Ethnicity and the policing of nightclub accessibility in the Danish night-time economy

Abstract

In early club studies, nightlife domains are often depicted as scenes where class and ethno-racial boundaries are dissolved into post-modern cultural formations. This article adds to a growing body of research challenging this characterisation, by exploring how the policing of nightlife accessibility contributes to the (re)production of ethnic divisions and inequalities in nocturnal consumer spaces. Based on ethnographic research in Denmark, the article explores the key governmental rationalities informing bouncers’ exclusion of visible ethnic minority men. The article argues that bouncers’ ethnic governance is a multi-dimensional process which can be analysed using different analytical approaches. While the first part uses the concept of “vernacular risk perception” to highlight how bouncers’ ethnic governance is driven by loss-reductive logics, combined with prejudiced thinking, the second part uses an interactional perspective to illustrate how bouncers’ ethnic governance is also the product of situated power struggles between bouncers and minority youth. Third, I use a performative perspective to demonstrate how the exclusion of minority men is also driven by intra-group processes and implicated in bouncers’ dramatised in-group construction of masculine identities. In conclusion, I discuss how a focus on bouncers’ ethnic governance and regulation of access can contribute to the study of (nightlife) youth culture.

• Nightlife
• ethnicity
• policing
• exclusion
• discrimination

Notes

Acknowledgements

This research has received funding from Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research, and the Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University.

Declaration of interest

The author declares no conflicts of interest.

This research has received funding from Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research, and the Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University.

Notes

1. In 2009, it became publicly known that Danish police officers informally referred to ethnic minorities as “pearls”; a play on words, as the pronunciation of the Danish plural form of “pearls” (perler) is quite similar to the term “perker”, a degrading and racist term used primarily about individuals of Turkish, Middle Eastern, Somali, Indian or Pakistani descent.

2. It should be noted that official statistics are biased by the fact that ethnic minorities sometimes face discrimination in the Danish criminal justice system. As an indication of this, Holmberg and Kyvsgaard (2003) found that individuals of non-Danish ethnic background are more likely than individuals of ethnic Danish background to be arrested, to be arrested without a subsequent conviction, and to be convicted when charged with an offence.