Starting in the late 1990s, the Swedish government began tasking Swedish universities to integrate, and thus mainstream, gender perspective in all higher education. This project culminated in 2016. According to the Ministry of Education and Research, this strategy was  “to achieve the gender equality policy objectives.” This approach has contributed to changes in academic programs and curricula, including the scope of courses and their accompanying course literature. This chapter describes how the strategy has affected art history and visual studies (hereafter referred to as “art history”). 

Pioneering scholars first introduced critical gender perspectives (then called “women’s studies”) into higher education in Sweden (and thus, art history) as part of the Women’s Liberation grassroots movement in the mid-1970s. Forty years before such critical perspectives became an administrative mandate, this was a trailblazing and groundbreaking stance. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, this approach formed the basis for an affirmative action plan, a method typically associated with tactics utilized to rectify discrimination in employment and education, and can be described as a kind of positive discrimination. Here, the term is used to discuss the effects of including literature with a gender perspective in art history curricula at Swedish universities. The results of inclusion are, in our experience, forceful.