Bodies Out of Place: Girls’ and Young Women’s Orientations in Racially Diverse Neighbourhoods and Urban Spaces in Sweden

The aim of this article is to explore how place and physical space are perceived by girls and young women living in two neighbourhoods marked as marginalized and how they orientate in urban spaces and their everyday lives. Data were collected through teller-focused, walk-along and photo-elicitation interviews with twenty-one 13- to 22-year-old girls and young women in racially diverse neighbourhoods in two Swedish cities and analysed using queer phenomenology and conceptions of space. Three themes emerge: orientations in everyday life, place as the Other, and belonging and the contestation of space. The girls’ and young women’s everyday life movements are understood as voluntary and forced into different directions in urban spaces. They orientate in spaces where class and racial boundaries divide people and places, as the local neighbourhoods and inhabitants are stigmatized as the Other. However, these boundaries are contested by the girls taking pride in where they live, their Muslim identity and forward orientations in life.