Gendered alignment and place-making: adolescents shaping social space in stigmatised neighbourhoods

This article analyses gendered practices and strategies in face of territorial stigmatisation. The empirical data includes interviews with 16 adolescents living in ‘prioritized’ areas in Sweden. Exploring the adolescents’ relationship to their own neighbourhoods as stigmatised spaces, the article demonstrates how the adolescents’ space is constructed through the dynamic interplay between dominant discourses and lived experiences. It further shows how the adolescents themselves, as bodies inhabiting a certain space, are part of creating its social meaning. The article also explores differences in male and female experiences of living in stigmatised spaces, as well as gendered practices of resistance towards stigmatisation. Findings from the interviews show that girls, more than boys, tend to orient themselves away from their own neighbourhoods. The interviews also show how identity and social space co-construct and how the intersections of class, ethnicity, age and gender, affects and are affected by the construction of social space. Concluding discussion focus on how these seemingly gendered practices reconstruct social space which in turn impact on the life the adolescents. The article makes a contribution to social work research and practice by broadening the understanding of the relationship between social space and the individual adolescents inhabiting stigmatised neighbourhoods.