Is there a non-socialist Swedish feminism?

Introduction

Sweden is internationally renowned as a just welfare society in which gender equality permeates all spheres of life: a gender equality paradise according to many. International measurements have largely counted Sweden and the other Nordic countries as the best places in the world for women to live. ¹ But is this an unequivocal truth? Even if Sweden is no longer first place in the rankings since 2007, it fell to number four in 2016, the answer should be yes regarding many aspects of everyday life and civil and sexual rights. However, these hard won rights should be carefully studied to avoid contributing to ethnocentric propaganda and the reproduction of what Dahl (2018: 1024) calls a Swedish gendered and sexual exceptionalism – referring to an overall cultural identity that reproduces heterosexuality among other hegemonic norms. Nonetheless, one of the feminist successes in Sweden has undoubtedly been the capacity to articulate feminist demands in political programmes and strategies and the foundation of the ‘Feministiskt Initiativ’, F!, parliamentary party in 2005. Over the course of its short history, F! has consistently struggled with the question of the political ideology behind the societal project that the organization represents. In their presentation on the party’s homepage we read:

There is a lack of political direction in order to tackle these challenges. The Feminist Initiative puts gender equality and human rights at the top of the political agenda. Our ideas are based on antiracist feminism and we think that politics should be about more than economic growth. Left and right wing perspectives are not irrelevant, but discrimination, racism and sexism do not disappear automatically with socialism. Neither does liberalism, with its focus on individual freedoms, remove the structural inequalities in our societies. That is why the world needs ideologically independent feminist political parties. (www.feministisktinitiativ.se)

Intersectionality comes forward

In 2002, I co-edited the anthology Maktens (o)lika förklädnader – kön, ras och etnicitet i det postkoloniala Sverige (The (un)equal disguises of power – gender, race and ethnicity in postcolonial Sweden), together with my colleagues Paulina de los Reyes and Diana Mulinari, which included the work of 12 authors from various academic institutions who addressed postcolonial feminism in Sweden. The book introduced the concept of intersectionality into the Nordic context, and was a tribute to pioneer Wuokko Knocke who had inspired many people in the Nordic countries with her courageous writing on discrimination against migrant women workers in Sweden. Part of our motivation was the finding that despite her important, relevant and high-quality scientific production, Knocke’s work had not been recognized by the Swedish feminist academic world. We shared a frustration at how what we called Swedish mainstream feminism failed to include women other than white Swedish middle-class heterosexual writers and activists in their struggle for a gender equal society. There was a need to hear these voices in the public debate and the book was met with censure by many colleagues in the Nordic countries.

Almost two decades later, much has happened in the field of Swedish postcolonial feminist studies. Many young researchers have emerged both inside and outside academia, taking inspiration from important voices from outside Sweden, including Audre Lorde, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Gloria Anzaldúa and Sara Ahmed, to name but a few. Articles, anthologies, doctoral dissertations and popular science work that have been published since the 2002 anthology provide an optimistic picture of the field’s growth. The postcolonial feminist collective has entered into an important alliance with queer feminists, and it is palpably present in activism. New generations are taking over, making demands and pushing to occupy new spaces from which racialized migrant women have historically been excluded. But we should not forget that the advance of the anti-racist movement is happening in a time of increasing racism. Although the generalized refusal to admit that racism is a structural component of Swedish society that is experienced in seminar rooms, on social media, in the media in general and in public spaces has waned, it has not disappeared completely.

