Abstract
The article explores how violence works to produce young women’s precarious positions in social milieus characterized by multiple marginalization. By paying attention to the micropolitics of violent engagements we argue that violent conflicts can be viewed as strategies for escaping positions of marginality into positions of relevance. The analysis builds on empirical data from Copenhagen, Denmark, gained through ethnographic fieldwork with the participation of 20 female informants aged 13–22. The theoretical contribution proposes viewing conflicts as multi-linear, multi-causal and non-chronological to account for the emotional tension and lived experience of violent conflicts. Finally we identify the need for further studies on how technosocial forms of communication play into violent conflicts among youth.
Girls’ violence is at once sensational, contentious, and enigmatic. In the 1990s, the popular press (re)‘discovered’ a seemingly ‘new violent female offender’ (Chesney-Lind, 1993; Males, 2010), whose image continues to be reinforced by the increased popularity of ‘girl fights’ posted on You Tube and other internet sites. A decade on, the focus expanded to so-called ‘mean girls’ and their engagement in relational violence (Brown, 2005; Simmons, 2003; Wiseman, 2009). In the meantime, in light of periods of increase in girls’ arrests and incarcerations for violence, academics began revisiting old debates (Adler, 1975; see Alder and Worrall, 2004) about whether girls’ violence is on the rise and what alternative factors might explain these official trends (Chesney-Lind and Jones, 2010; Lauritsen et al., 2009; Steffensmeier et al., 2005). Simultaneously, we have witnessed a burgeoning of scholarship that examines causes, correlates, and pathways contributing to girls’ violence (Gaarder and Belknap, 2002; Heimer and De Coster, 1999; Steffensmeier and Haynie, 2000), as well as investigations of situational and environmental contexts in which it emerges and takes meaning (Jones, 2010; Kruttschnitt and Carbone-Lopez, 2006; Miller and Mullins, 2006; Mullins and Miller, 2008; Ness, 2010; Zimmerman and Messner, 2010).
The enigma of girls’ violence is very much tied to the cultural equation of violence with men and masculinities. Girls’ involvement in violence has long been argued to be ‘doubly deviant’: not just a violation of cultural norms about civility, but also a violation of expectations about the performance—and ‘essense’—of femininity itself. Among feminist scholars, debates continue to swirl about whether girls who use violence are positioning themselves as ‘one of the guys’ (Miller, 2001), are reflective of a ‘masculine mimicry’ (McRobbie, 2006, in Renold and Ringrose, 2008: 316), engaged in ‘bad girl femininity’ (Messerschmidt, 2002: 462), or, perhaps, something more complex is taking place in relation to girls’ agency, resistance, and strategic decision making within contexts of multiple marginalizations (Burman et al., 2003; Jones, 2010; Miller, 2002; Schaffner, 2006; Waldron, 2011).
We are mostly engaged here with this latter body of scholarship, which seeks to understand and place girls’ violence in context. Yet, our goal is to add a new layer to the conversation. We are inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze, especially his collaboration with Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). And we see great promise in the ways this work has been put to use by feminist and other social science scholars in theorizing topics as diverse as cyber-bullying (Kofoed, 2009; Kofoed and Ringrose, forthcoming), graffiti-writing (Halsey and Young, 2006), anorexia (Bray and Colebrook, 1998), the heterosexual matrix (Renold and Ringrose, 2008), mothers’ political protest (Baydar and İvegen, 2006), selfhood (Sermijn et al., 2008), social identity (Brown and Lunt, 2002), responses to suicide (Isaac, 2007), and wartime losses (Biehl and Locke, 2010).
Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking offers up new ways of looking at girls’ violence, as it leads us to ask: What does this violence do? Asking this question in a Deleuzian way involves ‘an intellectual shift from a preoccupation with questions of significance and meaning to a concern with questions of function and use’ (Zayani, 2000: 95). Moreover, as with other poststructural approaches to investigating social life, Deleuze and Guattari’s work ‘aims to shake up the orderedness of things’ (Ferguson, 1991: 333). Much of the criminological tradition, including research on girls’ violence, is oriented toward the creation of linear story-telling, whether in the form of presentations embedded within ‘cause and effect’ storylines, or those drawing orderly connections between past or current life circumstances and offending behaviors (but see Ferrell et al., 2008; Lippins and Van Calster, 2010; Milovanovic, 2002). This is true, not just among those with more positivist orientations, but is also the case within the social constructionist orientation that guides a great deal of feminist scholarship in our field (see Ferguson, 1991). In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari’s approach to social life and the micropolitics within it cues us to pay careful attention to affect, desire, and temporality, with an eye toward dynamic flows, multiplicities, and moments of becoming.
We believe these ways of examining girls’ violent conflicts are particularly well suited for opening up creative lines of thinking that help shed new light on these events and the social milieus in which they are embedded. Here we explore conflicts with moments of physical violence. Analytically we distinguish between conflicts, physical violence, and violence in a broader sense. Conflicts are conceptualized as protracted, complex processes taking place across people, time and space, including those offered by new technologies. Conflicts involve acts of aggression, which we distinguish here from acts of physical violence as forms of non-physical violence that serve to establish control and dominance in conflicts. Physical violence involves aggressive physical contact between at least two people, including such acts as hitting, kicking, pulling hair and using all forms of weapons. Finally we apply violence in a broad sense, defined as being reduced to mere object status against one’s will (Jackson, 2002). This broad definition enables us to approach the interconnection between different forms of violence that can be structural, institutional, relational, and even symbolic (Schepher-Hughes and Bourgois, 2004). Empirically, distinctions between conflicts, physical violence, and violence are blurry and locally constructed.
To explore girl’s violent conflicts, we draw from an ethnographic investigation with violence-involved young women in Copenhagen, Denmark, conducted by the first author. Data were collected over a six-month period, including participant-observation, interviews, and conversations with 20 girls who served as key informants, as well as others involved in their social worlds. Specifically, we utilize analytic tools emerging from Deleuze and Guattari’s work to examine how violence functions to rupture, produce, and reproduce young women’s precarious positionings in social milieus characterized by multiple forms of marginality.
Young women, conflict, and violence: interactionist and rhizomatic understandings
Despite persistent gender gaps in the use of violence, evidence suggests that girls’ ‘involvement in physically aggressive behavior seems to be rather more common than previous work would suggest’ (Phillips, 2003: 713). Feminist scholars often highlight the ‘blurred boundaries’ of young women’s victimization and offending, linking their violence to gendered and other forms of marginalization (Batchelor et al., 2001; Gaarder and Belknap, 2002). In addition, scholars have recently paid increased attention to the situational, interactional, and environmental contexts in which girls’ violence takes place. While this has led some to emphasize relational aspects of girls’ conflicts, including ‘indirect, relational forms of aggression’ (Hagan and Foster, 2003: 75; see also Batchelor et al., 2001; Steffensmeier and Allen, 1996), others have suggested that some young women navigating within multiply marginalizing settings attempt to negotiate safety by establishing violent social identities (Batchelor, 2005; Jones, 2010; Ness, 2010). Some scholars argue that such identities provide girls with status and respect among their peers, and moreover, that issues of respect—rooted in reputational challenges and status hierarchies—are often central for understanding girls’ aggression, including their engagement in violence (Batchelor, 2005; Miller and Mullins, 2006; Mullins and Miller, 2008).
