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Glimpses into the Hearts of Whiteness
Abstract
Among institutions aiming to produce ‘desirable nationals’,1 the administrative procedures related to marriage and civil partnership offer a particularly relevant socio-legal space within which to explore the constitution of a privileged white group. The civil servants responsible for these procedures are increasingly involved in gate-keeping tasks aimed at excluding ‘abusive others’ from the national territory2 — a geographic as well as symbolic space.3 Since legal unions4 are recognized as universal human rights,5 registrars have to balance these restrictive practices with the democratic values of ensuring equal treatment for all and the absence of arbitrariness.6
... This helps to spread the conception of racism as an individual deviance (Zimmer 2011). As a counter to this opinion, several researchers have recently shown that structural racism is firmly embedded in Swiss formal institutions, like registry offices (Lavanchy 2014(Lavanchy , 2015, politics or media (Purtschert 2014). However, as Herzfeld (2005) argues, the state is not just a theoretical structure but is constructed and reconstructed by ordinary people every day and everywhere (in Müller 2011, 625). ...
... Developed in the United States and in Great Britain, the Critical White Studies have recently been brilliantly reflected within several current French publications (Cervulle 2013;Laurent and Leclère 2013). The Swiss field can be enhanced with said critical approach, which frames whiteness as an overlooked category (Minder 2011;Purtschert 2014;Lavanchy 2015;Purtschert and Fischer-Tiné 2015). ...
... This helps to spread the conception of racism as an individual deviance (Zimmer 2011). As a counter to this opinion, several researchers have recently shown that structural racism is firmly embedded in Swiss formal institutions, like registry offices (Lavanchy 2014(Lavanchy , 2015, politics or media (Purtschert 2014). However, as Herzfeld (2005) argues, the state is not just a theoretical structure but is constructed and reconstructed by ordinary people every day and everywhere (in Müller 2011, 625). ...
... Developed in the United States and in Great Britain, the Critical White Studies have recently been brilliantly reflected within several current French publications (Cervulle 2013;Laurent and Leclère 2013). The Swiss field can be enhanced with said critical approach, which frames whiteness as an overlooked category (Minder 2011;Purtschert 2014;Lavanchy 2015;Purtschert and Fischer-Tiné 2015). ...
This paper explores the process through which a white nation commonly considered as “raceless” is producing race and racism. Whiteness is a relevant concept to analyse the process of incorporating non-white minorities across everyday social interactions. It explores socio-cultural expressions of white normativity and possible interpretations of the notion of whiteness as an identity in Switzerland and beyond. The paper considers how non-white citizens with migration backgrounds incorporate themselves by adopting the dominant discourse that denies the presence of races and racism in the country. The Anthropological data and analysis illuminate how the participants make their settlement possible via presentations of self-alignment with Swissness/whiteness and misalignment with other immigrants. The paper discusses the process of reinforcing white national identity via the prevailing assumptions in Europe. It is designed from the reflexive viewpoint of a white anthropologist who collected subject narratives during fieldwork.
... The Swiss context is particularly useful for an analysis of the racialization of violence against women. Given its neutrality during the Second World War, and in the absence of any official colonial rule, Switzerland continues to claim a degree of exceptionalism within the European context (Lavanchy 2015;Michel 2015;Purtschert et al. 2016). As I have shown elsewhere, in Switzerland, race talk and race-related categories are replaced by discussions of cultural difference (Khazaei 2019b). ...
This article uses an intersectional lens to ethnographically analyze police treatment of domestic violence in Switzerland. The analysis suggests three interlinked explanatory factors to understand the differential treatment of domestic violence for white Swiss/European nationals on the one hand, and racialized non-European migrants on the other. These factors are (1) prevailing generalized representations of the racialization of violence against women in Switzerland, (2) the police professional logic used to categorize sections of the public, and (3) the specific police institutional memory of two emblematic cases of domestic violence involving families of Sri Lankan nationality. The article discusses the implications of this differential treatment not only for racialized non-Europeans but also for Swiss and white European women subjected to domestic violence.
... As other publications demonstrate, marriage, respectively family reunion, is often the only way for non-European citizens to enter Europe, respectively to obtain a residence permit (Beck-Gernsheim, 2011;Scheel and Gutekunst, 2019;Moret et al, 2021). Different European countries have developed new policies to fight so-called marriages of convenience, and street-level bureaucrats view marriages between EU and non-EU citizens as suspicious and seek ways to distinguish a 'genuine couple' from a 'bogus' one (Lavanchy, 2015;Scheel, 2017;Kristol and Dahinden, 2020). State authorities thus strive to prevent migrants from undermining migration control by way of obtaining residence permits through marriage. ...
... The lethal effects of affective suspicion are reflected in the death toll at Europe's external borders and in how people are left to suffer or die in Europe's archipelago of asylum and detention camps (see also Borrelli 2018; Davies, Isakjee, and Dhesi 2017; Suarez-Krabbe, Lindberg, and Arce 2018). Next to circulating in public discourse, affective suspicion impacts the decision-making of street-level bureaucrats tasked with enforcing border and migration control (Lavanchy 2015;Scheel 2017), and further enrols non-state actors, including employers, staff in hospitals and schools, and private citizens to become involved in borderwork (Rumford 2008;Schweitzer 2019;Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2018). ...
This special section emerged out of discussions between a group of scholars researching border and migration control regimes in Europe. In our research, we had all identified suspicion as characteristic of migration governance. We saw it in the anxiety-ridden public discourses surrounding ‘unwanted’ immigration, in increasingly repressive legal frameworks, in bureaucratic classification schemes and technologies designed to identify suspected, illegalised travellers or deserving from undeserving asylum applicants, and finally, in the distrustful gaze of street-level bureaucrats enforcing migration law. We had also experienced suspicion directed against us as researchers by the state agencies we were studying. Based on these observations, this introduction develops a conceptual framework of states of suspicion, which captures how suspicion permeates migration control on the individual as well as structural level: as an affective element, as codified in law and institutionalised practice, and as manifested in material border and migration control technologies. The contributions to the special section shed light on these various elements, and taken together, enabling us to capture the constitutive nature of suspicion in contemporary migration control regimes. The special section discusses the implications of suspicion, in particular for those people who are rendered suspicious by default. Studying suspicious states, we argue, enables us to trace how migration control produces, sustains and normalises racialised global inequalities.
