In the midst of the global financial crisis and in the ‘anti-race era’, Europe has witnessed a revival of deeply racialized discourses targeting the Roma, leading to new discriminatory practices and legitimating existing ones in many social domains. While westward Roma immigration has spurred these discourses, it has also favored the emergence of invisible grassroots reactions against them that need to be further analyzed. Drawing on interviews with migrant Romani women, this article aims to shed light on these unknown processes, (...) as experienced by women in Romani women-based solidarity networks. Data show that these networks help the women to access basic social facilities, while also challenging the abovementioned racialized discourses. (shrink)

The article examines national news reports on prostitution of Russian women in northern Norway between 1990 and 2001. Applying critical discourse analysis, the author shows how this particular type of cross-border, rural prostitution is represented as sexual transaction, as a sociopolitical problem, and as a symbolic issue used to legitimize stricter border controls. Images of prostitutes, pimps and customers are also discussed. The different thematizations are in turn connected to various historical practices of state regulation of sexuality, to constructions of (...) group identities based on moral categories, and to social definitions of what is normal and what is deviant. (shrink)