I samtida identitetspolitiska diskussioner har femmes kommit att bli kända främst för en feminin estetik, som trots sitt tydliga stilistiska ursprung i en lesbisk/queer begärsekonomi snarare än i heterosexuell feminitet, gör dem inte bara oigenkänneliga "som det de är" utan också politiskt omstridda, inte minst av feminister som ser feminitet som en problematisk yta. På senare år har femmes i urbana västerländska queera och feministiska kontexter blivit allt mer synliga, såväl i skrud som i skrift och då inte sällan genom att betona intentionalitet, ironi och parodi. Även om dessa argument om femme-ininitet är uppfriskande och politiskt försvarbara passar de som hand i handske i en senkapitalistik radikalindividualism där alla uppmuntras att se sig som unika - precis som alla andra. Ett fokus på medvetna val ger oss heller inga svar på hur queer femininitet förkroppsligas eller hur vi ska förstå relationen mellan materialitet och teknologi. Gör kläderna verkligen en femme?

Med Pandoras nyfikenhet öppnar denna rizomatiska essä den alltid lika omstridda feminina utklädningslådan och beauty boxen - inte för att varken ännu en gång fördöma och förkasta de plågor och smärtor som femininitetsattributen och dess trivialiserade arbetsinsatser orsakar dess bärare, eller för att likt en förkunnande modeexpert, hylla en korrekt och queer femmegarderob för en växande femme-inistisk rörelse där femmens osynlighet är "så förra året" utan för att fundera över femme mode som ett förkroppsligande av feministisk och queer historia. Med hjälp av modemetaforer och mot bakgrund av queera arkiv, är detta textexperiment en installation och en situation, och ett personligt, politiskt och etnografiskt inspirerat bidrag till att skriva den femme-inina kroppen som en somateknisk figuration snarare än en enhetlig identitetspolitisk kategori och där såväl språkande som skapande ingår i figurerandet.

I en essä som söker att figurera textualitet och materialitet samtidigt tas läsaren med till en femmegarderob som handlar mindre om queer synlighet och osynlighet och mer om kosmetikans plats i kosmos, feminitetens plats i feminismen och spegelns plats i spekulerandet. Här praktiseras det feminina arbetet med såväl kroppslig/klädesmässig som textuell estetik genom till synes triviala men alltid intellektuella feminina påklädningsritualer där olika argument och plagg prövas och kommer till uttryck. Genom att låta femme figurera snarare än enbart manifestera och genom att betona hur såväl plagg som idéer lånas, byts, stjäls och (om)skapas, vill texten inte bara visa tänkbara kombinationer av plagg och hur de kan förstås eller förkastas, utan också plädera för att femininitetsteknologier inte kan skiljas från utan är en del av en femme-inin subjektivitet.

Departing from contemporary femme movements, this essay discusses some ”surface tensions” within feminist and queer theory concerning the subject of femininity and in particular its relationship to superficiality and surfaces. Invoking the term ”surface tension”, drawn from chemistry, it suggests that it is the tension between inside/depth and outside/impression that produces the image of a surface and that this metaphor can be used to understand tensions around the very topic of the seemingly fleeting and superficial. By exploring femme as simultaneously a body of flesh and of knowledge, the article presents femme as a feminist figuration that might shed new light on understandings of both femininity and feminist history. Through re-reading some feminist classics on the topic of femininity, the essay discusses some of the ways that it has become tied to superficiality and also proposes that in fact, femininity is no superficial matter. Drawing on multi-sited examples of how contemporary femmes understand, incorporate and embody feminist histories the essay then proposes some ways that we might reconsider such assumptions both politically and theoretically. As a contribution to critical femininity studies and to écriture femme-inine, the essay thus creatively strives to simultaneously refigure femme within a larger register of the genre of femininity, reconsider the place of feminist archives and embodied memories, and reconceptualize the alleged surface/superficiality of femininity through the concept of somatechnical femmebodiment.

