Gendered subjectivity in Sweden 1959-1993: Psychological discourses of gendered subjectivity in relaton to history, materiality, political appeals and psychological truth-regimes. What about 2007?

To demonstrate the psychological importance of social changes in behavioural practice, three interview studies were carried out in Sweden, each in the decade of 1970, 1980 and 1990. All subjects were university students, as were te subjects in a study performed 1959 which served as an "anchor study".

The results were analysed using the following three perspectives:(1)Hegemonic social appeals regarding gender and subjectivity, (2)Lived experiences regarding conditions of upbringing as well as personal history, and (3)Local context such as study area, and how this related to the preferred position of parental identification.

The women´s movement in the 1970s contested the hegemonic social appeals, which were the cultural social context of the 1959 study, both in relation to the dominant political appeals in society as well as in relation to the dominant psy-complex of the time and place.The psy-complex of the 1970s still positioned young adults according to the same normative psychological truth-regime which was dominant in 1959, i.e. "Become like your parent of the same sex".

In the 1970s the women students contested this position call of parental identification and a lot of the women took up the position of identification with their father, while other women refused the parental identification call altogether. In the 1980s study a good deal of the young men took up the position of identification with their mother, while in the 1990s study of both young women and young men there was again a division according to sex, as in 1959; most young women took up the position of identification with their mother and most of the young men took up the position of identification with their father.

The students interviewed in the 1990s were born in the 1970s, and their parents were born in the 1940s, both generations being parts of the gender revolution in Swedish society during the period 1960-1990.During most of this period the Swedish government was run by the Social Democratic party, which advocated gender equality. What will the gender effects be of the political changes in September 2006, which brought an alliance of Conservative and Liberal parties to power?