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En ljus eller mörk framtid: Reproduktion, ras och nation i samtida Danmark

Jonsson, Sarah LU (2026) GNVK22 20261
Gender Studies
Abstract
This thesis examines contemporary Danish public discourse on fertility and demography, where anxiety over declining fertility among women of Danish origin coexists with anxiety over immigrants and their descendants becoming a future demographic majority. The empirical material consists of documents from and adjacent to Danmarks Statistik (2019–2025) and news coverage from Politiken and Danmarks Radio (2024–2026), read as artefacts of a single discursive operation tracked across institutional and public sites. Through feminist Critical Discourse Analysis and with an intersectional attention to how categories of gender and race are mutually constituted, the study argues that these two anxieties operate as one discursive mechanism in which... (More)
This thesis examines contemporary Danish public discourse on fertility and demography, where anxiety over declining fertility among women of Danish origin coexists with anxiety over immigrants and their descendants becoming a future demographic majority. The empirical material consists of documents from and adjacent to Danmarks Statistik (2019–2025) and news coverage from Politiken and Danmarks Radio (2024–2026), read as artefacts of a single discursive operation tracked across institutional and public sites. Through feminist Critical Discourse Analysis and with an intersectional attention to how categories of gender and race are mutually constituted, the study argues that these two anxieties operate as one discursive mechanism in which the boundaries of the nation are drawn through women's bodies. Combining Paul Gilroy’s postcolonial melancholy with Sara Ahmed’s affective theorisation of anxiety, and reading both through a postcolonial-feminist framework, the thesis identifies the logic binding the two anxieties as temporal: past-oriented melancholy and future-oriented anxiety meet in the reproductive body, which becomes the site at which a racialised national future is either secured or lost. The thesis contributes a theorisation of how two apparently separate anxieties are produced as a single discursive logic — bound temporally, affectively, and through the body. (Less)
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author
Jonsson, Sarah LU
supervisor
organization
course
GNVK22 20261
year
type
M2 - Bachelor Degree
subject
keywords
reproduction, race, nation, demographic anxiety, temporality, reproduktion, ras, demografisk ångest, temporalitet
language
Swedish
id
9238419
date added to LUP
2026-06-18 14:22:07
date last changed
2026-06-18 14:22:07
@misc{9238419,
  abstract     = {{This thesis examines contemporary Danish public discourse on fertility and demography, where anxiety over declining fertility among women of Danish origin coexists with anxiety over immigrants and their descendants becoming a future demographic majority. The empirical material consists of documents from and adjacent to Danmarks Statistik (2019–2025) and news coverage from Politiken and Danmarks Radio (2024–2026), read as artefacts of a single discursive operation tracked across institutional and public sites. Through feminist Critical Discourse Analysis and with an intersectional attention to how categories of gender and race are mutually constituted, the study argues that these two anxieties operate as one discursive mechanism in which the boundaries of the nation are drawn through women's bodies. Combining Paul Gilroy’s postcolonial melancholy with Sara Ahmed’s affective theorisation of anxiety, and reading both through a postcolonial-feminist framework, the thesis identifies the logic binding the two anxieties as temporal: past-oriented melancholy and future-oriented anxiety meet in the reproductive body, which becomes the site at which a racialised national future is either secured or lost. The thesis contributes a theorisation of how two apparently separate anxieties are produced as a single discursive logic — bound temporally, affectively, and through the body.}},
  author       = {{Jonsson, Sarah}},
  language     = {{swe}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{En ljus eller mörk framtid: Reproduktion, ras och nation i samtida Danmark}},
  year         = {{2026}},
}