The social construction of gender and ethnicity in youth migrants

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The social construction of gender and ethnicity
in youth migrants’ experiences
Resarch report
edited by Barbara Poggio
Contents
Introduction: the intersections of gender and ethnicity
Living in Finland. Experiences and future visions of young russian
3
11
speaking immigrant women
Päivi Katriina Juutilainen
Ethnicity, Gender and Educational Choice:
31
Illustrations from an interview-based project conducted in
Denmark
Bo Wagner Sørensen
Conclusions
55
References
58
2
Introduction: the intersections of gender and ethnicity
As a result of the increase of migratory flows towards Western Europe and
the arrival of men and women with different backgrounds, the ethnic and cultural
composition of the host countries is deeply changed and European countries have
developed into more multicultural and diverse settings that challenge the
traditional concept of society which assumes that people sharing the same
geographical space, will also have in common social ties and culture (Crow, 1997).
Experiencing the migration phenomena implies facing the integration challenge and
reflecting on how one ethnic belonging affects his/her position in society in terms
of subordination, marginality or social inclusion, avoiding the risk of marginalize or
exclude who/what is percieved as different because of his/her culture, language,
habits or religion. Within this multicultural framework, the dimensions of gender
alongside the one of ethnicity have been central concepts both to bring out the
importance to account differences and diversities for a full citizenship and to grasp
how and if the tracks of social inclusion are gendered and racialized (Mason, 2002;
Young, 1990) in order to intervene with adequate tools and policies.
Generally speaking, the concepts of gender and ethnicity share a common
root within the debate on the relation between differences and identities raised as
critique to western universalism and essentialism. By one hand, this critique points
out how policies founded on a universal and neutral notion of citizenship, run the
risk to produce inequalities and discrimination in practice for those who do not
belong to the dominant group ( Young, 1990). By the other hand, it highlights how
both gender and ethnicity are not ascribed qualities of the bodies – thus universal
and unchangeable – but situated productions of social interactions among
individuals, interrelated with power and culture.
However, what do gender and ethnicity mean? According to the feminist
inter-disciplinary debate, gender is conceptualized as a relational and dynamic
concept ( Gherardi, 1995), something individuals do rather than something
individuals have. Therefore, gender can be defined as a social practice people
3
engage through social interaction, a doing that produces gender identities through
simbolic and discoursive practices and a mutual positioning among individual
(Poggio, 2006). Hence, assuming this perspective enables to grasp how, in the very
process of gendering, different attitudes and characteristics are arbitrarily
attached to women and men and how those are informed by asymmetricals power
positions.
It enables, also, to understand that these gender postitionings are historically and
socially situated and so available to new and diverse re – settings. As Butler points
out
[...] gender is not always constituted coherently or
consistently in different historical contexts, and because
gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual and
regional modalities of discursively constituted identities. As
a result, it becomes impossible to separate out ‘gender’
from the political and cultural intersections in which it is
invariably produced and maintained. (1990: 3)
In order to reject the idea of a differentiation of human population on biological
and phenotypic basis, the concept of ethnicity, like the one of gender, has been
conceptualized as a relational process activated in the relation with the Other
through wich the ethnics identities of individuals and groups are constituted (Hall,
1996; Said, 1978). As Hall explains:
[..] ethnic identities are constructed through, not outside,
difference. This entails the radically disturbing recognition
that is only through the relation with the Other, the relation
to what is not, to precisely what it lacks, to what has been
called its constitutive outside that the positive meaning of
any term – and thus its identity- can be constructed.
(1996: 4-5)
4
Ethnicity has been regarded as ‘situational’ or ‘context-dependent’, ( Mason, 2000)
in other words that the context in wich it occurs shapes the meanings, expectations
and roles that particular ethnic identities carry. Thus, someone might regard
him/herself and be regarded by others as belonging to one or more ethnic groups in
one setting but to another ethnic group in a different setting. Clearly, also this
process of belonging and extraneousness is informed by paths of power that often
underrate the charateristics of minority groups, pushing them to the margins of
society ( Said, 1978).
Ethnic and gender practices and stereotypes, thus, rather than laying on a
ontological difference between the sexes or between the ‘races’, produce
themselves as a sort of self-fullfilling prophecy that carry people to act as these
differences of power and attitude ‘naturally’ and ‘really’ exist. In the context of
contemporary multicultural societies, has been highlighted how the dimension of
gender and that of ethnicity are not separate and independent from eachother in
the daily life of individuals neither in terms of shaping one’s subjectivity nor in
term of power relations and social inclusion (Andall, 2003). Many post-colonial
feminist scholars, for instance, underlined by one hand how gender practices and
behaviors are symbolic marks of ethnicity both in the process of labelling from
outside and in the costructing process of individual subjectivity and by the other,
they pointed out how ethnic resources or credentials are themselves gendered,
making gender a key process in the creation and manteinance of boundaries of
ethnic differences (Afshar and Maynard, 1994; Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1992).
‘Doing gender’ and ‘doing ethnicity’, therefore, exist as an interlocking system
that overlaps and intersects, even in a contraddictory manner: according to West
and Fenstermarker (1995), we can call it ‘doing difference’ in people’s daily social
encounters.
In order to carry this reflection further, it would be useful to borrow the
concept of intersectionality as it has been configured by feminist and racial
theorist (Crenshaw, 1989). The concept of intersectionality had been fruitfully
employed in both theorical and empirical works to point out how people are
simultaneously positioned in the social arena as women or men or for example, as
black, working-class or homosexual. This notion foregrounds a richer and more
complex ontology than approaches that attempt to reduce people to one category
5
at a time and it also points to the need for multiplex epistemologies: in particular,
it indicates that fruitful knowledge production must treat social positions as
numerous and relational. As Brah has argued:
‘the idea of power holds that individuals and collectivities
are simultaneusly positioned in social relations constitued
and
performed
accross
multiple
dimensions
of
differentation: that these categories always operate in
articulation’ (1996:242).
Intersectionality is thus useful as a handy catchall concept that aims to make
visible the multiple positioning that constitutes everyday life and the power
relations that are central to it.
This perspective is particularly fruitful within the analisys of gender and
ethnicity in order to create a theoretical space for analysing the interlocking of this
political categories, to avoid essentialism and to enable the significance of context
to be explored. Looking from the perspective of ‘intersections’ doesn’t remain only
a theoretical concept, but it can also be played out in practice enabling to question
how people negotiate and enact their gender and ethnic identities in the different
arena of their lives, how these differents fields of power emmesh and configure
and to inquire what kinds of social inclusion or exclusion these intersections
produce.
The articles that follow accept this challenge through describing the Finnish
and Danish research on minority youth issues and discussing the intersections
between gender and ethnicity in the everyday life experiences of youngster
immigrants in Denmark and Finland with a special focus on school and work
experiences. They become part of the activities of CHOICES, a partnership of
projects from Finland, Denmark, Italy and Spain which are all targeting groups
threatened by exclusion or segregation from and in the employment market within
their project (immigrants and ethnic minorities, gypsies, women, the young
unemployed, the disabled and long-term unemployed, people with special needs).
The Finnish project CHANCES, coordinated by the Finnish National Board of
Education, is aimed at developing career counselling services to prevent exclusion
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of young people from the labour market from a gender- and cultural – sensitive
perspective; the Danish project GEG – Gender, Ethnicity and Guidance coordinated by the Danish Research Centre on Gender Equality of Roskilde
University is aimed at including ethnic minority groups in the strategy of breaking
down the gender segregated labour market via new approaches to educational and
vocational guidance; the Italian project GE.L.S.O. – Genere, lavoro e segregazione
occupazionale – coordinated by the Departement of Sociology and Social Research
of the University of Trento is aimed at facing the gender vertical segregation in the
workplace through an accurate research activity of its structural and cultural
dimension as well as through experimental actions; the Spanish project CONCILIATE
– BIERZO coordinated by the council of Cacabelos is focused on the thematic area
of conciliation of family and professional life and the reintegration of men and
women that have left the labour market by promoting the developement of flexible
and effective way of organising work as well as support services.
The general aim of CHOICES cooperation, wich is coordinated by the Finnish
National Board of Education and founded through Equal Community Initiative
programme, is to create methods for guidance and counselling of young people at
risk of social exclusion and for promotion of equality between men and women in
the labour market, working both from a multicultural and gender-sensitive
perspective. Therefore, the main goals of CHOICES cooperation are first to identify
the similarities and differences of minority youth and occupational segragation in
each project country, and to compare, analyse and share experiences of the
nationally developed and used approaches on guidanceand counselling practises,
targeted at groups with special needs. Moreover CHOICES is aimed at raising
awareness of the importance of positive attitudes and mutual understanding in
including the most disadvantaged groups in the strategy of breaking down the
gender divided labour market as well as to disseminate the experiences of the
Developement Partners on a local level and the national results on a European
Basis. Finally, a specific research goal of this international cooperation – within
which this articles are set - is to exchange and carry out new knowledge on
minority youth issues focusing on gender and ethnicity as central notions to
understand how youth experience and negotiate their educational,working and
living path in transition between two cultures.
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The Finnish study entitled “Living in Finland. Experiences and future visions
of young russian speaking immigrant women” is written by Päivi Katriina
Juuntilainen within the activities of the national project CHANCES coordinated by
the Finnish National Board of Education. It focuses on immigrants with a russian
background that, at the moment, are the largest group of foreigners in Finland and
paticularly on women that are the majority within the Russian speaking
community. The research was conducted in June and August 2006 in the Southern
and Eastern Finland and it draws on the interviews with ten Russian speaking
immigrant women, ages of 16–23 years and resident in Finland from one to 13
years. The theoretical background of the research founds on a social constructivist
view of reality and on a contextual assumption of culture as well as on a post
modern view of identity and gender as a process of (de)constructing and
reconstructing. The aim of the study is both to examine how young Russian females
describe their life and experiences in Finland, how do they reflect today’s
experiences to their life history, how do they feel about their everyday life and
future in Finland, and to conceptualise the process of negotiations about identity
and gender between the two cultures. Juuntilainen highlights how migrants women
had faced both empowering and fragmenting experiences in their life in Finland,
splitted between direct and hidden discrimination and intolerance concerning their
national background and their gender belonging and a positive sense of safety and
stability for the future due to the faith of educational and working opportunities in
Finland. A special and interesting focus is payed on how these women manufacture
their identities negotiating and enacting different gender and ethnic performance
moving from mainstream and ethnic arenas like family, school or workplace
reflecting on motherhood, dress codes or intimate relations. Moreover, the author
argue that the construction of identity of the women involved in the research is
interrelated to the duration of residence in Finland – the longer the residence, the
more fragmented the identity - and suggest to conceptualize two levels of identity:
one emotional ´I am´ -level related to the belonging to the Russian background and
one rational ´Í want to be´-level related to the future life in Finland .
The Danish article entitled “Ethnicity, Gender and Educational Choice:
Illustrations from an interview-based project conducted in Denmark” is written by
Bo Wagner Sørensen and is largely based on one of the chapters of the Danish
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national report “Young People with a Twist”. The research was conducted between
June and September 2005 and it draws on eight group interviews with a total of 33
young women and men between 16 and 24 years old, with different ethnic minority
backgrounds who live in Denmark. Working on a theoretical focus on social
practice, doing and becoming, the article discusses the notion of educational
choice and the contexts in which it appears in order to highlight what does ‘making
a right educational choice’ mean in light of gender and ethnicity dimensions and
question the role of guidance and counselling in this process. Sørensen highlights
how even if making the right choice, finding one’s vocation and finding one’s place
are common expressions that are used indiscriminately to suggest that there is such
a thing, there may be many ‘right’ choices in the life of individuals and some
random choices may turn to right choices as well. Althought, it is suggested that
what matters most to youth is the very process by which they get to know a certain
education programme, enrol in it and eventually become genuinely interested and
motivated in it. Moreover, the author underlines how this process of becoming
involves fantasies of identity, power and agency about the person one would like to
be in the future and how, as a part of this process, youth assume certain
professional identities and take up various subject positions based both on gender
and ethnicity. Special attention is payed on how this fantasies and ideas on the
future follow or break gender and ethnnic stereotypes in the educational and
working choice and on how youth negotiate their traditional and untraditional
choices.
