Migrant mothers: work, nation and racialisation in Swedish official discourses 1970–2000

Abstract

ABSTRACT Images of migrant mothers have been a powerful marker for otherness in discourses of gender, migration and racialisation in Sweden. These women are often described as a problematic group in official discourses on labour-market policy, social welfare and gender equality. Taking as its point of departure the belief that knowledge production constitutes a central arena for deploying relations of power, the purpose of this article is to explore how migrant women’s experiences of motherhood have been represented in the Swedish Government Official Reports (SOU). What conditions of (im)possibility for motherhood, everyday life and integration into Swedish society are expressed in these government reports? How is the position of migrant mothers related to working conditions, intergenerational transmissions and reproduction dilemmas? The article focuses on the years between 1970 and 2000, a period that was characterised by profound transformations in Swedish society expressed not only in changing migration regulations and new gendered divisions of labour but also in the emergence of racialised patterns of inequality in housing, the labour market and access to social welfare. In so doing, the article contributes from the perspective of economic history to contemporary debates on the nexus between migration and racialisation in postcolonial societies.