Privileged underdogs: the heterotopias and anti-political correctness of upper-class men in a Swedish digital space

ABSTRACT

In this article, we focus on a Swedish upper class digital space called The Good Society, where texts, videos and discussions are published. In this digital space the elite comes out publicly as underdogs in relation to the supposed hegemony of political correctness and the Swedish welfare ideology. The upper class take the position of protectors against the feminization of society and the crisis of masculinity. We argue that this space can be understood in terms of what Foucault described as a heterotopia, a form of peculiar counter-space. Using multi-sited digital ethnography we discern a playful mimicking of the state, the public, the media and public conversation. The article concludes that it is important to acknowledge and critically examine such playful and peculiar heterotopias as counter hegemonic strategies, in order to understand how digital spaces are political and serve right-wing, masculinist populist mobilization.

KEYWORDS:

• Masculinity
• digital space
• upper class
• heterotopia
• anti-gender

Introduction

Today, new communities are emerging in digital rooms, with real and potential power to transform political landscapes and set the stage for polarized and racist political agendas. Digital space transforms the social fabric of society (Robert V Kozinets 2015) and influences and expands the scope of the political (Wendy Brown 2019, Arlie Russel Hochschild 2016; Chantal Mouffe 2018). In this article, we focus on a Swedish upper class digital space called The Good Society, where text, videos and discussions are published. It is a space, as we will argue, where the elite comes out publicly as underdogs in relation to the supposed hegemony of political correctness and Swedish welfare ideology. We focus on an easily recognizable transnational discursive construction of “political will” for another society—one where it is possible to say what you actually mean, break free from political correctness, stand up for re-masculinization, and scorn what is understood as feminine and soft. The digital is always merging and anchoring with local, national and transnational contexts and discourses—in this case Sweden and the notion of welfare society. The Swedish context is—as we will argue—also important in relation to how class is understood and performed.

The aim of this article is to scrutinize the above-mentioned digital space as a performative construction of an alternative reality. We argue that this performative construction can be understood in terms of what Foucault described as a heterotopia, a form of counter-space (Michel Foucault 1986). The concept opens for a complex understanding of anti-gender and the mobilization of authoritarian political longings, taking place in the digital sphere. Foucault’s notion of heterotopia helps us understand how the idea of protecting men and desire for traditional masculinity plays out in the digital space, in a country where gender equality and secularism is viewed as national traits. This national trait of Swedish exceptionalism is a form of imaginary.

Our first contact with the digital space was during our study of anti-gender rhetoric on Twitter (Lena Martinsson and Mathias Ericson 2023), where we encountered links to the blog The Good Society and its affiliated YouTube channel. For this article, we decided to focus on this specific space (the blog and its YouTube channel) because it was so dynamic, with weekly updated articles and videos that, based on the use of a kind of DIY or Do-It-Yourself aesthetics, seemed like a closed community. While other Swedish forums on the right, such as Kvartal, Axess and Timbro, signal an ambition to be part of and to intervene in the Swedish society, The Good Society seemed more introverted and used more of a DIY-approach. It also stood out as a space of upper-class performativity where it was possible to enjoy, relax, and escape the supposed oppression of political correctness. A place to be free.

