Queer citizens and the perils of the neoliberal city: Racialized narratives of homophobic hate crime in Oslo,Norway

Introduction

The aim of this article is to examine the relationship between queer citizenship, state violence and the exclusion of racialized, homophobic ‘others’. Since the turn of the millennium, a growing body of research has been preoccupied with the role of sexual citizenship in establishing a cohesive sense of nationhood. Cultures deemed patriarchal, oppressive and religiously fundamentalist, often referred to as the ‘Islamic world’, serve as a constitutive outside, lending substance to the purportedly liberal and progressive nation states of Europe and North America. The rights currently enjoyed by women and queers are thus portrayed as reflecting Western values, which are under threat by immigration and multiculturalism (El-Tayeb, 2012; Farris, 2017; Fassin, 2010; Massad, 2015; Puar, 2007). The socio-legal construct of homophobic hate crime constitutes a realm in which this ‘clash of civilizations’ is particularly noticeable. Hate crime laws not only indicate a punitive turn of queer politics; the notion of homophobic hate crime serves as raw material in the construction of nationhood (Haritaworn, 2015; Lamble, 2014; Mepschen et al., 2010; Moran and Skeggs, 2004). This suggests that by investing in punitiveness as a strategy of citizenship, queers risk becoming complicit in political and discursive formations that racialize migrant others.

Drawing on interviews with queers who have experienced incidents of homophobic hate crime, the article investigates the presence of racialization in narratives of homophobia. As narratives are reflexive projects within social contexts, I suggest stories of homophobic hate crime should be examined in light of the discursive frames in which they are constructed. The structure of the article is as follows: I begin by presenting the theoretical framework of the article, focusing on the current positionality of queer citizenship in liberal democracy. I then move on to present the research design, sample and data collection, before describing my use of narrative analysis. Following this, I present stories I identify as framed by a racialized narrative of homophobia, before finally discussing these findings in light of the theoretical framework.

Queer citizenship

Several scholars on sexual citizenship pinpoint how legal rights and market participation constitute a foundation for queer citizenship in liberalism (Duggan, 2003; Eng, 2010; Ferguson, 2019; Massad, 2015; Puar, 2007). Eng (2010) describes queer liberalism as ‘a contemporary confluence of the political and the economic spheres that forms the basis for the liberal inclusion of particular gay and lesbian U.S. citizen-subjects petitioning for rights and recognition before the law’ (p 3). He argues that while queers once were excluded from normative configurations of life, they now have become increasingly visible and public. ¹

Queer liberalism, I suggest, is a useful approach to describing the mode of sexual citizenship in contemporary Norway. In 2008, as the sixth country in the world, the Norwegian parliament passed a common marriage law for same-sex and opposite-sex couples, also granting couples adoption rights and access to IVF. While there was quite a bit of opposition to this law as it was passed, only a decade later, queer inclusion seems to have become a part of the backbone of Norwegian identity. Consider King Harald’s speech to the nation in 2016, where he stated that ‘Norwegians are girls who love girls, boys who love boys, and girls and boys who love each other’ (HRH King Harald, 2016). One might argue that the impact of a statement made by a king in a ceremonial, constitutional monarchy like Norway is limited. On the other hand, precisely because the power of the monarch is merely symbolic, their role is to stay clear of politically controversial topics and bring the nation together. The discursive impact, then, is that the inclusion of queers in nationhood is depoliticized and established as a Norwegian value.

As citizenship of rights gradually has been achieved, queer identity is increasingly shaped and performed through individualized practices of consumption, which Duggan (2003) refers to as ‘the new homonormativity’. Duggan’s concern with a market-oriented sexual politics is that it ‘is a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption’ (Duggan, 2003: 50). In other words, individualized queer identities materialized through market participation risk ignoring political issues concerning power structures and processes of exclusion.

