“A Dark Foreign Man”: Constructing Invisible Whiteness in Finnish Sexual Autobiographies from the 1990s

Abstract

This chapter analyzes a collection of 148 sexual autobiographies to discover how the narratives of sexual experiences and descriptions of sexual attitudes and feelings are connected to notions of race and nationality. The autobiographies, gathered in year 1992 in Finland in the FINSEX research project are studied using both corpus analysis methods and close reading. The chapter addresses the construction of Finnish whiteness in a context that is, seemingly, monoethnic and in which race is rarely discussed. While very few authors comment directly on race, there are traces of ethnicized understandings in the texts. The narratives implicitly construct the authors’ own white Finnishness as the authors note ethnic differences that make their own whiteness visible and construct the borders of Finnishness. The analysis of these autobiographies offers perspectives on the meanings of race and their connections to sexuality in the early 1990s Finland.