In this article, the Swedish market for magazines considered obscene (by authorities, distributors, retailers, etc.) is analyzed, with a focus on the first half of the twentieth century. Obscene content was combatted with several recurrent strategies by popular movements, the joint daily press, distributors and retailers, in addition to Freedom of the Press cases. However, once the consensus about the problem of pornography had been broken, during which time pornographers found ways to circumvent these strategies, a pornographic market was able to develop. The magazines that were considered obscene had different sub-genres: humorous and satirical (in the 1910s and 1920s), sex education (in the 1930s), nudism (1930s onwards) and pin-up (1940s onwards). All of the magazines in various ways distanced themselves from pornographic or sexual commercialism, but were nonetheless treated as part of it. Later, Sweden became one of the ‘forerunners’ in developing a market for pornography. This article traces the prehistory of this development and elaborates on the circumstances that prevented the market from developing earlier on. The argument is made that the restrictions were more connected to corporatist-related regulations concerning retail and distribution than to legal actions.

This article follows the discussion on female consumers in Swedish advertising journals and handbooks. The aim is to problematise the gendered aspects of Swedish consumer and early advertising history, by studying how the notion of the female consumer intersected with notions of social class, marital status and sexuality. The article also closes in on the persons who were invited to embody the consuming women and what kind of interests they represented. The article concludes that, from the start of the twentieth century, gender and class was prevalent in the advertising literature. The married woman was also from the start seen as the head of the consuming family. Therefore, reaching her through advertising became key for facilitating the relations between producer and consumer. With time, different women's organisations, the weekly press, and new theories of advertising from the US addressing the notion of 'Mrs Consumer' came to influence the Swedish advertising trade press. The result became the favouring of a certain kind of middle class, urban and rational kind of femininity, strongly connected to homemaking and women's roles in purchasing for the family. However, this femininity also paralleled notions of 'the flapper' and the professional woman.

This article demonstrates how Stockholm's reputation as the capital of sex attracted tourists and business alike during the sexual revolution. It follows the rise and decline of the ‘porn street’ Klara norra kyrkogata, and how it was liberally seen and handled by the police as a ‘free zone for pornography’. The article maps porn commerce on this street and in Stockholm city at large shortly before and after the legalization of pornography in 1971. For almost a decade, pornography was part of the accepted economy and could market business in ordinary newspapers. However, all of this changed with increasing resistance and protests against pornography from various groups in the 1970s and some re-regulations of porn in the 1980s. Then porn retailers were evicted, and Klara norra kyrkogata was cleaned up and reconstructed, instead turning into a ‘porn-free zone’ in the late 1980s, in accordance with outspoken political visions.

This article focuses on women’s business positions in Swedish porn publishing from the 1950s to the 1970s, i.e. when pornography was legalized and when sexually explicit magazines made their commercial breakthrough. The research draws on statistical information on women’s entrepreneurial roles in the overall publishing industry, which is then compared with women’s agency in porn publishing. According to the findings, women seem to have had a slightly more central role in pornography than within the mainstream publishing industry. The analysis is also expanded with details about a few key female pornography entrepreneurs, tracing their publications and business strategies connected to the Freedom of the Press legislation. It is argued that women’s presence in pornographic print and in the overall publishing industry were in fact similar, with a high ratio of family businesses. Women’s entrepreneurship in pornography thus followed a more general historical pattern whereby women engaged in small-scale business with relatively low barriers to entry.

Purpose – By studying the marketing of advertising space, this paper aims to study how class, gender and region were portrayed in terms of economic considerations in adverts selling advertising space to potential advertisers. The paper studies how readers were discursively transformed into consumers in this material and how different consumer groups were depicted, divided and framed during Sweden’s early consumer culture. By doing so, the paper highlights the tensions between aiming at a mass audience, on the one hand, and striving to reach more and more specific consumer groups on the other hand.

Design/methodology/approach – Both qualitative and quantitative analyses are made in order to follow the changes of highlighted consumer groups in the ads. Intersectional analysis is used to see how notions of class and gender intersected during the analysed period.

Findings – The sectioning of the press is in the paper stressed as a prerequisite for market segmentation and the economic history of mass media is lifted as essential for understanding it. The gendering and classing of market segments were also based on how common interests were interpreted by political movements and their press forums. For surviving in the long run, however, the paper argues that the political press needed to commercialise their readerships to attract advertisers and survive economically.

