The so‐called scandinavian cultural boundary in northern Sweden in viking times ‐ Ethnic or Socio‐Economic?

Sammanfattning

Den s k skandinaviska kulturgränsen i norra Sverige under vikingatid ‐ var den en etnisk eller socio‐ekonomisk gräns? En studie utifrån det arkeologiska materialet.

Till Ångermanlands kustland och Storsjöbygden i Jämtland i norr finns nordiska ortnamn som går tilbaka till järnåldern. Man talar här om “den skandinaviska kulturgränsen”. Men den har också av vissa forskare uppfattats som en statisk, etnisk sydgräns för den samiska kulturen.

Forskningen har länge dominerats av den norske etnografen Yngvar Nielsens “immigrationsteori” av år 1889, att samema först under nyare tid skulle ha vandrat söder ut från Nordtrøndelag i Norge och Lappland i Sverige. Den då gängse uppfattningen bland såväl norska som svenska arkeologer var istället den att samema var urbefolkningen i norra och mellersta Skandinavien.

Nya undersökningar stödjer detta. Forntida samiska gravar (och boplatser) finns i inlandet betydligt längre söderut, tydligast på Vivallen i nordvästra Härjedalen med hittils 21 skelettgravar under flat mark, från åtminstone 1000‐ og 1100‐talen. Andra gravar söder om kulturgränsen tolkade som samiska eller tillhöriga fångstkulturen är de s k insjögravarna, brandgravar från första årtusendet e Kr.

Vad innebar då den s k kulturgränsen under vikingatid? För att söka underlag för en hypotes härom har jag gått igenom tydligt skandinaviska eller östliga brons‐och silverföremål från 8‐, 9‐ och 1000‐(1100‐) talen, och deras fyndomständigheter, allt från Sverige norr om den tänkta gränsen.

Många av de aktuella föremålen härrör från gravar, som genomgående tycks vara samiska. Nära kontakter med såväl öst‐ som västskandinavisk kultur liksom finsk kan förklara att ett område utmärks av brandgravar under rosen, ett annat av brandgravar under hög, övergående till skelettgravar, medan ett tredje har givit skelettgravar under flat mark. Att större delen av området saknar kända gravar kan bero på inhemska, ej närmare kända gravseder.

De aktuella gravgåvorna är dräktprydnader. Sådana tycks i sig inte vara etniskt betingade. En annorlunda användning av utifrån införda ting, jämfört med bruket i deras tillverkningsländer, förefaller däremot att kunna nyttjas som en indikation på samisk etnisk tillhörighet. Inte heller gravformer och gravskick visar sig bundna till en etnisk grupp. Ett undantag tycks vara (sydda) näversvepningar som utmärkt samiska gravar. Gravlägena förefaller däremot att vara indikator på samisk tillhörighet; de antagna samiska gravarna ligger i regel på näs, öar och holmar.

Den s k skandinaviska kulturgränsen i norra Sverige tycks därmed under vikingatid vara en gräns åt norr för dels nordisk bygd, dels ett mera påtagligt inflytande från östra Skandinavien (Sverige) på den samiska befolkningen i fångstmarken. Den var alltså delvis en socio‐ekonomisk gräns och en gräns inom samisk område, inte en sydgräns för den samiska kulturen.     

In the Canine Archives of Sex: Radclyffe Hall,Una Troubridge and their Dogs

How does attention to dogs open up understanding of the queer, and more specifically, the Sapphic, past? This article examines the forgotten enmeshments of lesbian and pedigree dog subcultures in 1920s England. It takes as its case study one of the best-known couples of Sapphic modernity, Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, and their dachshunds, Wotan and Thorgils. Bringing into dialogue scholarship on queer, trans and animal history, it traces the historical footprint of the dogs and considers how what this article calls the ‘canine archive of sex’ – a wide range of documents including show catalogues, newspaper reports, fiction and scientific writing – adds to understanding of the complexities of modern Sapphic history. Sapphic here is used to denote relationships between people assigned female at birth, some of whom may have transed gender norms and expectations. The article argues that the records of Hall's and Troubridge's involvement in the world of dog breeding expand understanding both of Sapphic modernity specifically and the intersections between histories of sexuality and gender and animal history more broadly. They reveal how gender norms, class privilege and racialised practices converged in modern pedigree culture, shaping canine–human relationships as well as the queer subcultures that formed around them.     

