“Wronged White Men”: The Performativity of Hate in Feminist Narratives about Anti-Feminism in Sweden

Abstract

This article takes a close look at the phenomenon of “wronged white men”, focusing primarily on how this phenomenon has been conceptualized by Swedish feminist Maria Sveland. It is a poststructural critique of the standpoint feminism of her narrative about anti-feminism in Sweden, as well as an exploration of a possible companionship between poststructural and material feminisms. I also look at how Sveland attempts to universalize the experiences of the “(disraced) women-feminists” in her writings. This concept, which I develop here, is intended to highlight how the omission of racial markers in this context functions both to claim universality and to locate racist practices somewhere else, most notably in the “wronged white men”. Feminism, in this narrative, is written as the morally good, always in opposition to the morally bad “wronged white men”. I conclude by proposing a different understanding of the “wronged white men” phenomenon, where it is used not as a moral enemy to feminism, but as a figuration that opens up space for feminist self-reflexivity and where feminism and anti-feminism alike are understood as responsible for the worldly configurations of which they are part.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.