Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
invisible position. Yet, for Swedish women, these forms of mobility and reorientations
arenotelaboratedthroughthediscursiveframeofmigration,becausetheconceptofmi-
gration is deeply interrelated with racialized groups and bodies, negative discrimination
and borders. This chapter shows how this division is lived, negotiated, and reinscribed
by Swedish migrants who mark a cultural distance toward Spaniards, which draws the
linefortheinstitutionalizationofacertainmigrantcommunity,tosomeextentseparated
from the local Spanish society. As privileged migrants they identify as being part of an
international community outside the discursive boundaries of “locals” and “migrants.”
Beverley Skeggs (2004: 49) puts it this way: “[m]obility and control over mobility both
reflect and reinforce power.”
The chapter illustrates how while whiteness constitutes a form of structural privilege
that is convertible to local forms of privilege transnationally, it is not a static global po-
sition. Rather, it takes various shapes in shifting social and racial national and regional
logics, as whitenesses have always done. Ramón Grosfoguel (2003) suggests that the
map of whiteness changed during “the second modernity” 1650-1945 when Europe's
“heart” moved from Spain and Portugal to the Northern parts of Europe and further to
the United States. As a result of this shift, the previously “white” Southern Europe was
partly excluded fromthediscursive field ofwhiteness (atendency whichiscurrently re-
inforcedbytheeconomic crisisinEurope).Grosfoguel(2003,45)arguesthat“'Hispan-
ics' were constructed as part of the inferior others excluded from the superior 'white'
'European' 'races'.”
Nevertheless, the fact that the imagining of “the white Europe” is deconstructed does
not imply that European privileges in relation to mobility, accessibility, and (global)
rightsaredissolved. Privileges ofwhiteness connected toinstitutions, passports,orbod-
ies, are still contingent forms of white capital for migrants socially classified as white,
which are transferrable to other contexts, being relocated and renegotiated in relation to
local formations of class, gender, race, and sexuality in different geographical spaces.
Thus, we need to be sensitive to the fragmented constructions of contemporary white-
nesses, yet remain alert to the forms of “white privilege that are not undone, and may
even be repeated and intensified, through declarations of whiteness, or though the re-
cognition of privilege as privilege,” as Ahmed (2004: 58) points out.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the women who shared their time and stories with me during my
field work. This research would not have been possible without the support from the
foundationofHelgeAxisonJohnson.ThankstoUmeáIentreforGenderStudiesandthe
participants at Images of Whiteness in Oxford 2012, for important comments on this re-
search.
