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This article discusses how the relationship between gender and violence can be articulated, both in policy and theory, in order to unsettle the feminist orthodoxy that equates gender-based violence with violence against (heterosexual, white) women. Through an interview study with Swedish policymakers in public-sector healthcare, the author discusses the work done by different conceptualisations, in particular the new and seemingly neutral category of 'violence within close relationships', and shows that there is a need to open up a discussion about the ambiguities involved in trying to find the right language to talk about the relationship between gender and violence. While uncertainty and anxiety are often regarded as negative feelings, as something to be overcome, this article argues that holding onto doubts about the possibility of fixing meaning helps to avoid reduced understandings. Thus, the attempt to lay down one correct version should be dismissed, and instead the author emphasises the need for a politics of uncertainty – both in policy and theory.

Analysing interviews with diversity practitioners at three Swedish universities, this article explores how diversity is deployed and the ways in which the articulations of practitioners might contribute to politicising issues of ethnicity and race. In the post-political era of New Public Management, audit technologies, quantification and bureaucratisation often render diversity apolitical, and deprive it of its political nature. These processes of depoliticisation tend to downplay political conflicts and ignore or even reinforce social hierarchies such as those based on norms of whiteness and middle-class masculinity. Paradoxically, in this interview study, it is shown how seemingly neutral, apolitical procedures such as mapping, counting and producing statistics led to debates that revealed underlying antagonisms, and opened up a space for rearticulating diversity that could provide a destabilisation of the whiteness of academia.

This article critically analyses the assumptions and effects of the 'daring to ask approach' to gender based violence (GBV), as expressed in the policies that govern social services' work in Sweden. We show how GBV is constituted as a sensitive issue connected with shame and as something that will not be brought up spontaneously; GBV is something that women who had experienced it carry with them as an 'untouched truth' waiting to be discovered by social workers while women's worries about the consequences of telling are not made intelligible. The very speaking as such is seen as emancipatory, and the social worker is understood as a facilitator. With this approach follows standardised questions, aiming for neutrality and equity. However, these are so wide and unspecific, that the risk is that no one thinks the questions are directed to her. By making the assumptions and effects of a seemingly self-evident strategy visible, we demonstrate areas in need of further research and policy development, such as barriers to help-seeking (beyond stigmatisation) and effects of standardisation. This is an important undertaking since without critical scrutiny of the policies there is a risk that stakeholders assume that merely asking will resolve the problem of GBV.