Paper short abstract:

An ethnography of a psychotherapy center for refugees in Sweden that explores how is gender equality tackled in therapy, and what subjectivation processes are mobilized in relation to "women empowerment", in a social context made of the “Othering”, stigmatization, and exclusion of women refugees.

Paper long abstract:

“A lot of our work is about women empowerment”, this was how many of my interlocutors: women psychotherapists, described their work in a psychotherapy center for traumatized refugees in Sweden. Issues related to gender equality and women’s independence were very present in the individual and group therapy sessions, involving women refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and it infused the narratives of many of these women, in relation to the impacts of therapy, recovery, and transformation.

In fact, while refugees have been portrayed all over Europe as a securitarian, economic, and cultural threat (Greussing and Boomgaarden 2017), women refugees in Sweden have been particularly portrayed as a burden and threat to “the gender equality Swedish culture”, considered a hallmark of the Nordic state. They were Othered and constructed as problematic because of their traditionalism, and the idea of an unsurmountable “cultural distance” between “Modern Swedish women” and “Backward refugee women” infused not only popular discourses but political and administrative ones (Mulinari and Lundqvist 2017).

The psychotherapeutic encounter in the center, while focusing on trauma, was also about navigating this “cultural distance”, with an intention to support the women to be liberated, embrace the host country’s codes and values, and fit in. This ethnographic paper focuses on how do women therapists and exiled women “patients” tackle gender equality values in therapy, what subjectivation processes are mobilized, whether new subjectivities of “empowered women” are emerging, and how do these processes articulate with a social and political context made of “Othering” and exclusion.