Normalization And “Outsiderhood”

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This introductory chapter provides the conceptual framework for the book, focusing in particular on normalization processes within the contemporary neoliberal welfare state. In the first part we give the historical background to the ways in which “the normal” has functioned within the discursive field of the modern welfare state. The normal was double-sidedness: it was integral to the ideological formations of race biology and other disciplining and discriminating practices within what was later to be called social work, and it was also that which made possible the formulation of political demands for many underprivileged groups of people. This inclusive aspect of modern welfare policy has been toned down in the current individualized and market-oriented neoliberal welfare state. We argue in the second part of the chapter that the modern emphasis on inclusion as a citizen’s right has been replaced by a focus on the problem of those who are excluded, those outside, as individuals with difficulties in belonging. As we show, this shift leaves its imprint on many social and political areas, not least the ones concerned with gender equality and immigrant policy. After the historical overview, we briefly present some theoretical standpoints for the project, positioning ourselves in relation to our dependence above all on Foucault, Butler and Hacking. The chapter ends in a description of how our research relates to previous research within the areas of postcolonial theory, social policy theory, national identities and political oppositional activism.

The aim of the article is to explore the construction of a “normal birth” and of a “normal woman/mother”. The empirical material comes from field work in a birth clinic located in one of Sweden’s big cities. The chapter begins with a short overview of the Swedish welfare regime, with a particular focus on the (neo-liberal) changes that have occurred since the nineties. The second and third sections analyze the empirical material from the fieldwork, with regard to issues of gender, ethnicity and nationhood. These are followed by a brief conclusion.

This chapter analyzes the normalization processes that take place in a Swedish social welfare institution for children/families, as processes in which social life is regulated by sociotemporal patterns. Agendas for change in social work institutions are often tied to linear clock time and are continuously repeated in institutional practice. The empirical material consists of ten narrative interviews conducted with the personnel and is here analyzed in relation to the meaning of time in the narratives. The aim is to show how certain concepts of time become normalized as the supposedly neutral foundation for social life, and how the values and power relations inherent in them in terms of gender, race/ethnicity and class become invisible. This normalization makes time into part of institutional disciplining, thus legitimizing certain social practices while others are discredited. The very construction of normalcy itself seems to depend on a linear time structure (the right time, on time etc.). Ironically, these normalization processes may reproduce the very social power orders that create social marginalization, stigmatization and social problems that social work has to challenge. Normalization processes linked to linear time may discredit social practices related to process time, and it is the practices within process time that challenge those social power orders through which the privileged are made to appear normal and the underprivileged abnormal. By understanding and conceptualizing time as complex and various and as interpenetrating and permeating our daily lives, we open up the possibility of discussing and challenging these normalization processes through which outsiderhood is created and maintained.

The main purpose of this chapter is to discuss the construction of immigrant and disabled women´s needs in a training project in relation to normalization and othering. I follow the process of implementing this project by studying documentation from the Swedish Government, The National Board of Health and Welfare, a women´s shelter and an interview with and log written by the supervisor of the project at the women’s shelter. The analysis shows how normalization takes place through the construction of privileged “normal” positions and “others” in the everyday practices of the project and in official documents. This shows how paradoxes may arise in projects that aim to help people in vulnerable situations. Although measures may be taken at the individual level, structural problems of exclusion and discrimination may persist unchanged. The project constitutes an example of how welfare institutions, by identifying certain groups as different and in need of specific interventions, silently normalize other groups. The displacement of responsibility from Government to a voluntary organization individualizes and atomizes the addressing of structural problems of gender inequality, immigration and support for the disabled. In order to understand the relationship between power and othering in the welfare state and to improve policies aimed at people in vulnerable situation it is therefore important to examine the chain of categorizations that takes place all the way down from Government to voluntary organization.

The growing focus on individual responsibility in the neo-liberal welfare state has made issues of employability a focus of policy debates. In this chapter the consequences of this discourse in relation to ethnic minorities in Sweden is studied from an intersectional perspective. The widespread discourse on the responsibility of migrants to become normal - to integrate themselves into Swedish society by becoming employable, fluent in the Swedish language and observant of Swedish cultural norms - is discussed. It is argued here that since minorities are often considered to represent their whole ethnic group, individual responsibility to become integrated is transformed into a responsibility to integrate one’s whole group. It is concluded that the paradoxes of multiculturalism are discursively resolved by awarding responsibility for integration to individual immigrants and in that way making a group with relatively little power responsible for their own subordination.

