722175

research-article2017
EJW0010.1177/1350506817722175European Journal of Women’s StudiesLapiņ a

Article EJ WS
European Journal of Women’s Studies
2018, Vol. 25(1) 56­–70
Recruited into Danishness? © The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permissions:
Affective autoethnography sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1350506817722175
https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506817722175
of passing as Danish journals.sagepub.com/home/ejw

Linda Lapiņa
Roskilde University, Denmark

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.

Keywords
Affect, autoethnography, Danishness, embodiment, intersectionality, passing, race/
whiteness

‘Diverse’ or un(re)marked: The author’s changing

positionings
I moved from Latvia to Denmark in July 2004, at 18, together with my Danish partner. I had
previously visited Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen. My teenage gendered insecurities and

Corresponding author:
Linda Lapiņa, Department for Communication and Humanities, Roskilde University, Universitetsvej 1,
Postbox 260, 4000 Roskilde, Denmark.
Email: llapina@ruc.dk
Lapiņa 57

sense of alienation were exacerbated in the strikingly clean, bright and flawless spaces of the
Nordic capitals. I remember brightly lit stations, shops and cafes smelling of citrus detergent
or freshly ground coffee. The ideas about East, West and true Europeanness that permeated
the sociopolitical spaces of my childhood trailed me as I walked the streets, hoping to pass
unnoticed.
My becoming Eastern European was consummated after I moved to Copenhagen. I
learnt what people thought of those of ‘us’ from Eastern Europe – specifically me, a
young female who had left Latvia fresh out of high school, all for the love of a Dane. I
had even got married! What had felt like a romantic and rebellious act was redefined in
Copenhagen as a conservative, calculated, class-motivated and gendered manoeuvre to
benefit from Danish social welfare. ‘Love migration’ intensified the gendering and sexu-
alization of young Eastern Europeanness. Moreover, the Danish media featured stories
about ‘Eastern workers’, reflecting fears of mass labour migration after the European
Union’s eastward expansion in May 2004. These fears also shaped my body as a young,
female, uneducated, Eastern European love migrant.
My position has shifted since 2004. I am now older, educated, employable, fluent in
Danish. Danish people compliment me on these achievements, contrasting me to appar-
ently less integrated foreigners. I have become an accomplished migrant. However, I retain
a ‘diverse’ profile, particularly in Danish-only social spaces – for instance, certain of my
habits are attributed to my Latvianness or foreignness. Therefore, it is remarkable that I
consistently passed as Danish when conducting fieldwork in Copenhagen between 2014
and 2016. The fieldwork was part of my PhD research examining the emergence of bodies,
spaces and affects, intersectional markers, social inclusion and exclusion in Nordvest, a
‘diverse’ and gentrifying district in Copenhagen. Thus, this article relates to the research
project’s overall focus on embodied, situated minoritization and majoritization processes.
Nordvest is represented as multicultural and diverse, lumping together racialized,
sub-middle-class bodies and spaces (Lapiņa, 2016). Eastern Europeans, such as ‘Polish
neighbours’, are included in this diversity, although not as emblematic as ‘Muslims’ or
‘Arabs’. Yet in my fieldwork, I was never positioned or articulated as diverse. No one
asked me, ‘Where are you from?’ (a question I often get outside fieldwork situations). I
‘came from’ Roskilde University and lived in Frederiksberg, an upper-middle-class, con-
servative district. I became un(re)marked as a(n Eastern European) migrant – and ‘nor-
mal’ in a way that is often impossible for people of colour living in Denmark to attain
(Andreassen and Ahmed-Andresen, 2014).
This article explores the modalities of my passing as Danish, drawing on autoethnog-
raphy and memory work. I trace Danishness as emergent in embodied, affective encoun-
ters, analysing the role of racial, classed and gendered markers and other signs on the
body. While this analysis springs out of my experiences in an urban Danish context, it
speaks more generally of material-discursive-affective enactments of Danishness and
intersectionally mediated potentialities of proximity to Danishness.
In the following section, I situate this article with regard to Danish and Nordic femi-
nist-inspired research on race/whiteness and intersectionality. I then conceptualize pass-
ing, with a focus on embodiment, affect and tensions between contingency and continuity.
I also explain how I use autoethnography, supported by memory work, as an affective
methodology. I proceed to analyse my passing as Danish in two fieldwork encounters: an
58 European Journal of Women’s Studies 25(1)

interview with a white, middle-class, majority-Danish couple and a chance meeting in

the municipal library in Nordvest, where I was hailed to perform as Danish by a person
of colour. Finally, I highlight the contributions this article makes to feminist analyses of
race/whiteness, embodiment, affect and intersectionality in the Nordic context.

