Independence was gained gradually, with Iceland becoming an independent state in a personal union with Denmark in 1918 and declaring full independence in 1944. The interpretation of Iceland’s history as a struggle with “foreign” powers (Hálfdánarson 1994, 97) continued after independence with the occupation of Iceland by Great Britain and the United States during the Second World War. The continued presence of foreign militaries in the postwar period so soon after independence led to concern over its meaning for Iceland as an independent country (Björnsdóttir 1989, 100). The Icelandic government demanded that the base be sealed off in order to prevent Icelandic women from having sexual relations with foreigners and to thus ensure the presumed purity of the nation (Ingimundarson 2004, 69). The objection to the military took racialized forms as reflected in the concealed demands by Icelandic politicians that no black soldiers would be stationed in Iceland, to which the U.S. government reluctantly complied (Ingimundarson 2004). When the ban became public in the late 1950s, it caused a huge embarrassment for the U.S. government, which then sought to renegotiate the arrangement. They even sent a black representative from the U.S. Marines to Iceland in 1963 to investigate the perception of black people. His experience was that people were, for the most part, more curious than hateful, and it should not be expected that black soldiers would suffer from racism; it was more likely that they would be harassed because of their nationality (Ingimundarson 2001, 74). Black soldiers were stationed at the Keflavík airbase beginning in 1963, which seems to have caused little reaction in Iceland, but the revelations of the secret agreement had caused limited reaction there as well (Ingimundarson, 2001, 74; 2004, 85). There was, furthermore, no indication of hostility toward black tourists in Iceland in the postwar era (Ingimundarson 2004, 87). Famous black musicians, such as Louis Armstrong and Josephine Baker, were celebrated in the Icelandic media, which wrote about them as artists rather than as black subjects (Loftsdóttir 2012). In the recent past, the idea that humanity could be separated into different races was thus important in Iceland, while race itself was not always the most important categorization but rather intersecting with other identifications such as the category of foreigner. Nationalistic discourses continued to emphasize in diverse ways the purity of the nation, as in the past associating this purity with the language and country, which often is conceptualized as connected to the absence of foreign elements. In 1996, the controversial deCODE project began, which

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revolved around building a national medical database of Iceland’s population. The company’s spokesperson often emphasized that Iceland was ideal for this endeavor because of the smallness of the population and its homogeneity. As Bob Simpson (2000, 5) has emphasized, the genetic essentialism emphasized by deCODE can be seen as involving a “racialization of national identity.” Perhaps such “genetic essentialism” can gain stronger popularity in present-day Iceland considering the seemingly widely held belief that racism did not exist in Iceland in the past. The extensive public debate about the re-publication of the counting rhyme Negrastrákarnir is probably one of the best examples of such ideas, but, as implied earlier, the debates revolved around questions regarding whether the book should be seen as racist and to some extent what “race” meant in an Icelandic context (Loftsdóttir 2012). Many defended the rhyme on the basis of the argument that it could not be racist because there was no racism in Iceland in the past, and also by referring to the book’s illustrations. Even though the rhyme itself was translated from the English of the U.S. version, the illustrations from 1922 were made by Guðmundur Thorsteinsson (called Muggur), one of the most beloved Icelandic artists, meaning that the book could be conceptualized as an important part of Icelandic heritage. Muggur’s illustrations for the book were, however, very clearly based on American caricatures of black people, given the illustrations of the boys with large red mouths, sloping foreheads and oversized hands and feet. Such imagery, as outlined by Stanley Lemons (1977), was popular in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century. The illustrations reflect Iceland’s interconnectedness with the outside world and the readiness in which racist images were adopted (Loftsdóttir 2013). As I concluded in my analysis of this debate, the reactions to this book revolve to a large extent around protecting a certain nationalistic image of Iceland as nonracist in the past and as isolated from the global history of racism. Even taking into consideration the Icelandic context, such claims of exceptionalism from racism of the past are not limited to Iceland but can be observed in the other Nordic countries as well (see e.g. Rastas 2005).

African Immigrants in Iceland The geographical location of Iceland has isolated it from other European countries. Yet, as the previous discussion has indicated, Iceland has always been a part of global processes. As such it would be simplistic to characterize Icelanders as homogenous because throughout its history people have been migrating to and from the island. Compared to other

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Nordic countries, though, immigration has still been minimal in Iceland since the Second World War. The numbers started to grow in the 1990s, with increased demands for labor in Iceland during the economic boom years. From 1996 to 2011, the percentage of foreign nationals grew from 1.8 percent to 8 percent of the population of about 300,000 people (Statistics Iceland 2009; 2011). There was a great demand for women in the service sector and men in the booming building industry, including the construction of an aluminum smelter and a large power plant (Skaptadóttir 2010, 38–9). According to recent figures, Polish immigrants account for 36.8 percent of the total immigrant population in Iceland (Statistics Iceland 2011, 16). During the economic boom years, immigrants experienced disadvantages in regard to the labor market when compared with native Icelanders, as evidenced by lower salaries and discrimination in regard to upward mobility in the workplace (Icelandic Red Cross 2006). The economic crash in Iceland in 2008 had important effects on the position of immigrants. Employment opportunities dropped dramatically, leading to a high unemployment rate among Poles, at least by Icelandic standards. In 2010 this rate became twice as high for foreigners as for the native Icelandic population (Sigurðsson and Arnarson 2011). The sectors hardest hit in Iceland were those with the highest shares of immigrant workers, such as the construction industry, which was significantly impacted by the economic collapse (Wojtynska, Skaptadóttir and Ólafs 2012). Immigration from Africa to Iceland has never been particularly high, even though it grew along with the general increase in immigration to Iceland. Statistical data about people of African origins in Iceland was only first collected in 1973, according to information from Statistics Iceland (Hagstofa Íslands). Since 1998, statistics on immigrants’ countries of origins have been collected. This makes it difficult to estimate the immigration of individuals from African countries to Iceland prior to 1973.4 In 2011 there were 782 individuals from 42 African countries living in Iceland. The largest group, 19 percent, is from Morocco. The gender distribution is relatively equal among people of African origins in Iceland: 51 percent men and 49 percent women in 2011. Iceland is not a part of the EU but has been a part of the Schengen Area5 in Europe since 2001, meaning that African nationals must apply for a visa before travelling to Iceland unless they have a valid Schengen visa. Nationals of countries that are not part of the European Economic Area (EEA) need, furthermore, work permits to come and work in Iceland. Work permits are only given to residents of non-EEA countries after the employer has first sought to fill the position from the local workforce and from the EEA area. To get a work permit can thus be quite difficult for

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African nationals. Many individuals or 27 percent arrive on residential permits “for families of Icelandic citizens” (called ISf permits). Considerable numbers also have residential permits “based on special circumstances and close ties to Iceland” (TL permits) which is, for example, used for a divorced individual who has children with an Icelandic spouse. The second-largest type of permits issued for people from Africa are for students (Directorate of Immigration 2011). This means that in most cases people from Africa in Iceland arrive because they know someone, often intimately, or come temporarily as students. This was the case with those twenty-two black individuals I interviewed about their experiences of racism in Iceland. The great majority had come to Iceland due to marriage or an intimate relationship with an Icelander; thus they were integrated to some extent into Icelandic families. Half of those interviewed had children who were raised in Iceland. The experiences of the people with whom I spoke are probably shaped to some extent by this personal background, although all of them also actively participated in the labor market.

