Ulrika Dahl

Short presentation

Ulrika Dahl is Professor of Gender Studies at the Centre for Gender Research since 2018. Her current research concerns queer kinship, family and reproduction through intersectional, transnational and critical race perspectives. She also works on anti-gender movements and the conservative turn in feminism in Sweden and she teaches family/reproduction, methods, and intersectional feminist and queer theory on all levels.

Keywords

• whiteness
• sexuality and queer theory
• postcolonial studies
• family and kinship studies
• feminist ethnography
• europe
• feminism
• intersectionality
• femininity
• assisted reproduction
• affect
• creative writing methodologies

Biography

Trained at US institutions (BA Magna Cum Laude Anthropology and Gender Studies, Lawrence University 1994; Ph.D. Anthropology and Womens Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz 2004), I worked at Södertörn University from 2004-2016 when I joined the Centre for Gender Research. I've also previously taught in the Swedish Program at Stockholm University (2002-2004), at UC Santa Cruz (2000-2001) and in the Nordic Research School in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies (2008 and 2009) and Intergender (2009).

I've been a guest researcher at the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney (2009) and at The Somatechnics Research Centre, Macquarie University (2010) in Australia, both times funded by STINT. In the fall of 2011 I was the Fulbright Hildeman Fellow at the Department of Scandinavian Studies, Gustavus Adolphus College, Minnesota. During the 2023-24 academic year, I was invited visiting professor of Gender studies at Lund University.

At the Centre for Gender Research, I supervise PhD students and MA students and co-organise the Queer research group. I am also an active member of the Family and Kinship research group. At Uppsala University I am also affiliated with the interdisciplinary research school Women's Mental Health through the Reproductive Lifespan (WOMHER) and I have previously coordinated the interdisciplinary research network 'Nature as Culture: The (Re)production of Common Sense', funded by CIRCUS and consisting of 12 researchers from 7 departments in 5 faculties at Uppsala University.

Since 2014 I'm associate editor of the European Journal of Womens Studies and currently serve as the journal's Open Forum editor. From 2009-2020 I was senior editor (with Jenny Björklund) of the Nordic LGBTQ studies journal lambda nordica and now serve on the journal's editorial board. I also serve on a number of advisory boards of projects, journals and research centres in the Nordics and beyond.

Two central strands run through all my feminist (academic) endeavors; a passion for embodied style and creative writing and a commitment to decolonial and antiracist pedagogy and research. I always welcome and enjoy collaborations with feminist and antiracist activists, artists and scholars in and out of the academy.

Research

Current research

Scandinavian Border Crossings: Race and Nation in Queer Assisted Reproduction

Since 2021 I am working on research project together with professor Rikke Andreassen (Roskilde University), funded by Forte. This interdisciplinary research project focuses on questions of kinship and reproduction in relation to formations of gender, sexuality and race with a particular focus on bio politics, nation-making and reproductive medicine. Within the project, we study the meaning and practice of gamete matching as a border-crossing Scandinavian phenomenon involving parents, medical staff, digital media and online shopping and community making practices. This is also linked to my involvement with WOMHER.

My second project is part of a Swedish Research council funded "research environment" on anti-gender movement where I focus on the politics of reproduction and sexuality in Swedish anti-gender discourse and its overlaps with the conservative turn in feminism. Here I'm interested in what counts as "common sense" in affective border politics surrounding the category "woman" and the scapegoating of queerly feminine figures. In this work, I am a member of the Research school The Future of Democracy: Cultural Analyses of Illiberal Populism in Times of Crises (FUDEM; also funded by the Swedish Research council) and in this rapidly growing research field, I collaborate with colleagues in Sweden, the Nordics and globally.

My research interests also extend into my commitment to investigating and practicing creative writing, in particular autoethnography and theory, as modes of feminist (academic) freedom and imagining the world otherwise;

Previous research

Queer(y)ing Kinship in the Baltic Region

This project was funded by the Baltic Sea Foundation and also included associate professor Joanna Mizielinska (Warzaw) and associate professor Antu Sorainen (Helsinki) and Ph.D. student Raili Uibo at Södertörn University. The project explored various paths to and meanings assigned to 'family' and 'intimacy' among LGBTQ folks in different national settings around the Baltic sea. My own theoretical interests lie at the intersection of queer, affect, and critical race scholarship on reproduction and my ethnographic research focuses on ideas about relatedness, sexual and racial difference, futurity and intimate/affective labour among LGBTQ multi-parent families in the Stockholm area.

A range of publications have come out of this project, including two special issue of lambda nordica on Kinship and Reproduction (with Jenny Gunnarsson Payne and Jenny Björklund), articles in Sexualities, Somatechnics, and in several anthologies. We also did joint project anthology Queer(y)ing Kinship in the Baltic region and beyond (2023).

Femme as Figuration: Rethinking (Queer) Femininities

Much of my research have since 2002 centred on intersectional perspectives on queer femininities and feminist sexual politics. In this project, funded by the Swedish foundation for humanities and social sciences (Riksbankens jubileumsfond), I investigated how various strands of feminist theory have dealt with the question of femininity and feminine sexuality and sought to contribute to new ways of thinking feminine materiality and the relationship between bodies, technologies and knowledges.

The multi- and translocal ethnographic component of the project extended ethnographic work I did for the book Femmes of Power: Exploding Queer Femininities together with visual artist Del LaGrace Volcano. This project resulted in a number of articles in NORA, Tidskrift för Genusvetenskap, Gender Place and Culture, Feminist Theory, Sexualities, lambda nordica and New Formations as well as several book chapters. The project was completed in 2012 but my 2014 monograph Skamgrepp: Femme-inistiska essäer also further builds on this research. A special issue of European Journal of Women's Studies (co-edited with Jenny Sundén) on Femininity Revisited, 2018) also extends this research.

Translating and Constructing Gender Studies in the Nordic Region, 1975-2005

In this project, funded by the Baltic Sea Foundation, I worked together with Professor Ulla Manns at Södertörn and Professor Marianne Liljeström at the University of Turku, Finland on histories of formations of gender studies. My project was called "A Joint Canon? Transitions and Translations in Nordic Womens and Gender studies 1990-2005" and attended to how some ideas, concepts and theorists and not others came to be assigned geopolitical belonging in the Nordic region. There I studied stories about the development, content and change of "Nordic" womens/gender studies in relation to "European" womens/gender studies.

The project resulted in, among other publications, the book The Geopolitics of Nordic and Russian Gender Research 1975-2005 (Södertörn Academic Press, 2017). At present, this work has transformed into an interest in decolonial pedagogies and methodologies and intersectional and critical whiteness perspectives on hegemonic (academic) feminism. To that end, I am building collaborations with colleagues in South Africa, Brazil and Southern Europe.

Progressive Women, Traditional Men: The Politics of Knowledge and Gendered Stories of Development in the Northern Periphery of the EU

My dissertation in cultural anthropology (with research funded by the Wenner-Gren foundation for Anthropological Research) from UC Santa Cruz (2004) is an ethnographic account of the gendered effects of intersections of regional identity building, gender (equality) politics and European integration in an increasingly neoliberal and global imaginary around the turn of the millennium. It is not published in Sweden, but please contact me if you are interested in reading it.