Men who are fed up with political correctness

In her ethnographic study of the Tea Party movement in the southern US state of Louisiana, Arlie Russel Hochschild (2016) describes how anti-gender, racism & precarity is intrinsically interconnected to White men’s desire to be vindicated. According to Hochschild, the movement appeal to a “deep story” and a “deep feel” of being fed up with “political correctness” and the “PC-police” who “insults you as an ignorant redneck, making you feel humiliated and mad” (Hochschild 2016, 222). The appeal of the slogan “Make America great again” is resentment and a “deep story” anchored in a feeling that “all-male areas of life—the police, the fire department, parts of the U.S. military, and the oil rigs—needed defending against this cultural erosion of manhood” (Hochschild 2016, 202f). One can relate this description to the aims of The Good Society, although the latter differs substantially from the group in Hochschild’s study—first, by being an upper-class space and, second, being located in Sweden, a country usually called one of the most gender-equal and progressive countries in the world (Ylva Habel 2012; Lena Martinsson, Gabriele Griffin and Katarina Giritli-Nygren 2016). However, the appeal to the erosion of manhood and the deep story of lost entitlement shares many similarities. In recent years, a number of scholars have called attention to the way in which rising authoritarian, conservative and ethnonationalist political regimes appeal to the revival of masculinity (Graff Agnieszka, Ratna Kapur and Suzanna D Walters 2019; Michael Kimmel 2017). Cases in point are the manner in which political leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump and Victor Orban position themselves as reckless “tough guys” who have managed to turn hardness and blatant ignorance into virtues (Henry A Giroux 2018; Hochschild 2016; Rosana Pinheiro-Machado and Lucia Scalco 2020). In their introduction to the special issue of Signs on “Gender and the Rise of the Global Right,” Graff, Kapur and Walters (2019, 541) state that the global rightward political turn “is anchored in and in many places motivated by antifeminist misogyny and toxic masculinity.” Masculinity is once again serving as a valuable asset in the mobilization of the far right, manifesting itself as a powerful and influential political will (Kimmel 2017; Mouffe 2018). The fact that masculinity is a key point in this movement is not surprising, since critiques of and changes in masculinity have been one of the hallmarks of feminist critique and gender equality reforms. Defending men and masculinity has then become an effective strategy for a counter-movement. For instance, Elżbieta Korolczuk and Agnieszka Graff (2018) suggest that the anti-gender movements in Poland are “obsessed with the alleged threat to boys” and is fueled by a “promise to rejuvenate hegemonic masculinity and traditional fatherhood” (Korolczuk and Graff 2018, 803). They define the anti-gender movement as a “transnational political mobilization—an alternative illiberal civil society—based on an alliance between religious fundamentalists and illiberal populists” (ibid, 798). In this article, we will address a similar hope for mobilization.

Heterotopia, masculinity and vulnerability

According to Foucault, a heterotopia is a peculiar space and a counter-site that have “the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect” (Foucault 1986, 24). Unlike utopias, heterotopias are real places but they exist in a strangeness or as “being outside all places” and a “placeless place” (Ibid, 24)—such as a cemetery or garden. Foucault also stresses the relation to time, with heterotopias being outside of time, or a timeless time, but yet also involved in the “rediscovery of time” (Ibid, 24). A number of scholars have analyzed the digital as heterotopian spaces (Jutta Haider and Olof Sundin 2010; Robin Rymarczuk and Maarten Derksen 2014), such as the significance of digital space in different forms of social movements where it serves as places for resistance (Christina Schactner 2014; Tin-Yuet Ting 2022; Endah Triastuti 2021). In line with Rymarczuk and Derksen (2014) analyses of Facebook as a form of heterotopia we understand The Good Society as a site or a separate space in the society and not only social networking.

In order to understand how elites and populism work, we draw on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s (2001) discussion on discursive struggles in relations to hegemony and the articulation of political wills. Their work has helped us identify the heterotopian digital space as a counter hegemony, where the elite set themselves apart from society in specific masculinist ways. According to Mouffe (2018), we live in a “populist moment” with a manifold and conflicting antagonistic separation of the people against the elite. According to Mouffe populism is not a bad thing, but rather key to any political project. The problem is rather what populism can do, in terms of normalizing violence and authoritarianism. Gender and the specter of feminization of society are established as a new frontier articulating a political or collective will. This articulation positions liberal culture as its adversary, which, as Hochschild (2016) describes, makes it possible to mobilize poor people in support of elitist capitalist interests—such as in the Tea Party movement. This is a political will in support of white men. As Hamilton Carroll (2011) suggests, speaking of white masculinity, we should “keep in mind both its ability to shift location and its ability to change its nature” and pay attention to how “white masculinity has transformed the universal into the particular as a means of restaging universality” (Carroll 2011, 10). In our view masculinity is not a quality but a relation, with contradictions and inconsistencies as part of its flexibility and resilience, which open up the possibility for masculine norms to be made relevant in various situations and contexts (Dennis K Mumby 1998). We put our study in relation to research on how digital space has been flooded by a white masculinity and masculine pride centered political will, including what is sometimes referred to as the manosphere. As Nicholas Michelsen and Pablo De Orellana (2019) suggest, resilience has become a virtue by glorifying the strong, self-contained and invulnerable citizens who remain untouched by the demands of political correctness. Engaging in hate speech, offensive statements and a display of ignorance are honored as demonstrations of “resilience in the face of change in identity, culture and values” (Ibid, 272). Masculinity tend to stick to orientations that glorifies being rude, ignorant, stubborn, old-fashioned, self-contained and self-centered, in turn becoming a practice of resistance to the supposedly effeminate qualities of being nice, caring for the needs of others, listening to and putting others before oneself or demanding that society has a responsibility for one’s well-being (Brown 2019; Hochschild 2016; Sarah Ahmed 2014). Being outside of society, being a rebel, a misfit is not only “talk” within forms of “apocalyptic masculine resilient hero discourses” (Michelsen and De Orellana 2019, 281); it is also a practice of fatal violence, such as the 2014 attack at the University of California (Michelsen and De Orellana 2019) and the cold-blooded attack that killed 64 young people on Utøya in Norway 2011.