Racism in Contemporary Iceland My questions primarily revolved around people’s experiences in Iceland with regard to racism and prejudice. In most cases I used the 2007 republication of the book Negrastrákarnir as a point of entry. Everyone agreed with me that the book was racist and most had stories of racism they had experienced in Iceland, often in the form of drunken people calling them names or hearing racist remarks in other contexts. But it became clear in the interviews that people felt the prejudice they faced as foreigners was more salient than the racism they had experienced. When I pressed further about their experiences with racism, most of them said that while there certainly was racism in Iceland, it was limited to a few isolated cases. Kess, who has lived in Iceland for fourteen years, said the only time he experienced racism was when working at a nursing home where some of the elderly people did not want his assistance. Some of them told him straight out that it was because he was black. Susanne, who was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, explains it in the following way: I have not a sense of strong violence, in a sense of, more in sense of ignorance […]. I don’t, I would not classify [Iceland] as a racist society. I don’t think, I don’t think they have developed the history of that hate with them like Americans.

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Similarly, Fantu states: “We are in many ways very lucky in Iceland.”6 He is one of the few who chose to speak Icelandic and the way he uses “we” can refer both to “us” Icelanders or “us” of African descent. He explains that he feels some racism exists in Iceland but that it has never been able to gain ground among Icelanders. Most Icelanders, he claims, find racism disgusting (in his words: ógeðslegur). Daniel, who is well educated and has lived in Iceland for eleven years with his Icelandic wife and child, makes similar claims and stresses, as most of those I talked to, that prejudice is more directed at foreigners in general and does not in the majority of cases revolve around racism. He elaborates by explaining: “They [the Icelandic people] love our [Africans’] colored skin […], they want to be dark.” He laughs and continues: So they love my hair, so I don’t think it’s about my skin, or about me being a black person. I think the issue is more a matter of language and a little bit of how they think about foreigners: taking our money, taking our jobs, taking opportunities that the Icelanders have.

While emphasizing foreigner status as crucial, he still indicates how classification as the “exotic black other” matters in Iceland, similar to the comment made by Susanne, which was quoted at the beginning of this chapter. The iconic image of the exotic African has, of course, also historically had strong ties to racism (Lindfors 2001) and as such is far from innocent. In the beginning I thought this shift of focus from racism toward their classification as foreigners was due to the fact that people felt more comfortable speaking about xenophobia than racism. Most people had, however, no problem talking about racism that they had experienced in other countries, or criticizing other aspects of Icelandic society, or telling me about what they saw as isolated incidences of racism they had experienced in Iceland. On one occasion when I suggested to the person I was interviewing that surely the use of racist terms must imply racism in the society as a whole, the person said firmly that he had lived in many countries and that he knew racism; he was likely referring to my own privileged status as a white European. Some underscored that they believed other immigrant groups faced more racism than people of African descent. Many mentioned people from Poland in particular, who, as Unnur Dís Skaptadóttir (2011) has pointed out, have most often been the targets of critical discussions about immigration in Iceland. The interviews reflect how difficult it is in everyday life to distinguish between racism, prejudice and xenophobia. Scholars have pointed out that racism not only revolves around biological arguments but also cultural

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ones, which often makes it difficult to define (Balibar 1988) and also means that it is not clearly bounded in all cases. Daniel seems to have been thinking through the issues while he spoke, because in the beginning of his interview he speaks as if racism and xenophobia are the same thing but later he finds it useful to distinguish between them: I would not say that it is the majority, but there are people here who are racist… yes there is xenophobia here. I think we have to distinguish these two because even though racism is one thing and xenophobia another, in most cases this is not about skin color […], I think it has more to do with xenophobia.

Later in the interview, however, he gives examples of racism that indicate the difficulties in making such a distinction. Stephen, similarly, jumps between the concepts of racism and prejudice in his reply: Racism doesn’t have to be like color. It can be many things. So in this… you know, I have not seen any problems. Icelanders don’t have that kind of problem, you know, of prejudice. I don’t think so. I mean, I live my life here. I don’t find myself discriminated at home. I […] do whatever I want to do.

The great majority of those interviewed had lived in another Western country prior to moving to Iceland, and many referred to the extensive racism and hatred they had experienced there. To some extent, their views on racism in Iceland surely are tempered by those experiences. Read against such a backdrop, those I spoke to are not necessarily saying that racism in Iceland is insignificant, but rather that it seems so when compared to their experiences with racism elsewhere. The European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) (2007, 9), which is an independent monitoring institution of the European Council, has expressed concern that extremely few hate crimes are reported in Iceland and has stressed the importance of investigating the “apparent unwillingness of victims to report cases.” The National Commissioner of the Icelandic Police (2008, 17) has also emphasized the importance of investigating hate crimes in Iceland, acknowledging that the few cases reported are unlikely to reflect the actual situation. There also exists no research on structural racial discrimination in Iceland (ECRI 2007, 14).

