"Vad ska du göra?" Framställningen av kvinnor i Försvarsmaktens reklamkampanj

Sammanfattning: This work has performed a visual discourse analysis over the Swedish armed forces latest commercial campaign, called “What are you going to do?” from 2021, which was aimed at young women. The aim of this paper is to analyze how the Swedish armed forces portray women in their commercial campaign. By doing this, it is possible to make out the organization’s view on gender and women in their ranks. The material consists of the commercial campaign, which is two commercial videos and can be found on the Swedish armed forces’ own website. For the analysis certain central concepts were used, such as Judith Butler’s “performativity”, as well as William Callahan’s theory about visuality and visibility. The findings from this paper has shown that the Swedish armed forces have tried to portray themselves as gender neutral, rather than as an organization that welcomes women. The female main characters are also portrayed as gender neutral, since they cannot express nor perform their gender. Weapons are barely visible and when they are, they appear as props. The reason for this could be that they want to avoid connections to masculinity that militarism is associated with. There are numerous possible future research questions that this work has led to.