Sociology

Our growing Sociology list has a global outlook featuring high-quality research across emerging and established areas in the field, such as digital sociology, migration, gender, race and ethnicity, public sociology, and children and families.

Our series include Gender and Sociology, Global Migration and Social ChangeSociology of Children and FamiliesSociology of Diversity and Public Sociology.

We publish leading journals in the field, including Emotions and Society in association with the European Sociological Association's (ESA) Research Network on Sociology of Emotions (RN11) as well as Families, Relationships and Societies and the Journal of Gender-Based Violence.

Sociology

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Homonationalism and Racial Politics in Sweden
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Over recent decades, LGBTQ people have successfully fought for civil and reproductive rights across Western states, including the right to marry, have children and serve openly as public servants and in the armed forces. Internationally, states have started to use their stance on homonormativity to position themselves as progressive.

This book provides new insights into the role played by race, sexuality, and gender by analysing contemporary constructions of Swedishness through LGBTQ rights by using three specific case studies:

  • A ‘pride parade’ organised by the Swedish populist right

  • Swedish Armed Forces’ marketing material

  • A social media account by and for racialised LGBTQ people.

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This chapter takes a concluding look at what this book set out to do, summarizes the central findings and provides suggestions for ways ahead, both with regard to activist action and future research avenues.

The overall analysis shows how Swedishness is constructed with explicit reference to the recognition and protection of LGBTQ people. These boundary-making processes are profoundly racialized, relying crucially on the construction of racialized Others as a threat. Collective constructions of (non-)belonging through boundary making both draw upon and enable normative grids of intelligibility, creating ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ kinds of queers. At the same time, being-made-intelligible is complicated by the activism of particularly LGBTQ activists racialized non-White. The book’s findings therefore support activist claims towards a continued need for the protection and support of LGBTQ rights and LGBTQ people within contexts that are built around notions of LGBTQ-friendliness while also opening up for broader discussions regarding the inevitable instability of any attempt at boundary making around issues of sexuality and gender.

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Since the early 2010s, the rainbow flag has re-appeared in campaign and information material published by the Swedish Armed Forces (SAF) in different ways, gaining more prominence as time went by. Drawing on a combined analysis of visual and textual campaign material, this chapter looks at the role the rainbow flag has played in the SAF’s pride-related marketing material, focusing on the years 2017–22. It analyses the various ways in which LGBTQ rights are employed to ascribe meaning to the SAF as an organization as well as to justify the increasing rearmament and reterritorialization of Swedish defence in the face of anti-gender mobilization across Europe, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the increasing militarization of European defence discourses. It analyses how the pride campaigns perform a certain kind of ‘Swedishness’ through conveying a specific image of the SAF. It finally reflects upon how LGBTQ people are made intelligible within the context of these campaigns (both as soldiers and civilians), and the possible implications this may have for LGBTQ movements and their fights for LGBTQ rights.

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This chapter provides an in-depth introduction to the concepts of homonormativity and homonationalism and asks how we can continue to develop these concepts in order to maintain their analytical relevance. It looks at how the two concepts have developed from their initial formulation as they have entered different empirical contexts and new academic disciplines and connects them to discussions about LGBTQ rights as part of the international human rights discourse. It argues that by connecting new perspectives to core aspects of the original critique, we will be able to better account for the complexities and messiness of contemporary queer positionalities as they relate to various exclusive inclusions, as well as for the question of which queer bodies can and cannot afford to ‘not want rights’. Specifically, it draws on Cynthia Weber’s plural logics of and/or and Rahul Rao’s writing on queer temporalities in postcolonial settings.

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Based on feminist and queer research approaches, this chapter discusses methodological aspects such as site selection, data generation and data analysis as well as the ethical challenges that come with being a queer researcher researching ‘queer stuff’. It includes a section on theoretical aspects of discourse and visual analysis, and it also reflects on the process of writing as a crucial part of the analytical process.

