Transnationell vithet - Svenska migrantkvinnor i USA och Singapore

Abstract

This article examines different expressions of gender and whiteness in a transnational context through first-generation Swedish migrant women’s narratives of bodies and cultural identities, when moving and re-installing themselves in the altered social, racial and political landscapes of the United States and Singapore. Their specific migratory experiences are used as a departure to analyze the ways in which gender- and nation-specific forms of capital may be converted through migration. The central inquiries in the article are concerned with how Swedish women experience their bodies, as migrant bodies, and how embodied privileges move and are being re-invested in two racially different contexts. The study, conducted from 2006– 2009, is based on in-depth interviews, focus group discussions with almost 50 women in the western part of the United States and Singapore, all of them being members of a support group for Swedish-speaking women, and three of their spouses. In addition, I have conducted participant observations in several Swedish-related arenas in the two countries. It is argued that white privileges often remain normalized and invisible for the informants themselves, but while Swedish femininity is highly valued in the United States, it is represented as a non-normative whiteness in the Singaporean context. Thus, by looking at how Swedishness is being re-installed in non-Swedish contexts, the article contextualizes migrating Swedishness and whiteness and contributes with a transnational perspective on whiteness, which carries a potential to destabilize an idea of whiteness as a homogeneous entity.