Originality/value – The paper concludes that mass marketing and segmentation processes were in many senses parallel in the studied material. Statements of reaching all social classes diminished over time, but notions of the masses were prevalent in both the worker and the women categories. However, how advertisers choose between different media for their advertising campaigns or how they adopted different marketing methods towards different segments are beyond the scope of this paper.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the press’ self-advertising to the advertisers in order to trace early divisions into market segments primarily based on gender and social class.

Design/methodology/approach – Both qualitative and quantitative analysis are made in order to follow the changes of highlighted consumer groups in the ads. Also a qualitative intersectional analysis is made in order to se how notions of class and gender intersected.

Research limitation/implications – This paper takes an overall perspective of market segmentation in relation to the press and tells less about different market segmentation strategies from single businesses point of view. The sectioning of the press is stressed as a prerequisite for market segmentation and the economic history of mass media is lifted as essential for understanding the latter. Therefore the gendering and classing of market segments were also based on how common interests were interpreted by political movements and their press forums. For surviving in the long run, however, the political press needed to commercialize the political identities in order to attract advertisers and survive economically.

In this article, the process leading to decriminalization of pornography in Sweden in 1971 is analyzed. The interplay between the structural institutional level and company behavior is stressed, with an emphasis on business strategies. The article shows that the division between hard-core and soft-core pornographic magazines in Sweden was quite different than the development in the United Kingdom and the United States. It also shows how the business strategies used by hard-core pornographers challenged the obscenity legislation and regulation of national distribution, making them obsolete. Even though there was fierce competition between the pornography companies, producers formed joint alternative distribution channels crucial to the survival of the industry.

The article studies commercial actors and advertisements in the Swedish weekly press in order to trace how the transformed gender roles during the Second World War were handled and negotiated in the commercial sphere. Two key dimensions of consumer society constitute the objects of study: 1) the weekly press’ and advertising industry’s actions and promotion of the role of female consumers during the war; and 2) how commercial advertisements represented female consumers. The weeklies we study, Svensk damtidning, Hemmets Veckotidning and Vecko-revyn reached national readerships and were directed towards households and especially women. The paper concludes that although women were described as essential to national defenseby keeping up home front morale, the war was largely absent in the advertisements. Instead, the latter tended to remind consumers of peacetime affluence and family-based gender ideals. This meant that while many women’s everyday lives changed dramatically as a consequence of national wartime mobilization, their desires were commercially channeled just as they had been in peacetime: toward looking after their appearance, caring for the household and choosing the right consumer goods.

Since the 1990s, a new model for market control organized through tripartite standards regimes (TSR), has expanded globally and affected most market exchanges through standard-setting, accreditation, and certification. This article investigates business-consumer relations under this regime, with a specific focus on the functions of accreditation and certification. In our case study of Sweden, a new picture of consumer protection under late capitalism evolves. Seeing it as a form of neoliberalization, the article uncovers a transition between two regimes of control; from one built on a potential conflict between consumer and business interests, to one based on the assumption that business interests are beneficial for all parties. Although business interest was formulated as pleasing the consumer-or the customer-by both certification firms and the Swedish Accreditation Authority, in practice consumer interest as something worth protecting was made abstract in the era of the TSR.

In line with recent research that regards the Second World War as a “defining moment” rather than a temporary disruption to the development of consumer societies, this paper explores how consumers were imagined in nonbelligerent Sweden. The main empirical source material consists of business-to-business advertisements from newspaper and magazine publishers aimed at potential advertisers. There, publishers portrayed their readers as suitable consumers, and, given that the division of the press constituted the main infrastructure for reaching different consumer groups, this is interpreted as a key to understanding market segmentation processes. The findings show how geographical, demographic, and psychological factors were considered in optimizing advertising influence and reaching classed and gendered target audiences. Although the segmentation process consolidated during the war, focusing on stable, large consumer groups, the imagined consumer also underwent fundamental changes, combating anxiety and despair through dreams of both future and present patriotic consumption.

