Orientalism and American Immigration: A Social Work View

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Finally, Schlytter questions whether arranged marriages should be accepted in Sweden or not; an issue that should be of concern for the state, the judicial system, and social work practice. Schlytter and Linell , p. Schlytter and Linell studied girls who were between years were about to be taken into care. If inappropriate child-rearing and gender inequality among minoritized families are viewed as rooted in their cultural background, then social policy is encouraged to target and combat their culture. Consequently, in order to solve these problems, their cultures need to be contained, governed, fought, and excluded.

Following Foucault , normalization is constitutive of the dividing practices of disciplines, such as, social work, which divide the world and its people into different categories according to a principle of the normal and the pathological. Likewise, partitioning is the role of social work and social workers Chambon, et al. Families with immigrant backgrounds are at risk of being categorized by social workers as needing to undergo a normalization process.

Likewise, minoritized families are demonized and pathologized and when such notions became dominant in the society, social policy and social workers were encouraged to take punitive measures against these families. Such ideological constructions of Swedish gender relations as ethnic markers have become a discursive strategy to exclude women and men with immigrant backgrounds from belonging to Sweden.

These ideological constructions devalue differences as deviancy and reinforce the prevailing dominance of white Swedes over people with immigrant backgrounds. Using gender relations as a way to draw boundaries between Westerners and people from the Third World has been an important tool in the justification of Western dominance through colonialism and imperialism in the name of modernity, progress, development, enlightenment and rationality Mohanty, Therefore, there is a powerful conjunction between the imperial subject and the subject of humanism and a close relationship between modern Western feminism and modern individual women and imperialism.

This intends to justify the existing hierarchical ethnic power structure in society. The recurring depiction of Third World women as victims has been fiercely criticized by postcolonial feminists Minh-ha, ; Mohanty, ; Razack, ; Spivak, ; Volpp, ; Yegenoglu, who argue that the victimization of Third World women affirms the idea that Western women are emancipated, superior, and in possession of a sovereign subject position. In a contemporary Swedish and wider European context, when violence against women is discussed, gender is often placed in opposition to ethnicity, culture, race, etc.

According to Razack when gender is used to explain the violence or the murder that men belonging to the dominant group commit, the crime or oppressive practices against women are viewed to be products of individualized deviancy and criminality. If gender inequality is reduced to culture, then there is risk of condensing the complexity of the problem and the mechanisms behind the subordinating positions that many Muslim women experience in Western countries.

Since it limits the discourse that becomes the basis for political action and reduces gender inequality to overarching identities culture or Islam and excludes the flow of other signifiers like ethnicity, race, class, sexuality, and minoritized position that can give a more nuanced picture of the situation. The way culturalist researchers use the concept of culture in relation to the dominant society and minoritized groups is related to unequal power relations and citizenship status.

In this regard, Rosaldo asserts that while minoritized groups are marked, named and culturalized, dominant groups are assumed to be postcultural and rendered invisible through the interplay of culture, power, and citizenship.

Further, Park notes that culture in relation to minoritized groups indicates both deficiency and necessity. It is also due to the alleged deficiency and necessity of minoritized groups that the discourse of cultural competence has emerged in order to make the cultural Other intelligible for the dominant society.

Orientalist Social Work: Cultural Otherization of Muslim Immigrants in Sweden

This discourse leads to the pathologization of Muslim immigrants as violent while turning white Swedish men into an invisible category that does not run the risk of being scrutinized by social workers on suspicion of committing crimes or acts of violence against women and children. Subsequently, violence becomes associated with immigrant masculinities that are rendered visible and become targets of interrogation.