Genderism and the Bathroom Problem: (re)materialising sexed sites, (re)creating sexed bodies

This article introduces the possibilities of a new term, ‘genderism’, to describe the hostile readings of, and reactions to, gender ambiguous bodies. Genderism is used here to articulate instances of discrimination that are based on the discontinuities between the sex with which an individual identifies and how others, in a variety of spaces, read their sex. The article suggests that intersections between queer theories, that destabilise the dichotomy of man/woman, and performative geographies, that recognise the (re)formation of space, could facilitate, and indeed necessitate, a consideration of how the illusion of dichotomous sexes is (re)formed at the site of the body (re)constituting men and women in context. Nine women, who participated in a wider research project about non‐heterosexual women's lives, spoke of being mistaken for men yet understanding themselves and living as women. Using these narratives the ‘bathroom problem’, where women are read as men in toilets and as a result subjected to abusive and even violent reactions, is examined. These policing behaviours demonstrate the instability of sexed norms as well as how sites can be (re)made ‘woman only’ and simultaneously ‘women's’ bodies (re)produced. The article then examines how women negotiate the policing of sexed spaces such that bodies, sexed sites (toilets) and the location of these sites (nightclubs, service stations) are mutually constituted within sexed regimes of power. In this way the article aims to explore how sexed power relations (re)form the mundane ‘stuff’ of everyday life by examining moments where boundaries of gender difference are overtly (en)forced.     

‘It was entirely his fault’: constructing white masculinities and the Haga Man assaults in Umeå, Sweden 1998–2006

Several cases of single repeat offenders in urban space have raised public concern in Sweden during recent decades. Few studies have been conducted on the consequences of the ‘hostage situations’ that emerge when one individual offender causes fear and affects a large group of people in a specific place. The concern of this article is to examine consequences of the Haga Man phenomenon: the case of a serial rapist operating between 1998 and 2006 in Umeå, a medium-sized Swedish city. The article focuses on the construction of white masculinities among male respondents in Umeå during the time of the attacks. I examine how men positioned themselves in relation to the public image of the offender as a ‘normal Swede’ and how they related to women's increasing fear of violence in urban space. Three prominent constructions of masculinity emerged from the research data: the dangerous stranger, the suspect and the protector. These three constructions of masculinity were not clear-cut and did not ‘belong’ to specific men – several of the interviewees articulated various forms of masculinities but stressed them in different ways depending on, for instance, age and/or ethnicity/race. I conclude that men largely positioned themselves as protectors as a strategy to distance themselves from the perpetrator (the image of the ‘normal Swedish man’ performing the rapes) and to ensure that they would not be perceived as suspects. However, men largely perceived that women's increased fear of crime was ‘one man's fault’ and broader issues about gendered power relations in space were not raised.     

‘A Wagner for the Jews’: Moses Pergament,Richard Wagner and anti-Semitism in Swedish cultural life in the interwar period

This article deals with the Finnish-Swedish, Jewish composer and author Moses Pergament and his relationship with Wagner's theories, anti-Semitism in particular, and their influence on the development of modern Swedish classical music during the interwar period. The author emphasizes the importance of recognizing that Pergament's reaction to Wagner's cultural theories was part and parcel of his struggle for assimilation. The basis of Pergament's interpretation of Wagner was the notion that it is possible to separate life and belief: the anti-Semitism and enthusiastic lechery were part of Wagner's life, to which it was not necessary to attach much importance. The beliefs, on the other hand, were there to be analysed. Furthermore, an explicit and public critique of Wagner's anti-Semitism was inconsistent with an attempt to gain a foothold in Swedish cultural life. As Wagner's anti-Semitism was well known but was deemed either acceptable or irrelevant, paying attention to it was by definition proof of a Jewish identification. To be accepted as a Swedish music critic, Pergament had to follow the unwritten rules of the game, amongst them the requirement not to exhibit his ‘Jewishness’ openly. The actions of certain members of Föreningen Svenska Tonsättare (FST, the Association of Swedish Composers) indicate that Pergament's work was not thought to indicate a Swedish identification. On the contrary, his reviews were seen as a threat to ‘Swedish music’, and with implicit references to Wagner this was attributed to Pergament's supposed lack of feeling for the ‘spirit of the Swedish people’.     

