Books by Teresa Kulawik
Borderlands in European Gender Studies: Beyond the East–West Frontier, Nov 2019
With excellently chosen problematic topoi as its distinctive focus in gender studies dialogues wi... more With excellently chosen problematic topoi as its distinctive focus in gender studies dialogues within and beyond the East-West divide, this book speaks about the complexity of feminist agency toward current streams in theoretical discourses nowadays affected by neoliberalism, capitalism and hegemony of conservativism. This theoretically provocative volume explores to what extent a post-colonial perspective can be a vitalizing means to examining the role of post-East feminisms within a new global configuration along with a fresh revision of one’s own Marxist heritage and its potential. - Biljana Kašic, Feminist Theorist, University of Zadar/Centre for Women’s Studies, Zagreb, Croatia.
A brilliant and challenging critique of hegemonic East/West, North/South, and three-world narrative cartographies of feminist theory from the positionality and epistemic lens of the Eastern European borderlands and post-state socialism. Theorizing Eastern Europe and the Balkans as the European "Other", Borderlands traces a "cartography of absences" and makes a compelling argument for the significance of multiple, relational boundaries and borderlands as fundamental to a newly inclusive and capacious radical feminist project. A book that belongs on the bookshelves of all radical scholar–activists engaged in struggles for gender and economic justice globally. -
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Syracuse University.
This is a stunning and important critique. It brings a new perspective to the history of post-state socialism, thus "provincializing" the story Western academic feminism has long told about itself. The introduction provides a compelling reassessment of the terms of (Western) feminist theory, exposing its debt to Cold War epistemologies. The essays nicely demonstrate how new knowledge can be produced when the boundaries between East and West are courageously transgressed. - Joan Wallach Scott, Professor emerita at the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University.
This book examines the emergence of protective labor legislation and maternity benefits in Sweden... more This book examines the emergence of protective labor legislation and maternity benefits in Sweden and Germany. It addresses three central questions. Why was the early formation of welfare states in some countries more gendered than in others? Were gender politics relevant for the emergence of different welfare state regimes? How do we conceptualize gender as an explanatory category in comparative welfare state analysis? The study focuses on two countries that played a prominent role in the development of welfare states. With its legislation from the 1880s, Germany was the pioneer of compulsory workers’ insurance, and with its pension law of 1913 Sweden became the first country to introduce a universal social insurance scheme. In spite of these landmark innovations, there is extraordinarily little research looking into the rise of these two countries’ welfare states from a gendered perspective. For example, it is not well known that Bismarck’s health insurance law of 1883 made Germany the first country to introduce a maternity allowance for women workers. Roughly the same is true of Sweden. It was not in the era of social democracy, the 1930s, that maternity benefits were first proposed, but much earlier, in 1912, and as a state-subsidized allowance within the framework of voluntary health insurance.
Maternalist policies are rather contested among feminist scholars. On the one hand, some see these polices as having created and solidified a status of secondary citizenship for women. I argue that it is important to distinguish between visionary concepts and Realpolitik. Maternalist policies must be situated within a continuum of paradoxical gender relations: Motherhood can be used both to exclude women from citizenship and to include them. Social provisions for mothers were the focus of multiple and often contradictory objectives. They were a means to promote women’s economic independence – and its opposite. National women’s movements could be proponent as well as opponents of a gendered differentiation within protective labor legislation. This book examines the objectives that decisively influenced the strategies and identities of the political actors who shaped the conception of maternalist policies in Sweden and Germany before the First World War. Why Sweden and Germany? Sweden and Germany are ideal subjects for a comparative study of two countries. On the one hand, they present two similar cases of sociohistorical development. Both countries were characterized by late and rapid industrialization, late democratization, a traditionally strong state, a weak bourgeoisie, and early mobilization of the labor movement. On the other hand, despite these similarities they produced quite different types of welfare states. Today their welfare states are regarded as representative of two contrasting types: in Germany a conservative welfare state based on status and labor, and in Sweden a social democratic, universalistic welfare state based on citizenship. Both welfare states are also seen as having radically different gender specifics, with Germany representing a strong male breadwinner model and