This is why it becomes important to understand racism and social welfare arrangements within the context of unequal power relations between dominant and minoritized groups Eriksson, ; Pringle, , where the mass media have a powerful role in structuring an Orientalist discourse about Muslim men as violent, patriarchal, and oppressive, while representing Swedish men as possessing a desirable and inspirational form of masculinity Pringle, Many researchers have showed that ideological constructions of Muslim, Asian, or Middle Eastern families as a problem for Swedish society or for European societies play a significant role in legitimizing state racism and repressive immigration policies Brah, ; Fekete, ; Ghorashi, ; Gullestad, ; Kundnani, ; Mulinari, ; Razack, The actual lived experiences of these families do not bear much resemblance to the values and perspectives of the professionals within agencies of social welfare that are structured by stereotypical notions Brah, Advocating for structural change and helping to mobilize anti-racist directions and challenging domination are constitutive to anti-oppressive social work and anti-racist social work Dominelli, , ; Fook, , ; Penketh, ; Quinn, Understanding and identifying the social structures, processes, and practices that result in oppression is an important step toward enabling social justice and advocating for the opportunities and rights of marginalized and oppressed groups Dominelli, ; Fook, Social work that is permeated by case work, cultural competency, ethnic sensitivity, and color-blindness not only risks neglecting structural conditions that influence the life conditions of individuals but also the outcome of the relationship between social workers and disadvantaged groups and individuals Park, In order to enable social justice and equality, it is the duty of social work institutions to understand under what historical, cultural, social, and economic contexts discrimination and racism are legitimized, what groups discursively become objects of discriminatory practices, and how resistance can be framed against discriminatory structures Dominelli, ; Eliassi, If the goal of social work is to foster equality and challenge the subordinate positions of immigrants and marginalized groups, then it is essential to understand the processes of oppression and domination that deprive certain groups from having equal access to power resources.

Social work practices that engage with minoritized groups often reproduces the subordinated position of these groups and foster racist practices, enabled by white social workers trained to view the social problems of minoritized clients mainly as a consequence of their cultural background and leave the structural inequalities and experiences intact Dominelli, ; Park, Therefore, social workers need to be aware of colonial and Orientalist legacies and reconsider their understanding of social work as the source of positive and productive interventions for those who are subjected to it.

Mulinari, Keskinen, Irni and Tuori underline that Sweden and other Nordic countries not only see themselves as part of the Western world but also as inheritors of the values of the enlightenment. For example, Wright Nielsen shows how the concept of empowerment is used in practice within the framework of an integration project organized for women with refugee or immigrant backgrounds in a Swedish municipality.

According to Wright Nielsen, the cultural background of these women is thoroughly problematized within the framework of the project and the main aim of the project is to interfere in the subjectivities of the women through empowerment work that is equated with saving the women from their culture that is represented as deviating from a Swedish norm. Swedish integration projects entail discursive construction of Muslim immigrants as a group who are in need of help and care. At the same time, within these projects, the culture of Muslim immigrants is regarded as a threat to the Swedish gender equality and national identity Scuzzarello, Hence, integration is understood following the culturalist paradigm as an evolutionary process which minoritized groups should undergo in order to enter the realm of modernity and claim an equal subject position.

Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture

Consequently, the problem of integration is reduced to a matter of cultural deviation Eliassi, ; Razack, Undoing Pathologization of Families with Immigrant Backgrounds. Young women and men with immigrant background are well aware of the culturalist discourse and negative representation of families with immigrant backgrounds. Muslim parents might fear that they do not have the same right as white Swedish families to set limits and outline rules for their children due to their awareness of being structurally subordinated as well as culturally stigmatized and besieged Eliassi, ; Kamali, However, this is not to say that social workers should blindly neglect oppressive forms of parenting in the name of cultural relativism Barn, ; Dominelli, All families with Muslim backgrounds cannot be gauged by the same yardstick and the diverse variety of family forms among Muslims cannot be reduced to negative stereotypes in encountering, assessing, planning and determining interventions Eliassi, Turning the middle class Swedish family into a universal form of family constellation is another means, following Dominelli , to impose cultural imperialism on families who do not adhere to this norm.

In addition, white stereotypes of minoritized families are often based on racist notions of white cultural supremacy that permeate the societal social relations in contemporary European societies Dominelli, This prejudiced pattern of placement indicates that Muslim families are understood to be inappropriate places for nurturing and raising young people.

Hence, class, ethnicity, and religion become important considerations when social workers assess their interventions and plan sanctions against families who do not adhere to the routines and the rule systems of social services Eliassi, Punitive practices have become a hallmark of social work, especially in the context of resource constraints, efforts, and practices of a service-oriented social work have become limited; a relationship imbued with suspicion marks the interaction between social worker and client.

