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- Author or Editor: Kajsa Widegren x
- Social and Public Policy x
One of the flag-ship reforms of the Swedish welfare state was the parental leave–reform from 1974. In this chapter images from official, state-mandated information material designed to increase Swedish fathers’ use of parental leave are scrutinized. Images are often inherently contradictory, with meanings that tend to move beyond the intention to ‘inform’ the viewer. The images in the parental leave campaigns reproduce Sweden as well as Swedish fathers as modern, white and heterosexual. At the same time as some of the images strive to articulate the message that ‘dads should be pregnant’, that is to be bodies capable of taking care of infants, they show little or no closeness between fathers and children, either emotional or corporeal. Thus these messages simultaneously incite and deter men from parenthood as it might be lived in a more gender-equal context.