Following this, we suggest that masculinity construction is not so much a consistent discursive practice or ideology, neither do we want to construct different categories of masculinity, as it is a matter of political struggle and signifying practices (Ernesto and Mouffe 2001). Political struggles are popping up in unexpected ways and contexts, pulling together issues that may not seem relevant but that are turning situations into matters of gender in unanticipated ways (Martinsson and Ericson 2023). We argue that this is a form of anti-gender movement, a specific case of resentment, positioning masculinity as the self-righteous vintage point in areas that at first glance may not seem to have anything to do with gender at all, presenting alternative ways of relating to issues and manipulating affective intensities in favor of paranoia.

Methodology and collection of material

The digital space The Good Society that we examine in this article consists of a blog, a YouTube channel and a connected site and precursor The new welfare. We have approached it as passive observers, without asking questions to or being in contact with those who produce it. Instead, our focus has been on what is happening on the surface of the digital space, what is reiterated and mimicked. In line with Judith Butler (1990, 1993) we emphasize the need to scrutinize the performativity of language, norms, images and performances without asking what is behind. We meet the surface of the blogpost as any other followers might do and ask what these texts and videos do? We scrutinize what sort of societies and identities that emerge in this space and what it is that is excluded. This form of post structuralist ethnography in the digital sphere, is strongly influenced by multi-sited ethnography (George E Marcus 1995) which questions the vantage point that there is a possibility to discern a culture as something separate and well defined. Digital ethnography emphasizes the flows and ongoing transformations that follow with the never-ending technological changes (John Postill and Sara Pink 2012; Massimo Airoldi 2018; Reza Baygi, Lucas Introna and Hultin Lotta 2021). Concretely, we wrote field notes during our fieldwork in the digital space, watching the videos, reading blog texts, looking at images, following the links and listening to the voices. The ethnographic approach implies that we were not only interested in what was being said and written but also the movements, places and things that constituted part of the scenery, the images and how all of these aspects formed part of the emergence of communities such as this heterotopian space (cf. Kozinets 2015). The idea of using heterotopia as a concept emerged in the process of trying to make sense of our analyses of the material. Our method was that we went into this space and followed the headlines, comments and discussions on several occasions each month together. We discussed and described the complexity of all the articles and the videos published on the blog. We have chosen to scrutinize eight videos more thoroughly, with guests who are renowned for rallying against gender issues.

The collection of material and analyses was done together in synchrone. Working together we could help each other reflect on how we were situated in relation to the material and what impact that could have for our knowledge production (Donna Haraway 1988). For example, as part of collecting material and conducting the analysis, we discussed our emotions and worries in order to transform our experience of frustration with a community that holds us as their oppositional part into a more productive and constructive approach, trying to be curious about how we ourselves were drawn into oppositional positions in relation to the material (Tine Davids 2014). We strove for a deeper understanding of what these kinds of digital spaces are and how technology produces communities.

Our digital fieldwork and collection of material was done from April 2020 to December 2020. The number of articles written on the blog during this period is considerable, most of which are categorized under the label “Opinion.” For example, for the week of December 9 to December 18 in 2020, 29 opinion articles were published. The blog has a list of 29 writers, eight women and 21 men. The editors are Patrik Engellau, Mohamed Omar, Richard Sörman and Bitte Osarmo. Engellau presents himself as the founder of the site and its associated “think tank” The New Welfare, which we will return to later in the text. There is no more information on his merits and background on the site. However, he is a semi-famous person from the absolute upper-class milieu in Stockholm and was once a key figure in the rise of the populist and nationalist party, the now defunct New Democracy, in the early 1990s in Sweden. Mohamed Omar is presented as a poet and public debater, with reference to his pod and YouTube channel—where he engages with anti-Muslim rhetoric based in his own insider position as a former Muslim. He supports the ethno-nationalist party, the Sweden Democrats. Richard Sörman is presented as an associate professor (reader) of humanities and Bitte Osarmo as a journalist and public debater. The list of writers includes a number of controversial and right-wing academics, politicians and public figures. Here, we find names such as Katerina Janouch, who was renowned as an author of children’s books and an outspoken sexual advisor. She is now a far-right nationalist debater. Ian Wachtmeister, who remains listed as a writer although he passed away in 2017, was a count and served as New Democracy’s party leader and advisor to the Sweden Democrats. Lotta Gröning, a PhD and journalist who previously worked as the chief editor for a social democratic newspaper in Sweden and, later, the right-wing magazine Axess, writes on subjects such as terrorism and honour violence. Ilan Sadé is a chief jurist and chair of the right-wing party Medborgerlig samling. The list also includes Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth, a previous minister of culture and member of the right/bourgeois political party Moderaterna. Several of these figures describe themselves as conservative and liberal or libertarian. Just a few present themselves as having a role in business life.

