Jenny Björklund

Telephone:: +46 18 471 57 96, +46 73 469 74 87
E-mail:: Jenny.Bjorklund@gender.uu.se
Visiting address:: Villavägen 6A
752 36 UPPSALA
Postal address:: Box 527
751 20 Uppsala

Download contact information for Jenny Björklund at Centre for Gender Research

Short presentation

Jenny Björklund is Professor of Gender Studies.

Current research: reproductive decision-making in relation to climate change and environmental issues.

Other research interests: childlessness/childfreedom, motherhood studies, queer readings, literature and gender.

Most recent book: Negotiating Non-Motherhood: Representations, Perceptions, and Experiences, edited by Jenny Björklund, Dovilė Kuzminskaitė, and Julie Rodgers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025).

Keywords

reproductive decision-making and climate change
motherhood
non-motherhood
childlessness
childfreedom
queer readings
queer theory
cultural studies
literature and gender
twentieth-century literature
twenty-first-century literature

Biography

I am professor of Gender Studies and director of the Centre for Gender Research.

I received my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Uppsala University in 2004. I have done research and taught courses in Gender Studies, Comparative Literature, and Scandinavian Studies at various universities in Sweden and the United States, including Uppsala University, Stockholm University, Linneaus University, and UCLA.

Between 2021 and 2024 I was one of the work package leaders in in MotherNet, a network of researchers on contemporary European motherhood, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 952366. Between 2012 and 2020 I was senior editor (with Ulrika Dahl) of the Nordic LGBTQ studies journal lambda nordica.

Research

Reproductive Decision-Making and Climate Change

How do we make sense of family-building when climate change and other environmental issues threaten human life? This question forms the point of departure for my current research on family-building and reproductive decision-making in relation to climate change and environmental issues. I have written about how parenthood is represented in contemporary Swedish climate change fiction and done research in collaboration with Maja Bodin, who holds a PhD in reproductive health, on how lay people reason around reproductive decision-making in relation to climate change and environmental issues. Together with Maja Bodin I run the research project Reproductive Decision-Making in Times of Climate Change, which focuses on how family-building is discussed in relation to global issues like climate change and sustainability, in the media and by civil society actors.

Childlessness/Childfreedom and Non-Motherhood

I have done research on childlessness and non-motherhood as part of MotherNet, a project that received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 952366. I am the editor (with Dovilė Kuzminskaitė and Julie Anne Rodgers) of the volume Negotiating Non-Motherhood: Representations, Perceptions, and Experiences (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). While involuntary and voluntary childlessness have typically been treated separately and studied within different disciplines in previous scholarship, we explore non-motherhood beyond the involuntary/voluntary divide and consider a wide range of conceptualizations of women who do not become mothers. We bring together a variety of perspectives from different national contexts and from different disciplines, including literary and cultural studies, gender studies, sociology, and film studies to explore non-motherhood. In this volume, and elsewhere, I write about representations of non-motherhood in twenty-first-century Swedish literature.

Motherhood Studies: Mothers Who Leave Their Families

The point of departure for this research project and book, Maternal Abandonment and Queer Resistance in Twenty-First-Century Swedish Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), is the question what it means that so many mothers in twenty-first-century Swedish literature leave their families. While previous scholarship on motherhood in literature uses feminist theory and theories on motherhood, I draw on a queer-theoretical tradition, which explores failure and negativity as resistance. The queer-theoretical framework makes it possible to discover new themes—norm-critical dimensions, failure, and ambivalence—in literature about motherhood. By acknowledging the norm-criticalaspects of the novels, I show how literary representations of primarily heterosexual mothers who leave their families can be seen as resistance against norms in the Swedish society, such as involved parenthood, the nuclear family, and pronatalism.

Queer readings

One of my primary research interests is queer readings with a focus on Swedish literature. I have published the book Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and articles that highlight queer perspectives on film and Nordic literature. This research also includes more theoretically driven perspectives, for instance in the article about queer readings, co-written with Ann-Sofie Lönngren.