Paper short abstract:

This paper attempts to shed light on the impact of neoliberal shifts in affluent European welfare states on so-called “double minority” citizens. It presents an examination of how specific forms of social and economic marginality experienced - termed here as ‘hypermarginality’- can be contextualized in global climates of precarisation.

Paper long abstract:

Based on work from an ongoing anthropological research project on people with non-western backgrounds and physical disabilities in Denmark, this paper introduces a concept – hypermarginality - that aims to address the particular socio-economic conditions and corresponding experiential state of individuals and families facing multiple dimensions of social exclusion, outsiders among outsiders in a global economy. Rather than solely a case of ‘intersectionality’ (Crenshaw 1989) or a geographically and historically specific form of urban ‘advanced marginality’ (Wacquant 1996), I argue for a distinct theoretical lens, inspired by Judith Butler’s recent reflections on ‘precarity’, which can address the multiple, exponential and compounding (Spencer 2014) nature of the exclusion experienced in this social position. Phenomenological approaches developed in medical anthropology are employed to allow a vantage point through these certain subjectivities to larger structures of marginalization. To illustrate the common social and economic dilemmas from which this concept emerged, one such subjectivity is explored in the form of an ethnographic case. Here we see the story of Abuukar, a Somali wheelchair user, who feeling shut out of the Danish labor market and society at large, seeks to find his “own business”, his “own way of living this Danish government”. This story is then interpreted “outward” (Good et. al. 2001) to a wider global economic and political frame. In this analytical step, we see how the conditions of Abuukar’s as well as many other of my informants’ ‘hypermarginality’ are shaped and formed by the overarching political changes of late liberalism.