Can't I be seen? Can't I be heard? Black women queering politics in Newark

What does it mean for a black female to negotiate urban space? How is her body read, her politics enacted, and her agency understood and interpreted? How do black women use their bodies and identities to challenge structural intersectionality in US cities? To answer these questions, I explore how black women embraced a set of oppositional spatial practices to resist the intersectional effects of misogyny, homo/transphobia, racism, and poverty in Newark, New Jersey. I reconstruct the creation of the Newark Pride Alliance, a local lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and queer coalition that mobilized in 2003 and 2004, after the death of Sakia Gunn. Exploring migrations between ‘black women,’ ‘black queer’ and ‘black feminist,’ I examine how black women respatialized social capital and enacted resistance. Through semi-structured interviews and frame analysis, I explore how black women forged new relationships between queer youth and black vernacular institutions, and created political spaces in which honest engagement of issues of gender violence, poverty, and power could take place.     

La Quintrala's Confessions: The Contesting of Female Agency and Indigeneity in Two Popular Chilean Visual Narratives

Doña Catalina de los Ríos y Lisperguer, known as ‘La Quintrala,’ a seventeenth-century aristocratic woman of mixed ancestry accused of torture, witchcraft, and murder, has persisted as a recurring figure in the Chilean imaginary. While literary representations of this figure have been well explored, this article contributes an examination of two visual narratives, paying particular attention to the manner in which genre and context influence the repurposing of this violent woman: the 1986 teleserie La Quintrala, produced by Chile's state-owned television station (TVN), and the Chilean newspaper Las últimas noticias's 2008 comic ‘La Quintrala y el Cristo de Mayo.’ The teleserie, a product of the Pinochet era, positions her as an antithesis to the ideal Chilean woman, simultaneously denying her agency and condemning her. The comic echoes the rhetoric of the Concertación governments as it prominently links La Quintrala's downfall and redemption to the genesis of modern Chile at the cost of her distinctive racial and gendered characteristics. Ultimately, each work employs the structure of confession to recall her crimes while rejecting the female agency and racially mixed heritage La Quintrala represents.     

The editor and the CIA: Herbert Tingsten and the Congress for Cultural Freedom: a symbiotic relationship

This article deals with the relations between perhaps Sweden's most influential publicist during the Cold War, the professor of political science and editor-in-chief of Sweden's largest daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter 1946–1959, Herbert Tingsten, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), a CIA-sponsored organisation gathering the elite of the world's non-communist leftist intellectuals, Congress for Cultural Freedom and its Swedish sub-branch called ‘Svenska kommittén för kulturens frihet’ (SKfKF). Tingsten was a professor of political science at University of Stockholm from 1935 to 1946 and then editor-in-chief of Sweden's largest daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter from 1946 to 1959. It argues that parts of Tingsten's work both as an opinion maker and as a scholar was part of a symbiotic relationship with the CCF and the SKfKF. Tingsten was the foremost propagator for the ‘end of ideology’ thesis in Sweden and the article argues that this campaign was inspired by the CCF's advancement of this idea in the 1950s and 1960s. Tingsten was personally acquainted with several CCF intellectuals and he visited several of the CCF's conferences. The article also makes the case that Tingsten helped the CCF and the SKfKF's causes and furthered their agendas in a number of ways during his time as editor-in-chief of DN. For example, Tingsten allowed the SKfKF to use DN as a platform for presenting its ideas and programmes to a broader public. The article thus shows how the CCF network of intellectuals influenced opinion making in non-aligned Sweden.     

