Alice resa in i Vänsterlandet

Abstract

This article offers an analysis of the author’s social and cultural journey into the world of left-wing politics in the 1970s. Drawing on an autoethnographic approach, the author’s experiences as a young political activist are analysed intersectionally through interweaving the perspectives of gender, class, and place. Alice’s political awakening occurred when she went to the university in 1969. The left-wing student movement was at its peak and, for Alice, becoming a student turned out to be the same as becoming a left-wing activist. She entered the university with feelings of inferiority, both for her working-class descent as being the first member of her family to enter into higher education and because of her growing up in the remote and sparsely populated area in the mountains of northern Sweden. To become a member of an ongoing worldwide student movement was like opening a new world which infused her with a feeling that she could make a difference. After some years as a member of a Marxist-Leninist party, she became more and more uncomfortable with the increasingly sectarian politics and authoritarian Stalinist worldview and eventually resigned with a sigh of relief.