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While globally menstruators are increasingly receiving support through solidarity campaigns, the menstruating body remains an ambivalent subject in Swedish politics and feminist scholarship. Menstruation activists emphasise that periods are both a local and global political issue, urging menstruators to become more aware of how their bodily cycles impact them. This article aims to explore a selection of narratives on menstruation as a political and spiritual phenomenon and investigate the still residual ambivalence in the relationship between feminism and menstrual advocacy in a Swedish context. The study is empirically anchored in a campaign for menstruation awareness combined with interviews with feminist women about menstruation as an experience and as a cultural phenomenon. The campaign, here called PeriodPride, addressed different topics, such as body literacy and menstrual solidarity. Drawing on an ethnographic study combined with a narrative approach, three narratives have been identified: (1) the menstruating body as a ‘woman’s issue’, (2) menstruators in need, remembering period poverty, and (3) the forceful cycle, reclaim the value of bodies. These narratives elucidate the discursive complexity of menstruation advocacy, underscoring its entanglement with multiple frameworks of meaning and revealing some of the productive tensions inherent within Swedish feminist traditions.

In a contemporary popular cultural Swedish context, gender equality and economic equality seem to be increasingly formulated in financial terms, through narratives centered around succeeding on the stock market, owning assets or practicing venture capitalism. In this context, self-help books in financial speculation targeting women are marketed with a gender equality narrative. In this article, we focus on how values of feminism, gender equality and economy are shaped and maintained by such books. By effectively hiding power relationships and presenting financial freedom as an attainable goal for everyone and through a condensed narrative of happiness and balance in the future, we read the fantasy of financial freedom as cruel optimism through Lauren Berlant's perspective. The fantasy of financial freedom also produces a feminist subject who, with her investments, both can and should maintain control over her own life and her family as well as navigate around the vulnerabilities of life. 

I Umeå kommun finns ett flertal öppna mötesplatser; träffpunkter där människor kan umgås, hålla möten, skapa och uppleva kultur, idrotta, lära sig saker etcetera. I denna rapport presenteras tre av dessa verksamheter: Ersboda Folkets Hus, Kulturhuset Klossen och Mötesplats Stöcke, som alla drivs av civilsamhällesorganisationer. Följande studie baseras primärt på intervjuer med verksamma från mötesplatserna, med syfte att undersöka betydelser för användare, närområdet och för Umeå kommun, vilken roll organisationerna förväntas spela samt vilka förutsättningar de har för att verka. 

Mötesplatserna beskrivs som mycket viktiga ur flera perspektiv. De bidrar till att främja lokal sammanhållning och en positiv bild av stadsdelen och de ger människor tillgång till samlingslokaler som annars skulle sakna det. Medan kärnverksamheterna kan sägas handla om kultur, nöje, bildning och fysisk aktivitet, så fyller mötesplatserna också viktiga sociala funktioner för många målgrupper. De bidrar till att motverka ensamhet och psykisk ohälsa för den enskilde, och de utgör centrala forum för individuell utveckling och lärande, inte minst för barn och unga. Som lokalt förankrade öppna verksamheter beskrivs mötesplatserna ha en unik potential att främja social hållbarhet i både närområdet och Umeå i stort. 

Deltagarna lyfter också ett antal utmaningar. Mötesplatserna måste finna en balans mellan öppenhet och trygghet, så att alla besökare känner sig välkomna och trygga i miljön. Det inkluderar en balansgång mellan planering och spontanitet. Deltagarna lyfter att vissa målgrupper behöver mycket låga trösklar, medan andra behöver förväntningar och att aktivt få delta i utformandet av verksamheten. Långsiktig ekonomisk hållbarhet beskrivs vidare som en utmaning för alla organisationer. De erhåller alla olika typer av ekonomiskt stöd från offentliga aktörer, men detta stöd är oftast villkorat och tidsbegränsat och räcker sällan till för vad organisationerna skulle vilja och behöver göra på sikt. Alternativa inkomstkällor är främst viss kommersiell verksamhet respektive sponsring från företag eller privatpersoner. För att fortsätta vara just öppna mötesplatser, till nytta för närområdet, är det dock viktigt att denna typ av finansiering inte gör huset mindre tillgängligt för vissa grupper. 

