Telling Settler Stories: Heteronormativity and Settler Time in the Media Narrative of a Project Responding to the ‘Death of the Countryside’

This paper aims to contribute to critical studies of rurality, coloniality, and gender by analysing a media narrative of an initiative for “saving the dying countryside.” The initiative we are focusing on is aimed at making families with children move to a rural village in the north of Sweden. We problematize how the media narrative about the initiative constructed particular tropes of rural life that are normative of settler time. The material consists of newspaper articles about a housing project in a rural village initiated in 2019 in response to the threat of closing down the village school in a sparsely populated region in Sweden. Sweden is a settler colonial nation-state, and settler colonialism is a gendered process. We therefore use queer and decolonial theories to critically address the media narrative. The story-telling of the housing project is guided by a child-centred reproductive futurism of white, middle-class, heteronormative straight lifelines that are intertwined with rural futurity set against a backdrop of settler common sense.