1 May: Muslim Women Talk Back—A Political Transformation of Secular Modernity on International Workers’ Day

1 May 2017 hundreds of Muslim women wearing the veil took part in an International Workers’ Day demonstration in Gothenburg. The Swedish modernity project places a strong value on the idea of secularism. However, while secularism and Christianity become inseparable and part of the imagined Swedish community, Islam and Judaism are excluded from the Swedish and European centre. An EU verdict that sparked the idea of a 1 May demonstration is one example of this historical process. Muslim women wearing the veil are not counted in the modernist work of gender equality in Europe and Sweden. This example is especially serious, and violent, in Sweden, where gender equality is understood as a national quality. This version of modernity offers a bright future for the hegemonic centre and requires others to assimilate. The hundreds of Muslim women in the demonstration challenged the notions that modernity and Swedish gender equality must, by definition, be secular/Christian. The women—who addressed themselves as important historical political subjects—performed through the demonstration a decolonial alternative to the story of Swedish anti-religious modernity. The existence of more than one linear path to gender equality undermines the narrative of colonial modernity and Swedish white exceptionalism.

Public Intimacy and ‘White Feminism’: On the Vain Trust in Scandinavian Equality

This chapter addresses Islamophobia as it is expressed in and through discourses of feminism and gender inequality, in some recent debates about public appearances of Muslims in Sweden. In debates about whether or not we should open for a few hours of women only in the public swimming pools debaters use feminist arguments on equality, some writers argue that such an act would risk that Sweden turned into a ‘medieval’ situation, or becomes a version of Iran. Liberal debaters, who clearly restrict their liberalism to westernised individuals and practices, build these arguments upon a rationale of feminism and gender equality. How can we protect the feminist discourse from being used in Islamophobic contexts as these? In this chapter I argue that feminism has to strengthen its articulations of its critique against universalism, and white, western, secular, middle-class (as well as hetero- and cis-) values, if it wants to be relevant in a globalised world.

An Epilogue

I den bästa av världar [In the best of worlds] Den bästa av dagar [The best of days] Vi slapp ju nazister [We did not have Nazis] Så vad ska vi klaga? [So what should we complain about?] In the above poem, trans* activist and spoken word poet Yolanda Aurora Bohm Ramirez (2018) both names the ways the lives of specific groups of people in Sweden are threatened by the increasing neo-Nazi violence and illuminates the response of the majoritarian population to these threats: their demands of silence where protest and criticism is made nearly impossible.

Rainbow Flag and Belongings/Disbelongings: Öckerö Pride and Reclaim Pride in Gothenburg, Sweden 2019

In spite of the rainbow flag’s importance as a symbol for transnational queer belonging and its meanings for the survival of queers all over the world, much critical queer Anglo-Saxon research and activism concerning the rainbow flag and the celebration of Pride claims that it has lost its radical potential through processes of normalisation, mainstreaming, homonationalism and commercialisation. In order to address other queer political issues, alternative Pride events are organized in parallel with conventional Pride celebrations. This chapter will discuss two Pride events held in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2019, Reclaim Pride and Öckerö Pride, drawing on auto-ethnographic methods. It will reflect on two connected questions: What meanings, emotions, actions and temporalities are (re)produced as a result of the relationship between the events, the rainbow flag, the concept of Pride and the activists/participants—including the author? In what ways do the rainbow flag and the concept of Pride work as co-producers of belongings as well as disbelongings—and how does the author’s position as a Swedish, middle-class, white, lesbian, feminist, mother, former activist and now sociologist affect her feelings of belonging and disbelonging? It is shown that the rainbow flag is a very topical and heated cultural artefact in the Swedish political arena, in which racism, homophobia and Islamophobia are growing. The author’s experiences and emotions at the two Pride events reflect the ambivalent struggle that takes place at the borders of belonging and disbelonging. Temporality and space are important aspects of the contextualisation that needs to be applied in order to grasp the different effects that processes of inclusion and exclusion have on queer people in different places and situations.

A State Affair?: Notions of the State in Discourses on Trans Rights in Sweden

Departing from previous scholarly work that has studied the effects of state violence and conditional state recognition on the living conditions of gender-variant people (Beauchamp 2019; Linander 2018), this chapter explores the function of narratives of the state in discourses on trans rights in Sweden. It provides insights into the relation between state and civil society, and the practicalities of governance, through an examination of how activists interpellate the state and hold it accountable. With a critical inquiry into the hegemonic narrative that the Swedish state has a responsibility to alleviate the suffering of gender-variant citizens as a background, it addresses and situates the tension between liberal rights discourses of trans rights on the one hand and transformative politics asking for restorative justice on the other hand (Spade 2011). The argument is that the interpellation of the state can be understood as a strategy to repoliticise the violent effects of governance in times of neoliberalism.

