The Skin Color of Talent
BY: Dr. Özlem Belçim Galip
Talent possesses neither race nor face, but it has a skin color.
Meeting Evin Ahmad, a Kurdish actress born and raised in Sweden, added a powerful new perspective to my understanding of institutional racism in the film industry.
Now 31-years-old, Ahmad started her acting career at the age of 15 with the role of a troubled migrant teenager. This allowed her to pursue her true passion of acting professionally, but it never sat well with her that the role that put her on the map represented a stereotyped image of migrant communities in Europe, namely as helpless and passive victims. Nominated twice for best actress roles at the Guldbagge Awards, the official annual Swedish film awards, she says that education, self-improvement, and intellectual thinking helped her stay away from roles perpetuating stereotypes. This was especially the case for Evin, who is a Kurd, and therefore linked to honor killings, primarily due to the case of Fadime Şahindal (1975–2002). Following this case, Evin received offers for roles primarily dealing with honor killings, in which she could still only portray a victim.
My original intent in talking to Evin during our first meeting in 2019 was to understand her lived experiences as a second-generation immigrant and a well-educated young woman in a creative industry. In contrast to common thinking about non-white actresses, not having a leading role has not been an issue for Evin. She has a different tale to tell us.
Despite the presence of white privilege in the film industry, with her talent and determination, Evin has played several leading roles in Swedish (Ring Mamma, Beyond Dreams) and Danish (The Rain series) productions. Her criticism and struggle in the film industry also strays from the dominant narrative of the #MeToo movement that rocked the industry starting in October 2017, when the silence broke around suppressed stories of sexual misconduct. Rather, Evin’s agitation in light of the #MeToo movement centered on her desexualization because of her ethnic background.
“In the scenes [that I star in], my body gets desexualized. The characters that I play rarely fall in love or have sex or are involved in any kind of sex scenes.”
After doing a little research and analysis on the roles that non-Swedish, non-white, non-blonde actresses play, she recognized a pattern of “desexualization”.
She continued: “I am looking at all [the] beautiful Indian, Black, Middle Eastern actresses in Sweden. None of them are considered attractive by film or TV standards. I come to the set, they say ‘you are so beautiful’, but you sit in a make-up room and they say, ‘your character does not wear make-up’. The clothes picked for us are not even proper dresses. Just very ugly outfits, not even a dress. Our body can turn into any character that we portray. We have a complex body. We can be sexy, we can be romantic, we can be angry, and we can be frightened. But whenever I do a character, they are always one thing. They are not shot in either erotic or romantic scenes.”
Tedious Non-Whiteness versus Pretty White Exclusivity
Evin meets the socially acceptable standards of beauty in the context of thinness, youth, heterosexuality, and ability (to tick off all the beauty standards of internalized racism). However, she concluded that non-blonde and non-white actresses in Sweden’s film industry cannot uphold the institutional dominance of “appropriate femininity” for the sake of the white male gaze. Evin, being of Middle Eastern descent, although a second-generation migrant born and raised in Sweden, is still considered non-Swedish due to her skin color.
Drawing from Evin’s research and lived experiences, “appropriate femininity” is being white or, in other words, being Nordic, or at least European. As a non-white actress, Evin became acutely aware that she could not be seen or considered as Swedish, which severely limited the roles offered to her despite her talent.
Evin’s case illuminates the racism and sexism in the film and media industry in Sweden that, by controlling their images on screen, perpetuates the “othering” of certain women. “Controlling images”, a term coined by Hill Collins (1998), dictates how a woman’s body should look on the screen according to assumed/biased cultural norms, that also proscribe the portrayal of “docile bodies” framed as passive entities subjected to multiple sources of intrusion, control, and discipline. For instance, the managing film crew (producer, writer, director) dictates appropriate (lack of) make-up or clothes for Evin, and also requires specific mimicry and gestures from her. These characteristics are portrayed by other non-white, or non-Swedish actresses as well. Actresses of Middle Eastern origin in Nordic productions cannot appear confident, carefree, free-spirited, or outgoing. This is in order to be considered culturally appropriate for the region that her non-white skin is representing. By default then, a “Swedish” character cannot be played by a woman who looks like Evin, even though Evin herself is a Swede. She can only play Middle Eastern characters within an assumed culture in which women are supposed to be shy, conservative, and reserved
From ‘defective femininity’ to ‘appropriate femininity’: Mimicry or a transgression?
One year later in February 2020, when I met her again, Evin was much keener on refusing desexualized roles and challenging the essentialized understanding of beauty and expected attitudes from a non-white actress. A few months later, she secured the lead female role in Snabba Cash (Easy Cash; released in April 2021), a new Swedish Netflix original series from screenwriter Oskar Söderlund and bestselling author Jens Lapidus, who wrote the Stockholm Noir trilogy of which Snabba Cash is the first book adapted into a TV series.
In the lead role of Leya, Evin Ahmad plays a single mother who is determined to take what she wants, regardless of the danger in a male-dominated criminal world. Evin considers Leya to be her dream role — a powerful woman with a modern outlook, whose dark skin does not negate her femininity as had been the case in her previous films. Through this Netflix series, Evin transgresses fixed boundaries of non-white actresses by carrying white actress identifiers (desirable, attractive, confident, outgoing, feminine, brave). It is a sexy and dazzling lead role where her femininity and strong, smart character constitute resistance against the stereotypical representations of non-white, non-native, immigrant actresses, who usually are presented as having defective, or, who are simply lacking femininity.
Through the role of Leya, Evin neither takes on white identity to escape “racial oppression”, nor mimics the colonizer by adopting white traits. Instead, Evin’s playing this particular role allows her to challenge the normative insistence of whiteness in the Swedish film industry. With this role, she refuses to be “othered” while still inhabiting her non-white body. By crossing the stigmatized racial, gender, and sexual boundaries imposed on her as an actress of Kurdish origin, Evin opens up the space for equality with her colleagues of Swedish origin.
Özlem Belçim Galip, PhD, is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Her current research mainly concerns the activism of Kurdish migrant women in selected host European countries (France, Belgium, Sweden, Germany, and the United Kingdom) in terms of artistic and cultural practices in both the language(s) of the host countries and the women’s native Kurdish language. Dr. Galip earned her PhD in Kurdish Studies from the University of Exeter, having studied Kurdish artistic and literary narratives in Turkish Kurdistan and its European diaspora. She also worked with Kurdish NGOs and women’s and refugees’ organizations, including the Refugee Action Centre, where she was involved in ethnographic and creative qualitative/quantitative research on Kurdish women living in Europe and Kurdish regions. Dr. Galip is currently in the post production stage of her ethnographic documentary film, “Anywhere on this Road: Letters to My Unborn Daughter”, on Kurdish intellectual women in Europe, and on her own personal journey as a Kurdish woman migrant. Shot in various cities in Turkish Kurdistan along with Germany, England, and Sweden, the film will be released in Autumn of 2021.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 788651.
To republish an article from The WVoice in its entirety or as a derivative work, you must attribute it to the author and Women’s Voices Now, and include a reference and hyperlink to the original article.
If you would like to contribute to The WVoice, please review the Submission Guidelines.
