Malmö Universitet | Akateeminen Kirjakauppa

This thesis explores the everyday life of a group of teenage girls living in the city of Malmö. The analytical focus is on how the girls’ encounter, negotiate with, reproduce and embody unequal socio-spatial gender structures, class relations and processes of racialization in their every day lives’. The partaking girls are positioned in different ways in relation to class and race. As well as live in different areas of the town of Malmö. This enables the thesis to explore how these differences affect the every day lives of the girls in various ways. Focus groups, individual semi-structured interviews and interviews in pairs where conducted between 2012 and 2013. The girls were recruited from upper secondary schools and youth projects within the Municipality of Malmö. In total 22 girls from an age range of 16-19 years old partook in the study. The narratives show that the partaking girls live under different everyday conditions but how they are also faced with similar power structures. The girls’ bodily orientations are in different ways affected by structural boundaries that regulate the girls’ social and spatial everyday movement. Unequal gender structures materialises for example by means of boys controlling spaces, by the dispersal of degrading rumours and by the girls' negotiations with gendered norms. By exploring the girls’ economic positions, material differences are revealed. Girls with families who have strong financial positions are able to finance their everyday life, but they can also afford extra treats, for example: trips abroad, luxury goods, clothes or savings accounts. The analysis also shows how consumption practices of the girls, and their families, are influenced by ideals driven by social status and class. Consumer practices, taste and style of clothes as well as different spatial settings are used as classed distinction markers. Encounters of everyday racism are tightly interwoven with normative constructions of Swedishness and need to be understood in relation to a hierarchical process of racialization where whiteness is constructed as a norm. In the girls’ narratives encounters of everyday racism on the one hand appear unpredictable; on the other hand, racist encounters appear as expected in some rooms and environments. The girls’ narratives often confirm patterns of segregation in Malmö described in previous research. However, the narratives also present nuances. The girls’ experience of different spatial settings seems to be ambivalent and paradoxical. The girls seem aware of power structures and boundaries and develop their agency to challenge them. They in different ways renegotiate ideals, create alternatives and practice resistance towards categorizations, social ideals and power-bearing norms. The thesis has especially focused on the exploration of means of collective resistance as well as collective alternative orientations. These acts of collective agency for instance takes place through the means of narrating (talk back), sometimes they appear as alternative ways of being and sometimes as a way of creating collective friendly (home) spaces.