The Swedish Pastoral: Troubled by Trolls

The appearance of trolls in the film draws on a specifically Swedish history of mythological others and their treatment. During the medieval period when Sweden was christianized, trolls and belief in trolls signalled reluctance or resistance to abandon pagan practice; moreover, trolls were often associated with Finland, thought for a long time to be a place of heathen beliefs and wizardry. Parts of Finland were subsumed into the Swedish state under the banner of christianization (e.g. during the Second Swedish Crusade in the thirteenth century). Trolls have also been associated with supernatural or demonic activity in Sweden’s far north. Höglund also draws our attention to the conflation of trolls and Sámi in terms for Sámi rituals (“trollmesser,” or “troll-Masses”) and belief in historic miscegenation through the moniker “halvtroll,” or “half-troll,” for a mixed Sámi/Swedish person.¹⁴ Further, Sámi in Swedish-claimed Sápmi were the targets of conversion by Lutheran missionaries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Trolls thus have a history as subversives and bogeymen operating on the fringes of mainstream Christianity.

This premodern Sweden, in which a central, state-sponsored Christianity is troubled by trolls at its borders, is updated in Border to the contemporary world. Sweden is secular and its power is enacted through its welfare state, its chief instrument of pastoral care, concerned with the wellbeing of its citizens. We see this, for instance, in the exemplary concern of the state prosecutor with tracking down the child sex trafficking ring and bringing the perpetrators to justice. As the film indicates through its references to troll folklore, however, the welfare state—like the medieval church—has a dark history in the way it has dealt with those on or beyond its borders. The lives of Vore and Tina, respectively, represent two modes that the Swedish welfare state has historically employed to deal with outsiders: exclusion from the community through modes of fear or disgust, and (forced) assimilation into it.

Vore’s awareness of his troll biology and heritage lead him to behave in ways that invoke revulsion or angst in mainstream Swedish society, and thus require him to keep a certain distance from it. We see this early in the scene on the ferry, when Vore serves himself from a buffet by tipping the whole tray of smoked salmon onto his plate and eating noisily with his fingers, eliciting censure from a fellow passenger and provoking disgust from the viewer. We learn that Vore’s lifestyle is itinerant and that he has no fixed address, although he has links to Finland. He seems to have no friends. When, after the strip search, Tina asks him who he is, he answers, “What can I say? I travel. I stay in a place for a short while. And then I move on.” Vore’s lack of an address or paid work invokes the discourse around tattare in the middle decades of the twentieth century in Sweden. Tattare is analogous to the British “tinker,” “vagabond,” or “gypsy,” and could be both a social and racial descriptor of someone considered outside the norms of Swedish society.¹⁵ Tattare were most often associated with Roma ethnicities, but occasionally conflated with Lapps from the north or Finns from the east—but, importantly, the term was also used describe people with no fixed abode, intermittent employment, and various problems associated with low income (poor health, alcohol dependency, etc.): the term has thus both racial and social applications.

While Vore’s troll-ness is obvious and generates reactions in those he meets (varying from the confusion of the border guard who strip searches him, to the censure of the buffet customer, to the politely disguised fear of Tina’s neighbours), Tina’s surgery and adoption have allowed her to become assimilated into Swedish society. She has a Swedish name and she is trusted both professionally by colleagues and by her Swedish neighbours. It is an ironic commentary on the success of her assimilation that her work is in law enforcement—the policing of the borders that keep the community safe from outside influences.

Swedish state policy has a history of assimilating those considered to be problematic, and has used both persuasion and force in order to do so. As the Swedish welfare state grew rapidly through the twentieth century, intellectuals hotly debated assimilating or eradicating “unhealthy” parts of the population that were considered unable or unwilling to contribute to Swedish society. Discussions around eugenics concentrated on stemming the reproductive potential of tattare, and from the 1940s, sterilizations were regularly performed on those deemed “feeble-minded” or unhealthy (mostly women), including those unable to consent to the procedure. The fuzzy border between social outsider status and racialized/genetic outsider status is seen in the sterilization policy introduced in 1935, which laid out the conditions for sterilization on social or genetic grounds and demonstrated the way in which limiting reproduction—by force if necessary—was to be a system of reducing the perceived influence of both ethnic and cultural outsiders.¹⁶ The sterilization movement drew adherents from progressive social reformers (even including the famous women’s rights activist Elise Ottesen-Jensen in the 1930s) and genetic scientists alike.

