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Othering, identity formation and agency
Sune Qvotrup Jensen
Abstract. The article examines the potentials of the concept of othering to describe identity
formation among ethnic minorities. First, it outlines the history of the concept, its contemporary
use, as well as some criticisms. Then it is argued that young ethnic minority men in Denmark
are subject to intersectional othering, which contains elements of exoticist fascination of the
other. On the basis of ethnographic material, it is analysed how young marginalized ethnic
minority men react to othering. Two types of reactions are illustrated: 1) capitalization on being
positioned as the other, and 2) refusing to occupy the position of the other by disidentification
and claims to normality. Finally, it is argued that the concept of othering is well suited for
understanding the power structures as well as the historic symbolic meanings conditioning
such identity formation, but problematic in terms of agency.
Keywords: Othering; agency; ethnicity; gender; intersectionality.
Please cite this article as:
Jensen, S.Q. (2011). Othering, identity formation and agency. Qualitative Studies, 2(2): 63-78.
Introduction
From a social science point of view, identities are in some sense always social. This means that
ethnic minority identities are always situated within specific social contexts and conditioned by
them. One theoretical concept offered to explain such processes is othering, originally coined
within post-colonial theory. But can this concept help us understand the processes of identity
formation in everyday life?
Danish public discourses on integration, migration and ethnic minorities constitute a specific
case of situatedness for ethnic minorities, including young ethnic minority men. Media
discourses have to a very high degree problematized the presence of ‘others’ in Denmark as
well as pathologized their alleged ‘culture’ (Yilmaz, 1999; Wren, 2001; Røgilds, 2002; Hervik,
2004), and young ethnic minority men in particular have been subject to pathologization by
discourses which link ethnic minority backgrounds to crime and/or problematic and aggressive
sexuality (Andreassen, 2005; Jensen 2007). The non-white and non-Danish is then equated with
the savage, uncontrolled and deviant as opposed to orderly and civilized Danishness (cf.
McLaren, 1994, p. 60). These discourses may be understood as othering.
Following the adaptive theory research strategy outlined by Layder (1998), the aim of this
article is to confront the theory of othering with ethnographic data about young marginalized
ethnic minority men; not in order to test the theory in a narrow sense, but to create a dialogue
between theory and data in order to assess the limitations and possibilities inherent in the
concept, while at the same time shedding light on an empirical field.
The article analyzes empirically how othering is met with agency by these young men. By doing
so, the article raises questions about the structuralist understanding of identity formation
inherent in the concept of othering on two levels: Firstly, the idea that the power to construct
identity lies with the powerful. Secondly, the idea that identity formation can be grasped as a
dichotomous relation between self/first and other.
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The article starts by outlining some theoretical considerations about othering and identity
formation. The next part of the article analyses ethnographic data in order to examine whether
these young men are ‘becoming the other self’. First, strategies which capitalize on othering are
analysed. Next, strategies which can be interpreted as refusal of the category of the other are
analysed. Finally, the conclusion sums up the empirical results and discusses the limitations
and potentials of using the concept.
Theoretical considerations about othering and identity formation
Although first coined as a systematic theoretical concept
i
by Spivak in 1985, the notion of
othering draws on several philosophical and theoretical traditions. Significantly, the concept
draws on an understanding of self which is a generalization of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic as
developed in Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hegel is often – in what Heartfield (2005) calls a
dispirited version of Hegel – read as a theory of self and other in which the juxtaposition towards
the other constitutes the self.
This understanding of self and other is prevalent in de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1997). Here,
de Beauvoir describes how men are regarded as the norm and women as the other. With
reference to Hegel, de Beauvior universalizes a theory of self and other in relation to both
gender and other hierarchical social differences (1997, p. 16). She furthermore argues that the
otherness of women produces subjectivity since ‘women exist – and are only conscious of
themselves – in ways that men have shaped’ (Hughes & Witz, 1997, p. 49).
Early postcolonial writing is another theoretical reference point (Said 1995/1978). Said writes of
an imagined geography, which constructs the Orient as other in a reductionist, distancing and
pathologizing way. At the same time as being exotizised, the Orient is incorporated and fixed,
as the function of orientalism is ’at one and the same time to characterize the Orient as alien and
to incorporate it schematically on a theatrical stage whose audience, managers and actors are for
Europe, and only for Europe’ (pp. 71-72, emphasis in original).
A third stepping stone is the ideas of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Two important points can
be derived from Lacan: Firstly, that language plays a central role in constituting identity. This
understanding of identity later led Althusser to coin the notion of interpellation (1971), a notion
grasping how individuals are hailed by ideology to occupy specific subject positions, thereby
achieving identity. Secondly, Lacan stresses that identity is fundamentally gained in the gaze of
the powerful (Gingrich, 2004, p. 11).
