Never just a professor

Woman. Motley class background. Political refugee. Professor. A person can never be described in just one way. Diana Mulinari’s personal experiences have moved her to present a new theory on discrimination together with two colleagues.

“You don’t have to be a feminist to do Gender Studies. It’s a political decision. But feminism is the primary theoretical field that your studies will deal with.”

Diana Mulinari has just risen in front of the crowded basement lecture hall in AF-borgen, pushed up her reading glasses onto her forehead and welcomed the new students at the programme for Gender Studies. She talks fast, loudly and with a Latin American Spanish accent:

“Swedish isn’t my first language, but I’ve lived here for over 30 years. So if you think my Swedish is bad it’s because I’m bad at languages and not because I’ve lived in Sweden for a short time”, she tells her future students.

Diana Mulinari has had a hectic summer. She has just finished two books, one with her partner, sociologist Anders Neergard. In the book, they have interviewed women and immigrants who are active in the Sweden Democrats, Sverigedemokraterna. Both of these groups have a position that grows weaker in society as the Sweden Democrats grow stronger, so why are they attracted to them?

“I’m emotionally driven into finding an answer to these questions. As an immigrant I feel threatened by the Sweden Democrats, and as a woman I feel uncomfortable about the fact that there is no gender perspective in the studies that have been done on them,” she says.

With that explanation Diana Mulinari gets on to a concept that permeates much of her research: intersectionality. With two other scholars, Paulina de los Reyes and Irene Molina, she introduced the theory in Sweden and nowadays it is often used to explain how various kinds of discrimination work together. A woman is never just a woman. She also belongs to a class, a certain ethnicity and a sexual orientation. Everything matters to her standing in society. Diana Mulinari laughs when I ask her to describe herself from an international perspective.

“That wasn’t nice, but I’ll try”, she says.

Her class background is motley with a working class mother and a father who climbed the social ladder while still a child. He was the blondest of the children of a servant girl who died young and he was adopted by a “very bourgeois” family. Because of this, Diana Mulinari’s childhood in Buenos Aires held many extremes. On the one hand she was extremely privileged and was able to attend a very good British colonial school. On the other hand she was well aware that not everybody was that privileged. This was why, like many of her generation, she became politically active when she was in high school and chose to abstain from the things that her social class afforded her. Instead of staying in her nice neighbourhood she moved to a working class neighbourhood and joined a movement that opposed the authoritarian regime. The decision was easy.

“Injustice is right in front of you in Buenos Aires, there are loads of street children. It was impossible not to get engaged.”

She points out that she was far from unusual in that respect.

“The predecessors of the military regime were so incredibly moralist. People were very angry about not being able to wear the clothes and the haircuts they wanted. I was part of a collective resistance. But I don’t think we ever believed it would become so violent”, she says.

In 1976, when the military regime was reintroduced to Argentina, 30 000 people “disappeared”, never to return. Most of Diana Mulinari’s fellow students were killed, and she was pursued by the police. In their hunt for her they located her parents’ house and wrecked it. That was when she decided to apply for political asylum in Sweden.

At the age of 22 she came with her daughter to Lund. She remembers the first time with joy. The refugees from Latin America were welcomed with open arms.

“People were active in the Chile committee and the Swedish left knew more about Latin America than we did. Or so they thought.”

At the same time she felt a subtle racism. It was different from the racism of today, which she feels is more aggressive.

“Back then nobody said ‘we don’t want you here, go home’, but you were exotified, everyone assumed you were good at tango and salsa. We were just dagos”, she says.

As a woman Diana Mulinari was met with pity. Most people assumed she had never encountered equality before.

“As a matter of fact we were highly trained feminists through our political activism. The same goes for women who come here today from Palestine, Iran and Iraq”, she says.

In Lund she started to study the things she was interested in, without any real thoughts of what they would lead to. Social Anthropology was layered with the history of religion and eventually she started doing postgraduate studies in Sociology. She fell in love with how the discipline could be used to view and interpret the world, but soon got angry because of the discipline’s lack of understanding for the experiences of women. She found it arrogant. At the same time she moved in circles where other feminist sociologists where appearing, who like her were interested in creating a department fully geared towards Gender Studies.

“In the beginning there wasn’t any real undergraduate of postgraduate studies, the department just offered stray courses. My current workplace is the product of many hours of collective work done by feminist scholars”, she says.

Today Diana Mulinari is both a doctor and a professor, and the pity she was met with during her first time in Sweden has faded. Instead, as a woman, she has been met with other kinds of reactions. For instance because of her having children with three different men. Acquaintances wonder things like “how does that make your children feel?” and “how many children do you really have?”

“Today it isn’t as radical to have a family like that, but it used to be. A man would probably not have been challenged.”

She is still a woman and she still comes from Argentina. But what has happened to her class belonging since she came to Sweden from a stark class society? Diana Mulinari looks out the window and thinks for a moment.

“You could say I’ve been through a class reproduction. I was privileged there and I’m privileged here. It feels very uncomfortable to have to say that.”

Why?

“Because I want privileges to disappear. They lessen your ability to see the world.”

Text: Stina Linde

Photography: Martin Sjöström