The processes of demonization and assimilation also played out in Sweden’s northern borderlands, the site of the country’s modern colonial expansion: the region known as Sápmi that spans what is currently Norway, Finland, and parts of Russia, in addition to Sweden. Indigenous Sámi people who live in the region migrate with their reindeer or live off fishing on their coasts, practices that have come increasingly into conflict with Swedish industrialization, in particular in the development of forestry and the reconfiguration of waterways to provide hydrological power for the urbanizing south of the country.¹⁷ Like many similar initiatives in the colonial world—including residential schools in Canada and the United States and forced adoption in Australia—the Swedish welfare state forced assimilation by giving Sámi children Swedish names and insisting on Swedish language and customs.

Social, medical, and cultural interventions were all ways of dealing with the “problems” of those marked as outsiders, whether social outcast, ethnic outsider, or colonial other. Höglund notes that the colonial expansion of the Scandinavian nations in Sápmi has only recently—since the turn of the millennium—become a part of mainstream historical understanding; as he puts it, “the Nordic nations have rarely been perceived as having anything to do with colonialism.”¹⁸ The alignment of Tina and Vore with historically undesirable ethnic and social categories highlights a postcolonial revision of the myths of Swedish nation-building, producing a new critique of the Swedish welfare state in the twentieth century that we read as anti-pastoral.

“There’s No Flaw in You”: Transgender and Intersex Resonance in Border

The characters of Tina and Vore further extend the film’s critique of the welfare state’s execution of care by invoking transgender and intersex experiences alongside those of tattare and Indigenous people. The trans resonance comes about, first, through the appearance of Vore; the dialogue between Tina and her male colleague after the latter performs a strip search on Vore is worth repeating in full here: “Nothing?” she asks when he returns from the back room. “Nothing that’s any of our business anyway,” he replies, standing under the harsh fluorescent lighting that appears throughout the film’s many other institutional spaces (police station, hospital, and even Tina’s own kitchen). “You should have been the one doing it, not me. To put it in scientific terms, she…he…she has a vagina, not a penis. And it was rather embarrassing.” We recognize trans resonance here not in the supposed “mismatch” between gender presentation and sex characteristics, but rather in terms of “border control”: the state’s investment in policing the borders between male and female, just as it (literally) polices the geographical border. And indeed, border security is fraught for trans people the world over, thanks to this state investment.¹⁹ More specifically, the way in which Tina’s colleague settles on female pronouns for Vore despite his overtly male presentation echoes the ways in which current transphobic discourse takes biological sex as one’s “true nature”²⁰—not to mention the fact that it invokes that old chestnut about trans people as deceptive. All of which Tina’s colleague softens with a gesture of liberalism: “Nothing that’s any of our business, anyway.”

We read this encounter as an allegory for the Swedish’s welfare state’s treatment of transgender people—especially considering that troll mythology has historically focused on the general aesthetic otherness of trolls, rather than details of sex or gender. That is to say, in addition to contributing to the (re)conceptualization of Sweden as a settler-colonial society, the film also uses the updated figure of the troll to critique Sweden’s historic enforcement of sex and gender normativity. While the country likes to boast of its status as the first in the world to allow transgender people to change their legal gender (in 1972), that “permissiveness” has a darker side. First, until 2013, one could only change one’s legal gender after so-called “sex reassignment surgery.” No wonder, then, that Tina’s colleague cannot conceive of Vore as male; for 41 years, the state edict was that one’s documents and one’s body must “match.” Further, transgender individuals seeking such surgery were required to undergo sterilization during that period—an injustice for which many are currently seeking compensation.²¹ Like forcing Sámi children to speak Swedish, requirements around medical surgery and forced sterilization for transgender people are institutional mechanisms of normalization undertaken in the guise of benevolent care. But perhaps most interestingly, such gestures of “care” nonetheless demonstrate the anxiety of those in charge. That is, enforced sterilization of transgender people seems to suggest not (just) fears about the ultimate malleability of human binary systems of sex and embodiment, but also fear of “unnatural”—and yet perfectly biological—things happening with reproduction. To be even more specific, such sterilization requirements seem aimed at preventing scenarios in which, say, men could give birth—which is the very phenomenon that Border later dramatizes with Vore.