This work has been more attuned than previous research to interactional processes, including ‘ongoing interaction among event participants [and] the moral and emotional transformations that enable and motivate’ violence (Short, 1998: 12). Attention to such nuance offers rich insights for contextual understandings of violence. This approach has identified, for instance, the import of temporality, including the often protracted nature of girls’ conflicts, which only rarely are punctuated by violence (Batchelor et al., 2001; Mullins and Miller, 2008). It provides complex depictions of how girls’ conflicts unfold in time and space, are located in the contexts of their ongoing relationships with others and embeddedness within configurations of marginalization shaped by gender, race/ethnicity, age, and social class (Jones, 2010).
Most of this work, though, continues to seek out and present orderly interpretations of girls’ experiences, attuned to linear story-telling even in its complexity. On the other hand, poststructuralists like Deleuze and Guattari open us up to thinking about events within the social world in a more multi-linear and un-orderly way. Thus, while most analyses of girls’ violence seek ‘to find in the outlines of earl[ier] circumstances a unified pattern that gives birth to that which comes after’, Deleuze and Guattari call for us to focus ‘on discontinuities [and] the “profusion of entangled events”’ (Ferguson, 1991: 331). Doing so, we suggest, can advance our understandings of violence: it complicates conventional approaches and helps illuminate the complex lived experiences, emotionality, and logics associated with conflicts and the moments of physical violence that emerge within them.
Recent research on girls’ conflicts, relationships, and engagements with gendered marginalization—particularly in the context of what has been called cyber-bullying—has drawn on what Deleuze and Guattari call a rhizomatic analytics (Kofoed, 2009; Kofoed and Ringrose, forthcoming; Renold and Ringrose, 2008). A rhizome is a specific kind of root, which—unlike the root of a tree—grows and expands leading to new plants. Rhizomes form an intricate root/plant system of entanglements that have no starting and ending points, only points in the middle that are continuously connecting to other points. This is a key metaphor used by Deleuze and Guattari to deal with flux, flow, and foldings, rather than structure and reproduction. Such an analysis has been particularly well suited for understanding cyber-bullying, and, more broadly, the impact of emerging technoscapes of mobile phones, internet chatrooms, and web-based social networks on girls’ conflicts.
Girls’ conflicts increasingly make use of technosocial forms of communication. Irrespective of economic means, the mobile phone and internet have enabled new forms of sociability and connectivity (Katz and Aakhus, 2002), with mobile texting and talking, as well as exchanges in virtual spaces such as chatrooms and Facebook, making up an increasingly significant form of communication, including in processes of violent conflicts. These technoscapes appear to add new layers to the positional and relational uncertainties that often characterize girls’ experiences. Research on how youth in general use social media and particularly how these technologies are applied in social conflicts is therefore informative for understanding girls’ conflicts.
In relation to cyber-bullying, for example, these technologies have meant that bullying has moved beyond the schoolyard and spilled over into the everyday lives of youths and the spaces they inhabit (Hinduja and Patchin, 2009; Kofoed, 2009). Conflicts that play out using technosocial forms of communication add layers of intransparency by creating uncertainty about the senders, receivers, and viewers of any message that circulates by phone, SMS, Facebook, or instant messaging (Kofoed, 2009; Shariff, 2008). With fake log-ons, the use of others’ phones, anonymous calls and messages, calls with a group of friends listening in—the list of potential participants seems both overwhelming and innumerable. In addition, conflicts are dispersed in time and space, such that the emotional experience of being thwarted, allied against, and excluded from peer groups happens not at given places and times, but anytime and anywhere. Moreover, these create non-simultaneous emotional experiences since messages are sent, posted, and viewed by different participants across different times and in different spaces (Kofoed, 2009). They are rhizomatic, par excellence.
Such analyses help awaken us, as well, to how rhizomatics flow through girls’ experiences of their social worlds, irrespective of the involvement of technologies. Engaging with Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualizations is productive, by allowing us to see girls’ positionings and relations as becomings and assemblages: in movement and in flux, rather than fixed and pregiven. Girls are thus participants with fluid positionalities in conflicts, rather than the victims, perpetrators and bystanders that characterize the fixed positions often applied in more linear analyses. We become attentive to immanence and change—movements themselves, or what Deleuze and Guattari call lines of flight—rather than to the products (positions, relationships) of such movements. We also become attentive to folds: affective connections that produce multi-linear and asynchronous temporalities, rather than linear and chronological time. And we look at girls’ violent conflicts with an eye toward their roles in becomings—movements toward new positionings, which are affectively tied to other processes of becoming, as part of a circulation of positionings that is continually being organized and reorganized.
Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari to analyze girls’ violent conflicts entails applying concepts from a ‘tool box’ rather than presenting a coherent theoretical framework. As Deleuze explained of using their work, ‘the only question is, “Does it work and how does it work? How does it work for you?”’ (in Poxon and Stivale, 2005: 73). Thus, we turn to their work, not as a replacement for other ways of knowing, but to explore the additional insights for understanding girls’ violence that come from thinking about rupture, complexity, ambiguity, angst, uncertainty, and desires of becoming (Biehl and Locke, 2010). The concepts briefly introduced here also connect with one another rhizomatically, as will be highlighted as they are put to use in our analysis.
Producing data through fieldwork
The empirical data for this analysis were produced during six months of ethnographic fieldwork in Copenhagen, Denmark, conducted by the first author. The primary data-producing methods employed were participant-observation, interviews, and conversations with girls who have experienced using violence. 1 The main informants, 20 young women aged 13 to 22, were interviewed many times during the fieldwork. A third of the informants were Danish and the remainder were of mixed ethnic origin with one or both parents from countries including Argentina, Ghana, Pakistan, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Greenland. Additionally, friends, parents, and social workers connected to these key informants were included in the study through conversations and their partial participation in some of the interviews.
All of the key informants were or had been connected to institutions for ‘at-risk’ youth, which means they had varying social problems such as unstable living conditions, lack of school attendance, soft drug and alcohol use, and degrees of dysfunctionality in families. The first author initially came into contact with the girls by collaborating with two institutions, one in Copenhagen and one in a suburban area situated 20 km south of Copenhagen. The institutions were not the primary aim of the study but were chosen for a range of practical and ethical reasons. Prior work relations with both institutions enabled easy access to the field and informants. Both offer a combination of voluntary day-time counseling and residence; however only two informants resided in the institution. Knowing that all informants had positive relationships with competent social workers was essential for conducting this study, as it provided the informants a place of support, practical help, and therapeutic talk if their participation in the study triggered negative memories or self-reflections. In fact, all of the young women in the study met regularly with a social worker who provided practical help and support. 2 Research interactions with informants largely took place outside the institutions, and their participation was voluntary, confidential, and could be freely terminated at any time.
