CONSTRUCTING “THE SWEDISH CHILD”

The child has been a frequent figure in literary and cinematic texts that depict problems in the Swedish welfare state and the decades following its “golden era” since the late twentieth century. One of the key reasons for the prevalence of the child figure is the tension between the cultural construction of the Swedish child taken care of by the welfare state and the experiences of children who live in Sweden but whose everyday lives are anything but carefree. This tension is not by any means unique to Sweden or the Nordic region. The instances of child figures in films or literature who resist, find troubling, or simply do not have the ability to be like the culturally idealized child likely exist in most places where the understanding of who gets to occupy childhood refers to those who are privileged; in many Western contexts this means being white, middle-class, able-bodied, and heterosexual. Robin Bernstein, for example, discusses how depictions of Black children, such as Claudia in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye or the child in the memories of scholar Ann duCille, grapple with the experience of the forcible exclusion from the white innocent American childhood.³ Bernstein argues that the tension between real children and the cultural constructions of childhood has been a central question in the field of childhood studies, where the concept of childhood functions as abstract and disembodied, while “real children” are seen as “tangible and fleshy.”⁴ Instead of understanding these two as opposing sides, Bernstein suggests that historically located children and textually based childhood co-emerge and co-constitute each other through performance. This means that childhood is “best understood as a legible pattern of behaviors that comes into being through bodies of all ages.”⁵

The juvenile body can function as an effigy of childhood, but it will always be unstable and inadequate because it is ever growing. Childhood as an abstract idea, then, functions as an “act of surrogation that compensates for losses incurred through growth.”⁶ Bernstein writes this in the context of American popular culture, using the example of the 2006 Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards ceremony, where Dakota Fanning presented Shirley Temple Black with the SAG Life Achievement Award. Fanning, who was twelve at the time, performed perfectly Shirley Temple’s “particular mold of girlhood,” which the grown-up Shirley Temple Black could no longer have performed the same way. At the same time, Fanning, too, was in the process of growing up; thus, as Bernstein argues, the Shirley Temple doll that she held in her hand was the only surrogate of the Shirley Temple childhood that would not change through growth. Of course, the discourse around Shirley Temple has changed throughout the twentieth century. As Kirsten Hatch argues, it is the competing notions of innocence that have shaped childhood for a long time, and while Shirley Temple has also figured in many debates and discussions of pedophilia and the sexualization of childhood, during the time of her stardom she ultimately emblematized an innocence that was “built upon the fairly stable conception of the white child’s innocence as transformative, capable not only of deflecting adult sexuality but of transforming adults for the better.”⁷

The abstract idea of childhood and its impact on historically located children, however, has had a special status for both the self-image and international reputation of Sweden throughout the twentieth century. The official rhetoric of the developing welfare state in the 1920s and 1930s incorporated childhood as an emblem for the citizens of the Swedish state. Before the Social Democratic Party’s victory in 1932, Per Albin Hansson, the leader of the party, said in his famous 1928 speech at the Social Democratic Congress that Sweden as a good state should be like a home for its people. He said that in this good home no one should be privileged or left behind or be seen as a stepchild.⁸ Thus, in the ideal circumstances of the Swedish welfare state, the citizens would all be taken care of by the state, have equal opportunities, and no one would feel that they are better than others nor as a “stepchild.” After the Social Democratic Party came to power (and stayed in power for forty-four years), they implemented significant policies to expand the welfare state, improving state pensions, introducing maternity payments and establishing two weeks’ annual vacation in the 1930s. The primary mission of the emerging welfare state, as Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh argue, became protecting, caring, providing for, and educating children, who were seen as “defenseless today but citizens tomorrow and the new society’s best hope.”⁹ This included “liberating” children from the family with the help of the state as part of a larger effort “to liberate people from the unequal and unjust relations of dependency that had characterized the old class society with its authoritarian state.”¹⁰ Childhood as an abstract idea thus came to embody the people of the welfare state, but it co-emerged with addressing the circumstances of “real children,” and it greatly impacted policies regarding rights and care for children in the twentieth century. Such policies include the establishment of free school lunches in 1947, the ban of corporal punishment in schools in 1957, and, in the later decades, an increased agency and voice that children have in decisions concerning their rights. Bengt Sandin brings out a gender political aspect of this, saying, “The idea that women could work and men could participate in child rearing gave extra urgency to demands for parental education and an expansion of day care” in the 1960s and 1970s, while men’s share in child care did not expand as rapidly.¹¹ The common figurations of children in both nonfictional and fictional texts not only stood in for the abstract idea of childhood, but they also helped to further construct and mediate the image of the Swedish child.

Children figured in several influential texts of the early twentieth century that ultimately strove to better the life of the Swedish nation. Ellen Key declared famously that the twentieth century was to be the century of the child in her The Century of the Child (Barnets århundrade 1900), which was widely read, translated and referenced.¹² In this book, Key wrote about gender roles, marriage, and other aspects of the society, and she supported relationships and child rearing also outside of marriage, arguing that it was better for both the relationships and for the children when people enjoyed being together. Her proposed changes in child rearing and education were ultimately intended to ensure that children would grow up to be better citizens who would in turn develop the Swedish nation-state further. Her philosophy regarding children was, on one hand, Romantic in that, inspired by Rousseau, she believed that children were freethinkers and could easily be corrupted by schooling. She proposed adamantly that children should be brought up as independent thinkers so that they would be able to take on the responsibility of citizenship, as she believed that childhood determines adulthood. Thus, she also saw children as not yet but becoming citizens.¹³

The idea of children as independent thinkers in Key’s writing is an early example of imagining the Swedish (and Nordic) child as autonomous and competent. Helene Brembeck, Barbro Johansson, and Jan Kampmann argue that the concept of the competent child could be understood as “part of the Nordic rural tradition,” where the rural child was seen as a competent worker who took care of younger siblings and engaged in a variety of chores.¹⁴ In the early twentieth century, as Bengt Sandin points out, the experiences of childhood were by no means equal as children were distinguished between different social classes and genders, not to mention Indigenous childhoods (which are rarely mentioned in studies on Nordic/Swedish childhood).¹⁵ It became the responsibility of the state to make sure that children, (ideally) no matter their social class or gender, would be guaranteed a safe environment, opportunities to play, and receive a good education. The establishment of the welfare state, writes Sandin, was “parallel to the establishment of images of children as independent agents, strong and oppositional moral epigones to the adult world, fighters for rights and justice for themselves but also for animals and the downtrodden.”¹⁶ While this led to seeing childhood as a “period of life with its own characteristics” in the second half of the twentieth century, the ideas of the independent children created a paradigm where they were seen as “objects created by state individualism.”¹⁷ This means that the state had a strong role in the lives of children, which was justified by referring to parents’ incompetence and children’s needs for protection and independence.

