Mittuniversitetet

The aim of this paper is to raise and explore some of the challenges we as gender scholars have experienced in Sweden today in what could be conceptualized as 'overed' academic landscapes. Our argument is framed by Sara Ahmed's (2012) statement that the very idea that we are 'over race' is how racism is reproduced where it also has to be emphasized that the notion of being 'over race' needs to be understood as intertwined with being over gender. With autobiographical methods, we take leverage in a problematization of gender studies as 'a room of our own' and discuss related themes in academe such as the paradox of gender studies as a perspective and/or a discipline, pluralism and the academic institutional division of labour, feminism and neoliberal New Public Management, collaborative interdisciplinary work in audit cultures. The paper concludes with a discussion about resisting 'overing' through the conflicted position of the feminist scholar.

När individen på en marknad blivit den alltigenom dominerande modellen för att organisera samhällen och organisationer har det också påverkat hur en ser på betydelsen av kön. Den här boken utforskar hur normalisering går till under nyliberalism, hur det görs på sätt som både utmanar feministiska perspektiv och kan utmanas av feministiska läsningar. Om vi alla i nyliberal anda sägs göra fria, individualistiska val kring alla frågor i våra liv, val som var och en av oss själva samtidigt står ansvariga för, blir en feministisk kritisk position svår att se. Måste vi då kunna tänka i sociala kollektiv för att komma förbi föreställningar om och erfarenheter av ett privatiserat och personligt förtryck, förenklingar och individuell moralism? Så ställer boken frågor om feminismens (o)möjlighet under nyliberalism. Boken avslutas med att skissa möjliga feministiska positioner och strategier för förändring, för att slutligen visionärt diskutera vad ett feministiskt samhälle skulle kunna vara.

On the 15th of April, 2012, The Modern Museum (Modernamuseet) in Stockholm celebrated the World Art Day by having a reception with the Swedish cultural minister present, at which an artwork in the form of a cake made in the likeness of the body of a caricatured black woman was served, cut up and eaten, while the artist, masked as the cakes head, screamed. This conceptual, relational, and contextualizing artwork, which leads to a much heated debate in Sweden and which was also internationally picked up on, was made by the explicitly anti-racist artist Makode Linde. In this article, we explore the problem of this event in terms of its sociocultural significance. How did we react upon the drama that we were following from a distance? What did it make us see? What questions did the incident raise about the Swedish society of today? These are examples of the questions we as gender researchers working in Sweden will discuss in the form of a triptych. We use the triptych metaphor as a tool for opening dialogue. By opening its panels it becomes possible to decommodify the single image of the artwork and make relations between agents traceable, visible, and readable.

The purpose of this article is to explore through a reading of an official Swedish policy document what questions and challenges such a document poses for feminist theory by the way the 'normal' is (re)assembled in accordance with what others have called the risk politics of advanced liberalism. The intensified focus on risk in neoliberalism has seen responsibility move from the state to individuals, and old divisions between society and market as well as between civil society and state are being refigured. The argument put forward here is that current modes of governance tend to neglect the complexities of present-day life courses when using a gender-'neutral' approach to social policy that is in fact the work of a gender regime.