While scholars are often concerned about the impact of drawing samples from those identified as ‘at-risk’ or with connections to institutional settings (see Copes and Hochstetler, 2010), these concerns are tempered in the Danish context, given its expansive welfare system and the availability of services to a broad range of its residents. The Danish welfare state provides extensive support and intervention programmes for children and families, including those dealing with adverse social conditions (Kampmann and Warming, 2004). Most of this service provision is voluntary and based on preventive and family-based initiatives such as family counseling, social workers engaging with children and youth, and specialized group activities for youth. The sampling strategy utilized here likely resulted in contact with young women in Copenhagen who are less atypical of their peers than agency-based samples in countries with less extensive welfare states. Our analysis rests on the experiences of a sample of young women who use physical violence, experience a range of social problems in their everyday lives, and have opted to receive adult supports to deal with them in a state context in which such interventions are common and normalized. While our sample and the ensuing analyses are thus specific to this particular group, we do not believe this hinders the goals of our investigation, which are to explicate the utility of Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual tools for furthering our understandings of young women’s violence. Girls were interviewed in their homes, at the institutions, or other locations in town. In addition, many informal conversations and interactions took place walking around the neighborhood, sitting in cafés and pizzerias, and driving in the first author’s car (a space which seemed to generate confidentiality and conversations). Often their friends would join and participate in conversations. Conversations and interviews touched upon a range of issues including family relationships, school, friendships, conflicts, and experiences of violence.
Gradually conversations replaced prepared interviews, consisting of talk about everyday life, childhood memories, and future dreams. Other recurring themes were struggles with municipal case managers, shortages of money, unstable housing, and struggles with completing school. There was talk about friendships, boyfriends, and family, and as these relationships changed over the course of the fieldwork, insight was gained into the strengths and limitations of significant relationships in the girls’ lives. Rapid changes in affect and intensity, frequent conflicts, and even violence seemed to run through many of these relationships. The first author witnessed temporary ruptures, frequent dramas, but never the termination of a relationship. There were disputes between girls in face-to-face interactions and over the phone, and disputes were also followed on Facebook. Intentionally, there was no witnessing of physical violence: witnessing would signal condoning the practice, which we consider ethically problematic. Information was gained by talking with girls about physical violence, and drawing parallels between various observations of non-physical conflicts and their representations of situations involving physical violence. The analysis process can best be described as analytic induction informed by theoretical orientation and emic categories, allowing for the explorative dimensions of the study to unfold. 3 Our focus here is to examine the complexities of girls’ social conflicts, particularly as they include moments of physical violence, and within the social milieus of the girls’ daily lives. We give particular attention to temporal, affective, and positional flows while examining the question what does violence do?
Territories of marginalization: inequality, uncertainty, and gendered violence
It is essential to contextualize girls’ perpetration of violence within the violence they experience: witnessing it, listening to it, watching it, suffering it … [A] certain routinization of violence in girls’ everyday lives appears to have a strong effect on their decision-making.
The girls and young women in this study all come from neighborhoods in Copenhagen and the southern suburbs characterized by a high level of communal housing and unemployment, low average income, and a range of social problems such as youth gangs, crime, and the abuse of alcohol and drugs. Informants come from Nørrebro, Husum-Brønshøj, and Bispebjerg, that on average have 22 percent non-western immigrants compared to an average of 15.5 percent non-western immigrants in Copenhagen and 7.5 percent nationally 4 (Municipality of Copenhagen, 2011). Communal housing projects situated here, such as Tingbjerg and Mjoelnerparken, have compositions that exceed 50 percent non-western immigrants, and appear on the ‘Ghetto-List’ recently published by the Ministry of Social Affairs. 5
Such areas constitute pockets of relative poverty 6 in a city defined by a large middle class with high levels of free social services such as medical care, daycare, and education (Kampmann and Warming, 2004). The Danish welfare state has the largest share of tax-financed benefits among the EU countries. As mentioned, all of the girls are connected to specialized welfare institutions providing training, support, and help to at-risk youth and their families. However this specialized service provision entails the identification of youth as in need of development, betterment, and normalization. They are young clients in the Danish welfare system, and therefore in a particularly vulnerable position being enrolled in programmes that seek to change the identity and development of children (Andersen, 2003). Consequently, they are exposed to disempowering practices and even symbolic violence (Bo and Warming, 2003).
Most of the informants attend school in sporadic ways, with frequent shifts and long periods of non-attendance. In Denmark, free education is expected to bring about increased social mobility. The ‘contract’ between the citizen and the welfare state is one of mutual expectations and requirements. The State provides possibilities, and the citizen is expected to make use of these in order to create successful life trajectories that include being educated, employed, and reproducing nuclear families. It becomes an individual responsibility to make a success of one’s life, and individualized strategies dominate solutions offered to marginalized citizens within the educational sector (Katznelson, 2004), the child and family sector (Bo and Warming, 2003), and the unemployment and benefits sector (Mik-Meyer, 2004).
Education is a main concern of the girls’ caseworkers, who are trying to accomplish national strategies of education for all. 7 At-risk youth find this particularly difficult to accomplish as they try to cope with more immediate struggles in their lives, yet they are continually pressured into its pursuit. The informants are ambivalent in their concerns about failing to complete school, being expelled, and generally having poor experiences in educational settings. They have internalized discourses about education as significant for personal success, and recognize that their lack of education jeopardizes their future dreams of a life in suburbia with middle class values and a nuclear family. Thus, there is a tension between their expressed desire to accomplish this and their inability to complete school. These institutional and educational contexts are important layers of the girls’ marginalization.
Growing up in neighborhoods referred to as ghettos, experiencing relative poverty, and being targeted by the welfare state and educational system as in need of betterment and normalization provides the backdrop of childhood and youth experiences of marginality in hierachies of class and ethnicity. Being girls and young women, study participants are further positioned within hierarchies of age and gender, placing them in a matrix of domination relevant for understanding their everyday experiences and communications through violence. We approach the linkage between inequality and violence presented here as intertwined within multiple and intersecting inequalities. As Burgess-Proctor (2006: 31) explains: ‘Systems of power such as race, class, and gender do not alone shape our experiences but rather are multiplicative, inextricably linked, and simultaneously experienced.’
All but one informant come from single parent households, mostly comprised of mothers raising two to three children; all but two also have frequent contact with the other parent. Significant for the girls—having grown up in distressed neighborhoods in families of relative poverty and periodic parental neglect—is that the neighborhood becomes a space of interaction from around age 10 to 12. Informants all spend most of their adolescent time outside the home in youth spaces characterized by little adult supervision. Here, they are maneuvering within a stratified social space, and their everyday lives are characterized by negotiating precarious positions in constantly changing peer group assemblages.
An additional layer is the wide array of violence—physical, sexual, emotional, structural, and institutional—that girls experience during their adolescent years. This includes bullying; sexual harassment; name-calling; racism; parental neglect; institutional control and (mis)use of power; and physical violence in families, intimate relationships, and between friends. Girls describe that more routinized forms of violence, while deeply meaningful for them, are generally viewed by others as having limited importance. Even severe violence—including from parents or siblings, or toward mothers—receives remarkably little, if any, serious attention in the family, and the young women have experienced such events being disregarded by authorities like police and case managers.