Despite this two contribution approach the issue of gender and ethnicity
from a different thematic perspective, both of them underline how the intersection
of these dimensions influences youth migrants in the process of manufacturing
their identities as well as their life choices connected to school, job or affective
relations. Both Juuntilainen and Sørensen highlights how all the youth everyday life
activities occurs in a ongoing process of negotiation that involves the dimension of
gender, that of ethnicity, the mainstream culture of the hosting country as well as
their personal wishes and projects of the future. They give us back a complex
picture of the youth migration phenomena that suggests that in order to create
adequate tools and methods to face the integration challenge and to promote
social inclusion great attention should be paid to the relational dimension of
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gender and ethnicity in terms of the practice ways trhough wich it is enacted in
individuals daily life.
10
Living in Finland.
Experiences and future visions of young russian speaking immigrant
women
Päivi Katriina Juutilainen
Introduction
“I remember that I was in a daycare centre and then my
parents came to pick me up in our light blue Lada. We only
had that small three-door Lada in which we moved to
Finland. And then they said to say bye-bye to everybody.
And I said bye-bye and then we never returned there again.
In fact, I thought Finland was some big shopping centre,
because my granny is a Finn and she had brought me some
lego blocks and some tops before. And then they told me
they were from Finland.”
(Jelena, 18)1
In 2005, there were more than 40 000 immigrants from the former Soviet
Union residing in Finland (Tilastokeskus 2007). Immigrants with a Russian
background are the largest group of foreigerns in Finland at the moment. The
number of Russian immigrants in Finland grew significantly in the beginning of the
1990s due to a more liberal immigration policy in Russia, and because of the right
of the Finnish groups in Russia, especially Ingrian-Finns, to remigrate. (Etnisten
suhteiden neuvottelukunta 2003, 12; Heikkinen 2000, 104; Pietari 2007, 23). There
have been an increasing number of studies regarding Russian speaking immigrants
in the last ten years. Despite this, little is known about their cultural background
and level of education, their identity, social relations and language skills, even
though these questions have been acknowledged and raised in discourse related to
the living conditions of these immigrants (Iskanius 2006, 15).
Cultural diversification seems to have taken Finland by surprise in many
areas of life. There may still be situations where a teacher comes to work in the
1
All the names of the informants have been changed.
11
morning not knowing that there is a new pupil in class who does not understand any
Finnish at all2. In our society, which has so far emphasised monoculturism, we have
gradually started to speak about the appreciation of diversity, instead of tolerance,
and emphasise knowledge related to intercultural relations: for example, cultural
competences (Nissilä & Lairio 2005), cultural sensitivity (Kasurinen et al. 2005) or
the readiness to meet multiculturism (Taajamo 2006, 13). Career counsellors, for
example, have named issues related to internationality as their most unsatisfactory
competences in the national assessment on career counselling in 2002 (Numminen
et al 2002, 233).
This article is related to the national Chances project, coordinated by the
The Finnish National Board of Education, the objective of which is to prevent the
social exclusion of young people. This project was carried out between 2004-2007
in cooperation with the Career Counsellor Education Programme at the University
of Joensuu, the Department of Teacher Education and the Institute for Educational
Research at the University of Jyväskylä, and the Jyväskylä Vocational Institute. The
themes of the sub-projects were related to questions regarding equality and equal
opportunity. The objective of the international cooperation within the Choices
project was to exchange experiences and carry out research related to gender and
ethnicity. This article is based on an interview study implemented in 2006, which
examined the experiences and future visions of young women of Russian origin in
Finland. The focus of the examination are negotiations related to identity, gender
and everyday life, which are created by lives in cultural transition.
Russian immigrants in finland
About 2000 Russian speaking immigrants arrive in Finland every year (Etnisten
suhteiden neuvottelukunta 2003, 7). Immigrants with a Russian background have
been categorised in many different ways, for example, according to their
geographical background or reason for immigration. The largest group is the
Finnish-Ingrian immigrants and other people of Finnish origin who mostly speak
Russian. Some of the returnees in this group explain the reasons for moving by
2
These situations were described by teachers who took part in the training organised within the Chances project.
12
other factors than their ethnic background, such as studies. The second largest
group are those ethnic Russians, who have come to Finland for family or work
reasons from the area of the former Soviet Union, mainly from Russia or Estonia.
The smallest group are those citizens of the former Soviet Union who are neither
Russian nor Estonian but who speak Russian. (Iskanius 2006, 17; Pietari 2007, 2223.)
The age structure of Russian citizens living in Finland differs somewhat from
the age structure of the Finns. Of the overall number of Russians in Finland, 16%
are youths (Finns 17%), 76% (Finns 66%) are of working age and 9% are pensioners
(Finns 16%). The majority (62%) of the Russian citizens residing in Finland between
the ages 15-54 are women, whereas there are more men amongst those aged
between 15-19 and boys under 5 years of age. At the end of 2003, there were over
3500 marriages between a Finnish man and a Russian woman and 300 marriages
between Russian men and Finnish women. Compared with other foreigners, the
Russians have the highest level of education; 28% have competed tertiary eduation.
The majority (44%), however, have only completed their lower secondary
education; this group includes also those whose level of education is not known.
The degree of unemployment in 2004 was 41 per cent, which is remarkably higher
than both the nine per cent of the majority population and the average rate of 28
per cent amongst foreigners. (Pietari 2007, 24-25, in reference to Tilastokeskus
2006.)
The Russian population living in Finland are very active in different areas of
life. They have their own magazines, radio stations, shops, daycare centres, clubs
and freetime activities. Many projects and clubs are also aimed at facilitating the
adjustment of young immigrants. The most important factors in this process are
language, studying opportunities and passing one’s studies, because these create a
basis for the future and offer the possibility to create a social network. There are,
however, lots of problems in the lives of the children and the youth of this ethnic
group. The language skills of particularly those who have moved into the country
after having finished comprehensive school are poor, which is why it is harder for
them to get into further studies and pass them. Without education it is then almost
impossible to get work. In addition, problems with adjusting to the Finnish teaching
culture and difficulty in making contacts with Finnish peers have made it harder for
13
young Russian speaking people to feel at home. There is a clear need at schools for
more information on the pupils’ and students’ educational background, both in
their former home country and in Finland and, more generally, on Russian society
and culture. (Iskanius 2006, 18; Pietari 2007, 31.) Sufficient and correct
information helps the teaching and other staff to empathise with the lives of the
immigrants and to be at their side during the transition period, when all the
support networks are needed.
The implementation of this study
The objective of this study was to discover how young women of Russian
origin describe their life and everyday experiences in Finland: how their
experiences of today are reflected onto their life history, how they see their future
and what kinds of meanings they give to life in Finnish society. In addition, my
objective was to conceptualise how young women of Russian origin experience
their identity and what kind of negotiations are related to the reconstruction and
deconstruction of identity and gender.
The informants were 10 young Russian speaking women between the ages of 16-23
who had moved to Finland from the area of the former Soviet Union. They had
lived in Finland from one to thirteen years. Their backgrounds varied in such a way
that five had a Finnish-Ingrian family background, the mothers of four women had
married a Finnish man and one woman had married a Finnish man herself. The
women had moved to Finland from the Karelian Republic (Petrodsavodsk,
Sortavala, Pitkyaranta, Kondoboga, Olonets), Kazakhstan and Ural. Five of the
women lived in a steady relationship3. Four of these women had a child and, in
addition, one was pregnant with a second child. One woman was pregnant with her
first child. The remaining five women lived with one parent and/or other relatives,
such as grandparents or with the mother’s/ father’s siblings. The youngest woman
still went to a Finnish comprehensive school, two studied at a Finnish high school
and one in a vocational institute. Four of the women were unemployed during the
3
A steady relationship here means a situation where moving to live together is dependent on obtaining the
residence permit.
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interviews, one was doing work practise and one was on maternity leave. Some of
the women lived in a town and some in the countryside.
The data was collected in June and August of 2006 in Southern and Eastern
Finland through theme interviews. There was a Russian interpreter present at the
interviews. All the informants already knew some Finnish. One, who had lived in
Finland the longest, was very fluent, so her interview was conducted entirely in
Finnish. In the other interviews, the informants regulated the Russian and Finnish
languages themselves according to their own wishes. The interpreter was necessary
when the language was more abstract than that used in everyday life. The themes
of the interviews dealt with the background and reasons for arriving in Finland,
experiences related to moving to Finland and life in Finland, future plans and
visions, attitudes towards being Russian and Finnish, and gender, as well as the
position and relationship between men and women. I paid special attention to
experiences related to school and working life, social relations and the
construction of everyday life. The interviews lasted 55-100 minutes. Six interviews
were conducted on the premises of one project, three in the homes of the
infomants and one at the University of Joensuu. I made contact with the
interviewees through the Finnish-Russian society and through one career counsellor
who worked in the immigrant training programme. The interviews were audio
taped. During the autumn of 2006 they were transcribed into texts. This analysis of
the data was done as a qualitative content analysis. The approach may be
characterised as abductive, in that certain theoretical concepts guided the process
of the analysis. The central theoretical tools in the analysis were the concepts of
deconstruction and reconstruction. These were compared against the concepts of
gender and identity. For its other parts, the analysis of the data followed the
principals of qualitative thematization.
Empowering and fragmenting experiences
I approach the reality of the life of young Russian women in the framework
of social constructivism. According to Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman (1994),
knowledge becomes social reality through the actions and thoughts of individuals.
The experiences of an individual may at the same time be her/his personal reality
15
and reality which is shared with others, intersubjective and, for this part, uniform.
Language is in focus when constructing reality, because it is the tool with which
the world is understood, interpreted and produced. Language, however, signifies
more than the spoken representations. It covers the verbal and the non-verbal, the
practical and the cognitive, the conscious and the unconscious. (Neimeyer G. &
Neimeyer R. 1993, 4-5.)
As early as in 1921, Max Weber emphasised that people act upon those
meanings that they give to social reality (Antikainen, Rinne & Koski 2006, 250).
When the individual’s living environment changes, her/his personal reality may no
longer be in congruence with her/his environment. In this situation, which is often
felt to be contradictory, the meeting of the inner and outer worlds starts a
conceptualization process, which acts as a tool to deconstruct and reconstruct the
individual’s life and reality and the related beliefs, presuppositions and value
systems (see Cochran 1997, 4-9, 42). The meanings, therefore, are shaped as a
result of the negotiations between an individual’s inner dialogue and the
environment. They are conveyed in the language and in social practices, but are
not always conscious. (Peavy 1991.)
The conceptualization process effects an individual’s experience of
subjectivity and her/his ability to function. Even though the starting points for the
agency are, in general, perceived as individual processes, they are, to a great
extent, dependent both on the social and the societal resources of an individual
(Cooper 2003, 346; Richardson 1998, 5.) The improvement of agency has been
decribed by empowerment (Egan 2002, 55; Peavy 1997, 17; Richardson 1998;
Siitonen 1999), as a two-level process which is related to change both in the selfdefinition of an individual and in that enviroment where he/she acts (Antikainen
1996, 253-254). The interpretations of a young immigrant about her/ himself and
her/his environment can be analysed along a continuum, at one end of which there
are empowering experiences and at other end exhausting or restricting ones (see
Matinheikki-Kokko, Koivumäki & Kuortti 2003, 30). In the centre of this continuum
are the interpretations related to identity, community participation and everyday
activities. If a young person’s experiences in the area of the identity are
empowering, her/his ideas of her/himself, her/his cultural background and abilities
develop towards a positive direction. In an opposite situation, the interpretations
16
fragment her/his identity and the experience of being able to cope. Community
participation may enhance the feeling of belonging, for example, to a school, study
or work community for young immigrants or, conversely, further add to the feeling
of being excluded. Positive or negative experiences become concrete in everyday
practices and regulate conceptualisation related to learning, hobbies and social
relations.