The “Foreigner” in the Labor Market As discussed earlier, the category “foreigner” has a historically potent meaning in an Icelandic context, describing somewhat hostile or invading

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forces and, furthermore, creating a dualistic division into “us” the Icelanders and “them” the foreigners. As noted by James Rice (2007, 471), while the term “foreigner” seems on the surface to be “obvious” and “selfexplanatory” it is not so simple; when pressed further Icelandic people have difficulty determining who is a foreigner and who is not. The category creates a particular subject position that becomes relevant in the Icelandic context. Those I spoke to emphasized “foreigner” as signifying to some extent a shared experience of those categorized in Icelandic society as foreigners, which cut across other classifications, such as into racial groups and nationality. Those interviewed often talked about the labor market and the Icelandic language, even though my questions did not address those issues directly, indicating that these two spheres of society were the most important in the experience of being foreign. The emphasis on the language resonates with the importance of the Icelandic language historically in defining the Icelandic nation. While historically Danes were the principal symbol of foreignness in Iceland, they were far from marginalized in the labor market; instead they were key people in commerce and administration of the country (Folke Ax 2009), which changed with the nation’s independence. With labor participation from abroad intensifying during the economic boom era when Iceland joined Schengen, the meaning of the “foreigner” became associated with the labor market as a source of cheap labor. This indicates how the category “foreigner” intersects in complex ways with other identities and historical conditions, though maintaining its salience in Icelandic society as source of differentiation. Sara bluntly states, when asked about racism, that what matters in the job market is the label “foreigner,” thus indicating the shared experience of those defined as foreigners and their difficult position in the labor market. She explains, using both English and Icelandic: “The label of being útlendingur; that is the one people look at.” Her criticism of discrimination in the job market included in its claims that “only foreigners do cleaning jobs in Iceland” and that foreigners are paid less than Icelanders for the same jobs. Marianne, who has stayed in Iceland for an extensive period of time, similarly claims that “Icelanders are used to foreigners saying yes to everything,” thus drawing attention to the vulnerable position in which many foreigners are situated in the job market and how they are discriminated against. Gina, who has lived in Iceland for a few years, emphasizes strongly the prejudices against foreigners in the job market, arguing that no one asks what experiences “they” have or how “they” can be beneficial to the country. As she ironically states – underscoring the importance of Icelandic – imitating the kind of questions

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posed to a foreigner in Iceland: “‘Do you speak Icelandic?’ ‘No.’ ‘Okay, then you are going to be dishwasher.’” Furthermore, Susanne emphasized that both speaking Icelandic and participating in the job market are necessary in order to become a full member of Icelandic society: In Iceland, you are really not a face unless you have a job and can speak the language and can really understand […] and read the newspaper and become a part of this society.

John claims that speaking Icelandic is often viewed as the key to participating in Icelandic society, but in his view the language is more “a barrier of entry.” The language as a barrier to participating in Icelandic society seems to symbolize people’s positions as foreigners. Those I spoke with had different opinions on whether learning Icelandic does, in fact, actually increase job possibilities. This indicates that even those who have assimilated by learning the language still do not feel accepted as Icelanders. John, who has lived in Iceland for fifteen years, claims that he has “never seen a country where it seems to be [held] as a general belief that […] people are not here to settle.” His comment points out how people can get locked into the “foreigner” category despite having learned the language and been an active part of society for a long time. The fact that those I spoke to preferred to discuss the “foreigner” as a category, rather than discuss racism or xenophobia, reflects how certain social divisions are particularly important in historical and social situations (Yuval-Davis 2011, 160). This means they shift and change. This still does not mean that racism is not also salient but that it intersects with the people’s classification as foreigners. The fact that Polish people are the largest group of migrants and the most active in the labor market seems particularly important in terms of making them the targets of discrimination during and after the economic boom.

Racialization In spite of claiming that racism toward black people is not a large problem in Iceland, those interviewed had experienced racialization themselves in various ways. This racialization both reflects the salience of race in Iceland, and also the continued creation of the racialized subject. Interviewees expressed surprise at how different this racialization was from what they had experienced previously. Many found Icelanders to be either very curious (as phrased by some in the interviews) or ignorant, openly asking or commenting on things that people would not do in other

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countries or using terms indiscriminately that people elsewhere would avoid. William, for example, explains in relation to his reaction to the republication of the book Negrastrákarnir that he laughed and “couldn’t believe the level of ignorance.” John used the English word “playground” when referring to Icelandic discussions about black people, probably to draw attention to how in his experience many Icelanders say things that come to their minds without thinking through what the terms actually mean, like little children. Susan also implied that Icelanders are like children when saying we have to “educate them on their level” in the context of talking about Icelanders’ understandings of diversity within their society. Peter underscored Icelanders’ lack of understanding of racism with the following words: You see, for Icelanders the term “Negro” is “black American.” But [Icelanders] don’t understand it is as suffering, death, pain, separation, and those things that are the term “Negro.”

Peter tells me that people are occasionally “looking at us,” referring to himself and his family, but he adds: “No one is giving us any remarks. You know, racist remarks.” William has only lived in Iceland for a couple of years, but as the others he also implied that Icelanders are ignorant when telling me that he was really surprised by how little Icelanders knew about interacting with people from other countries. He explained: Most of the time when you meet people [in Iceland], you can tell that this person hasn’t really been in situations where they have been with people of different areas or groups.

Some individuals felt that Icelanders thought being from Africa was exotic in a positive way, for example, as in Daniel’s comment quoted earlier that people from Iceland liked his hair. Some individuals, however, found such stereotypes offensive, though not hateful, such as Susanne who speaks of Icelanders’ ignorance being translated into practice when they “say things [..], when they verbalize this kind of negative… this negative talk or, or, kind of ignorant babble.” The association with the exotic was also mentioned by some of those I talked to who work on immigration issues, such as one woman who works with Icelandic volunteers on a particular project directed toward immigrants. She said that it was easier to get Icelanders to work with someone from an African country than from Poland or Finland because the person from Africa would be seen as more exotic. She adds that the African person would be seen as the “cute

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foreigner.” Here, again, we have to remember the close association with the exotic other and racism.

Final Comments When I began this investigation of racism in Iceland toward people of African origins, it was simple to map the intertextuality of Icelandic texts and images of Africa and its inhabitants with racist images found elsewhere in the global North. When exploring the experiences of people from Africa in Iceland, however, I was struck by their dismissals of racism as a problem in Icelandic society despite acknowledging their own extensive racialization. In Iceland, the sharp distinction into the categories of “foreigner” and “Icelander” has historically been quite important and affects the experiences of these immigrants. The state does, of course, also work from particular subjectivities where the foreigner as a category has been important in policy and legal actions. Other variables could also be important, such as how the experiences of people of African origins differ depending on whether they marry into Icelandic families and become part of a local family network or not. Many of those I talked with perceived native Icelanders to be ignorant about diversity to the point of being backward. The interviews reflect that even though racism toward black people is not a big problem in Iceland in their experience, racialization is important in that racial terms are used in everyday interactions and are often considered by Icelanders to be objective and neutral in Iceland. This dismissal of racism as a relevant concern in Iceland can possibly partly explain how the same people can be capable of racist acts in certain contexts and non-racist or even anti-racist in other (see discussion in Garner 2009, 6). The use of racist language and images recreates race as a meaningful category of difference and keep alive social stereotypes associated with particular socially defined races. This signals important challenges in understanding these localized aspects of racialization and racism without reducing it into “individual intentions” (Blauner 1992), or rendering racism trivial in any sense. While racism is thus a global problem, it takes different forms in different localities. These interviews indicate that racism cannot be seen as a coherent and fixed system; rather, a deeper understanding can be gained through examining its interplay with other categories and boundaries, shaped by local histories and contexts.

