In a different thread in this forum, eric drew our attention to a scientific study that is mentioned in the English wikipedia entry on Fucking Åmål, but is unavailable online. It is a paper by Tiina Rosenberg, a former professor of theatre studies at the university of Stockholm, and now professor of gender studies at Lund University.
Find more on her here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiina_Rosenberg (wikipedia entry)
http://www.genus.lu.se/research (her university page)
The paper was originally published in 2002 in a rather obscure journal ("Journal of Theatre and Drama", published at the university of Haifa, Israel), but reprinted in 2006 in a book on feminist and queer issues published in the US and edited by Ellen Mortensen. If have gotten hold of a copy of this book and did a scan of the paper.
Since the resulting file is 16 MB large, I cannot host it on my own page. I have instead uploaded it to rapidshare.de, a file sharing service that is 100% safe, 100% free, and 100% pop-up-free. Just follow this link to download the paper:
http://rapidshare.de/files/39521340/Tiina_Rosenberg_on_Show_Me_Love.pdf.html
(Scroll down and click on "free" download, then wait for the counter to reach zero and enter the code that appears, just to prove that you are not an automated bot. No entering of any kind of personal data is required.)
The paper itself, entitled "Coming out of the National Closet: Show Me Love" is not so much on the film itself, but rather on its reception in Sweden. It starts with a theoretical part, and then features an extensive analysis of the reviews and comments Fucking Åmål received in Swedish media when it grew so amazingly popular in 1998 and the following year. The paper, I should warn you, is written from a decidedly lesbian perspective. Rosenberg is quite critical of the general reception of the film which she says is an example of "heteronormativity". By this she means that many reviewers and commentators on the film seemed to neglect, downplay or even deny the importance of the lesbian theme to the film, by saying that it is a "universal love story", not specifically concerned with two girls. (You know what she is talking about - we've had this discussion on this board, too.) This, Rosenberg argues, is - whether these people are aware of it or not - once more an attempt to deny public recognition to lesbian and gay people. Fucking Åmål is a film about them, and denying a lesbian identity to the central characters means taking the film away from them, acting against its central message.
Rosenberg is not critical of the film itself but rather seems to love it like most people, she is just politically opposed to the way it has been discussed in public. However one judges her thesis, this is surely an interesting article that should be read. I have come across no other study of this kind yet.