SWEDEN AND THE LONG ‘1968’: BREAK OR CONTINUITY?

The first part gives a chronological overview of the Swedish ‘1968’, in this article defined as a phenomenon with its roots in the late 1950s and it's end around 1980. Three phases are identified: a ‘liberal’ until 1965, a ‘red’ in the late 1960s and the ‘diversified’ 1970s. Underlying this time schedule are two characteristics of the Swedish ‘1968’ in its extended form: the role of the social movements and the interaction between old and new movements; and the unique role of the intellectuals. The second part discusses the (late and limited) research so far on this topic in Sweden. The academic works are still few and the critical debate little developed. One of the topics discussed is to what extent ‘1968’ was something fundamentally new and to what extent it was influenced by older social movements.     

White Women and Men of Colour: Miscegenation Fears in Britain after the Great War

This article examines miscegenation fears in Britain in the period after World War I, noting three dominant discourses: that miscegenation leads inevitably to violence between white and black men (focusing on the 1919 race riots), that these relationships involve sexual immorality (analysing the 1920 ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’, a case involving a white woman, a Chinese man and drugs and a trial of a white woman for killing her Egyptian husband) and that miscegenation has ‘disastrous’ procreative consequences. It is suggested that miscegenation stood as one British boundary marker, separating the nationally acceptable and the nationally threatening. The parties concerned – the ‘primitive’ man of colour, the white woman of a ‘low type’ and the ‘misfit’ offspring – were each pathologised in terms of their deviant sexuality. Yet interracial relationships did not decrease, quite the contrary. The move in Britain towards a more racially mixed community began in the years after the Great War, when certain white women made choices against the norms of respectable femininity.     

Heritage and resistance: irregularities,temporalities and cumulative impact

Urban social change and large-scale demolitions in the name of urban renewal often give rise to social conflicts. In this study, we investigate how resistances to this change emerge, coalesce and revolve, and how they use heritage to generate cumulative impact. The analyses of urban change and resistance in Gårda, a working-class neighbourhood of Gothenburg, Sweden, showed social conflicts to be instigated by their stigmatisation. Since the 1970s, Gårda has been called ‘out of place’ and marked for demolition. These demolitions were given legitimacy by the ‘housing quality standards’ that emerged in the 1930s as a means to reduce social inequalities. Over time these standards became an ‘intangible heritage’ employed in neoliberal urban policies. In response, five ‘Re-Gårda’ resistance strategies emerged to contest Gårda’s future. Resistance groups uncovered new values for Gårda, curating the vision with the slogan ‘have a coffee in Gårda’, and structuring the narrative ‘upgrade Gårda’. This challenged the dominant discourse ‘demolish’ or ‘conserve’ Gårda, and resulted in a government decision to protect Gårda as a ‘heritage site’. Investigating heritage and resistance in Gårda helped us reveal the potential of resistance in challenging the limits of authorised urban and heritage discourses, and in realising socially equal and just cities.     

Simultaneous love: an argument on love,modernity and the feminist subject at the beginning of the twentieth century

This article explores an argument on love as it was articulated within the framework of the ‘New Ethics’ sexual reform in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. While many commentaries on the alienating impact of modernity projected authenticity onto the ‘non‐modern’ woman and her love, the feminist authors at issue in this article promote ‘modern love’ as a medium of women's participation in modernity. Furthermore, they address the problem of love's temporality and non‐exclusivity. Yet, the engagement with these topics is a tricky one because non‐exclusivity and impermanence are at the same time dismissed as ‘decadent’ ways of loving and attributed to ‘archaic’ Europe and non‐European cultures.     

