The author Ulla Bjerne and the Politics of Female Embodied Experience

A new article about the authorship of Ulla Bjerne (1890–1969), written by associate professor in literature Boel Hackman at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, has been published in NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research.

Isaac Grünewald: Författarinnan Ulla Bjerne 1916. Moderna Museet.

In her essay “'I Have Had Myself as Experimental Object': Ulla Bjerne and the Politics of Female Embodied Experience", in NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, Boel Hackman writes that Ulla Bjerne, spoke as a woman and an outsider, and in order to claim the authority to do that, she performed a new type of woman throughout her life and testified to the experience of that in her writings. Hackman concludes that Bjerne challenged "the false claims to the universalism and transcendence of male subjectivity, and hence the literary values based on them".

Hackman writes the article to recover her Bjernes work and restore it to the gendered contributions of the Swedish twentieth-century literature. Doing so, Hackman also shows the general importance of Bjernes authorship. The analysis in the article revolves around the significance of the body to literary representation and reception.

Read the full article

Read more about Boel Hackman's research