While the texts on the blog are updated daily with new articles, the videos on the YouTube channel are added more seldom over a period of four years. The YouTube channel contained 46 videos posted between 2016 and 2020. We have watched all of them and then made a selection to analyze more in depth. Most of the videos are 40 minutes to one hour long and are mainly interviews and conversations between the host, Patrik Engellau and his invited guests. In some of the videos, there are other people who serve as hosts. A few videos differ in format, such as panel discussions in front of an audience and also a documentary format, on the subject of integration within the police authority.

Ethical considerations

In this study we use public and open information, but this nonetheless needs some consideration of ethical issues in relation to our study. First, the platform, articles and YouTube-films are aimed to create opinion and change society. The participants are politicians, journalists, opinion makers and other public persons. They come together, by publishing texts or being invited as guests on the YouTube “show.” The site is not a discussion forum or an open forum that includes its users, but rather designated writers selected by an editor. It is a one-way communication, much like other alternative media sites. For this reason, we consider the material public and open to research. Secondly, we are interested in studying an ambition to construct a political and collective we. We are not interested in mapping persons or political affiliations, but rather observing debates that transgress political parties and constructions of political communities in a public space. Third, there are ethical issues of studying a community. The site speaks as if there is a broad community behind, but we do not know what the community “behind” is. We are not examining if this community exists, but rather how it is called upon and constructed in the material. Fourth, ethical considerations are also relevant to how we approach and analyze this material. This form of analysis focuses on how political fronts and political wills emerge. To do this we make use of how the digital space presents itself as a space where some people feel welcome, and others, like we, do not. This could be understood as an effect of political work where a political community is under construction in an open public space.

Results

In what follows, we present our analyses. First, we analyze how the digital space is constructed as a parallel heterotopian society. Second, we analyze the misogynistic nature of this parallel society and how it clings to the idea that the feminization of society is a serious crisis. The third part examines male victimhood, while the fourth part analyzes the perceived need to vindicate “real” manhood. A concluding discussion then follows.

Mimicking the state

One of the striking features of the blog The Good Society is that it gives the impression of being a window into a vibrant community with a long (in terms of digital activity) history. On the blog, we are informed that “This is an initiative from The New Welfare.” When we click on the text, it takes us to the site of the think tank The New Welfare. In the “About us” section of the site, we read that the aim of this think tank is to work for democracy, welfare and a better environment for companies in Sweden. There is also a section informing readers that the think tank is financed by 15,000 companies in Sweden (there are more than 1,000,000 companies in Sweden). Among its achievements, it lists having contributed to the marketisation of schools, the privatization of public services and changes in legislation on competition and procurement. We have no idea whether any of this is true, but it is significant that this is the presentation they choose. Since we found it difficult to believe that it could be supported by this many companies, we searched the net and soon found articles reporting that the think tank had been suspected for misleading information, having published ads in newspapers and used the companies as senders without their knowledge. The aim of the ads was to support a shift in government with the support of the ethno-nationalist party, the Swedish Democrats. In a number of articles, there are allegations of scams, and The New Welfare is depicted as just one entity in a confusing number of companies, foundations and organizations with Engellau as owner or director. This strengthened our impression that the blog we initially got interested in was part of something bigger and seemed like a quite peculiar space and counter site, a form of heterotopia.

