Graduate Journal of Social Science

Articles

• What makes a White man White? Definitions teetering between color and class among white men in Rio de Janeiro

  Valeria Ribeiro Corossacz

  • Abstract

    This paper discusses how whiteness is perceived and described by upper-middle class men self-identifying as white in Rio de Janeiro. In part one I present a brief history of the role played by whiteness in the formation of Brazil as a nation and the specific characteristics of Brazilian color classification with particular attention for the relationship between class and color. In part two I explore the main methodological problems related to the study of whiteness within the framework of Brazilian research on whiteness and French socio- logical analysis of the upper-middle class and aristocracy. In particular I focus on the relationship between researcher and interviewee when the latter is part of a dominant group and the foci of the investigation concern his/her dominant position. I then discuss interviewees’ efforts to give definitions of whiteness, their silences and laughter, and the different types of answer they offer. Class appears as a privileged language for giving concrete content to whiteness: while class is described as something more tangible and objective, whiteness is perceived by these men as elusive and impossible to put into words.

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  • pp. 22–45

• Methodological reflections on being an East Asian researcher researching the white majority

  Sayaka Osanami Törngren

  • Abstract

    Criticisms have been cast toward researches concerning race and ethnicity being traditionally dominated by middle class white men, and different responses and positions to the criticisms have emerged. However still, the methodological discussions of the social positions of the researchers are circled around the issues of white researchers’ challenges in approaching the minority population, or concerns among researchers of ethnic and racial minority background in studying their own groups or other minority groups. I believe that there is an obvious lack of attention in the current methodological consideration in the field of ethnic relations: What happens when a researcher who is of ethnic and racial minority background researches the white majority population? The paper attempts to open up a methodological discussion that is missing in the field today. As a researcher of East Asian background in Sweden, interviewing white Swedes generates possibilities to observe how white Swedish interviewees interact with and communicate the racial and ethnic differences between the researcher and the interviewees. This paper will draw examples from the qualitative interview materials from my doctoral dissertation on Swedes’ attitudes toward interracial relationships.

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  • pp. 46–64

• Seeing through the white gaze. Articulations of (un)familiar bodies in Swedish transnational adoption policy

  Malinda Andersson

  • Abstract

    This paper will explore racialised markings of transnational adoptees and adoptive families in current Swedish transnational adoption policy. Policy statements about transnational adoptees’ physical appearance, and the significance ascribed to it in adoptive family relations and everyday life make up the empirical data. Drawing on critical social policy, postcolonial feminism, critical whiteness studies, and Foucauldian archeology, the paper offers an interdisciplinary reading of the discursive conditions structuring understandings of belonging and difference in this particular context. This paper concludes that the adopted subject is ascribed a natural orientation towards the birth country and the biological family in the documents. Dark skin colour is made a symbol of belonging to another nation, another family. This approach is an arrogation of destabilisation, with the purpose of challenging the ways in which transnational adopted bodies are constructed as revealing and disturb- ing elements in white Swedish imaginary. To conclude, racialised markings of transnational adoptees as familiar, but yet unfamiliar bodies make visible the symbolic boundaries withholding transnational adoptees unconditional national and familial belonging.

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  • pp. 65–83

• Position Paper
  ‘The White Flesh of a Fish’: Reflections about Whiteness and Methodologies

  Kristín Loftsdóttir

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  • pp. 84–90

• Announcement
  Postgraduates in the White Spaces Research Network

  Say Burgin

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  • pp. 100–103

Book Reviews

• White logic, White methods: racism and methodology edited by Tufuku Zuberi and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

  Anna-Esther Younes

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  • pp. 91–94

• Fire in the heart: How white activists embrace racial justice by Mark R. Warren

  Say Burgin

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  • pp. 95–99

• Researching ‘Race’ and Ethnicity. Methods, Knowledge and Power by Yasmin Gunaratnam

  Anna Levanchy

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  • pp. 194–197