Tough femininities: ethnic minority girls’ aggressive school opposition

Abstract

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.