Whiteness is from another world: Gender, Icelandic international development and multiculturalism

par Kristín Loftsdóttir

University of Iceland, Iceland

Abstract

This article focuses on desires, fears and identities as entangled in the past. Emphasizing gendered aspects of mobility, the author takes as examples debates relating to Icelandic Muslims and discussions in regard to Iceland’s increased international involvements in global peacekeeping. She sees them sharing entanglements with the nationalistic ideologies of Europeans as carrier of justice and equality, as well as a collective forgetting of past histories that foreground and position people in relation to migrations and encounters in the present. In these cases, gender is tightly interwoven with the tapestry of meaning, foregrounding, explaining and informing the relationships involved.