Drawing on the sources outlined above, Spivak was the first to use the notion of othering in a
systematic way. Although Spivak uses the concept in a review of Derrida as early as 1980, it is
not until 1985 that the concept is used systematically in her essay “The Rani of Sirmur”
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. Here
Spivak analyses three dimensions of othering present in archive material of the British colonial
power in India.
The first dimension is illustrated by the English Captain, who travels around Sirmur on
horseback to tell the natives, who their masters are. He describes in a letter how he journeys
around colonial India to make the people aware ‘who they are subject to’ (Spivak, 1985, p. 254).
In sociological terms, this dimension is about power, making the subordinate aware of who
holds the power, and hence about the powerful producing the other as subordinate.
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The second dimension is illustrated in a letter from a General who writes about ‘these
highlanders’ that ’I see them only possessing all the brutality and purfidy [sic] of the rudest
times without the courage and all the depravity and treachery of the modern days without the
knowledge of refinement’ (Spivak, 1985, pp. 254-5). In sociological terms, this dimension is
about constructing the other as pathological and morally inferior.
The third dimension is illustrated in a letter from the Board of Control in the British East India
Company which argues that the Indian Army in Colonial India should not be given access to
knowledge and technology, i.e. ’the master is the subject of science or knowledge’ (Spivak, 1985,
p. 256). This dimension of othering implies that knowledge and technology is the property of
the powerful empirical self, not the colonial other.
It is worth noting that othering is described by Spivak as a multidimensional process, in the
sense that it touches upon several different forms of social differentiation, and that othering as a
concept can therefore be combined with what has later been conceptualised as intersectionality
(Crenshaw 1989; 1991), or interlocking systems of oppression (Collins, 1989) in feminist theory
(see Collins, 2000; Brah & Phoenix, 2004; Gans, 2008). According to Spivak, in the case of the
Rani, the process of othering is classed and raced as well as gendered. Importantly, to speak of
othering is then not an alternative to speaking of racism(s)/sexism or class, but a way of
addressing an aspect hereof (Wren, 2001, p. 144). Hence othering concerns the consequences of
racism, sexism, class (or a combination hereof) in terms of symbolic degradation as well as the
processes of identity formation related to this degradation.
To sum up, the theory of identity formation inherent in the concept of othering assumes that
subordinate people are offered, and at the same time relegated to, subject positions as others in
discourse. In these processes, it is the centre that has the power to describe, and the other is
constructed as inferior. It should be noted that the concept in Spivak’s version does not focus on
the fascination of the other, as it does not evolve around ambivalence or the exoticism of the
colonial gaze. The other is always the other as in inferior, not as in fascinating.
Spivak’s conceptualization is in accordance with contemporary uses of the concept: For instance
Andersson uses the concept in relation to racialization processes that affect first generation
Europeans (2010, p. 7); Lister defines othering as a ‘process of differentiation and demarcation,
by which the line is drawn between ’us’ and ’them’ – between the more and the less powerful –
and through which social distance is established and maintained’ (2004, p. 101); Schwalbe as
‘…the defining into existence of a group of people who are identifiable, from the standpoint of a
group with the capacity to dominate, as inferior’ (2000, p. 777), or as ‘…the process whereby a
dominant group defines into existence an inferior group.’ (Schwalbe et al. 2000, p. 422).
Othering at the same time produces difference and problematizes it, in the sense that the group
which is othered is also in the process defined as ’morally and/or intellectually inferior’
(Schwalbe et al., 2000, p. 423). ’The others’ are reduced to stereotypical characters and are
ultimately dehumanized (Riggins, 1997, p. 9; Lister, 2004, p. 102). Such processes imply
reduction and essentialization in the sense that those who are othered are reduced to a few
negative characteristics. Consequently I define othering as discursive processes by which powerful
groups, who may or may not make up a numerical majority, define subordinate groups into existence in a
reductionist way which ascribe problematic and/or inferior characteristics to these subordinate groups.
Such discursive processes affirm the legitimacy and superiority of the powerful and condition identity
formation among the subordinate (see also Jensen, 2010a).
