Swedish film feminism
The purpose of the sabbatical is to complete the manuscript for the monograph Swedish Film Feminism: Between Grassroots Movements and Cultural Policies, for which a book contract with Bloomsbury Academic has been secured. The book explores the feminist film culture in Sweden in the 1970s and 80s and is the first in-depth study of this dynamic, but hitherto largely neglected, film culture. Drawing from rich archival materials and focusing on interaction with funding and state agencies, the book not only fills a gap in film history, but brings an innovative approach to international feminist film studies. The six chapters, approx. 65 000 words in sum, provide not only careful case studies of crucial contexts of production, distribution and reception, as well as of films and directors, but also elaborate reassessments of central debates in feminist film theory. Locating the overlooked Swedish case in relation to dominant Anglo-American accounts and established histories of origin opens up for crucial reconsiderations of what counts as essential events, concepts and conflicts in transnational film feminism. The book also offers crucial historical contextualization of the current revival of the film culture and the Swedish Film Institute’s famous gender equality program. The work is at an advanced stage. The leave will enable the writing and completion of the introductory and concluding chapters as well as revisions and adaptations of the four already written or drafted chapters.
Final report
The project’s most significant result is the completion of the manuscript for the monograph Swedish Film Feminism: Ambivalent Exceptionalism During the Second Wave. The book, which will be published by Bloomsbury during the spring of 2025, is the first in-depth study of the feminist film movement in Sweden during the 1970s and 80s. The book builds on extensive archival materials through which it charts and analyzes Swedish film feminism’s emergence, organization, discourse production, aesthetics, and politics. The film movement’s materialization in Sweden is contextualized with regard to contemporaneous Swedish film culture, the women’s movement, and so called “women-friendly” welfare and solidarity politics, as well as to transnational feminist film culture.
One of the book’s main purposes is to shed light on the feminist film movement’s interaction with state and cultural institutions and provide an understanding not only of what the era’s progressive political climate enabled but also of more paradoxical aspects. These include women’s limited opportunities to direct feature length fiction and the lack of gender equality measures in this area at a time when the goal of Swedish cultural policy was to increase participation in the cultural sphere and when Swedish gender equality politics made its mark on the global map. Moreover, remarkably few films directed by women in Sweden at this time explicitly centered issues of gender equality and to an even lesser degree issues of sexuality and race. By pulling contradictions and complexity into focus, the book seeks to understand the feminist film movement’s implication with, and preconditions given the contemporaneous political climate’s investment in an image of Sweden as moral forerunner. In this regard, the book also contributes to current critical discussions about Swedish exceptionalism and offers insight into how the notion of Sweden as a land of equality and as conscience of the world impacted women’s film production at this time.
The purpose is moreover to offer an original contribution to current methodological and theoretical debates in feminist film studies. The Introduction accounts for the work’s premises and intention to complicate given frameworks and origin stories in dominant Anglo-American feminist film historiography. The chapter highlights how the chain of events, as well as debates and film production in the Swedish context differed significantly from those making up established historical accounts. Therefore, parameters and concepts developed to discuss Anglophone film feminism do not automatically translate to or contribute to making sense of the Swedish case.
The first three chapters offer a contextualizing delineation of the key contexts, events, ideas, organizations, and types of films that constituted the feminist film movement in Sweden. The first chapter sheds light on the emergence of feminist film culture at the intersection between the new women’s movement and leftist film culture, but also on how discussions about women and film took hold broadly in Sweden in the 1970s. The second chapter explores the activities of four organizations engaged in improving conditions for women filmmakers and exhibiting so called “women’s films”. Based on archival records from these associations, as well as reception materials related to their public events, the chapter traces a discursive shift towards notions of “female dramaturgy” and “female films” during the second half of the 1970s and early 1980s. The third chapter explores the layered politics and aesthetics of women’s film work in Sweden in the 1970s and 80s. Surveying films circulating between women’s film screenings, the chapter draws out how these films centered issues of women’s history, reproductive labor, and environmentalism and pacifism, which was in line with the women’s movement’s turn to the notion of women’s culture in the second half of the 1970s. All three chapters stress the heterogeneous features through which feminist film culture manifested itself in this national context and pull into critical focus a recurrently articulated contradictory ambivalence and suspicion about politics in these contexts.