Sweden a weak one. Even in the early phases of welfare state formation, important differences were becoming evident. This study, by contrast, will show that each of these two countries had a considerably different gender order from the outset. I argue that greater gender solidarity was not a product of Sweden’s later, universalist welfare state; rather, it was an important element in the very rise of that kind of welfare state. On the other hand, the status orientation of German social policy was intrinsically related to safeguarding masculine status and to male closure of the public and political sphere during the early phase of welfare state formation. The research strategy pursued in this book links the explanatory framework of historical institutionalism to insights from discursive analysis. A fine-grained inquiry into decision-making processes is combined with a long-term perspective on state- and nation-building and on the formation of social classes and political actors. In Chapter 1 I critically review the variety of theories within comparative welfare state analysis and formulate a gender-inclusive approach based on interweaving historical institutionalism with discursive analysis. Chapter 2 examines the emergence of protective labor legislation in Germany. It demonstrates that the gendering of protective regulations was the result of a particular political constellation, enormously conflict-ridden and loaded with cultural cleavages, in which social welfare rights were posed against political citizenship. The feminization of protective labor legislation had its counterpart in an extreme masculinization of political identities. A strongly gender-differentiated citizen status rendered work in home and family care invisible while coding women’s wage labor as harmful to the social body. Chapter 3 shows how the pioneering invention of the maternity allowance in Germany amounted to a carryover of this constellation. Though its incorporation into the status-differentiated system of sickness insurance, however, the maternity allowance was tied into solidaristic relations that had very little to do with mothers’ life situations. Chapter 4 seeks to explain why Sweden did not adopt any gender-specific regulations for its first modern social welfare legislation around 1890. It is significant that there was initially no link between efforts at workplace protection and strategies against female work. The priority of economic over cultural cleavages eased the way for a “rational” manner of dealing with gender conflicts in both the political arena and in the processes of class formation. Two main pillars of modern gender dualism were not yet established in Sweden at the end of the 19th century: the interpretive patterns of physiological sexism and the universalization of political citizenship for men. Chapter 5 traces the struggle for the extension of the maternity allowance in Germany before the First World War. From the moment of its birth, the German welfare state is marked by a paradox that will leave a lasting imprint on it. Germany pioneered motherhood-oriented social policies, yet the German women’s movement had no influence at all on these early provisions. These benefits were embedded in relations of solidarity, which hindered polices friendly toward women in the long run. Chapter 6 explores Sweden’s introduction of a maternity leave for factory workers in 1900 and its ban on night work for women in 1909. Chapter 7 investigates the failure to invent an independent motherhood insurance in Sweden in 1912. Because Sweden had no compulsory sickness insurance at that time, the government drafted a bill to introduce a stand-alone maternal insurance for female factory workers. Swedish women were strong enough to prevent the institutionalization of a program based, as they perceived it, on false solidarities. Swedish women explicitly rejected the notion that there can be solidarity among women based on the experience of maternity and that might give rise to redistributive policies.
Journal Articles by Teresa Kulawik
Feministische Studien, 2000
Österrreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft, 2003
Schweden ist berühmt für seinen umfassenden Wohlfahrtsstaat und seine Gleichstellungspolitik. Es ... more Schweden ist berühmt für seinen umfassenden Wohlfahrtsstaat und seine Gleichstellungspolitik. Es mag deshalb verwundern, dass es nicht nur zu den Vorreitern auf dem Gebiet der Biotechnologie zählt, sondern über besonders " liberale " staatliche Regelungen verfügt. Verbrauchende Embryonen-forschung ist erlaubt, ebenso die Präimplantationsdiagnostik. Dieser Artikel rekonstruiert zunächst die schwedische Rechtsentwicklung, untersucht dann im Kontext der Institutionen und Akteure, ob und wie Frauen an den Willensbildung-und Entscheidungsprozessen partizipierten und wendet sich abschließend den öffentlichen und politischen Diskursen zu. Dabei wird deutlich werden, dass Frau-en zwar in hohem Maße an den politischen Prozessen beteiligt waren, dass sie jedoch keinen beson-deren Standpunkt zur Biotechnologie vertreten. Sie teilen vielmehr den Beinahe-Konsensus, wonach Biotechnologien durch ihre guten Ziele, z.B. dem Leiden der Frauen/Eltern an " unfreiwilliger Kin-derlosigkeit " abzuhelfen, gerechtfertigt sind. Die Anwendung selektiver Praktiken, wie der Prä-implantationsdiagnostik, wird als konsequente Fortsetzung der mit dem Abtreibungsrecht begründe-ten Selbstbestimmung aufgefasst.
