A Nordic Love Story
The Welfare State in Our Hearts
Keywords:
welfare love, welfare state, emotionality, attachment, Lena Andersson, Frelle PetersenAbstract
In this article, my overall aim is to contribute to welfare state research within the humanities by redescribing the so-called “Nordic model” not merely as a political-institutional model, specifying the structure and services of the state, but as an affective model too, specifying the subject’s emotional attachment to and perception of it. I identify and discuss what I take to be a dominant experience of the Scandinavian welfare states: the sense that the state is good, protective, and thus worth cherishing. My term for this affective relationship between welfare state and subject is “welfare love”. Crucial to the configuration of this affective Nordic model is, I suggest, the social fact that in the collective imagination the welfare state operates as a parental figure. In the latter part of the article, I turn to two contemporary interpretations of welfare love and the relationship between the Scandinavian welfare state and the family: the Swedish author Lena Andersson’s novel Sveas søn and Danish filmmaker Frelle Petersen’s Hjem kære hjem.
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