Lene Myong

Dad and Daddy Assemblage Resuturing the Nation through Transnational Surrogacy, Homosexuality, and Norwegian Exceptionalism

Transnational surrogacy and the reproductive practices it entails raise interesting questions about genetic relatedness, kinship formation, and the stratification of reproductive labor and rights. This article discusses two high-profile Norwegian cases involving the Crown Princess Mette-Marit and Øystein Mæland, who served as chief of the Norwegian police from 2011 to 2012. While surrogacy is illegal in Norway, the article demonstrates how newspaper debates on both cases discursively decentered the illegality of surrogacy practices and instead developed notions of “good” and “bad” practices, positioning surrogacy in California as ethically regulated, while surrogacy in India was framed as fraught with ethical issues and exploitative. The article concludes that the two cases point to how specific formations of gay surrogacy work to simultaneously produce legitimate citizens out of commissioning parents and children, as well as a superior and exceptional nation-state.

(Un)liveabilities: Homonationalism and transnational adoption

Rosa Morena tells a story about kinship in which a white homosexual Danish man adopts a child born to a black poor Brazilian woman. Using a theoretical framework of biopolitics and affective labour the article highlights how the male homosexual figure is being cast as heteronormative and white in order to become intelligible as a parent and the bearer of liveable kinship. The casting rests on the affective and reproductive labour of the birth mother who is portrayed as an unsuitable parent through a colonial discourse steeped in sexualized and racialized imagery. A specific distribution of affect fixates and relegates the birth mother to a state of living dead, and thus she becomes the bearer of an unliveable kinship.

Racial Turns and Returns: Recalibrations of Racial Exceptionalism in Danish Public Debates on Racism

In recent years, the Danish public has been embroiled in different debates on racism and whiteness. While these debates instigate a break with historic and color-blind silencing of racism in Denmark, they have also given rise to multiple reproductions of racist logics. Our analysis concentrates on a debate that took off in early 2013 following the publication of the book Are Danes Racist? The Problems of Immigration Research [Er danskerne racister? Indvandrerforskningens problemer] by Henning Bech and Mehmet Umit Necef. The debate centered around the question of whether or not so-called anti-racist research met scientific standards. We argue that this debate can be seen as a turning point in how both individual researchers in particular and racism research in general have been positioned as unscientific and as productive of social division and racism in Denmark. The chapter suggests that these racial turns can be seen as a recalibration of the tradition of Danish racial exceptionalism, where racism in Denmark is presented as containable and marginal, and where anti-racist research in itself constitutes a new form of racism.

Race, Gender, and Researcher Positionality Analysed Through Memory Work

Abstract Drawing upon feminist standpoint theory and memory work, the authors analyse racial privilege by investigating their own racialized and gendered subjectifications as academic researchers. By looking at their own experiences within academia, they show how authority and agency are contingent upon racialization, and how research within gender, migration, and critical race studies is often met by rejection and threats of physical violence. The article illustrates how race is silenced within academia, and furthermore how questions of race, when pointed out, are often interpreted as a call for censorship. The authors conclude that a lack of reflection around the situatedness of knowledge, as well as the evasion of discussions on racial privilege, contribute to maintaining whiteness as a privileged site for scientific knowledge production.