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While the understanding of identity formation inherent in the concept of othering can be
productive, it also raises certain objectives. It has thus been argued that the concept of othering
is binary as it is based on the dichotomy of the first and the other, rather than that which
transcends these binaries (Gingrich, 2004). Such an understanding of identity is parallel to an
understanding of language in which signs become meaningful in opposition to what they are
not. Or in the words of Diken, ‘the marked term is in fact necessary for the primary term to be
defined’ (1998, p. 41). Generalizing such structural thinking to matters of social identity can be
problematic since it sets up a frame of reference which fails to see the in-between, or the
‘thirdspace’, to borrow a term from social geography (Soja, 1996). Furthermore those who are
othered do not appear as active subjects. Consequently Bhatt criticizes postcolonial theory for
being ‘a kind of heroic, narcissistic victimology that cannot name itself as such’, and notes that
‘[i]n postcolonial theory, the subaltern is simply voiceless‘ (2006, p. 101). Other writers have,
with explicit reference to Spivak’s use of Lacan, spoken of a ’psychoanalytical fatalism in critical
disguise’ (Gingrich, 2004, p. 11). Hence Gingrich argues that in Spivak’s theoretization, othering
is something done by the powerful majority, and those who become ‘the other’ are objects in a
process of colonial interpellation (2004).
These critiques call for theoretical considerations about agency, which I here define as the
capacity to act within as well as up against social structures. I am in particular interested in what
McLaren calls oppositional agency (McLaren, 1994) whether or not it takes the form of explicit
political stance. In other words resistance is central to my analysis.
One could argue that identifying resistance requires consciousness and explicit purpose among
those who are said to resist. As Raby has pointed out, this criterion would however hinder us
from grasping resistance among young people who often act less from explicit and conscious
motives and more from an only partially conscious feeling of injustice (2005). Hence a wider
understanding of resistance as oppositional agency is applied here.
My analysis focuses on two forms of agency, which can both be argued to have a dimension of
resistance. The first I have termed capitalization. This form of agency, which is explained further
below, relies not on refusing othering discourses per se, but by appropriating (elements of)
them in an attempt to imbue the category of the young ethnic minority man with symbolic
value. Resistance here takes the form of refusing to be devalued. However this form of agency
also has a dimension of reproduction as it draws on stereotypical images. The other form of
agency I term refusal. This form of agency relies on articulating distance from the category of the
ethnic minority young man, explicitly or through irony, and on refusing to occupy the position
of the other.
While admittedly such a distinction could be theoretically deconstructed it here serves the
purpose of grasping empirical variation in reactions to othering.
Becoming the other self?
The rest of this article will use othering as an analytical starting point for understanding
cultural processes of identity formation in everyday life. I address how and to what extent
othering conditions identity formation by analyzing how a specific group of actors react to the
othering they are subject to.
While a full documentation of the discursive othering of the category of young ethnic minority
men falls outside the limits of this article, Andreasen has demonstrated how public Danish
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discourses about these young men draw heavily on cultural racism (2005). Hence, these young
men are successively being portrayed as highly problematic.
Andreassen has analyzed how media stories revolve around a representation of dangerous
‘young visible minority males’ involvement in what newscasters and journalists labelled gangs
or groups’ and ‘how they gather in city centres, how they commit crimes and violence’ (2005, p.
77, see Alexander, 2000 for British examples). Andreassen has also shown how minority men
are portrayed as having a ’dangerously high libido’ (2005, p. 215), and how ‘the media looked at
the visible minorities with a gaze embodied with fear and myths about hyper-sexuality’ (p.
221). Such discourses about sexually dangerous black Muslims draw on historical Western
fetishism and sexualisation of the black male body, which ambivalently combine fear and
fascination (Mercer & Julien, 1988).
Drawing on Andreassen, it is therefore possible to argue that these young men are subject to
intersectional othering, which is explicitly related to race, ethnicity and gender, and implicitly
to generation and urbanity.
The following analysis of how these young men react to othering is based on qualitative
ethnographic data from a fieldwork among marginalized young men with ethnic minority
background in Denmark. The data was collected as part of my PhD project investigating the
meaning of gender, ethnicity and style in the everyday life of these young men (Jensen 2007).
The fieldwork took place in three youth clubs and a social project for excluded youths in three
Danish cities. Two were ordinary Danish youth clubs (one attended May-December 2001 and
September 2003, the other October-November 2005), another an youth club assigned a special
role in work with troubled visible ethnic minority youth (attended April 2004-September 2005)
and the last a social project working with marginalized young people offering an alternative
way to finish school (attended October 2003 to April 2004). A total of 126 participant
observations were conducted. Most observations took place during the evenings (typically 3-4
hours). In addition to informal conversations, a total of 23 young men aged 15-25 were
interviewed in 18 taped semi-structured qualitative interviews with the duration of between 30
minutes and 2 hours. In addition to interview and observation data I draw upon material from
magazines, music as well as the internet, so that my empirical material makes up what Löfgren
refers to as an ‘empirical bricolage’ (1987). Since it is impossible to present the full material in
this article, the fragments offered here should only be considered illustrations of motifs that
appear often in my data.