On the opening page of The New Welfare site, there are links directing us back to The Good Society and its associated YouTube channel (DGS). The linking creates a form of cosmos, a community of forums and platforms. Thus, the links are significant for the community. In the navigation menu of The New Welfare there are, besides more usual links such as “About us” and “Contact information,” also two links providing more information about their activities that mimic or paraphrase the way in which the state is being governed, that is, through the use of investigations and a juridical infrastructure. For example, they created “The peoples official reports” (MOU), an alternative to the Swedish Government Official Reports (SOU). Supposedly, this digital space is on the “peoples” side, which is against the government. Strikingly, the MOU project began as far back as 1988. There is also a link to what they call “Företagarombudsmannen,” which provides juridical assistance to companies. The use of the word “ombudsman” is interesting here as a form of discursive tactic, since it is strongly associated with the state and the democratic infrastructure, where the ombudsman is the designated authority that may help people in need, for instance, when they are subject to discrimination. Thus, the invention of Företagarombudsmannen implies that companies are in need of support because they are supposedly discriminated against by the state. The third link in the navigation menu is to “Konkurrenskomissionen,” presented as a service where people may report misconduct regarding free market restrictions. According to the presentation, the commission has a list of well-educated and experienced juridical experts. The service began in 1994, once again giving the impression that this is not a newly established infrastructure. The think tank has also published a newspaper, active from 1997 until 2019. According to the last number (2019), it had over 450,000 readers (in a country with a population of 10,000,000). Under the publication menu, there are a number of committee reports that, according to the site, have also been sent to the authorities, starting in 1998 and continuing to 2020.

When we look at the two platforms together and in relation to each other, which the site asks us to do, we begin to wonder what amount of funding and work and commitment were put into this project. The New Welfare and The Good Society portray continuity over decades using basically the same formula. The Good Society is presented as just another example of the same formula to create parallel worlds, a place where it becomes possible to stand outside of society, do as you want, imagine another society or serve as a sort of playground or, as we suggest, a form of heterotopia.

Mimicking the concerned citizen

When we started to follow DGS’s “site for debate,” we got the feeling that we were looking into a community that we should not have had access to, creating a peeping-hole effect. This also had to do with the fact that we, who looked in, were the subject of the discussion—the problematic politically correct collective, the gender studies scholars. This border between them and us became very clear when we read a misogynist and anti-feminist article. In this article a professor from one of most prominent universities in Sweden, Stefan Hedlund presented views that might have caused him some problems if they were expressed at the university where he worked. In the article, published March 10 2020, the professor described gender perspectives as a virus, at precisely the time when the world had seriously begun the process of understanding the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was not his first article on the blog. During the last couple of years, he had published no fewer than 35 articles, most of which were scornful of work against racism and feminism and on equality and authority. This time, he wrote as follows: “While there is every reason to have significant concerns about the spread of the coronavirus, it may also be time to think about the long-term consequences of the gender virus that is now gaining more rapid spread in a number of countries.”

The headline for the professor’s text read “The gender virus mutates and spreads,” and to illustrate the headline, it included pictures depicting a supposedly angry, screaming woman with red hair (an image often used in antifeminist memes), arranged side by side with a picture containing a warning sign with the Biologic hazard logo in black against a yellow background, stating “Warning” and “Quarantine”. The professor wrote that “In the initial stages of the virus, the infected chose to unite in their own communities, entitled ‘gender studies’” but “over time” the spread of infection causes “demands for the ‘gender perspective’ even in the ‘hard’ (the real) fields of science.” His text reiterated a common polarization between the hard, controlled, and rational and the weak, emotional and irrational, who are “ranting and speaking in tongues.” Even gender studies are understood as an infection. He continued as follows:

Infected people can also be heard indulging in purely linguistic speaking about how intersectional perspectives can make visible how different power structures interact and about how non-racialized individuals must be actively de-platformed, while worrying about whiteness norms suggests that color perception may also be affected. Overall, a sharply increased level of aggression is also noted.

The text is published as satire. The chronicle is clearly written for the like-minded in order to have fun and laugh about others like us. The laugher creates a shared orientation and direction among those who enjoy the text, declaring the shared potential of an anti-position. It pulls together some people and excludes others, producing discriminatory belonging in relation to those who are turned into the objects of this laughter. The allegory of a virus turns gender studies and gender studies scholars into a threat to good values, institutions and the world.