Welfare abandonment and racialization

Sweden has internationally been described as an egalitarian welfare society (Esping-Andersen, 1990). Although that image should be strongly nuanced (the class structure of society was never deposed by social democratic regimes) and definitely updated (social democracy has turned into a rather neoliberal centrist political force), it is still common every now and then to fall into discussions with colleagues abroad who still see Sweden as a defender of social (and gender) equality. The neoliberal Swedish turn was announced conceptually in the 1980s with a changed language that replaced the slogans of solidarity and justice with new terms such as individual freedom, efficiency and rationalization (Boréus, 1994). An attempt to materialize the shift had been made as early as the 1970s, but the time for a neoliberal transformation was not yet ripe. The workers’ unions were strong and did not accept the new terms. Moreover, the discourses inherent to neoliberalism were not sufficiently widespread. An ideological change was necessary (Harvey, 2007). In the new rhetoric during the 1980s, the tone became more and more aggressive against welfare, and the state’s involvement in the economy was made a scapegoat for the alleged economic stagnation in the country. The neoliberal order began to become evident through a big set of liberalizing reforms between 1991 and 1994, and was consolidated in 1995 with Sweden’s entry into the EU. Welfare has not disappeared, but it has changed from state-regulated to market-regulated. Built into the Swedish model is a mixed form of neoliberalism, which is reflected in a partial dismantling of the welfare system. The model is based on a subsidized privatization, i.e. a system that continues to be financed by the common purse (taxes) but with a clear deterioration in the quality of services (Nilsson, 2019). Therefore, the Swedish version of neoliberalism can be called a ‘limited neoliberalism’ (Harvey, 2007: 122). Sweden is identified as the one country in the world that has undergone the fastest privatization in a number of social areas (SvD, 2012).

The established neoliberal scheme has resulted in an increased social gap, as well as increased unemployment and marginalization of the unemployed (Salonen, 2012). The model was reformed in the second half of the 2000s and its negative effects have consequently been distributed unevenly and selectively between people and places; while the rich have become richer, the poor have become worse off (Salonen, 2012). Following Standing (2011), one can talk about the Swedish precariat (see also Sohl and Molina, 2012) as a new phenomenon within the racialized working class (Mulinari and Neergaard, 2004). This social polarization is also reflected geographically in the uneven distribution of closures and savings between districts and areas in each city. Housing segregation and the process of racialization of space within the city have intensified systematically since the 1970s, partly as a result of the shocking liberalization of the housing sector that started in 1991. The racialization of urban spaces and social polarization have developed hand in hand. The accelerated process of privatization in the housing sector has shaped cities in which the social gap is increasingly visible in space. Racialization has also been sustained by a continuous and systematic racialized and sexualized stigmatization of suburbs that has transformed both place and population into ‘problems’, ‘criminals’ and ‘different’. Whereas migrant men are represented as patriarchal, violent and even as terrorists; migrant women, considered the objects of Muslim patriarchy, are victimized as representing passivity (Ericsson et al., 2002). By highlighting a special patriarchal system that only exists in ‘other cultures’, meaning Muslim cultures, mainstream feminism has adopted a cultural racist discourse, which has been present in dominant discussions about honour killings and honour violence for the last two decades. The particular gender construction of cultural difference has marked a chasm between the struggles against sexualized violence affecting white Swedish women, and the separate struggles against violence in which Muslim women are the victims (Alinia, 2011). The privatization and marketization of welfare has hit hardest in these racially and sexually stigmatized neighbourhoods, where a rapid deterioration of welfare services has taken place alongside rising unemployment.

Racialized capitalism is also gendered and fighting it requires a strategic resistance movement anchored in an intersectional socialism.

In some of my fieldwork research on urban segregation and social inequality, I met people who complained about the impact of racialized local austerity measures of cuts in welfare services that especially affect suburban racialized working-class neighbourhoods. During a visit to Rinkeby in northwest Stockholm, a young man expressed himself dramatically as he reflected on the series of closures that he and his neighbours had witnessed over the last 10 years: ‘the Swedish state has abandoned us’. He told me about the closed leisure centre, the closing of the offices of the employment services and social security, as well as the removal of ATMs, the 2000 lost jobs, the failed attempt to renovate the local shopping centre and of the residential buildings plagued by mould and vermin. This is further confirmed by a national investigation from 2005, in which many people from several racialized neighbourhoods around the country participated. The study concluded that services for residents were poorer in areas where there were many people with a foreign background than in other areas. The participants in this national investigation declared that the housing companies in these areas ‘do as they please’, and that the residents do not have much say. These companies ‘raise rents’ and ‘lower the heat’ in housing and do not enter into dialogue with residents. On another occasion, in a conversation with a young woman from a local activist organization in Gothenburg, she also reflected on the changed view of local welfare: ‘they only send police officers to prevent crime, but is it not the state and welfare that should prevent crime? Shouldn’t the police arrest criminals?’ This is in line with the general picture that research provides about racialized and stigmatized suburbs in large and medium-sized cities, as well as cuts and deterioration in all welfare areas. Racialized and stigmatized neighbourhoods have experienced an increased police presence and more violent behaviour on the part of the police. The state has simply switched social welfare to police; ‘cannons instead of butter’. There are many stories of provocation by the police before protests arise (Dikeç, 2017; Schclarek Mulinari, 2020). The normalization of surveillance and violence at the local level through the increased presence of police and private guards in the city suburbs is mirrored by the country’s actions at the global level, exemplified by the Swedish troops sent to Afghanistan and Swedish arms exports. In policing the city, officers make use of racial profiling to stop people in public spaces, such as metro stations and on the streets in the suburbs (Schclarek Mulinari, 2018, 2020). Institutional racism is a constitutive element of capitalism (Bhattacharyya, 2018).