Given the nature of fieldwork, the timing and phrasing of the invitation to participate in the
research varied, but all informants were informed that I was visiting the clubs to do research.
The young men were typically informed that the research was about ‘the culture that young
people make themselves’ (reflecting an interest in cultural agency and distancing the research
from cultural essentialism), and that it was ‘about possible differences between boys and girls’
(reflecting an interest in gender). Informants who participated in formal interviews were given
a more detailed description of the research.
All interviews and observation data were coded in Nvivo. The analysis presented in this article
cannot, however, be described as simply stemming from the empirical data in any positivist
sense. My approach has been inspired by Willis’ idea of the theoretically informed ethnographic
study (1997) and Layder’s adaptive theory approach (1998) implying that analysis develop
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through a dialogue between theory and data, but also that there can be no obligation of loyalty
towards pre-given theories.
Admitting the risk that such a description can in itself be othering, my sample can be described
as follows: The youth clubs and the social project were chosen because of their locality and/or
their social work with young people. The young men I interviewed and/or focused on in my
fieldwork were marginalized in terms of different dimensions: Many had problems with school,
most were considered by social workers to have social problems, and many were criminalized
to varying degrees. Most of the oldest men in the sample had problems finding
work/apprenticeships, and all had parents who were on the margin of the labour market. The
young men had different ethnic minority backgrounds, with parents from Somalia, Turkey,
Kurdistan, Palestine, Iran, Pakistan, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Ghana, Gambia and other
national contexts. All names used in the text are pseudonyms.
It should be noted that my situatedness as a white, ethnic majority, middle class man played a
role in the in the social logic of my research. I consider field work a meeting of (complex) social
positions as well as a meeting between unique individuals. This means that in some situations
the young men would speak to, and react to, my position from their position rather than react to
me as an individual person. Consequently my relations to the young men varied a great deal
during the fieldwork. Sometimes I was explicitly considered a ‘friend’ at other times I was
positioned as member of a powerful majority resulting in more troublesome field relations. I
consider this to be largely due to contemporary Danish discourses framing the field relations. A
full analysis of this problematic falls outside the limits of this article (see Jensen 2009), however
it should be emphasized that some of the data analysed in this article, most notably the motif of
claiming normality, were in my interpretation produced as the result of the relational interplay
of social positions in the interview situation (see below).
Capitalizing on othering
As argued above, the category of young men present in my sample are subject to intersectional
othering in current Danish discourses. My ethnographic material showed, however, that these
discourses could sometimes be appropriated in collective, cultural processes, which could be
termed subcultural in the neo-Birminghamian sense (Carrington & Wilson, 2004; Jensen, 2010b),
i.e. processes that in some sense answer a collectively shared situation. Sometimes such answers
can take the form of constructing subcultural capital (Thornton, 1995). Below, the term
capitalization and the verb to capitalize are used to emphasize that the creation of capital is an
active process involving agency. However, such agency is socially situated, and I therefore
agree with the critics who advocate rethinking the concept of subcultural capital, situating such
capitalization in relation to hierarchical differentiation and power (Skeggs, 2004; Carrington &
Wilson, 2004; Jensen, 2006). As mentioned above it could be argued that capitalization as a form
of agency has a dimension of resistance as well as a dimension of reproduction. In my material,
it is by mediating otherness through elements of style taken from hip hop that othering can be
capitalized upon, so that the self can be stylized
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and become attractive. In other words, the
position of the other can become imbued with value if versioned through a hip hop
iconography of black masculinity.
In my fieldwork, this was illustrated by the way some of the young men presented themselves
on a Danish Internet chat site called Arto. Admir had chosen the username Thug-gangsta. This
name is inspired by the rapper 2Pac, who has been pictured time and again with the word
‘Thug’ tattooed in gothic letters across his naked muscular torso. Hirsi had chosen the name lil’
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gangsta’, referring to the fact that he was rather short. Abdilatif had chosen the name 8210-cent,
a clever amalgam combining the local zip code for Århus Vest – the stigmatised part of Århus
iv
where he lived – and global hip hop culture in the form of the popular rapper 50-cent. Nadim
had chosen the name “Perker4Livet”, meaning Perkerforlife. The term ‘perker’ is a strongly
derogatory Danish term for immigrants from the Middle East or North Africa sometimes
appropriated by the young men themselves in their slang
v
. The name Perker4livet is clearly
inspired by the name of the Danish perker rap group ‘perkerforlife’, who spell their name P4L.
