Racialisation in a "raceless" nation: Muslims navigating Islamophobia in Denmark's everyday life

Abstract

This chapter explores how racialised spaces (both social and spatial) are often gendered. Political discourse targets Muslim women and men differently and offers different potentials for agency. To explore this, the chapter comparatively discusses how young Danish Muslims use city spaces to challenge their categorisation along racial and gendered narratives, especially the conflation of these into the archetype of the “submissive Muslim woman” beneath the “aggressive Muslim man.” The ethnographic examples I present in this chapter indicate that these youths—while insisting on their right to religious expression—traverse a unique, gendered, and racialised terrain to achieve upward social mobility through middle-class respectability. My interlocutors produced a self-image of affluence to resist the hegemonic structures of “us vs them” through their use of particular city spaces. This enabled them to produce a counter-narrative for political stereotypes dominating Danish political discourse and the Danish public’s imagination.