This view of racism as not only functional but also inherent within capitalism is necessary to understand why racism in both practice and discourse is stubbornly reproduced despite the extensive production of research from the postcolonial field, and despite some successes achieved by anti-racist activism.

The presence of postcolonial theory in Swedish research has a short but intense history. From the first translations from mostly Anglo Saxon literature and later to research produced in Sweden, the road has been anything but easy and smooth. The introduction of intersectional studies on racist sexism and racialized class oppression was met in the 2000s by a solid reluctance to engage with it within both the non-academic and the academic worlds. Seminars in which the subject was raised, rather than encountering an open attitude towards discussing the structures and practices producing and reproducing racism, provoked upset, and postcolonial scholars were considered to be unfairly accusing their Swedish colleagues of being racists. Common arguments for dismissing the very idea of the existence of Swedish racism, were, for example, that Sweden neither had colonies nor participated in the slave trade, or that the country had stayed away from war for hundreds of years and had also maintained a neutral position during the Second World War. Nazism and fascism were in these conceptions alleged to have been marginal phenomena in Sweden, belonging to the past. But Sweden has a well-documented history of state racial biopolitics. The hegemonic ideology of racism that supported the pseudo-scientific knowledge produced at Uppsala’s Institute for Race Biology with full state funds – after a unanimous decision by parliament in 1922 – had been totally ignored. So too had the biologically racist demographic policy in the name of which thousands of sterilizations on women’s (and also some men’s) bodies were practised as recently as the 1970s, with particular violence directed against the bodies of the Roma and the Sami people. Neither participation in slave trade (Ekman, 1975) nor the colonial repression of the native Sami population and the occupation of their territories has been narrated as expressions of Swedish racism in history books, which have instead remained silent on these episodes. Instead, racism has been defined in official documents only in relation to the German Holocaust and the Second World War, and ‘Swedish racists’ were only those few who had taken a stand in support of Nazi Germany. ²

Breaking this colonial understanding of Swedish history, the first generation of Swedish postcolonial scholars from the 1990s associated structural discrimination with racialized labour and housing markets, as well as racialized politics and cultural life. For the past 20 years, research has broadly evidenced the fact that racism does exist in the Swedish state institutions, whereas paradoxically it has been denied everywhere. Race biology was still taught in schools and at Swedish universities in the 1970s. Nonetheless, racism in Sweden was still being denied during the 1990s. A group of postcolonial researchers later raised the issue of the denial of racism in the Nordic countries (de los Reyes et al., 2002; Keskinen et al., 2009, 2019; Loftsdóttir and Jensen, 2012). One relevant question has been why it has been so difficult for Nordic societies to admit that racism is embedded in the very construction of the nation itself, and that the Nordic countries are no exceptions to this rule. In fact, this denial seems to be a constitutive aspect of Nordic exceptionalism, to the extent that conceptions of a culture characterized by goodness and humanism are important components of the imagination of the modern national state formation, whereas racism, while condemned, has been displaced to other countries outside the Nordic region (Keskinen et al., 2009; Loftsdóttir and Jensen, 2012).

