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This book is an extended and formally mixed prose poem on the experience of becoming a mother, and particularly on spending the everyday every day with a baby, observing their development and attempting to record what one perceives. The author, Lily Robert-Foley is an American writer; she is also a translator, university teacher, and artist, and she is a playful thinker with an interest in feminist and queer resistance. Her previous publications range from a novel to a book on experimental translation; this is her first published book of poetry.

Med denna Festskrift firar vi att Centrum för genusvetenskap i över fyrtio år har fungerat som en viktig mötesplats för kunskap och vetenskapande – en sådan plats som många uppfattar som absolut nödvändig för sin överlevnad i akademin. Genom att sätta genus i centrum på Centrum skapar vi kunskap över gränser mellan vetenskapsområden, fakulteter och forskningsfält. Centrum består i grund och botten av de människor som verkar där. Den här Festskriften är också en hyllning till alla dessa människor – deras arbete, engagemang, intelligens, uthållighet och inspirationsförmåga. Centrum existerar också tack vare de viktiga nationella och internationella nätverk inom forskning och utbildning som Centrum är del av. Med denna bok skickar vi alltså en hälsning och ett tack till alla våra kollegor inom fältet. Kapitlen i denna volym är en blandning som sträcker sig från essäer och personliga historieskrivningar om Centrum, till reflektioner om arbetslivet vid Centrum eller som genusforskare överlag, till forskningsartiklar om en rad mycket olika områden, vilka i sig också vittnar om den livliga och variationsrika forskningsmiljö som vi fortsätter att bygga tillsammans.

Vägarna till ensamstående föräldraskap är många, och de kan vara frivilliga eller ofrivilliga, omdebatterade eller okontroversiella. Livet som ensamstående förälder kan också vara präglat av ensamhet, eller inte alls ensamt. Enförälderfamiljer synliggör de många betydelser och nyanser, vanligheter och ovanligheter, värden och känslor som ryms i erfarenheter av att vara ensamstående förälder. Boken undersöker också skildringar av ensamstående föräldrars familjeliv i litteratur, film och andra medier, från banbrytande romaner på 1930-talet till komplexa filmberättelser och humoristiska seriealbum på 2000-talet. Kapitlen är skrivna av forskare, författare och journalister med olika perspektiv och utgångspunkter. Detta gör att boken som helhet ger en bred bild av hur det ensamstående föräldraskapet beskrivs, förstås och upplevs i olika sammanhang och situationer.

Since the 1960s, Swedish family policies have encouraged parents to share their parental obligations equally, and in the 1980s joint legal custody became standard after divorce or separation. Mothers as well as fathers are expected to financially provide for the family and to take part in the everyday care and fostering of the child. This study explores how single parenthood, non-residential parents and co-parenting play out and become conventionalized in daily news in this national context. The material consists of articles that mention single parenthood and “the other parent” from the four most widely read newspapers published in the period 2010–2019. The analytical focus has been on the written language and what is spelled out, alluded to or ignored, and dominant and less dominant representations. The results show that there are contrasting depictions of mothers and fathers. While the mother as a single parent, co-parent and non-residential parent overall is represented as good and attentive, the father is more of a split figure. He recurrently comes across as absent and negligent as the non-residential parent, but as committed and involved as the primary parent or co-parent with joint residential custody.

This chapter introduces the volume by outlining some crucial scholarly histories: the feminist study of motherhood and mothering, and the literary study of mothers in fiction and life writing, across many differences. Since mothers, motherhood, and mothering not only are defined by physical and material experiences but also take shape in narratives—in stories and recorded accounts—these also need to be continuously studied and theorized if we are to understand the culturally specific meanings of motherhood. The chapter then introduces each of the separate studies in the volume. These variously demonstrate that literary representations of mothers and mothering foreground the ways that parenthood and parenting for women are imbricated with dimensions like class, race, age, and nationality, as well as how motherhood is connected to living a heterosexual, lesbian, queer, or trans everyday life. In original analyses of a range of representations, from absent/missing mothers to highly present ones, the studies that comprise this book engage in a dialogue with the previous research, raising questions about how motherhood and mothering are marked by absence and/or presence and by profound ambivalences, about how maternal perspectives and voices gain space or mix with filial voices in the narratives, and about how mothers are constructed in relation to ideals and norms of motherhood.

Lone mothers are a diverse group but it has been argued in the previous research that they tend to be homogenised. This article explores representations of single mothers in Swedish newspapers. Material from the two largest morning papers and the two largest tabloids was collected from the years 2015–2017. The results of the study suggest that although the newspaper representations do not fully reflect the diversity of social realities, there are indeed varying images of lone mothers in the sample. A recurring representation is as a comparatively poor and hardworking—even heroic—woman, who in political argumentation is referred to as someone in need of societal support and policy reforms. A less frequent representation, that often occurs in lengthy, in-depth pieces, is the affluent official person who despite her prosperity struggles with combining single (good) motherhood with her career, or the middle-class woman who becomes a lone mother via assisted reproductive technologies. Teenage motherhood (i.e., age), race/ethnicity, sexuality, and welfare dependence are seldom, if at all, alluded to. There is no vilification or condemnation of the lone mother, as has been found in research on other national contexts.