The perceived incompetence of parents to take care of their children properly prompted Swedish activists Gunnar and Alva Myrdal in the 1930s and 1940s to support policies of population planning that included sterilizing people who were seen as unfit to parent and give birth to children who would not be “productive” for the Swedish welfare state. The Myrdals were widely known beyond Sweden, as Gunnar Myrdal was invited to travel to the United States to study the racial discrimination of Black Americans. This study resulted in his book An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy, a supposedly objective look based in what Benjamin Mier-Cruz has called “Swedish racial innocence” that draws from “a whitewashed history of ethnic and cultural homogeneity and a perennial myth of race and colour-blindness in the Nordic world.”¹⁸ In their close analysis of the “most iconic Swedish photograph of the twentieth century,” which features the Myrdal family prior to their journey, Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh write that the image represents the patriotic and progressive reproductiveness, closeness and equality in the Myrdals’s marriage, and the “zenith of the family as an institution.”¹⁹

As Per Albin Hansson had proclaimed that the Swedish welfare state should be like a home where no child is inferior to others, the decisions to force sterilization on people living in poverty or with mental illness established that the child (who also represents the citizen) who is protected and equal in the welfare state should not deviate too much from what was the norm. We can see further implications of such norm-focused thinking in the establishment and work of the Swedish State Institute for Race Biology (SIRB), which was active in Sweden from 1921 to 1958. The proponents of race biology in Sweden, particularly Herman Lundborg, the head of SIRB from 1922 until 1935, worked on mapping the Nordic racial traits in the Swedish population in the 1920s and 1930s, which included large-scale photographing of the people living in Sweden. The aim of this work, as Ulrika Kjellman demonstrates, was to secure a “healthy populace” in order to decide “who was a pure Swede and who was not, as well as what eugenic strategies to implement to strengthen the Swedish race within the borders of Sweden.”²⁰ The three race types that SIRB found dominating the Swedish population were the Nordic type (Swedes), the East Baltic type (Finns), and the Sámi type (then referred to with the pejorative term, the Lapps). Since the Nordic type gained a superior position in the rhetoric of race biology and ensuring the health of the nation, as Kjellman shows, Lundborg chose the photographs to represent the different types in a most biased way. Thus, the Sámi types and the East Baltic types were mostly of elderly people, not well dressed or healthy-looking, and often “depicted in front of a poor settlement,” while the Nordic types were represented by well-dressed young people, usually positioned in “exteriors of idyllic pastoral character, or in interiors of wealthy bourgeois homes.”²¹ Lundborg also advised strongly against any race mixing between Swedes and those considered lower races, such as the Sámi people, Finns, or Roma, and he promoted eugenic strategies to “save the Nordic race from degeneration.”²² These early examples show us that in order to achieve the goal of the welfare state as a good home where no child is seen as better or lesser, and to provide the autonomous competent children with the necessary support, those who deviated from that ideal had to be removed.

The thinking behind sterilization laws and population planning policies functioned similarly to what Lee Edelman has called “reproductive futurism,” a politics that invests all hope for the future in children and continues to be persistent in the beginning of the twenty-first century.²³ If activists for abortion rights claim that a right to reproductive choice is good for the children and therefore for the future, writes Edelman, they are still subscribing to the ideology of reproductive futurism. This articulation of the ideology of the Child (capitalized in Edelman), who is an emblem for a future, further illustrates the significance of constructing “the child.” We can see this ideology in Myrdal’s writing and activism, which promoted important rights for women, including contraception and abortion, but it was inspired by the idealization of the child as the future of the welfare state. Several critical accounts of Edelman’s points bring out that the child in his discussions signifies a very specific privileged childhood that should not stand in for the multiple and diverse experiences of children.²⁴ This is an important point. Even though Edelman differentiates the symbolic Child from the experiences of real children, whom he is not attempting to write about, rejecting the Child to resist the linear time of the nation neglects discussing the ways in which the politics of reproduction continue to impact the lives of both children and adults. In her analysis of how boarding schools intervened in the sexuality of Native children in North America, for example, Mary Zaborskis argues that racialized queer children are “barred from the future, and this barring is enacted precisely through promising futurity.”²⁵ In other words, reproduction can be meaningful for marginalized communities who have been barred from the future because they deviate from the normative image of the nation.²⁶ At the same time, reproduction can be experienced as oppressive by the marginalized communities if they are expected to reproduce themselves on colonizer’s terms, a topic that recurs in the novels and films analyzed in the following chapters.

The theoretical implications of childhood and reproduction are thus more complex than simply promoting or resisting the linear progress narrative.²⁷ In order to understand how children figure in cultural imaginaries more broadly, and in narratives that depict Indigenous and minority communities more specifically, it might be more efficacious to engage traditions and futures critically rather than disavow them (as Andrea Smith proposes in her analysis of the heteronormativity of settler colonialism in North America²⁸). How does the process of becoming, so often associated with childhood and with growing up, function in narratives about children who are legible as white while also perceived as not quite white? In the understanding of progress as linear, becoming means growing up physically and temporally. It means lining up with other bodies, as Sara Ahmed writes. Her point that to “inherit whiteness is to become invested in the line of whiteness” illustrates the expected trajectory of growing up for the Swedish child.²⁹ The inherited whiteness, as Ahmed argues further, functions as an “orientation that puts certain things within reach.”³⁰ Of course, growing up to line up with bodies that are considered to be the correct ones is problematic and impossible for many people who for various reasons do not inherit whiteness or other aspects that support the normative (such as heterosexuality or able-bodiedness). In that case, one might instead grow sideways, to use Kathryn Bond Stockton’s term that, instead of reducing the alternative to the death drive, locates queer children (in her analysis, queered by sexuality, Freud, innocence, or race) in a movement that goes back-and-forth instead of up, with energy and pleasure and without reproductive extensions.³¹ Or one might nevertheless decide to follow the normative line if growing sideways is not experienced as an option because that, too, is facilitated by the settler colonial state, internalized racialization and colonization that have barred one from the future (even if that future is normative, exclusive, and attainable only in abstraction). As I will elaborate more in the following sections, while the idealized image of childhood is not a unique phenomenon to Sweden or the Nordic region, the special status that the child has in the rhetoric of the welfare state provides unique challenges and opportunities for imagining what it might mean to perform growing up and sideways.