An autoethnography of passing as Danish

Nordic whiteness and Danishness, examined from its boundaries
This article discusses embodied, affective and discursive Danishness emerging in every-
day interactions and the related dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Passing was origi-
nally invoked to address racialized positionings, for example passing as white (Ahmed,
1999; Butler, 1997; Larsen, 1994). A growing body of research addresses the unmarked-
ness and hegemony of Nordic whiteness (see, for example, Andreassen and Ahmed-
Andresen, 2014; Andreassen and Vitus, 2015; Hübinette and Lundström, 2014; Myong,
2009; Svendsen, 2013). It has been argued that the hegemonic performativity of Nordic
whiteness coincides with and facilitates a belief that Nordic societies are exceptionalist
and inherently anti-racist (Hübinette and Lundström, 2014; Mainsah and Prøitz, 2015).
This highlights how the invisibility of whiteness in the West has increased potency as a
technology of domination in establishing racialized hierarchies (McDowell, 2009).
Consequently, voices addressing race and racism in the Nordic region have often been
silenced (Myong and Andreassen, forthcoming). This article contributes to evolving con-
versations on race and whiteness in Nordic countries, emphasizing embodiment and affect
(Andreassen and Vitus, 2015; Hvenegård-Lassen and Staunæs, 2015; Svendsen, 2013).
Nordic feminist-inspired scholars have analysed race and whiteness by drawing on
autoethnography and memory work (Ahlstedt, 2015; Andreassen and Ahmed-Andresen,
2014; Berg, 2008; Koobak and Thapar-Björkert, 2012; kennedy-macfoy and Nielsen,
2012; Mainsah and Prøitz, 2015; Myong and Andreassen, forthcoming). This article con-
tributes to this research by examining Nordic whiteness and Danishness from a position
on the boundary. Taking as points of departure both experiences of passing as various
migrant figures and becoming un(re)marked as Danish highlights the simultaneous con-
tingency and historicity of passing. My body has journeyed and laboured to become a
whiter, more Western body; at the same time, it carried the potentiality of conditional
passing as Danish even when enacted as a young, female, Eastern European love migrant.
This illuminates the emergence of race and whiteness as simultaneously always-already
there and re-established and negotiated from context to context (Hvenegård-Lassen and
Staunæs, 2015; Price, 2010). Explored through autoethnography and memory work, my
shifting alignments with Danishness highlight the intersectional relationality of white-
ness: a body takes place and shape as Danish, disrupting the notion of Danishness as an
either-or category.

Passing as Danish: A conceptualization

I describe passing as a discursive, embodied-material and affective process. Passing is
negotiated discursively, for instance by drawing on racialized figures of ‘immigrants’
Lapiņa 59

and ‘diversity’. Second, passing is embodied and emplaced, occurring as bodies resonate
with and enact each other, becoming aligned and set apart. Third, passing is experienced
affectively while simultaneously constraining possibilities for movement. Before
unpacking each of these assertions, I briefly address Danishness.
By Danishness I denote an un(re)marked majority positioning emerging in a given
context and point in time. In addition, I evoke the notion of the potentialities of prox-
imity to Danishness to highlight how alignments with Danishness are differently with
or within the reach of certain bodies. Danishness is not primarily a matter of ethnicity
or nationality – it arises through an interplay of intersecting markers (Andreassen and
Ahmed-Andresen, 2014).
Like ‘potentialities’, ‘passing’ conveys the performative, relational, ongoing emer-
gence of subject positions, bodies and boundaries (Doshi, 2017; Hvenegård- Lassen and
Staunæs, 2015; Kern, 2012; Parker, 2016). As Judith Butler (1988, 1993) has noted
regarding gender performativity, there is no ‘doer behind the deed’ in passing. It is not a
deliberate decision to pass or allow someone to pass as Danish. Rather, Danishness con-
strains and is enacted in the space between me and the research participants; it envelops
us or sets us apart, bodies recognizing and performing each other as located in particular
ways with regard to race, class, gender, sexuality and other intersecting processes.
Passing arises in the moment but is simultaneously constrained by past histories and
becomings (Ahmed, 2006, 2007).
Passing is negotiated discursively, for instance by referring to diverse others or to
one’s own majority privilege or tolerance (as a white Danish ‘host’ in the position to
extend hospitality to others). While the figure of the other emerges in the moment, it
draws on historically contingent racialized notions of the stranger or immigrant (Ahmed,
2000, 2012).
Second, passing is embodied – it ‘produces on the skin, through the gesture, the move,
the gait’ (Butler, 1993: 317) as bodies are shaped in traversing social spaces. On the one
hand, passing arises through ideas of difference and value that stick to bodily markers
(Ahmed, 2004b). On the other hand, it brings these signs on the body into existence, and
reifies them, by assigning meaning to them. Thus, bodies that take part and take place in
passing encounters are both material and discursive, existent and emerging. Subject posi-
tions arise from enactments of bodies and their labour in space, and these positionings in
turn mould and constrain the bodies that pass through them (Braidotti, 2011). Bodies
emerge and are continuously enacted through encounters, affecting and being affected
(Anderson, 2006; Blackman, 2012).
Affective circulations in instances of passing form the cornerstone of my analysis.
Passing is first and foremost felt and experienced, as it constrains bodies’ movement and
conduct in space and the shapes that bodies take. Affect, ‘simultaneously [a] … bodily
capacity and collective condition’ (Anderson, 2014: 17), constrains alignments of bod-
ies. Affective circulations trace entanglements and mutual constitution of bodies in spe-
cific encounters and branch out to bodies and collectivities elsewhere.
My conditional passing as Danish constitutes a location from which particular knowl-
edges arise and are articulated (Haraway, 1988; Rose, 1997). Feminist intersectional
scholarship recognizes the researcher as a situated, partial, embodied, knowledge-pro-
ducing subject (Doshi, 2017; Faria and Mollett, 2016; Kern, 2012, 2015; Parker, 2016;
60 European Journal of Women’s Studies 25(1)

Peake, 2015; Schurr and Abdo, 2016). However, even within this scholarship, researcher
positionings sometimes figure as listed categories (e.g. women, white, privileged). In
contrast, I engage in a detailed analysis of my changing positionalities. Partial, situated
knowledges are grounded in places and/as bodies. As emotions arising in fieldwork
encounters reflect ‘scholars’ entanglements in broader political geographies of commu-
nities, norms and institutions’ (Catungal, 2017: 289), through its very partiality and situ-
atedness, my passing as Danish offers a broader perspective on the emergence of
Danishness and the exclusions and inclusions that it produces.