... Zur Rechtfertigung angeblicher kultureller Differenz oder Unvereinbarkeit zwischen Schweizer:innen und «Anderen» wurden nicht nur in genereller Art und Weise kulturelle Aspekte von «Ausländer:innen» und ihre «Sitten und Bräuche», sondern auch ganz spezifisch die Beziehung zwischen den Geschlechtern verwendet (Fischer & Dahinden 2017;Lavanchy 2015;Bader 2018;El-Maawi & dos Santos Pinto 2019;Kaya 2012). In diesen Debatten wurde die Notwendigkeit betont, die Unversehrtheit schweizerischer Frau-en und Mädchen zu schützen, um damit beispielsweise die Bedrohung zu evozieren, die italienische Immigranten für schweizerische Sitten und Werte darstellen würden (Maiolino 2010). ...
Ce chapitre s’intéresse à comment les différences basées sur le genre et la religion s’imbriquent pour produire du racisme antimusulman en Suisse. Il montre comment les mécanismes racistes se renouvellent et s’adaptent à un contexte sociohistorique donné par l’utilisation de symboles et de représentations qui y existent. Pour illustrer cet argument, et après avoir donné quelques éléments contextuels au niveau international et national, trois exemples tirés du contexte suisse seront analysés. Ces exemples permettront de montrer comment l’intersection du genre et de la religion comme des catégories de différentiation sociale s’articulent pour racialiser les musulman-e-s et résultent en un racisme antimusulman particulier à la Suisse. Le premier exemple, largement étudié, porte sur l’initiative populaire «contre la construction de minarets». Les images et les discours des initiants durant la campagne du 2009 ont marqué l’entrée de la figure de « la femme musulmane » dans l’espace public suisse et a souvent été cité comme un moment important concernant le débat public suisse sur l’Islam (notamment par Boulila, 2013; Michel, 2015; Dahinden et al., 2014). Le deuxième exemple est celui de la deuxième grève nationale des femmes du 14 juin 2019, étudié par Meral Kaya (2020) qui a mobilisé un demi-million de personnes en Suisse pour revendiquer l’égalité. Malgré la célébration de la question de la diversité des femmes et l’intersectionnalité du mouvement, des tensions sur l’inclusion des femmes musulmanes voilées et leurs revendications ont révélé l’actualité de l’articulation du genre et de religion dans l’exclusion des musulman-e-s en Suisse (Kaya, 2020). Ces deux exemples, déjà étudiés dans la littérature, seront brièvement discutés, avant de terminer la démonstration avec un troisième exemple tiré de mes recherches. Cet exemple revient sur une nouvelle campagne de l’UDC (l’Union démocratique du centre, le parti d’extrême droite en suisse) lancée au moment de la grève des femmes en 2019. Cette campagne a instrumentalisé le sujet spécifique de violences faites aux femmes de même que l’élan du mouvement de la grève et les questions du genre pour renouveler son discours raciste envers les musulmans-e-s et les « étrangers-ères » en général.
... The scholarship on spousal migration and mixed marriages has extensively explored the ways in which states define legitimate and fraudulent relationships (Bonjour and de Hart 2013;Eggebø 2013). It has also demonstrated how the legitimacy of relationships is evaluated by civil registrars (Wemyss, Yuval-Davis, and Cassidy 2018;Lavanchy 2015) and visa and immigration officers (Pellander 2015;Scheel 2017;Satzewich 2014;Alpes and Spire 2014). Legitimacy is assessed on the basis of the norm of love marriage (D'Aoust 2013), but it also cannot be separated from the way the national community is conceived (Bonjour and Block 2016). ...
The role of marriage in accessing membership entitlements has been studied extensively in the context of marriage migration, but it remains under-researched in the literature on citizenship acquisition. This paper explores specific constructions of deservingness vis-à-vis the foreign spouses of citizens and their marriages in the context of facilitated naturalization in Switzerland. Based on an ethnographic investigation of the naturalization practices of street-level bureaucrats, we show that the politics of belonging in the context of access to citizenship is regulated by intersecting gendered, ethnicized and classed logics of desirability about how a marriage should be. Additionally, a patrilineal logic continues to guide street-level bureaucrats de facto even when legislation has introduced de jure gender equality. Finally, we demonstrate that it is not only immigration regimes, but also citizenship regimes that employ assumptions about what constitutes a ‘good marriage’ in order to draw the boundaries of the nation.
... Amine was willing to make exceptions for a family who evoked empathy, which then justified the decision to intervene and go beyond the mandate of detention custody staff. Evaluations of migrants' 'deservingness' can have both positive and negative implications, and even determine the fate for migrants with precarious legal status Lavanchy 2015;). The uses of categories of deservingness build on existing stereotypes, notably based on gendered and racialised assessment of persons, linked then to politeness, credibility or perceived vulnerability. ...
This book traces the practices of migration control and its contestation in the European migration regime in times of intense politicization. The collaboratively written work brings together the perspectives of state agents, NGOs, migrants with precarious legal status, and their support networks, collected through multi-sited fieldwork in eight European states: Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden and Switzerland. The book provides knowledge of how European migration law is implemented, used, and challenged by different actors, and of how it lends and constrains power over migrants’ journeys and prospects. An ethnography of law in action, the book contributes to socio-legal scholarship on migration control at the margins of the state.
Tobias Eule is Professor for the Sociology of Law at the Faculty Law, University of Bern, Switzerland.
Lisa Marie Borrelli is Researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Bern, Switzerland.
Annika Lindberg is Researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Bern, Switzerland.
