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From silence to Pride? A feminist visual narrative analysis of the Swedish Armed Forces’ Pride campaigns
Swedish Defence University, Department of War Studies, Functions and Perspective Division.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-5996-5470
2025 (English)In: Media, War & Conflict, ISSN 1750-6352, E-ISSN 1750-6360, Vol. 18, no 1, p. 103-121Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

State militaries increasingly communicate their acceptance of LGBTQIA+ individuals through glossy visuals online. This article takes the Swedish Armed Forces as its case since, through their military marketing, they have suggested not only their protection of LGBTQIA+ rights but also their status as a ‘queer’ force for almost a decade. While the gendered representation of the Swedish military is unstable, the narrative of Nordic states’ ‘progressiveness’ is particularly sticky in international politics. Through a feminist visual narrative analysis of SAF’s Pride campaigns, the author identifies patterns and tensions in the ‘queer’ Swedish military narrative and argues that the Pride campaigns mark attempts at normalizing cis-heteronormativity while consolidating the Swedish nation ‘brand’ as internationalist, feminist and LGBTQIA+ friendly. In the process, they (re)produce conventionally ‘queer’ subjects: the patriot and victim, which through wider discourses of neoliberalism and homonationalism rely on ‘Western’ notions of what it means to be LGBTQIA+ in Sweden and beyond.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2025. Vol. 18, no 1, p. 103-121
Keywords [en]
gender, LGBTQIA+, marketing, military media, narrative, queer
National Category
Gender Studies
Research subject
War Studies
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:fhs:diva-13373DOI: 10.1177/17506352241256571OAI: oai:DiVA.org:fhs-13373DiVA, id: diva2:1924633
Projects
Anna Lindh Projektet för kvinnor, fred och säkerhetAvailable from: 2025-01-07 Created: 2025-01-07 Last updated: 2025-09-29Bibliographically approved

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Berg, Elin

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CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

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Citation style
  • apa
  • harvard-cite-them-right
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf