THE REVOLUTION
WILL NOT BE ETHNOFIED!

In Sweden we have a tendency to ethnify terms like immigrant ie we give them an ethnic value. This comes to clarity when one analyses the use of the term immigrant in the Swedish language. For instance when one uses words such as "immigrantlanguage", "immigrantculture" and "immigrantpolitics" one can easily be mislead to believe that all immigrants in the Swedish context share the same language, cultural expressions and political preferences. At the same time, more and more children born in Sweden are calling themselves immigrants and are viewed as immigrants. Some mean that this is a choice, but to me, this is a cohersed role that some are given in society. As feminists wondered if the female sex said anything about a womans personality, opportunity to accomplish success in education and employment and about her legal and personal rights, I wonder what impact the word immigrant has on peoples lifespace and opportunities in the Swedish society.   Feminist researchers understood that womens rights- or lack there of, where influenced by how society viewed women as "social beings". They analysed the roles given to women in different societies to understand how their position where affected by powerstructures, cohersion and submission. They realised the power of using an analytical category such as gender to understand the relations between man and woman to explain it was not only about biology but about everything in society; the general ideas of manly and womanly behaviour that fills places, situations, politics and so forth. Some feminist researcher believed that one could understand the relationship between gender and the sexes through dividing it into two different terms. The first one they named the genderrole - where a person participates or not in a genderbehaviour which is the current norm in that specific context. The other was named the genderidentity- where the individual itself defins its on genderidentity. I believe that this way of thinking is fruitful for a new understanding of ethnic identity in our modern world and to understand the term immigrant in the Swedish setting. To make this transaction we need a new tool and hereby I propose a new analytical category which I have named Etnus.  

Cecilia Gärding had a bachelor degree in Ethnology before she started to study political science. She later gained a masters degree in political theory at Stockholm University. During the later years of her studies she worked as a languagerevisor and assistant for the Swedish government; ie for Masoud Kamali. After her studies she was headhunted to work as a political expert for the Department of Justice in Sweden for the committé of Integration 2005:09 in the year of 2006.   She views this book as an opportunity to join together her insights concerning the formation of identity from ethnological, political and feminist theory. Her aim is to contribute with theorydevelopment from a crossscientific perspective. This book is interesting for her also from a personal perspective. Cecilia is swedish and southafrican and is therefore viewed in the eyes of the Swedish state as a person categorised as a "second generation immigrant" or "person with a foreign background".