Kvinder, Køn & Forskning

The silenced genocide

Naja Dyrendom Graugaard, Amalie Ambrosius Høgfeldt — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

How is the anti/not/un-racist university a radical idea?

Linda Lapiņa, Rashmi Singla, Julia Suárez-Krabbe, Karmen Tornius, Laura Horn — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

In this essay, we share our experiences with a university campaign for solidarity with anti-racism struggles at Roskilde University (RUC, Denmark) and around the world. We situate the initiative in the broader context of Danish universities as racialized institutions. We recount previous initiatives of anti-racist and diversity-focused campaigns on campus and then unfold the events around the solidarity campaign of 2020 and the time thereafter. We end with an assessment of where we stand now, insisting on the need to continue to crack walls and push doors open.

Sensible Ruptures

Maya Acharya, Gabriella Isadora Muasya — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This paper explores queer and racialized experiences in Danish academia through what we call ‘sensible ruptures’: affective, embodied and sensory ways of knowing. Taking seriously these modes of knowledge, the article outlines the creation of an online, audio-visual archive. Weaving together text, audio and images to unfold our concept of sensible ruptures, we demonstrate how the audio-visual can meaningfully contribute to capturing the affective and material fabric of racialized and queer experiences with/in Danish higher education. Sensible ruptures underscore the importance of under-standing the complex processes of racialization in an institutional and national context saturated by ambiguity and exceptionalism. We contend that thinking not only against, but beyond, disembodied colonial logics offers a different mode of knowledge creation, reconfi guring the self as permeable: constituted through and with our histories and surroundings. We centre friendship as a vital part of this process, harnessing queer epistolary to perform our pursuit of, and argument for, knowledge as always and inevitably relational.

“In Women’s Hands”

Victoria E. Pihl Sørensen — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Eugenics had popular appeal and expressions in early 20th-century Denmark. This article tells two stories of what eugenics looked like ‘in the hands’ of bourgeois Danish women as they promoted ‘racial hygiene’ through cultural production. The first story highlights the eugenic feminism of nationally acclaimed women’s rights advocate Thit Jensen through a reading of her play The Stork (1929). The second tells of the Copenhagen Housewife Association’s engagement with new media technology and race science through their eugenics radio Listener Group (1934). Read through a lens that pays especially close attention to race and class, I argue that this work identifies them as significant proponents of eugenic ideology and as contributors to the targeting of the poor and working class in the name of ‘racial hygiene’ – a decidedly racist project.

Racialized spatial attachments

Tringa Berisha — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Danish high school’s rising ethnic/racial diversity and tendencies of segregation call for explorations of students’ educational experiences of racialized differentiation. This article unfolds methodological reflections on this endeavor, by focusing on researcher access. Not only is space a medium through which racial relations materialize – space is also interconnected with access. If researchers depend on relations for access to sites of inquiry, which depends on how researchers are read by actors in the field, it is critical to scrutinize the spatial dimensions to such readings and what knowledge is (allowed to be) produced. Unfolding two ethnographic vignettes, the researcher’s positionality of passing is analyzed to explicate the relationship between racialized bodies and racialized spaces. I propose the notion of spatial attachments as an analytical lens for explaining such body–space conflations to illuminate the interconnectivity between educational spaces and the broader external world, and to expand the language to address racialization in the colorblind context of Danish high schools.

Forhandlinger af tilhørsforhold på tværs af tid

Jin Hui Li, Ahrong Yang — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Inspired by spatial education research and queer and critical race theories, this article investigates how experiences of being a racially minoritized girl/woman in a Danish primary school context have shaped over time and influenced their belonging at school and in society. The analytical insights in this article derive from empirical material that spans a longer period of time and are based on, respectively, empirical material in which racially minoritized women share their experiences of attending Danish primary school in the period 1970 to the 1990s and empirical material in which female students share their experiences of attending Danish primary school today. While the students’ experiences are negotiated on different racialized terms, the temporal perspective helps to identify patterns of how racial exclusion cuts across time and how access to being seen as (fully) Danish is a struggle for racially minoritized female students. Overall, the analysis finds that belonging in the Danish primary school and in Danish society is a constant struggle for racially minoritized female students. Demanding continuous negotiation, explanations, and imagined alternatives, belonging is neither neutral nor taken for granted by the racially minoritized female students neither in the 1970s nor today.

“The curse of the refugee”

Tine Brøndum — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Drawing on narrative interviews with people who have recently or in the past fled to Denmark, this article examines experiences of being cast as refugees within the Danish asylum and integration bureaucracy. The analysis is situated within a social context formed simultaneously by Nordic exceptionalism and racial colour-blindness, and by increasing restrictions within Danish asylum and integration policy. Within this context, the article analyses narrative accounts of structural violence and racialization within three central sites of refugee management: namely the reception and asylum camps, encounters with municipal integration workers, and in contexts of schooling and employment. The analysis conveys intersubjective perspectives on how being labelled as a ‘refugee’ involves being racialized, managed and controlled and it argues that such forms of legally-sanctioned control measures can be understood as a slow violence that harms the lives of those seeking protection in Denmark. Finally, the article discusses how people labelled as ‘refugees’ respond to and oppose experiences of racism and control, and how such responses are often silenced in ways that further legitimize racism.

