In her lecture ‘The danger of a single story’, author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie discusses how there is always more to discover and understand about the world than what one single story can tell. The hegemonic position of the mantra of Swedish gender equality has contributed to the reproduction of a single story, so unitary that it has been talked about as an axiomatic example of what to strive for in inter/national equality politics and policies. That hegemonic gender-equality model makes it difficult to tell other stories, to live other kinds of lives and for other kinds of societies to be created (Butler, 2004).

In order to rethink gender equality it is necessary to challenge its modernist, nationalistic and postcolonial content, which have made it into a single story. Even if we have to abandon this idea of a national and at the same time universal model of gender equality, we do not have to give up our commitment to the many political projects of equalities that there are. On the contrary, we need a plurality of such political projects (Mouffe, 2005). To rethink gender equality, we have, in this volume, examined how it is (re)emerging in different and frequently problematic ways, and that there are many different simultaneous struggles for equality inter/nationally. The goal for these different struggles cannot be to find consensus or create a new single story. Rather, rethinking gender equality means entering an arena of political contestations, different models of equality, movements, spaces and actions. How to do that, how to recognise equality as a field of political contestations, is not an easy issue. The contributors to this book have pointed to some spaces for activists, feminist and other critical scholars, where controversies and contestations could, should and are already taking place.