Introduction

The focus of this book is on the many far from predictable transformative political processes on gender, sexuality and coloniality that grow out of the broad range of bodies and actors engaged in politics outside the hegemonic order and in everyday activities. These processes are not conducted by states, governments or transnational nongovernmental organisations; rather, they are examples of politics in-between states, organisations and national imagined communities. In this first chapter we will introduce some of the main themes, regarding these processes we in our joint research programme have worked on over the last couple of years.

‘Pain Is Hard to Put on Paper’: Exploring the Silences of Migrant Scholars

Despite the successful collection of thirteen life stories of working-class women of Greek background in their late sixties, who had migrated to Sweden in the 1970s, the two researchers who engaged in the study—Despina, herself a child of migrant Greek parents, and Diana, a political refugee from Argentina—were unable to publish the results. The aim of this chapter is to listen to women’s narratives by bringing into conversation the concept of social suffering through the use of a psychosocial approach. The aim is also to explore our inability (as migrants and daughters of migrants ourselves) to acknowledge what over-exploitation, gender and racial regimes can, and indeed do, to people regarding their sense of self and well-being. The chapter contains four sections. First, the text provides a short introduction to Swedish racial formation, followed by relevant efforts to conceptualise human pain, inspired by the work of Black British feminist scholars Gail Lewis and Yasmin Gunaratnam. Their theoretical intervention suggests the value of a synthesis of politicised psychoanalytic approaches to the dynamics of ‘race’ and emotional labor; providing a frame for a reflection of our own emotions, with special focus on shame and guilt. The central focus of the chapter is in the section ‘What (We Think) Hurts the Most’, which explores the stories collected organised through three topics—(failed) motherhood, broken bodies and (racist) respectability.

Pink Porn Economy: Genealogies of Transnational LGBTQ Organising

Studying pre-2000s pink porn magazines reveals the importance of politics in-between in the development of LGBTQ transnational organising in the twentieth century. The usual historical narratives of LGBTQ politics in the North are based on medical or legislative documents or on self-identified queers’ descriptions of their own interactions with these discourses. However, these discourses and data only capture parts of how twentieth-century queers developed sexual subjectivity, became nationally and transnationally organised, and conducted sexual politics. This chapter uses Claire Colebrook’s (Understanding Deleuze. Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2002) feminist engagement in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept device to discuss transnational political networks that rhizomatically connected the makers, disseminators and subscribers of male same-sex porn magazines produced in Denmark and Sweden between 1960 and 1980. The concepts enable an analysis of the messy entanglement of desire, subjectivity processes, consumption, organising and activism, and of the shaping of certain queer communities of belonging while also excluding others. The application of gender analysis to the entanglement of pink porn economies in queer transnational networks sheds a genealogical light on the historical division between the emergence of vis-à-vis lesbian and gay networks and politics—and on the tensions between them regarding so-called positive or negative sexual rights in the decades to come.

Contesting Secularism: Religious and Secular Binary Through Memory Work

The notion of Sweden as a secular nation-state, or rather the linkage between notions of secularism and gender equality, is strong in public discourse. Within this frame, religion is located in a traditional past and often understood as a hindrance to liberal and modern values. In this chapter we focus on our own situatedness as feminist researchers living in Sweden and thereby explore how, where and why ideologies of secularism entangled with notions of European values and superiority become dominant. Inspired by the feminist tradition of memory work, an aim is to explore the boundary between the secular and the religious through our own experiences and from our location in Sweden. The aim is also to search for counter-memories, both in the doing of secular (gendered) selves as well as the ongoing production of the “religious other”.

Fat, Black and Unapologetic: Body Positive Activism Beyond White, Neoliberal Rights Discourses

Body positivity messages and practices are rapidly being spread transnationally, particularly in the form of digital activism, challenging oppressive body ideals and advocating for diversity and the acceptance of all body types. At the same time, however, the movement is increasingly being criticised for its commodification, how it goes hand in hand with neoliberalism and its lack of intersectional perspectives. This text investigates the potential of the expansion, redefinition and ‘repoliticising’ of body positivity beyond the white, neoliberal discourse. The analysis mainly dives into the texts and images of blogs by two body positive advocates, Leah Vernon and Stephanie Yeboah, who both identify as black and fat and who both address the issues of race and racism. It is suggested that through their body politics, they display how race and gender are intersected in the shaping of both body shaming and the production of ‘proud’ bodies, thus contributing to the situatedness of body positivity. The stance of being unapologetic in one’s body—a central element of body positivity—is regarded as being reframed through the contestation of the whiteness privilege and racism.