The ensuing three case studies provide critical intersectional interventions that deepen the interrogation of the feminist film movement’s entanglement with Swedish gender and solidarity politics. These chapters focus on production contexts enabled by filmmaking opportunities sustained by state agencies and commercial companies outside of the regular Swedish cultural support system. Focusing on four of Mai Zetterling’s non-fiction shorts, the first case considers the commercial and international currency of Zetterling’s feminist auteur persona in the wake of the devastating Swedish reception of The Girls in 1968. These films, funded for instance by the Olympic Committee and the construction company SKANSKA, allowed for original explorations of feminist aesthetics. The second case study explores a complicated category of documentaries made by Swedish women about women in the so-called “Third World”, supported by the Swedish International Development Authority (SIDA) in the 1970s and 80s. SIDA’s film support was distributed at a strikingly equal rate in terms of gender and thus implied unique opportunities for Swedish women filmmakers. The third case study examines two rare and marginalized lesbian film productions that were paradoxically funded by the state agency Socialstyrelsen (The National Board of Health and Welfare), the same agency that oversaw the official classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder in Sweden until 1979. Against the backdrop of the feminist film movement’s paradoxical manifestations during the second wave, the Afterword reflects on recent turns in Swedish film feminism in the 2010s and 20s, such as the uprise of and recent pushback against the Film Institute’s campaign “50/50 by 2020”.
Peer-reviewed anonymously, the manuscript has been praised as “a new benchmark for feminist film historiography”. The publisher’s summary of the reviewers’ reports from August 2024 stresses the book’s originality, thorough research, and effective organization, as well as the complex, nuanced, and innovative exploration of dominant frameworks in feminist film studies. Moreover, the book is lauded for its feminist and decolonial critique of Swedish exceptionalism, as well as for its potential to “reset the research landscape in feminist film studies”.
Aside from the book manuscript, the project has resulted in a research stay at the Institute for Communication, Copenhagen University, during the month of June 2022, and in presentations in academic as well as popular science contexts. Parts of the manuscript were presented at the film studies seminar at the Department of Cultural Science, University of Gothenburg, in May 2022, and at the film studies seminar at the Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, in April 2023. During the stay at the Institute for Communication, Copenhagen University, a draft of the Introduction was presented during the workshop “Feminist film history in Scandinavia: new approaches, methodologies, and connections”. In the context of the workshop’s research network about feminist film history in Scandinavia, a chapter has been written for the forthcoming volume Women’s film histories: Scandinavian perspectives (Nota bene). The chapter explores further questions about feminist and queer film historiography that the book addresses. Moreover, the project has resulted in participation in workshops related to another research network focusing on transnational feminist film culture in the 1970s and 80s. Participation has included presentations exploring questions related to lesbian feminist film culture during the same period, at the Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University in April 2023, as well as at the Department of Film and Literature, Linnaeus University in March 2024, and a contribution to the forthcoming volume Women Filmmakers and the Welfare State: Transnational Film Cultures During the Long 1970s in Canada and Sweden.
The research is first and foremost disseminated through the open-access publication of the monograph Swedish Film Feminism: Ambivalent Exceptionalism During the Second Wave. Aside from collaborations with academic networks and anthology projects, collaborations have also included a popular science presentation and curation of a film program for the Cinematheque in Stockholm in May 2024, as well as a presentation of Mai Zetterling, written for the Cinematheque program in the fall of 2022. International dissemination and collaboration include a guest lecture at the International Institute for Popular Culture, University of Turku in November 2024. The project has also involved collaboration with the KvinnSam collection at the Humanities Library, University of Gothenburg, resulting in an exhibition with archival materials studied in the book, which were displayed in the entry hall to the library in December 2023.
One of the book’s main purposes is to shed light on the feminist film movement’s interaction with state and cultural institutions and provide an understanding not only of what the era’s progressive political climate enabled but also of more paradoxical aspects. These include women’s limited opportunities to direct feature length fiction and the lack of gender equality measures in this area at a time when the goal of Swedish cultural policy was to increase participation in the cultural sphere and when Swedish gender equality politics made its mark on the global map. Moreover, remarkably few films directed by women in Sweden at this time explicitly centered issues of gender equality and to an even lesser degree issues of sexuality and race. By pulling contradictions and complexity into focus, the book seeks to understand the feminist film movement’s implication with, and preconditions given the contemporaneous political climate’s investment in an image of Sweden as moral forerunner. In this regard, the book also contributes to current critical discussions about Swedish exceptionalism and offers insight into how the notion of Sweden as a land of equality and as conscience of the world impacted women’s film production at this time.
The purpose is moreover to offer an original contribution to current methodological and theoretical debates in feminist film studies. The Introduction accounts for the work’s premises and intention to complicate given frameworks and origin stories in dominant Anglo-American feminist film historiography. The chapter highlights how the chain of events, as well as debates and film production in the Swedish context differed significantly from those making up established historical accounts. Therefore, parameters and concepts developed to discuss Anglophone film feminism do not automatically translate to or contribute to making sense of the Swedish case.
