Immigration, Multiculturalism and Biopolitical Projects on ‘Difference’: Negotiating Intersecting Social Divisions From Positions of Privilege and Disadvantage

Homogenising projects and multi-culture in the Finnish national context

In nation-building efforts after Finnish independence and the Civil War of 1918, ethnic, sociocultural and linguistic differences were seen as threatening the potential for popular unification and suppressed (Häkli 1999; Hietala 2005: 196; Paasi 1992). This national project worked in helping to produce both a linguistic nationalism as well as a myth of Finland as culturally homogenous (e.g. Häkkinen & Tervonen 2004; Hult & Pietikainen 2014).

During the same period, the popularisation of eugenic thought in Europe and the United States was also influential in Finland (Hietala 2005; Rajas 2014: 133–135). For example, a state-funded eugenics educational campaign was implemented starting in the 1920s, where there was an emphasis on how hereditary factors impact the development of both the individual and the entire population (Hietala 2005). The influence of eugenics in Finland culminated in 1934 with the passing of the sterilisation act, with only 14 out of 200 Finnish Parliament members voting against it. Official targets of sterilisation were the ‘mentally ill’, ‘degenerates’, ‘sex offenders’, ‘criminals’, ‘alcoholics’, ‘idiots’ and other people deemed a burden to Finnish society. Unofficially, the targeting of groups was also based upon racialised, gendered, ableist and classist categorisations (Mattila 1999).

In addition, eugenic thought and practices were active during the development and implementation of Finnish nation-building projects. Primary among these projects was the development of the welfare state, which was conceptualised and built with intentions to reduce social class distinctions, raise the standard of living and improve the health of ‘the populous’ (Esping-Andersen 1990). Yet while welfare state provisions based on concepts of universal distributions of rights and resources were becoming increasingly formalised in law, eugenic thought was being enacted through alliances between civil servants and state actors, including those involved in planning and building the welfare state (Hietala 2005).

Eugenic thought also influenced ideas about immigration. For example, while serving as Interior Minister in 1938, longstanding and contemporarily glorified President Urho Kekkonen advised that Eastern-European Jews be denied entry at the border due to their supposed ‘standard of civilisation’. Similar exclusionary policies were also attempted with the first Somali refugees in Finland in the 1990s, which eventually gave way to restrictive asylum policies (Rajas 2014).

Migrating into ‘the Land of Equality’

Coinciding with an increase in the numbers of non-White immigrants in Finland starting from the 1980s, multiculturalism became an increasingly important topic of discussion. By the 90s, the Finnish political climate was characterised by a polemic between welfare state values of equality, universalism and solidarity on one hand, and difference and racial, ethnic and cultural diversity on the other. This polemic has been built and maintained in a variety of ways. For instance, the assumption of welfare society that all people are essentially similar is taken as incompatible with multicultural ideals that differences between people should be recognised and taken into account (Puuronen 2004). Equality has also been positioned as threatened by affirmative action policies that migrants purportedly unfairly ‘benefit from’ (Keskinen 2016). Discourses on immigration, multiculturalism and diversity occupy discursively contentious spaces that are in tension with those of the Finnish welfare model.

Importantly, popular understandings of Finland as ‘previously homogenous’ have become entangled with public knowledge of increasing immigration rates, while the two phenomena are understood as interdependent (Tuori 2007). This perceived interdependence contributes to race being built as the significant ‘difference’ in the Finnish nation. Thus a dominant way of ‘doing diversity’ in Finland is by positioning immigrants as ‘bringing’ multiculturalism, diversity or ‘difference’ – as well as inequality – into the nation (Menard, 2016b). When taken as positive, multiculturalism is argued as valuable for ‘Finns’ in learning tolerance, for ‘bringing colour’ into the nation or diversifying the gene-pool, and for contributing to the ageing workforce. The way that social categories of equality, universalism, diversity and difference intersect here is such that migrants’ value is produced as instrumental. When taken as negative, migrants may be positioned as lacking and in need of ‘repair’ and of being educated in Finnishness and, in particular, Finnish gender equality, which is understood as an already accomplished project (e.g. Tuori 2007). At worst immigrants are seen as being incapable of such repair, and thus in need of exclusion (Venäläinen & Menard 2022). Thus while gender equality in Finland is often seen as a successful, indigenous national project that is universally distributed, multiculturalism is perceived as ‘coming from the outside’ and external to Finnishness and Finnish equality (Holli et al. 2005; Tuori 2007).