Anna Wyss is Researcher at Maison d’Analyse Processus Sociaux, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
... In this discursive context, naming and contesting racism is reconfigured as 'an unfair accusation' (Ahmed 2011) or discounted as excessive. However, in light of the political challenges, flagged up by various actors, including the UN monitoring bodies, NGOs and emerging academic research (Michel and Honegger 2010;Boulila 2013, forthcoming;Michel 2013Michel , 2015Lavanchy 2015;Germann 2015;Cretton 2018), Switzerland requires a critical re-examination of the paradigms that guide knowledge production about racism and consequently, a transformation of anti-racist politics. Note 1. ...
Although mainstream historiography’s postcolonial indifference has been heavily contested, a profound engagement with how race relates to racism in Switzerland seems far-off. As the country’s direct democratic system relentlessly allows for race to be mobilized, Swiss racial denial results in an inability to productively name and contest racism. This would be particularly pertinent, as racism has not only been normalized by right-wing popular initiatives but also by a state-sponsored climate in which any attempt of naming racism is deemed excessive or hysterical. This article explores the effects of anti-racialist ‘anti-racism’ on public debates about racism in Switzerland. It has been argued that, in wake of the UNESCO consensus, anti-racialism has been established as the dominant paradigm of anti-racism across Europe. Through an analysis of Swiss state anti-racism, I will propose that an unexamined commitment to the anti-racialist tradition actively contributes to the difficulty of naming and combating racism in Switzerland.
... Nuur is aware of the limits to his formal membership in the Swiss nation, making evident through the reference to his skin colour and his African origin that race is a relevant marker of differentiation in Switzerland ( Lavanchy, 2015). In the context of an uncertain future in his country of residence, mobility capital becomes particularly significant: having accumulated enough of it opens up and solidifies options in more than one place. ...
Based on a case study of Somali migrants who have been living in Europe for at least a decade, this paper challenges the view that post-migration life is sedentary and pleads for a dialogue between mobility studies and migration studies. It explores the various cross-border mobility practices these migrants may undertake from their country of residence and how they can be transformed into social and economic advantages. "Mobility capital" consists of the ability to engage in cross-border mobility practices at particular times but also to remain immobile by choice. Social actors with high levels of mobility capital are in a position to articulate and benefit from local anchorage and mobility practices simultaneously and to control when and how they want to be on the move. There are two facets of mobility capital: the accumulation of past experiences of crossing borders; and the potential for future movements, or the unequally shared ability to be mobile again when it appears worthwhile to be so. The diachronic focus of the study shows that biographies evolve in response to external constraints and opportunities. Furthermore, migrants' control over their (im)mobility is shaped by their transnational social positions in their place of residence, but also in other places, including their place of origin. I argue that mobility capital is a neglected dimension of migrants' strategies to negotiate multiple and contradictory social positions in a transnational social field.
... In the light of their historical embeddedness, post-colonial representations of cultural difference can be seen as a consequence of colonialism without colonies (Purtschert et al., 2013). While the terminology of the discourse revolving around U¨berfremdung is a Swiss particularity, it is substantiated with transnational images of migrants as post-colonial gendered subjects (Lavanchy, 2015;Montoya and Agustı´n, 2013). ...
The literature increasingly recognises the importance of gender in defining the boundaries between national societies and migrants. But little is still known about the history and changes of mechanisms that shape the role of gender as category of difference. Based on a critical case study of Switzerland, this article examines how gender is implicated in the politics of migrant admission and incorporation and underlying notions of ‘the other’. Drawing on theories of boundary work, we show that gendered representations of migrants are mobilised by different actors to advance their claims and calls for certain forms of immigration control and migrant integration. Since the late 19th century, gendered representations of Swiss nationals and migrant others shift from classical gender ideas to culturalised post-colonial interpretations of gender roles and, most recently, to normative ideas of gender equality. As part of these changes, migrant women moved from the periphery to the core of public and political attention. Concomitantly, categories of difference shift from the intersection of gender and social class to an intersection of gender, culture and ethnicity. Local particularities of Switzerland – the idea of ‘overforeignisation’ and the system of direct democracy – play a significant role in shaping categories. But Switzerland’s embeddedness in transnational fields emerges as equally important. The article expands on recent research and illuminates how changing dynamics of categorisation and othering facilitate the construction of nations and national identities in a transnationalised world.
... In the light of their historical embeddedness post-colonial representations of cultural difference can be seen as a consequence of colonialism without colonies (Purtschert et al., 2013). While the terminology of the discourse revolving around Überfremdung is a Swiss particularity, it is substantiated with transnational images of migrants as post-colonial gendered subjects (Lavanchy, 2015;Montoya and Agustín, 2013). ...
http://nccr-onthemove.ch/publications/changing-gender-representations-in-politics-of-belonging-a-critical-analysis-of-developments-in-switzerland/
This article offers critical and complementary commentary on the new book Urban Secularism: Negotiating Religious Diversity in Europe by Julia Martínez-Ariño.
Plusieurs études ont critiqué la racialisation des violences faites aux femmes. Pour-tant la tendance à lier les violences dites «domestiques» à la migration reste populaire en Suisse. Cet article s’appuie sur une étude ethnographique d’une unité de police secours pour contester ladite tendance. L’examen du « cas sri lankais », un récit dans cette institution qui présupposerait que ce groupe ethno-racisé est plus enclin aux cas graves de violences, démontre comment les agent·e·s construisent la différence entre les cas similaires.
Street-level bureaucrats in the field of migration control express ideas of who should have the right to stay (or not), influenced by individual stereotypes, but also by organisational structures and established legal provisions. Tasked with screening for ‘bogus’ asylum seekers and deporting irregularised migrants, they are asked to categorise and sort these people according to certain guidelines and policies. It is argued that within migration enforcement, there are two interlinked and underlying rationales which allow for and facilitate such categorisations: suspicion and notions of (un)deservingness. The article presents ethnographic data collected in migration enforcement agencies in Sweden, Switzerland, Lithuania and Latvia in order to cross-examine both concepts. It captures how suspicion becomes a default mode of migration enforcement and allows exclusionary deservingness categories to be created, which again feed back into daily practices to detect suspicious individuals. This intertwined relationship can uphold and normalise a discriminating system despite discrepancies that come up in the creation of these categories.
