Amina Kakabaveh. Credit: Anders Henrikson from Flickr.
On the 22nd of June this year, politician Amineh Kakabaveh wrote an article in one of Sweden's major daily newspapers, Expressen, on the worsening situation for women in Sweden’s poor suburbs. As a representative for the socialist leftist party Vänsterpartiet in the Swedish parliament, and a resident of one of Stockholm’s ethnically diverse, working class suburbs, she is well informed about the situation. Kakabaveh described in her own words how Muslim men increasingly tell women and girls how to appear and behave, directly or indirectly, which prevents women and girls from moving freely. She was only one of many women telling the story of increased oppression and social control of women in the suburb and of the need for direct feminist action on the matter, asking for involvement from the government.
The most debated response to Kakabveh’s outcry came a week later, in the form of an article from three high-ranking politicians within Vänsterpartiet. The authors refer to Kakabaveh’s stories of oppression as “rumour spreading”. They claim that it is through the class divide and unequal distribution of wealth that these reactionary fundamentalist tendencies flourish, and that by singling out a single religious group as oppressive, we encourage those tendencies. The argument goes: we need to bring about economic equality in society as a whole, and prioritise the working poor of the suburbs, and then gender equality will be accomplished automatically, without direct action. The story is well known to women within the left – after the revolution, we will all be equals. So stop nagging about feminism in the meantime. For the authors, like many on the left, feminism and gender parity is a secondary concern to class struggle.