The first three chapters offer a contextualizing delineation of the key contexts, events, ideas, organizations, and types of films that constituted the feminist film movement in Sweden. The first chapter sheds light on the emergence of feminist film culture at the intersection between the new women’s movement and leftist film culture, but also on how discussions about women and film took hold broadly in Sweden in the 1970s. The second chapter explores the activities of four organizations engaged in improving conditions for women filmmakers and exhibiting so called “women’s films”. Based on archival records from these associations, as well as reception materials related to their public events, the chapter traces a discursive shift towards notions of “female dramaturgy” and “female films” during the second half of the 1970s and early 1980s. The third chapter explores the layered politics and aesthetics of women’s film work in Sweden in the 1970s and 80s. Surveying films circulating between women’s film screenings, the chapter draws out how these films centered issues of women’s history, reproductive labor, and environmentalism and pacifism, which was in line with the women’s movement’s turn to the notion of women’s culture in the second half of the 1970s. All three chapters stress the heterogeneous features through which feminist film culture manifested itself in this national context and pull into critical focus a recurrently articulated contradictory ambivalence and suspicion about politics in these contexts.
The ensuing three case studies provide critical intersectional interventions that deepen the interrogation of the feminist film movement’s entanglement with Swedish gender and solidarity politics. These chapters focus on production contexts enabled by filmmaking opportunities sustained by state agencies and commercial companies outside of the regular Swedish cultural support system. Focusing on four of Mai Zetterling’s non-fiction shorts, the first case considers the commercial and international currency of Zetterling’s feminist auteur persona in the wake of the devastating Swedish reception of The Girls in 1968. These films, funded for instance by the Olympic Committee and the construction company SKANSKA, allowed for original explorations of feminist aesthetics. The second case study explores a complicated category of documentaries made by Swedish women about women in the so-called “Third World”, supported by the Swedish International Development Authority (SIDA) in the 1970s and 80s. SIDA’s film support was distributed at a strikingly equal rate in terms of gender and thus implied unique opportunities for Swedish women filmmakers. The third case study examines two rare and marginalized lesbian film productions that were paradoxically funded by the state agency Socialstyrelsen (The National Board of Health and Welfare), the same agency that oversaw the official classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder in Sweden until 1979. Against the backdrop of the feminist film movement’s paradoxical manifestations during the second wave, the Afterword reflects on recent turns in Swedish film feminism in the 2010s and 20s, such as the uprise of and recent pushback against the Film Institute’s campaign “50/50 by 2020”.
Peer-reviewed anonymously, the manuscript has been praised as “a new benchmark for feminist film historiography”. The publisher’s summary of the reviewers’ reports from August 2024 stresses the book’s originality, thorough research, and effective organization, as well as the complex, nuanced, and innovative exploration of dominant frameworks in feminist film studies. Moreover, the book is lauded for its feminist and decolonial critique of Swedish exceptionalism, as well as for its potential to “reset the research landscape in feminist film studies”.
Aside from the book manuscript, the project has resulted in a research stay at the Institute for Communication, Copenhagen University, during the month of June 2022, and in presentations in academic as well as popular science contexts. Parts of the manuscript were presented at the film studies seminar at the Department of Cultural Science, University of Gothenburg, in May 2022, and at the film studies seminar at the Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, in April 2023. During the stay at the Institute for Communication, Copenhagen University, a draft of the Introduction was presented during the workshop “Feminist film history in Scandinavia: new approaches, methodologies, and connections”. In the context of the workshop’s research network about feminist film history in Scandinavia, a chapter has been written for the forthcoming volume Women’s film histories: Scandinavian perspectives (Nota bene). The chapter explores further questions about feminist and queer film historiography that the book addresses. Moreover, the project has resulted in participation in workshops related to another research network focusing on transnational feminist film culture in the 1970s and 80s. Participation has included presentations exploring questions related to lesbian feminist film culture during the same period, at the Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University in April 2023, as well as at the Department of Film and Literature, Linnaeus University in March 2024, and a contribution to the forthcoming volume Women Filmmakers and the Welfare State: Transnational Film Cultures During the Long 1970s in Canada and Sweden.
The research is first and foremost disseminated through the open-access publication of the monograph Swedish Film Feminism: Ambivalent Exceptionalism During the Second Wave. Aside from collaborations with academic networks and anthology projects, collaborations have also included a popular science presentation and curation of a film program for the Cinematheque in Stockholm in May 2024, as well as a presentation of Mai Zetterling, written for the Cinematheque program in the fall of 2022. International dissemination and collaboration include a guest lecture at the International Institute for Popular Culture, University of Turku in November 2024. The project has also involved collaboration with the KvinnSam collection at the Humanities Library, University of Gothenburg, resulting in an exhibition with archival materials studied in the book, which were displayed in the entry hall to the library in December 2023.