Vulnerability in Scandinavian Art and Culture
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Vulnerability in Scandinavian Art and Culture Edited by Adriana Margareta Dancus Mats Hyvönen · Maria Karlsson Vulnerability in Scandinavian Art and Culture Adriana Margareta Dancus · Mats Hyvönen · Maria Karlsson Editors Vulnerability in Scandinavian Art and Culture Editors Adriana Margareta Dancus Mats Hyvönen University of South-Eastern Norway Uppsala University Bakkenteigen/Borre, Norway Uppsala, Sweden Maria Karlsson Uppsala University Uppsala, Sweden ISBN 978-3-030-37381-8 ISBN 978-3-030-37382-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37382-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020. This book is an open access publication. Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa- tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Miemo Penttinen - miemo.net This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Acknowledgements This book has developed out of a seminar on vulnerability in Scandinavia organized by Adriana Margareta Dancus in Kristiansand in December 2017. The seminar was funded by the Faculty of Humanities and Educa- tion at the University of Agder. We want to thank the University of Agder for their financial support, which allowed researchers across disci- plines, university affiliations and national borders to meet and have productive discussions that eventually resulted in the current publication. Our many thanks go also to the interdisciplinary research programme Engaging Vulnerability at Uppsala University. Their generous funding made it possible for the editors to have optimal contact in the last phase of the project and to publish this anthology in Open Access. In addi- tion, the academic libraries connected to the University of South-Eastern Norway and the University of Agder have contributed with funds to enable publication of this book in Open Access. Thank you to all these institutions for supporting the effort of scholars in humanities to make an impact outside their immediate research communities. We are also indebted to the Scandinavian artists that have given permission to publish images of their works: cartoonist Sara Olausson, the theatre group Insti- tutet, and painter, director and pilot Simone Aaberg Kærn. The two blind peer reviewers have provided constructive criticism and insightful comments that have motivated us and helped the editors in making impor- tant editorial decisions, for which we are grateful. We also wish to express our deep appreciation to all the contributors to this edited volume, who v vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS have engaged with vulnerability in such a perceptive and nuanced way, and for an overall excellent collaboration throughout the project. Last, but not least, many thanks to the Palgrave Macmillan team for trusting the project, for optimal communication throughout and for excellent guid- ance in all phases of the publication process. Contents 1 Mobilizing Vulnerability in Scandinavian Art and Culture 1 Adriana Margareta Dancus, Mats Hyvönen and Maria Karlsson Part I Gendered Bodies and Scandinavian Privilege 2 Conditional Vulnerability in the Films of Ruben Östlund 19 Asbjørn Grønstad 3 The Mother, the Hero, and the Refugee: Gendered Framings of Vulnerability in Margreth Olin’s De andre (2012) and Leo Ajkic’s Flukt (2017) 33 Elisabeth Oxfeldt 4 Shared, Shamed and Archived Images of Vulnerable Bodies: On the Nexus of Media, Feminism and Freedom of Speech in Scandinavia 55 Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen vii viii CONTENTS Part II The Vulnerable Subject and the Welfare State 5 Nowhere Home: The Waiting of Vulnerable Child Refugees 81 Odin Lysaker 6 Vulnerability When Fecundity Fails: Infertility and Assisted Reproductive Technologies in The Bridge 103 Melissa Gjellstad 7 Uses of Vulnerability: Two Eras of Social Commitment in Swedish TV Drama? 127 Per Vesterlund Part III Societies of Perfection and Resisting Normalcy 8 Vulnerability and Disability in Contemporary Nordic Literature: Linn Ullmann’s Grace and Sofi Oksanen’s Baby Jane 151 Jenny Bergenmar 9 Life of a Fatso: Young, Fat and Vulnerable in a Scandinavian Society of Perfection 173 Elise Seip Tønnessen 10 Vulnerable Viewer Positions: Queer Feminist Activists Watching Paradise Hotel 195 Fanny Ambjörnsson and Ingeborg Svensson Part IV Mobilising the Pain of Others 11 The Art of Begging 223 Adriana Margareta Dancus CONTENTS ix 12 Partitioning Vulnerabilities: On the Paradoxes of Participatory Design in the City of Malmö 247 Erling Björgvinsson and Mahmoud Keshavarz 13 Facing War: On Veterans, Wounds, and Vulnerability in Danish Public Discourse and Contemporary Art 267 Ann-Katrine Schmidt Nielsen 14 The Politics of True Crime: Vulnerability and Documentaries on Murder in Swedish Public Service Radio’s P3 Documentary 291 Mats Hyvönen, Maria Karlsson and Madeleine Eriksson Index 315 Notes on Contributors Fanny Ambjörnsson has a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology and is Asso- ciate Professor of Gender Studies in the Department of Ethnology, History of Religion and Gender Studies at Stockholm University. Her research interests include youth studies, queer theory and activism, queer temporality and care work. Among her recent publications is a book on the practice of cleaning, Tid att städa. Om städningens praktik och politik (Ordfront, 2018), an (updated) introduction to queer theory and politics Vad är queer? (Natur & Kultur, 2016) and “Time to Clean—On Resis- tance and the Temporality of Cleaning” in Sociologisk Forskning (2019). Jenny Bergenmar is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion at the Univer- sity of Gothenburg. Her research interests include Nordic fin-de-siècle literature, digital humanities, and disability in literature and life writing. She has previously published articles on autism; for example, ‘Translation and Untellability. Autistic Subjects in Autobiographical Discourse’, LIR Journal 2016, no. 6; and ‘Autism and the Question of the Human’, Liter- ature and Medicine 2015, no. 1. She is currently working with a citizen humanities project and finishing a book about the European reception of Swedish women writers in the nineteenth century with colleagues at her department. Erling Björgvinsson is Professor of Design at the School of Design and Crafts, Faculty of Fine Arts, Gothenburg University. A central topic of xi xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS research is participatory politics in design and art—in particular, in rela- tion to urban spaces, and the interaction between public institutions and citizens. He has published in international design and art journals and anthologies, and he is the co-editor of the international art research journal PARSE. Adriana Margareta Dancus is Associate Professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway. Dancus researches at the crossroads of gender and ethnicity studies, with a focus on contemporary Scandinavian film and literature. Her most recent book, Exposing Vulnerability: Self-Mediation in Scandinavian Films by Women (Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press, 2019), is a cultural and socio-political analysis of contemporary films by Scandinavian women as they use their own experiences with glob- ally relevant issues such as race, gender, mental illness, bullying and the trauma of migration. Madeleine Eriksson is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology within the GENPARENT project at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI). Her research focuses on lesbian couple’s transitions from part- ners to parents. In particular, she is interested in the reasoning and the realization of the division of paid work, housework and care related tasks. Melissa Gjellstad is Professor and Norwegian Programme Coordinator at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. Since 2014, Gjellstad has also spent summers teaching Norwegian literature at the University of Oslo International Summer School. Gjellstad’s research interests revolve around gender studies and representations of mothers and fathers in millennial Norwegian literature.