Gendered racism: The emancipation of ‘Muslim’ and ‘immigrant’ women in Danish welfare politics and professionalism

This article examines the intersecting oppressions of Danish welfare politics and its emerging interest in emancipating ‘immigrant’ women and girls. It draws on Patricia Hill Collins’ notion of controlling images and, based on a documentary text corpus, it identifies how the images of the unfree immigrant housewife and the inhibited immigrant girl are formed through oxymoronic liberal arguments of care and control. The article demonstrates how this plays out in an assemblage of policy documents and suggests why welfare professionalism is called upon to ‘rescue’ ‘immigrant’ women and girls, situating welfare politics and professionalism within the racial welfare state and its racial capitalist and Orientalist logics. The analyses demonstrate how gendered and racialized signifiers help to structure welfare politics and professionalism, and how a space of emancipation is intertwined with a global economic division of labor. The article suggests that racialized welfare politics and professionalism are permeated by the desire to emancipate women, which remains a powerful impulse within Danish welfare state capitalism, liberalism and social-democratic reasoning. This article examines the intersecting oppressions of Danish welfare politics and its emerging interest in emancipating ‘immigrant’ women and girls. It draws on Patricia Hill Collins’ notion of controlling images and, based on a documentary text corpus, it identifies how the images of the unfree immigrant housewife and the inhibited immigrant girl are formed through oxymoronic liberal arguments of care and control. The article demonstrates how this plays out in an assemblage of policy documents and suggests why welfare professionalism is called upon to ‘rescue’ ‘immigrant’ women and girls, situating welfare politics and professionalism within the racial welfare state and its racial capitalist and Orientalist logics. The analyses demonstrate how gendered and racialized signifiers help to structure welfare politics and professionalism, and how a space of emancipation is intertwined with a global economic division of labor. The article suggests that racialized welfare politics and professionalism are permeated by the desire to emancipate women, which remains a powerful impulse within Danish welfare state capitalism, liberalism and social-democratic reasoning.

Mobilisering af barnets potentiale for en bedre fremtid:Opdragelsestænkningen i Torben Gregersens vurderinger af børnebogsmanuskripter i perioden 1942-1954

Children's books were one of the scenes where ‘progressive’ professionals - mostly teachers, psychologists and artists - around WWII fought the battle to change society through changed educational thinking. Especially after WWII it was acknowledged that children's books could contribute to the forming and education of the child, mobilising the child's potential to secure the future and promote peace and international understanding. This article examines so far unexamined sources, i.e., 89 assessments of children's book manuscripts from the private archives of Torben Gregersen (1911–1994): a teacher and prominent ‘progressivist’ hired by different publishers in the period 1942–1954. Using a descriptive and sociological approach, the article identifies the educational way of thinking imbedded in these assessments, which predominantly represents elements of developmental psychology, moral development and national culture, and literary and aesthetic-artistic elements to a lesser extent. Thus, the article shows that the emergence of ‘progressive’ elements which in research on children's literature normally are dated to the late 1960s, are not only present in the 1940s and 1950s in the assessments of Torben Gregersen; they are present with noteworthy nuance