Ensuring Failure?: The Impact of Class on Girls in Swedish Secure Care. Issue 2 (1st June 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Vogel, Maria A.
• Is Part Of: Girlhood studies. Volume 14:Issue 2(2021)
• Page Start: 80
• Page End: 96
• Publication Date: 2021-06-01
• Subjects: confinement -- ethnography -- femininity -- Foucault -- self-regulation -- subjectivity -- working-class; Girls -- Periodicals; Girls -- Social aspects -- Periodicals; Girls -- Social conditions -- Periodicals; Girls -- Education -- Periodicals; Girls -- Sexual behavior -- Periodicals; Girls -- Health and hygiene -- Periodicals; Women's studies -- Periodicals; 305.23082
• DOI: 10.3167/ghs.2021.140207
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1938-8209

Abstract

Abstract: Historically, the regulation of girls through institutionalization has been guided by bourgeois norms of femininity, including virtue, domesticity, and motherhood. Using a Foucauldian perspective on the production of subjects in Swedish secure care, I investigate whether or not middle-class norms of femininity, centered today around self-regulation, still guide the regulation of working-class girls. By analyzing data from an ethnographic study, I show that even though secure care is repressive, it is also permeated with the aim of producing self-regulating subjects corresponding with discourses on ideal girlhood. However, since working-class girls are rarely made intelligible within such discourses, thereby making the position of self-regulatory subject inaccessible, the care system leaves them to shoulder the responsibility for resolving a situation that is shaped by structures beyond their control.