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Notes 1

The concepts black and white are here seen as social concepts, arising from the historical categorization of people into racial groups. Race is thus used to refer to social classifications, not biological ones. 2 This theoretical perspective can be seen as coinciding with the feminist concept of intersectionality referring to the intersection of different identities and subjectivities – which has been particularly valuable in drawing attention to the complexities of human subjectivities. The concept “intersectionality”– usually credited to Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1994; Valentine 2007) – encapsulates the reaction during the 1980s from those more marginalized parts of the feminist movements (those identified at the time as “third world feminists” or “black” feminists) who stressed that the fight for equality did not take racism toward particular groups of women into consideration (Johnson-Odim 1998). 3 This project was supported in 2009 and 2011 by the Developmental Fund for Immigrant Matters, which is run by the Ministry of Social Affairs and by the University of Iceland Research Fund 2010–2011. A part of the data was collected with assistance from Þóra Lilja Sigurðardóttir, Guðbjört Guðjónsdóttir and Diana Wilson. 4 It is possible that some individuals registered in the statistics are children born of Icelanders stationed in various African states for one reason or another, such as missionaries. 5 Joining Schengen means the elimination of border controls with the other Schengen countries but tight external border control. 6 Við erum á margan hátt mjög heppinn á Íslandi.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Rikke Andreassen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Arts at Roskilde University in Denmark. Dr. Andreassen earned her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto and now works within the fields of media, race, gender and sexuality. She is the leader of the Nordic research network “Redeveloping International Theories of Media and Migration in a Nordic Context (TheoryNord).” She is the author of three monographs and numerous articles, notably “I Can Never be Normal. A Conversation About Race, Daily Life Practices, Food and Power,” with Uzma Ahmed-Andresen, in the European Journal of Women’s Studies 21:1 (2014), and "The search for the white Nordic: analysis of the contemporary New Nordic Kitchen and former race science" in Social Identities 20.6 (2014). She is the co-editor, with Katrine Vitus, of the anthology Affectivity and Race: Studies from a Nordic Context (Ashgate, 2015). Jenny Björklund is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at Uppsala University. Her research interests include literature and cultural studies, queer theory, family studies, and body/embodiment theory. Her most recent book is Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). She is also the author of a book on female poets and Swedish modernism (Symposion, 2004), and she has co-edited, with Anna Williams, a critical anthology of essays on the Swedish writer Agnes von Krusenstjerna (Norstedts Akademiska, 2008). She has published several articles on lesbianism in Scandinavian literature and film and Scandinavian modernism and serves as co-editor of lambda nordica, a Nordic journal for LGBTQ studies. Amanda Doxtater earned her Ph.D. in Scandinavian Studies from the University of California at Berkeley and currently teaches full time in the Department of German and Scandinavian at the University of Oregon. Her research on Carl Th. Dreyer examines connections between film melodrama and art house cinema in Scandinavia. She has published articles on representations of ethnicity in contemporary Swedish cinema and staging the body in Henrik Ibsen’s work. Her current research projects consider cinematic representations of childhood and the family in the

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Nordic welfare state and representations of class, race and ethnicity in a globalizing Sweden. Barzoo Eliassi is Senior Lecturer in Social Work at Linnaeus University, a position he has held since 2014. He is also a research associate in Oxford University’s Oxford Diasporas Program as well as an affiliated researcher with the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University and with the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society FORTE Center of Excellence (REMESO) at Linköping University in Sweden. He wrote the first international book on Kurdish diaspora in Sweden, Contesting Kurdish Identities in Sweden: Quest for Belonging among Middle Eastern Youth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and co-edited a special issue of the Nordic Journal of Migration Research on Kurdish diasporas. His work has appeared in the Journal of Qualitative Social Work, Critical Social Work, the Nordic Journal of Migration Research, Revue Hommes et Migrations, and the International Journal of Kurdish Studies. In 2015 he was nominated by York University as a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) for exceptional emerging researchers for his potential to lead in the field of migration and mobility studies. Melissa Gjellstad is Associate Professor at the University of North Dakota, where she coordinates the Norwegian program. She teaches all levels of Norwegian language as well as Scandinavian literature and culture courses, and she supports undergraduates in their co-curricular activities. Working with peers in collaborative governance is an important component of her university service, and she holds leadership positions on boards at the state and national levels. Gjellstad’s research investigates intersections between gender studies and literary criticism in contemporary Scandinavian fiction. Of particular interest are representations of mothers and fathers in literature and graphic novels from the millennium shift. She has also published translations of poetry and nonfiction. Jonas Hassen Khemiri is an internationally acclaimed author born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1978. He is the author of four novels and six plays. His first novel, Ett Öga Rött (One Eye Red, 2003) received the Borås Tidning award for the best literary debut. His second novel, Montecore (translated into English by Rachel Willson-Broyles and published by Knopf in 2011), won several literary awards, including the Swedish Radio Award for best novel of the year. Khemiri’s work has been translated into more than fifteen languages, and his plays have been performed by over fifty international companies. In 2011 Invasion! (also translated by

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Willson-Broyles) premiered in New York and garnered Khemiri a Village Voice Obie Award for playwriting. His 2015 novel Allt Jag Inte Minns (Everything I Don’t Remember, 2016) won Sweden’s top literary prize, the August Prize. Ursula Lindqvist is Assistant Professor of Scandinavian Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota and an affiliated faculty member in the college’s interdisciplinary programs in Film and Media Studies; Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies; Comparative Literature; African Studies; Peace Studies; and Latin American, Latino/a, and Caribbean Studies. She is author of Roy Andersson’s “Songs from the Second Floor”: Contemplating the Art of Existence (University of Washington Press, 2016), and she is also co-editor, with Mette Hjort, of A Companion to Nordic Cinema (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). She has published articles on Danish and Swedish nationalism and the colonial imagination in PMLA, African and Black Diaspora, and Space and Culture, as well as an article on the poet Edith Södergran’s gendered avant-gardism in Modernism/Modernity. Kristín Loftsdóttir is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iceland. Her research focuses on postcolonialism, whiteness, gender, racial identity, mobility and multiculturalism in Iceland and Europe, but she has also conducted research on the migrant work of indigenous communities in Niger, West Africa. In 2014, Dr. Loftsdóttir was recognized by the University of Iceland for outstanding research. She is directing the research project “(Icelandic) Identity in Crisis,” funded by Rannís – The Icelandic Centre for Research. She has published in internationally recognized journals such as Social Identities, Ethnos, Nora, European Journal of Women's Studies, Social Anthropology, and Ethnicities. She is co-editor, with Lars Jensen, of Crisis in the Nordic Countries and Beyond (Ashgate, 2014) and Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region (Ashgate, 2012), and she is the author of Teaching Race with a Gendered Edge (Central European University Press, 2012). Her book, in Icelandic, Konan sem fékk spjót í höfuði: Flækjur og furðuheimar vettavangsrannsókna (The Woman Who Got a Spear in Her Head: The Strangeness of Methodology, Háskólaútgáfan, 2010), received the Fjöruverðlaunin, or Women’s Literature Award, as scholarly book of the year in 2010. Loftsdóttir coorganized scholarly workshops and networks on “The Nordic Colonial Mind” and “Nordic Identities and Crisis,” funded by the Joint Committee