Homonationalism

The inclusion of queers in the normative frame of liberal democracy furthermore reflects how queer citizens serve as raw material in the production of a seemingly progressive and liberal nation state. Several scholars have pointed out how queers have been brought centre stage in the project of nation building. Sexual citizenship distinguishes progressive, liberal democracies from ‘underdeveloped’ cultures associated with gender oppression and homophobia both home and away (Bracke, 2012; El-Tayeb, 2012; Massad, 2015; Sabsay, 2012). A key term used to describe the role of queer citizenship in constituting national identity in liberal democracy is ‘homonationalism’. Puar (2007) uses the term to describe the recognition and inclusion of some (but not all) queer subjects in the narrative of ‘US exceptionalism’, which is produced through the war on terror. This form of exceptionalism is contingent upon the segregation and disqualification of racial and sexual ‘others’ from the national imaginary (Puar, 2007: 2–3).

A similar dynamic is at the core of what El-Tayeb (2011) refers to as the ‘Europeanization’ of sexual citizenship, which is particularly noticeable across the cityscapes of Western Europe. Drawing on Duggan’s (2003) notion of ‘homonormativity’, she argues that while a class of creative, white, middle class gays possesses forms of capital that are suitable for legitimate processes of regenerating urban spaces through commercialism, poor communities of colour are defined as lacking individualized and commercialized mobility demanded by liberal capitalism (El-Tayeb, 2011: 128). In the neoliberal city, these communities constitute what Mbembe (2019) refers to as ‘surplus populations’, that is, people no longer beneficial in liberal capitalism, embodying the ‘living dead’.

The social and political violence directed at these economically and spatially immobilized communities is at the centre of Wacquant’s (2008) work on ‘urban outcasts’. His term ‘territorial stigmatization’ describes the socio-spatial processes involving marginalized communities of advanced societies in late capitalism. Drawing on Goffman’s work on spoiled identities and Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power, Wacquant demonstrates how stigmatization of people residing in certain, discredited areas is performed through the symbolic violence carried out by journalists, politicians, bureaucrats, etc. Territorially stigmatized people manage their identities through ‘information control’, which implies carefully considering when and where their stigma can be revealed. In Vassenden and Andersson’s (2011) study of religion among young people in the racialized neighbourhood of Grønland, Oslo, non-white Muslims not only manage visual symbols of faith, but they also consider whether to disclose their neighbourhood.

The punitive turn of queer citizenship

Predominantly situated in the neoliberal city, queer citizenship also has implications for the politics of safety. Queer politics that not so long ago fought against criminalization, now supports crime control and extensive policing of newly gentrified ‘gaybourhoods’ (Ferguson, 2019; Lamble, 2014; Moran and Skeggs, 2004). The most explicit example of the alignment of ‘progressive’ queer politics with the more conservative and reactionary contemporary politics of law and order is found in the call for hate crime legislation. These laws introduce stricter punishment of offenders who commit crime with a ‘hateful’ bias, compared to similar crimes without such an underlying bias (Hall, 2013; Meyer, 2014).

The logic of sentence enhancement of hate crime legislation reflects contemporary, dominant discourses of criminality. Identifying key features of the politics of crime and social order in late modernity, Garland (2001) argues there has been a decline of the rehabilitative ideal and a re-emergence of punitive sanctions and expressive justice articulated through ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric. Thus, he claims, the current strategy of crime control in western, liberal democracies can be described as ‘punitive segregation’, which comprises of ‘lengthy sentence terms in no frills prisons, and a marked, monitored existence for those who are eventually released’ (Garland, 2001: 142). Intentionally or not, queer investment in punishment not only feeds punitive logics but also materially sustains the institutional structures of punitive segregation.

In his work on homophobic insult, Eribon (2004) argues that insult is both personal and collective, as it is aimed at a particular individual by associating that individual with a discredited group. Resisting the power of insult and stigmatization thus requires a sense of collectivity. However, while the collective nature of homophobia is obvious, a pressing question is whether responding to homophobia through the justice system precludes, rather than enables, collective action. Queer safety becomes the responsibility of the individual by adhering to ‘preventive’ measures of the police (such as ‘streetwise’ campaigns and other victim-oriented initiatives) and by reporting cases to the police (Moran and Skeggs, 2004). As hate crime laws usually target individual perpetrators, homophobia is rendered the misconduct of individuals, rather than sustained by heteronormative institutions and social structures (Russell, 2020).

