Although white men still remain overrepresented among the economic, political, cultural and academic elites and in managerial positions, their dominance in other arenas of social life is changing. Women’s altered positions in society in combination with a steadily increasing ethnic and racial diversity is dramatically changing the future for white men, who subsequently are losing faith in the future and increasingly see themselves as being dispossessed of their previous entitlement to power. This presentation is inspired by the intersection of whiteness studies and masculinity studies in order to be able to theorize the current social, cultural, and political changes surrounding white men’s declining dominance in late-modern Swedish society. It offers an analysis of the growing politicization of white men and white masculinity in Sweden; both as unorganized individuals and by means of new political movements like organized radical white male right-wing campaigns and political parties. This rise in a new type of politicized gender and race relations has not yet fully been explored in Sweden, although this current development most probably will shape present and future political struggles for a long time in the near future. Our analysis focuses on the gendered dimensions of Swedish whiteness in a white nation in crisis, and how a sense of white melancholia – that is the loss of homogenous and progressive Sweden – is currently developing into a crisis of white masculinity and into a violent uprising of white male right-wing radicalism. Such an analysis contribute to a) an understanding of the specific dynamics of Swedish white masculinity with all its differences and similarities in relation to the situation in the Anglophone world wherein theories on white masculinity are more explored and pronounced, b) a theoretical understanding of the intersection between historically privileged gender positions and an existential sense of loss among white men today, and c) a nuanced understanding of the intersections of whiteness and masculinity in a contemporary Swedish setting.

Catrin Lundström is Associate Professor in Sociology and a LiU Research Fellow at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO), Linköping University in Sweden. Her latest book is White Migrations: Gender Whiteness and Privilege in Transnational Migration (Palgrave Macmillan). Lundström is the author of several international articles within the fields of ethnographic research, migration studies, critical race and whiteness studies, and feminist sociology, published in Social Identities, Gender, Place and Culture, Journal of Intercultural Studies and European Journal of Cultural Studies, among others. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and the University of California, Santa Barbara in the US.

Tobias Hübinette, Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer
Department of Language, Literature and Intercultural Studies, Karlstad University, Sweden
E-mail: tobias.hubinette@kau.se