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Prompted by intense public debate and policy shifts, this study examines news media representations of gender‐affirming care for transgender and gender diverse (TGD) youth in Sweden from 2019 to 2023. The analysis draws on Hall's theories of media representation and articulation, with a framework focussing on risk and temporality. Analysing media representations is crucial for understanding how societal discourses on gender dysphoria are shaped. The media articulates a dramatic rise in youth seeking gender‐affirming care, and portrays a new group of patients, primarily young “girls” with neuropsychiatric conditions. This group is frequently articulated as vulnerable, mentally unstable and influenced by social contagion. The media representations draw on a risk discourse, centred on the threat of future regret, the irreversibility of medical interventions and suicidality. Both critics and supporters of gender‐affirming care invoke suicide risk to justify their positions. The study highlights how TGD youths' voices are largely absent from the media representations. It critiques the simplified constructions of gender dysphoria and calls for more nuanced understandings of the rise of a diagnosis, care access and mental health. Finally, the paper illustrates shifting alliances and resistance within a broader conjuncture where professional and cultural tensions shape public discourse on gender‐affirming care.

This article explores how civil society-based safety engagements are represented in Swedish news media, and how these representations are mediated through emotions. In a political climate where “increased safety” has become a dominant goal, we analyze how media narratives construct emotional regimes around safety and responsibility. Drawing on Stuart Halls work on representation and theories of emotions, we show how news media not only reflect but help (re)produce emotional and spatial geographies of (un)safety through personalized storytelling and emotive language. Focusing on personal portrayals of grassroots safety initiatives, such as women-led taxi services and local volunteer efforts, we demonstrate how emotions such as fear and frustration are articulated as morally productive and politically legitimate responses to unsafety. These narratives represent engagement as a matter of individual initiative and personal responsibility, often along gendered and racialized lines. Women are depicted as self-governing subjects whose emotional investments justify their civic actions, aligning with neoliberal ideals of responsibilized citizenship. Media participates in an emotional politics that valorizes agency and affective community while depoliticizing broader issues of inequality and exclusion. These representations risk obscuring the structural causes of unsafety by recasting safety as a matter of personal duty rather than collective or institutional responsibility.

The increase in private shelters for women escaping men’s violence in Sweden prompts an analysis of discursive struggles on separatism, violence, and safety. The analysis of websites and interviews with representatives from private shelters and women’s shelters show that the woman-to-woman approach is important for women’s shelters whereas private shelters frame their use of male staff as a practical necessity or a way to show women that there also exist ‘good’ men. Women’s shelters articulate the importance of knowledge about men’s violence for counteracting normalization of violence and self-blame, while private shelters emphasize therapeutic knowledge and interventions. To provide safety, women’s shelters articulate the importance of a homey atmosphere and ‘inner safety’, where private shelters emphasize security; shell protection, perpetrator profiles, and risk assessments. The women’s shelters position their work within a discourse of social change, whereas private shelters emphasize their lack of political ambitions, with profit-making as their primary motivation. Should public funding continue to be funnelled to private shelters, rather than to women’s shelters, it will undermine women’s shelter’s dual role of providing refuge and contributing to social change. Should the private shelters discourse prevail it will likely alter the support provided to victims of violence.

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. 

For-profit companies have begun competing with women’s shelters for ‘clients’ trying to escape violence. Using discourse theory, this study examines how 20 private shelters describe their business. The analysis shows that private shelters describe themselves as: (1) having a broad expertise and target group: (2) being able to tend to the individual needs of any client; and (3) being highly available and flexible. We understand this as an expression of a neoliberal market discourse and as a way to differentiate themselves from women’s shelters. This may put pressure on women’s shelters to provide similar ‘inclusion’, availability and flexibility. Furthermore: (4) private shelters contribute to shaping a desirable neoliberal subject, that is, a self-reliant woman; and (5), by articulating needs as individual and inherently mundane, they lean more towards ‘providing accommodation’ than addressing the particularities of (gendered) violence.

