“Eastern European”, Yes, but How? Autoethnographic Accounts of Differentiated Whiteness

Abstract

This article examines how intersecting markers of difference shape differentiated whiteness. In so doing, it contributes to scholarship on whiteness and racialisation. The authors draw on autoethnographic vignettes from fieldwork in Copenhagen to analyse the emergence of similar-yet-divergent researcher and migrant positionalities. Both authors are female researchers from Baltic countries living in Denmark and often perceived as Eastern Europeans-as not-quite-white and as "Europe's 'internal others'". Both of us conducted fieldwork in the same district of Copenhagen. Mantė carried out research on friendships among teenagersn a racially diverse public school and in youth activity clubs. Linda explored social inclusion and exclusion in contested urban spaces. However, our researcher positionalities played out differently. We analyse how ambiguous, contested and relational notions of (Eastern) Europeanness, together with intersecting racialised, classed and gendered tropes of Eastern European migration, made themselves manifest in our positionings and movements. Through an intersectional analysis of Eastern European racialised positionalities, our discussion of differentiated whiteness highlights how whiteness is intersectionally constituted, multiple and mouldable. These findings serve to nuance research on hegemonic whiteness in the Nordic setting.

Sexual Harassment or Volunteer Work?

“…Furthermore, my analysis shows how whiteness materializes as/in mobility to occupy and move across spaces, unpacking the role of accumulated experiences and sense of (im)possibility related to bodies' past, present and future movements. The article contributes to research on how readings of embodied, intersecting markers that come together to denote racialized subject positions are relational, spatialized and affectively experienced (Berg, 2008;Slocum, 2008;Hvenegård-Lassen and Staunaes, 2015;Lapiņa and Vertelytė, 2020).…”

“…This motivated me to adopt an autoethnographic lens. Like memory work, autoethnography is increasingly used to examine intersecting markers of difference, in particular, racialisation and whiteness (Ahlstedt, 2015;Mainsah and Prøitz, 2015;Lapiņa, 2018;Liinason, 2018;Lapiņa and Vertelytė, 2020). Drawing on autoethnography and memory work enables exploring how race is negotiated and experienced in everyday life (Kennedy-Macfoy and Nielsen, 2012; Andreassen and Ahmed-Andresen, 2014; Andreassen and Myong, 2017), focusing on affective, embodied labour in specific social and spatial locations in order to address the broader political configurations (Hinton, 2014) of differentiated whiteness and Europeanness.…”

“…Yet precisely because of this and their placing as norm they do not seem to be represented to themselves as whites but as people who are variously gendered, classed, sexualized and abled'. My analyses of intersectional, differentiated and malleable whiteness (see also Lapiņa, 2018;Lapiņa & Vertelytė, 2020) contribute to articulating whiteness in the context of East to West migration in Europe (Fox, Moroşanu and Szilassy, 2015;Krivonos, 2019). In a recent study of how Russian female migrants in Northern Norway modify their appearance to 'fit in' (Wara and Munkejord, 2018), the authors examine these gendered and sexualized practices as informants' attempts at 'becoming Norwegianized'.…”

“…Using memory work and autoethnography, I explore how affective experiences of intersecting markers of difference accumulate into affordances of differentiated whiteness. I draw on insights from critical whiteness studies, challenging binaries of white and non-white and conceptualising whiteness as fluid, relational and performative (Dyer, 1997;Meer, 2018), as operating through potentialities, rather than shades or hierarchies (Lapiņa, 2018;Lapiņa and Vertelytė, 2020). This article contributes to earlier research by proposing to examine how whiteness works as an affordance.…”

Comparing the racialization of Central-East European migrants in Japan and the UK

“…In post-Brexit Britain, meanwhile, "orientalist hierarchies" have placed Poles, who represent the largest CEE community in the UK, in a liminal position: "more 'western' than Commonwealth or Middle Eastern populations, but not as western as other, nearer, Europeans" (Botterill & Burrell, 2019, p. 25). At the same time, such experiences of "ambiguous whiteness" (Lapiņa & Vertelyte, 2020) do not exempt CEE migrants from reproducing racialized hierarchies and exclusions in the pursuit of attaining full European whiteness (Drnovšek Zorko, 2019;Krivonos, 2020;Tudor, 2017).…”