Towards affective methodology: Autoethnography and memory work

While autoethnographic accounts of fieldwork encounters comprise the main empirical
material for this article, memory work contextualizes my passing as Danish against a
backdrop of various migrant positionings. Memory work is conducted by writing down
memories of events related to the research topic (Berg, 2008). For this article, I wrote of
moments of saturation that occurred when I was beginning to perceive myself as Eastern
European shortly after arriving in Denmark, and of moments when I became positioned
as a more privileged, whiter migrant. Memory work has been traditionally used in femi-
nist analyses of gender, however it can also be applied to race and racialization (ken-
nedy-macfoy and Nielsen, 2012; Myong and Andreassen, forthcoming). Memory work
destabilizes un(re)marked majority positions by tracing how intersectionally mediated
positionings emerge through everyday interactions and social processes (Berg, 2008;
kennedy-macfoy and Nielsen, 2012).
Memory work grounds my analysis of the two autoethnographic vignettes in this
article. Autoethnography is increasingly used by feminist-inspired researchers to exam-
ine race/whiteness, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and other intersecting markers in the
Nordic context (Ahlstedt, 2015; Andreassen and Ahmed-Andresen, 2014; Mainsah and
Prøitz, 2015). Like memory work, autoethnography facilitates reflexivity about
researcher positionings and the politics of location (Rich, 1984) in the production of
partial, situated knowledges (Humphreys, 2005; Lapadat et al., 2010). Autoethnography
enables one to trace the emergence of racialized bodies (Fisher, 2015) by analysing the
affective circulations of fieldwork encounters. These autoethnographic vignettes relate
moments of saturation, condensation and heightened intensity (Militz and Schurr, 2016)
with regard to my passing as Danish, in contrast to passing as an (Eastern European)
migrant.
Using affective methodology (Ahlstedt, 2015; Lapiņa, 2017; Militz and Schurr, 2016),
I can trace passing as Danish as a material-discursive-affective process, through readings
of emotional circulations and embodiment. Feminist scholars have highlighted the feel-
ings and emotional entanglements between the researcher and the researched as co-con-
structive of the research endeavour (Ahlstedt, 2015; Billo and Hiemstra, 2013; Bondi,
2005, 2014; Lobo, 2010; Militz and Schurr, 2016). However, my main motivation for
developing an affective methodology is to emphasize the key role of embodied emotions
in passing. Letting affective circulations resonate in the text and with the reader high-
lights how emotions outline collective bodies and conditions (Ahmed, 2004b; Anderson,
2014), implicating in relations that produce social markings, inclusion and exclusion.
Lapiņa 61

Alignments with Danishness emerge differently in the two vignettes. When I inter-
viewed a Danish couple, my passing unfolded through the alignment of our bodies in a
shared space and their articulations of othered migrants as ‘diverse’ outsiders to
Danishness. In the second encounter, my Danishness was enacted when I was hailed to
do things that (only) a Danish body can do. These encounters convey multiple modula-
tions of passing: friction and smoothness, rupture and coming-together, alignment and
dispersion, proximity and distance.

Loving ‘diversity’ – together, from the outside

I was interviewing Karen and Jens, a couple in their forties, on a weekday after their
children’s bedtime. It was a warm May evening, daylight still entering their apartment on
the second floor of a detached house on a quiet street. The table was set with tea, coffee,
chocolates and liquorice candy. I felt like a friend whose visit they had looked forward
to. This was going to be a cosy evening.
I immediately felt we were aligned, or like one another, likeness in this sense being
‘an effect of the proximity of shared residence’ (Ahmed, 2007: 155), of coffee and snacks
on the table, and of our mutual understanding and expectation of liking each other and
having a good time. We had met briefly before, when their neighbour introduced us.
They knew my appearance and academic affiliation; perhaps they read me as a younger,
‘hip’ person, and creative like them. We seemed to occupy a shared positionality
(Mullings, 1999: 341) in terms of class, whiteness, creativity and open-mindedness. It
seemed that they had chosen to discount my accent and the lines of differentiation it
could establish.
The interview focused on Karen and Jens’s experiences of living in Nordvest and their
everyday interactions with other residents. The expectation of enjoyment and mutual
sympathy was upheld throughout the conversation, although I felt uncomfortable at
times. This happened, for instance, when Karen and Jens expressed anger and frustration
about oppressed ‘immigrant women’ ‘giving birth to children, not at all integrated,
although they are only 21 and have lived here all of their lives’. They described these
children as growing up understimulated, in closed, deprived ‘universes’ of immigrant
families. At the same time, Karen and Jens described ‘immigrants’ as colourful and ‘fan-
tastic’, praising strange spices in ‘immigrant shops’ and their unintelligible ‘shouting’ on
the streets. Shifting in my chair, I still felt aligned with them, invited as I was into a privi-
leged, intimate space from which I did not want to eject myself.
Karen and Jens also told me that their son’s racialized, deprived schoolmates were
always welcome in their home. They were proud of their son’s kindness towards homeless
people and beer drinkers on public benches. Throughout the interview, I felt we were mir-
roring each other as decent, tolerant people. I was supposed to recognize and value major-
ity acceptance of social and cultural difference and ‘diversity’, whether it manifested as
enthusiasm about exotic people, smells and sounds or care for the disadvantaged. Their
(our) ‘care for the other’ could be interpreted as an emotional, symbolic and material
investment in a sense of neighbourhood belonging and an enactment of a progressive,
tolerant, benevolent majority (white, middle-class, Danish) position built upon racialized,
gendered and classed logics (Ahmed, 2007; Fortier, 2010; Hage, 1998; Lobo, 2010).
62 European Journal of Women’s Studies 25(1)