Politics & Gender, 2009
This essay proposes an integrated discursive institutionalism as a framework for feminist politic... more This essay proposes an integrated discursive institutionalism as a framework for feminist political analysis. Both historical institutionalism and discourse analysis have merits and limitations, and both perspectives complement each other and offer solutions to their respective deficiencies. Traditionally there has been a strong demarcation between the two perspectives. A common way to divide both approaches is between investigating “causal regularities” and “understanding meaning.” I argue that a feminist institutionalism needs to deconstruct the dichotomy of causal explanation versus meaning and description and to reformulate the concept of causality. There is no adequate explanation without “meaning,” and the stretching of institutionalism toward “ideas” exemplifies this inadequacy
Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society, ISSN 1072-4745, E-ISSN 1468-2893, 2020
This article proposes the concept of feminist political epistemology to examine the changing moda... more This article proposes the concept of feminist political epistemology to examine the changing modalities of knowledge production in Germany. The article examines how German gender equality policies have been embedded in and shaped by the shifting modalities of knowledge production and the remaking of the science expertise-politics nexus. The two formative time periods investigated-the 1960s-1970s and 1998 to the present-account for major shifts in the gender and political knowledge regime in Germany. The findings provide insights into the contradictory dynamics involved in transformations of political and epistemic authority.
Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society, ISSN 1072-4745, E-ISSN 1468-2893, 2020
This special issue advances feminist inquiry and theorizing of the politics of knowledge within o... more This special issue advances feminist inquiry and theorizing of the politics of knowledge within our current, highly paradoxical societal landscape. It draws together feminist analyses of 'expertise' with feminist epistemologies of situated knowledge, Black feminist thought, theory of affect and emotions, sociology of knowledge and science and technology studies (STS). As such, it enables a timely inter-disciplinary engagement with current paradigmatic shifts in knowledge production and claims to expertise as well as an examination of the gendered and racialised epistemic authority. For several decades the study of 'knowledge', changing modes of knowledge production and the dynamics shaping the recognition of expertise, were a largely confided to the specialized sub-fields of sociology of knowledge and STS. In the last ten to fifteen years however, these themes have become a common research focus in wide array of social studies, including gender studies. There are diverse reasons for the increasing popularity of this research focus and each has profound implications for gender equality claims. The epochal transformations from industrial to knowledge-based economies and the increasing complexity of policy problems, is one of the most important factors driving this increased analytical focus on knowledge. These epochal shifts have amplified the relevance of knowledge-intensive policy areas and profoundly reshaped political processes and public communication into a novel style of governing through knowledge, resulting in both the scientification of politics and heightened politicization of expertise. Feminists' mobilisation of 'gender experts' and the dilemmas and restrictions associated with such a position, are emblematic of this style of governing through knowledge.
Haften For Kritiska Studier, 2000
Osterrreichische Zeitschrift Fur Politikwissenschaft, 2003
Die Grenzen des Maternalismus : Der Kampf um eine Mutterschaftsversicherung in Schweden und Deuts... more Die Grenzen des Maternalismus : Der Kampf um eine Mutterschaftsversicherung in Schweden und Deutschland
Book chapters by Teresa Kulawik
EU, Geschlecht, Staat / [ed] Kreisky, Eva, Lang, Sabine & Sauer, Birgit, Wien: WUV , 2001, s. 137-154, 2001
ECPR (European Consortium for Political Research) General Conference, Marburg, September 19–21, 2003., 2003
What makes Sweden especially relevant for this case study? At first, Sweden appears to have quite... more What makes Sweden especially relevant for this case study? At first, Sweden appears to have quite a puzzling policy pattern indeed. As a social democratic regime with an extensive statist governance system, Sweden stands out in its biomedical policy through remarkably liberal, lenient regulations which, in European comparison, are closest to those of Great Britain. Sweden's legislation allows for the use of so-called "spare" human embryos, resulting from IVF procedures, for research purpose, pre-implantation diagnosis, and egg donation. This country also has a considerable amount of embryonic stem cell lines at its disposal and has recently initiated an entire research program involving their use. Furthermore, legislative processes have been initiated, which could legalize the creation of – instead of the use of "spare" – human embryos for research purposes and so-called therapeutic cloning. This policy-making process provoked only a moderate deal of controversy. Parliamentary resolutions concerning the issue were backed by a broad consensus among all parties in Parliament. To say the least, the politicization of biomedical issues has been quite limited. This corresponds well to the virtual lack of noticeable mobilization of extra-parliamentary groups.