The language of ethics has become a conspicuous feature of the politics of biomedical research and practice. The last two decades have seen the creation of governmental ethical advisory commissions, administrative bodies charged with ethical decision-making, and public funding for studying the ethical implications of new technologies. This paper analyses the  role of national ethical counsils as advisory bodies in national ethopolitical regimes. This paper addresses the question  wether the instituitonalsization of ethical expertise in  ethics councils as advisory bodies contributes to a limitation of political conflict concerning the biomedical issues. The paper compares two national cases, namely Germany’s National Ethics Council with the Swedish National Council on Medical Ethics. Both countries represent contrasting cases of dominant ethical traditions and with regard to the time of emergence of such bodies. The Swedish council was a pioneer institution inaugurated in 1985, whereas Germany´s council  was a latecomer, established in 2001. This paper explores how such advisory institutions actually work from a double perspective. On the one hand, the paper examines the emergence and role of such bodies in political processes and thus how they have come to be understood as “political expertise”; on the other hand, the paper investigates the concrete working procedures of these councils and thus their modes of producing “ethical expertise”. Despite the differences the results of the study indicate similarities in the modes of producing “ethical expertise” and gives indicators, that such national ethics councils infact contributes to a depoliticization of biomedical issues.

The multifarious paths to modernity correspond with the various dramatizations of national narratives.  Sweden’s development has been composed as a linear success story. As the story goes: since the 1930s when the Social Democrats came into power, they had managed to lead the deprived smallish nation at the outskirts of Europe from the darkness of the poor house into the light of a prosperous welfare state combining a maximum of social security and equality with economic growth. In comparative perspective the Swedish welfare state was not only seen as outstanding in terms of class justice, but also in terms of gender equality.  Some scholars have there deemed it to be a “women-friendly welfare state”.[i] However, regardless of the importance of such narratives for the formation of national identity, success stories inevitably also produce distortions and omissions. The dark side of Sweden’s success story became most painfully apparent at the latest in autumn 1997. An article about forced sterilizations in the “peoples’ home” (folkhem), published in the country’s largest daily newspaper not only set off a heated national debate but it also caused an international sensation.[ii] Contrary to what the media suggested, knowledge of these practices was not a “recent” discovery.[iii] The new and challenging aspect, however, was that publicist Maciej Zaremba no longer attributed the sterilization policy to the zeitgeist or deemed it as a regrettable—although in the greater narrative as a negligible—episode but rather as an integral part of Sweden’s social democratic reform project. Through addressing the dark side of] the Swedish welfare state he broke a taboo that formed the quintessential core of Swedish identity. International reactions added insult to injury by comparing these sterilizations to practices of Nazi Germany.[iv]

The abundance of international attention, among other things, incited the Swedish government to install a commission to investigate the policies during that time and to draft a bill that would afford compensation to victims of forced sterilization. Compared to how victims of sterilization in other countries, particularly in Germany, [v] were dealt with, the Swedish investigative commission and compensation act were exemplary. Yet, for Swedish historians and social scientists it was no easy task to deal with these dark sides of modernity and statehood. A sense of loyalty toward the social democracy and the Swedish model has caused many scholars to oscillate—as some have self-critically admitted—between engaging in scholarship and ideology production.[vi] This might explain why outstanding feminist scholars such as Yvonne Hirdman, which has been a pioneer of a more critical stand on Swedes social and gender policies, has joined the chorus of the welfare state defenders in that debate. [vii]  The fact that Swedish politics have been highly successful in so many ways makes theories, which categorically establish the ambivalences of modernity and the welfare state, not exactly a Swedish specialty.

The same could be said about international comparative research that presents the development of the welfare state as a continuous extension of social rights. The establishment of a social democratic regime with universal benefits based on citizenship is often regarded the ultima ratio of this development.  This is not so surprising, as the power resources approach promoted by Scandinavian social scientists Walter Korpi and Gösta Esping-Andersen decisively contributed to establishing the Nordic state’s model status. Viewing Sweden in terms of a success story is not necessarily problematic because of what it says, but because of what it leaves out.  None of the common national or comparative interpretations can account for how the Swedish social democratic model’s supposedly inclusive welfare state and its universalistic programs could have been compatible with measures that classified people as “inferior” and propagated selection and institutionalization of their own people as well as sterilization as solutions to social problems.