“We are never allowed to just be ourselves!”

Morten Stinus Kristensen — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

For several decades, mainstream media have positioned Muslims as cultural, political, and social outsiders to Denmark. Danish Muslims confront and navigate this exclusionary racial project of hegemonic Danishness in a host of ways, including through online communication and social media practices. This article is a qualitative study of Danish Muslims who produce discursive interventions on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram in direct and indirect relation to mainstream media discourses on Muslimness. Their social media practices are conceptualized as part of an emerging, online Danish Muslim counterpublic where features that afford interactivity shape the counterpublic to be communal in distinct ways. This digital counterpublic provides direct challenges to hegemonic Danishness’ one-dimensional representation of Muslimness. Particularly when it comes to questions of gender and claims to ordinariness through quotidian posts on life as a Danish person who just happens to be Muslim, these social media practices are racial projects that undercut hegemonic Danishness’ racialization of Muslimness as non-Danish, monolithic, and culturally deficient.

Gendered racism

Marianne Brodersen, Trine Øland — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This article examines the intersecting oppressions of Danish welfare politics and its emerging interest in emancipating ‘immigrant’ women and girls. It draws on Patricia Hill Collins’ notion of controlling images and, based on a documentary text corpus, it identifies how the images of the unfree immigrant housewife and the inhibited immigrant girl are formed through oxymoronic liberal arguments of care and control. The article demonstrates how this plays out in an assemblage of policy documents and suggests why welfare professionalism is called upon to ‘rescue’ ‘immigrant’ women and girls, situating welfare politics and professionalism within the racial welfare state and its racial capitalist and Orientalist logics. The analyses demonstrate how gendered and racialized signifiers help to structure welfare politics and professionalism, and how a space of emancipation is intertwined with a global economic division of labor. The article suggests that racialized welfare politics and professionalism are permeated by the desire to emancipate women, which remains a powerful impulse within Danish welfare state capitalism, liberalism and social-democratic reasoning.

The magic of feminist bridging

Loving Coalitions Collective — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Are feminist coalitions magical enough to survive and endure while questioning and shaking the colonial/racist foundations of Swedish academic knowledge production and the overall Swedish society? Can feminist bridging and collective writing remain a magical process even when grappling with difficult experiences and memories of othering and racialisation? This is a creatively and collectively written article on feminist coalition building, and its importance in thinking, articulating and deconstructing race, racialization and racist structures. More than two years ago, seven interdisciplinary gender studies scholars of mixed ethnic and racial origins, came together to explore our differently situated experiences of disidentifying with Swedish academia and society in a collective we call Loving Coalitions. Against the background of Swedish exceptionalism, historical amnesia of Sweden’s colonial past and present, and the deafening silence on Swedish whiteness and racism, we are sharing our poems, letters, texts and testimonies of racist interactions in Swedish academia and society. While doing so, we discuss how moving away from conventional ways of doing research and experimenting with creative methodological alternatives, such as automatic writing, epistolary formats, poems, fiction, collective memory-work, allow us to acknowledge and embrace our different life backgrounds and academic trajectories as a mode of knowledge production. We hope and believe that our experiences, refl ections and ways to resist racism and Othering in Sweden and Swedish academia through alternative coalition building, based on mutual care and love, can be relevant in a Danish context as well.

Redaktionsledelsens forord

Michael Nebeling Petersen, Mons Bissenbakker, Camilla Bruun Eriksen — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Racialization and Racism in Denmark

Bontu Lucie Guschke, Iram Khawaja, Lene Myong — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Research and education on racism in Denmark

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Corrigendum to “Research and Education on Racism in Denmark - the state of the field and where to from here” published in Kvinder, Køn & Forskning 36(2), 21-28.

The roundtable discussion was originally published on November 22, 2023, with the authors listed as Bontu Lucie Guschke, Iram Khawaja, and Lene Myong.

The list of authors have been corrected on 08-12-2023 to acknowledge the collaborative efforts of the roundtable discussion, with the following names: Oda-Kange Midtvåge Diallo, Elizabeth Löwe Hunter, Jin Hui Li, Mira C. Skadegård, and Ferruh Yilmaz.

The special issue editors apologize unreservedly for this omission. The roundtable discussion has been republished with the correct list of authors.

Surviving Nordic Supremacy

kaseeta ssemigga — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Racism and Racialization in Danish Welfare Work

Iram Khawaja — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Den nye raciale kapitalisme og fængselssamfundet

Lene Myong — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100