This, again, is a reference to the Los Angeles based gangster rap group NWA’s second album
Niggaz for life (Ruthless Records, 1991). However, Nadim later changed his username to
‘HotPerker’, which does not entail any specific reference to hip hop, instead accentuating the
latent sexualization inherent in the specific othering that these young men are subject to. During
my fieldwork, I have seen the profile pictures uploaded by Nadim and Abdilatif. In the pictures
they pose like Afro-American rap or R’n’B stars, in street-wear with bandanas under their
baseball caps.
These usernames and self-made photos illustrate that, given the opportunity to version
identities in a virtual space these young men often pick a hip hop identity. Identifying with hip
hop is quite common in the contemporary youth cultural terrain. However, the identification
has two specific dimensions: 1) Marginality is important as a basis for identification, and 2) hip
hop makes it possible to ascribe value to racialized bodies marked by black hair and brown
skin. The combination of usernames and self-made pictures points towards a stylization of self,
a situated agency building on elements from hip hop to ascribe positive value to their position
as others.
Similar ways of versioning the self can be observed among young men producing rap music. In
recent years, the Danish hip hop milieu has seen the emergence of a subgenre often referred to
as ‘perker rap’. Highly controversial, this subgenre can be said, on the one hand, to reflect
marginality while on the other to stage marginality so that marginality is turned into a brand, in
an attempt to locally capitalize on othering. One of the representatives of this genre was the rap
group Pimp-A-Lot
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.
One of the rappers affiliated with Pimp-A-Lot was ‘Niggeren i slæden’, which roughly
translates into ‘The nigger in the ride’. He later changed his name to Johnson, referring to his
real name Marc Johnson, but also to a slang word for phallus. When interviewed about the
name change in Döner – a lifestyle magazine targeting young ethnic minority men – he explains
that the name change is related to him ’not getting a hard-on every time I smell pussy’. The
interviewer then jokingly asks whether Johnson might suffer from erectile dysfunction;
something Johnson dismisses with an ‘I wish so’, implying that his problem is the reverse
(Interview in Döner no. 1, 2003). By doing so, he stages himself as a young virile black man – a
staging that connotes and draws upon the Western sexualisation of the black male body present
in the current Danish representations of young ethnic minority men as sexually dangerous.
Staging oneself as virile and libidinous is then a form of sexualisation of the self made possible
by historical and contemporary discourses about black male hypersexuality. Later in the
interview Johnson also stages himself as a sexual object in a way that is closely linked to
dangerousness, when he states that ‘I only meet those girls who look at me, and then they know
that I’m a player’ and explain that ‘ they think I look like a criminal and that turns them on.’
(Interveiw in Döner no. 1, 2003). These accounts illustrate the relation between being dangerous
and being sexy. Johnson speaks of himself as a man – young and black – who is sexy because he
is (perceived as) dangerous. As a person who is read off as dangerous because he looks ‘like a
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criminal’. Looking like a criminal is about style, and about style being perceived in a specific
way when combined with certain bodily signs of race and ethnicity. The combination of hip hop
style, dark hair and brown skin makes it possible that Johnson is perceived as dangerous, and
therefore sexy. Johnson as an icon or sexual object comes to carry the connotations related to
Western imaginaries of black men as sexually dangerous and genitally well-endowed, which
parts of US hip hop has appropriated. By stylizing the self using elements taken from the
subcultural universe of hip hop, Johnson accentuates the latent positive dimensions inherent in
the Western imagery of the black man, and thus capitalizes on othering.
It is obviously impossible to know what the young women Johnson has sexual relations with
think of him – if they exist. However, here it is enough to observe that it is possible for Johnson
to tell about his self in this way, and that in doing so, he draws upon a historical conception of
the black man, with colonial roots. As Mercer & Julien has pointed out:
Historically, the European construction of sexuality coincides with the epoch of
imperialism and the two inter-connect. Imperialism justified itself by claiming that it had
a civilising mission – to lead the base and ignoble savages and ‘inferior races’ into culture
and godliness. The person of the savage was developed as the Other of civilisation and
one of the first ‘proofs’ of this otherness was the nakedness of the savage, the visibility of
his sex. This led Europeans to assume that the savage possessed an open, frank and
uninhibited ‘sexuality’… (Mercer & Julien, 1988, pp. 106-7).
In colonial thinking the black man is constructed as hypersexual. This historical idea of the sexy
black man can be actualized by stylizing one’s self using elements from hip hop
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.