PERFORMING “THE SWEDISH CHILD” THROUGH PIPPI LONGSTOCKING

Literature and films have had a significant role in remediating both the image of the idealized Swedish child and the children who deviate from it. Swedish children’s literature specifically, as Bengt Sandin argues, can be understood to have “fed into and expressed the moral basis of the centrality of children’s rights to welfare and care in the Nordic countries.”³² The depictions of children in Nordic children’s books already at the turn of the century, as Åse Marie Ommundsen argues, suggested that children had much more freedom than their peers in other Western countries.³³ Thus, the image of an independent freely roaming child has been a familiar figure for a long time. However, it is Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Långstrump (Pippi Longstocking; first published in 1945) that engaged with and made the idea of the autonomous child of the 1940s Swedish welfare state more broadly known.³⁴ As is well known and discussed by now, Pippi is a completely autonomous and competent child: She has financial resources, super strength, and a house but no parental oversight, and she does not usually express any need for parents or other adults. However, there have been many contradicting interpretations and responses to this figure of the child who questions social conventions.

One of the most significant contradictions that we can see in the different readings of Pippi is that while Pippi subverts normativity, the image of her has simultaneously come to represent a normative Swedish exceptionalism. As Eva Söderberg argues, the focus on what Pippi represents shifted during the twentieth century from seeing her as a child who challenges the traditional adult-child power relationships to emphasizing that she is a girl and making her into a feminist icon.³⁵ Pippi has also been read as someone who queers children’s literature and the child by going beyond boundaries between adult and child, feminine and masculine, human and animal.³⁶ Thus, by the end of the twentieth century, Pippi had come to represent both the cultural ideals of the welfare state (autonomy, gender equality) and “growing sideways”: She rejects the institutional help/oversight in her life and the idea of growing up. For example, in Pippi Långstrump i Söderhavet (Pippi Longstocking in the South Seas), she playfully invites Tommy and Annika to eat “krumelurpiller” (squiggle pills) that would help them to never grow up.³⁷ The combination of those two contrasting elements in this exemplary image of the Swedish child helps us to understand the drastically different ways that Pippi has been understood not only in the studies of children’s literature but also in discussions regarding the Swedish welfare state (and how Pippi as a child figure co-emerges with, contributes to, and performs the abstract idea of Swedish childhood). Furthermore, paying attention to this combination illuminates how Stockton’s concept of “growing sideways,” can, in the Swedish/Nordic context, become experienced as privileged and not attainable to everyone.

Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh resolve the contradictory forces in the figure of Pippi by arguing that it is the combination of two types of children that makes Lindgren’s books about her so original and such a productive example of the structure of the Swedish welfare state.³⁸ Namely, the stories of Pippi unfold from Tommy and Annika’s perspective, whose cozy and conventional nuclear family in the neighboring house is a better example of the carefree Swedish childhood. Tommy and Annika, too, are free to roam around with Pippi without much parental supervision, but they have a family who takes care of them and who guides them in the social expectations and tasks as they are on their way to become grown-up citizens of the welfare state. Thus, as Berggren and Trägårdh argue, these two childhoods together exemplify the Swedish welfare state as a combination of total individual sovereignty and the absolute necessity of a stable social order. Their discussion of Pippi as someone who children do not actually want to identify with because she is lonely (through Tommy and Annika’s eyes) suggests a reading of Pippi as someone outside of the construction of the Nordic child. Berggren and Trägårdh go on to argue that Pippi’s world displays most of the characteristics of Georges Bataille’s “sovereign man”—“non-productiveness, idleness, excessive and meaningless consumption, criminality and disorder.”³⁹ Nina Witoszek and Martin Lee Mueller argue against this point in their study on ecological ethics of Nordic children’s tales. They bring out that Pippi is, in fact, always busy baking, embarking on quests, cleaning, and that she fights for justice instead of being a “deviant criminal.”⁴⁰ Furthermore, the reading of Pippi as someone outside the construction of the Nordic child is based on trying to relate to Pippi as a “real child.” Ulla Lundqvist argues that neither Pippi nor Tommy and Annika are “realistic children” and that Tommy and Annika are constructed as too stereotypical, too puppet-like to contrast Pippi’s ideas and expressions.⁴¹ Instead, Tommy and Annika function as examples of performing the exemplary idea of Swedish childhood that Pippi represents. They are inspired by Pippi to question social conventions and to become more autonomous, and they can do so because their everyday lives are relatively independent and carefree.

A particular focus of scholarship on the implications of seeing Pippi Longstocking as a model figure has been on Pippi as a feminist icon. Eva Söderberg, for example, points out that while Lindgren, in her letter accompanying her manuscript of Pippi, asserted that Pippi should not function as a model for ordinary children, she has increasingly become a role model, particularly for girls and women. Pippi has become a normative figure, argues Söderberg, functioning as an ambassador who can “spread Swedish gender equality around the world.”⁴² If the strong, autonomous Pippi is the norm, asks Söderberg, which girls and women are excluded and othered because of that norm? Söderberg does not answer this question in her chapter that focuses mostly on a comparison of Pippi and Lisbeth Salander in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series of crime novels, but it is an important question. While this and other criticisms of Pippi focus on her as a feminist, as someone who empowers girls and women or exemplifies a normative idea of a woman (a “can-do” girl/woman, for example), her image as a normative child is equally significant, particularly when the image of that childhood is closely connected to and associated with the Swedish welfare state and, by extension, Swedishness.⁴³

The significant ways in which Pippi Longstocking changed the meaning of childhood, however, include in that normative image of the child a figure who goes against norms. Deviating from the cultural ideals that surround Pippi in her stories crosses the traditional boundaries between child and adult: Pippi presents as a child, but she also behaves as an adult in some ways, and she sees through the normative conventions of the adults and fights against them. In many ways, she “grows sideways”: There are no indications that she will ever grow “up” in the traditional understanding, and her character celebrates the back-and-forth movement of childhood without any reproductive extensions. Indeed, Jimmy Olsson’s mockumentary short Valla Villekulla / Whatever happened to Ms Longstocking provides a comedic exploration of what Pippi’s life might be like if she did in fact grow up. Olsson interviews Pippi (Ann Petrén), who is in her fifties and has had a falling out with Tommy and Annika after they started a business together, her money is gone, and it turns out that being a bit utanför systemet (outside of the system) has not been easy as an adult. “I didn’t have a social security number,” says Pippi to Olsson, “and you really need those last four digits” (Valla Villekulla). She continues to explain that she has not received much from the proceeds of Pippi-themed merchandise, and that no one wants to have a Pippi doll that has the looks of her adult self.

