I had to leave class early yesterday, so sadly I missed the toxicity discussion that I was really looking forward to! But it was also fun to see all the different films that people had made.

Chen’s discussion about worries about lead poisoned toys on a domestic level while not caring about/paying attention to the harm done on the workers who produce these toys made think about the recent scandal about the “this is what a feminist looks like” t-shirt that has been produced in sweatshops. While the scandal isn’t about toxicity, it does revolve around racialization and geography – buying the t-shirt might be a means of drawing attention to feminism, but in doing so you reinforce inequalities between different women.

This week’s readings also got me thinking about Nancy Langston’s book “Toxic bodies: hormone disruptors and the legacy of DES” that I read for a course last year. It doesn’t discuss racial matters very much (perhaps at all, I’m not sure), but it does give quite a good historical overview of gendered medicalization and the use of hormones to “deal” with women’s bodies in particular.

Also, unrelated to this week’s readings – over the weekend I remembered a TV series called In the Flesh that connects back to our zombie class. Like the Walking Dead, it features zombies, but it’s more similar to True Blood in terms of humanization of the series’ “monsters”, in that the zombies of the series have been taken in by the government and are given drugs to control their “zombiness” and make them more like humans. It’s just an mini-series, like so many British TV series unfortunately are, but it’s an interesting one.

So this is really not related to zombies at all, but talking about us/them and invasions today, after reading Swedish news this week got me thinking about wolves and also how Sweden is very clearly divided into north and south. Basically, this week a group of men were taken to court in Sweden for hunting wolf illegally (wolf hunting is heavily restricted in Sweden due to the low population number) and there’s been a lot of news coverage about it and “the wolf problem”.

There’s been two news articles in Dagens Nyheter that I found very interesting in relation to today’s discussion in class – the first is about wolf sitings in Stockholm (the capital, which is located in the southern half of Sweden) which is being framed as this sensational and threatening instance, as though this lone wolf somehow is a danger to the population of Stockholm (“us”) whereas the danger it may pose to people living in the North, where “the wolf problem” is actually located, is rarely covered by the major news channels. The second article is an interview with a random man who I assume is a celebrity of some sort (I honestly have no idea who he is) who is for an increased licensing of wolf hunting, because he argues that it’s only a matter of time before the wolves move on from killing the occasional sheep (in the north) to taking a child in the South. Perhaps he’s invoking the threat to the south in order to gain support from the population living there (the vast majority of Sweden’s 9 million) but it also creates an interesting dichotomy between the northeners and southerners.

In both cases, the “us” of the Swedish people who is being threatened by the existence of wolves are the Swedes living in southern Sweden, most of which have never seen a live wolf and most likely have either little to no opinion on wolf hunting or taking a strong anti-hunting stance because of their endangered status and little understanding for what kind of problems farmers in the north might be facing. Wolves are only really noteworthy when they pose a threat to “us”, but as long as they stick to the north, and only bother northeners (“them”), no one really cares all that much. Both the wolves and northeners are othered – and it’s hardly a coincidence that the “wolf problem” is hardly considered much of a problem for southern Swedes when a majority of “wolf land” intersects with “reindeer land” and reindeers are only allowed to be owned by the indigenous population (the Saami).

I’ve always considered Bridget Jones’ Diary (the novel, perhaps not the movie to the same extent) to be quite feminist, at least in the way I read it. It does invoke feminism, only to reject it as something from the past, it to me it does it in a thought-provoking way. My age is probably a contributing factor – I first read the novel in my early teens, and it was quite easy to identify with Bridget and her fears, and then I had to reread it for a course a couple of years ago and I still very much enjoyed it – as well as that I haven’t read that much chick lit, and haven’t grown tired of the genre or seen the reoccurring patterns. Or maybe it is because of what McRobbie calls a normalization of post-feminist anxieties – I am very much entangled with postfeminism in a neoliberal society that values female individualisation, and it’s difficult to disentangle from the fears that Bridget and I share, not matter my feminist values.

While chick lit as a genre is interesting of critique, I’m not sure why Bridget Jones’ Diary in particular is one to receive so much flack for being postfeminist. Is it because it was one of the early, big novels within the genre and has contributed to shaping how these novels look?

(Another interesting thing: when we discussed Bridget Jones’ diary in class, all the women in the course found Bridget’s situation to be very recognizable, whereas the men struggled to understand why we liked the novel, how we could possible consider it to be feminist, and why the novel had been such a big deal in the first place.)