Queer investment in punitiveness and state violence as a means for citizenship is inevitably an investment in the racialized economy of urban crime control (Meyer, 2014). While the over-policing of ethnic minorities in Britain and the United States has been widely addressed by activists, politicians and academics for several decades, there is a growing concern regarding racial profiling also in Norway (Finstad, 2018; Solhjell et al., 2019; Sollund, 2006). According to Franko (2020), racialization of crime control operates within a discourse of ‘crimmigration’, which describes the merging of policies related to crime control with policies of migration. Instead of applying a rights-based approach to migration based on humanitarian principles and the rule of law (which must be said to be core ‘European’ values), focus is on crime and insecurity. In this discourse, immigrants are not primarily seen as people in need of protection or as a potential source of labour. On the contrary, they are increasingly seen as potential rule-breakers and criminal offenders, which Franko refers to as ‘crimmigrant others’. The current government of Norway, which until 2020 included the right-wing, populist Progress Party, has given the police high targets for deporting unwanted foreign citizens, and Norway is currently one of the ‘deportation leaders’ of Europe (Franko, 2020: 87). The urban context of crimmigration is reflected in the response of Tor Mikkel Wara, former Norwegian Minister of Justice and representing the Progress Party, when asked about youth crime in Oslo. Instead of addressing issues such as poverty, racism and marginalization, his conclusion was that ‘Oslo can’t take any more immigration’ (Norum, 2018).

A notion of immigration as a threat to law and order in the cities of Europe is similarly evident in debates of homophobic hate crime. Although homophobia statistically speaking by no means is exclusive to migrant populations of Europe, homophobic hate crime seems to be associated with migrant ‘others’, particularly young men assumed to be Muslim, living in marginalized, urban communities (El-Tayeb, 2012; Haritaworn, 2015; Mepschen et al., 2010). Thus, I suggest, the logic of homonationalism and the logic of the ‘crimmigrant other’ merge in the realm of homophobic hate crime.

Materials and methods

This article is based on fourteen semi-structured interviews with self-identified LGBT people who have experienced one or more incidents of homophobic hate crime. The participants were recruited through advertisement in queer media and through queer organizations and groups. Some of the participants were recruited by other participants. One obvious advantage of such an approach, as opposed to accessing potential participants through police records, is that it includes people who for various reasons did not report the offence to the police. On the other hand, as hate crime is a legally defined term, some of the people who contacted me, turned out to have experienced violence or threats of violence, but without the ‘hate motive’ which is required to be categorized as hate crime. These people were declined from participating in the study. The majority of the participants were men between the age of 20 and 30, living in Oslo. This is not surprising, since police statistics on reported cases of homophobic hate crime have the same pattern (Politidirektoratet, 2018). The strict criteria for admission to the study have led to a relatively small sample. The sample is likely to have been larger if the criteria for admission had been wider, and this in turn could have provided me with more diverse narratives framed by a racialized discourse.

During the coding of the research data, ² the code ‘insecurity’ (Norwegian: ‘utrygghet’) was expectedly applied in all of the transcripts as this was a topic I actively asked the participants to reflect upon. In several of the transcripts of the Oslo-based participants, I applied the sub-codes ‘Grønland’ (neighbourhood in Oslo) and ‘immigrants’ (Norwegian: ‘innvandrere’) as these were linked to accounts of insecurity. These sub-topics appeared at the initiative of the participants. The fact that racialized accounts were common among this part of the sample can likely be explained by the fact that the big, multicultural cities of Europe is the setting of discourses of ‘homophobic others’ (El-Tayeb, 2012; Haritaworn, 2015; Mepschen et al., 2010).

