Röster som gjorde skillnad. Korsande identifikationer i folkhemmets populärkultur

Abstract

"Voices making difference: Crossing identifications in Swedish populär culture 1920-1950" starts and ends with reflections on the concept of intersectionality and its uses in recent debates. Its potentials to open dialogues between different perspectives on identity orders such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, age and generation need to be nourished and protected against divisive ways of transforming it into a means to dig trenches between perspectives. It is argued that there is no a priori given set of identity dimensions, but that the choice of which orders to focus is always context-dependent and needs to be decided for each particular study. It is also emphasised that both crossings and boundaries between dimensions need to be reconstructed in empirical interpretations, since links and differences are produced in specific cultural practices and texts, even though the connecting "inter-" may analytically and politically be privileged over the dividing "-sect". A further observation is that while in some texts, identity orders may line up or prismatically reinforce each other in clear patterns, they often combine in much more diffuse, ambiguous and contradictory ways. The central sections of the article present an example of an intersectional and intermedial analysis of song lyrics, novels, films and other identity texts that were triggered by the advent and assimilation of jazz music in the Swedish welfare society during the period 1920-1950. Examples of primitivist polarisations of white/black and male/female are juxtaposed to more open subject positions. An example of the former is the author Artur Lundkvist, who in his book Negerkust (Negro Coast, 1933) exploited black women as both racially and sexually "Others". The teenage jazz star Alice Babs exemplifies the hybridising option, her songs and films around 1940 transgressed and redefined borders in the age, class, gender and ethnic dimensions.