Vi vill avslutningsvis betona betydelsen av mötesplatsernas medborgardrivna karaktär. Företrädare från alla verksamheter menar att de skulle kunna bedriva ännu mer social verksamhet, särskilt för barn och unga, om de hade ekonomiska förutsättningar. I det fall mötesplatsernas sociala dimensioner ska utvecklas, vill vi dock framhålla vikten av inte betrakta dem som renodlade serviceproducenter som ska leverera något till de boende. Det är viktigt att värna om mötesplatsernas mervärde och särskilda förtroende, som framstår som nära knutet till deras gräsrotsbaserade verksamhet. 

What do tests performed on human bodies tell us? Hormones and genetics have become increasingly central to contemporary understandings of identities and kinship. In this article, narratives around hormone and genetic testing are examined through two examples: the use of DNA testing in migration control and hormone testing in sports. In the name of “fair sport” and “fair migration”, people are being tested because of regulations by the federation or by the state. Testing is said to produce better knowledge, where knowledge without testing is unreliable and defined as a problem which constitutes a risk to fair participation or belonging. In the narratives examined in this article, there is a simultaneous stabilization and destabilization of identity, gender and race. We argue for a slightly different articulation of molecularization, compared to how it has previously been conceptualized in canonized scholarly work. When considered as strategic and entangled with gender, race, and sexuality, molecularization appears as not only a development within or from biopolitics but also as a part of necropolitics. The relation between politics and molecularization is here centred on control by knowing the individual through biological tests, a form of control which we call testinaming.

There are many approaches to community development, which has been described as an inherently ambiguous concept (Shaw 2007). In this presentation, we explore how community development is differently perceived, represented, and put into practice by actors from three community centres, all located in a city in northern Sweden. The community centres are all run by non-governmental organisations and share many features and challenges. They are, however, located in three demographically different neighbourhoods and rooted in three different strands of civic engagement in Sweden: the rural development movement, the tradition of popular education, and the so-called People’s Houses (Folkets Hus); community centres with roots in the 20th century workers movement. These affiliations, together with the centres’ geographical locations and varying demography, provide a broad range of discourses on community development, that the interview participants variously build upon, contest, and reinvent. Based on in-depth interviews and an ethnographic approach, the aim of the paper is to analyse how representatives and users of the community centres approach the issue of community development and civic engagement. Based on which operational frameworks (Kenny 2002) do the centers make sense of and work towards community development? How are the concepts community and development interpreted and put into practice? We have found three overarching frameworks, that to varying degrees – closely linked to the neighbourhoods’ place identities and socioeconomic status – imbue the participants’ narratives: the framework of community organising and community work, the pragmatic planning frame, and the framework of entrepreneurship. 

Can there really be a feminist ethnography?

The question was asked decades ago, and we need to return to it. Feminist ethnographic ideals about trust, collaboration and exchange of knowledge are important but not necessarily easy. 

The following book is the result of discussions about reflexivity, ethics, and subject positions in ethnographic work within interdisciplinary gender studies. What do positionality and ethical considerations mean in our ethnographic work today? In this anthology nine researchers, from six disciplines, explore this area anchored in their ongoing research.

For centuries, male hypogonadism has been defined as a clinical syndrome caused by the inability to produce physiological concentrations of testosterone and/or normal amount of sperm. In 2020, an information campaign started in Sweden with the ambition of increasing knowledge about hypogonadism and (lack of) testosterone, targeting both men and healthcare providers. In this study, we take a closer look at media discussions in Sweden on hypogonadism over the period 2018–2021. Through feminist thinking on biomedicalisation, we analyse the media material about the phenomena and issues being raised regarding masculinity, age and health in contemporary neoliberal and biocapital times. For some people, hypogonadism is a severe condition, but we can also see that the diagnosis becomes a response to a wide range of symptoms, expanding the realm for diagnostic practices and tying into normative ideas about age, time and lacking or fading masculinity. The media narratives about hypogonadism not only reflect cultural norms regarding masculinity and the plasticity of diagnoses but also create desires, needs and markets.