Karen and Jens’s extension to me of a cosy, tolerant and caring Danishness constituted
an affectively entangled position. I felt relief and gratitude and shame and guilt, as I was
being allowed to pass at the cost of others being ejected as ‘diverse’. My recruitment into
an unmarked majority positionality felt generous and kind, even as, and because, it
depended on exclusion of others. I felt safe and welcome. I remember a visceral bodily
feeling of spilling out into my surroundings, enveloped and consumed by the comfortable
Danishness of the space, the minimalistic furniture, the light in the room. Simultaneously,
I felt stuck in this comfortable majority alignment, glued to the chair I was sitting in.
Our entanglement was intensified by power relations implicit in our mutual recogni-
tion. On the one hand, in addition to being majoritized like Karen and Jens, I could evalu-
ate their stances on ‘diversity’ from a researcher position; I could like them on the basis
of their opinions. On the other hand, Karen and Jens had power over me, a power estab-
lished through encounters where I had been marked and assessed as a migrant by people
like them.
The articulation of ‘diverse Others’ and my being recruited into majority Danishness
resonates with already established discursive-affective-embodied tropes that signal poten-
tialities of proximity to Danishness. While other informants marked Eastern Europeans
(Polish neighbours; Lithuanian construction workers) as ‘diverse’ (without articulating
me as such), for Karen and Jens, ‘diverse others’ were racialized Muslim ‘immigrants’. It
is telling just how few references it took to activate these images of otherness. When
Karen and Jens related their sensory enjoyment of ‘immigrant shops’ and made reference
to deprived women and children, they echoed affective, discursive images that were
already racialized, classed and gendered in particular ways. For example, all 11 times
‘women’ were mentioned in the interview, the reference was to racialized, ethnic minority
women. Jens and Karen did not use words like ‘Muslim’, ‘Arabic’ or ‘Middle East’; burka
was mentioned twice and headscarf once, in passing. But it was still very clear whom and
what places they were evoking when they spoke of ‘immigrants’.
That Jens and Karen could communicate things to me without saying them signifies
different bodies’ potentialities of proximity to Danishness – of becoming ‘alike’, liked
and embraced. Knowing who Karen and Jens were referring to when they mentioned
‘immigrants’ or (oppressed) ‘women’, recognizing and presumably sharing their affects,
located me within a white gaze that constructs sameness and difference while positioning
itself as unmarked and normal (Kobayashi and Peake, 2000: 397). Middle-class white-
ness becomes conflated with Danishness as it evokes the ‘disadvantaged’ ‘immigrant’ of
colour as already ‘diverse’. This figure’s availability to be othered enabled me to pass as
Danish, or at least as less ‘diverse’. I became recruited into Karen and Jens’s white gaze
and white care when they read me as a young, white, female, resourceful, progressive,
open-minded, middle-class, likeable and decent researcher and person.
My passage through space and time in this encounter was enabled by the ejection of
other bodies from Danishness. My body had become increasingly smooth with each
passing encounter, more likely to pass again. It had learned how to conduct itself in ways
that signalled entitlement. This highlights how passing is made by, and makes, material-
discursive-affective boundaries and emplacements over time. Embodied markers and
affective circulations morph into constellations of (un)Danishness, constraining bodies’
trajectories to differentiated futures.
Lapiņa 63

‘Could you talk to the librarian in the Danish language?’