Queerly situated? Exploring negotiations of trans queer subjectivities at work and within community spaces in the UK

While traditional perspectives on transgender from some strands of feminism and within medical/psychoanalytical discourse have argued that transgender people conform to and reproduce gender stereotypes, queer theory has celebrated transgender as a site that highlights the social and cultural construction of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ and, moreover, as a symbol of transgressive gender possibility. Both of these readings ignore the complexities of lived trans experiences and identifications. By evaluating a queer reading of trans through recent empirical research into transgender identities, I suggest that while trans identifications certainly queer binary models of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, such transgressions are materially, culturally, socially and spatially contingent. The article draws on empirical research to explore the ways in which access to queer subjectivities is constrained by, and negotiated alongside, the locales of the workplace and community spaces.     

The stories rocks can tell: Marie Stopes' evolutionary narratives of plant sex in New Brunswick's Fern Ledges

This article discusses British pioneer in birth control and palaeobotanist Marie Stopes' visit to Saint John New Brunswick's ‘Fern Ledges’ as an important historical episode for feminist geography. By considering the relationship between Stopes' inquiries into plant sex and human sex, this article explores feminist and queer studies' constructions of ‘natural’ bodies alongside environmental constructions of ‘natural’ environments. Stopes' work is useful in showing how early twentieth century plant-breeding and human sexual politics intersected through understanding sex as a perfectible technique for producing better bodies across plant, animal and human boundaries. This argument is developed along three significant sites that show how dynamic relationships between bodies and places are mutually constituted. The first site focuses on early twentieth century evolutionary thought which made it possible to conceive of linkages between plants and humans in their sexual lives. The second site is Stopes' experience of place in the ‘Fern Ledges’ through a palaeobotanical investigation of plants, which were read ‘backwards’ through human social categories of kinship, family, race and nation. The final site is an examination of Stopes' popular sex manuals as ecological texts that give specific attention to plant agency in shaping narratives of human sexual politics.     

Trans geographies,embodiment and experience

Queer geographers have long been interested in the interconnections between sexuality and space. With queer theorizing as its hallmark, queer geographical research has made substantial contributions to our understandings of genders, sexualities and embodiment and their constitution in, and production of, space and place. This article examines how trans scholarship intersects with several themes central to queer geographical research – subjectivity/performativity; experience/embodiment; and the historical, political and social constitution of what are now called ‘traditional’ LGBTQ or ‘queer’ urban spaces – and offers geographers interested in intersections between sexuality, gender and the body, alternative and challenging avenues of inquiry. This scholarship highlights, in part, the discontinuities and silences embedded in so-called LGBTQ and queer communities and spaces and points to the need to explore more particularly historical and political conceptualizations of the formations of subjectivities, identities and forms of embodiment in play in these spaces.     

Queering code/space: the co-production of socio-sexual codes and digital technologies

The mutual production of space by sexuality and technology has been differently addressed in the often-disparate disciplinary pursuits of queer geographies and critical studies of technology in geography. Building on Dodge and Kitchin’s ‘code/space,’ we highlight how studies of technology in geography are already concerned with questions of sexuality through the examination of biopolitics and the regulation of bodies, together with the (re-)establishment of new and old lines between the public and the private. The immanence of sexuality in code/space foregrounds the importance of spatial processes characterised by their difference and normativity in the geographies of technology. Queer geographies critically examine such different experiences and processes of differentiation through space in their nuanced conceptualisations of spatial regulation and transgression. We illustrate how these two bodies of geographical scholarship might be synthesised by outlining three approaches for studies of ‘queer code/space.’ To show how there are a variety of relationships between sexuality, code, and space, we play on the double entendre of ‘code’ as a set of social rules and norms, and ‘code’ as the set of algorithmic instructions underlying software systems. In both senses, codes constrain forms of intimate life, but can also transgress, disrupt, and distribute the norm. To queer code/space is to emphasise the complexities of difference and normativity in living with technologies, where technologies might both proliferate and regulate socio-spatial experience.     