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for Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS). Pia Karlsson Minganti is Associate Professor of Ethnology at Stockholm University. Her current research project, “Contested Marriages: Young Muslims in Transnational Contexts,” funded by the Swedish Research Council, includes a position as a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Politics, Institutions and History at the University of Bologna, Italy. There, Dr. Minganti has been participating in the EUfunded research project “Gender, Migration and Intercultural Interactions in the Mediterranean and South East Europe” (GeMIC) under the guidance of Professor Sandro Mezzadra. Dr. Minganti is also affiliated with Uppsala University’s interdisciplinary Religion and Society Research Centre, where she is part of the research program “The Impact of Religion Challenges for Society, Law and Democracy.” Her research fields include young Muslims in Europe, transnational migration, religious pluralism, and cultural transformations of identity and gender relations, and she has authored a book and numerous articles on these topics. Kristina Malmio is Adjunct Professor of Nordic literature at the University of Helsinki, where she leads the research project "Late Modern Spatiality in Finland-Swedish Prose Literature 1990௅2010," financed by the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland. She was also a visiting professor at the University of Vienna in 2014. Her research interests include Finland-Swedish and Finnish literature, modernism and postmodernism, literary theory, sociology of literature, narratology, and spatiality. Dr. Malmio has edited several volumes on Finland-Swedish literature; forthcoming is an anthology Novel Districts: Critical Readings of Monika Fagerholm, together with Mia Österlund. Her latest publications include Values of Literature, co-edited with Hanna Meretoja, Pirjo Lyytikäinen and Saija Isomaa (Brill/Rodopi 2015) and a special issue on Swedish literature in Finland for Joutsen Svanen: Yearbook of Finnish Literary Research (2015). Magnus Nilsson is Professor of Comparative Literature at Malmö University in Sweden and was a Fulbright-Hildeman Fellow in UCLA’s Scandinavian Section in 2009. His research interests include Swedish working-class literature, Marxist literary theory, literature and ethnicity, heavy metal, and intersections of literature and class. He is author of Den föreställda mångkulturen: Klass och etnicitet i svensk samtidsprosa (Imagined Multiculturalism: Class and Ethnicity in Contemporary

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Swedish Literature, Gidlunds, 2010) as well as numerous scholarly articles. His latest book is Literature and Class: Aesthetical-Political Strategies in Modern Swedish Working-Class Literature (HumboldtUniversität, 2014). Leila Karin Österlind is a Ph.D. Candidate in Ethnology at Stockholm University. Her dissertation-in-progress examines how fashion and diaspora are interconnected though different flows of migration in which people—and also material objects, trends and influences—migrate and change meaning. As a junior researcher at the Centre for Research in International Migration and Ethnic Relations (CEIFO) at Stockholm University, she participated in a research project titled “Islamic Fashion: The Emergence of Islam as a Social Force in Europe.” She has published several articles in her areas of research on diasporic entrepreneurs, transnational migration, fashion and politics, and the fashioning of Islam. Tobias Raun is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark. He has been a visiting scholar at the Berkeley Center for New Media at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the School of Media and Film at the University of Sussex. His research has been published in book anthologies and peer-reviewed journals in Danish and English (and a translation into Portuguese), primarily within the areas of visual culture, new media, Internet studies, transgender and queer studies. In 2013, his doctoral dissertation at Roskilde University, “Out Online. Trans Self-Representation and Community Building on YouTube,” was granted the KRAKA prize in Denmark for groundbreaking gender research and is forthcoming as a monograph with Ashgate Publishing in May 2016. Dr. Raun is editor of the New Media section of the journal TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. From 20152017, Dr. Raun is on research leave to take part in an international research project titled “New Media New Intimacies,” funded by the the Danish Council for Independent Research. Troy Storfjell is Associate Professor of Norwegian and Scandinavian Studies at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, where he has chaired the Native American and Indigenous Studies Working Group and taught in the Environmental Studies, Global Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies programs. Dr. Storfjell has published on several twentiethcentury Norwegian and Sámi authors, on colonial discourse and the Sámi, and on Sámi indigenous methodologies and indigenist criticism. His current projects include work on the pedagogy of place and on Sámi

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aesthetics. He earned his Ph.D. in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001 and has studied and worked in Norway and the United States. Benjamin R. Teitelbaum is Instructor and Head of Nordic Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His research explores the intersections of race, nationalism, and expressive culture in the Nordic countries, and he has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork among radical nationalist ideologues, activists, and musicians in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. His 2013 dissertation won the Joukowsky Family Foundation Outstanding Dissertation Award at Brown University as well as the Applied Research Award from Germany's Institute for the Study of Radical Movements. His manuscript Lions of the North: Music and the New Nordic Radical Nationalism is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Dr. Teitelbaum has written and presented on folk-tune collecting in 1800s Sweden, white nationalist hip hop and reggae, and Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik. His analyses of and commentary on radical nationalism in Scandinavia has appeared in various print media and radio outlets in North America and Europe, including the New York Times, Foreign Policy, Aftonbladet, Dagbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Sveriges Radio, and NRK Radio. In addition to research, Dr. Teitelbaum is also an active musician, specializing in Swedish folk music and Sweden's unofficial national instrument, the nyckelharpa. Having earned the first degree in nyckelharpa performance awarded outside Sweden, at Bethany College in Linsborg, Kansas, he tours nationally and internationally as a performer and teacher. Kirsten Thisted is Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Institute of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, Minority Studies Section, and she was a Visiting Fulbright Professor at the University of WisconsinMadison in 2009. Her research areas include minority-majority relations, cultural and linguistic encounters, cultural translation and post-colonial relations. She is co-editor, with Karin Langgård, of From Oral Tradition to Rap: Literatures of the Polar North (Ilisimaturarfik/Forlaget Atuagkat, 2011) and editor of Grønlandsforskning: historie og perspektiver (Research on Greenland: History and Perspectives, Det Grønlandske Selskab, 2005). She has published several books and numerous articles about Greenlandic oral traditions, modern Greenlandic literature and film, Arctic explorers, and Greenland and Scandinavia from a post-colonial perspective. She has participated in the the Arctic Discourses and Arctic Modernities research programs, both based at the University of Tromsø,

