ABSTRACT
Introducing the scope of the study, this chapter provides an overview of the major questions as well as the contents of subsequent chapters. To begin with, the chapter presents the overall investigatory focus: the paradoxical standing of the “masculine” modern woman in Swedish popular media in the 1920s as highly fashionable and at the same time a source of cultural anxiety. Though previous research has studied discourses on female masculinity in the 1920s in a range of other national contexts, this volume argues that the Swedish case adds new perspectives, as this was a country that was defined at the dawn of the 1920s neither by the horrors of the recent war nor an established urban, consumer culture. Considering how a rising modern visual culture in Sweden on the one hand tended to place young women at the center, while at the same time critiqued them for their public displays of (masculine) agency, subsequent chapters examine discourses on the “masculine” modern woman across several themes—film, fashion, sports, automobility, medicine and literature. In examining these materials, the study engages with new historical and theoretical work in the context of queer critical history as well as feminist and cultural studies.
