The digital storytelling of feminist foreign policy: Sweden’s state feminism in digital diplomacy

Abstract

This article interrogates the digital storytelling of Sweden’s feminist foreign policy. Drawing on scholarship on state feminism and digital diplomacy, it shows how digital platforms offer opportunities to reproduce narratives of state feminism through storytelling. We propose that digital diplomacy is used to advance feminist foreign policy through emotional sense-making that requires the telling of personal stories. The article provides a narrative analysis of the stories of women and girls that symbolise and embody feminist foreign policy, and the way in which they are communicated by the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. The article concludes by noting that the digital storytelling of feminist foreign policy allows the Ministry for Foreign Affairs to communicate to a wider digital audience. These stories, however, run the risk of obscuring the feminist ambitions of feminist foreign policy by insufficiently considering the gendered injustices that undergird the global gender order and by bringing together seemingly incompatible stories of feminist exceptionalism and success.