In contrast, when it comes to intersex people, we are not aware of any uniquely problematic history on the part of the Swedish welfare state. However, it is worth noting that Sweden does not currently prohibit “medically unnecessary sex normalizing treatment or surgery on intersex minors,” according to an OECD report.²² (As of 2019, Sweden ranks at 0/100 on this measure, as compared to a 24/100 for all OECD member countries—100 being the maximum ideal for “LGBTI inclusivity.”) And in fact, Border seems to make its strongest statement against institutional intervention through its resonance with intersex issues. First, when Vore mourns his and Tina’s “cut off, discarded, poor little tail[s],” we hear echoes of the fact that “unnecessary medical interventions”—from gonad removal to clitorectomies—“are a core part of the experience of many intersex people,” according to scholar Chris Breu. As he continues, “Many of them undergo [these] surgeries … during infancy or early childhood”—recall Vore’s use of the adjective “little”—“where there is no realistic ability for the intersex person to consent to the procedure. [O]ften [this approach] produces … lasting trauma.”²³ We read such trauma in the scene where Tina drops off her pregnant, laboring neighbor and her partner at the hospital. Tina accompanies them but then suddenly pauses outside the automatic glass doors to the building, jerking suddenly backwards as they begin to close. Staring into the hospital, she begins to breathe shakily. Sharply poignant music plays as the camera zooms in and then cuts to an extreme close-up of her trembling, tearful face. Importantly, this night time scene is framed such that Tina’s reflection is captured in the glass doors, making it appear as if she is simultaneously inside and outside of the building—which is perhaps exactly where she is, emotionally speaking.

Compounding the trauma of unnecessary medical intervention for intersex people is the “legacy of isolation, secrecy, and shame” that often surrounds it.²⁴ As Breu reports of his own childhood experience, “What I needed was knowledge of what had happened to my body and why. I also needed the ability to talk about what I had experienced, not only in private settings…but also in a public forum.”²⁵ These points certainly hold true for Tina, whose elderly father lies about the origins of her scar, as well as her adopted status, even after she has learned the truth from Vore. In the scene just preceding the one discussed above, she inquires about the scar, only to have her father tell her she fell on a rock. A personal passage from scholar Hil Malatino’s Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience, released a year after Border, bears striking resemblance to that filmic sequence:

a child is born in a small-town hospital … They have no idea how the medical professionals responded to their birth or whether they appeared of indeterminate sex at the moment of birth. Their parents both deny having any knowledge of an intersex condition before their teenage years. They know that there is a mysterious scar on their lower belly, just above where the pubic hair begins to grow; their parents say it is from a hernia operation they underwent at the age of three. This same scar is reopened at the age of sixteen, when they have their gonads removed from their abdomen. They are told that this is necessary.²⁶

When Tina asks her father if she was hospitalized, musing that it was strange that she could not remember this incident, he responds, “You were three. How could you remember?” But as we see in the proceeding scene, the trauma of the incident nonetheless remains, as does the fresh trauma of knowing definitively that her father is lying to her face. Perhaps not coincidentally, this familial discussion also takes place in an institutional setting and site of state-funded pastoral care: the father’s nursing home.

In contrast to the institutional status quo, the character of Vore parallels contemporary intersex activists in his rejection of isolation, secrecy, and shame. “There’s no flaw in you,” he tells Tina after she confesses her lifelong belief that she is an “ugly, strange human with a chromosome flaw.” This scene, like many of those in the film set outside, features only diegetic sound—in this case, running water, rustling leaves, and murmuring birds—which serves to underscore Vore’s suggestion that Tina is not “unnatural.” He even goes so far as to argue that, “If you’re different than others, it’s because you’re better than them”—a reframing that reminds us of how intersex activists have begun to use terminology such as, “intersex people are born with physical or biological sex characteristics … that are more diverse than stereotypical definitions for male or female bodies,”²⁷ in contrast to the predominating, pathologizing institutional phrase, “disorders of sex development.”

