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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.
Contributor Notes
Maria A. Vogel is director of research at a municipal Research and Development unit in Stockholm, Sweden. Her research, given its overall theme of the role of gender in young people's lives and development, focuses on those with psychosocial problems in secure care. She has a special interest in teenage girls and the construction of girlhood. She and Linda Arnell, Örebro University, are the editors of Living Like a Girl. Agency, Social Vulnerability and Welfare Measures in Europe and Beyond, forthcoming in the Transnational Girlhoods Series (Berghahn Books).