The empirical examples above illustrate a type of reaction to othering, which can be termed
capitalization. This type of reaction works not by resisting to occupy the position of the other
per se, but by resisting the devaluation and attempting to capitalize locally on being in the
position of the other, by accentuating those dimensions within the ambivalent gaze of the
majority which can be ascribed value. As Sandberg has noted, such strategies draw heavily on
public stereotypes (Sandberg, 2005). Similarly, Vestel has pointed out that the sign of the
‘dangerous foreigner’ is one of several available for the staging of self (2004, p. 449). What can
be observed is a stylization of self, a form of cultural agency which allows these young men to
capitalize on othering, to become sexy and dangerous and to see themselves as having social
value, perhaps even as being superior, as opposed to the inferior other.
It is worth noting that the strategies analyzed here are distinctively masculine (Prieur, 2002), if
not masculinist. Therefore they are highly controversial, and, in US debates about hip hop and
rap, parallel strategies have been criticised by feminists (Armstrong, 2001; Weitzer & Kubrin,
2009). Rap is however also a reflection of the marginalization and alienation experienced by its
founders at the racialized and socioecomically deprived margins of urban USA. Here it plays a
role as a medium for critique. Consequently, much hip hop – including perker rap – has
political and antiracist contents (Sernhede, 2009), and hip hop constitutes ambivalence between
antiracism and feminism.
Refusal
Whereas the form of agency analysed above can be thought of as capitalizing on othering,
strategies which can be interpreted as refusal towards occupying the position of the other are
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also present in my material. Such strategies articulate distance from the category of the other
explicitly or through irony.
One evening I accompanied a group of 10-12 young men and a social worker (Manou) from a
youth club in Århus to the nearby smaller town of Skanderborg. We shop at a supermarket:
The boys are kidding around and making a lot of noise. (...) We head towards the checkout. The
boys start joking by seemingly accusing each other of having stolen. ‘Hey, that guy’s taken
something’, one of them says in a twisted, squeaky voice. Samir and Kawan are throwing the
American football they brought along back and forth across the refrigerated display counter
with this week’s special offers and careful arrangements of fruit and vegetables. The boys get in
line at the checkout and continue to seemingly accuse each other of having stolen some of the
shops’ products. ‘Have you taken something, have you taken something?’ they ask each other
in caricatured, high-pitched voices, as if imitating an imagined officious shop assistant. The
women at the cash registers take it with a smile and get them through the checkout.
Memo, 27 October 2005
In this episode, the young men seem, at first glance, to be mocking each other. However, on my
interpretation, there is more going on, since the caricature of the officious shop assistant is
played out in front of a larger audience: Manou (ethnic minority), me (ethnic majority), the
women at the cash registers and the other customers (all ethnic majority). To make a caricature
of an officious shop assistant can be interpreted as a way of saying: We are well aware that you are
probably thinking that kids like us have something that is not theirs in their pockets. Hence the
mocking carried out by the young men can be understood as a comment, talking back to the
othering gaze, resisting and at the same time playing with the image of the criminal ‘immigrant’
young man. There is of course no way of knowing what the staff and customers actually
thought. But it is not unlikely that the young men have experienced being accused of criminal
activities by police and other social control agencies because of their bodily markers of youth,
visible ethnic minority background and maleness (Wellendorf & Cakmak, 2007; Ansel-Henry &
Jespersen, 2003). Other examples of refusal were articulated in the interaction between the
young men and me. The following interview exchange takes place in the social project:
[Interviewer asks about the division of labour in Tahir’s his family]
Tahir: … of course my little brother doesn’t help my mother with the cooking, like.
SQJ: What do you think about this way of living, do you like it, or…?
Tahir: What do you mean?
SQJ: That stuff, like some, the women do some things and the men do other things.
Tahir: It’s also like that in Danish families.
SQJ: Certainly, certainly. Yes.
Tahir: It is. It’s often the mother who cooks and the father he…I’ve often seen that, like.
SQJ: Yes.
Tahir:…It’s not…
SQJ: No, but I didn’t say.
Tahir: No-no, no-no, but it’s often like that. It’s pretty normal.
SQJ: Yes.
Tahir: I don’t see…it’s pretty normal.
SQJ: Yes. I think it’s fair enough. Ehm, when you grow older, would you like to live in the same way or...
Interview, 16 December 2003
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The excerpt illustrates how the field relations were sometimes conditioned by the ways gender
and ethnicity intersect in Danish debates on migration and integration. By a subtle underlying
mechanism the researcher is positioned as a representative of legitimate culture.