This article highlights the transfers and practical uses of thecommercial knowledge of window dressing in early twentieth-century Sweden through the analysis of the professional careerand family business of Oscar Lundkvist, Swedish display pioneerand former window dresser in chief of the largest and firstSwedish department store,Nordiska Kompaniet. Building on richsource material including unique written and photographicdocuments from the Lundkvist family, educational material andtrade journals, we show how the innovative and spectacularbecame ordinary and mundane in retail praxis. We argue that theemergence and professionalization of window display broughtwith it the dissemination and trivialization of the same practice.By focusing on not only the most conspicuous aspects andcultural meanings of window displays but also on the materialsand competences involved, we explain how setting up thedisplays became an everyday commercial practice and how it waspositioned between advertising and retail as well as between theartistic and the commercial.

This article analyzes a content-based market position that developed during the mid-1960s, situated in-between the pornographic and the accepted. By studying Swedish men’s magazines and sex films from the time period, the argument is made that these media products profited from both the advantages of pornography, i.e., more or less sexual explicit images, and the advantages of the accepted, i.e., common distribution channels, the possibility of having regular advertising and placards and being sold in ordinary kiosks (for magazines) and shown at ordinary cinemas (for films). For some years, this balancing act between the accepted and the pornographic was maintained, and the genre became enormously popular. From the mid-1970s onward, however, the division between pornography and accepted media became more clear-cut. The critique against pornography and the in-between media products intensified, and the uncertainty about pornography’s future role after the legalization in 1971 was followed by new ways of separating the pornographic from the accepted. While there were some differences between the two media formats, such as their degree of internationalization and the importance of advertising, they shared much in terms of content formulas and used the same female actors and models. It is argued that both formal regulations and the informal norms of gender and sexuality at the time and their change throughout the 1970s are key for understanding the development and the disappearance of the in-between genre.

Swedish cinema became recognized for daring representations of sexuality with such films as One Summer of Happiness (1951), The Silence (1963), I am Curious (Yellow) (1967) and a wave of sex films in the late 1960s and 1970s. The association between Swedish film and sexuality shows up frequently in popular culture-from Taxi Driver to Mad Men, references to dirty Swedish movies abound. Yet the connection has attracted little critical attention. In this collection of new essays, Swedish and American scholars go beyond popular misconceptions to explore the origins, influences and reception of sexuality in Swedish cinema during the "sexual revolution" on both sides of the Atlantic. A broad range of topics are covered, from analyses of key films, to a behind-the-scenes study of the Swedish Film Institute, which played a significant role in opposing Swedish film censorship.

Könspolitiska nyckeltexter är en mångfacetterad introduktion till svensk genushistoria. Genom ett pärlband av originaltexter, från C.J.L. Almqvists roman Det går an 1839 till #metoouppropen 2017, ges en fördjupad förståelse av hur kön har diskuterats, politiserats och iscensatts under nästan 200 år. Varje nyckeltext är kommenterad och analyserad av en forskare.

Arbete, sexuella rättigheter, familjeliv, diskriminering, våld, försörjning, värnplikt, rösträtt, preventivmedel, skönhet och barnomsorg är några exempel på de många frågor som behandlas i boken, nu i omarbetad och utvidgad upplaga.

This article constitutes a first attempt to systematically map the presence of women in the greatly changing Swedish advertising industry since 1930. The overarching aim of the study is to analyse how the gendered divisions of labour and business changed in relation to both business structure and the overall labour market in Sweden. While we conclude that women constituted around 40–50% of the workforce over time, we see an increase in the shares of women in higher positions and in women who were self-employed and managers. This upturn, however, stabilised during the 1990s. We argue that the changes in gendered divisions of labour and business coincided with a fast-changing business structure. First, the old cartel broke down in the mid-1960s. Then, the number of firms increased quickly during the 1970s and 1980s, and the market share for the largest firms declined. This, in turn, meant new business opportunities for women at the same time as their overall labour market participation increased. The article stresses the importance of both acknowledging women’s presence in the industry development as well as the structures constituting gender divisions.

Within sexual geographies, sexual struggles over urban public spaces are frequently explored. Less common is research on sexual struggles within sexually shared spaces and gay spaces. The aim of the article is to examine discursive struggles of meanings of gay male identity enacted in discussions of commodification/capitalism, disclosure, and space in Swedish gay press during 1969-1986. We trace the ambivalent feelings or the emergence of a new gay male norm situated between commercialism and non-commercialism within the Swedish gay press back to the 1970s. In the article we show how a monosexualization process was taking place in both the Swedish gay press as well as within sexual spaces. We explore rhetorical struggles between two competing discursive meanings of (ideal homonormative) male homosexuality, gay culture, and space: one wider (inclusive) and one narrower (exclusive).