This article examines configurations of Swiss national identity that were generated in the course of the drafting of the 2012 Female Genital Mutilation Act, a new law that seeks to regulate practices of female genital modification (including female circumcision and genital cosmetic surgery). Our analysis of Swiss parliamentary debates on this legislative proposal between 2005 and 2011 shows that Swiss MPs came to depict female circumcision as a threat to the Swiss nation but portrayed genital cosmetic surgery carried out in Swiss clinics as a signifier of “Swissness.” The Swiss debates over women's genital modifications produced an unusually high level of political unanimity between pro‐feminist left‐wing MPs and anti‐feminist conservative and populist MPs, all of whom claimed to defend women's rights. In this process, MPs formulated criteria for membership and non‐membership of the Swiss nation which, we argue, reflect wider political dynamics, best understood through the lens of femonationalism.
This article explores the contemporary practice of forced detainment and expulsion in Switzerland from two distinct perspectives: the 1995 law on coercive measures that first introduced the practice in Switzerland, as well as the cultural context that led to its constitution, and the documentary Le vol spécial by Fernand Melgar, made some fifteen years after the law was first introduced, which records the law’s consequences for the daily lives of rejected asylum seekers awaiting expulsion. Using Giorgio Agamben’s theoretical work on the states of exception and bare life, I seek to uncover what I call the narrative of expulsion, arguing that narrative politics operates on a number of interrelated levels not only to shape the context and practice of forced expulsion that undergird the asylum politics in Switzerland, and other countries, today, but ultimately also to change the post-enlightenment narrative of the political subject and challenge the efficacy of the Human Rights regime the world over.
Hegemonic views of migration in Switzerland are often based on the alleged whiteness of the nation. According to them, recent migration patterns change the appearance of Switzerland and introduce racial difference into a formerly white space. However, the idea that Switzerland is always-already white has been challenged by people of color activists and their allies. This article describes these shifting views by focusing on two recent political actions, a campaign against a racist advertisement and the demand to decolonise public institutions in Bern. Both are interventions that contest the whiteness of the nation and point out historical and contemporary manifestations of racism in public space by addressing the violent and exclusionary effects of racist images on people of colour. As I argue, they provide us with a new and crucial way of understanding democracy based on the decolonisation of public space.
The article links Swiss migration to questions of ‘race’ and ‘whiteness’ and shows how Swiss immigrants in Lima benefitted from the legacy of a colonial logic in post-World War II Peru. It problematises Switzerland’s economic and ideological interests, which influenced the representation of Swiss migration as ‘exceptional’. I argue that up to the present day the celebration of ‘Swissness abroad’ along with the construction of ‘Swiss whiteness’ form the basis on which Swiss actors imagine themselves as ‘superior’ while upholding imagined differences with ‘creolised’ Swiss nationals.
In the previous chapters, we have shown how in the discretionary spaces of decision-making, in struggles over the ‘readability’ of law and over time, street-level bureaucrats and other actors tasked with governing migration can act very differently from case to case.
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Cet article examine un domaine specifique de politique en matiere de sexualite : les mesures eugenistes que plusieurs democraties liberales ont mises en pratique entre les annees 1920 et les annees 1960. Plus precisement, la discussion des trajectoires politiques de mesures comme les sterilisations eugenistes en Suisse, en Suede et au Royaume-Uni servira de base pour une reflexion theorique sur le role de l’Etat dans la regulation et la surveillance de la sexualite reproductive, des pratiques sexuelles et des identites sexuelles de ses citoyennes et citoyens. L’analyse des liens entre la sexualite, la sphere politique et l’Etat m’amenera ensuite a problematiser la notion d’Etat. En effet, premierement, les exemples de mesures eugenistes concretes revelent que l’action etatique dans ce domaine n’a pas toujours ete coherente, ni homogene. Elle s’est caracterisee au contraire par des interventions souvent non systematiques, voir contradictoires. Deuxiemement, j’argumenterai que les mesures eugenistes se sont developpees aussi bien sous controle etatique qu’en dehors de l’Etat, voire contre ce dernier. D’une part, des acteurs paraetatiques comme des cliniques psychiatriques universitaires ou des autorites politiques locales ont joue un role cle dans la regulation eugeniste de la sexualite. D’autre part, des acteurs importants du point de vue de l’application de sterilisations eugenistes, comme les associations de medecins, se sont parfois politiquement opposes a l’elaboration de politiques publiques dans ce domaine, considerant l’intervention etatique comme une restriction de pratiques qui etaient deja monnaie courante. Je suggererai que la presence ou l’absence de politiques publiques eugenistes constitue de ce fait un indicateur insatisfaisant pour juger de l’importance de pratiques eugenistes dans des contextes nationaux specifiques. J’argumenterai que saisir la complexite de cette dynamique politique necessite une prise en compte des manieres dont les politiques publiques et les systemes etatiques sont, de maniere plus generale, a leur tour structures par des rapports de pouvoir autour de la sexualite, ainsi qu’autour d’autres marqueurs identitaires comme le genre, la « race », les classes sociales ou les handicaps physiques et mentaux.
This article explores the ethical challenges of conducting fieldwork in state institutions. It critically engages with the chain of competing claims and multiple loyalties that confront social researchers, and addresses as the main question: how does working with people with whose goals one fundamentally disagrees shape the necessity of building collaborative alliances and trust?
Drawing on the experience of a sensitive and precarious procedure – the administrative hearing of two fiancés suspected of a sham union – the article aims to give situated answers to general questions about the ethics of fieldwork relations. By challenging ideas about trust, neutrality and loyalty, it explores the tensions between building field alliances and private moral and political alignments. In the light of such dissonance, the article discusses the stakes of disclosure and the imposition of a covert role in forging alliances; the consequences of working in a state institution, where ‘customers’ are submitted to civil servants’ discretionary power; and how this blurs, for the researcher, the opposition between adopting a neutral stance and taking sides. Finally, the article addresses the ethics of unethical alliances and how this tension challenges choices in portraying and betraying research participants.
