Thinking about Sweden, and other mappings...

"To learn from travel, one must train
oneself to capture messages."
Fatema Mernissi.


Sweden is a country I had never really thought about visiting, although in the back of my mind there lingered some awareness of its status as the best-ranking country in the world in gender inequality, and some notion that this wealthy Scandinavian nation is recognized as exemplary in terms of social equality in general and successful welfare state policy.
Would it be "too boring", too "solved" to really capture my imagination, I wondered, when the chance to go there came in the form of professional commitment.  Of course, there would always be historical monuments, natural beauty, perhaps the chance to take a ride through the countryside on a fine Swedish (or Icelandic) horse, and then of course, the numerous museums to visit....

Now I am already on my second trip there. On the plane from Amsterdam to Stockholm, after a grueling 11 hour flight from São Paulo, I sit next to a Swedish woman whom I soon learn has gone from nursing to a doctorate in public health. Probably well into her fifties, she is a still youthful mother of three, now in her second marriage to a man who had several children of his own. When I comment, “So, I know that your country is considered number one in gender equality”, her reply comes quickly, together with a wide smile and, I detect, a twinkle in her eyes, “Yes, this is true! But we are still not satisfied [with the way things are]!”

My first stroll around Stockholm takes place on a drizzly, mid-November afternoon. There, at the boutique she works at in a trendy Stockholm neighborhood, I meet Sari, a young Afghani immigrant. Although the acute perceptions of life in Sweden that she shares with me lead me to believe she has a real penchant for the social sciences, she tells me, in beautiful English, that she has finished high school and not gone on the university. Then she explains that in Sweden, her adopted country, everyone has all their basic needs taken care of, so that the real difference between rich and poor can be seen through access to spheres such as hobbies and leisure. “There are many things you may want to do but if you are from a poor family, perhaps an immigrant family, you just won´t get the chance”. She also tells me that her mom wanted to bring her daughters to Sweden so that they could have the opportunities she never did. And as her daughters lives unfold in new ways, Sari´s father "isn´t too happy with it".

Later, in the evening, I am at a bar with my Rumanian friend, enjoying a bit of the city's night life. As the night draws to its end, emptying out rather early, in fact (well, it is a Tuesday evening, after all) there is just us and a large party at another table. One member of the group, a young man, gets up and starts to dance, showing off his not-so-meager talents in flashy movements of hands, legs and body, rather à la Michael Jackson. Then the d.j., who seems to be a friend of the group, switches the track to Middle-Eastern music, and a middle aged woman and another, somewhat younger one, who we later learn is her daughter get up from the table as well. Soon we are all dancing and laughing together, this one brief chance meeting pulsing with a sweet and dizzying current of something larger. Tamara, the older woman, tells us it is her daughter´s birthday, gestures toward her lovely granddaughter, a girl of about 16, and then goes on to lament the closed-off nature of Swedish life, its families and reserved society. “Look at us, we are all from somewhere else!,” she exclaims. Somewhere, in this case, means mostly Iran, but also Cabo Verde and Chile. Later, the young Chilean I speak to in Spanish tells me she was born in Sweden, daughter of people who found exile there, after Pinochet´s coup wrought fear and terror in their native land.



I am in Uppsala, after day one of our conference, chatting with Johanna and Ingrid over a beer. It is rather noisy in the pub, populated at the moment by a gregarious crowd that doesn´t seem to fit the “boring” label I have heard foreigners apply to the Swedes over the past few days. So I ask my friends to tell me something about young people in Sweden today, their habits and their life style. Johanna tells me her older sister is a Lutheran pastor, a single mother who “made” her child under the auspices of a Danish sperm bank and with current plans to follow suit for a second one. Ingrid, who tells me she still dreams of a rather conventional married life, like the ones who parents built and enjoy, to date, also adds, “A husband! Yes, I would like one. But I can also easily make my life without one. In fact, my best friends are a bunch of guys, and I´m almost always hanging out them, só for them, maybe, I´m just... well, one of the boys!”

On the final evening of my stay in Uppsala, snow is falling lightly, covering the ground with a thin and gauzy sheet. It is almost warm outside, and better yet, I have the prospect of a toasty, cozy hotel room awaiting me. So, there is none of the discomfort of Curitiba at the end of a winter day in store for me tonight. I feel satisfied after several days of “communing with kindred spirits” and after a well- received talk on fellow women travelers - in this case the Brazilian women in Barcelona who have shared their life stories of searching for self, of border-crossings, introspection and sometimes, “muito jogo de cintura” (a particular kind of cleverness, roughly speaking). On the plane home the next day, I read stories from the book my son has given me for my recent birthday. There are many good ones among them, but one in particular (Conversa de Bar, by the gaucha Renata Wolff)catches my attention, reminding me of the session my students and I “back home” spent re-visiting Rosario* . Like Castellanos, Woolff, Plath and others I so admire, Wolff's story takes a humorous and ironic look at mythologizing - and often disabling- ways of writing women, and perhaps also, of being women: the scripts, the "contracts" we accept and their “fine print” - and bringing me back again to a one of the questions that so often, or from time to time, come backs to haunt me: if in our ocean and border crossing, if, amidst our changing circumstances and selves, there is something we must still, most urgently, most importantly, dislodge from within.