During my fieldwork, I often spent time in the public library in Nordvest. The library is
also a cultural and community centre, featuring a workshop, creative spaces, exhibitions,
movie screenings, local organizers’ meetings, homework cafes, activities for parents and
children and a cafe run by an organization of people with developmental disabilities.
Mostly I would sit behind my laptop, aware of my surroundings while I worked. The
library was a break from the field, in the field.
One afternoon, as I was sitting at a table surrounded by bookshelves, a remote-con-
trolled car approached me. ‘Hi, what are you doing?’, the car asked, in Danish. A smart-
phone was attached to the top of the car. Glancing around, I noticed a white child around
seven years old, half-hidden behind a bookshelf, equipped with a remote control. There
was a robotics workshop being held that day. The child and I chatted, through the car, for
a few minutes.
A couple of hours later I had moved to a table with several chairs around it on the third
floor. I was sitting across from a brown man around 30 years old. Suddenly, one of the
people using the public access work stations by the window, a man around 60 years old,
started muttering to himself. He was black and skinny, with tangled long hair speckled
with grey, wearing many layers of worn clothing, multiple parcels by his side. He spoke
English at an increasing volume.
‘How can we live when NSA is everywhere? Our every move is being monitored! All
these drones …’. His voice grew louder, his distress more manifest. He approached our
table, addressing the brown man, acknowledging me by actively directing his body away
and not looking at me. I realized the man was probably referring to the remote-controlled
cars from the robotics workshop.
The young brown man sitting across from me shot sideways glances at the looming
presence next to him. Finally he addressed me, in English: ‘Could you go talk to the
librarian in the Danish language? So they come.’
The brown man had assumed correctly about my appearance: I could indeed speak
Danish to the librarian. Like me, the librarian was likely to pass as white, Danish and
female. Passing as a white, middle-class, (Danish) female, I was unlikely to provoke the
fear and suspicion with which even a middle-class looking, brown (‘Muslim’) young
man might be perceived. I was not approached to discuss steps to be taken, but hailed to
do what needed to be done. My table neighbour knew I was better equipped to do this,
via racial, classed and gendered markers on my body.
The brown man had not engaged with the black man directly. And the black man knew
not to engage with me, addressing a masculine person of colour instead. Perhaps the
black man knew that I might respond as a (white, female, ‘Danish’) psychologist trying
to calm down a ‘delusional’ person. Neither of them knew that I was from a university,
that I could speak Danish or that I was more likely to be heard by the librarian – but yet
they knew.
By heeding the brown man’s request to ‘speak to the librarian in the Danish language’,
I accepted and re-enacted intersecting, violent hierarchies that regulate Danish social
spaces. He knew that I was more likely to be heard qua my whiteness, gender and Danish
language skills. Our bodies orient themselves in and are oriented by spaces, accumulating
64 European Journal of Women’s Studies 25(1)

embodied knowledges about possibilities of movement – knowledges that continuously

shape our bodies and their conduct.

Discussion
Sara Ahmed (2004a: 122) remarks that ‘to pass through a space requires passing as a
particular kind of subject, one whose difference is unmarked and unremarkable’. While
conducting fieldwork in Nordvest, I became this kind of mobile, smooth subject. This
article was inspired by the question of who can move as Danish, or into and through
Danishness – and how. This section addresses this question by discussing the notion of
passing and potentialities of proximity to Danishness. I start by highlighting how these
conceptualizations contribute to feminist analyses of race and whiteness, affect and inter-
sectionality, in the Nordic context.
In recent years, Nordic scholars inspired by feminist theory have pointed to the
hegemony of Nordic whiteness, examining how assertions of anti-racism and colour-
blindness go hand in hand with the silencing and exclusion of racialized minorities
(Andreassen and Ahmed-Andresen, 2014; Hübinette and Tigervall, 2009; kennedy-mac-
foy and Lewis, 2014; Myong and Andreassen, forthcoming; Svendsen, 2013). This
scholarship has also emphasized the role of affective circulations in racial formations.
Nordic scholars have, on the one hand, highlighted the historic embeddedness of affec-
tive flows in reinstating whiteness by focusing on the role of melancholia and nostalgia
(Hübinette and Lundström, 2014; Svendsen, 2015). On the other hand, there has been
increasing attention paid to embodied, emplaced, here-and-now, affective enactments of
whiteness (Ahlstedt, 2015; Hvenegård-Lassen and Staunæs, 2015).
This article contributes to these feminist-inspired interrogations of race and whiteness
in the Nordic setting through an examination of the conditional emergence of white
Danishness in particular encounters. My analysis shows how Nordic whiteness might
achieve and uphold its hegemony not as a monolithic, stable structure, but rather by
being continuously enacted, mutable and fluid (Hvenegård-Lassen and Staunæs, 2015),
emerging through accumulating, embodied knowledges about bodies’ capabilities to
move, act and make themselves present and recognized. This whiteness is constantly
reinforced and remade in affective, embodied encounters. It reinstates and partially
renews itself through recruiting and embracing selected bodies. In the first encounter, my
body became whiter and desirable to Danishness through acquired intersectional mark-
ers (including researcher positionality) as well as the availability of other, ejectable bod-
ies. In the second encounter, in many ways different from the first, the invitation came
from a young, brown, English-speaking man who recruited me to perform as Danish,
assuming – knowing – that this subject position would be available to me.
Feminist theorists highlight the situated, embodied and affective nature of knowledge
production (Braidotti, 2011; Butler, 2016; Haraway, 1988): that what we can know and
articulate, even recognize as knowledge, is constrained by where we stand. This analysis of
the emergence of white Danishness has been enabled by my changing positionings as a
body, which increasingly enable my alignment with, or recruitment into, white Danishness.
Consequently, this article contributes to feminist scholarship on race and whiteness, affect
and intersectionality through an in-depth analysis of the author’s situatedness and specific
Lapiņa 65

politics of location (Rich, 1984) vis-a-vis an emerging Danishness. In addition, combining