There were a lot of confusing feelings and events related to the experiences
of the women who took part in this study. The breaking of solid social relationships
or not knowing how to maintain these from this point on had caused grief and
strong feelings of longing, as the women’s friends and most of their relatives
stayed in Russia. In addition to breaking loose from the former life, the new and
unknown life in Finland caused confusion. The feelings of difference and being
different were created and had arisen in many ways. The lack of language skills
had become concrete in small everyday situations, which had acted, particularly
with children, as a central indicator of one being different. Jelena, who had moved
to Finland at the age of five, reminisced about her early experiences at childcare
where in some situations Finnish was required of her when she had no skills to
express herself. The seating arrangement in classrooms was also done – with good
intentions – in such a way that it made the differences visible. “ ...our teacher,
when I came, put me next to a girl whose mother was from the Philippines... I
guess she thought that well, since you are both a bit different, you might as well
be together”, Jelena said.
At their loudest, the despising or hostile attitudes of the Finns manifested
themselves through jumping queues, refusal to communicate, calling names, or
even direct violence. Nearly all the informants had been called “ryssä”4 and/or a
“whore” and nearly all knew other Russians who had been called whores or other
insults. One infomant had been told that she smells Russian. Finnish parents had
also told their children not to play with Russian children or customers in a shop had
refused to deal with a Russian sales assistant. One informant said that she had
been sexually assaulted at the age of nine. Finnish boys aged about 15-16 from the
4
a derogative word in Finnish for a Russian person
17
same suburb had caught her and undressed her by force. “So then when they had
somehow half-undressed me I somehow managed to get away anyway”.
The negative experiences were, however, related to singular people and situations.
The helpfulness and kindness of the Finnish people were raised in many contexts,
and the Finnish standard of service was praised. Nearly all the women in this study
had gone to school or studied in Finland. Even though the school experiences had
been mainly positive, the women positioned themselves mainly in the margin or
from the margin; this became apparent through making distictions and through
experiences of them. One exception was the School of Eastern Finland, which
specialises in Russian language and culture. One of the informants went to this
school. Even though a lack of Finnish characterised the first months at school, the
position of the Russian language and culture in the goals and the atmosphere of the
school created a feeling of appreciation and of not being marginalised. “Everything
else (apart from language skills) was great, all my classmates were very friendly
towards me. There were seven of us altogether that were Russian in my class.
Because in our school Finns study Russian and Russians study Finnish. And it was
easy that then the other Russians sort of helped me in my Finnish studies...So it
was good there that they never offended Russians there like they can in Finnish
schools... There were two teachers whose mother tongue was Russian. And the
other teachers could speak some Russian. That’s why it was really easy to be
there”.
Moving to Finland had brought about an experience of safety and stability,
even though for some women livelihood meant a very scarce fulfilment of the
basic requirements of everyday life. Uncertainty related to the continuation of
one’s own or one’s close relatives’ residence permit toned down the feeling of
safety and caused uncertainty with respect to the future. In the images of the
women, future life in Finland had, however, been built upon a promise of a better
life. This belief and vision seemed to alleviate the home-sickness or ease a
situation where the previous numerous social contacts became fewer or
nonexistant. The women that I interviewd sometimes expressed strong feelings of
loss and longing – “It was like I missed so much about Russia that... like I almost
cried like every day...” – and said, at the same time, that their life is in Finland
18
and they intend to stay here. The meanings that life in Finland entailed were
related to economic stability, calm and safe society and justice, and educational
possibilities. “I think that it is good that my son was born here – his life is secure
here.” “What amazes me here is that everything is done so that it would be easy
for people to live here.” The lifelong learning idea in Finnish society had also been
mentioned, and the women felt that this offered more possibilities compared with
one’s own country of origin.
“...here I can learn a trade...there I couldn’t...
because I am already of that age where everybody in Russia is already working and
that age where you study has passed for me...It is not like you can study at
whatever age where I come from.” The meaning of education was also emphasised
as a factor for securing the children’s future. “...it was precisely the child’s future
that was the main thing for us – it is very difficult for your child to study in
Russia, if the parents are not wealthy.”
Cultural identity work
Jarmo Houtsonen (2000) has examined the construction of identity in
relation to the state and the transition processes of the prevailing culture and
society. He describes the construction of identity from traditional society to
modern and to post-modern society. In a uniform and slowly changing society, an
individual identifies himself with few identities, which he gains by being born to a
certain larger and immediate family and gender. The identities and the social order
are justified through traditions and the nature of things. Freedom of choice and
different opportunities have increased in modern society: the equilibrium of the
self is threatened by alienating work, more superficial relations between people
and living environments that consist of unfamiliar people. These mean choices,
contradictory expectations and an increasing relativity of values. We try to control
change through means of rationality, which is balanced by trying to reach the
authentic and rational self. This is demonstrated by the concept of identity
introduced by Erik H. Erikson in 1950. By self-identity, Erikson referred to the
experience of integrity and continuity, which is created by an interactive
relationship between the individual and his environmement. (Erikson 1982, 249.)
Later, this concept obtained a wider meaning that also refers to communal
19
solidarity and continuity (Iskanius 2006, 39). The modern interpretation of
“culture” is also based on an entity based on objective, uniform values and beliefs,
upon which the indivudual identity is built.
In postmodern society, uncertainty and changes are accelerating, Houtsonen
(2000) continues. The reality has an even more ambiguous interpretation: identities
and life-styles are created and maintained, and the identity types on offer may be
opposite to one another and contradictory. We speak of identity work; the
flexibility, fragmentary nature and conscious construction of identity, (Ahmadi
2005, 101). According to Nader Ahmad (2005, 112), the prevailing way to analyse
the cultural identity is, however, still mainly based on modern thinking. This leads
to the fact that the cultural majority aims to define the identity of those
representing minority cultures.
This contradiction is also visible in the Finnish immigration policy. The status of the
Finnish-Ingrian returnees in the 1990s was justified by their Finnish expatriot status
and their Finnish origin. The most central criterion for expatriotism in the
government report to parliament in 1998 was Finnish identity, including an
awareness of Finnish origin of birth and its declaration, the safeguarding of
customs, traditions and religion or participation in cultural and organizational
activities. (Työministeriö 1998, 6-7). This immigration policy, based on an
essentialistic ethnic ideology, combined the individual’s origin of birth, cultural
identity and social relations (Davydova 2006). As summarised by Olga Davydova
(2006, 42-44, see also Heikkinen 2001), Finland expected to receive Finns, but
suddenly we were in a situation where thousands of immigrants who spoke poor or
no Finnish arrived in the country. This situation created by immigration shows that
understanding the nation as an ethnic-cultural community no longer works in the
(late)modern world. Even if the returnee would be of the same origin as the
majority population, it does not guarantee a similar cultural identity.
Experiences related to the cultural differences of the young Russian speaking
women that I interviewed became apparent when they described their everyday
life in Finland. Even though they were grateful for the stability and security of
their living conditions, some of the women felt that the organised Finnish society,
with its boundaries and cultural practices, simultaneously narrowed their quality of
20
life. The flipside of safety and stability was the lack of excitement and dullness of
life. In this context, the interviewees, for example, wondered about the age limits
for young people’s discos and restaurants and the business hours of shops. “In
Russia we have the shops open on the eve of public holidays because it is then that
people want to buy lots of food and gifts...” “In Russia life is a lot freer, because
our laws are a bit different... that those laws, they are softer.” Cultural
differences were also emphasised in relation to sound and space: “In these public
spaces, in shops, for example, Russians are sort of louder. Here in places, for
example, in shops, the Russians behave in a louder manner. You have to behave in
a calm way here and you can’t talk in a loud voice. It is the same on the roads. It
is of course good for safety that it is calmer.”
The social integrity of the Russian culture was also emphasised. “And there
is still that difference between the Russians and the Finns that Finns hide
everything inside, but we in Russia share everything between friends, even all the
problems. Everybody helps one another.” The distant nature of the Finnish family
relations was also raised, because “in Russia all the relatives, aunts, uncles,
cousins, we are all one big family.”
The level of conscious reflection on questions related to one’s own identity varied.
The majority of the interviewed women had lived in Finland for only a few years,
so their linguitic identity was clear. Language had more of an instrumental meaning
– it provided a key for the opportunities offered by Finnish society and helped them
to get by in everyday life. Instead, those who had moved to Finland as a child had a
more shifting and fragmentary image of themselves: they underwent deeper
reflection on the relationship between language and the self as well as the
relationship between the self and the environment. “Yes, the language that you
have learnt is one new identity, like a new mask. Like the better you master the
language, the more that mask grows onto you. And I know that amongst Finns I am
a different person to that who I am amongst Russians. Or when I speak Finnish, I
am a different person to that Russian speaking person.”. “I don’t feel like I am
Russian nor Finnish. I don’t know who I am. But I live here and my place is
here...that I can’t go there anymore.” The Russian language was, however,
associated with the emotional experience of oneself: “And maybe there is more
21
feeling towards the Russian language than towards Finnish. Even though I love
Finnish, I figured that out later...at the moment I have a Spanish boyfriend...and
this is my first long reationship and love affair. And Russian is absolutely the first
there and not Finnish.”
Those women who had lived in Finland for a shorter duration expressed
being “Finnish” or “Russian” with a clear distinction and talked about ‘us’ in
relation to ‘you’ or ‘them’. In their experiences of national identity and cultural
identity there were two levels: the emotionally characterized present – “In my
heart I am a Russian” – and the cognitively characterized future – “I will have two
citizenships”. The women said that their objective was to acquire and adapt to
Finnish customs as part of their lives in the future. In this context, identity was
also examined from the viewpoint of citizenship, because obtaining Finnish
citizenship meant at the same time a stabilization of their uncertain living
conditions. The identity work targeted towards the future therefore meant a
conscious and spontaneous stabilization of one’s own life. It became apparent
when the women were talking about themselves and their children and their own
family or their extended family. “I would like him (the future husband) to be a
Finn so that we could continue this Finnish family line of ours.”; “So I do feel like I
am completely Russian at the moment. But I respect Finns, the Finnish culture,
Finnish traditions...So I would like that he (the child) would have a Russian
identity. But I hope that he would feel good about himself as a Finn in this
country.” There was also a wish that the process of becoming Finnish would be
fast: “Well, even though I have lived here for only eighteen months, in any case I
am more attracted to Finland than to Russia and I feel more drawn to Finland.”
A woman undergoing cultural change
Gender is also connected with the construction of identity and cultural
questions. Lucia Gilbert and Murray Scher (1999, 8-18) examine the social and
cultural dimensions of gender from four different points of view: as individual
differences, social constructions, language and discourse and as interaction
between individuals. Gender as individual differences and as a relationship entails
an idea related to the contrast between woman and man, concerning both
22
biological differences and a juxtapostition at the level of psychological features
and functions. The differences are apparent in the beliefs and suppositions
regarding the abilities of women and men, their personality traits, values, or
sexuality. Gender as social constructions entails those cultural, organisatory and
individual manifestations of society’s gender system which are realized and
renewed in the societal division of labour, as the different power of women and
men and as responsibility in education and care work (see also Liljeström 1986, 8889). Gender as a form of language and discourse is apparent in the way we use
language and the content of our speech. Our ideas about men and women, our
suppositions and beliefs are manifested when we talk to persons of different
genders, or when we speak of persons that are of different sex. Gender, in the
interaction between individuals, refers to processes, with which we assume the
social constructions that are associated with life as a man or a woman. These are
demonstrated as different forms of being and doing in everyday practices. (See also
Nummenmaa & Korhonen 2000.)