It has recently been claimed that a particular form of intimacy, `the pure relationship' is increasingly sought in personal life. For a couple, `the pure relationship' involves opening out to each other, enjoying each other's unique qualities and sustaining trust through mutual disclosure. Anthony Giddens (1992) postulates a transformation of intimacy in all personal relationships with radical consequences for the gender order. Popular discourse supports the view that heterosexual couples are more equal and intimate. However, stories of everyday lives told to researchers paint a very qualified picture. Much of personal life remains structured by inequalities. Gendered struggles with the gap between cultural ideals and structural inequalities result in a range of creative identity and relationship-saving strategies. More, perhaps much more, creative energy goes into sustaining a sense of intimacy despite inequality than into a process of transformation. Moreover, the rhetoric of `the pure relationship' may point people in the wrong direction both personally and politically. It feeds on and into a therapeutic discourse that individualises personal problems and down-grades sociological explanations. In practice, intimacy remains multi-dimensional and for the contenders for successful heterosexual equality, acts of practical love and care have been more important than a constant dynamic of mutual exploration of each other's selves.
This article examines Swedish migrant women to the United States. It asks how racially privileged European migrants adapt to US racial and gender hierarchies that require them to relinquish their economic security and gender autonomy in a neoliberal state? Drawing upon interviews and focus group discussions with 33 Swedish women and three of their spouses, and participant observation between 2006 and 2008 in a network for Swedish speaking women living in the US, the article discusses how a group of ‘white’ migrant women who arrive in the US with an ideology of gender egalitarianism negotiate a more socially conservative and economically vulnerable lifestyle, as the wives (and potential ex-wives) of upper-middle-class men. The article argues that while Swedish women benefit from their racial and social privileges in the US they lose their sense of economic security, acquiring new anxieties that make them reluctant to renounce their Swedish citizenship which they conceive of as a ‘flexible’ resource.
Until relatively recently the sociology of race and ethnicity, with a few notable exceptions, has been predominantly concerned with ethnic minorities and colour-based forms of racism. However, developments across a range disciplines have seen a new attention given to the question of white ethnicity and the meaning of whiteness. This paper considers three discernable approaches to critical whiteness studies and is focused on developing a productive dialogue between the materialist, deconstructionist and psychoanalytic frameworks identified. The author argues that these repertoires differ in seeking to abolish, deconstruct or rethink the meaning of whiteness and white identities as they currently stand. It is suggested that each of these positions can inspire an interrogation of white identities capable of disturbing the more traditional focus of race enquiry to engender new theory and political practices in the field. The article concludes by pointing to some of the limits of white ethnicities research and argues for more international approaches to offset the parochial possibilities of a ‘white studies’ agenda. It is suggested that new geographies of whiteness can displace the construction of critical whiteness studies as a Western pursuit and open up researchers to a global interpretation and postcolonial understanding of such race markers.
This article discusses the regulation of marriage migration to Norway through an analysis of the subsistence requirement rule which entails that a person who wants to bring a spouse to Norway must achieve a certain level of income. Policy-makers present two main arguments for this regulation. First, the subsistence requirement is a means to prevent forced marriage. Second, its aim is to prevent family immigrants from becoming a burden on welfare budgets. The major concern of both these arguments is that of dependency, either on the family or on the welfare state. The article investigates the representations of the “problems” underpinning this specific policy proposal and argues that the rule in question, and immigration policy more generally, needs to be analyzed with reference to the broader concerns and aims of welfare state policy and gender equality policy.
In den neueren Diskussionen über den Kolonialismus wird vermehrt dem »Kolonialismus ohne Kolonien« Beachtung geschenkt: Auf welche Weise waren auch solche europäischen Länder involviert, die selbst nicht als Kolonialmacht aufgetreten sind? Und wie wirken sich diese Verstrickungen auf die postkoloniale Gegenwart aus? Der Band geht diesen Fragen am Beispiel der postkolonialen Schweiz nach und stößt damit auch die längst überfällige Rezeption der Postcolonial Studies in der Schweiz an. Mit Beiträgen von Christine Bischoff, Christof Dejung, Sara Elmer, Francesca Falk, Gaby Fierz, Alexander Honold, Rohit Jain, Franziska Jenni, Meral Kaya, Christian Koller, Konrad J. Kuhn, Barbara Lüthi, Martin Mühlheim, Patricia Purtschert, Bernhard C. Schär, Daniel Speich Chassé und einem Vorwort von Shalini Randeria.
In den neueren Diskussionen über den Kolonialismus wird vermehrt dem »Kolonialismus ohne Kolonien« Beachtung geschenkt: Auf welche Weise waren auch solche europäischen Länder involviert, die selbst nicht als Kolonialmacht aufgetreten sind? Und wie wirken sich diese Verstrickungen auf die postkoloniale Gegenwart aus? Der Band geht diesen Fragen am Beispiel der postkolonialen Schweiz nach und stößt damit auch die längst überfällige Rezeption der Postcolonial Studies in der Schweiz an. Mit Beiträgen von Christine Bischoff, Christof Dejung, Sara Elmer, Francesca Falk, Gaby Fierz, Alexander Honold, Rohit Jain, Franziska Jenni, Meral Kaya, Christian Koller, Konrad J. Kuhn, Barbara Lüthi, Martin Mühlheim, Patricia Purtschert, Bernhard C. Schär, Daniel Speich Chassé und einem Vorwort von Shalini Randeria.
In den neueren Diskussionen über den Kolonialismus wird vermehrt dem »Kolonialismus ohne Kolonien« Beachtung geschenkt: Auf welche Weise waren auch solche europäischen Länder involviert, die selbst nicht als Kolonialmacht aufgetreten sind? Und wie wirken sich diese Verstrickungen auf die postkoloniale Gegenwart aus? Der Band geht diesen Fragen am Beispiel der postkolonialen Schweiz nach und stößt damit auch die längst überfällige Rezeption der Postcolonial Studies in der Schweiz an. Mit Beiträgen von Christine Bischoff, Christof Dejung, Sara Elmer, Francesca Falk, Gaby Fierz, Alexander Honold, Rohit Jain, Franziska Jenni, Meral Kaya, Christian Koller, Konrad J. Kuhn, Barbara Lüthi, Martin Mühlheim, Patricia Purtschert, Bernhard C. Schär, Daniel Speich Chassé und einem Vorwort von Shalini Randeria.