*(Castellanos, El eterno femenino)

Global Women

Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy.
Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, editors. New York: Metropolitan Books. 2003


“The personal is global”. With this new take on the old 60s and 70s feminist slogan “the personal is political” sociologist Arlie Hochschild finalizes her own contribution to the edited volume, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the Global Economy, a wonderful book replete with tales that move from sad and harrowing to fascinating and, occasionally, hopeful. Its well-documented stories from around the globe also present some excellent sociological and anthropological analysis of how women (and children, and families and men) navigate the contemporary world system.
I became intrigued by Arlie Hochschild’s more recent work after having the opportunity to hear her speak at the Centro de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona, and immediately set myself to the task of getting to know it better. The essays and articles that make up the volume are suggestive and inspiring for several of the ongoing projects I share, at present, with numerous students, colleagues and friends, and what I will try to do here is to present some general ideas so that those of you who visit this little piece of cyberspace get a better idea of what the book has to offer.
In the introduction, editors Ehrenreich (another one of my longstanding favorite critical social analysts) and Hochschild expound on their basic topic, the current and ongoing process of feminization of transnational migration. They point to how this process is intimately linked to the “care deficit” that has been created in “First World” societies: as more women devote themselves to work and public life outside the home (and trends toward increased male investment in home and domestic life continue to be relatively negligible) the scenario for a “global transfer” of services associated with a “traditional wife´s role”* is created. An intensified influx of women from countries and communities ravaged by debt, poverty, colonial histories and “problems of development” to the kitchens and households (and sweatshops, restaurants and streets) of the world’s “global cities” and richest nations enables life to go on smoothly for many, though the consequences and ramifications this has for the lives of villages, communities and families in poor and developing countries is not often considered.
When Hochschild suggests that perhaps a “woman’s care” constitutes the “new gold” flowing from south to north, she may not be exaggerating. There really does seem to be an ongoing reversal of trends if we consider that one of the most oft-discussed aspects of the history of women and work from the 19th to the 20th century in advancing industrial nations was the shrinking of domestic service, a type of employment that had been fundamental in an earlier period of Western bourgeois culture and society.
And what about the other side of care deficit, that one that is generated "on the other side of the ocean" by this new scenario? Parreñas’ article on the care crisis in the Philippines discusses repercussions in the care-exporting country (how children and families adapt to women’s absence) and is careful to point out that, considerable suffering notwithstanding, activists and policy-makers who take a stand against women’s migration become moralizing forces calling for the disciplining of women, while it is truly important to re-think the issues in ways that can work to dismantle or at least alleviate not only global inequalities and also to promote re-thinking the gender order (which would include new ways of thinking about fathers’ caring for children and families). Anther fascinating contribution shows how in contexts like that of Sri Lanki, emigrating women may spend years toiling abroad while unemployed husbands “mismanage” the remittances received, thus blocking family routes out of poverty. Among the saddest of texts is one which discusses cases of African women who were virtually imprisoned within the U.S. households where they were providing domestic services – often for professionals with high level positions in international organisms such as the UN, World Bank, IMF and in one incredibly paradoxical case, within the home of a human rights lawyer.
Young women’s incorporation in the global sex industry is the theme of one of the most powerful contributions to the volume, Brennan’s account of her ethnographic study of sex-workers in transnational sex/love circuits of the Dominican Republic. In the cases she discusses of young women from desperately impoverished rural areas of the island – most often, young mothers struggling to feed, clothe and raise their children on their own – and their relationships with German men who flock there to enjoy its beaches and ample opportunities for “sex tourism”, strategies up and out of poverty figure more clearly than concerns with conventional “romantic love”. And in the book’s concluding chapter, Sasskia Sassen speaks poignantly of the “feminization of survival” yet also makes it clear that women are not mere victims of global capitalism – nor are they mere victims of the specific beneficiaries of their services, such as more privileged social groups, elite households or mafias (and governments) who profit from trafficking of women. In many ways, she suggests, women involved in particular forms of transnational movement (particularly- I would imagine - those in which transnational circuits are linked to female and familial networks at a grassroots level) actively strive to have access to opportunities and often acquire new resources that enhance their ability to re-shape their own lives outside of conventional patriarchal constraints. In fact, the possibility of shaping and re-shaping one’s life, beyond conventional borders and boundaries - , geographic and the symbolic – and to do so, while creating new communities (local and/or global) is a hope and a struggle for women all over the globe. It is perhaps the best of the “cultural consequences of globalization” to which Indian Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai refers, this possibility to (re)imagine the self that is part of intensified global circulation of people, goods and images. Whether these “re-imaginings” can be connected to the genesis of more egalitarian forms of social life and culture is a major issue, and is clearly linked to the patterns of a global economic order which would require fundamental restructuring to loosen the forces of suffering and economic (and political) coercion that send so many people out to distant corners of the globe against the backdrop of a dire lack of options. For the time being, - and only exacerbated by the current context of crisis - women and men all over the world will continue packing bags and knapsacks, crossing oceans in planes or flimsy wooden boats, smuggling themselves or being smuggled across borders with no guarantees of what luck will be theirs “on the other side” - because this is all they feel they can do. The young woman who, while cutting my hair in a beauty salon ( a franchise of a national chain) in Barcelona shared her story of migration away from a small town in the Brazilian north east claims not to have been disappointed by her sojourn, guided as it was by her hope that somewhere else, things could be better. Or if not better, at least different, worth seeing, knowing and perhaps (as suggested by another informant, a Brazilian architect also residing in Barcelona) de-mystifying.

* As Saskia Sassen, in her contribution to the volume clarifies, a new household type has emerged which can be referred to as a “professional household without a ‘wife’ regardless of whether its adult couple consists of a man and a woman, two men or two women.” (p.259)