The analytical approach to the interviews in this article is narrative analysis. This form of analysis rests on the sociological insight that people’s stories and the way they tell them may provide knowledge about the social contexts in which the stories are situated. Narratives do not simply imply conveying personal experiences; they are part of larger meaning-making structures. Gubrium and Holstein (2009) argue that the notion of people telling ‘their own’ stories ignores that the story ‘belongs’ to the narrative environment just as much as it belongs to the narrator. Thus, they claim, stories operate within society (p. 11–12). If we return to Eribon’s (2004) claim that homophobic insult is always collective, this suggests that individual accounts both contribute and respond to a discourse of queer insult. The reflexivity between the narrator and the narrative environment in which the story is situated is a central theme in Plummer’s (1995) Telling Sexual Stories. He argues that ‘for narratives to flourish there must be a community to hear; that for communities to hear, there must be stories which weave together their history, their identity, their politics. The one – community – feeds upon and into the other – the story’ (Plummer, 1995: 87). If queer citizenship has become a key marker of nationhood in liberal democracies of the West, one would expect stories of queers to be interwoven with discourses of homonationalism.

How, then, does the narrative environment of queer culture appear in the accounts of the participants in the study? One of the participants, Thomas, reflects: ‘I don’t know why the incident made me more wary of Middle Eastern men; the guy who attacked me was “ethnic” Norwegian’. The notion of Middle Eastern men posing a threat to queers in the cityscape of Oslo seems to shape Thomas’ narrative of homophobic hate crime. At the same time, the reflexivity of narrative work becomes apparent, as he points out the inconsistency of the story. This illustrates that although the social context is present in storytelling, this does not deprive the narrator of agency. Indeed, performance and self-presentation is an important part of narrative work (Gubrium and Holstein, 2009: 91). In several of the narratives, the participants refer to specific, racialized areas of Oslo by using phrases such as ‘the people who live there’, instead of referring directly to ‘Muslims’ or ‘immigrants’. This strategy of narrative work can be understood as not wanting to present themselves as prejudiced or even racist.

The narrative work of self-presentation involves the listener, which means the positionality of the researcher should not be ignored. Some of the participants would ask me during the interview if I was gay, which I confirmed when asked. This can be understood as the storyteller wanting to clarify whether or not I was a part of the community, which Plummer claims ‘feeds upon and into’ stories of queer life. Thus, my position as ‘insider’, in addition to my position as white Norwegian, may well have contributed to the shaping of the narratives, which might have taken a different turn if I were straight or of colour.

The aim of this article is to identify and theorize racialized narratives of homophobic hate crime. Such an endeavour has several ethical implications. One ethical pitfall is the risk of not recognizing the gravity of the experiences of the participants. Several of the participants report incidents of hate crime, which have been devastating to them, and have led to increased insecurity, especially in public spaces. In a previously published article based on the same empirical data, I focus precisely on how fear of being subject to homophobic violence, be it verbal or physical, has an impact on how queer people present themselves to their surroundings (Klatran, 2019). This points to a paradoxical feature of queer citizenship. Hate crime laws signify citizenship in that they explicitly deploy state violence in the protection of queers. On the other hand, the fact that these laws exist in the first place reminds us that queer life still implies living in a ‘world of insult’, to paraphrase Eribon (2004). Precisely because queer life, even in the age of homotolerance, involves a certain level of insecurity, the discursive/political field of homophobia is vulnerable to becoming subject to the logic of right-wing discourses of nationhood, crime and security.

Another ethical issue I want to address is the risk of being interpreted as discrediting the participants as racist. There is nothing in the interviews that suggests that the informants of the study hold malicious, racist or anti-immigration attitudes. On the contrary, they all seem to be politically moderate and supportive of equal rights, etc. However, what I am suggesting is that the stories of some of the participants seem to be structured by racialization. This racialization has become naturalized to the point that the racism it reflects is almost undetectable. This insidious form of racism is referred to by Mbembe (2019) as ‘nanoracism’: ‘Nanoracism, in its banality and capacity to infiltrate into the pores and veins of society, is racism turned culture and into the air one breathes, at a time of the generalized idiotizing, machinic decerebration and bewitchment of the masses’ (Mbembe, 2019: 59). Mbembe’s notion of nanoracism suggests everyday forms of racism operate within a structural, naturalized frame, and that more often than not, racism is practiced without one being conscious of it. As a queer man myself, I sincerely hope my engagement with this form of racism is not understood as homophobic, or as trading the interests of one minority group with another.

