DATABLEED reads Rebecca Zätterström’s poems from ‘Barren Lands’
In 1934 and 1941, Sweden passed a law authorising the non-consensual sterilisation of persons deemed ‘legally incapable’. This included those with hereditary diseases, those ‘considered unfit to become parents’, and ‘people with other “deviant” behaviours” including Romani people, incarcerated individuals, ‘women who had sought to terminate their pregnancies’; those considered ‘“unworthy” and […] “inferior”’ and ‘mothers with “bad dispositions” (Amy & Rowlands 2018, 197; Ekerwald 2001, 543).
Ekerwald argues that these laws permitted society to ‘brand a person as unworthy to procreate’ which represents ‘one of the worst stigmatisations imaginable’ (2001, 555). And, as Amy and Rowlands emphasize, the policy was approved by all the country’s political parties, with the exception of the Communist Party (2018, 197). From 1935, after the passing of the first law, up until 1975, almost 63,000 people in Sweden were sterilised, of which approximately 4,400 were men and 58,500 were women (Mulinari, Herz and Svensson Chowdhury 2023, 247). As Ekerwald highlights, that equates to ‘more than four sterilisation operations […] carried out every day for forty years’ (2001, 541).
Ekerwald argues that these sterilisation laws were a ‘governmental abuse carried out in the name of the welfare state (2001, 555). They were deeply entangled with the Swedish social democratic politics of the time, particularly in relation to socio-racial ideologies about who was “deserving” of state support (Ekerwald 2001, 544). Maciej Zaremba, a Swedish journalist who wrote articles about the sterilisation scandal in 1997, argued the laws could be understood as either a ‘horrible consequence of a modernisation utopia about the cleaned up Home of the People conscious of all costs, or as a reform where a terrible weapon had been put in the hands of old gossips and other right-thinking persons in the parish’ (cited in Ekerwald, 544)
This is the context of Rebecca Zätterström’s poems, from ‘Barren Lands’, a collection in progress centring on these forced sterilisation laws. The fragmented, multilingual poems, full of ruptures, tears, scars, scabs and wounds, mark the damages these laws inflicted, and the pathologisation of feminine sexuality that underpins them. Using found text from a range of sources, including interviews, government documents, scholarly articles and newspapers, the poems enact shattered narratives of pain, loss and violence. In ‘Stygn: a found poem’, slivers of notation such as ‘has cheap make-up’, ‘unrestrained sex life’ and ‘painted nails’ underscore the way in which shame about women’s sexuality was weaponised so as to deem certain women ‘unfit to procreate’.
The poems are full of cuts, incisions and wounds: the repetition of ‘ripped/rip’ in ‘A Found Poem: Livsberättelse no. 2, Anna 74’, the play on ‘castrate/case/caste/consent’ and ‘scared/scarred’ in ‘Karin (Your words were castrated)’, the cutting of flesh and beating of blood in ‘You exhibit me in the great stony market-place for jesters': A found poem’. Zätterström’s poems dig into the archives of this horrific state-sanctioned eugenic and racist sterilisation programme and lay bare its effects and affects, from non-consensual surgery and stigmatization to humiliation and grief. The line is also a frequent motif, from the numbers and percentages that stitch a thick and overwhelming ribbon through the middle of ‘Stygn: a found poem’ to the fragmented timeline of ‘Rannsaka’. These lines create their own kind of anti-lineage; one which reflects an ancestry turned inside out.
Ekerwald wonders at how legislation ostensibly focused on the ‘well-being of children’ might have the potential to develop into ‘this form of abuse of power on the part of the authorities’ (2001, 555). But as Machin and Bjurstrøm point out, the Far Right has a history of weaponizing children as a part of their political agendas, from creating false links between green politics and declining birth rates (see, for instance, the rhetoric of Victor Orbán, Elon Musk and Nigel Farage), to using the so-called “protection of children” as a smokescreen for anti-immigration agendas. Within our current political context, Zätterström’s poems underscore that, as Ekerwald argues, Sweden’s history of forced sterilisations should be a ‘matter of process that every supporter of the welfare state should comprehend” (2001, 555).
Works Cited
Amy, J. and Rowlands, S. (2018) Legalised non-consensual sterilisation – eugenics put into practice before 1945, and the aftermath. Part 2: Europe, The European Journal of Contraception & Reproductive Health Care, 23:3, 194-200
Ekerwald, H. (2001) 'The Modernist Manifesto of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal: Modernization of Sweden in the Thirties and the Question of Sterilization', International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 14: 3.
Machin, A. and Bjurstrøm, N. (2025) '"Save Our Children": Breaking Down Far-Right Narratives Around Youth', Green European Journal [online] https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/save-our-children-breaking-down-far-right-narratives-around-youth/
Mulinari, P., Herz, M. and Svensson Chowdhury (2023) 'Exploring Swedish 'Family Planning': Reproductive Racism and Reproductive Justice' in Selberg, R., Kolankiewicz, M. and Mulinari, D. (eds.) Struggles for Reproductive Justice in the Era of Anti-Genderism and Religious Fundamentalism, Palgrave Macmillan