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and she currently leads the University of Copenhagen project “Denmark and the New North Atlantic.” Timothy Ryan Warburton completed his Ph.D. in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington in December 2014 and his A.B. degree in American Civilizations at Brown University in 2006. He received an American-Scandinavian Foundation dissertation fellowship in 2013 to conduct dissertation research in Sweden. His resulting thesis, “From AIDS to Assimilation: Representations of Homosexuality in Swedish Literature,” inserts literary discourses into the broader historical narrative of homosexuality in Sweden and focuses on the AIDS crisis as a crucial turning point that continues to shape contemporary discourses around male homosexuality. Anna Williams is Professor in the Department of Literature, Uppsala University. Her research interests are Swedish literature of the 1900s, literature and gender, biography and life writing, and working-class literature. Recent publications include Från verklighetens stränder: Agnes von Krusenstjernas liv och diktning, a biography of the Swedish writer Agnes von Krusenstjerna (Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2013); Fält i förvandling: Litteraturvetenskaplig genusforskning, a co-edited anthology, with Eva Heggestad and Ann Öhrberg, on literary gender studies (Gidlunds, 2013); and an article co-written with Åsa Arping, “It’s complicated – förhållandet mellan litteraturvetenskap, genus, estetik och samhälle” on the relationship between literary studies, gender and aesthetics, published in Edda: Nordisk tidsskrift for litteraturforskning (2014:4). Rachel Willson-Broyles is a freelance translator based in St. Paul, Minnesota, who specializes in translating contemporary literature from Swedish to English. She received her B.A. in Scandinavian Studies from Gustavus Adolphus College in 2002 and her Ph.D. in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013. Her ample literary translations include Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s novel Montecore (Knopf, 2011), his Obie Award-winning play INVASION! (Samuel French, 2013), and his August Prize-winning novel Everything I Don’t Remember (Scribner/Atria, 2016).

INDEX

2083: A Declaration of European Independence, 131-2, 135-6, 138-142 A Doll House, 259n12 Aarseth, Espen J., 66, 75n9 Aarseth, Helene, 248, 257-8 Acker, Joan, 223 Aftonbladet, 48, 137 Ahmadzadeh, Hashem, 183 Ahmed, Sara, 185 AIDS, see HIV/AIDS Åkesson, Jimmy, 53, 146 Alakoski, Susanna, 214, 222; Oktober i Fattigsverige, 222-3; Svinalängorna, 213, 238 Aldebe, Iman, 47-52, 56n9-11, 57n18 Altid og for evigt [Always and Forever], 31-2 Amiraux, Valérie, 41 Amnesty International, 80-1, 85, 94 Andersen, Leif Esper: Fremmed, 31-2 Anderson, Benedict, 25 Andtbacka, Ralf, 72 Arbetaren 240 Arendt, Hannah 182, 186 Arluk, 162 Armstrong, Louis, 268 Arping, Åsa, 214, 218, 225n4n6n9, 226n25, 235, 244n21 Asad, Talal, 166-8, Åsen [The Ridge], 221 Ask, Beatrice 104-13 Äta, sova, dö [Eat, Sleep, Die], 208n10 August Prize, 213 Awad, Cherin, 52

Bagger, Peter, 86-87 Bagher, Reza, 193; Vingar av glas, 205 Baker, Josephine, 268 Bannerhed, Tomas: Korparna, 213, 221 Bano, Masooda: Women, Leadership and Mosques, 42 Barthes, Roland, 66-7 Bathhouse Law [Bastuklubbslagen], 3, 6-7, 15 Bauman, Zygmunt, 168, 224 Berggren, Henrik, 203-4, 208n6 Berlant, Lauren; Cinema of Precarity, 199, 206-7, 208n10; Cruel Optimism, 194, 196, 224 Berthelsen, Frederik, 157 Bhabha, Homi K., 124-6 Bjarnesen, Jens Pilegaard, 83-4, 878 Bjurwald, Lisa, 137, 146 Blixen, Karen: Out of Africa, 160, 162 Bögjävlar [Faggots], 12-3 Bohlin, Rebecka; De osynliga: Om Europas fattiga arbetarklass, 214 Brandt, Aage; Altid og for evigt, 312 Brandth, Berit, 251-2 Breivik, Anders Behring, 131-3, 135-8, 142-7, 148n15; 2083: A Declaration of European Independence,131-2, 135-6, 138-142 Brix, Stine, 84-5 Castiglia, Chrisopher, 13 Chaaraoui, see Jelloul, Mejsa

New Dimensions of Diversity in Nordic Culture and Society Charlotte Isabel Hansen, 249-250, 259 Cinema of Precarity, 199, 206-7, 208n10 colonialism, 118, 160-1, 165-6, 168, 265; Danish, 151, 154, 156, 159 Conscripts of Modernity, 167 Country Exhibition of 1909, 28-9 Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams, 264, 278n2 Cruel Optimism, 194, 196, 224 cultural nationalism, 133-5, 138, 142, 144, 146 Dagens Nyheter, 52, 104, 137, 144 decode, 268-9 De hatade [The Hated], 146 De ofrivilliga [Involuntary], 207 De osynliga: Om Europas fattiga arbetarklass [The Invisible: The Working Poor in Europe], 214 dehumanization, 203 Deleuze, Gilles, 67 Demokraten, 28, 33-4 Denmark, 22-38, 79-83, 86, 93-6, 134, 151-7, 159, 164-9, 265, 268 Dette er mine gamle dager [These Are My Old Days], 249, 255 Diva, 61-74 diversity, 23, 52, 55, 63-4, 72-4, 7980, 116-28, 133-4, 183, 193-4, 207-8, 214, 248, 263, 276-7 Drumm, Caspian, 82-90 Ekman, Mikael, 135 El Khabiry, Khadiga, 52 Elina – som om jag inte fanns [Elina – As If I Wasn’t There], 205 ergodic literature, 66, 75n7 ethnonationalism, 133-7, 140, 142, 144 Ett öga rött [One Eye Red], 205 eugenics, 148n9, 267 European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance, 273

