‘Why can't I get married?’—Denmark and the ‘Twenty-four year law’

摘要

Recent geographical work in Whiteness studies has been primarily Anglophone and centered on the USA, Britain and Australia. This paper expands those studies to consider the case of Denmark. Using three themes of Whiteness, the paper analyzes the 2002 ‘Twenty-four year marriage law,’ which regulates marriage by Danish citizens and legal Danish residents to individuals from outside Denmark, the Nordic countries and the European Union. This law stipulates that for spouses or cohabitants from outside these three regions to be granted residence permits in Denmark, certain conditions must be met including the requirement that both partners must be over the age of 24. The paper argues that the implementation of the twenty-four year law is overt evidence that Whiteness is well-entrenched in Denmark, contradicts the very values Danish society states it wishes to uphold and is negatively impacting a portion of the very population that Whiteness is trying to protect.