In the Creative Space of Inclusion: Gender, Sexuality and Ethnicity in the Representations of Migrants in Norway

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation explores the way in which welfare state professionals and authorities, NGO employees and social work students in Norway represent migrants – Russian women and men from Africa and the Middle East – with regard to gender, sexuality and ethnicity. The main objective of the thesis is to explore whether the representations of migrants generate a tendency towards processes of inclusion or exclusion and marginalisation with respect to Norwegian society. In terms of theory, it draws on the cultural theory of representation (Hall 1997), the Foucaultian concept of subject position (Foucault 1972, 1980) and the post-colonial, post-structuralist feminist theory of intersectionality (Berg et al. 2010; Brah 2003; Lykke 2003, 2005; Staunæs and Søndergaard 2006). I argue that professionals tend to represent migrants as ‘traditional’: ‘migrant women in need of liberation’ and ‘foreign macho-men’. That positions persons defined as ‘migrants’ as ‘others’, and lays the grounds for their symbolic and potentially material exclusion from Norway’s ‘gender equal’ society. The analyses presents also the way in which, professionals and migrants (more specifically, Russian women living in northern Norway) transform these problematic gendered and sexualised representations and define migrants as ‘transnational caring fathers’ and ‘career women, living in harmonious families’. The research encourages us to revisit theories of inclusion within liberal feminism, the philosophy of multiculturalism and mainstream policy making. Concerns about the gender equality of migrants eclipse such political issues as distant parenting, the push of migrant women to the care sector of the economy and restrictive regulations of family reunification.