291

exceptionalism, 204-7, 269 Expressen, 137, 146 Facebook, 49, 79, 81, 86-8, 90-5, 97n14, 131 Fagerholm, Monika, 61, 72, 74n4; Diva, 61-74 Fares, Josef, 193; Zozo, 205; Jalla jalla, 205 fatherhood, 247-52, 255, 259n6 feminism, 63, 204, 208n9, 249, 278n2 Finland, 61-3, 72-3, 74n1, 134, 276 Fleischer, Rasmus, 137, 142 Foley, Barbara, 225 folkhemmet [the people’s home], 8, 183 Foucault, Michel: The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, 8-9; theories of bio-power and confession, 8-12; subjectivities, 166-7 Fraser, Nancy, 232, 234 Fremmed [Estranged], 31-2 Freuchen, Peter, 151, 167-8 Frye, Northrop, 160 Fägerskiöld, Katarina: Åsen [The Ridge], 221 förortssvenska [suburban Swedish dialect], 220 Förortsungar [Kidz in da Hood], 205 Gardell, Jonas: Torkar aldrig tårar utan hanskar, 2-3, 17 Gardell, Mattias, 138 gender identity disorder, 81 globalization, 63, 72-3, 113, 187, 194-5, 197, 206-7, 208n10 Godnatt, jord [Breaking Free], 238 Greenland, 122, 151-69; Greenlandic Home Rule, 162; Self-Government Act, 155, 169 Greider, Göran, 212 Grevsen, Vibe, 84 Griffin, Gabrielle, 5-6

292 Grundtvig, Nikolaj Frederik Severin, 34, 38n5 Guattari, Félix, 68 Gundel, Peter, 165-6 Gustavsson, Ylva: Förortsungar, 205 HIV/AIDS, 2-17, 18n14; National Delegation on AIDS, 6-9 Halal-TV, 52-5 Hamilton, Carl, 53-4 Hans Egede eller Guds ord for en halv tønde spæk [Hans Egede, or The Word of God for Half a Barrel of Blubber], 162 Hedman, Kaj, 62 Hemer, Oscar, 31 Heq, 162 Hills, Darryl, 90 Hobbes, Thomas, 25 Hobsbawm, Eric 25 Hobson, Barbara, 249-50 Holm, Sven: Hans Egede eller Guds ord for en halv tønde spæk, 162 homosexuality, 3, 6-16, 43, 79 Hus i helvete [All Hell Let Loose], 205 Hvam, Jørgen, 165 hybridity, 125-6, 160, 162 hyperliterary competence, 170 hypertext, 61, 66-8, 71, 73, 75n7-9 Härö, Klaus: Elina – som om jag inte fanns, 205 Iceland, 263-77, 278n4 immigration; in Iceland, 266, 270-2, 276; in Norway, 121, 132, 1334, 144; in Sweden 41, 43, 53, 175-87, 193 indigenous methodologies, 117, 125-6, 128n3 Infectious Diseases Law (Smittskyddslagen), 3, 6-7, 9-12 Information, 82, 84, 88, 90, 96n11 Ingemann, B. S.: Kunuk og Naja eller Grønlænderne: Fortælling

Index i tre Bøger, 151 Ingenbarnsland [No Child’s Land], 213, 216, 219-20 intersectionality, 223, 254, 278 Iran, 179-81, 183, 186, 187n1 Iraq, 176, 179-181, 183, 186, 187n1 Islam, see Muslim Islamophobia, 145-7 Ingvarsson, Stefan: Bögjävlar, 12, 14 Íslandssaga [Iceland’s History], 267 Jaffer, Nejat, 50 Jalla jalla, 205 Janson, Malena, 204 Jansson, Eugéne, 9 Jelloul, Mejsa, 47-8, 50, 56n9&10 Johnson, Eyvind, 241 Jones, Owen, 216, 222, 225n11 Jonker, Gerdien, 41 Jónsson, Jónas; Íslandssaga, 267 Jorgensen, Christine, 80, 86, 90 Jyllands-Posten, 52, 83, 96n9-10 Kalmbach, Hilary, 42 Karlsdóttir, Unnur, 267 Kassem, Dalia Azzam, 52 Khemiri, Jonas Hassen, 104, 111, 193; Ett öga rött, 205 Kjærgaard, Thorkild, 159, Knutsen, Torbjørn, 136-7 Korparna [The Ravens], 213, 221 Krag, Astrid, 82 Kris i befolkningsfrågan [Nation and Family], 8 Kunuk og Naja eller Grønlænderne: Fortælling i tre Bøger [Kunuk and Naja or the Greenlanders: A Story in Three Books], 151 Kuokkanen, Rauna, 126, 128 Kurdistan, 174-6, 179-81, 183-85, 187n1&2, 188n7&8, 189n12&13; Kurdish diaspora, 174-5, 180, 186 Kurikka, Kaisa, 126 Kvande, Elin, 251-2

New Dimensions of Diversity in Nordic Culture and Society LGBT/LGBTQ, 17, 80, 84, 86, 94, 95n3, 97n13 Laersen, Berthel, 156-7 Leine, Kim: Kalak, 152; The Prophets of Eternal Fjord;151169 Lemons, Stanley, 269 Lewin, Leif, 216 lexia, 67-8 Lidegaard, Mads, 156-8, 160, 163 Linderborg, Åsa: Mig äger ingen, 238 Lindgren, Astrid: Pippi Longstocking, 194, 203, 205 Linton, Magnus: De hatade, 146 Lo-Johansson, Ivar, 215, 221-2, 238-9, 244n20; Godnatt, jord, 238 Lodenius, Anna-Lena, 145 Lorentzen, Jørgen, 247, 254-5, 259n12 Lundberg, Kristian, 214, 216, 244n18; Och allt skall vara kärlek, 217-8; Yarden, 213, 2179, 230-43 Lundstedt, Andreas, 2-4, 10-2, 1417 Lutz, Helma, 28 Mannen som elsket Yngve [The Man Who Loved Yngve], 248, 259n6 Manifesto of the Communist Party, 233-4 Martinson, Harry, 241 Martinson, Moa, 215, 221-2 Marxism, 132-3 Mary Poppins, 251, 259n11 Michaels, Walter Benn, 214, 232, 234 Mig äger ingen [I Am Owned by No One], 238 Moberg, Vilhelm, 219, 225n19 Moderates (Moderaterna), 216-7 Moravian Brethren, 156-8 Morgan, David, 250 Muggur, see Thorsteinsson,

