Perversa flickfantasier - Anne-Marie Berglunds textlekar, rumsligheter och ironier

Abstract

This article examines short stories by the Swedish writer Anne-Marie Berglund (1952- ). The starting point for the article is the possibility of a literary deconstruction of the stable, chronologically aging and developing subject. By analysing girlhood, not foremost as an age category, but rather as nomadic subjectivity, a gettingaway- from feminine adulthood, we observe how Berglund and the characters of her writings find ways to escape from, play with and undermine, or in other ways resist, the seriousness and limitations of adulthood. The theoretical work of Rosi Braidotti, with the concept nomadic subjects, is used in the article to link thinking, emotions and fantasies as important aspects of the literary analysis of age, not as stable, biological ground, but as contextual states of body and mind. Judith/Jack Halberstam and Sara Ahmed’s theorizations of queer time and space, and their deconstruction of life narratives are also used to point out the disruptions and spaces that are created in Berglund’s short stories. The article identifies three different important themes in Berglund’s work, presented in three parts. The first is ”Nomadic age – time and place”, a section which examines how adulthood capacities are found in girl characters that need to run away in order to escape age-normativity. The second is ”Spatialities” that examines the agency of rooms and objects in Berglund’s short stories, and the third part analyses the ironic mirroring of the European culture of seriousness. We also identify a meta-perspective on writing, where the literary texts open up for a linking of creativity, embodiment and critique of psychoanalytical discourses on hysteria and the woman writer as an intruder and paradox in the literary landscape. This meta-perspective occurs throughout the entire work of Berglund, commenting on the multiple ways her characters resist and undermine restrictions of the writing woman.