Throughout the course of this essay I will de-riddle the puzzling features of Sweden's biopolitics through presenting the juncture between institutionalist and discursive approaches. In short, I argue that the Swedish model is based on a productivist paradigm, the institutional and discursive parameters of which have not been decisively extended through its "new politics." In this way, elitist policy-making structures within environmental and technology policies have remained intact. Ironically, this relative openness, which enabled the rapid integration of new issues and political actors, was what led to the blockage of extensive participatory rights (as a counter-concept to the elitist policy style) and hindered the development of oppositional public spaces and forms of knowledge. Sweden's heritage of utilitarian ethics and pragmatic legal tradition and its assertions make it even more difficult for leftist or feminist to formulate a critical stance. Therefore, the only anti-embryo research position taken in the political arena was by the Christian Democratic Party.
I will start providing an overview of policy regulations, then analyze the peculiar relation between the social democratic state, and the so-called new politics. I will then examine the institutions and actors in the biomedical policy field, and finally reconstruct the lines of argumentation within policy discourse.
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Books by Teresa Kulawik
A brilliant and challenging critique of hegemonic East/West, North/South, and three-world narrative cartographies of feminist theory from the positionality and epistemic lens of the Eastern European borderlands and post-state socialism. Theorizing Eastern Europe and the Balkans as the European "Other", Borderlands traces a "cartography of absences" and makes a compelling argument for the significance of multiple, relational boundaries and borderlands as fundamental to a newly inclusive and capacious radical feminist project. A book that belongs on the bookshelves of all radical scholar–activists engaged in struggles for gender and economic justice globally. -
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Syracuse University.
This is a stunning and important critique. It brings a new perspective to the history of post-state socialism, thus "provincializing" the story Western academic feminism has long told about itself. The introduction provides a compelling reassessment of the terms of (Western) feminist theory, exposing its debt to Cold War epistemologies. The essays nicely demonstrate how new knowledge can be produced when the boundaries between East and West are courageously transgressed. - Joan Wallach Scott, Professor emerita at the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University.
Maternalist policies are rather contested among feminist scholars. On the one hand, some see these polices as having created and solidified a status of secondary citizenship for women. I argue that it is important to distinguish between visionary concepts and Realpolitik. Maternalist policies must be situated within a continuum of paradoxical gender relations: Motherhood can be used both to exclude women from citizenship and to include them. Social provisions for mothers were the focus of multiple and often contradictory objectives. They were a means to promote women’s economic independence – and its opposite. National women’s movements could be proponent as well as opponents of a gendered differentiation within protective labor legislation. This book examines the objectives that decisively influenced the strategies and identities of the political actors who shaped the conception of maternalist policies in Sweden and Germany before the First World War. Why Sweden and Germany? Sweden and Germany are ideal subjects for a comparative study of two countries. On the one hand, they present two similar cases of sociohistorical development. Both countries were characterized by late and rapid industrialization, late democratization, a traditionally strong state, a weak bourgeoisie, and early mobilization of the labor movement. On the other hand, despite these similarities they produced quite different types of welfare states. Today their welfare states are regarded as representative of two contrasting types: in Germany a conservative welfare state based on status and labor, and in Sweden a social democratic, universalistic welfare state based on citizenship. Both welfare states are also seen as having radically different gender specifics, with Germany representing a strong male breadwinner model and Sweden a weak one. Even in the early phases of welfare state formation, important differences were becoming evident. This study, by contrast, will show that each of these two countries had a considerably different gender order from the outset. I argue that greater gender solidarity was not a product of Sweden’s later, universalist welfare state; rather, it was an important element in the very rise of that kind of welfare state. On the other hand, the status orientation of German social policy was intrinsically related to safeguarding masculine status and to male closure of the public and political sphere during the early phase of welfare state formation. The research strategy pursued in this book links the explanatory framework of historical institutionalism to insights from discursive analysis. A fine-grained inquiry into decision-making processes is combined with a long-term perspective on state- and nation-building and on the formation of social classes and political actors. In Chapter 1 I critically review the variety of theories within comparative welfare state analysis and formulate a