Randi Gressgård

Asexuality: from pathology to identity and beyond

This article draws attention to the constitutive mechanisms of asexual identity. It identifies a shift in expert discourse: a move away from pathology towards recognition of asexual identity. While this discursive shift, propelled by recent research in psychology and sexology, could pave the way for the inclusion of asexuals in public culture, it also reaffirms dominant terms and formations pertaining to sexuality and intimacy. The article argues that the discursive formation of a new asexual identity takes place through a process of objectification and subjectification/subjection at the interface between expert disciplines and activism. The recognition of identity is constitutive of subjects that are particularly suitable for self-regulation within the parameters of (neo)liberal citizenship. Yet, at the same time, the discursive shift also makes room for critical intervention akin to queer critique of naturalised gender and sexuality norms. The recognition of asexual identity could serve to destabilise the sexual regime (of truth) that privileges sexual relationships against other affiliations and grants sexual-biological relationships a status as primary in the formation of family and kinship relations. The article concludes that asexual identity encourages us to imagine other pathways of affiliation and other concepts of personhood, beyond the tenets of liberal humanism – gesturing instead towards new configurations of the human and new meanings of sexual citizenship.

The “Will to Empower”: Managing the Complexity of the Others

Intersectionality is a concept that aims at handling the complexity of social life. It is often presented as a sensitive, and thus accountable, approach to the complexity of life lived in an age of globalization, migration, and displacements of identities, individuals, and groups. This notion of intersectionality presupposes that approaching complexity requires more than the mere adding up of categories like race, class, and gender; it requires an approach presupposing that these categories intersect in mutually constitutive ways in and through socio‐cultural hierarchies and power dimensions that produce complex relations of inclusion, exclusion, domination, and subordination. For feminists, this constructivist approach to identity categories seems promising; on the one hand, intersectionality rejects essentialism and reductionism, on the other hand, the complexity sensitivity of intersectionality maintains the possibility of feminist politics in a complex world, because politics no longer amounts to essentialist identity politics. In this article we want to ask, however, if the complexity sensitivity of intersectionality really is the solution to the problem of potential essentialism and reductionism in feminism. Or does intersectionality rather reproduce the problem of reductionism and the logic of identity in new, more sophisticated forms? Can feminism at all avoid essentialism and processes of othering? Is it possible to come to terms with the “will to power” inherent in all research by demonstrating a “will to empower”? The purpose of this article is not to evaluate whether different intersectionality studies are capable of accounting for complexity and thereby making it possible to avoid essentialism, reductionism, and othering. The purpose is, rather, to highlight and discuss some implications of the constructionism of intersectionality. As we will try to show, the constructionism that is claimed to form the basis of intersectionality, in opposition to additive approaches to social differences, is sometimes compromised for the sake of accountability.

The Veiled Muslim, the Anorexic and the Transsexual: What Do They Have in Common?

The Muslim woman wearing the veil, the female anorexic and the from-male-to-female transsexual constitute three different figures that, despite their striking differences, have a common symbolic ground. By focusing on the similarity between the veiled woman and the other two figures, the article sheds a different light on the debate about the Muslim veil in western societies. It is argued that the western notion of woman is based on a structural ambivalence of transcendence and immanence. On the one hand, woman is expected to be liberated, in control and active in public life and in all ways just as free as the man, on the other she represents a deficiency compared to the man; it is expected of her that she takes up a complementary, subordinate position in relation to the man. The subordinate position, however, is seldom pronounced. Officially, the gender hierarchy is not a part of egalitarian societies, that is, the modern configuration that formally rejects a hierarchical worldview. Is this the reason why the three figures are regarded as pathological? Does their way of demonstrating extraordinary transcendence combined with extraordinary immanence make them monstrous?