Olsson’s film is part of a series of mockumentary shorts that all depict beloved Swedish children’s media characters who have grown up and find themselves as adults somewhat unsettled in the adult world in contemporary Sweden and reflecting on the commodification of their childhoods.⁴⁴ Through the mockumentary mode, which includes hidden camera scenes, interviews, and handheld footage, the quirks of these characters seem odd and problematic when looked at in the realistic setting of contemporary society instead of children’s literature or films. In the mockumentary, Pippi is still portrayed as somewhat outside of the normative expectations of the society—she does not seem to have a job or a romantic partner (in fact, Tommy has fallen ill because of the impacts of the unrequited love he had for Pippi), and she leaves the meeting with Tommy and Annika by climbing through a window and reaching for a soda bottle from a tree on her way (referring to the story in Pippi Longstocking where Pippi shows Tommy and Annika that soda bottles grow inside some trees). Her life, however, is portrayed as lonely and not so enviable anymore. The mockumentary thus draws attention to the image of childhood that Pippi has been vested with; it also further locates the ability and celebration of growing sideways and standing against norms as something that children are uniquely positioned to do.

As an exemplary figure of the child, Pippi has mediated the shifting understandings of childhood as both being and becoming, and we can see the co-emergence of that change in the abstract figure of the child as well as historically located children. As Bengt Sandin delineates, beginning in the 1960s, childhood was seen increasingly as an autonomous and adult-like time, with legislation emphasizing children’s parity with the rights of adults.⁴⁵ Thus, it was established that children possess civil rights as Swedish citizens. Now, as Sandin puts it, “being a child is no longer just a matter of being, of existing as a half-adult, but is transformed into life’s great project, ‘becoming,’ for children and parents alike.”⁴⁶ This understanding further constructs an autonomous child who is also competent and should therefore have more say in decisions and is a partner with adults.⁴⁷ Thus, the image of ideal Swedish childhood, mediated through Pippi Longstocking, locates “growing sideways” in the space of privilege. It expects children to go against conventions that are oppressive because children are autonomous, competent, and moral. While the policies of better care for children have, of course, had significant impact on children living in Sweden and the Nordic countries, as Brembeck, Johansson, and Kampmann argue, they have constructed “the Nordic child” that “is primarily a construction, a rhetorical figure of thought with fluid content that from time to time has been presented to serve its purpose in ideological, political contexts.”⁴⁸

DEVIATING CHILDHOODS

Focusing on the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, when the Swedish welfare state went through a significant transformation of the society (moving toward a neoliberal trend of privatization, individualism, and down-sizing public sector), Eva Söderberg argues that the independence and competence of Pippi have come to suggest that it is an individual decision that everyone can make to become and be a Pippi.⁴⁹ This mind-set does not, of course, consider structural inequalities and complexities that might hinder one from becoming like Pippi or from performing qualities associated with Pippi, especially when that would essentially mean becoming Swedish/white/Nordic/middle-class—something that often has not been possible for several groups living in Sweden. While the dominating attitudes in Sweden as a settler colonial state toward the Indigenous Sámi or the Tornedalian people were steeped in racial and colonial ideologies that actively othered these communities for centuries, the later decades of the twentieth century also saw a significant increase of other minority groups in Sweden as Sweden took in migrants and refugees from the non-Western world to a comparable degree with larger European countries like the UK or France.⁵⁰ Thus, by 2010, about 15 percent of the Swedish population had a non-Western background.⁵¹

Sweden accepted many migrants and refugees during the era that Tobias Hübinette and Catrin Lundström call the “white solidarity” period (1968–2001), when Sweden became “the leading Western voice for antiracism.”⁵² The prevalence of racism regarding people of color and other not quite white people in Sweden, however, was increasingly not talked about. Instead, in a similar fashion to many other Western European locations, discussions of race were replaced by conversations about ethnicity or culture. The 1960s media narratives did discuss race and racism some, as Hübinette has brought out, and as the transnational adoption rates were growing during that time, the adopted children of color were seen by several commentators as the key to “solving the race problem” in Sweden. As commentators at the time observed, those children would be growing up in white families and make the unfamiliar more proximate and familiar to Swedes because they would become Swedes (whereas children growing up in migrant or mixed-race families would suffer from racism, feared the critics).⁵³ Children and childhood also figured prominently in the writings of the Swedish Romani activist and writer Katarina Taikon during the 1960s and 1970s. We can see an example of that in Taikon’s popular series about a Romani child named Katitzi, who is an outcast and does not have the protection and benefits provided by the welfare state. As Olle Widhe demonstrates, Taikon’s series sought to contest the idyllic portrayal of childhood in Swedish children’s literature as it depicted unjustified violence and abuse of the Romani people and children in Sweden.⁵⁴ The continued prejudice against those who deviated from normative white Swedishness thus meant there was an increasing number of children who were not included in the idealized image of the Swedish childhood, which continued to mean white, middle-class, healthy children. The exclusion felt by these children resembles many other Western societies where, as Stockton argues, “it is a privilege to need to be protected and thus to have a childhood.”⁵⁵ The normative and idealized meaning of autonomous childhood functions in a similar way: It is a privilege to be autonomous in a carefree protected environment. It is also a privilege to be celebrated for going against cultural conventions.

It is not surprising that as many Swedish films and novels in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries depicted the crumbling welfare state, they often incorporated the figure of the child to do that.⁵⁶ These works often imagine children who are autonomous but not carefree: They are dealing with difficult circumstances on their own. While this trope tends to function as a criticism of the welfare state policies, which do not always include all its residents, particularly reflected in changes to the political landscape in the end of the twentieth century, the struggles of the children are also presented as caused by adults in their lives who are incapable of providing them with a safe environment. Autonomy in these challenging experiences can still be inspired by the triumphant Pippi, however. As Amanda Doxtater argues, there are a variety of child figures in early twenty-first-century Nordic cinema who are immigrants, refugees, or not ethnically Swedish and who despite all odds remake themselves and are thus still reproducing Swedish exceptionalism.⁵⁷ Similarly, Anders Wilhelm Åberg argues in his analysis of the 2006 Swedish comedy-drama film Förortsungar (Kidz in da Hood) (dir. Ylva Gustavsson and Catti Edfeldt) that while it is an exception among the Swedish children’s films, which in the early 2000s were still almost exclusively homogeneous and increasingly nostalgic, in its storytelling it tries to optimistically transcend ethnic differences in the name of “inter-ethnic solidarity.”⁵⁸ In the scenes where the nonwhite protagonist Amina reads Astrid Lindgren’s book, she seems to realize that Sweden and Swedishness are a cultural realm that one can enter for positive reasons and not a threat.⁵⁹ In other words, through the image of the child who is performing Swedish childhood here, the film makes visible discrimination toward the Other in Sweden and resolves it by aligning the child with the abstract idea of Swedish childhood. Åberg concludes that the film provides a contradiction where the happy ending is possible through the child being embraced by Swedes, who have so far been depicted as the antagonists. Thinking about the significance of challenging cultural ideals and constructions, particularly in the “adult world” that Pippi Longstocking represents, Amina follows that example and is successful in performing a Swedish childhood that is supposed to question adults’ motives.