A week later, Engellau wrote on the blog, stating that even though the professor’s text was supposed to be funny, it also had a serious message. He wrote: “Stefan’s chronicle wasn’t really funny at all because his observations are absolutely true.” According to Engellau, the professor’s text sat well with his own experiences of how the first “victims” were “society’s soft departments, first of all, the maturing welfare state such as National Board of Health and the Swedish Social Insurance Agency.” The emphasis on “soft departments” is significant here, positioning these authorities as weak and supposedly in need of protection, as too soft, defenseless and oriented towards care. These authorities are also gendered as workplaces for women. According to Engellau, these “soft” departments, “who happily became ill,” stand in contrast to the “hard” or “tough” ones, who Engellau stated seemed resistant at first. He then stated, “but soon it infiltrated the toughest government agencies such as the Police, the Armed Forces and the Royal Institute of Technology.” These are workplaces predominantly connected to male bodies. Based on these gendered binary flows of infections of irrationality from “soft” to “hard” authorities, Engellau’s conclusion is that we have now reached a tipping point: “Now we clearly see what we should have seen before—or perhaps saw but did not dare to express as clearly as we should—that the politician’s power with its favorite set of politically correct theses is detrimental to the country.”

While Professor Hedlund invoked a community among those who found the allegory funny, Engellau more explicitly interpellated “we” who have “seen” but “did not dare” to intervene. The blog is presented as a safe space for a collective who feel alienated in society. A societal crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic supposedly only makes this mission for heterotopian spaces more urgent: “The management of the coronavirus is an example that reveals a profound system failure. The system error is the political power and its PC ideology.” The emotions produced in the texts—first something to laugh about in the professor’s article and, then, something to be afraid of in Engellau’s comment—reiterate an idea about the tyranny of political correctness as a haunting threat of de-masculinization and feminization, suggesting that politicians and those in power have discarded masculinity and masculine spheres as the backbone of society. Not only does it marginalize care work and gendered studies, it also advocates for a defense of masculinist gender orders—protecting them from contamination. Soft departments have supposedly always been a problem, but the alarming situation is when the “toughest government agencies” also begin to soften. This is supposedly a serious crisis, much worse than the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mimicking the media

The notion of the blog as an heterotopian space is especially relevant in relation to the YouTube films presented on the blog. The YouTube channel enforces the manifestation of openness and transparency of this alternative reality. The specifically striking feature regarding the videos is hearing the voices, seeing the faces and feeling the atmosphere, the way in which this room is brought into being, not just through text and words but also through a broader palette of bodily expressions invested in this affective/discursive formation (Mouffe 2018). As soon as we open the YouTube page, an introductory video starts. It shows Engellau sitting behind a desk looking into the camera, with his elbows on the desk and hands folded. He sits in front of three windows that depict the skyline of Stockholm in daylight—alluding to a classic talk show or news report setting. The setting is animated, shot using a green screen. If The New Welfare tried to copy the state, Engellau here imitates the media. He leans forward on the desk and says that he wants to welcome us into this community: “This is where today’s self-understanding is created. And this is a serious statement because we need to understand our times better.” This opening statement brings a specific space and community into being, a place that differs from elsewhere and a community which will understand society in a better way, with Engellau as guide and master.

In his welcoming talk, Engellau also speaks about the problem with journalists and media in the problematic world outside. He says that he himself is “just a normal intelligent person who is fed up with the established Swedish media.” He is frustrated that the media “always makes the problem too complicated and never asks the serious questions” because it is so “politicized” and restricted by “political correctness.” He “can’t stand it” he says, and “is most often forced to leave the TV sofa.” He says that he longs for “the Soviet times when we still had journalists who scrutinized the Kremlin-friendly propaganda and that we lack those types of journalists today, who take their work seriously.” According to Engellau, these times need a more critical awareness of media: “We need to read between the lines, scrutinize the clichés and the blabber.” As he emphasizes, this is “crucial for Sweden, and it is urgent,” and this is why he started DGS TV. The YouTube site invites the viewer into an alternative space that belongs to those who share the same feeling of being fed up or alienated by the politically correct culture. It is a promise of vindication and of being seen, creating but also declaring the appropriate feelings and desires that this heterotopian space serves. The heterotopian space is created around notions of being worried as well as being brave and straightforward, not being afraid of saying things that could make other people angry or upset. The YouTube channel is created as a space to speak the truth, in opposition to the others, those who do not dare and are too weak. In this sense, it is a space for engagement in political and societal debates through the very act of displaying and claiming the right to be disengaged from ordinary society, being without responsibility and without bonds or ties—a form of resilience towards the politically correct culture, the feminization of society and the abandonment of masculinist honor and responsibilities (Hochschild 2016; Kimmel 2017; Michelsen and De Orellana 2019).

