Who’s Afraid of a Feminist Initiative?

Re-shaping political debate within parliamentary boundaries

(NOTE: This piece was written two days before the EU elections. The Feminist Initiative received 5.3% of the Swedish vote, giving them one seat in the EU Parliament: the first for a feminist party in Europe. Following that success, I was interviewed on HuffPost Live to talk about the party. )

The established parties do not take challenging established gender power structures seriously. We have inquiry after inquiry while important decisions about equality are just pushed into the future. Despite the rights that women have struggled to obtain through stubborn determination our current political system does not enable the realization of an equal society. The Feminist Initiative has the politics to challenge the other parties, and to drive through a feminist politics for a world free from discrimination. The Feminist Initiative adds a new dimension to politics. (From website of Sweden’s Feminist Initiative party)

In 2006, Sweden’s newly-formed Feminist Initiative (also known as Fi or F!) put up candidates in the Swedish national elections. Sweden is well-known as a (purported) haven of progressive gender politics, the epicenter of feminism, the place to be for the working mother, et cetera, et cetera. So, one would have expected, if not a landslide, at least a fairly decent showing.

They got 0.68% of the vote.

The premature death of Fi appeared to come in the subsequent 2010 elections, when the party attracted an embarrassing 0.4%, putting them only 13,000 votes ahead of the Swedish Senior Citizen Interest Party.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the funeral…

Fi stuck it out, and over the past 6 months Sweden has seen what some are calling a “Feminist Spring.” It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the tide turned, but, interestingly, a television program may have been the catalyst. The 3-part series (Fittstim: My Struggle), aired on Sweden’s public service SVT, triggered a mediated debate on the state of Swedish feminism which clearly energized Fi (I wrote a piece about the program and Swedish gender politics). Applications for Fi party membership rocketed, and poll numbers began an upward tick.

Much of the rise of Fi must be attributed to party co-spokesperson Gudrun Schyman (the former leader of the Swedish Left Party). Schyman is one of the most polarizing figures in Swedish politics, having previously compared misogyny in Sweden to Afghanistan and floated the idea of taxing men to compensate for the cost of male-on-female violence to Swedish society. On the other hand, Schyman is one of the most popular and charismatic political figures in an otherwise a personality-deficient political landscape.

So, here we are. Opinion polls put Fi at 4.5% which would mean a seat in the European parliament (and a level of support that would also give Fi seats in the Swedish parliament).

What do they stand for? We might look at some of the other statements on the Fi website about society and politics and ask ourselves: when was the last time we heard a political party speak in these terms…?

Power structures collaborate: It’s about a dimension that problematizes and challenges gendered power structures, heteronormativity and their collaborations with other power structures which, combined, constitute the basis for the gendered order.

Anti-discrimination is not a special interest: In order to achieve our goal we must make anti-discrimination the focus of our political work. Structural discrimination runs through every component of our society and, thus, should not be seen as a “special interest.” Norms and structures systematically subordinate certain groups while privileging others.

Class analysis isn’t enough! Within traditional party politics class is the basic unit of analysis for understanding societal structures. The concept of class is far too limited and is not useful for illuminating the patriarchal, heteronormative and racist structures which distribute resources and influence in an unequal manner both within Sweden and globally.

Academic in tone, to be sure. And, Fi have been vague about how these goals will be achieved in practice, as well as how required changes to fundamental Swedish social, political and economic structures will be paid for. Thus, it would be easy to paint Fi as a pie-in-the-sky, one-issue party with little grasp of the realities day-to-day politics. It would also be easy to say that Fi will never obtain real power, and so a vote for them would be—depending on one’s perspective—either useless or harmless: both somewhat infantilizing.

But I would argue that there is another way to look at parties like Fi: that they are a much-needed, extremely important addition to a supposedly democratic political landscape devoid of serious discussions on structural discrimination. In countries such as the US and the UK (where I have also lived), feminism is still treated with disdain. That, in turn, leads to the issues raised by feminists to be treated with disdain. Political power is very much about the power to control rhetoric, to control how we discuss certain issues—just think patriotism, law and order, immigration or unemployment.

Political organizations have to begin somewhere. Fi is a party based on hard work and sweat at the grassroots level. While they may lack the organizational depth of more established counterparts, it is hard to deny that parties such as Fi help to re-shape how we discuss progressive politics within parliamentary boundaries.

That’s a trade-off worth considering.