Anti-Pastoral Allegory

The 2018 Swedish cult film Border (Gräns) has plenty of scenes that one might label as pastoral: protagonists walking barefoot over forest moss, bathing in a pond, and communing with wild animals. In this article, however, the authors take up a sometimes-overlooked gloss of the term “pastoral”: related to care or tending, as in the pastor of a church. We argue that Border indicts through allegory the supposedly benevolent acts of care enacted by the Swedish welfare state—but unfortunately repeated throughout the world—in relation to Indigenous populations, LGBTQI+ people, and various sociocultural Others. These acts of supposed care range from forced linguistic assimilation to forced sterilization. Drawing on Indigenous studies, intersex studies, and ecocriticism, we explicate the film’s powerful allegory and offer an expansive delineation of the “queer anti-pastoral.”