The animated newsroom is used in the first ten programs. Invited guests sit with Engellau behind the large imagined studio desk. However, after eleven programs, the scenery undergoes a dramatic change with the introduction of an authentic room. In the introduction to this video, Engellau explains, “As you can see, we have changed studios. The reason is that we want it to be more of a homely feeling. This happens to be my office.” To ask for a “homely feeling” is also an invitation to those who can recognize this special room as a possible home. The office is situated in an apartment in one of Stockholm’s most fashionable areas, Östermalm, and the inventory displays an upper-class milieu. The apartment is old with deep window niches in dark wood and a window bar. The window depicts a view where we look out over the roofs of other old and yellow plastered stone buildings with black roofing plates—symbols of the exclusive areas of Stockholm. However, the upper-class character is not arranged or stylized; rather, it is stripped. There seems to be a complete lack of interest in making the office look tidy. Flexes and camera lights are visible for the audience. It is messy. Engellau himself and some of the interviewees wear wrinkled clothes. The interviewees seem to have just been put in front of the camera. They no longer work with a facade; instead, we enter an alternative space as it is, in all of its authenticity. The heterotopian room seems safer than ever.

Mimicking public conversation

In a special series of videos published in January 2020, The Good Society engages more directly with masculinity and the position of men. The title of the series is “Paula’s Hour about the Degeneration of the Man.” As the title expresses, the series supports the notion that issues of masculinity are important to this heterotopian space. The series on men and manhood also strengthens the notion that The Good Society is a project for men, serving the interests of men and seeking to secure certain ideals of masculinity and manhood—protecting men. In three of the programs, the actress and cultural entrepreneur Paula Ternström moderate discussions with three groups. The group in the first program consists of three men and one woman, the second consists of four women and the third of three men. The program starts with scenes from the room where the seminar is held, seemingly, again, in Engellau’s office but now decorated with crystal chandeliers and art. Accompanied by soft meditative music, we see the audience arrive, get a drink, mingle and chat with each other. This expresses an intimate, laid-back atmosphere and warm space. The seminars are arranged as a panel, with the participants sitting in chairs and Ternström in the middle. On both sides of the panel, there is a pink fabric, and at the back, there are black and white art photos of men performing traditional masculinity. When the panel discussion starts, the invited panelists get a glass of whiskey (which would be impossible in the Swedish public service), served by the moderator, who then asks them about the masculine connotation of drinking whiskey. Some of the panelists are famous Swedes. They are musicians, politicians (from the ethno-nationalist right-wing party the Sweden Democrats); one is a theater director; and one is a historian. The questions raised at the beginning of each program signal a critical approach to the supposedly dominant understanding of masculinity in Sweden: “Is the Swedish man going through a degeneration?” The first program addresses the following questions: “What is the Swedish man like?” “Has the Western man lost his masculinity?” “Is there a war between men and women?” “Has the man been downgraded after #metoo?” “How are you supposed to be as a man?” A figuration of men in crisis in Sweden is constructed.

In the panel discussions, it is evident that there is no consensus on this trope of men in crisis. One of the male and racialized participants seems hesitant to question this agenda as a bit phony. He talks about a visit to Morocco where people asked him if it is true that men in Sweden are oppressed and have nothing to say. He says that it is a misconception. Ternström questions this, pointing out that other participants in the panel have also witnessed that this holds some truth, such as the female theater director’s description of the silencing of men during her theater education. The discussion illustrates how the vindication of white men has little to do with the person’s gender, but rather, it is a matter of orientation and the political mobilization of the need to protect traditional masculinity. In the second program, four women are invited, three of whom have experienced or come from “cultures” other than the Swedish one and are asked to make comparisons. The question of the decline of masculinity is both acknowledged and challenged by the panelists in the different groups. In a liberal manner, some said that men are individuals, that many masculinities exist. The women in the second panel recognized that some confusion could also be good. It seems that in these videos, the invited guests did not simply conform to the agenda set by The Good Society and challenged the idea that men have lost their masculinity.