This article offers an analysis of three popular Swedish handbooks for new parents, written by authors in the “media class.” In these texts breastfeeding as a gendered, embodied practice collides with the Swedish ideal of gender-equal parenting. The analysis explores the various ways that gendered bodies, gendered (parental) rights, and gender equality figure in the handbooks, drawing upon feminist studies of bodies and embodiment, and of breastfeeding in particular. It contextualizes the primary texts in terms of the Swedish ideal of gender-equal parenting, and in terms of current breastfeeding practices in Sweden. In the handbooks, the “breastfeeding imperative” is resisted because it is irrelevant and constraining for women, but also because it alienates fathers from infant feeding. Breastfeeding is ultimately rejected for reasons grounded in differences between gendered parental bodies, and particular understandings of gender-equal parenting. We contend that the books’ suggestion that breastfeeding be rejected in the name of parental gender equality, while it may cause women to feel physically free, also supports fathers’ rights discourses and in fact serves to (once more) marginalize women’s bodies, straight and queer.

Making home explores the orphan child as a trope in contemporary US fiction, arguing that in the times of perceived national crisis, concerns about American identity, family and literary history are articulated around this literary figure. The book focuses on orphan figures in a broad, multi-ethnic range of contemporary fiction by Barbara Kingsolver, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Cunningham, Jonathan Safran Foer, John Irving, Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison among others, and investigates genres as carriers of cultural memory, looking particularly at the captivity narrative, historical fiction, speculative fiction, the sentimental novel and the bildungsroman. From a decisively literary perspective, Making home engages socio-political concerns such as mixed-race families, child welfare, and racial and national identity, as well as shifting definitions of familial, national and literary home. By analysing how contemporary novels both incorporate and resist gendered and raced literary conventions, how they elaborate on symbolic and factual meanings of orphanhood, and how they explore kinship beyond the nuclear and/or adoptive family, this book offers something distinctly new in American literary studies. It is a crucial study for students and scholars interested in the links between literature and identity, questions of inclusion and exclusion in national ideology, and definitions of family and childhood.

This essay investigates representations of working-class mothers—particularly aging, ill, and dying maternal bodies—in novels by middle-class sons (Mustafa Can, Peter Handberg, and Peter Sandström). Unlike patrifocal narratives, filial life writing about mothers is typically not written to recover a parent who has been absent, but to re(dis)cover one who has always been present. The novels offer a space for thinking through motherhood and sonhood as relational, embodied experience, and for reconsidering the interplay between gender and perspective in life writing as well as in cultural criticism.

cross-disciplinary text; does not fit DIVA's system of categories

Academic articles and thereby journals have become more and more important in the everyday life of Academia. Even though the contents of an academic journal depend on numerous factors, an analysis of the archive of a journal can tell us something important about a research field, and/or a discipline. This article analyzes how gender research and “gender studies” [genusvetenskap] is represented in and by a central scholarly journal in the Nordic region: Kvinnovetenskaplig tidskrift (KVT, 1980–2006), later Tidskrift för genusvetenskap (TGV, 2007–). By drawing on theories of representation (Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak) the article investigates and analyzes what the almost 700 published articles are about and whom they represent in terms of disciplines and universities, but also how representation and place are related. Based on a content analysis and conversations with previous editors, the study demonstrates that the “what” of representation in KVT/TGV depends largely on the “where” and the “who”. While not unique to gender studies these are material aspects of scholarship that needs to be further acknowledged. Findings also include some important shifts and continuities. The representation in KVT/TGV are increasingly focused on Sweden, on the academy as such, and on gender studies as a discipline (genusvetenskap), while the presence of “women” “sex” [kön] and “feminism” remain strong throughout the period.

“In Sweden, Men Can Have It All”—in 2010 this intriguing claim headlined an article in The New York Times on parental leave in Sweden.1 Swedish men’s access to family life in general, and to their children in particular, has been the focus of a range of discourses especially since the 1990s, and the specific history of parental politics in Sweden—especially the parental leave system—is a significant factor behind the increasing visibility of fathers in this national context.2 Fathers often hold center stage in the current media debates about parenthood, as well as in Scandinavian gender studies research, where studies on “new fathers” are much more common than studies of (new) mothers.3 While discourses on fathers have specific inflections in the Swedish papa-political context, the expanding interest is also part of an international—not least Anglo-Saxon—trend of investigating and “redefining” fatherhood, problematizing meanings of fatherhood in nonpatriarchal or postpatriarchal familial contexts, and investigating the (gap between) norms or ideals on the one hand and practices or lived experiences on the other.4