Mid Sweden University

This study examines discursive representations of Thai-Swedish couples in the Swedish daily press. The sample studied includes 17 articles. The study shows that the couples are constituted as inherently “different” through interweaving discourses such as a romantic love discourse, a sex tourism discourse, and a normalizing discourse, and through intersecting power relations such as those of gender, “race”/ethnicity, class, and sexuality. The normalized position representing “Swedishness” is not usually made explicit but is nevertheless constantly reproduced, and hierarchies are formed within as well as between the “normal” couple and “the Other”.