Of course, doctors who perform intersex interventions believe themselves to be “doing the right thing.” Similarly, when Tina’s father finally confesses that he and his wife adopted her when he was working at St. Jörgen’s, a psychiatric hospital where her parents and many trolls were imprisoned and died, he seems to deflect responsibility by insisting on the ethos of care: “all we wanted was a little girl to care for. … I was just the caretaker. But I offered to care for you.” It is here that the welfare state gains its unimpeachable emotional sway. As Malatino argues, “medical practitioners able to green-light gender reassignment technologies” are regularly characterized “as saviors, beings capable of bestowing life to people in dire existential circumstances, often shaped by grappling with suicide, poverty, social disenfranchisement, and significant quotidian violence.”²⁸ And yet such life-bestowing care is intimately intertwined with death and destruction; we learn not only that Tina was stripped of her original name, Reva, but that her parents and other trolls are buried under scattered boulders behind the hospital—echoing the recent, horrifying discovery by the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation of the remains of 215 Indigenous children, “‘Some … as young as three years old,’” buried in unmarked graves at a former residential school run by the catholic church in what is currently British Columbia, Canada.²⁹

Interestingly, given the focus of this special journal issue, Malatino understands that supposedly benevolent, yet ultimately violent, medical gaze in ecological terms. They describe a doctor who insisted that,

given the relative rarity of my condition, it was important that I allowed other physicians access to both my case history and, well, my body. He explained that today the goal was to get “the lay of the land”—a metaphor that I found really poorly chosen. I wasn’t a territory to be discovered and colonized. I wasn’t the mute terrain on which some doctor-explorer got to adventure alongside his brothers-in-arms. Or was I? Years later, I read Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, the first chapter of which is entitled “The Lay of the Land.” In it, she writes, “all too often, Enlightenment metaphysics presented knowledge as a relation of power between two gendered spaces, articulated by a journey and a technology of conversion: the male penetration and exposure of a veiled, female interior; and the aggressive conversion of its “secrets” into a visible, male science of the surface.³⁰

Malatino doesn’t mention it, but a generative work in ecocriticism/ecofeminism is, likewise, titled The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters; Annette Kolodny’s 1975 book explains how dualities such as Indigenous/nature/female versus European/civilization/male shaped and justified processes of settler colonialism. Here we can see again how the constructed categories of tattare, Sámi, trans, and intersex people overlap.

The anxiety of the welfare state authorities around those categories finds strong expression in Border through its portrayal of reproduction and intergenerational continuity. We see no children and, aside from the rude teenager smuggling booze, no young people in the film—only adults and babies, including that of Tina/Reva’s neighbor; the unseen baby at the center of the child sex trafficking ring; an embryo that Vore produces; and a troll baby that, as we will see, Tina/Reva finds at the end of the film. The importance of reproduction and intergenerational continuity is a source of fear, both to those reproducing (who have to face the loss of their infant child) and those from whom the right to reproduce and raise a new generation has been forcibly withdrawn (Tina’s/Reva’s birth parents). Doubling back to the discussion of trolls as racialized outsiders calls to mind the aforementioned residential schools as well as the Australian “Stolen Generations”; a key strategy of settler-colonial authorities has been to break the cycle of social and cultural reproduction by removing Indigenous children from their birth parents and placing them with foster families or in church- and/or state-run educational institutions. Further, the film’s focus on babies echoes the idea that medical intervention for intersex people typically takes place at a very young age and therefore without conscious consent—sometimes even before they leave the hospital.³¹ Perhaps then there’s another way to read the hospital scene cited above: standing fretfully outside, Tina/Reva may be thinking not only of the medicalized violence she herself experienced after birth, but also that which her neighbor’s arriving baby could experience.