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This chapter introduces the main questions that drive the overall enquiry of the book, focusing on the mobilization of LGBTQ rights in nationalist projects of (non-)belonging, the role played by racialization in these projects and the ways in which they create grids of intelligibility through boundary making. It covers the empirical context, the methodological approach and the underlying theoretical concepts that guide the analysis and discusses the main contributions and delimitations. Finally, it gives an outline of the book’s structure.

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This chapter discusses one specific way in which right-wing political actors employ LGBTQ issues and established homonationalist narratives in their nationalist boundary making in order to exclude racialized Others. By analysing the event Pride Järva, and in particular a speech delivered by Sjunnesson on the occasion of Pride Järva 2016, it shows how LGBTQ rights are used to construct and reproduce notions of tolerant and progressive Europeanness vis-à-vis a threatening Islamic and racialized Other. I argue that this has implications not only for constructions of who belongs and does not belong within boundaries of Swedishness; it also draws upon as well as reinforces specific notions of who is and who is not intelligible as ‘the right kind of queer’ within these boundaries. While right-wing actors share certain narratives with other political actors, their opposition to LGBTQ rights and continued stigmatization of LGBTQ people as internal non-heteronormative, non-cisnormative Others sets them apart.

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By taking a closer look at the experiences of young LGBTQ people racialized as non-White and/or Muslim within predominantly White Swedish LGBTQ contexts, this chapter investigates some grids of intelligibility that make up the ‘field of the recognisable’ (Butler, 2015, p 34) in these contexts. It does so through an analysis of experiences shared on an activist Instagram account, identifying predominant grids of intelligibility for LGBTQ people racialized as non-White and/or Muslim within White Swedish LGBTQ contexts. The chapter identifies four major ways in which LGBTQ people racialized as non-White and/or Muslim are made intelligible in predominantly White Swedish LGBTQ contexts: as the victims of a hateful Other, through coming-out narratives, via exotification and tokenism and via experiences of lacking representation. All of these revolve around notions of LGBTQ people racialized as non-White and/or Muslim as never quite belonging, never quite recognizable. They are instead frequently situated between White, gender-equal and LGBTQ-friendly ‘Swedishness’ and threatening, LGBTQ-phobic racialized ‘Others’, made intelligible only in relation to these. However, the analysis also shows that the writers in various ways navigate, manoeuvre and thus expand the grids of intelligibility available to them, among other things by creating separatist and activist spaces for themselves.

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This chapter introduces two of the main concepts underlying the analysis of the book: boundary making and intelligibility. Boundary making enables a theoretical engagement with the discursive-performative creation of communities of (non-)belonging that characterizes the ways in which LGBTQ rights are mobilized in constructions of Swedishness. The concept grids of intelligibility attends to notions of identity and subjectivity created by boundary-making processes and the need to appear or present oneself in certain ways in order to be eligible for belonging to a certain community. It enables a critical discussion of the necessity of becoming intelligible – and the limitations this imposes – and explores how intelligibilities are multiple and fluid, providing opportunities for contestation and re-signification. The chapter connects foundational literature from different fields in order to conceptualize the relationship between projects of (homo)nationalist boundary making and the grids of intelligibility these projects draw upon and (re)produce.

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This chapter explores the concept of racialization, or the social ascription of race to certain bodies, as a central marker of Otherness in contemporary constructions of (non-)belonging around sexuality and gender. By drawing on works from the fields of Black studies, critical race studies and post/decolonial studies, it conceptualizes how notions of race have been a central category for hierarchically differentiating people and communities, as well as of the implications these hierarchies have had, both historically and in contemporary contexts. It discusses racialization processes (including Whiteness) in relation to migration and Othering in Northern Europe and Scandinavia. It finally argues that by combining Black perspectives on humanity and liberation beyond the recognition of the law with queer approaches that challenge the presumed coherence of concepts such as ‘the normal’ or ‘the perverse’, we can nuance claims about the homonationalist character of certain political processes of boundary making, as well as analyse the ways in which LGBTQ people are variously positioned to deal with these processes.

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