Queer stories of homophobic ‘others’

At this point in the article, I will take a closer look at how racialization operates in the narratives of the participants. The story of Eric, a white, gay man living in Oslo with his husband, illustrates how the situational assessment of risk is intertwined with racialized readings of bodies. He and his husband were waiting for the train at an underground station in the city centre of Oslo late in the evening, and they felt they were being glared at by a group of men:

They were African men, or they looked that way. They wore some sort of a skullcap, a hat I associate with African clothing, at least there was something traditional about it. One of them was eying us up and down. My husband didn’t really notice this, but I did, and I thought it was very uncomfortable. […] They got off at the same station as us, and I felt they were following us all the way out of the station building. I am certain they were following us, but we hurried out of the station, and walked straight home. […] Although nothing happened, I felt this was a threatening situation.

Eric interpreted these men as hostile towards him and his husband, and this may well have been the case, even though the men did not threaten them verbally. At the same time, it seems the appearance of the men (African, wearing traditional clothes and a white skullcap signifying Islam) played a role in the reading of the men as a potential threat. Later in the interview, Eric elaborates:

I have conflicting thoughts about this, because I have absolutely nothing against immigrants. I don’t like using labels, but let’s call them traditional, African men, I don’t like the fact that they have a higher degree of homophobic attitudes. […] It makes me feel vulnerable that we live in an area with many Africans.

Whether or not the men Eric and his husband encountered meant to threaten or harm them, the episode illustrates how homophobia is recognized through the embodiment of racialized others. Ahmed’s (2000) work on the figure of the ‘stranger’ in post-coloniality pinpoints how familiarity is a premise for the racialized stranger to obtain its position as ‘out of place’. In other words, the stranger is not simply someone we have not yet encountered, but someone we have already encountered, personally or through the stories of others. Eric’s narrative work suggests he is sensitive to how his point of view stigmatizes African men. The initial phrase ‘I have absolutely nothing against immigrants’ appears as an attempt to neutralize his point of view and disassociate himself from racism.

Recognizing strangers as ‘out of place’ and posing a risk becomes evident also in the narrative of Jacob, another Oslo-based respondent. He explains how he and his boyfriend were severely beaten up on the way home from a party at a friend’s house:

We had been at our friends’ apartment in Grønland, not far from where we lived at the time. We were a bit drunk and held around each other. […] About fifty metres from our front door, I noticed a group of young men, perhaps between the age of fifteen and twenty, they looked Middle Eastern or North African, there were about five or six of them. […] They were walking in our direction, so we crossed the street. Shortly after, they crossed the street too, approaching us. The one in the front of the group looked at us and asked ‘Are you gay?’ Whereby I, I guess I was a bit provoked by this, so I replied ‘If you have a problem with that, you can just move along’. […] Eventually they surrounded us, and the same guy said ‘I can’t stand gays’. That’s when the first strike hit me.

The young men, although they spoke Norwegian, are identified by Jacob as ‘Middle Eastern or North African’, suggesting they disqualify as ‘proper’ Norwegians, even though it is likely that Norway is their place of birth and that they are Norwegian nationals.

Racialized processes of identification were also a part of several of the participants’ risk assessment. In Thomas’s narrative of risk and safety, there is a fusion of non-whiteness, ethnicity and religion in regard to what kind of strangers that invoke a sense of insecurity:

If you are less integrated in society, and you don’t feel a part of society, and then if you’re part of a group where they feel the same, and when you have religion on top of all that, you know… […] So I think groups of foreign, young men from the Middle East, they are the ones I fear the most. I’m also thinking about religion here, it gives them a purpose of attacking gays. It’s not just about beating people up, they represent something by doing it.

The assumption that certain racial/ethnic appearances signify Islam corresponds with key findings of Vassenden and Andersson’s study of faith information control in Grønland, Oslo. Although significations are complex, within the context of Oslo, they suggest there is a widespread notion that non-whiteness signifies religion (and first and foremost Islam), while whiteness signifies secularism (Vassenden and Andersson, 2011). What is more, Thomas presents a narrative in which Islam governs the beliefs and actions of young men of Middle Eastern descent, as he states that ‘they represent something by doing it’. The prominent role of Islam in this narrative thus effectively rules out the role of identity work and the socio-economic position of ‘immigrant boys’ in the context of a liberal and secular society. This reflects a common understanding of Islam not as a religion, but an all-encompassing ideology, in which Muslims lack individuality and agency (El-Tayeb, 2012).

