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Interdisciplinary in perspective, this book explores contemporary struggles around 'identity politics' in Europe, offering a unique glimpse into contemporary tensions and paradoxes surrounding identities, belonging, exclusions and their deep-seated gendered, colonial and racist legacies. With a particular focus on the Nordic region, it provides insights into the ways in which people who find themselves in minoritized positions struggle against multiple injustices. Through a series of case studies documenting counter-struggles against racist, colonialist, sexist forms of discrimination and exclusion, Transforming Identities in Contemporary Europe asks how the paradigm and politics of the welfare state operate to discriminate against the most marginalized, by instating a naturalized hierarchy of human-ness. As such it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in race, gender, colonialism and postcolonialism, citizenship and belonging.
The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Transforming Identities in Contemporary Nordic Europe
2. ‘Welcome to the Most Privileged, Most Xenophobic Country in the World!’ Affective Figurations of Whiteness in the Making of a Danish Citizen
3. Exploring Challenges and Potentialities for Antiracist Education in the Nordic Countries: Cases from Finland and Denmark
4. Autobiographical Flesh: Understanding Western Notions of Humanity through Una Marson (1905-1965)
5. ‘It’s Our Bodies, We are the Experts!’: Countering Pathologisation, Gate-keeping and Danish Exceptionalism through Collective Trans Knowledges, Coalition-building and Insistence
6. Gayness between Nation Builders and Money Makers: From Ideology to New Essentialism
7. (Not) in the Name of Gender Equality: Migrant Women, Empowerment, Employment, and Minority Women’s Organizations
8. ‘Home is where the cat is’: The Here-There of Queer (un)belonging
9. The Poetics of Climate Change and Politics of Pain: Sámi Social Media Activist Critique of the Swedish State
10. Varieties of Exceptionalism: A Conversation
About the author
Elisabeth L. Engebretsen is a Professor in the Centre for Gender Studies, University of Stavanger, Norway. She is the author of Queer Women in Urban China: An Ethnography (2014).
Mia Liinason is Professor of Gender Studies in the Department of Cultural Sciences, Lund, Sweden. She is the author of Feminist and LGBTI+ Activism across Russia, Turkey and Scandinavia. Transnationalizing Spaces of Resistance (with Selin Cagatay and Olga Sasunkevich, 2022) and Equality Struggles: Women’s Movements, Neoliberal Markets and State Political Agendas in Scandinavia (2018).
Summary
With a focus on the Nordic region, this book explores contemporary struggles around ‘identity politics’ in Europe, considering various forms racist, colonialist, sexist forms of discrimination and exclusion, and the ways in which the marginalized struggle against gendered, colonial and racist legacies.
