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Single Parents in Swedish Twenty-First Century Media

Author(s): Helena Wahlström Henriksson, Disa Bergnehr

Thursday 15  |   9:40-10:00

Room: TP45

Session: Parenting in the Nordic countries

Although single parenthood is a highly feminized phenomenon, fathers as well as mothers are single parents. Therefore, it is important to investigate how “media images and representations intertwine with political and social ideologies” (Gallagher 2014, 27) to convey gendered messages about single parents. Drawing on findings from an interdisciplinary cultural studies project on single parents in Swedish media, this presentation explores representations of single mothers and fathers in three sets of materials: newspaper articles, fictional cinematic film and television, and literature (fiction and life writing). The analysis focuses on how these representations speak to the contemporary political and ideological context of their time of production. Single parenthood is “normalized” rather than socially or morally stigmatized in Sweden, and family policy has promoted fathers as (potential) primary parents since the 1970s, while regarding the single mother as “any other parent” and as “any other taxpayer” based on the high proportion of mothers in paid employment. Our study demonstrates that the single parent is a “split figure” (Hall 2019) in the Swedish media landscape, for while newspapers and TV series represent them as competent primary parents who manage well to combine work and family life, in Swedish drama they are primarily tragic figures marked by disqualification as a parent, which raises questions about their ostensible non-stigmatization. In fictional literature, meanwhile, the single father demonstrates parental commitment and ability but also embodies a fear of lost or unrecognized parental legitimacy, whereas single mothers are represented – often in auto/biographical narratives written by their grown children – in a range of ways, from failures to struggling survivors. It would seem, then, that while newspaper and TV representations discursively align themselves with gender-equality oriented national family policy in portraying the single parent as accomplished, and as managing the work-(family) life balance according to the ideal that every parent is an “earner-and-carer,” films and literature offer counter discourses in their subjective explorations of single parenthood as fraught, failed, or threatened.