This exclusion of (particularly) young, immigrant men from nationhood, demonstrates the paradoxical nature of European self-identity. While Europe, and especially the European Union, claims the values of humanism, equality and tolerance make up its political and cultural foundation, there is an increasingly hostile attitude towards migrant populations, especially Muslims, as they are seen as an internal threat to these values. Thus, there is a continent-wide European construction of a ‘minoritarian’ migrant population, which consists of second and even third generation nationals positioned outside ‘proper’ Europeanness (El-Tayeb, 2012: 80–81). Mbembe (2019) argues that liberal democracies have abandoned the values, rights and freedoms on which they were founded and inverted into societies of separation, in which citizenship has been divided into ‘pure’ citizenship of the native born and ‘borrowed’ citizenship. This notion of ‘pure’ citizenship articulated through the imagined but naturalized phrases ‘native Norwegian’ and ‘ethnic Norwegian’ conflates whiteness, culture and nation and simultaneously immobilizes racialized nationals in the position of ‘out of place’. These people, many of whom know no other country than the one in which they are born, are thereby contained in the category of the ‘migrant’, with the stigmas and limits this implies. Returning to Ahmed’s work, racialized strangers are not external to the formation of national identity; on the contrary, the proximity of strangers is required in order for the nation to exist. National identity thus emerges through everyday encounters between those who see themselves as natives and those who are recognized as ‘out of place’, in this place (Ahmed, 2000).

Racialization of space: The ‘no-go zone’ of Grønland

Based on the stories of several of the participants, the recognition of homophobic others seems to be place-specific. One neighbourhood identified by several of the Oslo respondents was Grønland, located in the eastern part of the city centre. A traditional working-class area with low property prices, Grønland attracted many labour migrants arriving in Norway from the late 1960s. Although there are other areas in present day Oslo with a higher proportion of ethnic/religious minorities, the neighbourhood has three purpose-built mosques, ethnic minority community centres and shops. Thus, the area stands out as an urban space associated with multiculturalism in general, and Muslims in particular (Vassenden and Andersson, 2011: 580). The last couple of decades, Grønland has been the object of concerns regarding failed integration. Both media reports and politicians have identified a so-called ‘moral police’ consisting of Muslim men acting as self-appointed guardians of propriety, verbally harassing unveiled women and gays (Helland, 2019).

Jon is one of the participants who refers to Grønland, rather than racial/ethnic groups of people, when addressing queer safety in public places:

When I lived in Tøyen ³ with my boyfriend, and when we would walk hand in hand through Grønland, people often shouted offensive remarks at us, such as ‘you’re disgusting’, ‘faggot’ or ‘pedo’. Both men and women did this, not just men. […] A couple of times I have turned around and said something back, which turned out to be a bad idea. These experiences were quite unpleasant, and made me feel vulnerable. An easy way out, of course, is not to hold hands in this area, it’s better than having to face all of these stares and comments.

Jon’s narrative suggests that safety measures such as not holding hands are not applied all across Oslo, but in Grønland and Tøyen, rendering these parts as exceptional in an otherwise gay-friendly city.

The reference to Grønland as a place where hostility towards queers is common is also found in Vik’s (2019) study of queer people’s experiences of the urban spaces of Oslo. Her respondents were fairly unified in their views of the gayfriendliness of the different neighbourhoods of central Oslo. Hegdehaugsveien, a street dominated by shops, restaurants and bars in the west end of the city centre, was described as white, heteronormative, but indifferent to queers. Grønland was a place where queers told her they had to ‘straighten up’ to avoid harassment or even hate crime. Grünerløkka, which is adjacent to Grønland, was understood as the most comfortable place for queers. Unlike Grønland, Grünerløkka has become almost completely gentrified and has established itself as one of the ‘gaybourhoods’ of Oslo.