Even though the condition for the construction of genders varies in different
cultures, the dichotomy between men and women seems to demontsrate itself in
one way or another in all societies. (Bem 1993, 80) Finnish and Russian societies
are similar in the high level of education amongst women and in the number of
women working; in both countries about half the work force is female. In addition,
strict segregation within working life seems to be a common trait. According to UN
reports (Human Development Report for Russian Federation 2005, Gender equality
and extension of women’s rights in Russia in the context of the UN millennium
development goals 2005), the stereotypes targeted for women and men in Russia
are strong, and apparent, for example, in strict status, role and wage differences
(a woman’s income is about 60-70% compared to a man’s income level). Even
though the political objectives promoting equality between the sexes have
included better opportunities for women to combine work, motherhood and
housework, the objective is also indicative of the presupposition that the
responsibility for the family and housework is the woman’s domain.
The Russian idea of family, where parenthood appears to be different from
the Finnish perception, is connected with the division of labour between the sexes.
In Finland, parenthood is based on the heterosexual nuclear family concept and the
23
ideal of romantic love, whereas Pirjo Pöllänen (2005) describes the Russian family
through the concept of extended motherhood. This means that the women,
normally the grandparents and the sisters, share the responsibility of raising and
caring for the children. This childcare culture has been explained by the high
number of women as family breadwinners and by the fact that women become
mothers at a young age. On the other hand, the official family ideal in society is
described, for example, in the publication entitled Gender equality and exension of
women’s rights in Russia (paragraph 6.2) by concepts such as “incomplete
families”, which refer to single-parent families, and “full families”, which refer to
families with two parents.
In my own data, the “extended motherhood” became apparent when the
women told me about their lives: “When we lived in Russia, my mum had three
jobs...so I spent a lot of time with my granny”, said 19-year-old Maria. In relation
to combining work and family in the future she said:...”well, we have talked about
this matter a bit with my mum here in Finland and mum has said that she has
nothing against looking after the children when that time comes.” The majority of
the women,
however, were aware of the Finnish daycare system and trusted the offered
services. Because raising and caring for children in Russia is not based on a tightly
defined mother-child relationship, it is natural that daycare provided by
professionals is more natural for them than, for example, for women that come
from strong housewife cultures. On the other hand, women with children who have
got used to support from the extended family may face problematic situations upon
moving to Finland, both from the point of view of concrete everyday situations and
the attitudes of the enviroment. An arrangement where the grandparent cares for
the child in Finland suggests that the mother is not able to look after her children.
Cultural change seems to put pressure on these immigrants to conform to the
Finnish idea of good parenthood. In Pirjo Pöllänen’s study (2005), for example,
Russian women seemed to both acknowledge and adopt the idea of the Finnish
nuclear family once they had married a Finn. Upon moving to Finland, women, in
particular, experience cutural change, both in a concrete reduction of the support
network and at a sybolic level. The effect of the paralyzing new life situation in my
24
reserach material became particularly apparent with one woman in the form of
loneliness and extreme isolation from the world outside the home.
All the interviewed women expected to have a family-life with a husband, children,
a profession and a job in the future. Education and professional plans, particularly
for those who had moved to Finland recently, were cautious and “realistic” by
nature. They were rather based on the opportunities on offer, which were
restricted by lack of languge skills and their marginal position in the new society,
than on their own interests, strengths or dreams. 16-year-old Galina, who was still
in comprehensive school raised high-school studies as a desired and better option,
but said, at the same time that that she had no possibilities to get in. “So it would
be better for me to go to a vocational school...I don’t know what I’ll study
exactly, but to be a chef or a hairdresser.” When Galina was asked what she would
like to do, if there was nothing stopping her, she said she would like to “work
somehow in the business world between Finland and Russia”. Raisa, who studied
food industry in a vocational school, said that she ended up in this field because
she was able to get into the school and she had work prospects, too. Raisa said that
she would have been interested in becoming a chef, but that she also dreamt of
the tourism industry. 22-year-old Irina had had periods of both unemployment and
work practise. She had got into a fashion school, but her studies were interrupted
because of an injury. Irina, however, was not interested in becoming a seamstress,
but hoped to get into studies to become a hairdresser like her aunt or a masseuse
like her mother. Before her maternity leave, 23-year-old Nina studied to be a
painter in the building industry, but she had to postpone the start of her studies
because of her pregnancy. She also told me that she was interested in being a chef
or a baker or in working in a daycare centre.
Two of the young women that I interviewed had taken dance lessons since
childhood. This intensive hobby was also part of their future plans. 19-year-old
Marija had applied to study in a conservatorium and was waiting for the results at
the time of the interview. Her future dream was to study choreography at
university. 19-year-old Aleksandra had tried to get into a high school, but had not
got in. She planned to enter a high school for adults and later a dance instructor
programme at the Polytechnic. Two of the women were still in high school. They
25
had both come to Finland as children and gone to school in Finland. Their future
visions, as with those who had some important hobby in the background, were
more extensive and based on personal values, interests and strengths. One of
them, Anna, wanted to do humanitarian work with people or with animals, and the
other, Jelena, was planning to study architecture. The connection between future
plans and visions and the social background of the women was also clear. The
daughters of highly educated mothers, in particular, planned higher studies and
described their opportunities as more extensive. The professional plans of all the
women followed the traditional division between the sexes, even though due to the
social context and related restricted possibilities the women had to settle for
training within the fields of industry or the building industry as temporary
solutions.
The views of the informants were the most uniform in their ideas on gender.
The interviewees wanted to draw a clear line between the areas and activities of
men and women, when we talked about the division of labour, childcare, and the
relationship between the man and the woman in the family. The man is the head of
the family, whom the woman has to obey, because the man is stronger and possibly
also wiser: “I think that it is like natural that the man is the head of the family
and does sort of harder things. But this like requires geat wisdom and ability to
take care of these things. There is no sense that the king is stupid, no.” The man’s
role also included providing for the family in principle – “so that it would be better
for me that the man earns the living. And would then take care of me, too.” –
even so, all the women also wished to have a career for themselves. The fact that
in Finland men also take part in looking after the children and raising them and can
also work in fields that are traditionally women’s field, also raised some
amazement: “If, for example, you have six children at home, a man cannot
cope...but a woman can...I have noticed myself that here in the kindergarten the
man is like a nanny...that was really strange to me. Or that there is a man
teaching at a school.” The differences between the sexes were also emphasized in
relation to raising children: “I would raise my son in such a way that he would
become a good man…and a girl a woman”. Two women, however, questioned the
position of (Russian) men as the head of the family and women’s duty to take care
26
of the children and housework. 19-year-old Tanja said that the father of her
unborn child will stay at home, if she gets into a school.
According to the informants, the most significant difference between a
Finnish and a Russian woman was the attitude towards one’s looks. They described
the absolute precision of their own mothers, relatives and Russian women in
general in this matter. “A Russian woman is such that the most important thing for
her is the way she looks.” “Here the girls are, I would say, modest.” The women
had, however, faced a cultural contradiction upon coming to Finland: the “Russian”
way to display femininity by one’s appearance in Finland had the stigma of being a
loose woman in Finland: “…when I am a Russian I dress so that if other people see
me…that I am a Russian, and I am wearing a skirt and high heels –which means
immediately that I am a prostitute, that I am easy to get – from the Finnish men
…those who are drunk I have experienced like, if they can’t have their way, then
you are a Russian whore, and why don’t you let me have you.” The women also
said that they regulate their dress code, hairdos and make-up according to whether
they are in Russia or in Finland. Natalja, who is married to a Finn, described how
her husband, particularly in the beginning, had told her his ideas about dresssense.
The interviewer: What about clothes and your dress-sense, has this
been some sort of a topic with your husband. Have you talked about
this, and does he have some wishes in relation to this?
Natalja: In the beginning he did.
The interviewer: What kind of discussions (did you have?).
Natalja: He said that your skirt is very short. And that, well, why are
you going into town in such high heels, that it is easier to walk in
lower heels. And in the beginning when we were shopping in Russia
and I chose some garment he like might have said that that is not nice,
don’t take it.
The form of femininity which is acceptable in the Finnish culture had been
learnt rather quickly, as Nina, who moved to Finland two years ago, describes:
“…When I was in Russia I took care of my looks a lot, because if you went in the
27
street in Russia, you might have been criticized if everything was not…I mean
carefully chosen. And here it is not so important, so this must be another thing
where I have changed.” Jelena who has lived in Finland since childhood raised a
more vivid experience: “Maybe in that way I have sort of become a Finn a lot, that
if I wear clothes that are more Russian style, I mean really feminine for example,
or more make-up, then I at once feel like I look cheap. Even though many of my
friends do that, I mean dress like that…And I don’t see them as cheap, but I see
myself as cheap if I would wear those clothes”.
Summary
The objective of this study was to examine how young women aged 16-23
with a Russian background have experienced their lives in Finland, how they
perceive their future and what kind of meanings they give to their lives in Finnish
society. Another objective was to conceptualize their negotiations related to
identity and gender between the two cultures, and to make visible the processes
that enhance or weaken their agency and processes that are empowering and/or
exhausting in everyday life. The theoretical framework of this study was based on a
constructivist view of reality, where language is the central tool for constructing
and deconstructing reality.
The young women who took part in this study had had both empowering
experiences and then experiences that restrict one’s resources. They had met open
and hidden discrimination and intolerance. Reliquishing a close social network had
caused grief and the new and unknown life situation in Finland had caused
confusion. There had been experiences of difference and being different that had
emerged and been created in many ways at schools, work places and other
situations, like in public places. Nearly all of the women who took part in this study
had been called “ryssä” or “whore” and nearly all knew other Russians who had
been trated the same way.
The
empowering experiences had been
created through
communal
participation and the feeling of solidarity and the atmosphere in which being
Russian and the Russian culture was respected. Similarly, being appreciated and
the possibilities for genuine participation added to experiences of well-being. The
28
image of Finland and the better life offered by it acted as a strength that
supported their everyday life and maintained hope even when life was
characterised by unpleasant experiences, scarce income or uncertainty related to
the continuance of their residence permits. The meanings related to a better life in
Finland kept internalized pertained to the security of society, justice and equal
rights and educational possibilities. The Finnish education system and educational
thinking offers such opportunities that would not have existed in Russia, according
to these women.
The future visions of the women were very traditional. They all expected to
have a family life with a husband and children in the future (see also Kasurinen
1999, 93). Their educational visions were hopeful yet cautious and “realistic”. The
educational and professional plans of those who had lived in Finland for a shorter
duration, in particular, were related to the social context and envisaged
possibilities rather than personal strengths, interests or dreams. Despite this, their
ideas related to the Finnish educational possibilities created faith as did the fact
that sometime later in life it would be possible to continue one’s studies or change
one’s field altogether. Those women who had been in Finland longer or had some
long-term interest in the background had more open educational and professional
views, even though their professional hopes were, to a great extent, aimed
towards traditional women’s professions. Despite the small amount of data the
connection with social background was also clear.
The thoughts of the women who took part in this study regarding gender and
relationships between the sexes were based on emphasising the differences
between men and women and their specified roles, particularly in the area of
family. Life as a woman seemed to strongly involve looking after one’s physical
appearance; clothes, hairdo and make-up. The women felt that there was a great
difference compared to Finns in this area. The women had, however, “learnt” to
regulate their femininity both consciously and more intuively, according to subtle
messages from the environment, and it was also shaped depending on the context
when shifting between the two cultures. There were also influences from the
Finnish culture in relation to ideas regarding family and parenthood.
29
Their experiences of cultural identity and national identity varied according
to the time spent in Finland – the longer the women had lived in Finland, the more
their experiences reflected a shifting and a more fragmented identity. In the
interviews, there were two levels of identity to be found, the emotionally toned
present (‘I am’) and the cognitively toned future (‘I will be’).
The results demonstrate how ethnic background and gender are concretely
intertwined in everyday life of the young Russian immigrant women. So, much
attention should be paid to the support systems of young immigrants in different
areas in the Finnish society. At school, it is as important to promote respect for
cultural and gender diversity with educational processes, as enhance the quality of
guidance and counselling services to be better available and more adequate for
multicultural issues.
