Women with Class: Swedish Migrant Women's Class Positions in the USA

Abstract

This paper examines gender- and nation-specific forms of capital through migration. It focuses on first-generation Swedish women moving to a new social and political landscape in the USA, typically from upper- and middle-class environments in Sweden. Their migratory experiences are used as a departure to analyse how former class positions are being re-enacted (or not) in the neo-liberal USA. The study, conducted from 2006 to 2008, is based on in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with 33 women and three of their spouses and participant observations in a support group for Swedish-speaking women in the Western region of the USA. Using an intersectional analysis, it is suggested that Swedish women are located in contradictory class positions in the USA in terms of the loss of social and cultural capital, access to the social democratic welfare state and a dependence on racialised labour in a different social geography. It is argued that the women's class privileges are shaped, transformed and reproduced through their capacities to re-invest their cultural and embodied forms of capital in marriage and by marking a distance to subordinated groups, often other migrant women, thereby mirroring the unequal relations between (migrating) women in a global arena.