televisionismygirlfriend:

shannonsunrise:

When Rooney Mara, star of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, suggested that Lisbeth Salander was not a feminist, Stieg Larsson’s partner knew how to put her down. “Does she know what film she has been in?” asked Eva Gabrielsson, who shared much of Larsson’s life until his death in 2004. “Has she read the books? Has she not had any coaching?”

In case you were in any doubt, the questions were rhetorical. To Gabrielsson, Mara was another ignorant Hollywood star. If she had taken the trouble to understand The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo before playing its goth heroine, she would have realised that Salander’s “entire being represents a resistance, an active resistance to the mechanisms that mean women don’t advance in this world and in worst-case scenarios are abused like she was”.

[…]

Except that Larsson wasn’t a feminist – or not a consistent one. He wrote with real anger about the oppression of women with white skins. When others tried to do the same about the oppression of women with brown skins, he denounced them as racists. My friend and colleague Johan Lundberg, the editor of the Swedish journal Axess, has done what I should have done and read Larsson’s obscure book on honour killings. He waited for the release of the film to give us his findings.

Larsson did indeed break off from writing the Millennium trilogy to intervene in the debate about the “honour killings” of two Kurdish women in Sweden. Far from worrying about the suffering of women, Larsson and his co-author said those who campaigned for the rights of women in immigrant communities wanted “to portray all male immigrants as representatives of a single homogeneous attitude towards women”. They had sexist as well as racist motives. They only talked about honour crime because they wanted to divert attention from how white men raised in the “patriarchal structures of Swedish society” abused and murdered women as a matter of course.

This article (from January 7th in The Observer) highlights one of the main arguments of modern feminism - we see it all the time in our online activist community. This author finds Larsson’s apparently dismissive attitude toward the suffering of immigrant women as racist and sexist because Larsson is presumably fighting against Western feminism’s tendency to paint entire othered religious/cultural groups - ESPECIALLY the Islamic world - as comprehensively abusive and misogynistic. 

This is the crux of so many feminist divides in the modern age. It all starts with “women in the west aren’t oppressed because they aren’t getting stoned every day like Muslim women” and extends to the complaints of this author. I have not read Larsson’s piece on the honor killings yet but I’d very much like to - I find it hard to believe that someone who so actively fought against the sexist trappings of western patriarchy, and the abuse of women that it breeds, would have taken this opportunity to belittle the deaths of WOC. I would hope - and suspect - that he was simply (and passionately) condemning the western attitude of feminist superiority, which paints all of Islam as violent and radical, and allows white feminist voices to drown out the voices of the WOC of whom they speak. I am assuming Larsson believes that the pervasive feminist perspectives on the Islamic world are brewing racism in the sense that we are dehumanizing and vilifying the men of entire nations/cultures/religions just as we use the women of these groups as oppression porn and unfair bases for triumphant comparison and feelings of cultural supremacy. But maybe it’s just not that simple.

What are everyone’s thoughts?

First of all, I’m really glad Mara was called out on her shit. She clearly had absolutely no knowledge of feminism, which would have been fine if she was working on Romantic Comedy Number 2543 but not fine if you are playing a character who has been explicitly called a feminist icon. Sadly, she was probably not coached, at least if I know anything about David Fincher. That interview frankly disgusted me and I’m glad she got her dues.

I honestly would want to know more about the context of Larsson’s own words/actions, few of which are noted, before making a judgment call. Knowing a bit about Scandinavia I can say, unfortunately, that Sweden and other Scandinavian countries have a history of poor attitudes towards Muslims, as well as towards people of color, despite their more progressive attitudes towards (white) women.

So I think if Larsson was being racist/sexist towards these WOC I would sadly not at all be surprised—the place he’s coming from is not exactly a mecca of religious/cultural/ethnic tolerance. But I also think that it would be an excellent and refreshing change of pace if he was actually trying to combat Western imperialist attitudes. And of course, he is an individual who was extremely critical of Swedish government (Swedish government being among the main sources of Islamophobia). I’d love to know more but I’m sort of cynical about it, I guess, given the lack of any Muslims, POC or other underrepresented groups in the novels.

i agree with all of this commentary. i think there is a solid chance larsson was critiquing the western feminist tendency to speak for others and vilify nonwestern communities as oppressors. obviously i’d have to look into it more, but i actually think larsson does at least attempt to factor in POC in his books, especially considering sweden is largely homogeneous, altho far more heterogeneous than other Scandinavian countries, like denmark.  miriam wu’s character, at least in the books, is an asian woman who is queer, a kickboxer, and grossly mistreated by the swedish media and police department.  i cant imagine an author writing a character like this while simultaneously making publicly racist statements.  but obviously id have to look into it more. and naturally, islamophobia has almost become an issue distinct (but obviously not separate from) racism due to its current political salience.  i would just add one more thing, which is that while western people are western people are western people, scandinavian ideas about race and gender are NOT the same as american ones and therefore, while we can and should critique larsson and anybody else writing about these social issues, i would hesitate to take away someone’s feminist identity.