Whiteness is from another world: Gender, Icelandic international development and multiculturalism

Abstract

This article focuses on desires, fears and identities as entangled in the past. Emphasizing gendered aspects of mobility, the author takes as examples debates relating to Icelandic Muslims and discussions in regard to Iceland's increased international involvements in global peacekeeping. She sees them sharing entanglements with the nationalistic ideologies of Europeans as carrier of justice and equality, as well as a collective forgetting of past histories that foreground and position people in relation to migrations and encounters in the present. In these cases, gender is tightly interwoven with the tapestry of meaning, foregrounding, explaining and informing the relationships involved.

Within a ‘white’ affective space: racialization in Iceland and development discourses

“…The emphasis on 'rescuing' women in war situations in Afghanistan often took central stage without any public acknowledgement of the greater political context in which this took place. These images were easily comparable with other Western civilization missions of white men rescuing black women from their own countrymen (Björnsdóttir, 2011;Loftsdóttir, 2012c).…”

“…There was a strong emphasis that uniquely Icelandic characteristics would explain Iceland's success on the international front which had close relations to the representations in early twentieth century schoolbooks. These narratives can, in some respects, be seen as implicit with notions of whiteness, stressing Iceland's original population of Norwegian Vikings; but not fully, as they stress the Icelandic population as being superior to their neighboring populations (Loftsdóttir, 2012c). This emphasis however, in the light of increased plurality of the origin of Icelandic citizens was exclusionary.…”

"Hún gæti alveg verið múslimi og allt það": Ráðning fólks af erlendum uppruna til íslenskra fyrirtækja

“…Áhersla á jafnrétti er þó iðulega notuð, eins og rannsóknir hér og erlendis hafa bent á, til þess að gagnrýna eða réttlaeta fordómafull viðhorf til múslima í heild (Abu-Lughod 2002;Kristín Loftsdóttir 2012b).…”

„Að þreifa sig áfram í myrkrinu“: Ríkjandi stefnur og straumar um ungt flóttafólk í íslensku grunn- og framhaldsskólakerfi

“…Þrátt fyrir þá jákvaeðu merkingu sem leggja má í orð kennarans um mikilvaegi móðurmáls og menningar fyrir ungt flóttafólk er engu að síður gerður skýr greinamunur á menningu þeirra sem þau eiga að hafa í sínu lífi annars vegar og íslenskrar menningar hins vegar. Svipað orðalag má finna í markmiðagrein í Viðmiðunarreglum Flóttamannanefndar þegar raett er um nauðsyn þess að "vernda og raekta" menningu flóttafólks en slík orðraeða hefur verið tengd við úreltar hugmyndir í anda nýlendustefnu þar sem vald meirihlutahópsins yfir minnihlutahópnum er tryggt og endurskapað með tilvísun í sérstöðu meirihlutahópsins sem umber og verndar viðkvaemari hóp (Kristín Loftsdóttir 2012. Wendy Brown (2008) hefur fjallað um hugtakið umburðarlyndi eins og það birtist sem pólitísk lausn í félags-og menntastefnumótun í tengslum við fjölmenningu.…”