As a contrast to Amina in Kidz in da Hood and several other similar child figures in Swedish cinema, Doxtater argues that Ruben Östlund’s film Play (2011) is an exception to reproducing Swedish exceptionalism through child figures. Play, writes Doxtater, depicts autonomous children who are “surviving, rather than conquering precariousness.”⁶⁰ Östlund’s film is a drama based on real-life court cases, and it depicts psychological games between two groups of children in Gothenburg—a group of Black children robs a group of white children. The film raised a heated debate in Sweden about whether it contributes to racist ideologies or challenges them. The eight child protagonists in this film fail to live up to the heroic individualism that Pippi represents, which causes them to suffer. Furthermore, both through plot and stylistic choices, Play’s use of estrangement, washed-out bystanders, long takes, and minimal camera movement, as Doxtater argues, deflates the fantasy of social critique and triumphant fight against injustice present in the Pippi figure and instead imagines the child protagonists as unexceptional.

Another cinematic portrayal of a child who is not able to perform Swedish childhood is Lukas Moodysson’s Lilja 4-ever (2002), which depicts a Russian-speaking girl, Lilja, from an unnamed post-Soviet country (filmed in Estonia) who gets trapped in sex trafficking in Sweden and, after breaking free from an apartment in southern Sweden, commits suicide. This film has typically been analyzed as an example of a critique of the Swedish welfare state, where, despite its welfare systems and progress in gender equality, not everyone is safe and taken care of (Andrew Nestingen calls it a melodrama of demand⁶¹), or as an example of a common tendency in Swedish/Nordic media to depict Eastern European women as victims of sex crimes. As Mariah Larsson has argued, these images of victimized women represented the anxieties prevalent in Swedish society regarding the post-Soviet spaces and people and, therefore, further enforced the idea of Swedish exceptionalism.⁶² Most of the writing on this film does not engage with the meaning of childhood in Lilja, probably at least in part because getting trapped in sex trafficking removes her from the innocent child status. Furthermore, as Larsson has pointed out, Lilja 4-ever is ultimately about “bad sex”; it shows people who choose to engage in sex work only because they are forced or because they are from less progressive states who supposedly do not yet know about gender equality. “Bad sex” is often seen as imported, and it deviates from the national construction of “good” and moral sexuality that, as Don Kulick argues, has had an integral role in the rhetoric promoting laws on gender equality or comprehensive sex education in the Swedish welfare state.⁶³ In this film, Lilja’s experience of violence and abuse is primarily caused by the sex traffickers, who are Eastern European men, even though her clientele in Sweden represents a variety of Swedish men.⁶⁴ Lilja is, of course, not born in Sweden; doesn’t speak Swedish; and is, therefore, not expected to have the same privileges as Swedish children. She is a child who represents the “problems over there (galloping capitalism, non-existing welfare systems, etc.)” that will “obstruct progress in issues of gender equality” in Sweden.⁶⁵

It is, thus, still somewhat rare to imagine what it would look like for a literary or cinematic construction of a child in Sweden to not perform the idea of Pippi. The child who often occurs in the narratives about migrants and minorities, for example, could in many cases be interpreted as someone who, just like Pippi, overcomes their difficult experiences through autonomy, competence, and moral compass while providing the audiences with an emotional journey and healing.⁶⁶ This kind of reading suggests that these texts ultimately reproduce the idea of the autonomous Swedish child and that anyone can become like Pippi if they only want to. As the following chapters demonstrate, however, looking at how different cultural texts imagine moments (sometimes extended and prolonged moments) of impossibility, pause, delay, and hesitance to line up as the Swedish child—or, for that matter, any other kind of child that represents a rigid identity category—open up new ways of understanding how childhood figures in the histories of racialization, colonization, and not-quiteness in Sweden.

THE NOT-QUITE CHILD

While there are, then, different examples in Nordic cultural texts where children are growing sideways, the struggle between lining up and growing sideways or backward or just getting stuck provides some unique perspectives on the narratives that deal with the experiences of the minorities and migrants that share a long colonial and cultural history with Sweden. The history of Finland as part of the Swedish empire before 1809 could be called semi-colonial, and the colonial relationship between the Sápmi lands and Tornedalen and Sweden is still ongoing.⁶⁷ This has resulted in violent and traumatic histories of colonial erasure and racialization throughout the twentieth century. As mentioned above, the Swedish race scientists in the 1920s and 1930s categorized people in different racial types and saw three types dominating in the population: the Nordic type (Swedes), which was deemed superior; the East Baltic type (Finns); and the Sámi type. Both the Sámi people and the Tornedalian people (living in the northern parts of Sweden) were subject to large-scale scientific skull measuring and other colonial violence that attempted to eliminate or segregate these cultures from the Swedish nation. At the same time, as Åsa Össbo points out, Tornedalians were also early settlers to the region that had been inhabited by the Sámi people.⁶⁸ When Finland was ceded to the Russian empire in 1809 after the war between Sweden and Russia, the border that separated Finland from Sweden was drawn and it split up both the Sámi siida (Sámi local community) territories and the lands where Tornedalians were living. Both groups not only faced direct settler colonial violence by Sweden but also experienced the long-lasting effects of stereotypes and prejudice based in the rhetoric that both were inferior races. The concurrent idea that Finnish-speakers were less civilized and inferior extended to common misconceptions and prejudice toward the Finnish labor migrants who arrived in Sweden in large numbers during the second half of the twentieth century. Thus, while there are crucial differences, power dynamics, and racialized hierarchies between the three groups that the texts analyzed in this book focus on, there are also shared experiences of historical racialization, of experiencing oneself as almost but not quite white/Swedish, while often also having the ability and privilege to pass as white/Swedish.