gender-inclusive approach based on interweaving historical institutionalism with discursive analysis. Chapter 2 examines the emergence of protective labor legislation in Germany. It demonstrates that the gendering of protective regulations was the result of a particular political constellation, enormously conflict-ridden and loaded with cultural cleavages, in which social welfare rights were posed against political citizenship. The feminization of protective labor legislation had its counterpart in an extreme masculinization of political identities. A strongly gender-differentiated citizen status rendered work in home and family care invisible while coding women’s wage labor as harmful to the social body. Chapter 3 shows how the pioneering invention of the maternity allowance in Germany amounted to a carryover of this constellation. Though its incorporation into the status-differentiated system of sickness insurance, however, the maternity allowance was tied into solidaristic relations that had very little to do with mothers’ life situations. Chapter 4 seeks to explain why Sweden did not adopt any gender-specific regulations for its first modern social welfare legislation around 1890. It is significant that there was initially no link between efforts at workplace protection and strategies against female work. The priority of economic over cultural cleavages eased the way for a “rational” manner of dealing with gender conflicts in both the political arena and in the processes of class formation. Two main pillars of modern gender dualism were not yet established in Sweden at the end of the 19th century: the interpretive patterns of physiological sexism and the universalization of political citizenship for men. Chapter 5 traces the struggle for the extension of the maternity allowance in Germany before the First World War. From the moment of its birth, the German welfare state is marked by a paradox that will leave a lasting imprint on it. Germany pioneered motherhood-oriented social policies, yet the German women’s movement had no influence at all on these early provisions. These benefits were embedded in relations of solidarity, which hindered polices friendly toward women in the long run. Chapter 6 explores Sweden’s introduction of a maternity leave for factory workers in 1900 and its ban on night work for women in 1909. Chapter 7 investigates the failure to invent an independent motherhood insurance in Sweden in 1912. Because Sweden had no compulsory sickness insurance at that time, the government drafted a bill to introduce a stand-alone maternal insurance for female factory workers. Swedish women were strong enough to prevent the institutionalization of a program based, as they perceived it, on false solidarities. Swedish women explicitly rejected the notion that there can be solidarity among women based on the experience of maternity and that might give rise to redistributive policies.
Journal Articles by Teresa Kulawik
Book chapters by Teresa Kulawik
Throughout the course of this essay I will de-riddle the puzzling features of Sweden's biopolitics through presenting the juncture between institutionalist and discursive approaches. In short, I argue that the Swedish model is based on a productivist paradigm, the institutional and discursive parameters of which have not been decisively extended through its "new politics." In this way, elitist policy-making structures within environmental and technology policies have remained intact. Ironically, this relative openness, which enabled the rapid integration of new issues and political actors, was what led to the blockage of extensive participatory rights (as a counter-concept to the elitist policy style) and hindered the development of oppositional public spaces and forms of knowledge. Sweden's heritage of utilitarian ethics and pragmatic legal tradition and its assertions make it even more difficult for leftist or feminist to formulate a critical stance. Therefore, the only anti-embryo research position taken in the political arena was by the Christian Democratic Party.
I will start providing an overview of policy regulations, then analyze the peculiar relation between the social democratic state, and the so-called new politics. I will then examine the institutions and actors in the biomedical policy field, and finally reconstruct the lines of argumentation within policy discourse.
A brilliant and challenging critique of hegemonic East/West, North/South, and three-world narrative cartographies of feminist theory from the positionality and epistemic lens of the Eastern European borderlands and post-state socialism. Theorizing Eastern Europe and the Balkans as the European "Other", Borderlands traces a "cartography of absences" and makes a compelling argument for the significance of multiple, relational boundaries and borderlands as fundamental to a newly inclusive and capacious radical feminist project. A book that belongs on the bookshelves of all radical scholar–activists engaged in struggles for gender and economic justice globally. -
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Syracuse University.
This is a stunning and important critique. It brings a new perspective to the history of post-state socialism, thus "provincializing" the story Western academic feminism has long told about itself. The introduction provides a compelling reassessment of the terms of (Western) feminist theory, exposing its debt to Cold War epistemologies. The essays nicely demonstrate how new knowledge can be produced when the boundaries between East and West are courageously transgressed. - Joan Wallach Scott, Professor emerita at the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University.