Ongoing Management of the ‘UNFIT’

In the paper, we understand the building and maintenance of the Finnish welfare state as intimately entwined with biopolitics. According to Foucault (2003: 245), ‘Biopolitics deals with the population, with the population as a political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power’s problem’. In dealing with this problem, modern states have developed biopolitical projects that aim at constructing the nation as a homogenous populace. The function of these practices is to compartmentalise the population into the fit and the unfit, according to whatever biologically construed classification (e.g. race, sex/gender, sexuality, ability etc.) may be deployed. Institutionalised managements of life and death – enacted via law enforcement, prison systems and health/illness institutions for example target these different categories of people in different ways. These materialisations of biopower extend beyond the practices of state actors, and into their bodily targets. State actors thus implement normalisation processes in ways that have material effects, altering bodies and bodily practices along biopolitical lines.

A biopolitical framework is relevant to this study in three primary ways. Firstly, biopolitics is useful for understanding some of the ways in which bodies marked through race and immigration discourses and practices have come to matter in modern nation-states. A vast amount of work has been done on the biopolitics of immigration and ‘race’, probably not least because ‘race’ and racism were focal in Foucault’s development of his theory of biopolitics. Racism fulfils the function of allowing for an imaginary of a homogeneous population, thus also making possible an imagined disruption of it by ‘non-natives’ (Lemke 2011: 41–42). Where such homogeneity is considered beneficial for a ‘healthy welfare state’ – as we have argued has historically been the case in Finland – a boundary between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ members of the population is created that is managed along lines of race, immigration and citizenship through which the attributes of normal and abnormal are articulated. Moreover, from the 90s onwards, the number of immigrants has increased in the Nordic welfare states (Hervik 2019), thus opening biopolitical practices to new kinds of challenges and controversies and thereby increasing the importance of the biopolitical approach.

Secondly, biopolitical theory is relevant to our study in that participants include persons diagnosed with ‘Asperger’s syndrome’. Asperger’s has been described as a genetically based developmental disorder affecting social interaction that is located on the ‘less severe’ end of a spectrum of autism diagnostic classifications. The name comes from Hans Asperger, an Austrian physician working in the Nazi era who identified Asperger’s in children that he was observing in his clinics. Although Asperger has been celebrated for ‘protecting’ these children, he legitimised forced sterilisations, used harsh diagnostic language (e.g. ‘autistic psychopaths’), and cooperated with the child euthanasia programme – sending children deemed ‘uneducable’ and ‘unemployable’ to killing facilities (Czech 2018).

Kanner (1943) pathologised autism as an inborn psychiatric disorder of affective contact exacerbated by cold mothering. The shift away from the ‘refrigerator mother’ theory did not begin until over 20 years later (see Nadesan 2005). Persons marked as autistic are nevertheless still constructed as being in their own world and selfish, as having underdeveloped minds and selves (e.g. Hobson 1993), and lower levels of empathy (e.g. Baron-Cohen 1985). There is, however, some resistance to essentialised and hegemonic understandings of Asperger’s and autism. In critical autism studies for example assumptions as regards a non-autistic ‘norm’ are questioned (Nadesan 2005; O’Dell et al. 2016). Neurodiversity activists have challenged autism as a deficit, pathology or negative embodiment (Ortega 2013), approaching ‘autistic ways of being’ as comprehensible interaction styles (Murray 2008).

In Finland, an individual perceived as possibly being autistic may undergo extensive diagnostic assessments through the public healthcare system in order to gain access to state-subsidised specialised education, healthcare or psychotherapy. In this study, we understand autism and Asperger’s as socially and discursively produced identity categories that are necessarily imbued with situated meanings that are framed by specific historical, social and cultural contexts (e.g. Goodley 2018; O’Dell et al. 2016). We also take these social constructions as having real, material effects on the everyday lives of those who have been labelled as such.

Thirdly, a biopolitical framework is relevant in that study participants also include transgender persons. The pathologisation of transgender embodiments can be traced at least to the related pathologisation of transvestitism, which was included as a diagnosis in the first DSM in 1952 in the sexual deviation section that homosexuality also appeared in. The continued psychopathologisation of sexual and gender non-normativity has gone through a multiple revisions and sub-categorisations. ‘Transsexualism’ and ‘gender identity disorder in childhood’ diagnoses in the 1980 DSM III were created as distinct from transvestitism due to a lack of associated sexual pleasure that was claimed to accompany transvestitism. Transgender diagnoses nevertheless still work on maintaining the conceptual links between male effeminacy and sexual perversion that were previously held together through pathologisations of homosexuality (Tosh 2014).

