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The number of Swedish children conceived through commercial surrogacy abroad are increasing and the media debate on surrogacy is heated. In the wake of this, the Swedish public sphere is being filled with personal narratives of individuals travelling abroad with the purpose of having a child through surrogacy. This article analyses two books written by parents through surrogacy: Jaga storken (Hunt the stork) and Moscow baby, with a particular interest in how these two narratives describe and justify the stark class inequalities between intended parents and surrogate mothers. This kind of personal stories contribute to the normalisation of surrogacy through representing intended parents as ”having no choice” and the surrogate mothers as ”choosing subjects”. Thus, they play a crucial ideological function in the ongoing debate on surrogacy.

How have ethnologists applied discourse theory? This text introduces the special issue of Kulturella Perspektiv called “Discourse ethnology”, in which nine Swedish ethnologists present their work with applying discourse theory. The introductory text briefly outlines the ontology of discourse theory and discusses articulatory practice as a way of thinking the move from ontology to application.

What does discourse theory “do” to ethnology? And complementarily, what does ethnology “do” to discourse theory? In this article, these two questions are approached by investigating how Swedish ethnologists have hitherto described and applied discourse theory. The article identifies a couple of overarching tendencies within Swedish discourse theoretical ethnology, relating these tendencies both to other intra disciplinary trends and to parallel international developments of applied discourse theory. Specifically, the article will discuss current ethnological interpretations and applications of the concept of discourse as well as the discourse theoretical understanding of the subject, and will furthermore argue that these theoretical ideas still harbour underutilized possibilities, opportunities that, if taken, might serve to further develop discourse theoretical ethnology.

In 1982, ethnologists Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren rhetorically asked whether the concept of culture could mean anything, and whether it would not be wiser to just stick to one definition of it. Some thirty years later, it has become quite clear that the concept of culture is still one of our most multi-faceted concepts. With Johan Fornäs’ recent book Kultur (Culture) as its starting point, this text discusses two different models that have recently been developed to provide an overview over the plethora of understandings of ”culture”. It argues that Johan Fornäs’ model serves an important pedagogical purpose, but suggests that Magnus Öhlander’s multi-theoretical model suits the discipline of ethnology somewhat better.

The feminist struggle has during all its three waves, as they are commonly referred to as, to a great extent been about the ability for women to live their bodies in different and more emancipated ways. Just like Mary Wollstonecraft already in the late eighteenth century did, the Swedish feminist fanzines of today raise this question. This article discusses the ways in which this is done in Bleck, a feminist magazine that started out as a non-commercial fanzine in the late nineties. Bleck has from its early issues on criticized inequalities between men and women in sports. Both representations of female athletes in the media and economic injustice between men and women within grassroots as well as elite sports have been discussed in the magazine. The main analytical tool for this article is representation in its two meanings — aesthetic representation and political representation — and the interdependent relationship between the two. The concept of aesthetic representation is used to understand the ways in which Bleck condemns representations of female athletes in the mainstream media for being sexist, and the ways in which Bleck creates counter representations that can be said to function as feminist role models. The concept of political representation is used to analyze how Bleck, while doing the above, makes "herself" what can be called a political representative, or a spokeswoman, for other women.

Recension av: Margareta Hallberg, Etnologisk koreografi. Att följa ett ämne i rörelse. Nora: Nya Doxa, 2001. Tiina Rosenberg, Queerfeministisk agenda. Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlas, 2002. Annika Nordström, Syskonen Svensson: Sångerna och livet — en folklig repertoar i 1900-talets Göteborg. Skrifter från Etnologiska föreningen i Västsverige 39, 2002. Dan Lundberg & Gunnar Ternhag, Musiketnologi: En introduktion. Gidlunds förlag, 2002. Elizabeth L. Toth & Linda Aldoory (eds.), The Gender Challenge to Media: Diverse Voices From the Field. Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, Inc., 2001. Bruno Latour & Peter Weibel (eds.), iconclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. Sven-Erik Klinkmann (ed.), Popular Imagination: Essays on Fantasy and Cultural Practice. Åbo: NNF Publications 12, 2002.