Frankenberg explores the unique intersection of race and sex as she examines the way that white women relate to racism. She writes from the assumption that whiteness is socially constructed rather than naturally pre-existing. She theorizes "from experience" to offer a unique perspective that retains the strength of a theoretical foundation as well as the relatability of personal narratives. She interviews thirty white women to get their perspectives on various racial topics and gain a critical standpoint for thinking about individual and social forces that construct and maintain whiteness in contemporary society. She begins with the question, "What is white women's relationship to racism?" The women discuss various aspects of interracial courtship, the role of power in acknowledging racial differences, and the function of language in facing and overcoming the negative effects of this difference.
Jensen outlines the history and function of whitness in the United States. He argues that the existence of white privilege is obvious given the evidence throughout society of the beneficial treatment that white people receive in relation to non-white people. He notes a need to examine racism embedded within individual and cultural history to help people understand the way that white privilege operates. He then looks at the three main emotional reactions of white people to the existence of racism and white privilege: guilt, anger, and fear. While noting that solutions to the problem of privilege are contextual in nature, he encourages privileged people to engage new and uncomfortable ideas and strategies as they attempt to fight white privilege.
In den neueren Diskussionen über den Kolonialismus wird vermehrt dem »Kolonialismus ohne Kolonien« Beachtung geschenkt: Auf welche Weise waren auch solche europäischen Länder involviert, die selbst nicht als Kolonialmacht aufgetreten sind? Und wie wirken sich diese Verstrickungen auf die postkoloniale Gegenwart aus? Der Band geht diesen Fragen am Beispiel der postkolonialen Schweiz nach und stößt damit auch die längst überfällige Rezeption der Postcolonial Studies in der Schweiz an. Mit Beiträgen von Christine Bischoff, Christof Dejung, Sara Elmer, Francesca Falk, Gaby Fierz, Alexander Honold, Rohit Jain, Franziska Jenni, Meral Kaya, Christian Koller, Konrad J. Kuhn, Barbara Lüthi, Martin Mühlheim, Patricia Purtschert, Bernhard C. Schär, Daniel Speich Chassé und einem Vorwort von Shalini Randeria.
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In 1946, the French constitution made colonial subjects in Africa into citizens. Having been content to rule 'tribes' via their 'chiefs', at that point it had to track individuals entitled to vote and receive social benefits. The new citizens retained their personal status - regulating marriage, filiation, and inheritance - under Islamic law or local 'customs' rather than through the civil code. That posed a dilemma for French officials, for the état-civil did not just record life events, but symbolized the integration of all into a single body of citizens. French officials and legislators - including African representatives - could not agree on whether the multiple status regimes necessitated two états-civils or one. In the end, officials were too torn between their recognition of difference among peoples under French rule and their desire for singularity to put in place a consistent policy of identification, registration, and surveillance. They bequeathed the problem to their successors.
In this provocative book, now reissued with a new introduction, Paul Gilroy contends that race-thinking has distorted the finest promises of modern democracy. He compels us to see that fascism was the principal political innovation of the twentieth century - and that its power to seduce did not die in a bunker in Berlin.
The experience of bureaucratic incompetence, confusion, and its ability to cause otherwise intelligent people to behave outright foolishly, opens up a series of questions about the nature of power or, more specifically, structural violence. The unique qualities of violence as a form of action means that human relations ultimately founded on violence create lopsided structures of the imagination, where the responsibility to do the interpretive labor required to allow the powerful to operate oblivious to much of what is going on around them, falls on the powerless, who thus tend to empathize with the powerful far more than the powerful do with them. The bureaucratic imposition of simple categorical schemes on the world is a way of managing the fundamental stupidity of such situations. In the hands of social theorists, such simplified schemas can be sources of insight; when enforced through structures of coercion, they tend to have precisely the opposite effect.
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This article is based on the ethnographic observation of a Prefecture service in charge of immigration control. By emerging himself in this professional environment, the observer develops an understanding of the relations between the social position of the actors, the bureaucratic norms under the constraint of which they operate, and the resulting professional practices. The organized scarcity of resources, the technical codification of procedures, the bracketing of legal rules, and the imposition of quantitative goals in the processing of asylum requests are as many factors that contribute to creating a relation of bureaucratic domination over asylum seekers. In their daily practice, these “low-level policing agents” are led to develop a depoliticized vision of “social problems” and, depending on their social trajectory, their years of service and their own persuasions, they adopt different strategies to cope with their situation. Those who have access to sufficient resources can choose to leave. But for the others, the effect of time is a certain habituation to the established norms. Beyond the changes heralded by new regulations, the length of service appears as the best way to ensure the reproduction of supervisory practices.
Examines the (post-)colonial background of three objects that are historically associated with Zurich: a porcelain figure depicting a slave being sold; Zürcher Rösti with sliced meat (a dish containing potatoes); and the children's classic "Der Schweizerische Robinson" (i.e. "The Swiss Family Robinson"), which was originally published in Zurich.
Drawing on interviews with birth and adoptive parents who have remained in contact with each other following placement of an adopted child, this article examines the dynamic of motherhood that emerges in these relationships. Moving back and forth from legal and social event to women's subjective experiences of these events, it argues that open adoption constitutes a "potential space" where two familiar "truths" about motherhood - as an experience of identity and of connection, and as an experience of contingency and separation-converge in powerful ways. Focusing on the double vision of mothers who feel both "real" and "not real" at the same time, it explores the tendency of open adoption to resolve into familiar dichotomies of nature and law and its potential to produce new subjectivities that defy legal categories. The article suggests that analysis of the sociolegal world and of the possibilities for its transformation must work along the unstable boundary of different subjective worlds, moving between them to expose the exclusions and injustices upon which each is premised.
