Tough femininities: ethnic minority girls’ aggressive school opposition

Abstract

This article addresses school resistance in ethnic minority girls. Girls’ school opposition is mostly described as covert. If described as hostile, it is rarely understood in terms of femininity. Through psychosocial analyses of extensive fieldwork and interviews with students in a Norwegian upper-secondary school, the article describes an affective practice in which young minority girls reject school aggressively. I argue that through their school opposition, the girls are constituting a transgressive femininity that that does not jeopardise their ethnic belonging or their femininity within school. Their aggression is fuelled by the experience of disentitlement from success in a school perceived as being for ethnic Norwegians and not for them. Although the noisy girls at Skogbyen act in a way that is locally accepted, they still act in opposition to the larger gender order – which comes at a cost.

Keywords:

• Femininity
• ethnicity
• gender
• educational achievement
• school rejection
• school opposition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This study was approved by the Privacy Ombudsman for Research at the Norwegian Centre for Research Data. All participants provided active and informed consent, and parents provided written consent for participants under the age of 18 years. Interviews were recorded and transcribed, the recordings were encrypted and deleted after transcription, and the transcriber signed a letter of confidentiality. Anonymity was ensured by using pseudonyms and obscuring facts that could lead to the identification of the school or participants.

2. The scale goes from one to six, where six is the best and 3+ is mediocre.

3. As an adjective, Svarte is polysemic. It means the colour black, but in the sociolect that these youths use, it also means bad. As an interjection, it is used as swear word.

4. Literally: ‘noisemaker’.

5. The number of Norwegians varied, but therey were, in fact, four at this point in time.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway Norges Forskningsråd [FRIPRO Grant (funding scheme for independent research projects)].