30
Ethnicity, Gender and Educational Choice:
Illustrations from an interview-based project conducted in Denmark
Bo Wagner Sørensen
Making the right choice of education at once is an explicit ideal in
educational policy because it is considered a waste of economic and human
resources if (young) people drop out and do not complete whichever education
they commence. The importance of making the right choice is emphasized in the
Danish government’s recent initiative on education in the global economy
(Regeringen, 2006). In the same publication it is argued that counselling – in its
multiple forms (Plant, 2006) – should be professionalized in order for counselling to
work as an instrument for reducing wrong choices. Altogether counselling appears
as a buzzword and there seems to be an underlying idea that counselling, once
professionalized, is the answer to most problems and obstacles.
But what does ‘right choice’ mean? Underlying the ideal seems to be a
notion of the right choice, which is understood as a perfect match between choice
and individual personality. Such a match would be identified on the basis of a
thorough investigation and elucidation of the individual personality, competencies
and interests, which, in turn, are held up against and tuned in according to the
actual situation on the job market. To find one’s vocation, one’s place, one’s niche
or one’s true calling are expressions that point in the same direction. One can also
miss one’s vocation in which case we think in terms of a mismatch.
While we tend to operate with a notion of the right choice from the
individual point of view, it is also generally agreed on that the individual (young)
person is not capable of making the right choice on his/her own. This is why the
guidance counsellor enters into the picture, serving as a professional sparring
partner in addition to family and social network. It is also generally agreed on that
some people need educational guidance and counselling to a larger degree than
others, and young people with ethnic minority backgrounds are cases in point. The
idea of a perfect match thus appears to be repeated when it comes to the
31
relationship between counsellor – or rather counselling – and counsellee. What kind
of counselling would match different types of young people?
This article is largely based on one of the chapters in Young People with a
Twist (Sørensen, Madsen & Sørensen, 2006).1 It has a special focus on the notion of
choice and the contexts in which it appears. Although it is acknowledged that
people may operate with ideas about the right choice and that such ideas may be
influential appearing as the education or job of one’s dreams, the notion of the
right choice is nevertheless a notion, not a fact. It is suggested that what matters
is the very process by which people get to know a certain education program, enrol
in it, become part of it and eventually become genuinely interested and motivated
in it. As part of the process, people assume, and fantasize about, certain
professional identities and take up various subject positions based on gender. It is
suggested, too, that there may be many ‘right’ choices, and that somewhat
random choices may turn out to be ‘right’ choices.
Our young interviewees are in a process of becoming, which involves
fantasies – that is, ideas about the kind of person one would like to be and the sort
of person one would like to be seen to be by others, and such fantasies of identity
are linked to fantasies of power and agency in the world (see Moore, 1994a,
1994b). Although the article tends to be descriptive, it is informed by a general
theoretical interest in practice considering that gender identity is both constructed
and lived.2 Gender is central to a process of becoming, of acquiring an identity, of
structuring one’s subjectivity, and can no longer be thought of as a structure of
fixed relations (Moore, 1999, p. 155).3 Or as Connell puts it: “Being a man or a
woman, then, is not a fixed state. It is a becoming, a condition actively under
construction” (Connell, 2002, p. 4).
Material and methodology
The article is based on eight group interviews with a total of 33 young
women and men – from 16 to 24 years – with ethnic minority backgrounds.4 Some of
them can be designated refugees and others immigrants and descendants. About a
quarter of them are in 10th grade and the rest are attending a number of youth
education programmes such as commercial college, technical college, the upper
32
secondary school, the higher preparatory examination (HF), adult education
centres (VUC) and social and health care assistant training programmes. The
interviewees were chosen by counsellors from four youth guidance centres located
in different parts of Denmark.5 The centres are cooperation partners in the Equal
project Gender, Ethnicity and Guidance.
The young people were asked questions that dealt with the relationship
between gender, ethnicity and guidance in the widest sense. What dreams have
they got concerning education and jobs? Have they made a choice? What is their
experience of educational and vocational guidance? What are their families’
expectations? How are their views on gender equality and the relationship between
marriage and education? What experience do they have of discrimination? What is
the relationship between education and where they go to live in the future?
The interviews took place in the period between June and September 2005.
Group interviews were preferred over personal interviews mainly for practical
reasons and because it was expected that the interviewees would be more relaxed
if they were part of a group and thus more prone to talk and engage in discussions.
In retrospect it seems that certain questions and themes would be more suitable
for the personal interview approach – e.g. reflections on personal motives for
choosing an education – whereas others such as gender rights issues would be more
suitable for a group discussion. Six of the interviews were carried out in genderdivided groups – three women’s groups and three men’s groups – and two in mixed
groups. This division was based on the supposition that the young people would be
less shy and talk more freely in all-male and all-female groups. It is difficult to
make any definite conclusions as to the meaning of gender in the different
constellations. Some of the young men, for example, seemed to be intimidated by
some of the others in the all-male groups and it certainly did not loosen their
tongues. The reasons for that are complex. They may know and dislike each other
as it is, they may have different commands of the Danish language, they may be
afraid to expose their families, and there may be ethnic and class-based rivalries.
The all-female groups on their part sometimes created a space for shared intimacy.
If we turn to the mixed groups, neither women nor men seemed to be muted. If
anything happened it was rather a tendency to be more outspoken and perhaps
challenging, a kind of gender game.6
33
It is a fact that researchers influence their material in the sense that there
are limits to what we are able to ‘see’ and understand based on gender, age, class,
ethnicity, nationality, political stance, ideology etc. Some of one’s perceptions are
coloured by one’s personal circumstances (Caplan, 1992). At the same time our
informants respond to us the way they perceive us. Researchers are inevitably
involved in the production of gender (Poggio, 2006, p. 230) in intricate ways. The
project’s interviewers were adult Danish women employed at the Danish Research
Centre on Gender Equality and consequently informed by gender equality thinking.7
Thus there seemed to be a tacit understanding that women’s education and
independence were not to be questioned.
The young people seemed to be aware that they participated in the
interview because of their immigrant background. Some of the more self-conscious
even took on the role of immigrant representative and bridge builder. At the same
time it appeared that some of the youngsters were very sensitive about being
categorised by others and that they sometimes tried to resist this categorisation
and preconceptions about how ‘they’ – i.e. immigrants – do things (B. W. Sørensen,
2006, p. 18).
Educational choice
Educational choice is an expression often understood as a well thought-out
decision taken on the basis of consideration of one’s own abilities and interests and
insight into the existing possibilities and their respective advantages and
disadvantages (cf. Nielsen & Sørensen, 2004, p. 12). Viewed in this perspective,
young people who are faced with choosing an education can show varying degree of
‘readiness for choosing’ and consequently be categorised as either ready or not
ready (Pless & Katznelson, 2005, pp. 14-15). And if the educational choice equals
‘choosing one’s future’ at one and the same time, it becomes momentous and
appears to be the great, decisive choice in one’s life, because it means selecting a
path in life and the ultimate choice of life(style). The question is, however, if the
young people themselves experience it like that when adults do not remind them.
The fact is that what later is regarded as a choice that was made at a crucial
point hardly seemed to be that in the situation if we look at it from the individual
34
youngster’s perspective. This applies, for example, to upper secondary school,
which for many is just a natural extension of primary school and nothing that is
really decided on and either chosen or rejected, if one comes from an environment
where the upper secondary route is practically laid down in advance (cf. Nielsen &
Sørensen, 2004, p. 17). In this way many so-called choices take place relatively
automatically. They are obvious because they have been taken in advance. If for
one reason or other one goes against what is expected, one could rather speak
about a choice in the form of a rejection.
Choice is probably not an adequate term for the way in which one ends up in
a certain educational programme and perhaps even completes it. It should rather
be said that this is due to actions undertaken more or less wholeheartedly. And
these actions – like, for example, enrolling in an educational programme and then
turning up and attending it – often have some consequences in the shape of one
being captured inside a process, becoming curious, acquiring a taste for some of it,
beginning to view oneself as a student, an apprentice or pupil of a certain type
who attends a certain place and becomes part of a certain social community with a
special professional identity. The importance of acquiring a sense of belonging can
hardly be stressed enough.8 At the same time as young persons today are expected
to make a decision about their life early on and show readiness to make a choice, it
is a fact that the seemingly very independent choice goes hand in hand with a quite
extensive youth guidance machinery, which, in turn, is the result of a specific
educational policy (cf. Plant, 2006). So the development is ambiguous in many
ways.
Many elements are involved in the choice (cf. Lehn, Madsen & Sørensen,
2005, pp. 26-27). It is class ‘determined’ in the sense that some young people are
more geared for academic studies from their home environments than others. The
literature talks about educationally accustomed and educationally foreign (home)
environments (Pless & Katznelson, 2005, p. 17). It is also gender ‘determined’ in
the sense that women and men make different choices to a very great extent.
Another way to put it is that they respond to a range of available education
programmes that are already highly gendered and a labour market based on a
sexual division of labour. In all likelihood ethnicity also plays a role, but this can be
difficult to isolate because ethnicity and class often interact in the Danish context.
35
The young people’s choices
The young people who were interviewed generally come from homes with a
relatively modest level of education and poor contacts with the Danish labour
market in the case of both parents. Where one or both parents have an education
from their country of origin, they typically do not use it in Denmark and some of
them have taken early retirement. It can be said that like the ethnic minorities in
Denmark in general, they occupy a marginal position on the labour market. For
ethnic Danes who live with compulsory education and its impact as something
natural, examples of no schooling or schooling for only a couple of years are quite
foreign. But this is actually the case for some of the youngsters. A young woman of
18 says of her parents, who come from Turkey: “My mother never attended school,
and my father went to school for five years [in Turkey].” A young woman has the
more general observation about the relationship between the young people and the
parents’ generation: “It is also difficult for us that we know far more about society
in Denmark where we live than our parents do.”
Even though some of the youngsters come from homes that one would tend
to designate as foreign to education, it appears from the material that both the
young women and the young men want to get an education of some kind and that
in general they are expected to do so. The message that one cannot manage
without an education in Denmark today has gone home. Education-foreign is by no
means synonymous with hostile to education, because across the board education
seems to be regarded as something to be desired. A young man who has been living
in Denmark for five years says that there is a great difference between Denmark
and where he comes from. He stresses that people in Denmark are much more
focused on the future and think ahead, and that one must have an education to get
a job because one gets nowhere without an education.
A recent study shows that ethnic minority parents say that it is very
important for them that their children get an education (Tænketanken, 2005, pp.
80-81). On the other hand, precisely what education they choose would seem to be
less important. The parents have no education themselves and would therefore be
proud if their children were to get any education whatever. It also appears that it
36
is the ethnic network rather than the parents that influences the young people’s
educational choice and that to a high degree the young people themselves say that
they draw on their ethnic network (friends and cousins) when they are choosing an
education. According to the same study, this may be one of the explanations for
the somewhat one-sided educational choices, and it can involve a risk of ‘wrong’
choices because the network is too young to have any significant experience of the
Danish education system.
Traditional or untraditional choices?
It is not always obvious what can be characterised as traditional and thus
also untraditional educational wishes and choices. The literature often emphasises
the special predilection that young people with ethnic minority backgrounds have
for long-cycle higher education in medicine, dentistry, engineering and the law,
and in this connection it is mentioned that these study programmes are connected
with prestige in the ‘home country’ and that they are some that are known ‘from
home’ (Seeberg, 2002, p. 70; Dahl & Jakobsen, 2005, p. 38; Lehn, Madsen &
Sørensen, 2005, p. 35). It is, however, a fact that both doctor and barrister are on
the top 10 list of young people’s job wishes (Pless & Katznelson, 2005, p. 40),
covering young people in Denmark generally, and all of the educations mentioned
are prestigeous among ethnic Danes as well. This makes it difficult to spot any
particularly ethnic minority tradition. One could rather say that these education
programmes have a prototypical character both here and there, i.e. that they are
the very essence of education programmes.