Welfare Policing and the Safety–Security Nexus in Urban Governance

Abstract Based on a study of policy frames in Malmö, this article discusses the safety–security nexus in urban governance. It argues that perceived safety is constituted as an index of order and that security politics becomes a means to this end. Security forms part and parcel of an expanded cohesion agenda that links criminal justice, immigration control, and integration as a chain. This multi-levelled policy chain, which includes police collaboration with governmental as well as non-governmental actors, opens up for expanded policing – termed welfare policing – in immigrant-dense areas of the city. The expansive security politics conflates welfare provision with crime prevention in specific urban districts, thus rendering entire sub-populations legible as ‘dangerous’ others against which society, or the city, must be defended. In conclusion, the article argues that the inherited structures and institutions of the welfare state seem to offer favourable conditions for expanded policing in urban space.

The racialized death-politics of urban resilience governance

ABSTRACT In the essay, ‘Necropolitics’, Achille Mbembe attends to the contemporary subjugation of life to the power of death – exceptional violence that exceeds the biopolitical aim of fostering life – thus alluding to a state of emergency in which law is suspended and martial rule is brought into force. However, as several commentators have suggested, exceptional politics does not need to be legitimized by a declared state of emergency, such as in cases where governmental and non-governmental actors are vested with powers to take strong measures against specific urban sub-populations in the name of security or order maintenance. Still, even these reworked and expanded approaches to death-politics revolve around sovereign exceptionality and the accompanying fabrication of undesirable ‘others’. Somewhat counterintuitively, the present article advances an analysis of racialized security politics issuing from the breakdown of representational, topographical boundaries between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘us’ and ‘others’. Illustrated by a case from Malmö, Sweden, it urges greater attention to how necropolitics could operate entirely outside the trope of emergency as exception. The principal argument is that urban security politics, when operating within the frame of resilience governance, involves distinctly different configurations of necropolitics, which require a critical-theoretical vocabulary outside the traditional framework of securitization.

Planning for Pluralism in Nordic Cities

* E-mail: Randi.Gressgard@skok.uib.no This special issue probes into planning for cultural and ethnic pluralism in Nordic cities, focusing especially on urban diversity politics and practices related to migration. Although transnational migration is a predominantly urban phenomenon, there is a notable divergence of research interest between the scholarly fields of migration and ethnic minority studies on the one hand, and the fields of urban studies on the other. Nicholas De Genova (2015: 3) aptly points out, in an earlier issue of this journal, that even though migration studies research tends to be disproportionately urban in its empirical focus, it commonly leaves the urban question under-theorised or unexamined. In a similar vein, Nina Glick Schiller and Ayşe Çağlar (2011: 2) note that ‘[w]ithin the migration literature there are many studies of migration to cities and the life of migrants in cities but very little about the relationship of migrants and cities’. Whilst urban studies have been predominantly concerned with socio-economic urban divisions and spatial differences pertaining to segregation, much less attention has been on issues of race, ethnicity and migration. Although there has been a gradual orientation towards exclusionary effects of gentrification on ethnic minorities and racialised citizens, main focus is still on spatial and material dimensions of social (in)justice (Brenner et al. 2012; Butler 1997; Davis and Monk 2007; Harvey 1996, 2009; Marcuse et al. eds. 2009; Sassen 2000; Smith 1979, 2002; Smith and Ley 2008). Conversely, migration research has addressed problems of ethnic discrimination, racism, marginalisation of minority groups etc. for decades, whereas the urban dimension of (in)justice has remained largely unscrutinised. True, there is a growing body of literature that seeks to bridge the gap between migration/minority studies and urban studies/planning (see e.g. Fincher et al. 2014; Fincher and Iveson 2008; Kihato et al. eds 2010; Neill 2004; Neill and Schwedler eds 2007; Sandercock 1998, 2003; Schiller and Çağlar eds 2011; Wood and Landry 2007), but such intersections are still scarce in a Nordic context. Research in this region is predominantly oriented towards evaluating national welfare programmes, rather than studying cities (Dannestam 2008: 356). However, as the welfare state is restructured and an increased inflow of migrants settle in urban areas, a number of pressing issues regarding planning for pluralism arise – issues that are at once specific for the Nordic context and related to broader trends in Europe and beyond (see e.g. Righard et al. 2015). The following sections explore theoretical perspectives on planning for pluralism and the implied methodological challenges. The final section introduces key terms and themes of the special issue.