The violence these girls experience in their daily lives, like girls in many other locations (Alder and Worrall, 2004; Miller, 2008; Schaffner, 2006), consists of these varieties of harms, most of which appear invisible. They often fall outside normative perceptions of what constitutes serious violence (see Schepher-Hughes and Bourgois, 2004), and leave no visible signs on the body. They do not appear in police reports, enter statistics in emergency wards, or reach other authorities. Yet, the everyday nature of these experiences of marginalization, objectification, and erasure—which extend over time, as compared to the time- and space-boundedness of physical violence—is what makes them so problematic (see also Natland, 2009; Putallaz and Biernan, 2004; Schaffner, 2004). In this way, violence, broadly defined, is embedded within and made invisible by the very structures of inequality that co-produce it, and lead girls’ lives to become affected by drama, emotional tensions, and uncertainty.
Living with conflicts on a daily basis creates emotional tensions that have a profound impact on the girls. Class, ethnicity, gender, and age are constituted as categories with particular social values attached, and girls experience peer group relations—where a great deal of conflict occurs—as a constant source of shifting, re-ordering, and positioning that often plays out with reference to these constituted categories. Thus, girls describe the experience of navigating daily life as one in which they have to continually strategize and think ahead, rather than live a habituated life of everyday practice. Describing her complex social life of ever-changing social relations, constant struggles to maintain social position, and repeated efforts to mobilize peer networks for back-up, 16-year-old Selma puts it like this:
You know, life is a chess game. This is what my sister taught me: always think ahead, always have a plan. It’s a game you play, and I have to hope I made the right move, otherwise I’m check mate and I will have to start all over again.
And yet, this life of routinized chaos, rife with violence, could be a familiar and thus secure space to be in. As Sofie, age 21, explains:
It’s like being in it, being in something that you know. Being in that huge chaos, but you know it, you know the feeling. You know about being beaten, you know about feeling like shit, you know about not eating. You don’t know about that—you know, receiving [help and comfort] and having a stable life, where it is like this [she draws a straight line in the air with her hand]. You only know about [she draws a line going up and down, changing rapidly] … Sometimes I pick a fight with Joey [her boyfriend] just to feel that, you know, just because that feeling is so familiar.
Sofie is not sure whether this description makes sense, and she struggles to put into words how the emotional tension of being in conflicts has been an everyday practice for her, and sometimes still is. She describes chaos as a comfortable and recognizable space, while stability and being cared for are foreign to her. Yet, the urgency of the conflicts seems to lessen as girls grow older. Kassandra, aged 19, draws a sigh of relief that her life is no longer caught up in that earlier space, in which ‘it’s like every morning you wake up, and it’s like, “What happened? What happened?” All the time, that chaos and shit.’ The younger girls, however, remain caught up in the urgency of these conflicts, and this itself produces relentless emotional tension.
Technosocial forms of communication, as noted earlier, exacerbate this way of life for girls. Spending time with them clearly shows (the first author) that they are always reachable and are constantly being reached. During an initial interview with 15-year-old Sally, for instance, her phone rings six times and she receives nine texts during the hour-and-a-half-long interview. Girls carry their phones at all times, and these frequently attract attention due to repeated calls and text messages. Mobiles serve to maintain relationships through short but frequent contacts, but also serve as a form of social control demanding ‘perpetual contact’ (Katz and Aakhus, 2002; Licoppe, 2004).
In fact, Sally describes that she has actually ‘called in sick’ the day of the interview to get some peace and quiet. She has done so by updating her profile on Facebook to say she is down with the flu. This gives her a few days at home to watch TV and relax without having to get involved with ‘who is angry with who, who has broken up with who—all this chaos, all the time, that I have to attend to’. In resonance with Sally’s experience, Licoppe (2004: 153) writes, ‘it becomes necessary to be available for interaction, or necessary to justify or renegotiate one’s unavailability’. She feels obliged to participate in the constant repositionings that take place in her peer groups, and the only way of temporarily eluding it is to call in sick.
Yet, on the whole, girls are intensely concerned with being informed about what is going on, which for all requires being within reach of their mobile phones and for some frequently checking updates on Facebook and in chatrooms. The changing technoscape, made up of internet chatrooms, virtual networks, instant messaging and emails, constitutes relevant and real forms of communications, which supplement and sometimes replace face-to-face interactions among the girls and others in their social networks. And as we will see, these technologies play an important role in girls’ violent conflicts. Most of the girls are only occasionally involved in physical fights themselves, but the emotional tension from potentially changing positions and relations—each embedded within marginalizations—seems to take up a significant part of their everyday interactions and concerns.
Violence, lines of flight, and becoming-relevant
In Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization, the everyday social terrain girls navigate—characterized by class and ethnic inequalities, gendered violence, emotional tension, and uncertainty—can be understood as a territorialization of girls’ marginalization. Territorialization involves the formation and perpetuation of rigid hierarchical positions along seemingly fixed axes such as gender, ethnicity, class, and age (Arrigo et al., 2005: 8; Best and Kellner, 1991: 100), with territory ‘a way of describing the creation of meaning in social space through the forging of coded connections and distinctions … creating a kind of uniformity or consistency amongst the relevant features of the “territorialized” space’ (Brown and Lunt, 2002: 17). Girls are positioned (territorialized) in their social environments as unimportant, not deserving of respect, not mattering, not being relevant.
And yet, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 204) insist, ‘there is no social system that does not leak in all directions’. Such leaks are conceptualized as deterritorializations or lines of flight: ‘the movement by which “one” leaves the territory’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 508), seeking a path of escape or transformation, however fleeting or unstable it may be. In this way, we suggest that girls’ violence can be understood as a line of flight, a deterritorializing movement toward becoming-relevant. Becomings are points or moments that destabilize the fixed identities ascribed to individuals within territorializations. In the current context, they are neither simply about performing femininity or mimicking masculinity, or responding to relational insecurities (such interpretations, in fact, reterritorialize, reinforce, and reiterate fixed gender identities), 8 but are movements toward becoming something new: a subject who matters.
Being perceived as unimportant and unworthy of respect (and thus, potentially easy targets for victimization) are all positions that the girls in our study seek to escape. The misfit between the positions offered by others in their shared social terrain and girls’ self-perception (the desire to be relevant, to matter in their social world) is a driving force in girls’ conflicts and their moments of violent engagement. In fact, girls’ desire for relevance itself is a deterritorialization: a rupture in ‘the colonization of [girls’] desire’ within a territorial formation that insists they accept, embrace, and invest in their marginalization (Best and Kellner, 1991: 78).