Although the majority of the Indigenous Sámi, Tornedalian, and Finnish- speakers possess this ability to pass, the racial hierarchization of them as not quite white has resulted in stereotypes that have persisted to some extent to the present day. This not quite whiteness is somewhat similar to how Rosi Braidotti has analyzed Eastern Europeans as not quite, not yet white in the imagination of Western Europe, using Homi Bhabha’s much-cited discussion of the colonial nonwhite subjects who are “almost the same but not quite” in their mimicry and knowledge of the colonizer.⁶⁹ Alfred J. Lopez writes that Bhabha’s “not quite/not white” explains well the colonial sham that results in “a subject who simultaneously identifies with the white ideal and is radically alienated from it.”⁷⁰ The temporality of the not-yet in Braidotti’s discussion, of course, reminds us of a common colonialist rhetoric that sees the currently or previously colonized as temporally othered, always lagging behind modernity or other Western-centric ideas of progress.⁷¹ Braidotti’s use of “not-yet” reminds us also of the reality that most Eastern Europeans, just like most of the historically racialized minority groups in Sweden, are legible as white and that it is easier for them to pass as white than for people of color to do so. While there is no essential difference between white passing as white and nonwhite passing as white, writes Sara Ahmed, there is a “structural difference that demonstrates that passing involves the re-opening or re-staging of a fractured history of identifications that constitutes the limits to a given subject’s mobility.”⁷² In many cultural texts that address the history of Finnish-speakers, Indigenous Sámi people, and Tornedalians in Sweden, we see that the close proximity of these groups of people to whiteness in the Nordic region adds an expectation of an ease of becoming white/Swedish that at the same time is not always possible, or it can happen only at the cost of erasing one’s other identities. Writing about the Sámi boarding schools, for example, Rauna Kuokkanen has argued that since the Indigenous Sámi people were integrated into the Nordic nations as any other citizen, this (settler) colonialism appears benign, but it has a significant impact on the Sámi consciousness.⁷³

This book is not arguing for a unified minority or Finno-Ugric identity that would simplify the complex dynamics of racialized hierarchies in northern Europe, but it makes the case for a comparative analysis of the increased archive of cultural texts that seek to make visible the experiences of these three diverse groups of people in Sweden. This increase was likely at least in part caused by the official recognition of these three groups as well as the Roma and the Jews as national minorities in Sweden (under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities). While this new minority political situation resulted in official support from the Swedish state and functioned as empowering for the minority groups, it has still taken time for these groups and Sweden’s part in the colonial histories to be fully recognized and understood by the dominant society or even by the minorities themselves. Much of the work of recognizing this history is being done concurrently with my writing this book. In November 2023 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Tornedalians, Kvens, and Lantalaiset handed over its report to the Swedish government. The commission outlines the history of racial discrimination and violence (including skull measuring and photographing done for race biology as well as grave plundering), forced assimilation, and erasure of the Tornedalian culture and language in Sweden during most of the twentieth century.

A similar commission for truth of the Indigenous Sámi people in Sweden made its report in 2021, asking the Swedish government to officially recognize the violence and injustice done to the Sámi people. While the former Swedish minister of Agriculture and Sámi Affairs, Annika Åhnberg, made an official apology to the Sámi people in 1998, this apology did not lead to any real political changes.⁷⁴ The representatives of both commissions emphasize the need for Sweden as a country that criticizes other countries for being racist or helps them to achieve the goals of reconciliation to work through its own “dark history.”⁷⁵ Elisabet Fura, the chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Tornedalians, Kvens, and Lantalaiset, writes in the foreword to the report that “through concrete measures, the State can lay the foundations for a future where the experiences of the old multicultural and multilingual Sweden help guide us to a future modern Sweden.”⁷⁶ The experiences with assimilation and reclaiming identities of the Indigenous Sámi people are in many ways also similar in the Norwegian and Finnish sides of Sápmi and, as Harald Gaski and other Sámi scholars argue, Sámi identity is not bound by nation-state borders.⁷⁷ This book, however, focuses on the Swedish side as it hashes out how the significance of the child and the particularities of Swedish colonial histories are entangled in these cultural works of the twenty-first century.

The Not-Quite Child describes experiences of Nordic not-quiteness—of being seen and understood as almost but not quite white/Swedish/Nordic. This not-quiteness found in the materials analyzed in this book includes a trajectory, expectation, and often a desire to “become white,” even when one already presents as white, since whiteness continues to be equated with Western-ness, Nordic-ness, and, in Sweden, with Swedishness.⁷⁸ This is why Nordic/Swedish not-quiteness is often explored, addressed, and elaborated on through texts that foreground the child. Throughout the twentieth century children have typically been understood as not yet there but on their way to becoming citizens.⁷⁹ The figure that I call the not-quite child illustrates the experiences of being understood and categorized as almost but not quite Swedish (and therefore also not quite white) as the texts pay close attention to the disruptions to the trajectory of becoming and growing that the child experiences. In my analyses of how these cultural texts that foreground Finnish, Tornedalian, and Sámi people in Sweden construct the not-quite child, I draw from both theorizations of childhood having queer and subversive potentials and scholarship on race, racialization, and postcolonial/settler colonial ideologies and practices, particularly in the Nordic region.

If a child inherits not-quiteness from their parents, passing almost completely as white Swede but not quite, the child also inherits orientation toward certain objects that are not quite within their reach: In the example of discrimination against the Sámi people, this could mean access to education or to clothing other than the traditional Sámi clothing that was deemed inappropriate by the settler colonial policies. At the same time, the child who is legible as white in the Swedish welfare state has a potential to grow up to line up and become Swedish. This ability distinguishes the experiences described in the texts I analyze in this book from experiences of other kinds of not-quiteness in the Nordic region—for example, that of the transnational adoptees of color to Sweden. The not-yet-ness of the child was significant in the rhetoric that Swedes should adopt nonwhite children because they would grow up in white Swedish families and make nonwhiteness more comfortable, a discourse that became prevalent in the 1960s, as Tobias Hübinette has demonstrated.⁸⁰ Writing about this complicated demand on becoming Swedish, Richey Wyver writes that the adoptees are “forever slipping between two poles of non-recognition, almost Swedish but not quite (/not white), almost immigrant Other, but not quite … desired for a difference that is unspeakable; rejected for the very difference they were desired for; hyper-visible but invisible.”⁸¹ It is a privilege to be able to grow out of not-quiteness when one is legible as white, but during the twentieth century it has also often meant erasing lines that run parallel or in different directions from the dominant one. In order to delve into how different narratives navigate this, in the following chapters I look at how the texts explicitly foreground lines of whiteness in the architecture of the Swedish welfare state or imagine lines that run parallel to the dominant heteronormative reproduction. Lining up in the classroom or while walking through a village are ordinary everyday experiences of children in the twentieth century, but in the spaces of not-quiteness, such as the colonial school system for the Sámi and Tornedalian children that we see in the films discussed in chapter 1, they obtain charged/added meaning.