A history of reproductive anxiety is implied through another echo from Swedish folklore, drawing on medieval concern around baptism, in the concern in Border around the naming and registering of infants. When Tina/Reva hears an infant crying in the apartment where she detects the smell of child abuse, the detective reports to the state prosecutor, “if there was a baby, it’s not registered anywhere.” Registration is the means by which children can be protected/tracked by the welfare state. Shortly afterwards, when Vore shows a sinister interest in the newborn baby of Tina’s/Reva’s neighbours and asks after the name of the child, the mother hesitates. The father answers him, “Elsa,” but adds, “we think….” Their reluctance to reveal the name of their daughter plays with medieval worries about the dangers inherent in the liminal “rites of passage” such as naming that accompany her arrival in the world.³²

Registration, like baptism, represents the threshold for membership in the community; another border in a film concerned with gatekeeping, with the integrity of borders and attempts to uphold or transgress them. The anxiety about the integrity of the next generation, their membership (or not) in the intergenerational community, and the liminal states around birth and registration is carried through to the final frames of the film.

Conclusion

In the film’s last sequence, we find Tina/Reva walking barefoot on the ground outside her house, with only diegetic sounds such as bird calls, blowing wind, and crunching snow audible. She returns to the house to find a box on her doorstep. She takes it indoors to open it and finds a baby troll, replete with hairy body and posterior tail, accompanied by a “Welcome to Finland” postcard. At first perturbed, she carries the baby outside and feeds it a cricket—providing a bookend to the film’s initially inexplicable first scene, in which Tina/Riva picks a cricket up from the ground and then puts it back down. The infant smiles in pleasure and Tina/Reva does as well, then the film cuts out.

We believe this conclusion is worth discussing in our conclusion, not because we are uncreative in our argumentative syntax, but because it provides perhaps the most important opportunity to consider how Border pushes us beyond easy queer readings. To begin with, those steeped in what some have called “white queer theory” might critique this ending for engaging in something like Lee Edelman’s “[hetero]reproductive futurism.”³³ That is to say, one could argue that, troll ontology notwithstanding, this ending is too pat and sentimental. Further, it seems at this point that the film has denounced its most darkly radical character, Vore, by having revealed him as part of the child sex trafficking ring (he steals infants and replaces them with the embryos he produces). Vore’s unfertilized embryos will die within a few weeks; the trafficked infants, meanwhile, have moved outside the system, where they cannot be policed. Wibke Straube suggests an alternative angle with “the ambivalence of revenge” as a possible reading for the film,³⁴ focusing our attention away from the possible sentimental outcome for Tina/Reva and lingering on Vore’s callousness in perpetuating cycles of injustice.

But when we read this film through the concept of the queer anti-pastoral that we have proposed—including through the lenses of Indigenous studies and intersex studies that inform our thinking—it looks rather different. For one thing, we see that parenthood (social and cultural, if not actual biological reproduction) has been restored to a group from whom it was taken away. Tina/Reva receives the child “outside,” both in the sense of being out of doors and being outside normative biological and cultural structures; this child of ambiguous provenance, who has arrived in an unmarked box, clearly has not been registered with the state, but in a much more positive sense than the trafficked child invoked earlier. The care that Tina/Reva extends to the infant is a horizontal rather than paternalistic form of care, one not defined by the power of institutions, lack of consent, or traumatic secrecy. Finally, the threat of medical intervention is nowhere to be found. In fact, in this scene the infant plays with one of the dangling strings on Tina/Reva’s sweatshirt, which evokes its twitching tail—a very subtle imagining of bodily integrity restored.

This moment of reproductive restoration makes clear the limits of the pastoral mode. Far from being a benevolent form of stewarding a community, it depends on a centralized and monolithic power structure and a normative and heterogeneous “flock.” The experiences of Vore and Tina reveal the violence and trauma at the heart of pastoral systems and the abilities of queer agencies to disrupt and subvert them. Returning to the term “pastoral” in its more standard literary context—a bucolic pasture, contented sheep, and a benevolent human or two watching over it all—we might consider the violence and normativity that it depends on.

Acknowledgements

We thank Julia Leyda for first thinking through this film with us, and Cristina Richie for citation suggestions.

Competing Interests

The authors have no competing interests to declare.