Presenting this interpretation of girls’ conflicts, including their engagement with violence, should not be construed as romanticizing girls’ agency or resistance, in contrast to dominant tropes that pathologize it. This is not our intent. Instead, it is to analyze these events ‘as a series of interconnected practices … considered in terms of what [they] create’ (Bray and Colebrook, 1998: 58). Deleuze and Guattari encourage us to look at practices less in terms of what they are and what they mean, and instead in terms of what they do—their productive functions. Thus, as Bray and Colebrook (1998: 58) explain:
In this quite specific sense, certain practices that have been interpreted as signs of some general … pathology might be more usefully reconfigured as forms of critique; that is to say, these ‘deviant,’ ‘abnormal,’ or ‘pathological’ forms of bodily comportment [or action] might effect a positive difference or create a distance from certain regular or normalized ways of being.
And yet, lines of flight rarely have radical potential. They challenge the unity and coherence of girls’ marginalization within their social milieu, revealing the instability of this positioning. But mostly, they are moments of becoming-relevant, quickly reterritorialized, bringing girls back into repressive hierarchies. Moreover, such moments can themselves draw from territorializations in their constructions: girls’ efforts at becoming-relevant can occur on the backs of other girls, providing a singular line of flight that reinscribes marginalization even as it disrupts it (Miller, 2001; Renold and Ringrose, 2008).
As girls move through the social terrain of their daily lives, they are ‘always engaging in processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization’ (Fuglsang and Sørensen, 2006: 9). Our interest here lies in mapping this multiplicity of movements and positionings, this process that is always in flux. To do so, according to Deleuze and Guattari, means beginning with ‘the moment of contact or interaction’ (Lorraine, 2000: 193)—in our case, a situation of physical violence or a conflict—and tracing it backward and forward, not with the goal of identifying its starting and ending points, but instead by ‘following out … the lines that make up multiplicities’ (2000: 188). In what follows, we draw from two instances of aggression in girls’ lives: the first, severe violence between a girl and boy that becomes a protracted conflict; and the second, a protracted conflict between two girls punctuated by violence, degradation, and technosocial assaults. Juxtaposing these two cases allows us to examine dynamic ruptures, transgressions, positionings and repositionings, and understand the complex temporalities associated with girls’ violence and their moments of becoming relevant.
Territorializing, deterritorializing, and reterritorializing gender inequality: the rhizomatics of Selma’s conflicts with Farouk
Selma is 16 years old. She has lived in Nørrebro most of her life, where she grew up with her Danish mother but in frequent contact wih her Iraqi father and Muslim family. She identifies as being Iraqi-Muslim-Danish, mostly in that order, however this hyphened identity construction (Mørck, 1998) is repeatedly contested by the Iraqi family due to her Danish heritage and ways of living. Living the hyphen is expressed by Selma as a competence but indeed also a struggle that sometimes leaves her belonging nowhere. In terms of ethnic categorization it leaves her marginalized in Danish settings being too dark-skinned, and in Iraqi settings being too assimilated to Danish culture. Belonging to multiple ethnic categories seems to disturb the social order in various multicultural settings, where people like Selma can be named with derogatory terms which designate hyphened ethnic categorizations as deviant and culturally unrecognizable (Staunæs, 2004).
Selma has her own small apartment provided by the municipality in Nørrebro, an inner-city area in Copenhagen known equally for its multi-ethnic vibe and social problems, including crime and gang violence. Though Selma also has a place in Ballerup, which she shares with her incarcerated boyfriend, Nørrebro is home to her social life, where she sees herself belonging, even as it means navigating terrains of violence and gendered marginalization.
She is tense and emotionally engaged as she talks about a violent encounter that happened the night before. The violence has taken place in her apartment, where she has been hanging out with her two friends, Minnah and Farouk, who are in a relationship. At first, Minnah and Farouk get into a fight because, as Selma puts it, ‘Minnah is being hysterical’. Minnah’s behavior reminds her of herself sometimes, and Selma thinks it appropriate that Farouk does what he has to do to quiet Minnah down, including slapping her and sitting on top of her to hold her down.
The event soon escalates when Farouk places his hands around Minnah’s throat. Selma then jumps on Farouk shouting, ‘what is wrong with you, you psychopath, you’re strangling her!’ The fight is then between Farouk and the two girls, who side with each other. As the three struggle with one another, they are being tossed against the wall, shelves are falling over, and, as Selma notes, ‘I was getting really pissed by the way the place, I mean my things, were being ruined. That’s just disrespectful—don’t ruin my things.’
As Selma describes its unfolding, the fight quickly becomes between her and Farouk, with Minnah standing on the side and, according to Selma, yelling and whining. It is broken off by one of Farouk’s friends who comes by. The situation appears to settle with the interference of the friend, and a compromise is reached that the mess should be cleaned up before the guys leave. While Selma and Farouk are in a struggle for position and dominance, further violence seems deterred by the arrival of Farouk’s friend, who moves to get Farouk out of the apartment and away from additional conflict.
As Farouk leaves, however, he does so saying, ‘Fuck you, you slut!’, knowing that if Selma lets him go on that remark, he definitely comes out of the conflict on top. Selma reacts swiftly: ‘I went straight at him, head first. No one calls me that—I just went mad!’ Yet, her account of the violence that followed has none of the detail of the first fight. She can’t remember much:
It was like real violence, you know, not like before. He was using all his physical strength, sitting on top of me, holding me down. I can’t remember, it was like I think the others were yelling. But I only remember him, and that I poked his eyes and I think I kicked him. But … I don’t know … I don’t know what the others did. I couldn’t really see outside, like I only saw him.
In her retelling of this event, Selma’s speech is incoherent, and her description lacks the detail of the earlier fight. She doesn’t recall how the fight ends, only that the boys leave and she is in the apartment shaking and ‘all up there’ sharing a joint with her friend to calm her down.
There are numerous lenses through which we could interpret these two connected violent encounters. We see evidence, for example, of the role of situational characteristics in shaping the event, including the important role of bystander intervention in both escalating and diffusing violent conflicts (Baron et al., 2001; Felson and Steadman, 1983). Likewise, we could focus on these primarily as examples of gendered violence among young people—reflecting some young men’s willingness to use violence against girlfriends, including in front of an audience, the role of sexual double standards (‘you slut!’) to derogate young women, and how these function as motivational precursors for girls’ violence in defense of victimized friends or their own reputations (see Miller, 2008; Natland, 2009).
Our interest here, though, is to consider what insights can be gained by thinking of these events and Selma’s telling of them rhizomatically: paying close attention to the distinct temporal rhythms of the two events, which play out sequentially within about 30 minutes but are experienced by Selma as dramatically different; attending to the emotional tensions at play across and within the two; and considering how they speak to Selma’s desires for becoming.
Unlike most violent situations girls describe—which are part of prolonged conflicts related to position and status—these incidents are not planned, anticipated, or the result of an escalating conflict. Selma and her friends are hanging out when the possibility of violence suddenly becomes actualized. Of the first violence between Farouk and Minnah, Selma initially participates in the territorialization of gender inequality, in which males are deemed rational and females (including Selma herself) emotionally ‘out of control’, in need of the assertion of male power for containment. Farouk’s disciplining of Minnah is seen as appropriate (see also Miller and White, 2003).