If we examine what the young people actually say they would like to be, a
rather mixed picture emerges, and the education programmes mentioned do not in
any way dominate. At the same time it is important to be aware that the
youngsters’ answers range from dreams and vague notions to clearer, more realistic
and preliminary choices. Three of the women are undergoing training as social and
health care assistants, while two of them dream at the same time of becoming
respectively a cosmetician and a laboratory assistant or doctor. Two speak of
becoming shop assistants, but this mostly seems to be a compromise solution,
because the one would really rather become a technical assistant but lacks the
37
necessary Danish language skills, and the other thought first of hairdressing but
gave up the idea because there were too many applying for this. One speaks of
becoming a bank employee, another a children’s educator, and the third a dental
technician. Two – and they are not the shop assistants – have considered having
their own (clothes) shop, but one of them has abandoned this idea. One wants to
become a politician, but does not seem quite aware that this possible job is not
really something for which one takes an education. One wants to be a journalist,
because she feels she has a calling to be a kind of bridge builder between Danes
and immigrants. One originally wanted to be a psychologist but is not interested in
this any longer. Now she just wants to go to university but has no idea what she
wants to study. Another wants to become a defence lawyer, but does not sound
particularly convinced of this herself, unlike a third who wants to study physics and
chemistry at university. One dreams of becoming a police officer, another does not
give any clear answers. It is difficult to perceive any pattern in this mixed picture
of education and job wishes. The young women who were born in Denmark perhaps
start out by being more ambitious with respect to thinking about long-cycle higher
education – with psychology as the popular subject here – but this idea is
continuously revised.
The young men differ from the women in that several of the men – four or
five – emphasise the wish to become independent or have their own business,
respectively own mechanics workshop, own IT firm, own restaurant and own
unspecified commercial enterprise. Four point to an education as IT-supporter,
computer programmer or the like. One of these, however, mainly wants to have his
own restaurant and wants to have some IT skills to use here. Four have considered
becoming police officers and this is still the first choice in the case of two of them,
while the third has switched to something with dental care, and the fourth
mentions child psychology, police officer and children’s counsellor at one and the
same time, while also saying that he is not at all academically inclined. One wants
to become a machinist, another a car mechanic and the third an air mechanic. One
wants to do hairdressing, and there is also one budding civil engineer. Two of them
considered nursing at one point, but both of them have abandoned that idea again.
One of them has made a radical switch to air mechanic while the other has
remained within the world of white coats. He now wants to become a dentist
38
instead, and he shares this dream with another young man, who, however, is also
considering becoming a dental assistant if that proves to be more realistic. Finally
there is a rather more curious dream of becoming a professional cricketer.
Like the young women, several of the young men themselves say that they are still
very much in doubt, and it is mostly those who have only been in Denmark for a
short time and are improving their Danish language skills. As one of them who
attends a school for bilingual children says: “I think it’s a little early to choose now
... I want to have time to think about it and decide [subsequently take a
decision].” It is not so surprising that they are in doubt considering that they are
still struggling to learn Danish and probably find it difficult to judge where they
stand in relation to being able to complete an education (in Danish) in Denmark.
It is not possible on the basis of the interview material to identify
differences in ambition or clear differences in educational wishes against the
background of ethnicity or national origin, because the informants are too few and
too varied. One young woman does say that it is an Afghan tradition to take a
proper education, and if one were to take her at her word one would think that the
Afghan population in general was extremely well educated. But the woman is
obviously speaking from an upper class Afghan perspective. What neither the young
women nor the young men have to say about their educational wishes seems to be
particularly uniform, even though in the case of the young men, for example, there
are four attractive things: computers/IT, mechanics, uniforms and white coats.
Simultaneously the wishes of both young women and men appear to be realistic in
general in the sense that very many of them seem to have thought about the
relation between their own abilities – including present language skills in the case
of some of them – and choice of education, as well as the prospects of a job later
on. It is possible that guidance has had an effect.
Youth guidance
To the question of whether he has talked with an education and vocational
counsellor, one of the young men answers that he has done so many times, “but
more in the primary school ... very counsellor-ish. I used them quite a lot because I
39
had no idea of what to do.” He seems to be one of those who appears to know
what he wants because he is in his second year as a shop trainee, but this is not
actually really him. He has sincerely regretted it and according to himself he is
only staying there because he has a contract he cannot annul. He has lots of ideas
that go in widely different directions: travel abroad for a year to get away a little;
take the higher preparatory examination (HF) even though he says he is not very
good at school. And during the interview he says that he would rather like to
become a police officer, child psychologist or children’s counsellor. This young man
does not really know what he wants, has not clarified his choice when it comes
down to it, and in this respect he resembles many of the other interviewees who
are either attending primary school or a youth education programme. At the same
time it could be objected that the concept of ‘no clarification’ is diffuse because
statements can point in different directions (cf. Pless & Katznelson, 2005, p. 40).
Another problem is that the concept at one and the same time is used as an
objective, statistical measure and refers to a subjective perception of one knowing
what one wants at a certain point in time. Very few of the young people make
clear statements such as: I’m going to be ... Most of them are rather airing ideas
and wishes. At the same time as it is typical that the young people do not know
precisely what they want to start out on, the material gives no cause for thinking
that they are particularly worried about not having taken a clear position. A young
woman who has been in Denmark for five years says: “There are so many different
things ... I can choose one of them. But right now I can’t make up my mind because
there are so many things. I choose ... I change every day right now [at present]”
(cf. Kofoed, 1998).
As the interview material does not allow for direct comparison between
minority and majority youngster, it could be worthwhile to take a look at other
literature, and it emerges that young people with an ethnic minority background
are generally far more in doubt than young ethnic Danes about what they want to
do after 9th grade (Pless & Katznelson, 2005, p. 18). There would thus seem to be
good reason for aiming special youth guidance efforts at young people with ethnic
minority backgrounds. On the one hand, some of the young people seem to have
quite patchy knowledge about concrete things, like for example a young man who
says that he reckons on going to technical college, and if he finds this too difficult
40
that he reckons on attending the upper secondary school instead. There are also
examples of weird notions of what is required to become a police officer.9 On the
other hand one can be left with the impression that some of the youngsters – in all
likelihood due to a lack of knowledge – do not categorise the different education
programmes in the same way as ethnic Danes do, but the material in this area is
too thin for anything more definitive to be said. One youngster first thought of
becoming a police officer but is now considering dentistry, and one wonders at the
very wide range. There are a couple of other similar examples.
The great majority express satisfaction with the youth guidance they have
received, but apart from that one can conclude very little from the statements,
which often have the character of a matter of course: “Well, a counsellor helps you
... If you want to be something or other … a nurse, for instance, then she’ll tell you
what to do.” There is a general difference in the view of counsellors and youth
guidance among the relative newcomers and the so-called descendants. Whereas
the first group seems to be satisfied and appear to regard youth guidance as an
extended service and are not inclined to discuss the counsellors’ proposals, the
others are more critical and can on occasion defy the counsellor. Sometimes the
counsellor comes to appear as a person who is holding the young person back
unnecessarily by being too careful on her or his behalf, but most of the stories
about specific youth guidance seem nevertheless to prove the counsellor right in
the end. A young man mentions that a counsellor suggested that he take the
business college basic education course (HG) because in her opinion he could not
take the advanced level business studies course (HH), but “we had different
opinion.” The counsellor then had him take some tests and he found out that “it
probably was best” to do as she had suggested. Not all stories, however, end up
with the counsellor being proved right. A young woman remembers clearly a
conversation in the primary school: “She wanted me to ... She practically forced
me to take 10th grade even though I didn’t want to ... And then I say no, I wanted
to take HH ... [but] no, she said HG. And what did I do? I took HG and wasted a
year there.”
Finally there are some of the young people who complain about the
tendency to think in terms of technical college in connection with youth guidance
of youngsters from ethnic minorities. For example, a young woman says: “When I
41
was in 9th grade, they said that I should take technical college. That would be good
for me ... It would be better for me. They tried to brainwash us to attend technical
college. Typical! I think that they try to get all immigrants in my school to attend
technical college and it’s not a good school. Let me put it like that.” In the eyes of
the young people, negative expectations of immigrants have the character of
discrimination. For their part the counsellors probably – and often rightly so – argue
that some of the young people do not have a realistic picture of their own abilities,
and that it is typical for the counsellor to get the blame if something goes wrong.
I am (not) the type
Fixed ideas about who one is and what one can take, manage and even put
up with, can probably be both good and bad in educational and wider integration
contexts. On the one hand it can perhaps give some ballast, irrespective of the real
content. On the other hand the ideas can tend in the direction of deadlock and
habitual thinking. Finding one’s type is in practice something one does not do alone
as significant others confirm one in a given identity with specific characteristics.
One may sometimes risk having a certain identity attributed to one by others, to
appear to be a certain type by virtue of others’ typologisation. Typologies
contribute to reducing the complexity of reality, and they are numerous in popular
scientific experiments where one can find out if one is mainly rational, emotional
or creative etc.
Some typologies seem to be closely associated with the young people’s selfrepresentations, i.e. the way they wish to appear in their own and others’ eyes. A
young man says that he wants to be independent – a mechanic or with his own
business – and he gives the following reason: “Because I am not the type who can
work for others. It’s better to have one’s own business.” Another young man had a
paid job in a place but only stayed there for two weeks as “I didn’t want to do it
any more,” because “It wasn’t good ... there were some who had to tell you what
to do. People who were younger than me, and that wasn’t my scene.”
Emphasising independence in the educational and work context seems to be
more pronounced among the young men than the young women. A young man says:
“My father and I are more or less alike. We’re very independent types.” Being
42
one’s own master, to be at the top of one’s own private little hierarchy and not
putting up with taking orders from others (other men) is a typical, pleasurable
male future scenario. Having one’s own business also means that one is not directly
compared with other men and perhaps found wanting. Two other young men agree
that it is best to have one’s own business even though one of them later says that
he does not mind working for others: “But it’s sort of what we have from our own
country or where we come from. It wasn’t a democratic country. They told you
what to do, always, and then you have it mentally within you that you will not be
bossed around by others ... It’s also a matter of being able to decide for yourself.
Over there [country of origin], they boss everyone around. What music you should
listen to, what you should eat and ... so it’s really bad. And just to have your own
business. There is nobody who decides.” Having one’s own business, being
relatively autonomous, can of course also be seen as an expression of it being a
realistic path to take, and it can be interpreted as a preventive feature or
countermove against discrimination. A young woman says: “I’m not someone who
can learn to relax,” so therefore it is probably no good studying to be an educator.
As she says: “Well, I’d like to be an educator. But I know very well that I don’t ... I
don’t have the patience. I don’t have what it takes to work with children, but if I
did I’d like to become an educator.” Another woman had considered becoming a
psychologist but when she had thought about it she found out that is was “sort of a
bit boring”. As she puts it: “When you think of a psychologist, it’s just all the old
people and things like that, but you can be young too. But I think that it’s rather
boring work. And because I’m very sensitive, I probably couldn’t stand listening to
all the problems that emerge.” It is, of course, excellent to know one’s own
limitations, and it is not very wise to become an educator if one cannot stand
children: “But children every morning, I couldn’t get up for that!” And it is not very
wise either to be a psychologist if one cannot take listening to other people’s
problems. But if one typologises oneself this can simultaneously take on the
character of destiny, the same way as both sex – i.e. the biologically sexed bodies –
and culture are often used deterministically. Presenting oneself as a certain type
can also be used internally in the family. A young man has a mother who is advising
him to become a doctor, but he has an excellent countermove: “It’s good enough,
43
a doctor is fine, but I’m not the type who is going to learn it ... I can’t stand the
sight of blood either.”
Tethered fantasies
There is to a high degree an element of fantasy involved in selecting an
education and one should be able to see oneself as a practitioner of the profession
in which one wishes to be trained or educated. Educational selection is
pleasurable, creating images and fantasies of how one wishes to be regarded as a
gendered person. Men and women typically are not interested in the same thing,
because gender has been stamped on several lines of education in advance.