In Finland, a transsexual diagnosis is required in order to update gendered aspects of Finnish legal documents such as a person’s first name, social security number and gender marker, as well as to access transgender related healthcare. Transpersons seeking documentation changes or trans-related healthcare are also required to pass a ‘real-life test’ that lasts 12 months (living in their ‘new gender/sex’ in everyday life), as well as ‘commit’ themselves to their ‘new sex’ via sterilisation or infertility. Repo (2019: 98–99) argues that although it is tempting to link the 2003 trans-sterilisation laws in Finland to the nation’s eugenic past, that the laws are more of a shift towards normalisation projects on life related to nuclear family life and kinship.

Social subsidisation of trans-related health care in Finland are thus arguably at least in part biopolitical projects: They are attempts at aligning trans-bodies into the gender binary and cisnormative nuclear family model, making them more ‘hidden’ and unnoticeable. These biopolitical practices aim to manage gender non-conforming and fluid embodiments, while also sustaining the reification of what is taken as normal and healthy gender expression (Spade 2006). Eugenic practices such as the trans-sterilisation laws that govern access to body-modifying medical treatments and appropriate legal documentation are an explicit example of operations of biopower on trans-bodies (e.g., Lowik 2018).

Intersectionality

In this study, our aims and research questions are guided by intersectional theory. We ask how participants – who occupy both privileged and disadvantaged social positions – negotiate the intersectional performances in the vignettes by accepting, transforming or challenging them, as well as how they construct their own positions in the process.

Intersectional theory was formulated by Black feminists’ discontent with the lack of acknowledgement and dialogue in mainstream feminism of the multiple social divisions that intersect in Black women’s everyday lives. Among the primary insights and contributions of intersectional theory is the idea that privileges and oppressions based upon socially pervasive categorisations such as race, gender, sexuality, ability and class intersect in specific experiences and identifications that are irreducibly different. Intersecting categories of subjugation are theorised as variable as well as mutually constitutive, rather than simply additive (e.g. Yuval-Davis 2006). Entwinements of social divisions are both historically specific and continuous, both independent and interdependent (Buitelaar 2006; Collins & Bilge 2016; Gunnarsson 2017). Power is approached as being carried through hierarchical matrices within which individuals stand in varying relations that are derived from the multiple, intersecting systems of disadvantage and privilege that frame each of our lives – although necessarily in very different ways (Collins 2000: 273–275; Collins & Bilge 2016). Thus the ways in which particular social divisions are or become relevant for particular individuals in specific situations should be an ongoing empirical question (Hancock 2007: 251).

In our analysis, we work with the idea that social divisions operate in multiple dimensions, and therefore ought to be approached empirically at different levels of analysis. Yuval-Davis (2007: 198) separates four levels of intersectional analysis that correspond to four ontological dimensions in which social divisions operate (see also Anthias & Yuval-Davis 1983). Social divisions are articulated through organizations and formalised structures such as laws, institutions and families, reproduced through representations in images, texts and ideologies, and experienced interpersonally and subjectively through social relations and subjectivities. Subjectivity is thus understood here as embedded in social relations, rather than ‘inside’ individuals (e.g. Brah & Phoenix 2004). Although organisational, representational, interpersonal and subjective dimensions can be distinguished analytically, these ontological dimensions are presumed inseparable in everyday discursive and social practices. The inequalities operating in each ontological dimension can be either material or symbolic, or both material and symbolic (Anthias 2001: 381).

Negotiating Vignette 1: The Common Good Is Everyone’s Responsibility

Table 1 shows our analysis of the vignette 1 that we used to elicit participant responses at representational, subjective and interpersonal levels. At the level of representation, classifications intersect to build ‘us’ identities as egalitarian minded, ordinary and working Finnish citizens. By classifying immigrants in relation to ‘difference’ (U4), immigrants are discursively pulled into a network of us/them distinctions that work through divisions between ordinariness/difference, same/not-same benefits for everybody, egalitarian/not-egalitarian and working/not-working.

These categories unfold through power-dominant viewpoints such as ‘Finland’ and ‘society’ that culminate in soliciting the reader into a subjugating ‘we’ viewpoint (U8). Assumptions work in attempts at reducing differences. For example, starting with U2, egalitarianism is conceptualised as something in which everybody has access to ‘the same’ resources and benefits. This way of doing equality works on updating and normalising inequalities to the extent that there is little room for the recognition of material and power differences, and the different needs that are implicated in such unequal position(ing)s. Assumptions thus work with us/them distinctions and viewpoints in this vignette through repeated rhetorical moves of constructing, accentuating and normalising (power) differences. Together, in vignette 1 classifications, viewpoints and assumptions intersect in performing exclusion and domination of minoritized groups and immigrants whose power is discursively deflated, while ‘us’ categories and viewpoints are built as privileged and entitled to ‘Finnishness’ and resources.