When she perceives Farouk crossing a line, Selma responds by jumping into the fray, but she experiences and describes this fight in a relatively non-dramatic way; Farouk’s behavior toward Minnah is not experienced as explicitly about Selma. In her retelling, she can provide details of what happened, and is taken up primarily by the damage of her property as a matter of ‘disrespect’. There is no line of flight here; if anything, instead, a ‘supple segmentary line’, in which Selma’s intervention into Minnah’s choking ‘disturbs [the] … normalcy’ of Farouk’s right to use violence, but is merely a ‘crack … in the façade’ of gendered territorialization (Best and Kellner, 1991: 100).
While Selma considers the first event somewhat mild and undramatic, the second she experiences as serious, both in terms of the physical violence and her need for retaliatatory response. In her own words, this violence is ‘real’. This reveals emic categorizations of violence along different lines than a simple division between physical/non-physical, but rather ordered though localized experiences and distinctions based on emotional intensity, lack of control and use of physical force. Her descriptions suggest that her experience of this violence is not just one in which she is more emotionally invested, but also has a distinct temporal rhythm, a ‘speeding up’ that is tied to the event’s emotional intensity for Selma. If the first conflict comes to resolution with no clear ‘winner’—the friend’s intervention disrupting its outcome—Farouk reterritorializes his claim to gender dominance as he leaves, with ‘fuck you, you slut!’ re-establishing his status and position vis-à-vis Selma. Farouk’s use of this language, a crude symbol of her as sexually stigmatized other, is a device around which he can reiterate her marginalization. Selma’s response is one of blind rage—an immediate line of flight against this reterritorialization, and toward becoming-relevant.
Selma enters what Collins (2008: 93) describes as a ‘tunnel of violence’ or ‘forward panic’ 9 characterized by ‘hot emotion, a situation of being highly aroused [and] steamed up. It comes on in a rush, explosively’ and ‘is rhythmic and strongly entraining’. As he describes, ‘fighting takes up the complete attention of those who are engaged in it; it overwhelms the senses and focuses the mind so that all else fades into invisibility’ (2008: 65). In this second fight with Farouk, Selma’s account is one of going into a sensory tunnel where sight, sound, and bodily pain is reduced to the repetitive rhythm of their struggle. Her entrainment in that space means that afterwards—and in contrast to the first violent incident—she remembers little of the detail of what happens, how long it lasts, or how it ends. Instead, her memory is of its corporal and emotional sensations. 10 Likewise, unlike in the previous fight, Farouk brings his full weight of violence to this fight, reterritorializing Selma’s line of flight and his own masculine positioning through brute force. It is, she says, ‘real violence … not like before’. At stake, at least for that moment, are their very positions in the social terrain.
Temporality, precarious positionings, and protractions in Selma’s fight with Farouk
Selma’s retelling of the story of her fight with Farouk also illuminates that chronological time plays but a small role in her ongoing experience of it. For representational purposes we have given a linear account of the situation, however in the following we will disturb this chronology by paying close attention to the way Selma narrated her experiences that afternoon in different ways. Selma’s account demonstrates a multi-linear temporality in which different storylines about the event simultaneously offer her the possibilities of different social positions. In her telling, Selma moves experientially across time, drawing from the past, present, and future, as her fight with Farouk shifts its meaning and import for her. There is no ‘freeze-framing’ of the event and its positioning of her, no single storyline with a clear beginning and end. Instead, it is a moving part in her ongoing struggles for becoming-relevant, as she places the event in her shifting desires and expectations for the future.
The lengthy conversation about the fight takes Selma through multiple entry and exit points. In one retelling, Selma links her emotional entrainment in the fight—particularly Farouk’s holding her down and ‘using all his physical strength’—to a recent experience of a friend attempting to rape her. During this telling, her body posture shifts, and she appears disillusioned about her life and her future, brought back into the fold of territorialized definitions. Though she does not establish a direct line between Farouk’s actions and her recent experience of sexual violation, her strong reaction links the disempowerment of sexual victimization with the sense of fear and distress at being overpowered and constrained by Farouk during this fight. Repeatedly, she insists, ‘no one does that to me. Achmed [her boyfriend] can do it, or my brother, but no one else.’ Being subjected to violence is ‘being reduced to mere objectivity without agency’ (Jackson, 2002: 57), and for Selma it seems to matter whether such objectifications take place within established relations where she is not merely an object for violence, but a subject constituted through relations: a sister, a respected friend, an intimate partner, and a range of other subjectivities. While accepting control from a romantic partner or male family member, and thus ‘articulating [herself] to norms’ of gender inequality/difference (Geary, 2010: 340), Selma refuses the extension of these territorialized priviledges to ‘any’ man. 11
Here, her folding of time brings outside experiences inside the event and her experience of it, shifting her interpretations and complicating any linear cause and effect interpretation of the violence. During another moment of the retelling, Selma reasserts her relevance and her right to a position that matters: ‘When he called me a slut, I thought, what the fuck, is he stupid? I had already gone at him [a few weeks] earlier and it took four people to control me and get me off of him!’ Re-empowered through this version of her telling, she immediately begins plotting her revenge, picks up the phone and starts calling people. In doing so, she commences the rallying of back-up and alliance that characterizes situations of protracted conflict among the girls in this study. Her fight with Farouk thus expands further in time and space, and becomes another kind of test of Selma’s becoming-relevant: the materialization of her social position through her ability to provoke others’ engagement in her conflict with Farouk.
Protracted conflicts are the norm in this investigation, with only a small portion described as ‘out of control’ in the ways Selma characterizes this fight with Farouk. Instead, most are placed within complex and intricate peer-group relations and interactions, and their emotional charge relates to status and social positioning. Through these, girls are being positioned and positioning themselves, but again, in a quest to become-relevant. Selma is repositioned through the violence that takes place with Farouk: as the victor, he has restablished his dominance and her irrelevance. Yet multiple pathways and positionings emerge for her within the hours that follow.
She first calls her brother, seeking his support in rallying some friends to go to Nørrebro and beat Farouk up. During the time spent walking and talking that afternoon, she calls several friends and sends off SMSs. Selma is impatient yet nervous at the thought of retaliation. As the hours pass, it becomes clear to Selma that the violence of the night before requires her to take action. She explains:
You [the first author] don’t understand. I can’t go home to Ballerup and cool off. I have to go to Nørrebro and deal with it. That is my life. I have to be hard, I can’t let people walk all over me. Because they will do it again and again. He needs to know who I am. What he did to me, you don’t do to me. Who does he think he is? Doesn’t he know who I am?
Selma thus repositions herself as relevant, as someone who matters. For her, turning away from the violence would be a form of social death (Biehl and Locke, 2010: 325), an acceptance of her marginalization.
Having lost the physical fight, Selma’s ability to become-relevant again is tied directly to her social positioning, and she finds herself precariously placed. Having worked to rally her brother, she then has loud and rowdy conversations over the phone with three friends, attempting to engage them in her repositioning, in recognition of ‘who I am’ in relation to Farouk. But they have not shown up quite as loyally as she has hoped. Hanging up, she laments, ‘these stupid kids, they know nothing. Maybe they won’t come through for me, maybe I will have to do it myself’. She is distressed—not only at the prospect of more fighting—but also of the possibility that her social network consisting of family and friends both male and female will reveal itself less potent than she has imagined and hoped for. Likewise, her relationship with her brother is materializing in his commitment to this conflict, and she admits that she is worried that he will not engage in it. If he does not come through for her, it will be a public display of his lack of alliance and loyalty—further confirmation of Selma’s marginalized position of irrelevance.