It is simultaneously the case that what is difficult to become will usually
seem to be more attractive than what most people can manage. Scarce
commodities have always been attractive both here and there. If it is difficult to
get a place in an education programme, it automatically becomes worth more in
people’s eyes. And if a great number of students fail and only a few pass, this also
increases the value of the education. Young people who receive a high average
mark typically want to exploit this to the full and therefore go after the education
programmes that are most difficult to get into. And programmes with the highest
entrance requirements strangely enough often seem to be dream study
programmes. But dreams are also graduated and weighed in relation to realities, so
that in spite of everything we end with having somewhat different dreams. “I want
to be a cop,” says a young man in answer to the interviewer’s question about what
he would like to be. When questioned further, he gives the following reason for his
wish: “It would be cool to be a patrolman. Just to have control over all those
people. You … it’s authority and things like that. They have masses of authority.”
There is no doubt that the power is attractive and that the choice is pleasurable.
But the desire is dampened by the actual requirements for the training. The young
man says that the physical requirements are not a problem. But the academic
requirements are: “It’s more those school things that I can’t really do … they have
some school requirements … written requirements and all. So it’s more that kind of
thing I’m a bit in doubt about.” Another young man who has only been living in
Denmark for five years talks about the many requirements for becoming a police
44
officer, and it shines through that he does not see it as a realistic possibility:
“Language … and German, English and physics … a lot of things. You sort of have to
have … high grades.” One woman is taking a social and health education (SOSU),
but at the same time her “big dream is to be a cosmetician … and I almost dropped
my SOSU programme.” But it was too difficult as she has to be in three places at
almost the same time in connection with the school period, the trainee period and
the basic course. But her dream is still intact. “It’ll end with make-up,” as she
says. It emerges that there are several aspects of the story. She foresees that her
chances of getting a trainee place are very poor if she commences her dream
education in the area she lives in. She assesses the chances as follows: “Well, it’s
almost one out of a hundred. One in a thousand. If it was a Dane and me, they
would rather take on a Dane. I’m convinced of that.” She said earlier that she had
never experienced any unpleasantness at her job, i.e. her present training
programme, even though she wears a headscarf, but this apparently does not
exclude the expectation of discrimination. One of the other women brings up yet
another aspect, namely that many immigrant families are reluctant to send their
daughters away from home – i.e. to another Danish city than the one in which the
family is living – in connection with education, because then people talk and
everyone interferes.10 And the woman with the dream of becoming a cosmetician
answers that in that way it is good that most of her family live in the country of
origin. “In a way I’m happy about that, because there aren’t so many who come in
and say ‘Why on earth are you doing that?’ and ‘Don’t let your daughter do that!’
and the like. And my father is like – when he has said something, then that’s that,
even if my uncle comes in and my grandfather comes in. When he has talked to his
daughter about it and it’s absolutely OK, then they shouldn’t interfere.”
The reasons for making the choice one makes are very different. A young
man has the following to say about his wish to become a police officer: “I just think
it’s a terrific job … Driving around and arresting bad people. It was like … I just
thought it was interesting.” Another young man comes with a circular answer: “It
was because when I was small I thought I wanted to be a police officer. Then I grew
up and I wanted to be a police officer.” A third young man points to the
pleasurable aspect: “It’s because I love cars. I think it’s cool to be a mechanic.” A
young woman’s choice is quite by chance and somewhat characterised by a
45
negative choice: “It’s not because I’m so keen on office work. I just took it because
I didn’t have anything else to choose when I took HG. There wasn’t much else that
was interesting. Because I didn’t want shop work.”
It is difficult to say anything general on the basis of the material about how
selective the young people are or allow themselves to be, or if one is expected to
be very enthusiastic about what one is doing, or if less can suffice. Only one young
man is very explicit in this area and sounds unmistakably like a young Dane, and he
is not one of those who have recently come to Denmark: “I just feel … of course
you shouldn’t work at something you don’t like. You should like what you do … then
it doesn’t matter what you do. Whether you’re a rubbish collector or a bank
director … if you love what you’re doing it’s OK.” It appears from a recent Danish
study of young people without an education that their arguments for choosing and
not choosing education are based on the idea – or ‘youth mantra’ – that one should
only do what one feels like and that one has to be (true to) oneself (Jensen, 2005,
p. 87). However, such a project of self-realization may be more pronounced among
ethnic Danes.
Gender-traditional choices?
The male police officer and the female cosmetician fit very well into the
existing sexual division of labour, and the interview material does not contain any
great surprises with respect to educational wishes. In general the young women
and men seem to make the ‘right’ choices – i.e. gender traditional – which can be
explained by the fact that some ‘choices’ or subject positions carry much more
social (and material) reward than others, and some are negatively sanctioned.11
The role of dominant discourses on gender and gender identity are crucial in this
connection. Not surprisingly, most young men aim at educations and work with a
strong male connotation. There are, however, examples in the interview material
of deliberations and choices that spontaneously break with habitual thinking about
women and men. Some of them have to do with practical training periods, while
others refer to thoughts about a certain education. A young woman, who was born
in Afghanistan, was in a practical training period as an air mechanic and chose it
because it “sounded so exiting. But it wasn’t what I wanted to be.” Thus it was not
46
because of experience from her practical training period that she did not continue
in this line of work. Another young woman with an East African background did her
practical training period in the military: “I’ll never ever do that again in my life …
It was really a challenge. Just to try something new, because everybody believed …
Well, it started out for fun because I was in the class and I said, ‘Oh, I could try the
military!’ Then everyone [said], ‘You in the military? Forget it!’ and I didn’t think it
was so hard. I just turned up in high heels and things like that. Then I just came
over there and then you had to train, run in the evening … Shit, I‘ll never do it
again.”
The fact that all young women are not particularly fond of children is not so
strange but nevertheless worth emphasising because it may run counter to some
ideas about ethnic others as generally suited to care work: “You can just forget
kindergartens! … Because those children gave me a headache. In the end I didn’t
want to do it. So I said … I said I wasn’t coming any more. I worked there for a
month and then I didn’t want to do it any more.” On the other hand we have a
young man who would like to do “something with helping children who have a hard
time at home, or children who can’t keep up at school.” But he is not dreaming of
becoming an educator, and his wish is perhaps mostly about what he wishes others
had done for him in his childhood. Two young men from Kurdistan (Iraq) considered
becoming nurses at one time. And at the urging of the interviewer, one of them
gave his reasons in the following way: “One helps people, and they take care of
people … help the old people … They are good at comforting you and making you
forget that it hurts.” It emerges that the young man himself was hospitalised in a
Danish hospital for a couple of days and that he thinks the nurses were fantastically
good. Caring, comforting and helping belong to the classic picture of a nurse’s
functions. What is unusual from a Danish point of view is that he does not think of
the profession as a woman’s job and he has two male cousins in Kurdistan who are
nurses.
Even though the care aspect is what has been brought up, it can by no means
be excluded that the attraction also has to do with prestige in the form of the
white coats. It appears at least that he makes a quite clear distinction between
care and service and that he may possibly be imagining a nurse as a kind of doctor
who does not get his hands dirty. The other young man, who also thought along the
47
lines of nursing and also has some family members who are nurses in their home
country, has actually done a practical training period as a nurse in Denmark, and
during the interview he advises his fellow countryman not to do it. As he says:
“Don’t do it … I don’t think it’s exciting to do a nursing practical training period.
You are not allowed to do anything that you’re given permission to do other places
… It’s cleaning, the toilets or things like that …” And the first young man replies:
“If that’s the case, I don’t want to!” He has apparently not imagined that those
kinds of service aspects are part of the job, and they obviously do not appeal to
him. Another young woman from Afghanistan mentions that her dream had been to
become a police officer but that she is too small [i.e. may not match the physical
requirements], after which she thought of becoming a hairdresser, but that takes
too long. It is her father who gave her the idea of joining the police force because
he had been a police officer in the home country. She has also spoken with the
counsellor about it and the counsellor seems to have said that that was an
excellent idea and “you can surely do it because they need bilinguals now … [so]
I’m still thinking about it.”
The question has been raised of whether young people with an ethnic
minority background are counselled to a particular extent to make gendertraditional educational choices (Lehn 2003:51-52). One of the young people makes
a statement that points in this direction when she speaks of “counsellors’
ignorance of what one may and may not do [as a girl or young woman with an
ethnic minority background] … that limits how much motivation they give … I think
that many of them have in the back of their minds: Oh well, she’s a girl. She’s
probably oppressed at home and her father wouldn’t be very pleased if … so I
should rather advise her to take HG.” It seems more likely, however, that
counsellors in general want to contribute to these girls’ liberation as they see it.
In general it can be said that the young people’s thoughts and wishes
concerning their future education do not produce many surprises from a gender and
gender equality perspective. There are relatively few untraditional examples and
they typically represent transitory wishes. But it is worth pointing to the fact that
the untraditional examples exist as they demonstrate the variation within the
category of ‘young people with an ethnic minority background’. It is also worth
thinking that if we compare the young women with their mothers another picture
48
emerges, and we can hardly argue that nothing much has happened. The young
women are in fact in the process of carving a future life that is very different from
the lives of their mothers. They want an education and imagine making use of it
afterwards by getting a job (B. W. Sørensen, 2006, p. 22; Prieur, 2002, p. 164).
It could be imagined that men with an ethnic minority background find it
more difficult to make a break with gender stereotypes in their choice of education
than men with a majority background, because they could risk double
stigmatisation as immigrants in educations and professions with a strong female
connotation. There are, however, signs that these men are increasingly applying
for social and health education programmes,12 which traditionally qualify for jobs in
so-called female professions, and it must be assumed that to a high degree they do
so because there are jobs to be got afterwards. In other words, the men have the
possibility of fulfilling their own – and probably their significant others’ –
expectations of being in a position to support themselves and their family instead
of, in the worst case, being supported and partly deprived of control of their own
affairs by the public authorities. The fact that the route to being able to live up to
the role of a man and provider is via education programmes and professions with a
majority of women plays a less important role, as the possible and temporary loss
of prestige is richly balanced by the end result.
The challenge of guidance and counselling
It appears from the literature on youth, educational choice and guidance
that it is difficult for many young people to find out what they want. It seems that
some have a hard time coping with the increased pressure of individualization, i.e.
that every youngster is expected to choose an education and thus indirectly choose
a course of life, because individual choice means individual responsibility
(Katznelson, 2005, p. 72). At the same time, however, the individual choice has
been institutionalized and backed up by a veritable youth guidance machinery.
Counselling and guidance has become compulsory. The literature has a special
focus on so-called exposed youngsters, i.e. those who for some reason have, or are
expected to have, more difficulties in getting an education than youngsters in
general. Ethnic minority youth make up one such category, which can be shown
49
statistically (Tænketanken, 2005; A. R. Sørensen, 2006). For the same reason
researchers have taken an interest in finding out if youngsters with ethnic minority
backgrounds need special guidance whether it be quantitatively or qualitatively,
i.e. more intensive guidance or different guidance as regards both form and
content.
Most researchers would agree that culture matters somehow in this
connection, and most would agree with a normative statement about the
importance of a culture and gender sensitive approach to counselling and guidance
(cf. Launikari & Puukari, 2005; Jakobsen & Søndergaard, 2002). However, there is a
big gap between the recognition of culture on a general level, including the
theoretical
field
of
intercultural
communication
and
the
ideology
of
multiculturalism,13 and the meaning of culture in real life encounters between
people with different backgrounds. In order to avoid stereotypes or rough
generalizations about ethnic others – and ‘ourselves’ for that matter – it is
therefore no wonder that empirically based researchers tend not to talk of culture
in the sense ‘two cultures meet’ in a counselling situation.14 Instead they tend to
subdivide the categories of ‘young people’ or ‘ethnic minority youth’ in order to
have a clearer picture of what kind of youngsters they are dealing with and what
kind of guidance might match each sub-category. One researcher talks about
different educational strategies among ethnic minority youth and outlines six such
strategies based on his empirical material (Seeberg, 2003, p. 329). Another
operates with four youth profiles based on how much cultural and social capital
they possess (Jensen, 2005, p. 90) and she argues that the four categories are
profiles or types and do not represent real persons. She has done a similar profiling
of young people with an ethnic minority background (Jensen & Hansen, 2006).
