Intimacy, shared experiences and evening out the power relations between researcher and the participants play an important role in feminist methodology. However, as highlighted in previous research on studying 'up', such methods might not be appropriate when studying privileged groups. Therefore, studying privileged women challenges fundamental assumptions in feminist methodology. When researching privileged women, the assumption that the researcher is almost always in a superior position within the research process becomes more complicated. The article seeks to contribute to the feminist methodological literature on how to study privileged groups by exploring how class, gender and whiteness are produced in three fieldwork situations with women who hold privileges in a postcolonial and capitalist landscape. Drawing on interviews and participant observations with white Swedish migrant women, the article argues that researchers need to turn the problems, fears and feelings of being uncomfortable into important data, in order to study privileged groups of women.
Notions of gender equality are strongly linked to the Swedish selfimage. This article explores returning Swedish migrant women's negotiations of heterosexual gender equality ideals based on their experiences of being housewives to middle-and upper-class men with work contracts abroad. From fieldwork conducted within two networks for returning Swedes, the article provides an analysis of the ways in which the women talk about work, gender equality, and domestic workers. The analysis of the women's accounts of gender relations shows that different ways of doing femininity are central in their narratives. By using the concepts "emphasized femininity" and "gender-equal femininity" the article highlights the different forms of femininity that can be traced in the women's narratives. Drawing from the empirical examples, it is shown that the women are troubled by Swedish gender equality ideals and express a feeling of not "fitting in" after returning to Sweden. I suggest that the women's articulations of not "fitting in" to (imagined) gender-equal Sweden tend to downplay the fact that they still have advantages that assist with "fitting in" from social positions such as class, whiteness, and (hetero)sexuality: positions which may create space for negotiating social norms in Sweden.
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