Thomas also clearly expresses how he perceives Grønland as a dangerous place for queers:

Well, I’m not particularly fond of Grønland, I can tell you that right away. I don’t like that place because there are many people there with a religion that is not very gay-friendly, and that’s why I don’t feel safe there. […] It’s particularly those with a religion that is so hostile towards… So I am like, ok, so I’m not going to talk to you, then. It’s a shame, really, because it prevents contact between different groups of people. But definitely Grønland, it’s not where I shake my gay feathers, to put it that way.

Thomas’ narrative work involves attempting to present himself as positive to ethnic diversity, as he underscores that he thinks it is a shame that the hostility of the residents prevents ‘contact between different groups of people’. The awareness of presentation also becomes clear as he actively seems to avoid using the term ‘Muslim’, and instead refers to ‘people with a religion that is not very gay-friendly. Avoiding the ‘M-word’ reduces the appearance of the narrative as islamophobic. Both Jon’s and Thomas’ implicit reference to Muslims is successful because their stories feed on an already established discourse of Grønland as a racialized, ‘Muslim’ neighbourhood.

Jacob presents a similar narrative of indirect racialization when he reflects on showing affection to his boyfriend in public:

We have never experienced any problems with kissing in public, but I could never have done that in Grønland, simply because you know it would be seen as a blatant provocation in that area. You know that the people there have attitudes that aren’t very good, so you just have to refrain from doing it. […] My boyfriend is quite affectionate and likes to hold hands, but when we enter Grønland, we make sure to not come across as a couple.

Jacob’s narrative has similarities to the one presented by Thomas. He avoids the ‘M-word’, and instead refers to ‘the people there’. Returning to the work of Wacquant (2008), a key feature of territorial stigmatization is the conflation of race, religion and space, where space implies certain, racialized and marginalized populations, without race or religion being named. Furthermore, as El-Tayeb (2012) points out, such a conflation effectively disregards class perspectives on urban marginality, as poverty here is often culturized as ‘failing to integrate’. There is also a notion of homonationalism in Jacob’s story. He claims he has never experienced any problems with giving a kiss in public, thereby adhering to the well-established image of Norwegian society as tolerant towards queers, rendering homophobia as a cultural/religious trait of migrant others in certain parts of the city.

Discussion

If we accept Plummer’s (1995) claim that stories and the community, in which they are situated, feed into each other, we need to turn our attention to the narrative environment. Is there a racialized, collective story of queer life in Norway, which structures the narratives of the participants? In 2009, at a time when the above-mentioned ‘moral police’ of Grønland already was established and addressed, a hate crime incident sparked extensive media coverage. A white, male gay couple holding hands was attacked by a man of ‘foreign descent’, and the attacker had allegedly exclaimed that ‘Grønland is a Muslim neighbourhood’ (Hansen and Hultgren, 2009). Two weeks later, Skeive Dager, the festival currently known as Oslo Pride, announced they would move the point of departure of the Pride parade to Grønland the following year (Flydal, 2009). While the organizers claimed moving the parade to Grønland had been discussed for quite some time, the timing of the announcement suggests the decision was triggered by the moral panic fuelled by the mainstream media. While the organizers may well have had the best intentions, there is little doubt that the workings of racialization and territorial stigmatization are at play here. Judging by the public debate about homophobia in Grønland in the wake of the attack, the attacker, who was identified as ‘foreign’ and Muslim, seems to be understood as speaking and acting on behalf of the local Muslim population. Without any doubt, homophobic hate crimes occur in Grønland, as they do elsewhere. However, if a queer couple were attacked by a white man in the racially unmarked west end of the city centre, such as Hegdehaugsveien, it is difficult to imagine that the Pride parade would be moved there the following year. Unlikely to become the object of territorial stigmatization, the neighbourhood would not be held accountable for the actions of an individual, rendering the perpetrator a ‘twisted deviant’. Despite the fact that homophobic hate crimes occur all across Oslo, similar queer ‘interventions’ have not been organized elsewhere in Oslo. Since 2010, the annual Pride parade commences at Grønland and finishes at Pride Park in the city centre. The relocation of the parade has thus contributed to a collective, queer perception of Grønland. ⁴