This chapter focuses on the way in which organizations and legislation, despite their explicit intentions, nevertheless promote normative inequality, maintaining sexual harassment as an apparently inevitable part of schooling. Peer sexual harassment is found to be both frequent and pervasive in Swedish schools and is more or less expected as an everyday hassle that students have to handle. This chapter highlights the social and discursive pre-conditions that, despite laws and policies, let behaviours related to sexual harassment continue to take place at a high frequency. These behaviours function as an obstacle for change toward a safe school environment, which is free from discriminating behaviours. Drawing on previous research, this chapter shows the gap between manifest legislation and common practices at school. The method is interpretive and critical, in the sense that it is a sustained discussion of questions being raised by earlier studies. The following six aspects of the discursive normalization processes that collaborate to make sexual harassment a common and concealed phenomenon in Swedish schools are: 1) Not including genderbased violence as a specific domain in the national public health policy; 2) Sexual harassment being invisible in school surveys; 3) Sexual harassment being invisible in anti-bullying programmes; 4) Ignorance of power and gender perspectives in schools; 5) The normalization of asymmetric power relations as a hindrance to victims speaking up and taking action; and 6) Lack of a common understanding and definition of sexual harassment.

This chapter provides a theoretical overview of some of the ways in which the process of normalization functions as forms of hidden privilege. It outlines how privileged groups come to represent the dominant norm whereby white, male, able-bodied, heterosexual, middle-class people in Western societies come to embody what it means to be normal. It also explores strategies for challenging the normalization of privilege by encouraging the development of responsibility not only for individual actions but also for the social practices which create them.

In Swedish neoliberal political rhetoric the word democratic has come to designate already established “normal” values said to be inherent to Western culture. Democracy is seen as already established by a cultural process called democratization. In this way a narrative is formed that is essential for the neoliberal view of democracy of choices within an already established order. This also makes it possible for the Swedish national school curriculum to enumerate what is said to be undeniably fundamental democratic values as something given, that anyone sharing the same cultural heritage ought to agree upon. In a study by ethnologist Ann Runfors, included in a report by the Swedish Commission of Inquiry on Power, Integration and Structural Discrimination (2006), she describes the kind of normalizing social processes that thus permits the establishing of values as undeniable. In my article I elaborate on her analysis, in order to reach further into the complexities involved in understanding such social processes of normalization in their ability to legitimize certain interpretations of specific values. On a further level I also discuss the concept of social process itself, that I argue stands in close connection to the concept of culture. Through the poststructuralist questionings by Derrida and Foucault of culture as a concept for definable communities that produces their meaning, their values and their norms, I argue the need of literary reading and philosophical analysis as a complement to the empirical research of the social sciences in order to challenge normalization processes by reading differently.

The internationally renowned Pippi Longstocking books by Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking (1945), Pippi goes on board (1946) and Pippi in the South Seas (1948), have come to represent a modernist revolution within children’s literature in Sweden, and Pippi herself has become a symbol for the “strong girl”. Originally interpreted as a tool for criticizing norms, rules and normality within the context of the construction of the modern Swedish welfare state – and by Lindgren herself, who explicitly stated that Pippi was not an ideal for children to follow – the character Pippi has come to perform many different functions in relation to the discursive constructions of women and girls since the 1940s. In the 1970s, she emerged as a feminist icon and she has maintained this role in many respects. But the dialectic between normality and its modernist critique that characterised the modern state has today been replaced by different aesthetics and different views of female empowerment. In this chapter, I shall investigate how the meaning of the symbol, Pippi “the strong girl”, has changed in the context of neoliberal times, and how, in some ways, it has now become a demanding ideal for young women. The extraordinary and exceptional, transgressive and explorative, has become a normative normality, and thus, perhaps, has lost much of its critical potential. Through readings of how Pippi is used in present day Swedish literature, this chapter investigates the normalisation process of the negative, and the inclusion of norm-breaching.

The interdisciplinary research project “Challenging gender” was a joint effort by members of two Swedish universities. Researchers were grouped by five different themes, while together they became “the Arena”. The present authors’ theme focused on normalization processes, and included gender researchers from literary studies, sociology, social work, and public health studies. The purpose of this chapter is to explore what it is to challenge normalization processes as researchers; the context is interdisciplinary gender research under a neo-liberal regime. To deepen their understanding of what the process has occasioned, the researchers used “collective biography”, a memory-work method developed by Bronwyn Davies, who led the researchers’ work of writing down their memories prompted by experience of striations and of lines of flight. In this chapter the memories so produced are discussed in the light of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Thanks to the financial resources the project was able to muster, we were able to create the kind of collective “room” where we could take the opportunity to be creative and challenge structural patterns – but equally where we could give vent to our frustration at these same patterns. Our memories seemed to waver between fragile but uplifting flashes of optimism and a feeling that nothing would work, and not only just the one or the other – always somewhere in between. Our theoretical understanding of normality grew out of that most dangerous of ideas: that we should open our minds to the unpredictable, the non-normalizing, to whatever could be different.

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