Place and Gender in the Political Mobilization around Women’s Health Care and Jobs

The austerity politics that would have led to the closing down of one out of three hospital servicing the region of Västernorrland, Sweden, has the last year been met with increasing protests. Though the people living in Northern Sweden for decades have experienced population decrease and the subsequent dismantling and relocation of the services they used to take for granted, the withdrawal of this, the last outpost of the Swedish welfare state, resulted in a strong reaction with a local social movement on the rise. This paper looks at the role of place in this political mobilization by using discourse theory as a means to understand political change, and finds that fantasies around different places serve as an important factor in the possibilities to successfully mobilize people in these protests. Through the historical importance of the region in the (in)famous event of the shooting and killing of five striking workers by the military in 1931, the workers’ struggles of the early 20th century with its political subject; the working class man, is today reformulated into a continuous line of struggle that articulates another political subject; an insurgent identity connected to and placed in the area of Ådalen. This possibility to connect to previous workers’ struggles is now mobilized to defend women’s right to health care, the maternity ward being the first to be threatened by closure, while at the same time the women’s workplaces being lost in the same hospital is ignored. The growing social movement thus both connect to a history of labor struggles in their mobilization and at the same time disconnecting it from the current labor market situation under new public management.