Sex in/and Sweden: Sexual rights discourses and radical sexual politics in Sweden

Abstract

Tracing historical as well as current understandings that contribute to shape discourses of sexual rights, this article aims to show how particular understandings of sexuality interact in the discursive production of Sweden as a modern, rational and liberal nation. Inspired by recent developments in queer theory, I engage in a broader critique of how understandings of sexuality intersect with notions of gender, class, “race”/ethnicity and national identity. With departure in three historical points of impact for the development of sexual rights, I provide a historical contextualization to tease out the specific features of sexual rights’ discourses in this context. Guided by an interest to study how particular discourses of sexual rights come to retain a status as legitimate and “true”, I then conduct a close reading of a graphic novel, as well as of the reception of this novel. Finding that normative understandings of love and sexuality in mainstream culture sustain their status by a selective inclusion of more radical views, I show that the dominant view of sexual rights in Sweden is ambivalent. Here, I use discourse analysis to illuminate how notions of equality is constructed through processes of normalization. Drawing on these findings, I conclude the article by arguing for the need of a critical engagement with norms as collective sites for political resistance.

Keywords:

• sexuality
• gender
• subversivity
• normativity
• sexual rights

Public Interest Statement

What can we learn today from the depiction of Sweden in the late 1960s as the land of sin? And how does that fit with the characterization of Sweden in the 1990s as a women friendly nation? Clearly, in western societies, discourses of sexual rights and gender equality are linked with wider understandings of modernity, rationality and liberalism. Yet, such discourses have a certain normative effect. Tracing the historically variegated origins of present-day discourses of sexual rights in Sweden, this article examines how notions of sexuality and sexual rights come to retain their status as acceptable and true. It shows that normative understandings of love and sexuality in mainstream culture sustain their dominance by a selective inclusion of more radical views. Understanding these dynamics can support political projects in developing tools to expand limiting standards of gendered subjectivity and sexual conduct. By so doing, it can contribute to realize radical political democracy.

Notes

1. The reviews of the novel appear in a variety of publication channels, such as national and local newspapers, daily press and tabloids, print and online media, as well as established newspapers and alternative publication channels (online blog). I made a search at Mediearkivet [Media Archive], a database that archives Swedish newspaper articles, to find all reviews that had been written about this graphic novel. They were published over a three-month period (August, September and October) and I collected the reviews directly through the websites of the newspapers and the blog. Since the year of its publication, the graphic novel has been rewritten as a theatre performance and these performances have also been reviewed in the daily press. In this article, however, I have limited my analysis to study only the reviews of the graphic novel.

2. Since all reviews took a similar stance in their understandings of sexuality and love, my analysis cannot reveal any information about the potentials or limitations in different publication channels, of more radical readings. Thus, rather than studying a distinct sphere of media and publishing, my analysis sheds light on the dynamics of readings (dominant/subversive) in a wider cultural/societal arena.

3. Although the graphic novel adheres to academic customs by the inclusion source literature for example, page numbers are missing in the graphic novel, so I cannot give full references to the pages where the strips analyzed appear.

4. All quotes from the graphic novel are translated by me.

5. The brothers Richard, Louis and Per Herrey are artists, famous for winning the Eurovision Song Contest in 1984.

6. Niclas Wahlgren is a famous artist in Sweden. As with the brothers Herrey, Niclas Wahlgren is known as well-behaving, often described as “a mother’s dream.”

7. The names of these persons (with the exception for Jason Mraz and Sonny & Cher) relate to famous musical artists in Sweden, and in their cues, they repeat a line from the chorus of well-known songs.

8. For a related discussion based in a Finnish context, see Kolehmainen (2012, p. 992).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mia Liinason

Mia Liinason is Wallenberg Academy fellow and associate professor in Gender Studies at the Department of Cultural Sciences, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is researching transnational feminist and LGBTQ-activist movements. This article is part of a broader comparative research project aiming to expand our understandings of how transnational encounters in the struggle for women’s and LGBTQ-rights in Scandinavia, Turkey and Russia enable new meanings, new political subjectivities and new collective identities. Researchers in this project are also interested in studying how feminist and LGBTQ-actors understand, negotiate and articulate women’s and sexual rights in relation to particular geopolitical histories in these contexts, to which this article contributes with crucial knowledge.