Abstract
Present demands for inclusion within the feminist movement are not new; since the 1970s, mainstream feminism has been criticized for giving white, heterosexual women a privileged position. This critique gave rise to the formation of marginalized groups both within feminism and in society in general. Today, however, we argue that the effects of this critique have changed due to changes in political forms of governing; that is, the logic of the market is increasingly replacing the logic of the political and this shift has consequences for feminist politics. Within gender-equality policies in Sweden, political demands are turned into administrative or bureaucratic techniques, depoliticizing gender by turning gender equality policies into checklists and tool kits in order to fit the policy to the prevailing systems of audit and quality assessments. Among feminist activists, the reaction to such depoliticizing moves seems to be a retreat to a stable and safe identity whose political activity consists of demands for ever-more-specific recognitions and inclusions into this very audit system. As feminist activists make claims that fit neatly into a liberal rights discourse, even the activist-subject is turned into a self-regulating subject managing its own success or failure—only here success and failure are based on recognized identities, and hence, different identities are cast into a struggle against each other. Our conclusion is that the depoliticized production of rights claims does not generate challenges to the prevailing political order; rather, there is a risk of re-producing this order, where right-wing identity politics is mobilized as a response to left-wing identity politics, and vice versa.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
NPM was introduced and supported by Social Democratic governments during the late 1980s, and was enhanced and followed up by major privatizations during periods of right-wing governance (especially 2006–2014). Hence, both Social Democrats and the various right-wing parties are part of this development (see also Edenheim and Rönnblom 2012).
- 2.
Although citizenship per se is not central to our analysis, we are well aware of the existing scholarship on feminism and citizenship (e.g. Lister et al. 2007; Philips 1993), including the ambitions to challenge non-feminist and especially liberal understandings of citizenship. Because our analysis emphasizes how neoliberal rule challenges the conditions for political change, we are not focusing on the specific content of or definition of citizenship per se.
- 3.
In this chapter, we are only analysing Fi’s party platform as an example of feminist party politics. We believe that a broader analysis, including different sets of material, could have given a more complex picture of their political claims, and we would like to stress that we use the party platform as one of several examples of a trend in feminist politics.
- 4.
For example, ‘The Feminist Initiative has a vision of a society where everyone can travel well through life. This requires that society in all aspects observes human rights and secures the right to health, work, home, education, social care, and safety. […] Human rights will apply to all humans residing in Sweden. People without documents and people applying for asylum will have the same rights as citizens or as people with a permanent residence permit’ (Fi 2013: 4).
- 5.
The current official grounds for discrimination are ‘gender’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘gender identity or gender expression’, ‘religion or other belief’, ‘sexuality’, ‘disability’ and ‘age’.
- 6.
‘Surrendering epistemological foundations means giving up the ground of specifically moral claims against domination—especially the avenging of strength through moral critique of it—and moving instead into the domain of the sheerly political: ‘wars of position’ and amoral contests about the just and the good in which truth is always grasped as coterminous with power, as always already power, as the voice of power’ (Brown 1995: 45).
References
Åse, C. (1997). Individ utan innehåll. Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift, 96(2), 138–152.
Björk, N. (2014). Ingen makt är större än den ekonomiska makten. Dagens Nyheter, 12 November.
Brown, W. (1995). States of injury: Power and freedom in late modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Brown, W. (2005). Edgework: Critical essays on knowledge and politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. New York: Zone Books.
Echeverría Quezada, M., & Palmström, J. (2014). Drama i repris. Bang, 4.
Edenheim, S., & Rönnblom, M. (2012). Tracking down politics and power in neo-liberal society. Nora – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, Special issue “Neo-liberalism and Tolerance – Scrutinizing Politics and State Regulations”, 20(4), 227–229.
Eduards, M. (2002). Förbjuden handling: Om kvinnors organisering och feministisk teori. Liber ekonomi.
Feministisk initiativ. (2013). För en feministisk politik. FI Party Platform.
Harding, S. (1986). The science question in feminism. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Hill Collins, P. (1990). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness and the politics of empowerment. Hyman.
Jónasdóttir, A. G. (1991). Love, power and political interests: Towards a theory of patriarchy in contemporary western societies. Göteborg: Studies in Politics.
Kiros, J. (2014). Identitetspolitk och vänterpolitik är inte antipoler. Dagens Nyheter, 10 November.
Linderborg, Å. (2014). Det ska fan vara politiskt korrekt. Aftonbladet, 7 November.
Lister, R., Williams, F., Anttonen, A., Bussemaker, J., Gerhard, U., Heinen, J., et al. (2007). Gendering citizenship in Western Europe: New challenges for citizenship research in a cross-national context. Bristol: Polity Press.
Manin, B. (2002). The principles of representative government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Martinsson, L., & de los Reyes, P. (2015). Största problemet är diskriminerande strukturer. Feministiskt perspektiv, 28 February.
Moberg, E. (1961). Kvinnans villkorliga frigivning. Unga Liberaler: Nio inlägg i idédebatten. Stockholm: Bonnier.
Mol, A. M. (1999). Ontological politics: A word and some questions. In J. Law & J. Hassard (Eds.), Actor network theory and after (pp. 74–89). Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers/The Sociological Review.
Mouffe, C. (2005). On the political. New York: Routledge.
Mouffe, C. (2013). Agonistics: Thinking the world politically. London: Verso.
Philips, A. (1993). Engendering democracy. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Philips, A. (1995). The politics of presence. Gloucestershire: Clarendon Press.
Rancière, J. (2004). Introducing disagreement. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 9(3), 3–9.
Ramnehill, M. (2014). Som en plusmeny, Bang (4).
Rönnblom, M. (2011). Vad är problemet? Konstruktioner av jämställdhet i svensk politik. Tidskrift för genusvetenskap (2–3), 35–55.
Scott, J. W. (1996). Only paradoxes to offer: French feminists and the rights of man. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
SOU 2010: 83. (2010). Rapport XI från Delegationen för jämställdhet i skolan (Delegation for gender equality in schools). Stockholm.
Spivak, G. C. (1993). Outside in the teaching machine. New York: Routledge.
Spivak, G. C. (2005). Use and abuse of human rights. Boundary 2, 32(1), 131–189.
Squires, J. (1999). Gender in political theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Westerstrand, J. (2015). Egofokus försvårar universitetsstudier. Dagens Nyheter, 10 February.
Zizek, S. (1999). The ticklish subject: The absent centre of political ontology. London: Verso.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Edenheim, S., Rönnblom, M. (2016). Representations of Equality: Processes of Depoliticization of the Citizen-Subject. In: Danielsen, H., Jegerstedt, K., Muriaas, R., Ytre-Arne, B. (eds) Gendered Citizenship and the Politics of Representation. Citizenship, Gender and Diversity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51765-4_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51765-4_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-51764-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-51765-4
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)