The experience of bureaucratic incompetence, confusion, and its ability to cause otherwise intelligent people to behave outright foolishly, opens up a series of questions about the nature of power or, more specifically, structural violence. The unique qualities of violence as a form of action means that human relations ultimately founded on violence create lopsided structures of the imagination, where the responsibility to do the interpretive labor required to allow the powerful to operate oblivious to much of what is going on around them, falls on the powerless, who thus tend to empathize with the powerful far more than the powerful do with them. The bureaucratic imposition of simple categorical schemes on the world is a way of managing the fundamental stupidity of such situations. In the hands of social theorists, such simplified schemas can be sources of insight; when enforced through structures of coercion, they tend to have precisely the opposite effect.
This essay arises out of a concern to understand how categories of racial, ethnic, and cultural difference-particularly between women- have been constructed in the past, in order to explore how these categories continue to be reproduced in more recent political and ideological conflicts. Until very recently, feminist theory relating to the writing of history has tended to emphasize questions of gender and their articulation with class, with the result that issues of "race" have been overlooked. Focusing on ideas about whiteness and the various constructions of white racial identity can offer new avenues of thought and action to those working to understand and dismantle systems of racial domination. The recognition that the lives of women of color are inescapably prescribed by definitions of race as well as gender can also be applied to women who fall into the category "white." This essay argues for a feminist theory of history that inquires into the construction and reproduction of racialized femininities. Focusing on images and ideas about white womanhood produced at particular points in the past, examples from the author's book Beyond the Pale illustrate a range of questions that flow from having a perspective of race, class, and gender. The essay looks briefly at the idea of historical memory, using a discussion of oral history to consider ways in which social memory of Empire is continually affected and transformed by cultural forms in the present. Finally, by taking apart various constructions of white femininity in two narratives of cultural conflict, the essay demonstrates how a historically informed and "antiracist" feminism might intervene differently in debates about contemporary politics.
The past 10 years have seen an increase in legislation pertaining to marriage migration in Europe. Such attention betrays various concerns and anxieties that intersect not only with issues of risk management, rights, and citizenship, but also with less tangible dimensions such as emotions, which become embedded in legal as well as in surveillance practices. Emotions such as love are integral to the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculation, and tactics that Foucault identified as part of governmental processes; the latter should not necessarily be equated with (and limited to) rationalized technocratic processes detached from emotional components. Technologies of love are central to the governmentality of marriage migration; as modes of subjectification and governing practice, they connect intimacy with citizenship. More than the manifestation of the rationalization of a specific emotion, technologies of love allow for an exploration of what an engagement with emotions such as love does to governmentality. Illustrations of the “attachment requirement” in Denmark, and the case of “Catgate” in Great Britain, show that technologies of love play a significant role in stirring and disciplining specific migration flows (what kind of marriage migrants the state welcomes or keeps at bay), but also in challenging, even if inadvertently, those policies and practices designed to gauge “true” relationships.
This article takes the naturalisation process as a vantage point to consider how citizenship constitutes a site of emotional investment not only on the part of applicants and ‘new’ citizens but also on the part of the state. The premise of this article is that naturalisation is more than solely the admission of foreigners to the position and rights of citizenship, and it approaches naturalisation as a state practice that needs to be understood within a politics of desire. The article asks three questions: what makes naturalisation a thinkable and desirable means of acquiring citizenship? Second, what do practices of naturalisation tell us about ‘the state's attachment to particular embodiments of desirable citizens’ (S. Somerville, 200548.
Somerville, S., 2005. Notes toward a queer history of naturalization. American quarterly, 7 (3), 659–675.[CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]View all references, Notes toward a queer history of naturalization. American quarterly, 7 (3), 661)? Third, ‘who may desire the state's desire’ (J. Butler, 2002. Is kinship always already heterosexual? Differences, 13 (1), 22)? Using policy documents and auto-ethnographic material, the article examines practices through which the state selects its own objects of desire and produces them as citizens, while it also produces itself as desirable. The article concludes that naturalisation distinguishes desirable from less desirable citizens through fantasies of English proficiency and birthright citizenship. In addition, the staged performance of the citizenship ceremony assures the state of its desirability by subsuming ‘as if’ enactments of citizenship.
This article examines the relationship between `mass media' representations of love and a model of love which we commonly view as more `realistic', that is more compatible with sharing everyday life with another. The article offers three arguments: (1) the postmodern claim that everyday life in general and romantic love in particular have been colonized by the empty `simulacrum' of mass media resonates with a long-standing Western discussion of the problematic relation between fiction and reality; (2) the relation between mass media representations of love and realistic models of love is reconceptualized as deriving from two conflicting bodily experiences of love; (3) postmodern love is defined as being characterized by a particular crisis of representation in which signifiers and signifieds of love do not match.
Is the concept of 'whiteness' applicable to the Netherlands (and - mainland Europe)? This article explores cultural expressions of white normativity and possible interpretations of the notion of whiteness as identity. For that purpose we combine two data sets: first white and/or Dutch normativity in political and public life and in the media are discussed, and, second, everyday experiences of racial and/or national identity among whites. The former includes MA theses on newspaper coverage of the Dutch multicultural society. The latter draws from student essays about the meaning of whiteness in their life histories. Dutch students avoid references to 'skin colour' and to 'whiteness' because of the 'racial' connotations. Inequalities are not denied but recognized and verbalized more readily in terms of ethnicity, citizenship, national identity or western superiority and civilization.
Despite their insistence on the common European colonial roots of whiteness, critical whiteness studies tend to focus on Anglophone contexts. This article explores the theoretical and analytical potential of deploying the concept of whiteness in other spaces, namely French and Swiss cyberspaces. First, we define whiteness as a "white vanguard narrative" which generates a discursive border distinguishing subjectivities or practices, and which changes across time and space. Second, we explore the discursive operation of whiteness in two cyber-debates hosted by a French blog and a Swiss blog. This comparative micropolitical analysis of discursive spaces—marked by very different colonial legacies—reveals the fluidity and heterogeneity of the marking processes through which racialized power relations continue to be disseminated in postcolonial Europe.
