Compassionate celebritization: Unpacking the “True feelings” of the Danish people in the media reporting on a deportation case

ABSTRACT

This article introduces the concept of compassionate celebritization as a framework for analyzing how Danish media reporting on a deportation case enacted a transformation of its subjects, a young child, and her mother, from deportable migrants to celebritized Danish citizens. I suggest that the reporting subjected the migrants to a process of celebritization premised on the affectivity of the white Danish public’s compassionate intervention in their situation. The analysis demonstrates how celebritization unfolded compassion as a “true feeling” of the Danish people, orientating emotionally towards the migrants as worthy objects of white Danish compassion, most significantly through the positing of the figure of “the innocent child.” Additionally, the reporting framed the compassionate intervention as a restoration of a forgotten Danish humanitarianism. This happened through a displacement of the object of emotion to the Danish public itself, and an orientation towards it of pride and being moved by the efforts made to intervene. The celebritization also became a celebrated revelation of the “true” character of the Danish people, which gained the momentum to act as a force for good in the face of the inhuman decision made by the state authorities.

KEYWORDS:

• Celebritization
• migration
• whiteness
• affect
• nation

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the LOVA research group, the intersectionality network at Aalborg University, and the two anonymous reviewers, for their engaged and constructive feedback and comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. My choice of the term “citizen” is not to indicate that Suthida and Im obtained Danish citizenship in the legal sense, as they only obtained residence, but to address the public imaginary, where Suthida and Im were celebrated as belonging to Denmark as if they were full citizens.

2. A few public voices were raised that rejected such claims to pure feeling. I have been able to locate two articles, both of which quote the general secretary of Save the Children Denmark, who points to the double standards of not helping other children in similar situations, and rhetorically asks, “imagine if it had been a Somali boy” (Sune Gaumann Christiani 2013, Steen A. Jørgensen 2013).

3. The later cases include those of Emma, 2013–14 (Steen A. Jørgensen 2013), Yiming, 2017–18 (Karsten Gøttler 2017), Aphinya, 2018 (Torben Rask 2018), and Mint, 2018–19 (Berit Hartung 2018). Most recently, the case of Mint led to the Danish parliament changing the law concerning the “potential of successful integration” for children (DR 2019, Sine Bach Jakobsen 2019).

Additional information

Funding

The article is part of the research project Loving Attachment: Regulating Danish Love Migration (LOVA), funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark [Danmarks Frie Forskningsfond] under grant 6107-00095.

Notes on contributors

Asta Smedegaard Nielsen

Asta Smedegaard Nielsen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Politics and Society, Aalborg University. Her research interests include media and migration, critical race and whiteness studies, feminist studies, and affectivity studies. E-mail: [email protected]