At the end of the first program, which focused on male role models, the audience is encouraged to ask questions or give comments. A man at the back of the audience, hardly visible in the video, says: “I want to mention a key word for me, and that is ‘chevaliers’.” This is met by spontaneous applause by the audience, with some also nodding. The man continues: “And I regard the fundamental problem to be the normalization of rudeness” and that people are not “polite and urbane.” Ternström shows appreciation for this comment, stating that it is “wonderful.” However, one of the panelists, a musician named Willie Crawford, protests and says that he has no interest in going back to the conservative ideal of a chevalier masculine figure. To back up the significance of this statement, he refers to his own position as a real knight and having been born into the upper class, as someone who should really know what this ideal entails. It seems that although the trope of lost masculinity is a recurrent theme in the production of this counter-space, it does not rest in any consensus on what it is that men have supposedly lost. The powerful hold of the idea of saving men and masculinity is not tied to securing a specific way of being a man or a masculine ideal; it is a manifold of struggles for some abstract freedom from the social, a counter-space where conceptions of crisis may still be diametrical to each other.

Conclusions

Although the digital space we have focused on in this article consists of different articulations—a homesite, a blog and videos—they are all connected by recurrent themes about a surge for another society and by playing with, or transforming an imaginary of the hegemonic society outside. We argue that the concept of heterotopia is crucial for the understanding of how this digital space is formed and used not only in contrast to how they imagine—and construct—the society outside their heterotopia but also in contrast to dominant societal imaginaries such as Sweden as the most gender equal society in the world. In the first section we looked at heterotopia in the form of discourses and practices that mimics and paraphrase the welfare state. By way of these reiterations, a separate, alternative state, with its own regime and authorities, was created. The “citizens” of this heterotopian space are set free from the dominant order outside. In this section we also looked at how this digital space is presented as representing the needs of small business company owners and their supposed precarity in relation to the Swedish state. In the second section we focused on the blog as a free place for rallying against feminization, gender equality and gender studies, which were described as a threat to society—mounting up to a crisis where the state is threatened and destroyed by feminization. The digital space is here mimicking the concerned citizens, or the people, who are worried that the departments had become too soft, weak and in need of protection. The concept of heterotopian helps us understand how this digital space offers possibilities to speak up and exercise resilience to political correctness in distinct ways. The third section focused on the mimicking of media and production of a journalistic responsibility. The will to create an alternative, heterotopian space was also materialized through the creation of a studio, with an ambition to look international and professional. However, after a while it was replaced by a more authentic homelike and welcoming atmosphere, behind the scenes—while simultaneously also emphasizing the upper-class milieu and privileged position of the people who provide and long for this digital space. The last section shows a mimicking of public conversation. In focus is the degeneration and crisis of masculinity, but we also noted that the claims were challenged, opening for a more diverse approach to and claims on what is at stake. Not even the heterotopian space, or the mimicking, are safe.

All our examples show how the alternatives, the heterotopian space, are in conversation, mimicking the hegemonic order. At the same time, it is being at odds with the times, being outside of time or being of another time in specific ways, with its own distinctive orientation towards an alternative world. In order to understand this heterotopian space we argue that it is important to notice that these are not just parallel spaces—as an alternative to what is understood as the tyrannic dominant order—but also highly political. The digital heterotopian space makes it possible for a community to emerge and take place, to recognize each other as different, with another direction than the dominant one. The counter hegemonic strategy we have discerned is part of a bigger populist mobilization—a political populist “we” against “them;” the politically correct. A form of political subjectivity emerges that opens for upper class members in society to position themselves as victims thereby political subjects in a political struggle—based on an heterotopian notion of the public’s will. It is also important to acknowledge the political role of the digital. In the politically correct world, the persons involved here can be understood as an economically privileged elite, but in the digital heterotopia it is possible to transform one’s identity. The men (and some few women) who usually manifest their upper-class position in social connections, positions, material efforts and titles, here identify themselves as political underdogs who defend a society. The digital space is crucial for this possibility to reconstruct oneself and provide a space where the underdog position comes to life.

Finally, we want to emphasize that masculinity is key to the performance of this digital heterotopian space and to the parallel idea of the public’s will. Masculinity is also key to the feelings of contempt and fear of feminization, blaming a society that has become too weak and irrational because of excessive levels of sympathetic feelings and diversity politics. Protecting masculinity is, we suggest, one of the grounding drivers for the digital space and how it insists on breaking free from the politically correct culture. It is a form of men’s project, creating a space for privileged white men, and those who support their desires, in direct opposition to immigrants, Muslims, feminists and the designated tyranny of politically correct culture. It is a freedom movement defined in opposition to anything that could place responsibility on or point to the privileged position of white upper-class men.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) Myndigheten för Samhällsskydd och Beredskap and Swedish Research Council [2020-04164].