This paper examines the complexities surrounding feminist articulations diverg-ing from the established gender equality policies in Sweden, particularly concern-ing the valorization of wage labor as the cornerstone of women’s emancipation. Drawing on feminist-Marxist theories of social reproduction, it analyzes instances of women’s resistance to the hegemonic discourse of full-time wage labor, focus-ing on three empirical examples: the Haro organization advocating for the recogni-tion of unpaid domestic labor, the 2005 daycare debate ignited by Nina Björk, and the discourse of ‘mama-influencers’ typified by UnderbaraClara. Through the lens of boundary struggles and emotional labor, this study challenges the binary divi-sion between productive and reproductive work, making visible alternative femi-nist agendas centered on reducing wage labor and revaluing reproductive work. By reinterpreting women’s narratives within a feminist social reproduction theory framework, this paper aims to show how a feminist-Marxist analysis can broaden the scope of mainstream gender equality discourse. 

Mobile applications against gender-based violence are a global and growing phenomenon, with hundreds of apps available in the international market. In this article, we analyze how apps and digital technologies are discursively construed as measures against (gender-based) intimate partner violence in marketing and media coverage of three Swedish businesses and their digital tools aiming to combat and prevent violence. Focusing on sociotechnical imaginaries about the potential of technology, we analyze how the intersection between digital technology, innovation culture, and feminism affects the understanding of violence as a social problem and what type of solutions that become desirable. We do so by first scrutinizing how the selected apps’ technical functions are represented. These representations emphasize, first, a need for more, objective, and data-driven information about the nature and extent of violence, among both help-seekers and supporting institutions, and, second, the apps’ potential as tools for help-seeking and self-care, partly akin to mental health apps. While we share the conviction that digital communication can be a useful tool for help-seeking, we argue that the representations of these technical functions as solving the problem with gendered violence (a claim accentuated by the competition driven innovation context), produce a simplified and post-ideological understanding of the persistence of violence, as rooted in a lack of individual and professional insights and risk-assessments. Simultaneously, the risks of bias and increased surveillance associated with user data analyses, often perpetuating structural inequalities, are left unmentioned, something we conclusively argue is highly important for future studies and uses of technology against gendered violence.

Hur påverkar och samspelar föreställningar om digital teknik, innovationer och feminism förståelsen av könsbaserat våld som ettsocialt problem? I denna artikel undersöks hur tre kommersiellamobilapplikationer marknadsförs och konstrueras som verktygmot våld i nära relationer och mäns våld mot kvinnor.

By interviewing Swedish feminist activists who sell commodities to serve feminist purposes, this study focuses on how they articulate their engagement and make it intelligible. To untangle how articulations about feminist businesses may stabilise, reshape and challenge feminist values and engagement, we use theories of popular feminism alongside discourse theory to capture its contingencies. The analysis shows that, rather than enhancing sales by the use of feminism, the interviewees articulate an interest in spreading feminism through the sale of commodities. They understand their commodities to be ‘authentic’ and ‘truly’ feminist, thereby distancing themselves from corporations that use feminism to brand their products. However, this aligns precisely with the dominant contemporary corporate branding discourse of authenticity, understood as untainted by capitalism. The interviewees want to provide their customers with confidence, a dominant trait of popular feminism, through the display of feminist expression. A quest for visibility tends to absorb political aspects, which is further illustrated in the expressed wish to avoid an aggressive, provocative or explicitly political address. Understanding popular feminism as a discursive struggle, we conclude that the domination of a happy, confidence-building feminism will render more confrontational and radical versions of feminism less visible.

This paper explores the concept of “safe spaces” in digital learning environments, specifically in the context of gender studies educa-tion. Through a pedagogical development project called Safe Spaces Online, we collaborated with colleagues and students to address the complexities of safety in online education. Rather than reproducing the often-sensationalized portrayal of gender studies students and university settings found in mainstream media, our project examines how concerns around safe spaces are understood and realized in our courses and how these concerns influence our pedagogical practices. Drawing on our project experiences, this paper discusses how safety is understood and conceptualized in our gender studies teaching.

Our discussion reflects insights gained through dialogue with both colleagues and students, aiming to enrich and bring nuance to the polarized debates on safe spaces in higher education, particularly those concerning gender studies students. Our analysis reveals that online safe spaces in gender studies are understood in ways that significantly diverge from popular media portrayals. Contrary to narratives dominated by terms such as “trigger warnings” and “cancel culture”, students express a need for safe online spaces characterized by structure, clarity, relational engagement, and teacher presence. This paper seeks to contribute to a more balanced understanding of safe spaces by highlighting the practical and relational aspects valued by students in gender studies learning environments.