Considering that she operates with a co-ordinate system it is not surprising that she
ends up with four categories, one in each slot, in both cases. However, she names
them differently. A third researcher deals with youth in general and distinguishes
between three different educational plans (Katznelson, 2005, p. 75). One is based
on airy dreams and not anchored in anything concrete; the other is based on reality
and holds directions on how to go about it; the third refers to the broken plans of
disillusioned youngsters. Applied to our interview material, we can recognize the
50
airy dreams and the more realistic ones whereas our study does not cover the
disillusioned youngsters.
What the above mentioned researchers have in common is an interest in
what kind of guidance would seem to match the different categories or types of
young people. And although one may disagree with the ways in which the
typologies come about, it seems promising to work on a level that is neither too
general nor completely individualistic. To present ethnic minority youth with a socalled culturally responsive counselling may seem like a good idea in principle, but
it is not altogether clear what it means. To categorize the young people who have
been interviewed for this project as ‘cultural others’ and expect them to be very
different from so-called ordinary Danes would be misleading for the simple reason
that many of them have been born and raised in Denmark.15 This means that their
‘Danishness’ cannot be separated from their ‘Turkishness’, for instance (cf. Mørck,
1998; Prieur, 2003, pp. 308-9; Pedersen, 2005).
Putting educational choice into perspective
The main purpose of this article has been to present and discuss a number of
young people’s ideas and views on various aspects of the educational choice.
Ethnicity and gender, and how both aspects interrelate with the educational
choice, have formed a sort of backdrop in this connection. The article has
questioned the widespread notion of the right choice and the idea that it can come
about through rational thinking as part of an increased, more professionalized,
counselling and guidance. This does not mean that the profession should not strive
towards an improved effort. The argument is rather that there are limits to what it
can accomplish. It has also been mentioned that perhaps we need not present the
educational choice as a fateful decision because it may put an added pressure on
the youngster, suggesting that there is such as thing as the right choice, the
perfect match, rather than many possible matches. Emphasizing the aspect of fate
is also strange in light of all the talk about lifelong learning, which seems to
suggest that it is never too late to get an education or to get re-educated or
retrained.
51
Finishing the article, I have become more and more aware of interesting
aspects and issues, which have only been briefly touched upon. What the
informants say about their dreams and the ways in which they represent
themselves could have been dealt with much more thoroughly. And their dreams,
fantasies, driving forces, motivations, preliminary choices etc. could have been
integrated in a more coherent analysis of doing gender and ethnicity, informed by
post-structuralism.16 Such an analysis, however, would have been much more
obvious and ‘easier’ to go about if it had been integrated in the methodology from
the very start. I could have asked questions inspired by Henrietta Moore (1994b, p.
64) such as: If becoming an engendered person is not just a matter of acquiescing
to or identifying with a single femininity or masculinity, then what is it that makes
the young people take up particular subject positions as opposed to others? How
are particular subject positions reflected in the young people’s expressed dreams
and preliminary choices? What accounts for the differences between them with
regard to their self-representations? What is the relationship between discourses –
about gender and ethnicity and their interrelatedness – and personal identities? And
Moore’s concept of ‘crisis of representation’ might turn out to be useful in
understanding and explaining not just men’s violence, but how and why some
young people – men and women – become disillusioned and drop out in
consequence of a mismatch between self-representation and others’ behaviour and
interpretation of that representation.
Notes
1. The chapter referred to, entitled The Choice, is written by the author. Young
People with a Twist forms part of the project entitled Gender, ethnicity and
Guidance, which receives support from the European Equal programme for the
promotion of gender equality and inclusion on the labour market. The objective of
the programme is to counteract gender stereotyped educational and vocational
choices among ethnic minorities and to further their gender equality on the labour
market.
52
2. The anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner sums up practice theory in the statement
”that human action is made by ‘structure’, and at the same time always makes and
potentially unmakes it” (Ortner, 1996, p. 2). She also points out that practice
theory is not really a theory, but rather a range of loosely interrelated work
(Ortner, 1984).
3. According to Henrietta Moore who is an anthropologist herself, anthropology has
begun to move away from a simplistic model of a single gender system into which
individuals must be socialized, towards a more complex understanding of the way
in which individuals come to take up gendered subject positions through
engagement with multiple discourses on gender (Moore, 1994, p.142).
4. The young people or their parents have a background from Turkey, Macedonia,
Kosovo, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Somalia,
Uganda and Morocco.
5. There is a total of 45 youth guidance centres in Denmark as per January 2007.
6. The author of this article did not take part in the interviews, which means that
he has no observational data and thus limited material for methodological (self)reflection. Colleagues from the Danish Research Centre on Gender Equality, Aase
Rieck Sørensen and Diana Højlund Madsen conducted the interviews except for one,
which was carried out by Sine Lehn.
7. The project’s overall objective is to work at eliminating barriers based on
gender and ethnicity; cf. note 1.
8. See Richard Jenkins (1996, 2002) for a basic introduction to social identity and
the us/them distinction.
9. In fact, the police has an exemplary homepage with detailed information on how
to become a police officer: criteria, procedure etc. The physical tests that
applicants are required to pass are also illustrated and described in detail. See
www.blivpolitibetjent.dk
10. See Yvonne Mørck (1998) and Annick Prieur (2002, 2003, 2004) on the issue of
private and public among immigrants (in Denmark and Norway) in a gender and
generational perspective.
11. I am aware that it is a simplification to represent the process of taking up a
subject position as one of a simple choice. See Moore (1994).
53
12. Reference is made to a study conducted by the firm of analysts LG Insight. The
study was in the news in February 2006. See Sørensen, Madsen & Sørensen (2006,
p. 16, note 16).
13. The lines between intercultural communication and communication as such
often tend to be blurred. This is also the case with Iben Jensens’s book on
intercultural communication in complex societies, which is based on illustrations
from Denmark. Culture is not an analytic concept in her line of thinking, but just
something that ordinary people use in different circumstances (Jensen 1998). See
Daniel T. Linger (1994) for an inspiring article on communication. See Keesing
(1994) and Wright (1998) on the concept of culture. Although multiculturalism is an
ism, a policy, an ideology, it is sometimes used as a descriptive term accordin to
Mørck (2002).
14. Hjermov et al. (1996) talks about counselling in terms of the two cultures
metaphor, although they write elsewhere that the young people they have
interviewed – immigrants with an ex-Jugoslav background – can hardly be
distinguished from ethnic Danes (Hjermov et al., 1996, p. 67).
15. They are categorized as something special, though, in the dominant discourse
on immigrants whether they are refugees, immigrants or descendants. ‘Immigrants’
is the generic, more polite term used by the Danish public. This categorization
means that ‘immigrants’ tend to define themselves accordingly. A sense of
community, however, does not mean that they are culturally uniform. I use the
twist in Young People with a Twist to denote that they are represented and often
represent themselves as somewhat different from ethnic Danes or the prototypical
Danes. They are Danes with a twist so to speak. Mørck (1998) argues along the
same lines speaking about hyphenated identities.
16. According to Moore (1994b), identities of all kinds are forged through practical
engagement in lives lived, and as such they have both individual and collective
dimensions. The post-structuralist concept of the subject means that a single
subject can no longer be equated with a single individual. Individuals are multiply
constituted subjects who can, and do, take up multiple subject positions within a
range of discourses and social practices. Recent work has demonstrated that
cultures do not have a single model of gender or a single gender system, but rather
54
a multiplicity of discourses on gender, which are frequently contradictory and
conflicting.
55
Conclusions
Despite of the theoretical interest in questions related to gender and ethnicity
addressed mostly by feminist and racial theorist, they are constituting important
areas of joined empirical enquiry in a wide range of social science disciplines only
in recents years (Andall, 2003). In the early nineties for istance, Afshar and
Maynard have identified
‘the paucity of material concentrating on the relation of race
and gender, in general, and the consequences of racism for
women of differents backgrounds, in particular’ (1994:1).
However, research has pointed out how both the feminization of migration (Castles
and Miller, 1993) and the becoming settled of migration in ethnic groups of secondand third-generation citizens raise wider issues concerning gender and ethnic
relations in Europe, above all in the field of labour and education (Andall,2003).
This suggests not only that these issues need to be central in the European debate,
but also that they are key elements to be considered in order to create adequates
policies and strategies of intervention to avoid social exclusion and marginality.
Within this framework, the article collected in this report gave an important
insight on these issues trhough providing empirical accounts of the complex way
minority youth make sense of themselves in their everyday life experiences in
transition between two cultures. Both of them have the aim to give insights and
advices that will be useful in order to create methods for guidance and counselling
of young people at risk of social exclusion and for the promotion of equality
between women and men in the labour market, aim that informs all the activities
of the transnational project CHOICES within they have been conducted. Despite
they work on their specific nationals contexts, Denmark and Finland, their findings
contribute to the wider european debate on these topics and their suggestions
could be helpfull for who – researchers and governements alike - is facing the same
issues and problems in other european countries: another important goal of
CHOICES, in general, and of this articles, in particular, in fact, is to exchange
56
knowledge and share perspectives on these issues in order move the first steps to
compose an european overview.
The two contributions clearly showed how the issues related to gender and
ethnicity are key notions to grasp how multicultural processes work and how they
intersect with the notions of culture, nationality, language or religion in the daily
lives of individuals. They suggested that gender and ethnicity should not be
considered as separate ‘differences’, but should be examined as interlocking
categories in order to show the complex nature of individual’s positioning
according to the work, school or family context and the changing and relational
character of the articulation of identity. In order to create tools and politics of
equality and inclusion within a multicultural framework, this standpoint is
particularly useful because it investigates the processes and outcomes of individual
and collective identification - that is, the claims and attributions that individuals
make about their position in the social order of things, their views of where and to
what they belong (and to what they do not belong) - as well as gives an
understanding of the broader social relations that constitute and are constituted in
this process. By making explicit the mutual process of social construction that
identifies groups and individuals as different, this perspective avoids also the last
risk of essentialism that can exists in dealing with diversity simply by fragmenting
identities in multiples but indipendents elements. In fact, these articles illustrated
how the gendered and racialized representations and practices in youth lives do
not occur in a process that add difference on to difference and where categories
are considered as splitted and fixed. Through the narratives of Russian women
speaking immigrants, for istance, Juuntilainen showed how the process of
constructing and de-costructing identity exists in a coreography of differents
elements that include the gender culture and practices of the origin country and
that of the hosting one alongside the ethnic expectations and stereotypes related
to the Russian background of the intervieweds. Sørensen, as well, pointed out how
the process of ‘doing the right educational choice’ is composed of fantasies about
certain professional identities that are constituted at the same time following and
challenging the gender traditional roles in education and work as well as the ethnic
stereotypes. Thus, what emerges from this studies is that the manufacturing of
minority youth identities as well as their life choices and experiences are an
57
ongoing negotiation of many categories that exist simultaneously and that shift
according to the context. From a theoretical point of view, finally, what emerges is
that a social constructionist approach that examines the simoultaneous production
of gender and ethnicity and considers the relational construction of identities holds
much promise in uncovering the micro- level structures and complicated features
of inclusion and exclusion to the dominant mainstream arena and in grasping the
material and simbolic trhough wich people engage in it.
However, as Sørensen points out at the end of his article, these reflections
and approach can be carried further and some issues raised from these empiricals
studies are still availables for a further inquiry. Do minority youth shift their
gender perfomances across mainstream and subcultural settings in response to
different gender norms? If so, what meanings do they assign to the different
perfomances that they engage across different settings? How do they experience
and negotiate such transitions? What is the relationship between discourses – about
gender and ethnicity and their interrelatedness – and youth personal identities in
specifics contexts?
Even though, the path followed by Juuntilianen and Sørensen in developing
their researches that considers the interlocking dimensions of gender and ethnicity
seems the most adequate both to give insights and suggestion to create tools and
strategies for equal opportunities and to push forward the theoretical reflection on
these issues.
58
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