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The purpose of the paper is to produce new knowledge about the positions that public libraries both take and are given in the conflicts over politics and identity that play out in contemporary cultural and library policy debates. Using conflicts over drag story hour at public libraries as case, the study seeks to contribute to an emerging body of research that delves into the challenges that public libraries as promoters of democracy are confronting in the conflictual political landscape of today.

The paper presents an analysis of debates reported in news articles concerning Drag story hour events held at Swedish public libraries. Utilizing the analytical lenses of discourse theory and plural agonistics, the analysis serves to make visible the lines of conflicts drawn in these debates – particularly focusing on the intersection of different meanings ascribed to the notion of the reading child, and how fear is constructed and used as an othering devise in these conflicts.

Different imaginings of the reading child and the construction and imagination of fear and safety shapes the Drag story hour debates. The controversies can be understood as a challenge to the previous hegemony regarding the direction and goals of Swedish cultural and library policy and the pluralistic democratic society these policies are meant to promote.

The paper offers new insights into the consequences of the revival of radical right politics, populism and societal polarization, and the different responses from public libraries.

This chapter discusses the control of women's bodies and minds through the daily practices of menstrual control apps. Based on Michel Foucault's concepts (2003, 2006, 2013), the research is based on women's relationship with their own bodies. Still, it is wider than the body per se since the central theme is the construction of subjectivities. This paper embraces power modalities and explores disciplinary and discursive practices and regimes of truth, biopower, biopolitics and governance. The paper frames the fundamental points of Michel Foucault's analysis of power and how they are associated with strategies used for menstrual tracking apps. It looks at how apps act on the subjectivity of being a woman, shaping ways of thinking and acting. It looks at how disciplinary practices, knowledge–power and surveillance, as Foucault tells us, relate to themselves and medicine. The text highlights that monitoring data and corporate surveillance by menstrual apps poses unprecedented challenges to feminist politics. Therefore, we argue that the technology of menstrual tracking apps acts subtly and uninterruptedly to docilise female bodies and make them useful. Trying to find new paths and solutions from a feminist and critical perspective, we offer suggestions for further research on the topic, disregarding liberal approaches which rely on media literacy exclusively rather than a holistic comprehension of technology and women's rights.