memory work and autoethnography with an emphasis on affect and embodiment com-
prises a methodological contribution.
The continuous re-enactment and conditional willingness of whiteness to reinvent
itself are constrained by potentialities of proximity to, and alignments with, Danishness.
‘Potentialities’ highlight how, while white Danishness is differently within or out of
reach for different bodies, it is not an either-or category. After arriving in Denmark, I
became a young, uneducated, female, sexualized, Eastern European love migrant, but
even so, I might have been closer to passing as Danish than someone who grew up here.
On the one hand, this positioning delineates shades of whiteness and hierarchies of
Europeanness (Dzenovska, 2013, 2014) – of ‘Europe’ as a colonial formation that also
emerges through the enactment of ‘internal others’ (Kalnačs, 2016). On the other hand,
even when positioned as Eastern European, my body carried the potentiality of becoming
(almost) ‘normal’, a condition often unavailable to bodies racialized as non-white
(Andreassen and Ahmed-Andresen, 2014).
While potentialities of proximity to Danishness are constrained by markers pertaining
to race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, age and body language, their workings cannot
always be accounted for or made sense of in a straightforward manner. For instance, the
young brown man in the library did not know that I was a graduate student, or that I could
speak Danish; and the black man who was distressed did not know that I might interpret
his distress as delusional from a position of a white (Danish) female psychologist. Yet
they acted as if they knew. This shows how racialized positionings accumulate into, and
are mediated by, embodied knowledge.
Karen and Jens, the Danish couple, acted as if I did not have an accent. I interpret this
oversight as indicative of my recruitment into Danishness, or a majoritized position. The
potentially othering effects of my accent seem to have been outweighed by the desirable
‘Danish’ ways I performed academic capital, creativity, hipness and progressive, ‘liber-
ated’ femininity – as opposed to the oppressed, disadvantaged, unintegrated women who
became representative of ‘diversity’. Potentialities of proximity to Danishness inform
bodies’ often vaguely traceable but nonetheless rapidly occurring and clearly sensed
(mis)alignments with Danishness. Without knowing, we know.
Intersectionally mediated privilege manifests as unmarked mobility, a gliding through
space, and is maintained by not failing (to speak Danish, to appear to know the codes of
‘Danish’ spaces, etc.). My passing as Danish feels like a relief, even as it is enabled by
the ejection of other bodies positioned as ‘immigrant’, strange, exotic or ‘diverse’.
Conditions for passing can change across spaces, time and encounters, but these shifting
realities bend, shape and break bodies and lives. Talking to Karen and Jens, I felt stuck
in emotional ambivalence. Allowing me to pass was at once generous and unjust; it was
contingent on what I was born with(in) and on sweeping feats of labour, labour that
(often unknowingly) forms my body and conduct in the world.
Passing aims to capture the mutual embeddedness of material, affective and discursive
relations underlined in feminist postcolonial theorizations of subjectivity, power and space
(Doshi, 2017; Kern, 2012; Nightingale, 2011; Parker, 2016; Peake, 2015). In addition to
framing passing interactions as ‘encounters with difference’ (Valentine, 2008; Wilson,
2017) they can be analysed to explore how difference and sameness are contextually
66 European Journal of Women’s Studies 25(1)

negotiated and, indeed, made. Thus, while an analysis of passing asks ‘how things work’
(Chun et al., 2013), it is also concerned with the conditions for their ‘workability’.
Furthermore, passing highlights how structures of power and violence manifest and are
reinforced in mundane, everyday spaces and encounters.
Passing is simultaneously spontaneous and laboured, achieved by a body and extended
to this body; of-the-moment and always already there. Passing requires affective, bodily
and discursive work involving the navigation of hierarchies of power and social, bodily
codes of conduct. Writing on passing, Sara Ahmed (1999: 101) evokes the notion of
‘techniques of the self’ in order to capture how bodies approximate particular images in
order to pass. Ahmed underlines that these ‘techniques of the self’ do not necessarily
involve intentional labour, but this notion still does not quite capture the relationality and
performativity (Butler, 1988) of passing.
Our bodies are continuously made by the meanings and possibilities extended to them
through accumulated experiences and embodied encounters. For instance, the body of
the brown man I met at the municipal library fit the space enough to take a seat at the
table, but not enough to know he could speak to the librarian and be heard. The spaces
we pass through, or are hindered from passing through, shape our bodies and movement
in the world on material, discursive and affective levels in ways that manifest in the par-
ticulars of a given encounter (Lapiņa, 2017). The markers that are ‘always already there’
are (re)made through the continuous accumulation of immediacies in the here-and-now.
My analysis of passing and emerging Danish whiteness shows how intersectional
processes such as race, class, gender and sexuality (embodied markers signifying iden-
tity and difference) cannot be constituted save through one another (Butler, 1997: 267).
Even for bodies passing as white, ‘real’ whiteness and Danishness may be attainable
through, for example, markers of education, employability, fluency in Danish, resource-
fulness, ‘hipness’ (balanced with presentability), ‘appropriate’ gender performances or
youth (to a degree). Even one carrying these embodied markers might find themselves
passing as an ‘accomplished migrant’.
Passing is also strongly mediated by, and mediates, an embodied sense of (lack of)
entitlement: the affective force with which bodies carry and conduct themselves across
spaces. My body has learned that it will most likely be tolerated and even welcomed as
it moves across ‘Danish’ spaces. This highlights how passing is material and emplaced,
constraining trajectories of movement and possibility. Passing encounters mould bodies,
spaces and affects in different ways – caressing, hardening, propelling, floating, elevat-
ing and submerging them (Lapiņa, 2017).