As research on racism and anti-racist activism has intensified, the voices of the anti-racist movement have happily multiplied. ‘We are many, we are strong’ one could argue today compared to the beginning of the 2000s. Anti-racists exist in the academy to a much greater extent today than 20 years ago, but also in cultural life, in politics and particularly in suburban activism. A network of voices from these different places is growing in strength. But as the movement has grown, a polarization has occurred. In the wake of the neoliberal turn that has been going on for more than 20 years, racism has become more noticeable. Political parties on openly race-based platforms have emerged and most of them succeeded in entering the Swedish parliament (Riksdagen) in 2010. In the most recent development, the racist party the Sweden Democrats won 22.4% of the national vote ( Aftonbladet, 25 September 2019), and (at the time of writing) is on the verge of consolidating a coalition with the traditional conservative right-wing party Moderaterna and the Christian Democratic party, as a strategy to win the coming elections. Although racism as an ideology has somehow always been part of the political establishment, it is now being re-institutionalized in a way that should sound alarm bells, and recalls the hegemonic era of racial biology. Feminism is under serious attack in this political climate (SVT, 2018).

According to many anti-racist researchers, activism and research go hand in hand. This is something that many other anti-racist feminist researchers such as Angela Davis, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Chandra Talpade Mohanty have experienced and explained in the past. Patricia Hill Collins (2012) sees a need to communicate research findings outside the academy. For scholars, it becomes crucial to participate in an open dialogue and collaboration, including ideally co-writing with those who work with anti-racist feminism in local contexts, for example in neighbourhoods which go through austerity policies, segregation, racialized stigmatization, displacement and renoviction (urban renovation with eviction); in workplaces, in trade unions, and in all potential spaces of resistance. An important question is whether an anti-racist struggle can be articulated in isolation from the class struggles and the fight against patriarchy. In 1998 Paulina de los Reyes wrote a critical article entitled ‘The problematic sisterhood’, which was historically important for Swedish feminism. Since then, Swedish feminism has undergone an intensive self-critique regarding its capacity to include different experiences of patriarchy and to practise gender solidarity, which proves time and time again to be still valid and necessary. De los Reyes did not think that sisterhood is not possible, but she pointed out the difficulties it faces when the relationship between women from different social and racialized backgrounds is not put into a critical context in which surrounding power relations and the ideological power systems within which these relationships are built, are clarified.

So, back to the question of whether there is a feminism outside the sphere of socialism. Following Bhattacharyya’s (2018) work on racial capitalism, sexism and racism are integral parts of a capitalist power logic. They are also functionally integrated constituents of a racist and sexist exploitation of the labour force, for which a considerable amount of empirical evidence has been gathered. Thus, I am inclined to believe that a political group like feminist liberals or conservative feminists who defend the free market and a global neoliberal order and its foundations in violence and militarization cannot in all honesty support a feminist project. An anti-capitalist position is fundamental both for the articulation of feminist struggles and for the articulation of anti-racist struggles. It is, therefore, both credible and fruitful to articulate the fight against patriarchy and racism around a network of progressive organizations that oppose the system of norms that capitalism has been shaping over centuries of exploitation and the ideological legitimization of this exploitation.

Final comments

Swedish postcolonial feminists inside but also outside academia have struggled to put the debate on racism within the feminist agenda. Postcolonial feminist scholars have always participated in anti-racist networks and organizations. For postcolonial feminists, activism has been both a matter of course and a necessity. Postcolonial feminist scholars ‘put their finger on the wound’ of the kind of racial relations that have characterized Sweden since the Second World War. Moreover, they have changed national political agendas by raising burning questions about racism and structural discrimination, about growing nationalism, about the racialization of the city and working life, about the mass media racist representation of the Other, about the new racialized working class and about intersectional relations of power and oppression.

Finally, I would like to argue for a sharpening of the definition of the postcolonial feminist political agenda, and support for the overarching goal of social justice. I call, as Diana Mulinari expressed it during the 2017 national election campaign:

…for a voting movement where it is possible to discuss how we can organize the society for enjoyment and justice and not, as today, for suffering and profit maximization. I wish for political visions and not well-adjusted rhetoric in the search for more votes. I wish we, transnational (left) feminists can work together during the electoral movement to stop femonationalism, homonationalism and the ‘national’ left. (Mulinari, 2017)