Feminist Theorizes the Political: The Political Theory of Wendy Brown

ed from culture, i.e. prior to culture and free to choose culture. But just as important is autonomy of politics from culture, i.e. the idea that political power (the state) is above culture and free of culture (2006: 167, 170–171). Brown’s delineation of tolerance discourse demonstrates that ‘‘autonomy is the liberal good that tolerance aims to promote’’ (2006: 154), but tolerance discourse also—and this suggests a crucial circularity within tolerance discourse—requires in advance what it promotes (2006: 154). As for the latter, Brown goes on to argue that ‘‘[t]olerance is extented to almost all cultural and religious practices seen to be ‘chosen’ by liberal individuals, but it may be withheld from those practices seen to be imposed by culture inscribed as law’’ (Brown 2006: 171). One becomes tolerable to the extent that one is able and/or willing to transform cultural, religious, or sexual practices into individually chosen beliefs or practices. Only by being converted into privatized choice, is culture compatible with moral autonomy (2006: 152, 154). Furthermore, this privatization signifies a concurrent ideological depolitization of culture and religion, suggesting that the autonomy of the individual and the autonomy of the state are inextricably linked. Brown speaks of a liberal secularism that comprises culture as much as religion: ‘‘Liberalism is conceived as juridically securing the autonomy of the individual from others and from state power through its articulation of the autonomy of the state from cultural and religious authority’’ (2006: 170). ‘‘Culture is what the liberal state presumes to subdue, depower, and privatize, as well as detach itself from’’, she notes (2006: 171). Consequently, the subject of tolerance is tolerated only so long as it does not make a political claim or form a community. Individual Choice and Essentialized Identity Those who supposedly lack autonomy—and thereby lack (the freedom of) choice— are regarded as not only intolerable, but also in themselves non-tolerant, illiberal, and uncivilized, often designated as fundamentalists. Certain groups, such as Muslims, tend to be marked as others both within the nation-state and external to the nation-state: as internal others, as well as external enemies due to their presumed underdevelopment of both rationality and will (2006: 153). We may ask, however, how this emphasis on ‘‘choice’’ corresponds with the essentialization of culture, religion, and sexuality that characterizes liberal tolerance discourse. As noted above, tolerance is supposed to be a solution to the problem of cultural difference—‘‘a mode of incorporating and regulating the threatening Other within’’ (2006: 27)—and the definition of its limits signifies that tolerance requires in advance what it also promotes, namely autonomy. However, viewed from a different angle, we may argue that tolerance explicitly promotes individual choice and autonomy but in fact requires essentialized or naturalized identities in terms of cultural ‘‘differences’’. This paradox seems to lie at the heart of tolerance discourse, and yet it appears to make up the less rigorous aspect of Brown’s analysis. That being said, her delineation does give us a clue as to how this paradox could be explained, suggesting a wider circularity pertaining to tolerance discourse. It is worth noting that the original meaning of liberal tolerance, as formulated by, among others, John Locke at the end of the seventeenth century, was concerned with Review Essay 261

Author responseGressgårdRandiMulticultural Dialogue: Dilemmas, Paradoxes, Conflicts. Oxford, UK/New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2010; 186 pp.: 9781845456665, £42/US

the potential revision and comparative denaturalization of position that this movement of difference might facilitate serves to remind us of the creative potential of such a politics. The problem then, is our frequent inability to adequately account for such creativity within a politics of difference that is commonly abstracted or taken to be a static political end. In this respect, Multicultural Dialogue might be productively viewed as a critical starting point for rethinking the practices of multiculturalism at a time when its politics are under increasing strain – not only to address the contradictions and paradoxes, but also to outline the ongoing possibilities that still lie at the heart of its dialogue.