PMA Ph.D. Candidate Victoria Pihl Sørensen has published an article called “Colonial Reproductive Coercion and Control in Kalaallit Nunaat: Racism in Denmark’s IUD Program" in NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research. Victoria’s co-authors are Naja Dyrendom Graugaard and Josefine Lee Stage. Sørensen, Graugaard, and Stage also published a popular article summarizing their findings in Denmark’s largest newspaper Politiken on January 7.
Sørensen’s academic article appears here through Taylor & Francis Online.
Sørensen took some time to speak with us about her work:
Can you tell us a bit about what brought you to this project and what you hope readers will take away?
This article is the product of feminist, decolonial collaboration between Josefine Lee Stage, Naja Dyrendom Graugaard (University of Aarhus and University of Copenhagen, respectively) and I. We were fortunate enough to find each other a little while back, when we realized that our individual research projects led us to asking similar questions about racism and colonialism in Denmark and Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland).
In 2022, news broke that thousands of Indigenous girls and women had been fitted with intrauterine devices (IUDs) in the 1960s, and many of them without being asked or properly informed. As a result, the birth rate in Kalaallit Nunaat fell drastically, and some women suffered painful complications, which left them infertile. Josefine, Naja, and I noticed that the history of Danish colonial power in Kalaallit Nunaat, and the role of racism and sexism in that history, was continuously minimized in discussions of the IUD program. In scholarship and in popular culture, Denmark is often presented as a benevolent colonial power and welfare state. Our article challenges this dominant narrative.
By examining news reports and the Danish state's papers from the 1960s-1970s, we have demonstrated that a racist and sexist image of the "Greenlandic woman" as "promiscuous" and irresponsible legitimized systematic reproductive coercion and control, and that this control was considered necessary for the success of the Danish "modernization" of Kalaallit Nunaat. As such, we argue that it would be a mistake to consider the IUD program as anything but a tool of the Danish state to retain control and power over Kalaallit Nunaat in the midst of the intensifying transnational movement for decolonization in the mid-twentieth century. The IUD program harmed Kalaallit girls and women, their communities, and, by keeping the Kalaallit population number down, the potential for Kalaallit Nunaat to gain independence.
What was your approach in crafting this publication?
We approached this project from an intersectional feminist point of view rooted in decolonial analysis. We focused on the Danish state, its media, policy makers, and practitioners to map out the colonial logics that underpinned the IUD project and to attempt to avoid satisfying what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have called "the settler colonial gaze" through the reproduction of histories of violence and harm against Indigenous people. To expand access to our research, we have been sharing our findings popularly via podcast and the Danish news and with the Kalaallit women who are now suing the Danish state.
What would you like readers to know about your work?
My research challenges Danish national self-perceptions, but more so the idea that Denmark, and Scandinavia at large, are the pinnacles of social equity that they often are made out to be in international discourses. My dissertation specifically demonstrates how race science and eugenics were integral to the formation of the Danish state, national identity, and popular culture throughout the 20th century. I place the IUD program in Kalaallit Nunaat in this history of how the Danish state has manufactured differential reproduction according to a hierarchy of human worth, wherein Indigenous people, people of color, poor and working-class people, women, disabled people, and queer people were systematically considered, and treated as, less-than.
Victoria E. Pihl Sørensen (she/her) is a Ph.D. Candidate at Cornell University in the Department of Performing and Media Arts minoring in Science and Technology Studies. She holds an MA in Women's and Gender Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center. Victoria is a 2024/25 Graduate Fellow at the Institute for European Studies in the Einaudi Center for International Studies. Read more about Sørensen’s work.
