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To refer to Sweden as a good example of care and welfare reforms has been common among many US scholars all through the 1990s until today. In this article, the author tries to understand why the Swedish pandemic strategy during 2020–21 was met with surprise and confusion, most visible in the US where the political divide between for-or-against lockdown, that is, for or against free access to public spaces, made the right-wing refer to Sweden in positive terms. In Sweden it was the extreme right-wing party, the Swedish Democrats (founded by neo-Nazis), that expressed an explicit belief in complete lockdowns, while in the United States it was the Democrats and the liberal left.

This article positions the sinthomosexual in relation to kinship, climate crisis, and vulnerability. By placing Lee Edelman’s version of queer in the modern family, the sinthomosexual – here presented in the form of the childfree woman – is positioned not only as against reproduction, but also against certain versions of community and kinship. The article investigate what this position is dependent on and gets subjected to in the wake of the dismantling of the welfare state and the privatisation of economies, communities and identities. This is done by a close reading of the so-called anti-social turn in relation to different feminist versions of kinship and community – from radical lesbian feminism to posthumanism. The article also gives a historical and cultural background to the position of the childfree woman.

Contemporary society believes itself to be in dire need of tolerance, and tolerance is perceived as anaimin itself and as a virtue that should emanate from within all (good) citizens. The state's role is to explain how tolerance is the solution to all our problems. To do so, the state also has to present the problems in need of being solved. This study focuses on how the problem of intolerance is represented in governmental policies. The study positions tolerance as a symptomatic politics of regulation of the self as well as minorities. In a detailed study of an exhibition on the life of Anne Frank, directed toward schoolchildren and produced by the Swedish agency Forum for Living History, the author identifies the agency's directives as problematic, since it assumes the Holocaust can be used as an example of intolerance, caused by individuals' inability to let everyone "be themselves." The notion of "being yourself " is scrutinized and placed in a late modern, liberal production of depoliticized identities. Instead the study suggests that using tolerance as a solution to the present problems of racism, hate, and the rise of fascism will prove counterproductive.What is needed instead is the ability to see the discourse of tolerance itself as a symptom of Western subjectivities, where the autonomous subject with a pre-social identity constitutes the hegemonic ideal of modernity, including both liberal and fascist uses of history.