Weight, relief and overcoming: a safe space for racialized women learning to swim in Sweden

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article aims to contribute to the nascent field of critical phenomenology in geography by elaborating on a feminist-phenomenological understanding of the conceptual binary of weight–relief and Nietzsche’s (self)overcoming. These notions provide a theoretical language for the universality of the human condition, transcending the tendency for theoretical-political reification of marginalized subjects’ lives and agencies. The empirical component consists of in-depth interviews with predominantly non-white, immigrant women who have either learned or taught other adult women to swim in a women-only swimming school founded in the multicultural suburb of Fisksätra, Stockholm, Sweden. By historicizing and contextualizing this setting, it is argued that the lack of swimming ability in Sweden (and elsewhere) is today a partly racialized phenomenon, where this deficiency constitutes a socio-phenomenological weight in individuals’ everyday geographies. What this gender-exclusionary space enables, in its quality as a ‘safe space’, is not so much the integration or securing of minority identities as the possibility to overcome one’s own fears and bodily challenges regarding water through shared experiences of safety, convivial solidarity and the joyful pleasures of being-in-water together.