This article explores some of the ways in which UK Government policies inscribe tensions between tolerance of cultural difference, on the one hand, and an attempt to instil a regime of normalizing discipline, on the other. It argues that these tensions are expressed in the ambiguity of the figure of 'the immigrant woman', who simultaneously embodies the possibility of assimilation into and destabilization of the nation and the national. This is because this figure has come to occupy a significant place both in the struggles over the meaning of cultural plurality and as the subject around whom the characterization of the nation as tolerant and modern is invested.
This article presents a contextualised, interpretative analysis of the debate about the word neger that took place in the Norwegian mass media during the winter of 2000–01. The aim is to contribute ethnographic material and analytical perspectives to the comparative analysis of the current reinforcement of ethnic national boundaries as a reaction to extra-European immigrants to Europe and the accompanying normalisation of racial discourses. On the one hand, Norwegian mainstream reaction draws on the same sort of racial ideas and boundary-constructing practices found in other European countries. On the other, the contributors to the debate drew on a complex set of discourses and exhibited particular points of emphasis. For many majority Norwegians a specific collective memory and a corresponding national self-image are currently at stake. In this self-image Norway is always outside imperialism and colonialism, and innocent in relation to the colonial legacy. The analytical argument of the paper is that when people construct racial boundaries, they draw on a mixture of discourses, rooted in different social realms, with different histories and degrees of legitimacy. The self-evidence of racial categories derives from the legitimacy of well established historical themes, concepts and lines of conflict. As the debate about the word neger unfolded over time, majority hegemony was challenged, rearticulated and reconfirmed.
This collection of articles on Swiss national identity is impressive on several counts. First, it gathers together the finest scholars of Swiss nationalism of the new generation: a cohort steeped in the lexicon of theories of nationalism and multiculturalism. Second, it displays impressive rigour: the pieces are so analytical and restrained that one can divine neither whether the authors are Swiss or not, nor whether they are moved by its spirit. Finally, all of these works step in and out of the Swiss case with ease to draw similarities with, and differences from, other countries. They are impressively broad-gauged, moving seamlessly from early modern history to political theory, international relations to social-network analysis. All the while, their analytical frame shifts incessantly from state to canton to commune and back.
Issues regarding race and racial identity as well as questions pertaining to property rights and ownership have been prominent in much public discourse in the United States. In this article, Professor Harris contributes to this discussion by positing that racial identity and property are deeply interrelated concepts. Professor Harris examines how whiteness, initially constructed as a form of racial identity, evolved into a form of property, historically and presently acknowledged and protected in American law. Professor Harris traces the origins of whiteness as property in the parallel systems of domination of Black and Native American peoples out of which were created racially contingent forms of property and property rights. Following the period of slavery and conquest, whiteness became the basis of racialized privilege - a type of status in which white racial identity provided the basis for allocating societal benefits both private and public in character. These arrangements were ratified and legitimated in law as a type of status property. Even as legal segregation was overturned, whiteness as property continued to serve as a barrier to effective change as the system of racial classification operated to protect entrenched power. Next, Professor Harris examines how the concept of whiteness as property persists in current perceptions of racial identity, in the law's misperception of group identity and in the Court's reasoning and decisions in the arena of affirmative action. Professor Harris concludes by arguing that distortions in affirmative action doctrine can only be addressed by confronting and exposing the property interest in whiteness and by acknowledging the distributive justification and function of affirmative action as central to that task.
Intersectionality has attracted substantial scholarly attention in the 1990s. Rather than examining gender, race, class, and nation as distinctive social hierarchies, intersectionality examines how they mutually construct one another. 1 explore how the traditional family ideal functions as a privileged exemplar of intersectionality in the United States. Each of its six dimensions demonstrates specific connections between family as a gendered system of social organization, racial ideas and practices, and constructions of U.S. national identity.
In this article, I examine the ways in which silences around race contribute to the maintenance and legitimation of Whiteness. Drawing on ethnographic data from two demographically different schools, I highlight patterns of racially coded language, teacher silence, silencing students’ race talk, and the conflating of culture with race, equality with equity, and difference with deficit. These silences and acts of silencing create and perpetuate an educational culture in which inequities are ignored, the status quo is maintained, and Whiteness is both protected and entrenched.[silence, Whiteness, race]
The academic declining significance of race did not begin with William Julius Wilson’s work in the late 1970s. In this paper, we take a broad look at the methods mainstream sociologists have used to validate Whites’ racial common sense about racial matters in the post-civil rights era. Our general goal is to succinctly examine the major tactics sociologists have used to minimize the significance of racism in explaining minorities’ plight. Specifically, we survey how (1) most work on racial attitudes creates a mythical view on Whites’ racial attitudes, (2) the various demographic indices used to asses post-civil rights’ racial matters miss how race affects minorities today, (3) perspectives on the culture of minorities are based on ethnocentric perspectives that tend to hide the centrality of racially based networks, and (4) the way most sociologists report their results distorts the significance of racial stratification. We conclude by suggesting that work on racial matters will need to be revamped if it is going to have any practical use for those at the “bottom of the well.”
Après le tournant généralement invoqué, dans les politiques d’immigration ouest-européennes, pour décrire les restrictions apportées à l’accès au territoire et à la procédure d’asile au début des années 1990 (à la suite de la chute des régimes communistes notamment), la plupart des observateurs notent une nouvelle étape dans le durcissement des politiques migratoires occidentales après les attentats du 11 septembre 2001 aux États-Unis. Ce nouveau tournant est généralement associé à l’activati...
Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1988. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 266-276).
Experiencing Race in the Alps: From Racial History to Self Made Race Construction’, unpublished paper presented at conference ‘Ethnographic Inquiries into Contemporary Configurations of Racism
- Viviane Cretton
Subversive Love”: How do Municipal Registrar Officers Distinguish Real from Fake Marriages in Brussels?’, unpublished paper presented at conference ‘Intimate Migration
- Maïté Maskens