How then, can queers engage politically in the fight against homophobia without becoming complicit in homonationalism? As a point of departure, we should consider Butler’s (2008) claim that such an endeavour does not imply trading sexual freedoms for religious ones, rather it involves scrutinizing the prevalent framework that insists that the struggle against homophobia must contradict the struggle against cultural and religious racisms. Furthermore, if Duggan (2003) is correct when she claims that the ‘new homonormativity’ depoliticizes and individualizes queer citizenship, it seems bringing back the political and collective in queer is a premise, although solidarity and senses of a queer collective must reach beyond sexual citizenship. Indeed, pre-citizenship queer politics was built on solidarity with populations subject to stigmatization and state violence, such as ethnic minorities, migrants, drug users and sex workers, to mention some (Ferguson, 2019). Based on the findings of this study, investment in state violence as a means for queer citizenship appears to be an obstacle in the pursuit of solidarity with stigmatized, over-policed and marginalized groups.

Thus, I identify two central political themes with which I suggest the Norwegian queer community engage. First, there is a need for a critical engagement with the current, queer pro-criminalization strategy. Whether or not state violence constitutes a productive and effective means to combat homophobic hate crime should be critically examined. Critical perspectives on the punitive turn of queer politics reject the claim that hate crime laws protect queer people. It is difficult to accept a logic which argues that perpetrators, who are not deterred by the punishment for an underlying crime, would be deterred by the enhanced sentencing that hate crime laws provide. This suggests these laws are a tool for punishing crime, not preventing it (Lamble, 2014; Meyer, 2014; Spade, 2015). To expand on this assertion, I believe the punitive turn of queer politics comes dangerously close to embracing what Butler (2020) describes as a merging of crime, migration and securitization in the name of safety. She argues that the securitization of public spaces through expansive forms of policing, presented as necessary to protect people from violence, subject marginalized people to ever more discipline, restriction and containment (Butler, 2020: 191). Queer safety pursued through crime control exercised by a benevolent state does not challenge the hegemonic position of heterosexuality, on which homophobia is dependant. As Brown (2006) asserts: ‘Like patience, tolerance is necessitated by something one would prefer did not exist. It involves managing the presence of the undesirable, the tasteless, the faulty – even the revolting, repugnant, or vile’ (p. 25). Homophobia, I would argue, is always a possibility lurking behind the tolerance heterosexuality has the privilege of granting queer people.

Second, I suggest Norwegian queer politics begins to actively engage with the workings of homonationalism. There is a need for a queer sensitivity that resists the current discursive conflation of homophobia and migration. Homophobia, being the companion of homosexuality, does not originate from the so-called patriarchal and repressive cultures outside the West. As D’Emilio (1993) demonstrates: ‘Gay men and lesbians have not always existed. Instead they are a product of history, and have come into existence in a specific historical era’ (p. 468). Massad (2015) argues that the conjuring of a nexus between homophobia and Islam (in particular) is enabled through universalization and translation, two well-known vectors of colonialism. Western sexual epistemology is presented as universally intelligible, while non-western configurations of sociality are translated into a primitive and undeveloped version of Europe before it was transformed by sexual liberation (Massad, 2015: 233–234). A racialized discourse of homophobia is not merely ahistorical; it also risks eclipsing homophobia among so-called ‘ethnic Norwegians’. ⁵

Homonationalism as a mode of current queer citizenship is not inevitable. Salam, an organization for ethnic minority queers in Norway, has given voice to the resistance to the racism of mainstream sexual politics. At the opening Pride event in Oslo in June 2020, president of Salam, Begard Reza, stated that ‘we refuse to turn to islamophobic tools in order to achieve queer liberation. That is the wrong way to go. It is possible to fight for queer rights without throwing others under the bus’ (Engesbak, 2020). This sentiment suggests there is a possibility for a non-racist queer collective to re-emerge in alliance with people whose entitlement to citizenship seems ever more contested and out of reach.