The emotional tension is building up, increasing with every minute spent with Selma. Her body posture and changing flow in communication reveal an inner turmoil. As the planned retaliation gains momentum with every phone call and SMS sent and received between her and her friends and acquaintances, Selma becomes deeply entrained in this emotional space, but it is no longer one shared temporally or spatially with Farouk. Through these technologies, their conflict spills over into her relations and networks of potential back-up, and she finds herself caught in an emotional space maintained through technosocial forms of communication, as she attempts to position herself, to carve out a space of relevance through the use of physical violence, threats of violence, and, most importantly, by making her connections in her peer network visible. Yet uncertainty proliferates the situation, as Selma has no way of knowing who is allying with her, who is allying against her and—maybe worst of all—who considers her need for retaliation irrelevant. A few days later, the first author reaches Selma by phone and asks how the situation unraveled. She briefly remarks, ‘it’s all ok now, he got his beating and that’s the end of it’. Despite various attempts to make her elaborate on the unfolding of the event, she has few comments to add. It is of the past and the dramatic moment has passed. Meeting her in person a week later sheds no further light on the dramatic situation. Instead, her immediate occupation is with the arrest of a friend in relation to the robbery of a grocery store. Apparently, she and Farouk were both involved in the robbery, and her pressing concern is whether he will tell on her as a consequence of her retaliation. Thus, even as one dramatic moment passes, others open up and connect backward and forward, in an unfinished and ongoing process which a linear approach to conflicts insufficiently captures. The flux and fluidity embedded in processes of social conflict is made visible through rhizomatic analysis.
Selma’s experiences of violence relate to territorializations within gender and age hierarchies where Selma refuses to be victimized and marginalized. The emotional turmoil of precarious becomings is made evident through a rhizomatic reading of her experience, as presented above. The physical violence takes up very little of the attention that these conflicts receive. Her attention is directed toward assemblages of social networks, lines of flight and becoming-relevant, testifying to violence not only producing physical and emotional harm, but working to produce precarious lives and emotional tension.
‘Becoming is not always heroic’: Miranda, Rebekka, and lines of flight as reterritorializations
Selma and Farouk share ethnic and class positionings. Their ongoing conflicts are embedded primarily in struggles to deterritorialize and reterritorialize hierarchies across gender. But many of the conflicts girls describe revolve around precarious positionings between and among girls. Here, we address another series of lines of flight, illustrated by the example of a protracted conflict, with multiple violent situations, between several girls contesting territorializations within gender and across class hierarchies. This conflict plays out through both technosocial forms of communication and face-to-face encounters, creating affective responses of alliance as well as abjectifications.
Miranda, age 16, speaks of frequently using chatrooms and Facebook in relation to violent conflicts. She explains how a particular girl, Rebekka, on repeated occasions calls her a whore, and similar names, both to their peers and on Rebekka’s Facebook wall. This has instigated a situation in which Miranda repeatedly takes revenge, in the form of insults, violence, and humiliations of Rebekka, particularly when Miranda and her friend Silja happen to come across her around town. They engage not just in acts of violence toward Rebekka, but in cruel degradation ceremonies against her, including, in one instance, forcing her to eat dog feces. Miranda is unable to reflect on why this has become a repeated interaction with Rebekka, but reports that it has taken place five or six times over a period of about six to eight months. She feels compelled to engage with Rebekka’s insults every time, but describes the violent, humiliating encounters almost as happy accidents. She explains:
I mean you can’t plan these things, you don’t know what will happen. Like I can’t plan that, ok, there should be a soggy old box lying in a rain-pit, or dog shit [laughs]. But we cut her hair, spit on her, make her kiss our shoes, kick her and that stuff … Just so we are even and then some.
Seemingly, despite the ongoing degradations and assaults she sustains at Miranda’s hand, Rebekka continues to insult and demean her on Facebook. As with Farouk’s calling Selma a ‘slut’, Rebekka’s use of the term ‘whore’ is designed to situate Miranda in a stigmatized gender category, it is a territorialization symbolizing her position as insignificant in a matrix of domination based on gender and class hierarchies. While Miranda is being positioned in a space of irrelevance, she responds to the positioning by asserting her position as someone to be ‘respected’—getting even and then some—someone who controls positioning and subjectification within their peer groups.
Yet the dynamics are distinct: unlike Selma, Miranda does not fly into a blind rage at the insult. Instead, her encounters with Rebekka are opportunistic, and recounted with emotionality that involves humor and excitement rather than fear and fury. The stakes in Miranda’s ongoing conflict with Rebekka are different than those between Selma and Farouk. Farouk has the upper hand in the conflict with Selma, as she is clearly positioned beneath him in the territorialized space of gender inequality, a position she seeks to challenge by becoming relevant. In contrast, Miranda and Rebekka are locked in a contest in which their lines of flight are themselves built on the reterritorialization of gender hierarchy, as each attempts to position the other within this terrain and themselves beyond it. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 10) note, ‘groups and individuals contain microfascisms just waiting to crystallize’. Thus, ‘becoming is not always heroic. Solidarities formed in reaction to … alienations … can themselves become exclusionary, founded less on expanded empathy than … twisted into instruments of power [and] violence’ (Biehl and Locke, 2010: 336).
Initially, Miranda claims that she has never been offended by anyone to the extent that violence is called for, claiming that ‘no one has ever like come up to me and threatened me. That never happens.’ However, her friend Isabelle, age 18, who participates in the interview, corrects Miranda and reminds her of the incidents with Rebekka. The interview itself, then, is a site in which Miranda seeks a space of becoming-relevant in her story of self: to come across (to the first author) as someone who ‘knows everybody’ and is sufficiently respected that no one will threaten her (see also Sermijn et al., 2008). Later, walking together in malls and by the train station where a lot of youth hang out, she greets many people on the way, confirming (to the first author ) her own presentation as a person with a large social network, a person who matters.
Likewise, Miranda and Isabelle’s positionings of Rebekka also function to draw contrasts with themselves that speak to their own positionings. These are not simply gendered territorializations; instead, gender is interlocking with claims of class-based inferiority. When asked to describe Rebekka, both girls say she is ‘a really sorry one’. They note that she smells, has bad hygiene, and looks like a 12-year-old despite being 16. These disparaging remarks are resonant with other research which shows that girls’ conflicts often are embedded within insults pertaining to the body, girls’ capacity (economic and otherwise) to invest in their personal grooming, and inappropriate displays of femininity (Miller and Mullins, 2006; Natland, 2009).