Centering on how the child is spatially situated provides a reorientation in space. While I approach the figures of children in context, also paying attention to adults and other objects surrounding them, this spatial reorientation through the child goes beyond the common reading of children as figures who provide the adult authors and readers with a defamiliarizing effect.⁸² The problem with the latter is that the figure of the child can be incorporated simply for the adult to convey something that might otherwise not be accepted or have quite the same impact. The implication of this can be that the child is seen as someone who is not yet aware of political circumstances or histories thus perpetuating the discourse of childhood as a time of innocence and pre-subjectivity. I am more interested in the different angles of space and time that are constructed through the child’s eyes or other senses and that reorient our expectations and understandings (or the idea that adults understand these historical circumstances and narratives). In Amanda Kernell’s 2016 film Sameblod (Sami Blood), for example, this includes a variety of sequences that establish the Indigenous child looking away and not giving the audience access to what she is seeing, and in Eija Hetekivi Olsson’s novel Ingenbarnsland (No child’s land), it means imagining a child figure whose failures to line up make the adults around her think of her as abject, while she chooses that failure with pleasure. Katarina Kieri’s 2015 novel, Vårt värde (Our worth), in turn, reorients both the image of the child and the not-quite child by imagining a plural child figure.

These examples of reorientation resonate with Sara Ahmed’s call to reorient ourselves from the dominant understandings of spatial situatedness. She uses the example of the kitchen table, which could function as a reorientation device for the labor of writing philosophy, particularly when engaging with texts written by male philosophers who have used the writing desk as an example to talk about phenomenology but are able to do so only because the labor of cooking and child care is done by others, around different tables. Perceiving one’s surroundings at the kitchen table might provide completely different ways of thinking and understanding the world; it also makes one aware of the dynamics of privilege when it comes to having access to tables and desks that are associated with uninterrupted time. The figures of children in literary and cinematic texts that the following chapters analyze are sometimes hiding underneath the table. Not only do they hear and see the struggles of their parents there, but their perception of the space around them also reorients what and how they see and feel in the architecture of the Swedish welfare state.

Being under the table refers, on one hand, to the marginality that children (even the privileged child to a certain extent) are often vested with. When childhood is understood as a pre-subjective state, as a beginning, it is emphasized that the child is smaller than adults, has less power, and is ultimately inferior to them. This inferiority inherent in childhood intersects with other categories of marginalization. In her study on the figurations of childhood in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western cultural sites, Claudia Castañeda asserts that for a long time it has been self-evident to assume that the child is a human in an incomplete form, a “potentiality rather than an actuality.”⁸³ In racial and colonial practices, childhood became associated with the “Now of the primitive,”⁸⁴ and in colonial discourse of the nineteenth century, the “child-body was used to conjure other kinds of bodies in the time and space of a ‘global’ human history.”⁸⁵ The texts of Nordic not-quiteness intersect the memories and experiences of racialization and colonization not only with social class but also with childhood as an identity category that has often had less power than adults.

However, being under the table can disrupt the thinking of normative linearity, of needing to become someone else. Anna Mae Duane uses the children’s table at parties as an example of childhood studies in the humanities: a marginalized space that can be experienced as freeing and creative because “one’s voice is out of earshot.”⁸⁶ Being out of sight when children are hiding under the table or behind other furniture makes it possible to gain information about the lives of adults that the children might not want to reproduce. It can provide a creative and playful space where a child in Susanna Alakoski’s novel Svinalängorna, for example, imagines that she becomes a dog together with the family dog. At the same time, the need to hide underneath something or to run in a bog outside of town is typically associated with danger, fear, or trauma in the texts of not-quiteness. Furthermore, since all the narratives analyzed and discussed in the following chapters address to greater or lesser extent the perception of being invisible in Swedish society, the spaces that signify being out of sight also make visual explorations of how children might experience invisibility as both empowering and shame-producing.

Thus, the spaces that function as a way to reorient familiar perspectives, familial and national lines, and continuities in these texts about not-quiteness and childhood are also charged with traumatic memories, shame, or fear. As we know from the extensive work from affect, phenomenology, and trauma studies, bodies are affected by the spaces they inhabit.⁸⁷ Maija Lanas and Tuija Huuki combine the theorization of trauma as intergenerationally affective with new feminist materialist theory in their analysis of a haunting affect experienced by a Sámi professor while giving a lecture to university students:

Lecture halls, swans, girlhoods, snickering bodies, weasels, silences, atmospheres, graveyards, academics, swamps, teacher education, fishing, adulthood, and the rural all come together as an affective assemblage, all playing their role in the event in question. These forces pulse and vibrate among myriads of other elements so strongly that they seem to “leak” into the present of this lecture hall, in the form of Tuija’s anxiety. Together, these forces and elements form a ferocious more-than-human apparatus (Barad 2007) that impairs Tuija’s agency with the affective weight of the commodified, exploited history of the Sámi people.” (149–50)⁸⁸

Lanas and Huuki’s analysis makes an argument about the coexistence of childhood and adulthood, among other entities that have traditionally been divided, such as human–nonhuman or past–present within the body of Tuija, the Sámi professor. The analyses in the following chapters will come back to how childhood and adulthood become merged in some of the narratives that go beyond the linear thinking of childhood as a “not-yet” and, with that, also provide a temporal reorientation. There is a child in Svinalängorna who in some ways obtains the role of an adult by taking care of her parents and siblings because the parents are descending into alcoholism while she imagines that she does not grow at all; there is a child in Sameblod who is expected to reproduce the image of Sámi adulthood but is not allowed to access everything needed for Swedish adulthood that the settler colonial power has prescribed. As these texts imagine the not-quite child, that figure becomes also more than child. In other words, the figure of the child who experiences not-quiteness is surrounded by forces of different spaces and temporalities that vibrate and leak into their present day, creating moments of disorientation, reorientation, or return to the demand to line up.

