Gendering Sweden's nuclear renunciation: a historical analysis

Abstract

Contemporary developments in international affairs underscore the need for successful outcomes in the field of nuclear disarmament. However, feminist scholars have shown how linkages between masculinity and nuclear posturing continue to make disarmament appear as a policy of the weak, associated with emasculation and/or feminization. In this article I show how a feminist study of Swedish nuclear history has the potential to complicate, and disrupt, such linkages. Analysing a broad range of primary sources through a discourse analytical lens, the article shows how Sweden (re)constructed a white masculine self through its nuclear renunciation and disarmament engagement in the 1950s and 1960s. The article contributes with new insights about how gender, nuclear renunciation and disarmament interact; how lessons from the past can inform our understanding of disarmament dilemmas in the present; and the policy implications of such an analysis. Arguing that such knowledge is crucial for imaginative and transformative disarmament policy in the present, the article concludes that to reach a world free from nuclear weapons, it is crucial to expose, and challenge, those power relations that contribute to sustain a gendered and racialized nuclear order.