The Change They Make: Greenlandic Women in the Danish Parliament

On October 3, 2019, the Danish Folketing had its annual opening debate. After having argued that the Greenlandic Inuits who were sent to Denmark in 1952 as a part of a social experiment were entitled to an apology from the Danish government, the young, Greenlandic representative Aki-Matilda Høegh-Dam finds herself in a harsh parliamentary debate. Having finished her speech, she walks down from the lectern, she is shaky and tears are streaming down her cheeks. The female, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen quickly rises from her seat on the floor. She goes to Høegh-Dam and hugs her. Høegh-Dam cries and the prime minister comforts her more. This paper constitutes the first empirical study of the female Greenlandic representatives in the Danish Folketing. Its analysis concludes that the episode – and the symbols it created – should be interpreted as a part of an entirely new type of Greenlandic parliamentary representation, which saw the day of light in 2007 when for the first time in Danish-Greenlandic history the two Greenlandic representatives in the Danish parliament were women. The paper investigates if and how the change of the gender of the Greenlandic representatives has influenced the representative behavior of the Greenlandic representatives in the Folketing and its symbolic meaning. To study this, the paper applies biographical information, parliamentary data (parliamentary questions posed and committee assignments), as well as data on how parliamentary actions are interpreted in the Danish and Greenlandic media. In turn, interviews with the involved MPs are carried out. The paper concludes that important changes have occurred within the substantive and symbolic Greenlandic representation after women replaced men in the Danish Folketing. Yet to explain this change an intersectional approach that incorporates the way identities and institutions interact is called for.