Minoritetsstress – begrebet, dets anvendelighed og potentiale

Abstract

Minority stress – a critical analytical introduction to the concept, its scope, and potential. This article explores and gives an overview of what minority stress is as a phenomenon and concept by looking into how the concept can be utilized to understand minoritized and racialized subjects’ daily challenges of dealing with microaggressions, stigmatization and discrimination. There is a lack of research on this concept in a Danish context where stress often is understood in individualized terms, and a focus on discrimination and othering rarely addresses the negative psychological and affective consequences of these processes. Minority stress represents a focus on the structural and societal conditions and discourses that position specific subjects as Others. The experience of being stigmatized, othered and racialized is connected to a constant form of stress and hyper-vigilance, which needs to be understood in its own right. To get a deeper insight into the complex processes underlying the experience of minority stress and the different ways of coping with it, central theories of stigma, emotional labour, internalized racism and passing, are addressed. The article points to how minority stress can lead to broader, more nuanced conceptualizations of stress and resilience as structural and societal processes taking social inequality, discrimination and racism into account.