Conclusion
This article conceptualizes passing as a relational process involving discursive, embod-
ied and affective circulations enacted in the moment and simultaneously shaped by
other spatiotemporalities. I have examined my own passing as Danish, or my incorpo-
ration into an un(re)marked majority, when conducting fieldwork in Copenhagen. The
analysis draws on autoethnographic vignettes and memory work that contextualizes
the encounters of passing as Danish in relation to my various modalities of passing as
a migrant.
Lapiņa 67

I discuss the here-and-now emergence of passing through the interplay of intersecting

markers branching out to multiple, historicized, embodied and affective spatiotemporal
elsewheres, constraining and enabling bodies’ movements and becomings in space.
Instances of passing accumulate, morphing into embodied knowledges about what bod-
ies can(not) do. These accumulated knowledges relate to the embodied potentialities of
proximity to Danishness. Especially for bodies that also pass otherwise, passing involves
anticipation and a sense of contingency and (im)possibility. This highlights the affective
and temporal complexities of passing. It pertains not only to the alignment of intersecting
markers in the present, or to what a body has passed through and the embodied knowl-
edges and ways of carrying itself it has picked up; it also pertains to situated, relational
processes of becoming. The potentialities of passing influence the affects with which
bodies live and move: hope and openness or uncertainty and fear.

Acknowledgements
I thank JP Catungal, Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable
comments on earlier drafts of this text; and Amanda Bidnall for skilful and sensitive linguistic edit-
ing. I am grateful to my research participants for sharing their thoughts, feelings and time with me.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: This research was funded by the Independent Research Fund
Denmark/ Humanities, grant number 1319-00042B.

References
Ahlstedt S (2015) Doing ‘feelwork’: Reflections on whiteness and methodological challenges in
research on queer partner migration. In: Andreassen R and Vitus K (eds) Affectivity and Race:
Studies from Nordic Contexts. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 187–205.
Ahmed S (1999) ‘She’ll wake up one of these days and find she’s turned into a nigger’: Passing
through hybridity. Theory, Culture and Society 16(2): 87–106.
Ahmed S (2000) Strange Encounters. London: Routledge.
Ahmed S (2004a) Affective economies. Social Text 22(2): 117–139.
Ahmed S (2004b) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Ahmed S (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Ahmed S (2007) A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist Theory 8(2): 149–168.
Ahmed S (2012) On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. London: Duke
University Press.
Anderson B (2006) Becoming and being hopeful: Towards a theory of affect. Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space 24(5): 733–752.
Anderson B (2014) Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions. Farnham: Ashgate.
Andreassen R and Ahmed-Andresen U (2014) I can never be normal: A conversation about race,
daily life practices, food and power. European Journal of Women’s Studies 21(1): 25–42.
68 European Journal of Women’s Studies 25(1)

Andreassen R and Vitus K (2015) Introduction: Affectivity as a lens to racial formations in the
Nordic countries. In: Andreassen R and Vitus K (eds) Affectivity and Race: Studies from
Nordic Contexts. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 1–20.
Berg AJ (2008) Silence and articulation – Whiteness, racialization and feminist memory work.
NOR – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 16(4): 213–227.
Billo E and Hiemstra N (2013) Mediating messiness: expanding ideas of flexibility, reflexivity,
and embodiment in fieldwork. Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography
20(3): 313–328.
Blackman L (2012) Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation. London: Sage.
Bondi L (2005) Making connections and thinking through emotions: Between geography and psy-
chotherapy. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30(4): 433–448.
Bondi L (2014) Understanding feelings: Engaging with unconscious communication and embod-
ied knowledge. Emotion, Space and Society 10(1): 44–54.
Braidotti R (2011) Nomadic Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Butler J (1988) Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and femi-
nist theory. Theatre Journal 40(4): 519–531.
Butler J (1993) Imitation and gender insubordination. In: Abelove H, Barale MA and Halperin DM
(eds) Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 307–320.
Butler J (1997) Passing, queering: Nella Larsen’s psychoanalytic challenge. In: Abel E, Christian
B and Moglen H (eds) Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism.
Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 266–284.
Butler J (2016) Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso.
Catungal JP (2017) Feeling bodies of knowledge: Situating knowledge production through felt
embeddedness. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 108(3): 289–301.
Chun J, Lipsitz G and Shin Y (2013) Intersectionality as a social movement strategy: Asian immi-
grant women advocates. Signs 38(4): 917–940.
Doshi S (2017) Embodied urban political ecology: Five propositions. Area 49(1): 125–128.
Dzenovska D (2013) Historical agency and the coloniality of power in postsocialist Europe.
Anthropological Theory 13(4): 394–416.
Dzenovska D (2014) Bordering encounters, sociality and distribution of the ability to live a ‘nor-
mal life’. Social Anthropology 22(3): 271–287.
Faria C and Mollett S (2016) Critical feminist reflexivity and the politics of whiteness in the
‘field’. Gender, Place and Culture 23(1): 79–93.
Fisher KT (2015) Positionality, subjectivity, and race in transnational and transcultural geographi-
cal research. Gender, Place and Culture 22(4): 456–473.
Fortier A-M (2010) Proximity by design? Affective citizenship and the management of unease.
Citizenship Studies 14(1): 17–30.
Hage G (1998) White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Annandale:
Pluto Press Australia.
Haraway D (1988) Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of
partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–599.
Hübinette T and Lundström C (2014) Three phases of hegemonic whiteness: Understanding racial
temporalities in Sweden. Social Identities 20(6): 423–437.
Hübinette T and Tigervall C (2009) To be non-white in a colour-blind society: Conversations
with adoptees and adoptive parents in Sweden on everyday racism. Journal of Intercultural
Studies 30(4): 335–353.
Humphreys M (2005) Getting personal: Reflexivity and autoethnographic vignettes. Qualitative
Inquiry 11(6): 840–860.
Lapiņa 69

