Embodied nativism in Denmark: rethinking violence and the far right

Abstract

Since 2017, the Danish far right party Stram Kurs has staged hundreds of Islamophobic demonstrations in neighbourhoods known for their ethnic minority and Muslim communities. Confrontational counterprotesters are filmed by far right activists who widely diffuse the footage on social media. These scenes of “native” bodies under duress from racialized others serve the far right as evidence of an incompatibility between racialized foreigners and the Danish ethnically defined nation. When far right activists subject their bodies to potential violence they are embodying nativism; dramatizing the threat of ethnic impurity to the nation. Embodied nativism denotes how actors imbue bodies with–and physically perform–values linked to essentialized ethnic categories to advance exclusionary claims. We develop this concept through visual analysis, utilizing images to show how scenes of embodied nativism exploit liberal frameworks of free speech, violence, and nonviolence; framing counterprotesters as racialized aggressors on the national body politic.