Samuel Butler's Sheep

Alice Stopford Green, widow of proto-social and Teutonic nationalist historian J.R. Green, who went on to become an Irish nationalist historian and campaigner, complicates our view of fin-de-siècle women writers. Surprisingly for an amateur historian in an age of professionalization, she took a consciously separatist position, privileging the particular over the general, and defining her writing as both female and Irish.

This article focuses on Stopford Green's 1915 epilogue to her husband's Short History of the English People (1874), and her startlingly anguished periodical article of 1897 from Nineteenth Century, to demonstrate a separatism both bold and self-aware.‘Woman's Place in the World of Letters’ (1897) prefigures Cixous in its call for an écriture feminine. It views women as utterly alien to the established order of this world. Stopford Green at once acquiesces with female essentialisation – ‘woman’ comes in the singular – and undermines it by insisting that woman's true nature is almost never seen. In the ‘Epilogue’ (1915), which updates her husband's narrative to her war-torn present, Stopford Green voices jingoistic rhetoric, but employs unobtrusive asides to distance herself from these calls to imperialism. Through such surreptitious means, she uses her late-husband's popular textbook as the conduit of subversive ideas, both voicing and subverting his English nationalism.     

Écrire la (non-)violence : le cas de Laëtitia ou la fin des hommes d’Ivan Jablonka

This article analyses Ivan Jablonka’s Laëtitia ou la fin des hommes, which garnered three major prizes in the fall of 2016 (Le Prix Littéraire du Monde, Le Médicis et Le Prix des Prix) while also receiving quasi-unanimous acclaim from French press and media. My purpose is to explain how Jablonka’s writing contributes to exposing, denouncing and even, as far as possible ex post facto and by means of a text, undertaking a kind of reparation of the masculine violence inflicted on the 18-year-old young woman not only at the end, but throughout her entire life. To this end, the paradigm of violence laid out by Lévinas and Derrida will allow us to explore the ethics and poetics of non-violence. If on the one hand Jablonka’s text reveals the subjective involvement of the researcher and writer, we will see on the other hand that his project carries social, political and human stakes: his writing of a ‘crime story’ constitutes a manner of understanding the tragedy in the context of French society, with its social, judiciary and political institutions.     

Translation on Trial: The Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776) in Sweden

Tracing the international career of the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights to Sweden via France, this article is a study in the translation of politics and the politics of translation. Specifically, it shows how the Swedish translator, physician and publisher Lorents Münter Philipson (1765–1851) reached for it in 1792 to add to domestic arguments against hereditary office, the purpose of which, the article argues, was to revive and legitimise a more indigenous but by now slumbering rights revolution. The article first outlines the reception of America in Sweden and the ways in which Sweden figured in American debates. It then provides a detailed analysis of the trial that ensued as a response to the Swedish translation of the Virginia Declaration. Having reconstructed the process of transmission and the trial, during which the translator was charged with attacking Sweden's monarchical constitution by means of ‘wrongly’ translating the term ‘magistrate’, the article places the translation of the declaration in political context. The contextual analysis shows that translating the declaration at this particular point in time makes most sense against the background of the events unfolding in revolutionary France, which the translator hoped would influence political developments in Sweden and which the authorities sought to suppress.     

White gloves,feminist fists: race,nation and the feeling of ‘vintage’ in femme movements

This article raises the question of how the cultural politics of race and nation manifest within contemporary queer femme movements, performances and aesthetic practices. Focussing on the feeling of ‘vintage’, I specifically examine symbols, icons and aesthetics used in projects to queer femininity that invoke ‘the 1950s’. Grounded in femme-inist multi-sited ethnographic research in a movement to which I also belong, I draw on interviews and participant observation in queer subcultural spaces and analyse two examples of ‘vintage’ iconography within contemporary femme organizing where ‘vintage’ is a form of archival activism that also relates to a broader cultural imaginary of racialized femininity. Then I turn to an example of queer performance where ‘vintage’ is used as a critique of imperialism and whiteness. In closing, I discuss how the feeling of ‘vintage’ relates to whiteness and to a form of imperialist nostalgia.