293

Guðmundur multiculturalism, 116, 118, 120-1, 125, 132-3, 136, 143, 174, 186, 193 Muslim, 23, 107, 205; immigrant, 175-6, 178, 235; intermarriage with ethnic Danes, 24-7, 35-6; roles of Muslim women in Sweden, 41-56; threat to Nordic society, 134, 137, 144; women’s fashion, 47-51 Myrdal, Gunnar and Alva: Kris i befolkningsfrågan, 8 Møller Mortensen, Flemming, 84-5 McClintock, Anne, 25, 30 Negrastrákarnir [Negro Boys], 2656, 269, 271, 276 neoconservatism, 212 neoliberalism, 196-7, 208n10 Nestingen, Andrew, 195 Neuromaani [The New Novel], 71 Nielsen, Niels Jul, 239 Nilsson, Magnus, 213-4, 216, 224, 225n6&7, 230-245 Nuur, Barlin, 45 Norway, 51, 117, 121-3, 132, 134, 136, 142-3, 152-4, 247-8, 252, 254, 265 nydanskere, 22 Och allt skall vara kärlek [And everything shall be love], 217-8 Ohlson Wallin, Elisabeth, 13 Oktober i Fattigsverige [October in Impoverished Sweden], 222-3 Old Man and the Sea, 257 Olsen, Torjer A., 121 Olsson, Eija Hetekivi: Ingenbarnsland, 213, 216, 21920 Östlund, Ruben: De ofrivilliga, 207; Play, 192-209 Out of Africa, 160, 162 Palestinians, 175, 183-4

294 parental leave, 254, 258n1&2 Parliament (Riksdag), 9, 217, 224n2 Phoenix, Ann, 28 Pickett, Kate, 220, 225n7 Pichler, Gabriela: Äta, sova, dö [Eat, Sleep, Die], 208n10 Pippi Longstocking: autonomous child, 194, 203; exceptionalism 204-6 Pixley Mapogo, 249, 252 Play, 192-209 Politiken, 22-3, 33-4, 37, 83, 96n9 Pomerance, Murray, 251 Pontoppidan, Henrik, 154 Poohl, Daniel, 135, 144, 146 postcolonialism, 161 Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, The, 195 Profeterne i Evighedsfjorden (The Prophets of Eternal Fjord), 151169 Project REVA, 104, 109, 111-2 queer, 3, 12-7, 63, 69, 95 Riksförbundet för sexuellt likaberättigande [The Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights], 6 racialization, 38n1, 236, 264-5, 267, 268, 275, 277 racism, 32, 45, 50, 53, 55, 105-6, 117-8, 120, 132, 135-6, 138-40, 142,144, 147, 160, 185, 192, 263-6, 268-9, 271-3, 275-8 radical nationalism, 132-3, 136-7, 144-7 Rasmussen, Knud, 166-8 Renberg, Tore: Charlotte Isabel Hansen, 249-250, 259; Dette er mine gamle dager, 249, 255; Mannen som elsket Yngve, 248, 259n6; Pixley Mapogo, 249, 252 Reed, Christopher, 13

Index rhizome, 67-8 Rice, James, 274 Riel, Jørn, 152, 167; Sangen for livet, 162 Roma, 121, 185 Rossi, Oscar, 72 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 25, 153, 162, 168 Rydström, Jens, 15 SMFR, see Svenska Muslimer för Fred och Rättvisa SMR, see Sveriges Muslimska Råd SUM, see Sveriges Unga Muslimer Saga, 131-2, 140-1, 147n7 Said, Edward, 184 Salmenniemi, Harry, 72 Sámi, 114-28 Sangen for livet [The Song of Life], 162 Sattarvandi, Hassan Loo: Still, 213, 220 Scott, David, 160-1, 166; Conscripts of Modernity, 167 Sexological Clinic, 81, 83-7, 89, 91, 94-5, 96n5 Sigurdsen, Gertrud, 6 Simpson, Bob, 269 Skaptadóttir, Unnur Dís, 272 Skeggs, Beverly, 225n5 Skrede, Kari, 255 Social Democratic Party (Socialdemokraterna), 17, 34, 212, 215, 225n10, 239 Socialstyrelsen [National Board of Health and Welfare], 9 stállu, 114-22, 124-128 Standing, Guy, 195 statare [migrant farmworkers], 221, 238, 244n20 statelessness, 174-6, 179, 181, 1834, 186 Stenwall, Åsa, 63, 70 Steorn, Patrik, 9 Still, 213, 220 Stockholm CITY, 49

New Dimensions of Diversity in Nordic Culture and Society Sundhedsstyrelsen [Danish Ministry of Health], 81 subjectivities, 167-8, 277, 278n2 supertext, 73 Svéd, George, 6-7 Syria, 17981, 183, 186, 187n1 Svedjedal, Johan, 66, 70-1, 73, 75n9 Svenska Muslimer för Fred och Rättvisa [Swedish Muslims for Peace and Justice], 45, 50 Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna), 53, 1345, 137, 146-7, 224n2 Sveriges Muslimska Råd [Muslim Council of Sweden], 45 Sveriges Unga Muslimer [Sweden’s Young Muslims], 43-8 Svinalängorna [The Swine Rows], 213, 238 Sweden, 2-4, 6-17n6, 18n14, 42-3, 45, 47-8, 50, 52-55, 56n2&10, 74n6, 104, 109-13, 134-5, 137, 144-7, 174-9, 181-4, 186-7, 193-7, 203-5, 208, 212-14, 21619, 221-24, 225n3, 230, 234-8, 240, 242 Swedish Academy, 241 Swedish citizenship, 177-8 Swedish Trade Union Confederation (Landsorganisationen i Sverige), 212 Söderberg, Eva, 204 Sörberg, Anna-Maria, 15-6 Taguieff, Pierre-André: cultural racism 134-5 Taslimi, Susan, 193; Hus i helvete, 205 Thatcherism, 216

295

Thorning-Schmidt, Helle, 79-80 Thorsén, David, 7-8 Thorsteinsson, Guðmundur, 269 transgender, 6, 43, 80-98 True Finns, 134 Trägårdh, Lars, 203-4, 208n6 Tuhiwai Smith, Linda, 117 Turi, Johan, 114 Turkey, 38n3, 174, 176, 179-83, 186, 187n1 Vingar av glas [Wings of Glass], 205 Wallentin, Daniel: Ett öga rött, 205 Warner, Michael, 12-5 welfare state, 4, 6, 8, 17n7, 34-37, 96n12, 158, 175, 184, 194-6, 203-6, 212, 214-6, 223-24, 230, 232, 239, 257 White, Hayden, 160 Wilkinson, Richard, 220, 225n7 Women, Leadership and Mosques, 42 working-class literature, 212-8, 2213, 225n8, 225n19 Wright, Rochelle, 193, 208n3 xenophobia, 272-3, 275 Yack, Bernard, 160 Yarden [The Yard], 213, 217-9, 23043 Yli-Juonikas, Jaakko: Neuromaani, 71 Yuval-Davis, Nira, 25, 28 Zozo, 205