Ylva Perera, Åbo Akademi University 

“Writing from the Wound. Antifascism through Weakness, Suffering and Sympathetic Joy in the Prose of Mirjam Tuominen” 

The purpose of this article is to examine how the Finland-Swedish writer Mirjam Tuominen’s (1913–1967) way of writing about weakness and contempt for weakness in her essays and short stories from the 1930s and the 1940s can be read as an expression of antifascism. The study takes its point of departure in Harald Ofstad’s study of the Nazi mentality (1979), where he concludes that the very core of Nazism is constituted by contempt for weakness. Weakness is present in Tuominen’s prose in the way she centers physical and mental illness, poverty and people that in various ways could be defined as outcasts. Drawing on Alison Kafer’s work in crip theory (2013), the article treats weakness as a category constructed by not only material, but also political and relational, conditions. The main focus of the analysis is the short story “Anna Sten” (1939), but examples from all books published by Tuominen during the 1930s and 1940s are used. By drawing on 20th-century thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as recent advances in crip theory, the article shows how Tuominen exposes weakness as a touchstone of human existence rather than something to be eliminated. This in turn means that antifascist resistance relies on our ability to challenge our own contempt for weakness, a practice I have chosen to call “inner antifascism” (as opposed to the overt political actions of “outer antifascism”). While inner antifascism requires work on oneself, it depends on our ability to commiserate (medlidande, “to suffer with” in Swedish) with others as well as our ability to feel sympathetic joy. Tuominen herself coins the term medglädje (“to rejoice with” in Swedish) to illustrate how accepting weakness doesn’t need to mean an end to life, but rather a beginning.