Gendered racism
Together with Marianne Brodersen, Trine Øland explores Danish welfare politics and its emerging interest in emancipating ‘immigrant’ women and girls. The article identifies how the images of the ‘unfree immigrant housewife’ and the ‘inhibited immigrant girl’ are formed through oxymoronic liberal arguments of care and control, and it demonstrates 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 labour. 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.