Adriana Margareta Dancus

Maria Karlsson

Mats Hyvönen

In this open access book, seventeen scholars discuss how contemporary Scandinavian art and media have become important arenas to articulate and stage various forms of vulnerability in the Scandinavian welfare states. How do discourses of privilege and vulnerability coexist and interact in Scandinavia? How do the Scandinavian countries respond to vulnerability given increased migration? How is vulnerability distributed in terms of margin and centre, normality and deviance? And how can vulnerability be used to move audiences towards each other and accomplish change? We address these questions in an interdisciplinary study that brings examples from celebrated and provocative fiction and documentary films, TV-series, reality TV, art installations, design, literature, graphic art, radio podcasts and campaigns on social media. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Vulnerability in Scandinavian Art and Culture

In this open access book, seventeen scholars discuss how contemporary Scandinavian art and media have become important arenas to articulate and stage various forms of vulnerability in the Scandinavian welfare states. How do discourses of privilege and vulnerability coexist and interact in Scandinavia? How do the Scandinavian countries respond to vulnerability given increased migration? How is vulnerability distributed in terms of margin and centre, normality and deviance? And how can vulnerability be used to move audiences towards each other and accomplish change? We address these questions in an interdisciplinary study that brings examples from celebrated and provocative fiction and documentary films, TV-series, reality TV, art installations, design, literature, graphic art, radio podcasts and campaigns on social media.

This book explores the diversity of perspectives afforded by the emerging body of Scandinavian films produced by women. The author focuses on women filmmakers' use of their own vulnerability in representing Scandinavian experiences with globally relevant contemporary issues such as race, gender, mental illness, bullying, and the trauma of migration, and highlights the frictions between the positive and negative manifestations of such vulnerability. Though Scandinavia is reputed for its ambitious and innovative film tradition, film scholarship has largely ignored women's bold contributions to the canon. Exposing Vulnerability is a cultural and socio-political analysis of contemporary film by Scandinavian women as they use their lives and work to reconfigure the cinematic, the political, and the ethical.

Self-Mediation in Scandinavian Films by Women

Exposing Vulnerability

In the 2010s, Scandinavia has strengthened its reputation as an ambitious and innovative film region. Established Scandinavian male directors like Lars von Trier and Aki Kaurismäki have continued to generate a lot of public and scholarly interest for their willingness to push aesthetical, political and ethical borders. Exposing Vulnerability calls attention to the increasing number of Scandinavian films in which women directors film themselves and their close ones in order to take up the most pressing contemporary problems such as mental illnesses, bullying, the traumas of migration and racism. The book investigates the aesthetics, politics and ethics of these films.

Adriana Margareta Dancus

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