Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies - Volume 21, Issue 3, 2018

This research article reflects on social inequalities in Europe in a transnational perspective, focusing on racial hierarchies between Westerners and ‘peripherally white’ migrants from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Peripheral whiteness is a concept introduced to account for the simultaneous privilege and subordination experienced by white migrants from non-Western countries. Peripheral whiteness is here examined on the example of migrant domestic workers from Ukraine employed in Poland and their Polish counterparts active in private households in Belgium. The contribution shows that, compared to their non-white counterparts, peripherally white domestic workers from CEE benefit from being racialised as white. This privilege is, however, inextricable from the subalternity of their status. The fact that the majority of domestic workers in Brussels are Polish and an increasing number of domestic workers in Warsaw come from Ukraine can be partially explained by the worker-employer hierarchy implicitly established by the 
(semi-)peripheral status of their countries of origin.

Paris’s working-class Château Rouge neighbourhood is popularly referred to as ‘Little Africa’ for its concentration of Afro-Caribbean shops, and derisively labelled an ‘enclave’ by politicians and white middle-class French residents who desire to replace the ‘exotic commerce’ with ‘traditional’ ‘French’ and ‘Parisian’ businesses. Urban spaces such as Château Rouge are thought to challenge French universalism, which simultaneously seeks to erase differences between French citizens and marks any attempt to distinguish individuals or groups from the universal French nation as disruptive. Drawing on interviews with residents and archival documents, I demonstrate how urban planning and social mix policies have shifted from a focus on residential mix to a desire for commercial mix following decades of urban renewal in the neighbourhood. I argue that gendered and racialised French republican discourse is reproduced through local municipal planning aimed at maintaining an ideal ‘mix’ of white and non-white populations.

In this paper, my aim is to present what I call Third-World feminist internationalism, which stemmed from the Black Power Movement and the Black Women’s Movement in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. More precisely, I look at the ways this political articulation is essential to a historicised understanding of the book The Heart of the Race, and especially its authors’ analysis and contestation of British imperialism and whiteness.

This article discusses social positions of Swedish female converts to Islam who have previously passed as white majority Swedes, but whose experiences have changed, sometimes radically, since donning the hijab. It addresses their accounts of being treated and evaluated differently by teachers, co-workers, family, and friends, and having their choices questioned by strangers. It also examines the double standards that white converts to Islam must negotiate when dealing with daily life in Sweden, and how becoming a Muslim leads to frequent exclusion from constructed whiteness and Swedishness and the privileges attached to those positions.