In 2018, the compulsory military service will be reinstated in Sweden and will, for the first time, be comprised of both men and women. The Swedish Armed Forces are looking to raise their diversity and wants to reflect the population of the Swedish society and are therefore working actively with their marketing to reach groups that have previously been excluded. The purpose of this thesis is to examine what type of image of Sweden the Swedish Armed Forces are (re)producing through their marketing and how it is used to try and interpellate new, poten-tial recruits. This will be done by examining four advertisement campaigns as well as comments retrieved from the Swedish Armed Forces social media accounts. The analysis will be conducted through a semiotic image analysis and a discourse analysis inspired by Laclau and Mouffe. The essay takes its theoretic starting point in a feminist critique against militarism and highlights the issues of using women and/or LGBTQ-people in the armed forces as symbolic figures of modernity and democracy. The study’s result shows that inclusion becomes a way for the armed forces to improve their own image and elude scrutiny regarding their own problematic structures by positioning themselves as an agency of good. This means that, by the inclusion of marginalized groups, there is as risk of legitimizing the Swedish Armed Forces existence, while still maintaining the problems that these groups are subjected to.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:umu-153426 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Josefsson, Malin |
| Publisher | Umeå universitet, Umeå centrum för genusstudier (UCGS) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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