Demonizing and pathologizing Muslim families in Sweden as dysfunctional and deviant from a normative Swedish Middle class family obstructs a process of dialogical relationships, contestation of perspectives and mutual narrativization of prevailing social problems and possible solutions Eliassi, If changes are to occur, then the basis of the racist epistemology within the discipline of social work needs to decolonize through critical inquiries that highlight and formulate new routes of action and strategies to deal with racism.

An adequate strategy needs to look at those discriminatory practices that are reproduced on a daily basis by dominant subjects and dominant institutions and thereby undo those naturalized privileges that have discriminatory effects on minoritized individuals and groups. Further, social workers should also reconsider their social location as service providers within dominant social institutions that take white Swedishness as the normative point of departure for their service provision.

Wail S. Hassan

In this regard, Fook points out that social workers should assess the lenses through which they analyze the social problems of those groups with which they work. Interrogating the basis of these dominant lenses is crucial to critical social work practice. In the same vein, writing from a critical social work perspective, Quinn argues that it is because of institutional racism that policies, practices, and institutions of the dominant society function for the advantage of one or some groups. Besides, it is within such institutional frameworks that the world-views, beliefs, and values of the dominant group are established as the normative point of comparison to which other values and meanings are constructed as inferior, pathological, and deviant Quinn, Social work in Sweden is permeated by a culturalist discourse about young people and families with immigrant backgrounds.

This discourse classifies and frames their cultural background as inferior and assigns them deviant qualities. Identity formation is consequently a dynamic social process that is sensitive to prevailing structural constraints, inequalities, and opportunities.

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Therefore, social work research should pay attention to those structural inequalities that generate difficulties for Muslim families and youth to attain full and equal citizenship in the society where they are living. Social work can contribute to the formulation and mobilization of anti-oppressive forces in society in order to alter oppressive structural inequalities. Similarly, Pringle suggests that there is a great need to change the discourses about ethnicity within Swedish welfare agencies and among welfare researchers and policy makers.

The notion that the Swedish welfare system is a just entity and does not practice racism should be challenged; otherwise, social workers will continue to reproduce the prevailing unequal social relations Pringle, Social workers should also take into consideration the ideological basis of constructions of certain immigrant groups in terms of cultural deviancy and inappropriateness and link these constructions to the ways they experience structural inequalities.

Following Humphries , social work is central in defining the boundaries of the welfare state and in challenging different sources of inequality. Many people with immigrant background are clients of social welfare services that have shifted their concern from welfare to a position of authoritarianism, a culture of blaming the victim, and emphasis generally on control, restriction, surveillance, exclusion, and enforcement Humphries, Critical social work provides important theoretical perspectives and directions and asserts the importance of commitment to work towards social justice and equality for oppressed groups as well as the importance of working alongside these groups.

Critical social work should involve itself in analyzing the power relations and dominant assumptions and beliefs that oppress and marginalize certain groups Allan, In the light of rising ethnic discrimination and anti-Muslim racism in Europe, critical social work has a crucial role in fighting structural inequalities and otherization processes that permeate the wider society.

This is a perspective that is remarkably absent within Swedish social work education and practice that are imbued with Orientalist fantasies about Muslim immigrants as culturally disrupting elements within the Swedish welfare state. Pattern of Prejudice, 41 2 , Immigrant culture as an obstacle to 'partnership'. I skuggan av kulturella stereotypier: Sociologisk Forskning, 2 48 , Theorising new development in critical social work. Theoreis and practices for a socially just world 2nd ed.

Continuity and change in the lives of young Asians. Assimilation, acculturation, and juvenile delinquency among second generation Turkish youths in Berlin. A fine balancing act. British Journal of Social Work, 37 8 , British Journal of Social Work, 40 7 , Women of South Asian origin in Britain: South Asia Research, 7 1 , Mellan tystnad och tal. Girls and honour violence in Swedish public polic] Unpubliched doctoral dissertation.

Reading Foucualt for social work. On social cohesion and its obstacles] pp. A stranger in my homeland. The politics of belonging among young people with Kurdish backgrounds in Sweden Unpubliched doctoral dissertation. Quest for belonging among Middle Eastern youth. Kvinnovetenskaplig tidskrift, 5 , Reversing colonial practices with indigenous peoples.

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