Historical research often tends to focus on the radical and progressive forces of a period, highlighting movements and profiles at the forefront of change, formulating the new impulses.[1] The historiography of the women’s movement, in Sweden and elsewhere, has often had a focus on explicitly progressive (leftist and/or liberal) forces, actors and pioneering policy breakthroughs. While this may be understandable, it has resulted in a shortage of research on other actors in the political landscape, including those who more gradually came to accept and recognize gender equality as a positive value and political objective. The shortage of research is, in addition, augmented by the fact that political historians working with this period have not paid much attention to issues of gender equality policy or female politicians.[2]

Historically, politicians in conservative parties have been less feminist and less concerned with gender equality in comparison to political parties on the centre and left.[3] Still, gender equality policy today appears as a diverse and broad field, where groups from left to right attribute different meanings to concepts such as gender equality and feminism. In the 2000s, it has not been uncommon for right-wing Swedish politicians – especially female – to call themselves feminists. A growing scholarly research examining ‘the righting of feminism’ frequently assumes the incorporation of gender equality-goals in conservative parties to be a rather recent phenomenon, arising in the 1990s.[4] Here, a historical account has the potential to provide a genealogy that furthers our understanding and helps to explain the passing, in Sweden in 1980, of the first Gender Equality Act, forbidding gender discrimination, and the establishing of a Gender Equality Ombudsman (JÄMO) to offer a channel for complaints, both under a centre-right government.

The chapters of this volume have demonstrated the protracted coexistence in the early modern era of a wide variety of medical knowledge regimes and practices – both religious and ‘worldly’ – for interpreting health and combating illness. In contrast, the modern medical paradigm, consolidating its hegemonic authority in the first half of the twentieth century, understood health as primarily a concern of medical science and of the public sphere. 

However, as this epilogue will explicate, the latter decades of the 1900s saw a reemergence of alternative epistemologies and the growth of a more multifaceted health market. The epilogue discusses comparisons, analogies, and contrasts between this era of ‘late modernity’ and the early modern era.

Three main aspects of health culture in the late 1900s and early 2000s are discussed in this commentary: the return of holistic new spirituality and alternative medicine; the ideology of ‘healthism’ and the marketization of health from the 1970s; and the emergence of fitness culture and issues of physical appearance.

In October 2019, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the most successful and famous Swedish football player ever, was honoured with a monument by the Swedish Football Association and the city of Malmo. Born in Malmo in 1981, Ibrahimovic grew up in a migrant area of the city (Rosengard). Growing up, he played football in local teams, and at the age of 19 he was sold by Malmo FF to Ajax for the highest transfer fee ever in Sweden. However, when Ibrahimovic unexpectedly entered as an investor in rivalling Stockholm-based football club Hammarby in November 2019, he challenged local identities: The place is the team, the team is the family, and betrayal of the place and the team is a betrayal against the family. The monument was soon vandalized and taken down, facing an uncertain future. The aim of this article is to understand the different interpretations, eruptions of emotions, and conflicts that the monument of Zlatan Ibrahimovic raised. As a theoretical frame, three disciplinary perspectives will be used: a cultural historical and a historical didactic perspective, with the intention of understanding the motives and signals send and received through public art in the city space area; a second perspective with a focus on the special use of history in sport, where gender and nation form an interpretive framework in this study; and finally, a third ethnological perspective based on 'scaling', where a monument as a social phenomenon can change meaning depending on geographical scale from district to city to nation and a global scale.

Med titeln Knäböj tar Sara Martinssons Augustpris-nominerade essäbok ett fyndigt avstamp i Sven Lindqvists Bänkpress, utgiven 1988. Lindqvists bok är en associativ reflektion om betydelsen av kroppslig styrka som kombineras med berättelsen om hur författaren själv kliver in i källargymmets gemenskap. Sara Martinssons bok har ett liknande upplägg, men mot bänkpressen som emblematisk värdemätare för manlig styrka ställer hon en annan av styrketräningens grundövningar med skivstång: knäböjen. Denna övning är, menar hon, ”det optimala kvinnliga styrkeprovet”, väl lämpad för kroppar med låg tyngdpunkt och hög andel av musklerna på underkroppen.