ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we turn our attention to processes of negotiations of belonging and non-belonging to a social community. We address the following questions: which characteristics, abilities or values should people have in order to belong to a certain social community? Who is included in the social community, and who is excluded? Drawing on Yuval-Davis work on the politics of belonging, we analyse three individual stories of women who have migrated to Sweden. According to the three stories, the women face similar challenges when it comes to claims for belonging to the Swedish social community. A recurring pattern is that formal belonging to the Swedish social community by having a Swedish passport is not the only mechanism for inclusion and exclusion in the social community. Even though all three women formally belong to the social community by their status of being Swedish citizens, in their everyday lives, a range of interrelated racial as well as cultural boundaries leave them in positions as non-belonging. At the same time, and in different ways, the women do claim their belonging to the social community of ‘normal’ citizens. They do so by drawing boundaries between Me/Us and Them along civil, cultural and racial lines. All in all, the three stories address the crucial question of who is included in the social community and who is not.
