Who Cares? The Neoliberal Turn and Changes in the Articulations of Women’s Relation to the Swedish Welfare State

Abstract

This article aims to investigate how articulations of women’s relation to the welfare state and modes of political agency has changed in Sweden between 1977 and 2017; a period characterized by the introduction and implementation of a neoliberal political rationality. By way of discourse analysis, the article highlights the reciprocal relationship between the construction of the welfare state and women. To this end, it analyses the debates following two films that problematize women’s relation to the welfare state, Summer Paradise (1977) and Beyond Dreams (2017). The article argues that: (a) childcare as a structuring factor for women’s work is replaced by a focus on the responsibility of the individual to provide for herself; (b) gender as a structuring principle is replaced by gender as an attribute of the individual, and; (c) the relation between women and the state is individualized. As a result, the state becomes articulated as an individualized collectivity, which aims to serve the individual’s self-preservation as opposed to the state being an arena for solving societal and collective problems. We argue that the neoliberal turn has changed women’s political subjectivity from a focus on collective action to an atomization of agency against systemic gender inequalities.