Recruited into Danishness? Affective autoethnography of passing as Danish

Abstract

This article critically examines emergence of Danishness via an autoethnography of passing as Danish. Drawing on feminist scholarship, the author conceptualizes passing as an embodied, affective and discursive relation; simultaneously spontaneous and laboured, fleeting and solid, emergent and constrained by past becomings. Once positioned as a young female uneducated Eastern European love migrant in Denmark, the author now usually passes as an accomplished migrant. However, conducting fieldwork in Copenhagen, she found herself passing as Danish. These shifting positionings from (un)wanted migrant to un(re)marked majority comprised a unique boundary position for tracing Danishness. Her body and Danishness became aligned, while other bodies were ejected. These fluctuating (dis)alignments highlighted potentialities of proximity to Danishness. Using autoethnography and memory work, the author develops an affective methodology. The encounters’ embodied affective circulations are simultaneously collective capacities illuminating material-discursive-affective contours of Danishness. The article makes a theoretical and methodological contribution to feminist-inspired research on race, whiteness, embodiment and affect in Nordic and European contexts.

Swedish surnames, British accents: passing among post-Soviet migrants in Helsinki

“…For example, Wara and Munkejord (2018) suggest that migrant Russian women's attempts to "blend in" in Norway by no longer wearing make-up or skirts are a form of bodily (re)orientation to avoid feeling stigmatized and out of place. Linda Lapiņa's (2018) autobiographical account of passing as a Dane captures the position of Eastern European migrants, who labour on their bodies to become whiter and more Western, even though their bodies already have the potential for conditional passing that non-white Others do not have. This research also suggests that, for some, the ability to pass as white is contingent on maintaining other bodies as "immigrant", "diverse" or "exotic".…”

Sexual Harassment or Volunteer Work?

“…Researcher positionality matters for which spaces, informants and perspectives are accessible and accessed, and which information becomes empirical data. Situated knowledges emerge from places and/as bodies (Lapiņa, 2018). Consequently, this article traces whiteness by examining embodied, emplaced encounters in two apartments in Copenhagen, discussing my trajectory between them to address the accumulation of whiteness as affordance.…”

“…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.…”

“…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.…”

“…I draw on the emerging field of research that explores the interplay of affect and intersecting markers of difference, with a particular focus on whiteness (Ahlstedt, 2015;Myong and Bissenbakker, 2016;Loftsdóttir, 2017) and its role in delineating Europe and European bodies (Keinz and Lewicki, 2019). While I could have foregrounded other markers, such as femininity, in my analysis of the two encounters, it is whiteness, modulated by other intersecting markers of difference, including gender, class, language and sexuality, that affords my passing as Danish (Lapiņa, 2018). Earlier research discusses the pivotal role of whiteness for how bodies come to occupy majoritized positions as Danish (Andreassen and Ahmed-Andresen, 2014), Swedish (Koobak and Thapar-Björkert, 2012) or belonging in Europe (Kennedy-Macfoy and Lewis, 2014).…”