How did our respondents negotiate vignette 1 and its classifications, viewpoints and assumptions? In terms of its overall argument, the respondents expressed suspicion. They were generally unconvinced by the meaning-making and positionings unfolding in Vignette 1 (N red = 43; N yellow = 33; N green = 18). The clearest disagreements were with utterances “In Finland, minorities have been invested in too much” (N red = 15; N yellow = 2; N green = 0), “Everything flows as long as immigrants integrate into Finnish traditions and customs” (N red = 10; N yellow = 6; N green = 1) and “Finland’s own social problems must be solved before we can take care of others’” (N red = 11; N yellow = 4; N green = 1). Although these tallies may give some indication of respondents’ basic stance to the utterances, of greater relevance is the ways in which respondents interact with and (re)negotiate the intersectional performances in vignette 1.

Let us take a look at Text 1, below, which was narrated by a respondent with transgender experiences. The text demonstrates a recurring way that both trans- and Asperger-classified respondents contest the tightly-bordered ‘us’ classifications set out in Vignette 1 by rejecting the propositional assumption in the vignette that minorities are not working people (U1), and by re-presenting minorities as working and effortful contributors.

The respondent works on deflecting divisions set out in the vignette between ordinary working people on one hand, and minorities and immigrants on the other. This is accomplished by reformulating boundaries around ‘us’ in broad and loose terms, inclusive of minorities, working people, taxpayers, immigrants and everybody. ‘Society’ is represented as an exclusionary ‘them’ force of subjugation of minoritized and marginalised individuals. Additionally in Text 1, classifications of minorities and immigrants intersect with those of inequality that are articulated through viewpoints of disadvantage. In challenging the intersections in Vignette 1, respondents recurrently frame their responses through viewpoints that shift between those of the disadvantaged on one hand, and those of ‘everybody’ on the other. These shifts in viewpoint in Text 1 can be interpreted as working to problematise power differences between minoritized people, immigrants and everybody.

While respondents largely contested the assumption that minorities and ordinary working people are mutually exclusive categories, Text 1 above and Text 2 below demonstrate their simultaneous lack of resistance to the assumptions in Vignette 1 that implicate special services as being not-egalitarian (U2). Rather than questioning the idea that positive discrimination implicates inequality, both responses work through propositional assumptions that inequalities and discrimination are why special support and different benefits (i.e. ‘unequal treatment’) for immigrants – in particular – are needed. The narrator of the following Text 2 is a transwoman.

Produced through viewpoints of minorities, the narrator of Text 2 classifies ‘equality’ against positive discrimination, which, in turn, is networked with classifications of cultural diversity, integration and inclusion and employment. An interesting pattern in the data is that at the level of representation, ‘us’ classifications of effort and rights to equality intersect and, at the level of subjectivity, are performed through viewpoints of disadvantage. At the same time, positive discrimination was given meaning in relation to inequality, and attached to migrant bodies. Thus while respondents do a lot of work on incorporating the disadvantaged inside the boundaries of ‘us’, they often simultaneously implicitly identify with viewpoints of privilege in accepting positive discrimination as not-egalitarian and linked to migrant bodies.

Moreover, texts produced through viewpoints of disadvantage did not always incorporate immigrants into ‘us’ classifications. The following Text 3 is produced by a respondent with both an Asperger’s diagnosis and transgender experiences, and is an example of how subjectivity may evolve and narrow with shifts in the topic of discussion.

The first part of text is produced through a viewpoint of situated knowledge of disadvantages involved in non-conformance to hegemonic representations of heteronormative sexuality and neurological typicality. ‘Them’ representations of the majority are built in rejection of the assumption in Vignette 1 that investing in minoritized persons amounts to tailoring society to their needs.

The second part of the text is built largely in alignment with the homogenising viewpoints and assumptions in Vignette 1. This is done through building subjectivity in relation to ‘us Finns’ (U1) and intersecting privileges of citizenship, and value assumptions related to assimilation and dominant, traditional Finnish culture and language (U7). Notable is the viewpoint of privilege that the respondent takes up, as having the power to ‘give immigrants a chance’ to become Finnish. Additionally, ‘us’ representations are geared towards constructing a Nordic identity that is given meaning in relation to a traditional hymn (suvivirsi) that is sung at the end of the year in primary and secondary schools. Making reference to the hymn is significant. It has been appropriated as a tool in the right-wing populist political campaign of the (True) Finns for asserting the importance of cultural traditions in national(ist) identities (Ylä-Anttila 2017).