Simultaneously Tahir is positioned as an illegitimate other, and his answers are articulated from
this position. It is not only a matter of (mis)understanding each other, but also a matter of
positions being shaped by the relational interplay between two actors bodily marked as
respectively minority and majority in a specific societal context. This explains why Tahir reacts
from the position as the ethnified other, illegitimate in terms of gender relations such as
division of domestic labour. In other words, questions about gender are asked by a researcher
already positioned as white and Danish, to a young ethnic minority man already pointed out by
public discourse as a representative of inappropriate gender inequality
viii
(Jensen, 2009). Tahir,
however, refuses being positioned as the other. He protests against the othering of him and his
family. He disidentifies
ix
with the identity he is offered, and claims normality, while at the same
time accepting the implicit premise of not being Danish. In other words, he exercises power by
refusing the identity the situation offers him.
Other exchanges touch explicitly upon media representations and knowledge production. The
following episode took place in a youth club:
AbdiRahmane and Thomas are in the room. Suddenly AbdiRahmane says loudly [referring to
me]. ’Hey, what is it that he’s doing, that guy?’ (...) ’He’s a writer. He’s written that book, you know’’,
Abbas answers: ’Hey, what are you writing about us?’, Ousamah asks […] ’Hey writer’,
AbdiRahmane says and continues. ’Where do you want to go with that? You’re on the wrong track.
You need to become a doctor’ (...) ’That’s where the future lies. Not that writer stuff’. He begins
walking around the room. ’What do you want to write about us. What is there to write?’ He sits
down beside me. ’Okay’, he says, ’Let’s say this is a talk show. You only get 5 seconds, and I’ll ask you
about something: What do you want to say about these young people here in [X-City]. Remember, you’ve
only got 5 seconds’. ’Then you can’t say anything’, I start. ’Come on, say something’, he says and
continues, ’About the young people, they’re in such a bad place and there’s so much crime’. ’ Shut up,
AbdiRahmane’, someone says, laughing. ’You’re confusing yourself ’, someone else adds.
AbdiRahmane continues, still in his mock talk show host voice. ’There is a lot of crime, what do
you want to say?’. ’There isn’t that much’, I reply and continue, ’You’re not gangsters or anything like
that’. ’Yes. it’s true… there is’, says AbdiRahmane. ’Not as much now as there used to be’, Abbas
adds and continues: ’We used to do a lot, but we’re not doing as much now’. ’Yes ’, I say, ’but it’s not
as much as it says in the papers’. Abbas answers, ’The papers have written about us before, but that was
then. Then we did a lot’. AbdiRahmane ends his show. ’No’, he says. ’That writer stuff is no good’. In
a slightly more serious tone he adds: ’It is okay, you’re on the right track. But you have to come up
with something else’.
Memo, 4 September 2003
In the episode, AbdiRahmane is ‘having a laff’ (Willis 1978), joking with the researcher at the
same time as entertaining the other young men in the room. In a subversive way, he confronts
the researcher with the fact that he as a writer has the privilege of producing authoritative
descriptions of the young men. In other words, he seizes power and subverts the privilege of
description. Accordingly, I have difficulties giving a qualified answer when AbdiRahmane
takes on the role of a zealous journalist pressuring me for an answer by repeating the words
‘What do you want to say’. All I come up with is a somewhat quiet pointing out that they are not
73
as criminal as they are often described. At the same time, AbdiRahmane is mocking the media’s
representation of the young men and the neighbourhood they live in, when, assuming the role
of a talk show host, he insists that the young men ‘are in such a bad place and there’s so much
crime’. AbdiRahmane’s joking can be interpreted as an ironic comment on the overall discursive
context of the research. This is important because, as shown above, Spivak addresses the
privilege of controlling representation as the property of the powerful. However, AbdiRahmane
resists those who have the power to position him and his friends as criminal others living in ‘a
bad place’ by reclaiming the role of the ‘representer’, the producer of knowledge.
Discussion and conclusion
Generalizing the substantial empirical findings outlined above to all ethnic minority young
men, or even all marginalized ethnic minority young men, would itself be othering. Therefore it
must be emphasized that the concrete reactions outlined above cover only one specific cluster of
reactions to othering among a specific group and in a limited number of contexts. It is also
necessary to emphasize that the refusal of othering analysed above can be understood as a
specific variant of a common tendency to refuse negative categorizations imposed by others.
Claiming normality, insisting that one is not that different, can be a strategy for humanization.
Constructing oneself as a normal, ordinary person is therefore also a way of appealing for
sympathy and understanding (Sandberg & Pedersen, 2006, p. 237).
