Pluralistic Struggles in Gender, Sexuality and Coloniality Challenging Swedish Exceptionalism Edited by Erika Alm · Linda Berg Mikela Lundahl Hero · Anna Johansson Pia Laskar · Lena Martinsson Diana Mulinari · Cathrin Wasshede Pluralistic Struggles in Gender, Sexuality and Coloniality “There is a hegemonic narrative of Sweden as an exemplary and exceptional feminist nation-state, one that exists in a secular, migrant-friendly, and market-friendly, liberal democracy. Yet this narrative’s racial and religious exclusions and conflicts— of which there are many—have led feminists and LGBTQ activists to question the terms of normative belonging, and to probe the tensions and frictions of contemporary Sweden. This necessary and powerful collection of essays reveals both the exclusions of this exceptionalist national narrative, one that the editors and authors trenchantly term “neocolonial,” and the demands of feminist, queer and trans artists, researchers, migrants, and activists striving to produce lives that think a different Sweden: of communities that are plural, transnational, multi-racial, transformative, radical and ever-changing. —Inderpal Grewal Professor Emerita, Yale University Erika Alm • Linda Berg Mikela Lundahl Hero Anna Johansson • Pia Laskar Lena Martinsson Diana Mulinari • Cathrin Wasshede Editors Pluralistic Struggles in Gender, Sexuality and Coloniality Challenging Swedish Exceptionalism Editors Erika Alm Linda Berg Department of Cultural Sciences Umeå Centre for Gender Studies University of Gothenburg Umeå University Gothenburg, Sweden Umeå, Sweden Mikela Lundahl Hero Anna Johansson School of Global Studies Division of Social Work and Social University of Gothenburg Pedagogy Gothenburg, Sweden University West Trollhättan, Sweden Pia Laskar Department of Research and Collections Lena Martinsson National Historical Museums of Sweden Department of Cultural Sciences Stockholm, Sweden University of Gothenburg Gothenburg, Sweden Diana Mulinari Department of Gender Studies Cathrin Wasshede University of Lund Department of Sociology and Work Science Lund, Sweden University of Gothenburg Gothenburg, Västra Götalands Län, Sweden ISBN 978-3-030-47431-7 ISBN 978-3-030-47432-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47432-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021. This book is an open access publication. Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the reativeC 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 licence and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s Creative Commons licence 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. 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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Acknowledgements The work with this book is part of the research project The Futures of Genders and Sexualities: Cultural Products, Transnational Spaces and Emerging Communities and was made possible by funding from the Swedish Research Council. Assembling this collection has been a collective endeavour, in which each of the editors has taken part and contributed. The process has been challenging, immensely rewarding and involved people without whom the collection would look very different. We would like to extend our warm thanks to Amelia Derkatsch at Palgrave Macmillan for taking an immediate interest in the project, to Sharla Plant for taking over the publishing process, and to the external reviewers for feedback which contributed to the final focus of the collection. Finally, we would like to express our special thanks and gratitude to all of you who have participated through generously sharing stories, reflec- tions and expressions, and with whom we, in some cases, also have gath- ered in the streets, mobilising in a common struggle for a better future. v Contents 1 Introduction 1 Erika Alm, Linda Berg, Mikela Lundahl Hero, Anna Johansson, Pia Laskar, Lena Martinsson, Diana Mulinari, and Cathrin Wasshede 2 Public Intimacy and ‘White Feminism’: On the Vain Trust in Scandinavian Equality 19 Mikela Lundahl Hero 3 We Were Here, and We Still Are: Negotiations of Political Space Through Unsanctioned Art 49 Linda Berg and Anna Sofia Lundgren 4 1 May: Muslim Women Talk Back—A Political Transformation of Secular Modernity on International Workers’ Day 81 Lena Martinsson 5 Fat, Black and Unapologetic: Body Positive Activism Beyond White, Neoliberal Rights Discourses 113 Anna Johansson vii viii Contents 6 Rainbow Flag and Belongings/Disbelongings: Öckerö Pride and Reclaim Pride in Gothenburg, Sweden 2019 147 Cathrin Wasshede 7 Pink Porn Economy: Genealogies of Transnational LGBTQ Organising 177 Pia Laskar 8 A State Affair?: otionsN of the State in Discourses on Trans Rights in Sweden 209 Erika Alm 9 ‘Pain Is Hard to Put on Paper’: Exploring the Silences of Migrant Scholars 239 Despina Tzimoula and Diana Mulinari 10 Contesting Secularism: Religious and Secular Binary Through Memory Work 269 Linda Berg, Anna Johansson, Pia Laskar, Lena Martinsson, Diana Mulinari, and Cathrin Wasshede 11 An Epilogue 299 Erika Alm, Linda Berg, Mikela Lundahl Hero, Anna Johansson, Pia Laskar, Lena Martinsson, Diana Mulinari, and Cathrin Wasshede Author Index 307 Subject Index 311 Editors and Contributors About the Editors Erika Alm holds a PhD in History of Ideas and is Associate Professor in Gender Studies at the University of Gothenburg. Situated in intersex and trans studies, Alm has studied knowledge production on trans and inter- sex in medicine and law, and activist knowledge production and organi- zation as practices of resistance. Recent publications include ‘What constitutes an in/significant organ? The vicissitudes of juridical and med- ical decision-making regarding genital surgery for intersex and trans peo- ple in Sweden’, in Body, migration (re)constructive surgeries (2019) and ‘Make/ing room in transnational surges: Pakistani Khwaja Sira organiz- ing’, in Dreaming global change, doing local feminisms (2018) and a co- edited special issue of Gender, Place and Culture, ‘Ungendering Europe: critical engagements with key objects in feminism’ (2018, with Mia Liinason). Linda Berg holds a PhD in Ethnology and is Associate Professor in Gender Studies at Umeå Centre for Gender Studies, Umeå University, Sweden. Berg returns to concepts such as solidarity, subjectivity and place ix x Editors and Contributors recently through studies of street art and political mobilization. She researches and teaches within the fields of feminism, anti-racism and postcolonial studies. Anna Johansson is Senior Lecturer at University West (http://www.hv. se/) with a PhD in Sociology (1999) from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her principal areas of research are resistance studies, critical fat studies and gender studies. Among her most recent publications are ‘ISIS-chan—the meanings of the manga girl in the image warfare against the Islamic State’, Critical Studies on Terrorism (2017); Feta män. Maskulinitet, makt och motstånd [Fat men: Masculinity, power and resis- tance] (2017); ‘The Rainbow Flag as Part of the “Apartheid Wall” Assemblage: Materiality, (In)Visibility and Resistance’, Journal of Resistance Studies (2019); and Conceptualizing ‘everyday resistance’: A transdisciplinary approach (2019, with Stellan Vinthagen). Pia Laskar holds a PhD in the History of Ideas and is Associate Professor in Gender Studies at Stockholm University. Her research interests are intersections between gender, class, and race in the construction of (het- ero-)sexual norms and nationhood. Laskar’s research and teaching is the- oretically rooted in critical gender and sexuality theories and decolonial studies. Her research interests are knowledge production, medical and political history, and, in recent years, also museology and critical heritage studies. Recent publications include the method book Den outställda sexualiteten. Liten praktika för museers förändringsarbete (2019); ‘Transnational ways of belonging and queer ways of being. Exploring transnationalism through the trajectories of the rainbow flag’ (with Klapeer 2018); ‘The displaced Gaze’ (2017) and ‘The construction