This essay is committed to resolving this puzzle. It focuses on what, today, is subsumed under “family policies” and contains an analysis of the emergence of social benefits in the 1930s, which were geared toward subsidizing and encouraging child rearing, and were thus a forerunner of the universal child allowances introduced in Sweden in 1948. This case study will reveal that measures primarily aimed to meet the needs of women (as mothers)—and were therefore largely considered part of the “women-friendly” concept of social citizenship in Sweden— were actually characterized by an amalgamation of pro-natalism and anti-natalism. In effect, amalgamation meant that those classified as “inferior” or “unwanted” were barred from social benefits.

Feminist scholars have provided us with an array of analytical perspectives on the comparative analysis of  welfare states. However despite the reachness of feminist scholarship in that field, it is also marked by a clear limitation. Feminist research focused, above all, on gender-specific contents and outputs of social policies. Much more widely neglected is the question of how country-specific differences may be explained, and whether gender contributed to the politics that created different welfare state regimes. There is one exeption however: scholars working within the tradition of historical institutionalism such as Theda Skocpol, Ann Orloff and Diane Sainsbury have made important efforts in order to explain the early formation of gendered welfare states.

The aim of this paper is both theoretical and empirical. First it explores the contribution of gender sensitive historical institutionalism for the explanation of gendered welfare states regimes. In contrast to the way that this approach has frequently been understood, I do not see institutionalism’s major contribution simply as adding on a new set of variables – the variables of state capacity and structure – as it suggested within the policy analysis aproach launched by Amy Mazur und Dorothy Stetson. Rather, the central new insight that institutionalism imparts to comparative politics comes from its reflexive perspective on  the political. This goes hand in hand with a concept of configurative causation acknowledging that political developments are contextual, relational, and process-oriented. A critical review of feminist historical institutionalism reveals one important limitation of its conceptual framwork however as it reduces “gender” to “women”,  to be more precise: to the impact of women´s movements on welfare state formation. I regard this reductionsm as the last vestige of determinism. Within institutionalism, to be sure, collective identities constitute an important point of reference, but since the processes of identity formation as such are not theorized any further, the precise connections linking institutions and the ability to act remain vague. In order to overcome this reductionism I propose to broaden institutionalism’s framework by formulating an approach based on interweaving historical institutionalism with discursive analysis. Such an integrated approach enables to conceptualize gender as relational and a relevant analytical category, even if womens agency might be deemed an irrelvant explanatory factor in specific national contexts.

The second aim of the paper is to demonstrate the fruitfulness of such an analytical approach in a comparative case study focusing on the emergence of gendered welfare state regime in Sweden and Germany. Sweden and Germany are ideal subjects for a comparative study of two countries. On the one hand, they present two similair cases of sociohistorical development. On the other hand, despite these similarities they produced quite different types of welfare states: Germany a conservative welfare state representing a strong male breadwinner and Sweden a social democratic, universalistic welfare state with a rather weak breadwinner model.

In contrast to issues concerning bodily integrity (abortion, violence) reproductive technologies represent a topic,which has been highly controversial among feminist activists and scholars. Some regard it as an expansion of power over women´s bodies through medical expertise. Especially reprogenetics - the fusion of assisted reproductive technics and genetical knowlege - is percieved as a new form of biopower, where life itself is becoming objectified through instrumental sociotechnologies. Others welcome reproductive technologies as an extension of women´s  autonomy and right to choose, with regard to their bodies. As such reproductive technologies challenge the liberal notion of selfdetermination. Related to the classical integrity issues selfdetermination meant a "negativ" liberty right as freedom from various forms of coersion or force, when it comes to reproductive technologies, selfdetermination is linkd to a "claim right, namely to have a healthy baby. But can there be a right to have a healthy baby? Should it be an issue of state concern to satisfy the poeples yearning for children? In addition to such challenging question, reproductive technolgies profoundly destabilize central categories of the political and cultural order, on which feminist demands for bodily citizenship have rested. Drawing on sholarship from governmentality studies this paper aims to rethink the concept of  bodily citizenship.  I will discuss the fruitfullness of such an approach drawing on empirical research covering Sweden, Germany and Poland