OUTLINE

In the following chapters, I analyze how various films and novels construct the figure of the not-quite child as a way to both address and rethink how this history of not-quiteness is remembered and remediated and to reflect in various ways on what it actually means to represent experiences of not-quiteness through the child. While not all the chapters will focus on memory, all the works analyzed in this book could be described as works of memory. Written in the twenty-first century, they articulate histories that have been relatively invisible in the grand narratives of collective memory, and though the child’s focalization is a common mode in narratives of memory, these texts imagine child figures who refuse to memorialize narratives that establish rigid national or familial boundaries by way of generational transmission. Thus, in a similar vein to how forgetting functions in Jack Halberstam’s theorization of queer failure, the protagonists’ failure to remember tidied-up versions of disorderly histories unleashes “new forms of memory.”⁸⁹ Together these chapters demonstrate how twenty-first-century cultural texts imagine the changing Swedish welfare state in the twentieth century and reimagine the implications and approaches to depicting fictional children who deviate from normative expectations.

Chapter 1 discusses two films, Elina: som om jag inte fanns (Elina: As If I Wasn’t There, Klaus Härö, 2002) and Sameblod (Sami Blood, Amanda Kernell, 2016), both of which incorporate a child as a central figure to mediate the experiences of racialization and colonialism in Sweden during the 1930s and 1950s. Depicting Tornedalians and the Indigenous Sámi people (both groups located in the northern areas of Sweden have been to varying extent colonized by Sweden), both films construct a child who is at first portrayed to be growing to the side of the “Swedish child,” and both of the children are expected to line up with a trajectory that either assumes a full assimilation or segregation from the settler colonial state, and in both films the child resists that trajectory. Engaging with scholarship on settler colonialism and meanings of race and whiteness in Sweden, the chapter analyzes the different modes of filmmaking and emphases on the narrative and visual level in these films that imagine the child eventually lining up with the dominant culture and with whiteness/Swedishness. However, as I argue in the chapter, while in Elina the ultimate goal is to make visible the unjust history of the Swedish welfare state through a defamiliarizing and inspiring perspective of the child’s eyes, the child’s gaze in Sameblod does not always provide information. Instead, in several sequences the child is looking away as the film meditates on what it actually means to visualize and see racialization, which is often experienced as invisible, and what it means to use the child’s gaze to inspire the adult audiences.

Chapter 2 analyzes the construction of child figures who, a couple of decades later from what the films in the previous chapter depict, continue to problematize rigid lines and expectations in both the dominant national and diasporic communities. It focuses on two best-selling novels, Svinalängorna (Susanna Alakoski, 2006) and Ingenbarnsland (No child’s land, Eija Hetekivi Olsson, 2011), that depict working-class Finnish-speaking families in Sweden during the 1960s–1980s. These texts that emphasize the role of social class in feelings of not-quiteness, as I argue, explicitly question the promise of hope and future in the figure of the child who is expected to grow up and line up with Swedishness or with Sweden Finnishness. As the child’s resistance to do that is seen as unacceptable or abject by people surrounding her, the chapter argues that these narratives function as both a way to reorient the affective responses to the stories of the not-quite child and a way to imagine what it would mean to fail growing both up and sideways. In this the chapter engages with different theorizations of abjection and with what Jack Halberstam has called “queer failure”—failing the normative ideals can provide the child characters with alternative modes of being, becoming, and growing along parallel lines.

Chapter 3 discusses the novel Populärmusik från Vittula (Popular Music from Vittula, Mikael Niemi, 2000) along with its film adaptation by Reza Bagher (2004) and the novel Vårt värde (Katarina Kieri, 2015), which extend the figure of the not-quite child to depictions of the generation of Tornedalian-speakers in Sweden in the 1960s–1970s, who are the first generation to not experience discrimination as intense as their parents, although they observe the still-existent feelings and assumptions that they are inferior to Swedish-speakers. These novels delve into the impact of not-quiteness on children, and through formal choices, like irony, parody, magical realism, or plural voice, they further explore both the privilege of these children, who can increasingly easily pass as white Swedes, and the slippage between performing the idea of exceptional childhood and reality, as well as between the entangled colonial histories of racialization and white privilege in northern Sweden. Both the film and novel version of Populärmusik draw our attention to the fictional construction of the child by exaggerating the stereotypes or images associated with Tornedalians and with childhood/adolescence to the point of absurdity or parody while exploring how subculture, like playing pop/rock music in Tornedalen, provides the characters with a way to challenge heteronormative linearity of growing up. Vårt värde, in turn, imagines a child who is pluralized—the child narrator uses predominantly first-person plural voice but makes explicit that it does not refer to a group of people—which allows the narrative not only to destabilize boundaries and lines between different colonized and colonizer communities (as “we-narratives,” according to Rebecca Fasselt, have done in postcolonial literature⁹⁰) but also to resist the singularity present in the conceptual framework of “the child,” whether or not it is the idealized Swedish child or the not-quite child.

Finally, the conclusion summarizes the main arguments this book has made and discusses how the figure of the not-quite child has transformed in the cultural texts depicting these minority groups in contemporary, twenty-first-century Swedish society.

Lastly, a brief comment on my own position on the material I am working with in this book. As a white European academic working in North America, I am increasingly aware of my privilege both in terms of access to scholarly work and time to write, as well as not having to face racism or generational trauma that the texts I work with depict and engage with. I also recognize that I have been trained primarily within “Western” academic discourses in and beyond the field of Scandinavian studies, which undoubtedly informs my interpretations and analyses, and I continue to unlearn frameworks of thinking that are harmful and exclusive. Growing up in post-Soviet Estonia has also given me a personal understanding and empathy of dealing with generational trauma and prejudice based on one’s ethnicity. Both in my personal life and my professional life, I have witnessed people dealing with traumatic memories of the Soviet occupation and the legacies of colonization that Estonia has been subject to for centuries as well as the detrimental impact of the common rhetoric in Estonia that wants to realign Estonia with Western Europeanness and does not acknowledge the privilege of whiteness that most Estonians have. I have also personally experienced prejudice and insults when working in the Nordic spaces because of the common stereotypes regarding Eastern European women. Differently from most of the other Eastern European countries, Estonian language and people belong to the Finno-Ugric group, thus sharing some linguistic and cultural similarities with the three groups of people featured in the texts that I analyze in this book. In order to situate the cultural texts analyzed here and to ask better questions about them, I have prioritized being in conversation with Indigenous and other minority scholarship and writing from the Nordic region and beyond.