Maternalist policies are rather contested among feminist scholars. On the one hand, some see these polices as having created and solidified a status of secondary citizenship for women. I argue that it is important to distinguish between visionary concepts and Realpolitik. Maternalist policies must be situated within a continuum of paradoxical gender relations: Motherhood can be used both to exclude women from citizenship and to include them. Social provisions for mothers were the focus of multiple and often contradictory objectives. They were a means to promote women’s economic independence – and its opposite. National women’s movements could be proponent as well as opponents of a gendered differentiation within protective labor legislation. This book examines the objectives that decisively influenced the strategies and identities of the political actors who shaped the conception of maternalist policies in Sweden and Germany before the First World War. Why Sweden and Germany? Sweden and Germany are ideal subjects for a comparative study of two countries. On the one hand, they present two similar cases of sociohistorical development. Both countries were characterized by late and rapid industrialization, late democratization, a traditionally strong state, a weak bourgeoisie, and early mobilization of the labor movement. On the other hand, despite these similarities they produced quite different types of welfare states. Today their welfare states are regarded as representative of two contrasting types: in Germany a conservative welfare state based on status and labor, and in Sweden a social democratic, universalistic welfare state based on citizenship. Both welfare states are also seen as having radically different gender specifics, with Germany representing a strong male breadwinner model and Sweden a weak one. Even in the early phases of welfare state formation, important differences were becoming evident. This study, by contrast, will show that each of these two countries had a considerably different gender order from the outset. I argue that greater gender solidarity was not a product of Sweden’s later, universalist welfare state; rather, it was an important element in the very rise of that kind of welfare state. On the other hand, the status orientation of German social policy was intrinsically related to safeguarding masculine status and to male closure of the public and political sphere during the early phase of welfare state formation. The research strategy pursued in this book links the explanatory framework of historical institutionalism to insights from discursive analysis. A fine-grained inquiry into decision-making processes is combined with a long-term perspective on state- and nation-building and on the formation of social classes and political actors. In Chapter 1 I critically review the variety of theories within comparative welfare state analysis and formulate a gender-inclusive approach based on interweaving historical institutionalism with discursive analysis. Chapter 2 examines the emergence of protective labor legislation in Germany. It demonstrates that the gendering of protective regulations was the result of a particular political constellation, enormously conflict-ridden and loaded with cultural cleavages, in which social welfare rights were posed against political citizenship. The feminization of protective labor legislation had its counterpart in an extreme masculinization of political identities. A strongly gender-differentiated citizen status rendered work in home and family care invisible while coding women’s wage labor as harmful to the social body. Chapter 3 shows how the pioneering invention of the maternity allowance in Germany amounted to a carryover of this constellation. Though its incorporation into the status-differentiated system of sickness insurance, however, the maternity allowance was tied into solidaristic relations that had very little to do with mothers’ life situations. Chapter 4 seeks to explain why Sweden did not adopt any gender-specific regulations for its first modern social welfare legislation around 1890. It is significant that there was initially no link between efforts at workplace protection and strategies against female work. The priority of economic over cultural cleavages eased the way for a “rational” manner of dealing with gender conflicts in both the political arena and in the processes of class formation. Two main pillars of modern gender dualism were not yet established in Sweden at the end of the 19th century: the interpretive patterns of physiological sexism and the universalization of political citizenship for men. Chapter 5 traces the struggle for the extension of the maternity allowance in Germany before the First World War. From the moment of its birth, the German welfare state is marked by a paradox that will leave a lasting imprint on it. Germany pioneered motherhood-oriented social policies, yet the German women’s movement had no influence at all on these early provisions. These benefits were embedded in relations of solidarity, which hindered polices friendly toward women in the long run. Chapter 6 explores Sweden’s introduction of a maternity leave for factory workers in 1900 and its ban on night work for women in 1909. Chapter 7 investigates the failure to invent an independent motherhood insurance in Sweden in 1912. Because Sweden had no compulsory sickness insurance at that time, the government drafted a bill to introduce a stand-alone maternal insurance for female factory workers. Swedish women were strong enough to prevent the institutionalization of a program based, as they perceived it, on false solidarities. Swedish women explicitly rejected the notion that there can be solidarity among women based on the experience of maternity and that might give rise to redistributive policies.
Throughout the course of this essay I will de-riddle the puzzling features of Sweden's biopolitics through presenting the juncture between institutionalist and discursive approaches. In short, I argue that the Swedish model is based on a productivist paradigm, the institutional and discursive parameters of which have not been decisively extended through its "new politics." In this way, elitist policy-making structures within environmental and technology policies have remained intact. Ironically, this relative openness, which enabled the rapid integration of new issues and political actors, was what led to the blockage of extensive participatory rights (as a counter-concept to the elitist policy style) and hindered the development of oppositional public spaces and forms of knowledge. Sweden's heritage of utilitarian ethics and pragmatic legal tradition and its assertions make it even more difficult for leftist or feminist to formulate a critical stance. Therefore, the only anti-embryo research position taken in the political arena was by the Christian Democratic Party.
I will start providing an overview of policy regulations, then analyze the peculiar relation between the social democratic state, and the so-called new politics. I will then examine the institutions and actors in the biomedical policy field, and finally reconstruct the lines of argumentation within policy discourse.