The bodies of others in Swedish feminism

Abstract

The body – or, more specifically, women’s bodies – has long been one of feminism’s central topics. This discussion has ranged from explorations of the cultural meaning of biology to the challenging of classification systems regulating bodies not only culturally coded as female or male but also understood through race regimes. This article seeks to explore the location of bodies within Swedish feminism, examining how women’s bodies are understood, designated and acted upon in feminist agendas. Our focus is on the location that bodies take in political conflicts among and between feminists. In particular, we explore the impact of the presence of black bodies within the field of Swedish feminism. On a theoretical level, this article bridges decolonial feminist contributions of Black, Chicano and Latin American feminist thought on the body. The research methodology combined autoethnography with feminist ethnography, including an analysis of 25 narratives of young feminist activists engaged in public resistance against, and confrontation with, the growing presence of right-wing xenophobic social movements and political parties in the public sphere.     

‘They have to abide by our laws … and stuff’: ethnonationalism masquerading as civic nationalism

The long established distinction between civic nationalism and ethnonationalism is useful heuristically to understand different dimensions of nationalism and perhaps track a movement from ethnic forms to civic allegiances, though some have challenged its empirical veracity and others question the normative implications of such a distinction. This paper demonstrates the ways in which the two are elided in everyday discourses about migrants in Australia. We argue suspicion of cultural difference, identified more than three decades ago as the new racism, has given way to talk of the need for migrants to ‘follow the law’. This serves rhetorically to reinforce the notion that migrants, often implied to overlap with the category ‘Muslims’, are insisting on breaking the law and/or changing it and are therefore culturally incompatible with a modern liberal democracy. We argue that since ethnic nationalism, like racism, is out of favour normatively, ethnic nationalist arguments are now superficially concealed beneath the acceptable language of civic nationalism. The manner in which this occurs is mapped discursively using data from a corpus of twenty seven focus groups conducted around Australia.     

Decolonizing Food Justice: Naming,Resisting, and Researching Colonizing Forces in the Movement

Over the past 15 years social movements for community food security, food sovereignty, and food justice have organized to address the failures of the multinational, industrial food system to fairly and equitably distribute healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate real food. At the same time, these social movements, and research about them, re‐inscribe white, patriarchal systems of power and privilege. We argue that in order to correct this pattern we must relocate our social movement goals and practices within a decolonizing and feminist leadership framework. This framework challenges movement leadership and scholarship by white people who uncritically assume a natural order of leadership based on academic achievement. We analyze critical points in our collaboration over the last four years using these frameworks. Doing so highlights the challenges and possibilities for a more inclusive food justice movement and more just scholarship.     

“Our life is a struggle”: Respectable Gender Norms and Black Resistance to Policing

This paper investigates the role of women in anti‐racist campaigns against policing in post‐2011 England. It argues that imperial discourses about gender norms and respectability have helped to shape how race and crime are constituted in the contemporary period. Women's resistance to police racism has received scholarly attention from black feminists in North America; such attention has been less in Britain, particularly since the 1990s. While influential analyses of policing in Britain have deployed a post‐colonial lens, gender and women's resistance are rarely the primary focus. This paper significantly develops debates on gender, race and policing, by arguing that the colonial roots of race and gender norms are fundamental to conceptualising one of the key findings of the field research which informs this paper: that women lead almost every campaign against a black death in police custody in post‐2011 England. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews with activists, ethnographic observations at protests and scholar‐activist participation in campaigns against black deaths in custody, this paper demonstrates how 18^th and 19^th century imperial discourses on respectability and nation do not simply contextualise racialised policing in the contemporary period, but expose the racialised and gendered norms that legitimise racist policing in modern Britain.     

RACE AND ANIMAL‐BREEDING: A HYBRIDIZED HISTORIOGRAPHY

Because it associates animals with one of the most vital topics in human history, the historiography of the cross‐connections between race and animal‐breeding is at once controversial and inspiring. This article wishes to position this historiography in a more systematic framework than has been done thus far by examining both its merits and failings along with the more and less appropriate ways to write on the subject. The article identifies two main narratives in race–animal‐breeding historiography: the influence narrative and the projection narrative. The first reveals how perceptions of animal breeds and livestock‐breeding practices influenced the rise of racialist and eugenic worldviews. By contrast, the second shows how conceptualizations of human racial segregation contributed to the construction of ideas about the subdivision of domestic animal species into different breeds. The article argues that despite the projection narrative's inherent anthropomorphism, this perspective renders it possible to draft a nonanthropocentric history of the cross‐connections between race and animal‐breeding with a focus on human–animal relations rather than on human society.     

What does a republican government with Donald Trump as President of the USA mean for children,youth and families?

This viewpoint outlines the likely impact of the election of a Republican government with Donald Trump as President on children, youth and families. It focuses primarily on the impact on undocumented and mixed-status families, and briefly addresses the impacts on children’s health services, juvenile justice and education.     

Geographies of Isolation: How Workers (Don’t) Access Support for Problems at Work

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the social and spatial processes adopted by workers who face problems at work. Using interview data with minority ethnic workers in three local communities in London, the paper explores the mechanism people use to seek help and advice and what resources are available from local community organisations. Key findings suggest that many workers, both unionised and non‐unionised find themselves isolated and unable to access the support they need.     

German modernity,barbarous Slavs and profit‐seeking Jews: the cultural racism of nationalist liberals

This paper examines emblematic texts by two important protagonists of post‐1848 liberalism in Germany, Gustav Freytag and Heinrich von Treitschke, focusing on their treatment of Jews and Poles. The paper analyses the social content of their statements and argues that the elements of anti‐Semitism and anti‐Slav racism that they contain were motivated by the specific kind of nationalist liberalism that frames their affirmation of the process of modernisation. This affirmation was directed against the Poles on the one hand, seen as backward Easterners who had to be pushed into civilisation by Prussian–German colonialism, and, on the other hand, the Jews, largely perceived as representing the wrong kind of modernity against which benign (supposedly German) modernity had to be protected. At the same time, the image of the Jew in Freytag and Treitschke also participates in that of the backward Easterner, permitting to see undesirable, allegedly Jewish aspects of modernity also as distortions resulting from an alien and ancient culture. This analysis has consequences for theorisations of both liberalism and nationalism: it suggests that the racism and anti‐Semitism of nationalist liberals were intrinsically related to core aspects of the liberal world‐view rather than being merely contingent opinions held by particular individuals. It also indicates that the nationalism of many German post‐1848 liberals was ethnic as well as liberal. In this way, the paper contributes to the growing body of literature discussing the illiberal aspects of liberalism as well as the shortcomings of the long‐established conceptual dichotomy of ethnic vs. liberal nationalism.     

Becoming imperialist: Italian colonies in Fascist textbooks for primary schools

The essay explores the way in which primary school textbooks in Fascist Italy played an important part in disseminating the colonial discourse. Starting from a brief overview of the education system and textbooks in Liberal Italy, the essay reviews the changes made by the Fascists after 1922: Gentile's reform; the national commission for primary school textbooks; the introduction of the testo unico di Stato (single state-approved texts). These changes reveal the increasing emphasis on colonial topics and the development of the ‘new Italian man’. The impact of 1936 as a turning point in Fascist colonial policy following the conquest of Ethiopia and the proclamation of the empire of Italian East Africa is highlighted by the ways in which primary school textbooks reflected Fascist ambitions to imbue pupils with a new imperial consciousness.