In spite of the rainbow flag’s importance as a symbol for transnational queer belonging and its meanings for the survival of queers all over the world, much critical queer Anglo-Saxon research and activism concerning the rainbow flag and the celebration of Pride claims that it has lost its radical potential through processes of normalisation, mainstreaming, homonationalism and commercialisation. In order to address other queer political issues, alternative Pride events are organized in parallel with conventional Pride celebrations. This chapter will discuss two Pride events held in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2019, Reclaim Pride and Öckerö Pride, drawing on auto-ethnographic methods. It will reflect on two connected questions: What meanings, emotions, actions and temporalities are (re)produced as a result of the relationship between the events, the rainbow flag, the concept of Pride and the activists/participants—including the author? In what ways do the rainbow flag and the concept of Pride work as co-producers of belongings as well as disbelongings—and how does the author’s position as a Swedish, middle-class, white, lesbian, feminist, mother, former activist and now sociologist affect her feelings of belonging and disbelonging? It is shown that the rainbow flag is a very topical and heated cultural artefact in the Swedish political arena, in which racism, homophobia and Islamophobia are growing. The author’s experiences and emotions at the two Pride events reflect the ambivalent struggle that takes place at the borders of belonging and disbelonging. Temporality and space are important aspects of the contextualisation that needs to be applied in order to grasp the different effects that processes of inclusion and exclusion have on queer people in different places and situations.
This article deals with questions about the performative power of cultural products that travel the world. The Japanese manga genre Boys’ Love and Yaoi has gained a broad readership outside of Japan during recent decades. This has cultivated an image of Japan as sexually radical and ‘as more than Japan’, something which has produced alternative subject positions and practises regarding gender and sexuality among Swedish Boys’ Love/Yaoi followers. With the help of the concept hyperreality and elaborations on materiality within feminist theories, this article discusses: Which images of Japan and Sweden are produced as manga Boys’ Love/Yaoi – as cultural products – travel from Japan to Sweden? Which subject positions and forms of desires emerge? In order to understand how cultural products create new subjectivities, images and desires, we also ask: What can a sharper focus on materiality and the agency of matter add to the understanding of the concept of hyperreality and the construction of new realities? We argue that embodied experiences of certain subject positions and desires challenge the idea of the hyperreal as a surface phenomenon. Further, the article shows how the image of “Japan” is often coloured by the desires that West cultivates about the ‘other’.
This book investigates co-housing as an alternative housing form in relation to sustainable urban development.Co-housing is often lauded as a more sustainable way of living. The primary aim of this book is to critically explore co-housing in the context of wider social, economic, political and environmental developments. This volume fills a gap in the literature by contextualising co-housing and related housing forms. With focus on Denmark, Sweden, Hamburg and Barcelona, the book presents general analyses of co-housing in these contexts and provides specificd i s c u ssions of co-housing in relation to local government, urban activism, family life, spatial logics and socio-ecology. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in a broad range of social-scientific fields concerned with housing, urban development and sustainability, as well as to planners, decision-makers and activists.
The focus of this book is on the many far from predictable transformative political processes on gender, sexuality and coloniality that grow out of the broad range of bodies and actors engaged in politics outside the hegemonic order and in everyday activities. These processes are not conducted by states, governments or transnational nongovernmental organisations; rather, they are examples of politics in-between states, organisations and national imagined communities. In this first chapter we will introduce some of the main themes, regarding these processes we in our joint research programme have worked on over the last couple of years.
This article aims to problematize the normalization of children in a Nordic welfare society. The production of 'good childhoods' is seen as a guarantee for socially sustainable societies. Children are subject to different governing strategies; the 'child' and 'youth' are disputed symbols, used to protect already established 'futures', that is, the present order, and promote alternative futures. Parliamentary debates and government reports about children in the Freetown of Christiania, Denmark, are analysed. The results highlight the need to distinguish between soft and coercive disciplinary power and the presence of sovereign power even in liberal societies that value freedom of the individual.
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