Now, to return to an assessment of the limitations and potentials inherent in the concept of
othering, the analysis has shown that othering is not a straightforward process of individuals or
groups being interpellated to occupy specific subordinate subject positions. On the contrary,
agency is at play, and actors far from always accept becoming the other self. Othering can be
capitalized upon or disidentified from.
It is worth dwelling on the type of agency which has been termed capitalization. This type of
agency illustrates how othering discourses can, in a paradoxical way, be part of the symbolic
raw material of agency. Elements of othering discourses may be appropriated, because such
elements can be given local value as part of a subcultural style. That is possible because the
specific discourses of othering relevant here are latently ambivalent in their gaze upon the
other, as they also contain implicit exoticism and fascination of the other. For some young
ethnic minority men, the public stereotype of the black male can be used as a resource – an
element in the ‘pool of styles, meanings and possibilities’ (Willis, 1978, p. 59) at hand for
producing styles – offering them a way to capitalize on othering. Othering discourses, even if
they are experienced as painful, also open a space for agency. In a paradoxical way, agency as
capitalization illustrates the continued relevance of the concept of othering: Thinking in terms
of othering allows us to grasp how power structures condition agency and to reflect on how
historical symbolic meanings frame the possibilities at hand for negotiating identity.
Capitalization has dimensions of both resistance and reproduction, because it can be interpreted
as an attempt to challenge the devaluation of the other, although it does not disrupt the
category.
Another type of agency in relation to othering has been termed refusal. This strategy is based on
rejecting the category of the other. Thus in many instances, informants refuse to occupy the
position of the other, whether in relation to the researcher or in relation to third parties. In such
situations the young men often claim normality.
74
It is also worth dwelling on the motif of claiming normality, which appears quite often in my
material. Although these young men often claim normality, there is not one case of informants
explicitly categorizing themselves as Danes. This can be explained by the character of the
Danish discourses about migration, as these discourses block the way to ‘Danishness’ for
anyone not part of the imagined Danish kin (cf. Fangen, 2007). Furthermore, aspiring to become
Danish would imply aspiring to exchange one particular identity for another, to exchange
firstness for otherness. The fact that the young men do not aspire to ‘Danishness’, but do claim
normality, can therefore be interpreted as an attempt to carve out a space in-between, a
thirdspace, which is not defined by firstness and otherness, but transcends the dichotomy:
simply as a normal human being - not Danish, but also not different from the Danish. It may have
some overlaps with Danishness as this third position could sometimes have some of the same
attributes as those ascribed to Danishness. However, it is not synonymous with (an aspiration
to) Danishness. This attempt to carve out a third space which transcends majority and minority
problematizes the binary thinking inherent in the concept of othering. That, however, does not
mean that the concept of othering should be discarded. On the contrary, the concept seems well
suited for grasping a specific type of space for agency. Its merits furthermore lies in its potential
for understanding contemporary discourses in the light of history, its openness towards
intersectionality, and its understanding of identity formation as a process. However, when
used in an analysis of concrete identity formation, the concept of othering works best when
used in a dialogue with concepts more suited for grasping agency.
Acknowledgement: I thank the anonymous reviewer, whose constructive comments greatly
improved the analytical points advanced in this manuscript.
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qvotrup@socsci.aau.dk
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Notes
i
The word othering was used sporadically in philosophical texts as early as the 1920s and 1930s,
meaning change or analytically distancing oneself.
ii
Sirmur is a region in the lower Himalayas. The Rani is the Rajah’s wife, who becomes the
formal leader after he is dethroned (Spivak, 1985).
iii
Stylization here covers the double meaning: 1) that an aesthetic style is created and 2) that
something simple is created from something complex in the sense that a complex and
ambiguous person is staged in a somewhat stereotypical way.
iv
Århus is the second largest city in Denmark.
v
In some youth milieus, the term perker has been turned into a badge of honour, in much the
same way as the word nigger (often spelled nigga) in some parts of black urban US culture.
vi
Pimp-a-Lot is a reference to the US rap record label Rap-A-lot.
vii
Some of the young men in my sample are not literarily black. Said, however, argues that a
similar erotic fascination is inherent in the Western gaze upon the Orient (1978).
viii
I argue that such mechanisms do not rest on the characteristics or skills of the researcher,
since similar mechanisms occur in parallel research projects, in different institutional settings,
by other researchers, but in the same national discursive context (Andersen, 2005; Hviid, 2007;
Staunæs, 2007).
ix
The concept of disidentification, and the verb to disidentify (Skeggs, 1997), denotes an intentional
and marked distancing from identity categories. It is therefore different from a mere absence of
identification. See also Goffman on the related concept of disidentifiers (1963, pp. 60 ff.).