Hvenegård-Lassen K and Staunæs D (2015) ‘And then we do it in Norway’: Learning leadership

through affective contact zones. In: Andreassen R and Vitus K (eds) Affectivity and Race:
Studies from Nordic Contexts. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 77–94.
Kalnačs B (2016) Comparing colonial differences: Baltic literary cultures as agencies of Europe’s
internal others. Journal of Baltic Studies 47(1): 15–30.
kennedy-macfoy m and Lewis G (2014) Race and anti-race in Europe. European Journal of
Women’s Studies 21(1): 3–8.
kennedy-macfoy m and Nielsen HP (2012) ‘We need to talk about what race feels like!’: Using
memory work to analyse the production of race and ethnicity in research encounters.
Qualitative Studies 3(2): 133–149.
Kern L (2012) Connecting embodiment, emotion and gentrification: An exploration through the
practice of yoga in Toronto. Emotion, Space and Society 5(1): 27–35.
Kern L (2015) From toxic wreck to crunchy chic: Environmental gentrification through the body.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(1): 67–83.
Kobayashi A and Peake L (2000) Racism out of place: Thoughts on whiteness and an antiracist
geography in the new millennium. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90(2):
392–403.
Koobak R and Thapar-Björkert S (2012) Becoming non-Swedish: Locating the paradoxes of in/
visible identities. Feminist Review 102: 125–134.
Lapadat JC, Black NE, Clark PG, et al. (2010) Life challenge memory work: Using collaborative
autobiography to understand ourselves. International Journal of Qualitative Methods 9(1):
77–104.
Lapiņa L (2016) Besides conviviality: Paradoxes in being ‘at ease’ with diversity in a Copenhagen
district. Nordic Journal of Migration Research 6(1): 33–41.
Lapiņa L (2017) Making senses of Nordvest: Tracing the spaces, bodies and affects of a gentrify-
ing neighborhood in Copenhagen. PhD thesis, Roskilde University, Denmark.
Larsen N (1994) Quicksand and Passing. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Lobo M (2010) Negotiating emotions, rethinking otherness in suburban Melbourne. Gender, Place
and Culture 17(1): 99–114.
McDowell L (2009) Old and new European economic migrants: Whiteness and managed migra-
tion policies. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 35(1): 19–36.
Mainsah H and Prøitz L (2015) Two journeys into research on difference in a Nordic context: A
collaborative auto-ethnography. In: Andreassen R and Vitus K (eds) Affectivity and Race:
Studies from Nordic Contexts. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 169–186.
Militz E and Schurr C (2016) Affective nationalism: Banalities of belonging in Azerbaijan.
Political Geography 54: 54–63.
Mullings B (1999) Insider or outsider, both or neither: Some dilemmas of interviewing in a cross-
cultural setting. Geoforum 30(4): 337–350.
Myong L (2009) Adopteret: Fortællinger om transnational og racialiseret tilblivelse. PhD thesis,
Aarhus Universitet, Copenhagen.
Myong L and Andreassen R (forthcoming) Researcher positionality, race, and gender formations
analyzed through memory work. Nordic Journal of Migration Research.
Nightingale AJ (2011) Bounding difference: Intersectionality and the material production of gen-
der, caste, class and environment in Nepal. Geoforum 42(2): 153–162.
Parker B (2016) Feminist forays in the city: Imbalance and intervention in urban research methods.
Antipode 48(5): 1337–1358.
Peake L (2015) On feminism and feminist allies in knowledge production in urban geography.
Urban Geography 37(6): 830–838.
70 European Journal of Women’s Studies 25(1)

Price PL (2010) At the crossroads: Critical race theory and critical geographies of race. Progress
in Human Geography 34(2): 147–174.
Rich A (1984) Notes towards a politics of location. In: Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose
1979–1985. London: Little Brown and Co., pp. 210–231.
Rose G (1997) Situating knowledges: Positionality, reflexivities and other tactics. Progress in
Human Geography 21(3): 305–321.
Schurr C and Abdo K (2016) Rethinking the place of emotions in the field through social labora-
tories. Gender, Place and Culture 23(1): 120–133.
Svendsen SHB (2013) Learning racism in the absence of ‘race’. European Journal of Women’s
Studies 21(1): 9–24.
Svendsen SHB (2015) Feeling at loss: Affect, whiteness and masculinity in the immediate after-
math of Norway’s terror. In: Andreassen R and Vitus K (eds) Affectivity and Race: Studies
from Nordic Contexts. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 133–151.
Valentine G (2008) Living with difference: Reflections on geographies of encounter. Progress in
Human Geography 32(3): 323–337.
Wilson HF (2017) On geography and encounter: Bodies, borders, and difference. Progress in
Human Geography 41(4): 451–471.