Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and daughters-in-law. That's different. But if you move here when you are
older, and do not become part of this thing with schools and children and so
on, then it is, then you should get married to someone or have a girlfriend
here who is married to a Spanish man.… You know, one always believed in
that, oh integration, which is so debated in Sweden, which you have opin-
ions about yourself, but I have to say that I now understand the fact that
Chinatown, Rosengård, and what's the name of that place in Stockholm …
Rinkeby, Hammarkullen, and Angered outside Göteborg [different segreg-
ated areas in Sweden] exist. I do understand that.… I have a very different
view on that today.
For Freja, it is the institutions in a society; schools and marriages that provide integ-
ration, and since she is not part of these, integration is not possible for her. In the dis-
cussion on integration, Freja compares her own situation to marginalized migrants in
Sweden and elsewhere. Due to her experiences in Spain, not only can she now under-
stand the processes of disintegration, but accept them as well. From her migrant posi-
tion, she has got new experiences, which for her shed new light upon migrants' com-
parable situation in Sweden. Despite this idea of parallel marginalization with migrants
in Sweden, or elsewhere (which was rather common among the informants), this idea
wasnotcarriedintoeffectinthelocalcontextbysocializingwithmarginalizedmigrants
here,suchasNorthernAfricansorLatinAmericans.Instead,theSwedishmigrantswere
integrated into parallel communities of Swedish or Northern European whitenesses.
White Divisions
An analysis of intra-European migrations illuminates how social practices create the
idea of a common, culturally homogeneous European (white) identity. What appears to
beaSouth-Northdivideisbuiltuponadeepintra-Nordicpostcolonialidentificationand
identification with Anglo-Saxon countries and cultures—and parallel disidentification
withtheformercolonialpowersinSouthernEurope.Inthisway,theideaofahomogen-
eous whiteness—often interchangeable with “the idea of the West” (Bonnett 2004)—is
disentangled. Through an analysis of Swedish women as migrants, the chapter strives
to destabilize the idea of whiteness as a homogeneous entity. Ruth Frankenberg has ar-
gued that whiteness “is a complexly constructed product of local, regional, national and
global relations, past and present. Thus the range of possible ways of living whiteness,
for an individual white woman in a particular time and place, is delimited by the rela-
tions of racism at that moment and in that place” (1993: 236). Reinstalling whiteness in
different national racial systems could either improve one's feeling of opportunities in
life, but as well involve a sense of being deprived of one's normative and structurally
