Paper short abstract:

This paper applies the notion of affordance to explore differentiated whiteness in the context of East to West migration in Europe. I draw on memory work and autoethnographic vignettes detailing encounters with two white, single, elderly Danish men in their homes in 2004 and 2014.

Paper long abstract:

This paper applies the notion of affordance to explore affective, intersectional emergence of differentiated whiteness in the context of East to West migration after the enlargement of the European Union in 2004. I draw on autoethnography and memory work, detailing encounters with two elderly, white, single and physically impaired Danish men in their homes in 2004 and 2014. Cleaning Ole's apartment in 2004, I was invited to provide sexual services, passing as a sexualized, too young, unemployable Eastern European love migrant of limited social value. In contrast, interviewing Carsten for my PhD in 2014, I came across as able-bodied, middle-class researcher, progressively feminine and fluent in, perhaps even, Danish. I heard no sexual undertones in Carsten's invitation to 'visit again', instead perceiving it as a suggestion to become a voluntary visitor. Analyzing the affective flows in these encounters, I trace how markers of difference intersect to denote different whitenesses. I discuss how whiteness functions as an affordance, accumulated over time, emerging in situated, affective encounters and constraining bodies' possibilities for movement and becoming. The article contributes to research on racialisation and whiteness and to scholarship that explores emergence of 'Europe' by examining relations between centre/periphery and racial formations.