Förortsfeminismens villkor - transversell politik

Abstract

Juan Velásquez is recognizing the difficulties that frame the fight against discrimination, segregation and racism in Sweden. Gender mainstreaming and anti-discrimination work usually go for disparate roads, in spite that growing racism, homophobia and antifeminism require bigger unification between civil society, administrators and the scientific community. To articulate these actors Velásquez proposes transversal politics. He has studied this type of transversal work within the frame of a research project conducted in the multicultural community of Fittja, Botkyrka municipality in the metropolitan region of Stockholm. To advance this work he has developed a perspective based on participatory research that has turned into a transversal research. From the interaction among municipal officials, women’s networks and researcher, Velásquez seeks to make two fundamental contributions to the discussion on transversal politics. The first one is to engage in the local community. Transversal politics has been lifted as a perspective to build feminist alliances to overcome global patriarchal structures, and case studies on micropolitics related to that discourse are still few. Both the way in which women performed diversity as well as the search for commonality among them is subject to a series of conditions that frame what Velásquez in the context of a multicultural suburb in the Swedish welfare state calls a suburban feminism. The second contribution is based on a study how women in a place like Fittja overcome the conditions that frame their political underrepresentation. Velásquez shows how women practice what feminist scholars named ”rooting” to analyse their subordinate condition, advancing dialogues where the use of affections and feelings are fundamental. These affections have been important to make ”shifting”, to go from the understanding of subordination to the construction of a local alliance to face the patriarchal outline that concern them. The understanding of the conditions that frame the construction of local feminist alliances is also analyzed in relation to the problems that urban governance can generate, when a transversal frame between women networks, the public administration and researcher is established in order to empower underrepresented groups among women.