Additionally, although the respondent advocates ‘taking along’ ethnic minorities and immigrants in Finnish traditions, there is a lack of engagement with ethnic minorities’ and immigrants’ viewpoints. Privileged standpoints of citizenship and of being able to avoid disclosing one’s own culture – which in the Finnish context implicates Whiteness – work in framing negotiations of, and claims to, Finnishness. Thus in contrast to Text 1 in particular, this excerpt demonstrates how unmarked categories of Finnish citizenship, Finnish language and Whiteness can intersect with, and in many ways work on absolving, categories of disadvantage in rhetorical strategies of belonging. This interpretation resonates with work that has demonstrated how Finnishness is given meaning in relation to Whiteness, while immigrants are racialised as non-White and thus excluded from Finnishness (e.g. Leinonen 2012).

Negotiating Vignette 2: Society Should Take Responsibility for Everyone

Vignette 2 unfolds rather differently, shifting between viewpoints of ‘difference’, ‘active people’ and ‘those most in need of help’. These viewpoints frame representations of ‘us’ as tolerant, immigrants and minorities, people at risk of marginalisation, the welfare state and those that value equality. Classifications and viewpoints intersect and work with the assumptions in the vignette, hailing the reader into storylines of effortful minorities, inclusion of ‘difference’ and equality. Table 2 shows our analysis of Vignette 2 at representational, subjective and interpersonal levels.

How do respondents interact with these storylines? Overall, they had some doubts yet relatively few disagreements with the utterances of Vignette 2 (N red = 7; N yellow = 28; N green = 56). The disagreements with this vignette were primarily in relation to the idea that intolerance and fear of ‘different kinds of differences’ are increasing (U10). The following excerpt was written by a transwoman, and demonstrates how this was accomplished by her assimilating minoritized viewpoints in the vignette into that of the ‘mainstream’.

By producing the text through viewpoints of both society and transpeople, and in alignment with the value assumption of tolerance in Vignette 2, the narrator of Text 4 works on framing her argument through increasingly diverse ‘us’ representations. Ethnic minorities are subsumed into categories of people benefitting from how ‘our tolerance’ has led to a mainstreaming and fading of ethnic differences. Thus we can again see that this passage works through intersections with Whiteness, on discursively equalising (i.e. homogenising) individuals occupying potentially differently valued social positions and the material inequalities associated with them. This existential assumption of ‘sameness in difference’ works on claiming minoritized experiences of power relations as universal and equivalent (cf. Ahmed 2000: 173). The assumption also conceals relations of domination that operate not only between power dominant and subjugated standpoints, but also between (differently) subjugated standpoints.

The following Text 5 was written by a respondent with an Asperger diagnosis. It is interesting in the sense that rather than taking up the viewpoints of ‘difference’ that vignette 2 is built through, the respondent identified with the privileged viewpoint of ‘young Helsinkians’ who presumably are not immigrants. Through this identification, the respondent rhetorically distinguishes metropolitan people from other Finns as being ‘more tolerant’.

However, the respondent then implies that in Finland, tolerant metropolitan people are also somewhat intolerant. By reasoning that Finland’s geographical position between the east and west has slowed down the development of its national identity, the respondent categorises ‘Finnish backwardness’ as ‘understandable’. Texts 4 and 5 together demonstrate how minoritisations and differences are dealt with among respondents in ways that legitimise relations of domination.

The last excerpt, Text 6, is from a self-classified transboy. It is exceptional in the sense that its narrator identifies and problematises viewpoints of privilege that can discursively contribute to relations of domination and material inequalities.

Similar to Text 1, representations of society are given meaning in relation to a somewhat stable notion of intolerance. Notable is that rather than classifying society in relation to an intolerant ‘them’, the respondent does not dissociate his unfolding identity from that of society but at the same time problematizes privilege. By self-reflexively taking up a position of privilege, the respondent not only rejects the assumption that ideological social values of tolerance benevolently regulate relations between Finnish citizens and immigrants. He also calls into question an ideological Finnish social value that arguably governs interpersonal relations – that of ‘equal sociability’. In brief, this social value works primarily through negative evaluations of those who are interpreted as ‘placing themselves above others’. Examples of such rhetorically downgraded non-normative sociabilities may be related to, for example wearing distinctive fashion (Törrönen & Maunu 2005) or engaging in political activism (Menard 2016b). In effect, this social value works on maintaining inegalitarian social relations through ongoing discursively disseminated obligations to conform to normative Finnish cultural practices.