Understanding Power and Performing Resistance: Swedish Feminists, Civil Society Voices, Biopolitics and “Angry” Men

Abstract

This article discusses feminist resistance in relation to different concepts of power. In particular, it analyses current debates within Swedish feminism in order to understand what perceptions of power and resistance are being harboured within these discussions. Within the Swedish feminist debate it has been suggested that the equality debate must be radicalized, creating real change instead of policy reports and political party programmes. Others, however, have argued that we must not abandon equality politics for “conflict, struggle, and revolt”. This debate is discussed from different theories of power and resistance, and we argue that different forms of power become entangled with different forms of resistance, thus creating manifold and messy forms of resistance.

Acknowledgements

The authors of this article would like to thank the anonymous reviewers appointed by NORA for valuable and constructive comments on this manuscript, as well as gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Swedish Research Council, which has awarded Lilja to undertake research on a project entitled Globalization of Resistance: Influences on Democracy Advocators in Civil Society in the South from 2010 to 2014 (project no. 2010-2298).

Notes

¹ Feminism will be used to describe a set of ideas that recognize in an explicit way that women are subordinate to men and seek to address imbalances of power between the sexes (Hannam 2007: 3).

² The term “wronged white men” indicates that an intersectional approach might be used to analyze the debate. However, in this article we do not take this approach but have instead used a Foucauldian viewpoint in order to display different patterns of power and resistance.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Evelina Johansson

Mona Lilja, Associate Professor, has a PhD in Peace and Development Research. She works at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden where she is a Researcher in Peace and Development at the School of Global Studies. Mona Lilja's area of interest is the concepts of power and resistance with special focus on the linkages between resistance and social change as well as the particularities—the character and emergence—of various forms of resistance. In focus are the discourses, performances, and identities created by those engaged in resistance practices. What relationships enable or constrain articulations of resistance? One area of interest in this regard is Cambodian women politicians and how they navigate in a context of unequal power-relations. Yet another field of interest is the emergence of “new democracies”. Recent work has been carried out, particularly with reference to the hybrid character of the Cambodian democracy. Lilja's publications on resistance and contemporary Cambodian politics have, among other things, appeared in Feminist Review, Asian Perspectives, and in the monograph Power, Resistance and Women Politicians in Cambodia (Nias Press), as well as in a number of edited books.

Mona Lilja

Evelina Johansson, is a PhD student in Gender Studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, where she is studying the relation between ethics and politics within contemporary Gender Studies. The connection between ethics and feminist thought is not a new one. In fact, it has been present in feminist thought throughout the twentieth century. In the 1990s, however, ethics is conceptualized in a radically different way. In Johansson's research she scrutinizes how the transformation of this concept can be understood, how it is connected to questions and issues within the feminist movement, and what consequences it can have for the articulation of a concrete political struggle towards change.