The girls also attribute their claims about Rebekka’s weak social positioning to her disputes with Miranda, an additional move toward becoming relevant through a ‘reterritorialization … of dominance, differentiation, and Otherization’ (Renald and Ringrose, 2008: 332) of Rebekka. They say that she used to ‘have an ok amount of friends’, but now has none because of their ongoing conflicts. Isabelle has known Rebekka since early childhood, and comments that she used to be quiet and well behaved, until suddenly ‘she starts acting all smart, having an attitude, and she goes around saying stuff about Miranda. Like I warned her, she would be beaten if she continued.’ Hence, while Miranda and Isabelle are making claims to their own positions of relevance, they are appalled by Rebekka’s attempts to do the same and believe these efforts are deserving of violent censure: it is not simply that she is insulting Miranda, but that she is acting ‘smart’, has an ‘attitude’, and thus is refusing a marginal position of being quiet, well behaved, and invisible. 12 Their ability to position themselves as respected and connected thus hinges on positioning Rebekka as irrelevant, and they do so through discourses of both class- and gender-based inferiority. Here, quite clearly, territorializations of gender inequality pit the girls against one another as they vie for positions that matter (see also Miller, 2008; Schaffner, 1999).
Reading these incidents in a chronological way, with an eye toward linear causality, we could identify Rebekka as the instigator of the conflict, by calling Miranda a whore, but Miranda as the offender, because she responds to the insult by means of violence and acts meant to degrade and humiliate Rebekka. Yet where does that leave Silja and Isabelle, and all the others who express opinions about the incidents in peer groups and receive and read SMSs and updates on Facebook and in chatrooms? Reducing them to witnesses clearly misrepresents their key roles in such conflicts, and, in fact, the very notion of witnesses, offenders, and victims as fixed positions in violent situations distorts the lived experiences of Miranda, Isabelle, and even Rebekka. As when Selma seeks to make her social position visible through the rallying of back-up against Farouk, Miranda and Isabelle’s narrative focuses less on the physical acts perpetrated against Rebekka than on the reordering of alliances and precarious becomings. Social spectators, in this instance, are who the violence is enacted for: it is through the interpretations of assemblages of peer networks that Miranda’s acts of violence affectively rework relations and positions.
In fact, Miranda’s reputation in her peer networks is not only one of relevance and respect. Other informants refer to her as ‘too much’, ‘a real street girl’, and the type that would ‘steal and burn off cars and stuff’, indicating clear emic distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate forms of delinquency and violent performance for girls. Even she and Isabelle have at one time fallen out as a consequence of Miranda’s degradation of Rebekka. For Isabelle, making someone eat dog feces crosses lines of legitimacy, and goes beyond asserting a position of relevance. Expressing her disgust at Miranda’s actions, they have sent SMSs threatening one another, with Isabelle inviting Miranda to ‘come over with all your friends, and we will see what happens’. In the continuing flux of social positionings, they eventually side with each other against Rebekka, deciding ‘it was not worth fighting over’. It is likely, though, that this allegiance will itself remain temporary, reflecting the impermanence of girls’ alliances in territories of marginalization. This specific day, Miranda and Isabelle happen to be sitting together at an interview, presenting the conflict with Rebekka as minor and of the past. Yet, disputes, realignments, and ruptures in solidarity happen on an everyday basis.
Moreover, others continue to express grave concerns about Miranda’s behaviors. Social workers, for example, express concern for her mental health, and consider the possibility that she has a borderline personality or schizophrenia. Reflecting on these characterizations and others’ fear and distaste of her actions, Miranda comments, ‘It’s mostly bad. It’s nice that people don’t, like, beat you up. But of course it’s not nice that people think you are a violent psychopath and walk on the other side.’ Her attendance at school has been affected by this reputation, and she gives many examples of feeling excluded and wrongly blamed by other students and teachers.
In this way, the extreme lines of flight Miranda seeks to become relevant are reterritorialized but also position her as someone new. Among some in her peer networks, and at some times, her violent acts function to make her worthy of allegiance. Yet, this is a precarious and unstable positioning, as others position her as abject and monstrous, with potential psychiatric diagnoses threatening to adhere to her a stable position as ‘sick’. This is a well-documented territorial stance toward girls’ aggression (Worrall, 2004). To say this is neither to excuse nor valorize Miranda’s cruel mistreatment of Rebekka, but to highlight the productive functions of her actions and others’ responses to them. Simultaneously, these interactions create multiple new becomings for Miranda, including that which she seeks—becoming relevant, and the unexpected—becoming pathological.
Discussion
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) have inspired us to look at violence as affective encounters creating rupture and disorder, and which continually reorganize the social spaces of youth. By looking at how violence works in the lives of young women we are able to grasp precarious becomings and agentic lines of flight. Micro-analysis of violent conflicts has made us attentive to conflicts as ways of negotiating multiple marginalizations and becoming-relevant as movements toward mattering and visibility. We argue that the young women who participated in this study were marginally positioned in unequal structures of class, ethnicity, gender and age, and we connect processes of violence to micro-movements within this matrix of domination.
Deleuzian understandings of territorrialization and deterritorialization help us account for movements from dominated positionings to agentic becomings-relevant in peer-groups and among girls. In this way, our close, detailed analyses of Selma’s and Miranda’s experiences with conflicts—and the moments of physical violence that punctuate these—both complement and extend recent feminist scholarship drawing from interactionist and constructionist frameworks. The search for gendered respect is part of what guides girls’ actions. But their lines of flight, we suggest, run deeper than reputational concerns: they are about girls’ intrapsychic and intersubjective desires to matter in social worlds that routinely and repeatedly devalue them.
However we have also shown that such lines of flight are often broken, and reterritorialization seems to disturb becoming-relevant. The positions that are taken up by the girls and young women are precarious and untenable, and continuous reconfiguring of social positions and relations seem to be everyday practice. Rhizo-analysis allows us to see violent conflicts as multi-linear, multi-causal, and involving multiple becomings, thereby complicating linear, causal and chronological explanations and representations of violence (Collins, 2008; Messerschmidt, 1997). Such an approach pushes us to avoid conceptualizing physical violence in terms of fixed positions such as ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’, which often binarily imbues some with agency while denying it to others. Tracing the non-linearity in girls’ accounts of conflicts and moments of physical violence also points us to their multiple and simultaneous functions in negotiating social place and identity within social terrains.
In addition, our research highlights that emotional tension is profound in the lives of young women involved in protracted conflicts. Our analysis suggests that in addition to looking at situations and processes of violence, we need to pay attention to extended periods of conflict engagements that in rhizomatic ways rework positions and alliances. While our analysis focuses on two seemingly distinct conflicts—one exemplifying severe physical violence in resonance with ‘real violence’ being physical (Collins, 2008); another mediated by technosocial forms of communication largely in resonance with perceptions of female name-calling, bullying, and relational conflicts, but punctuated by incidents of violence—both involve the production of precarious positions and emotional tension, and are experienced by the young women as harmful and disruptive in different ways.
In addition, emerging technoscapes are changing and informing new ways of connectivity and sociality among youth. Though our research here was not a direct investigation of the impact of such technologies on violence, they invariably become part of the story—whether in Sally’s need to ‘call in sick’ to seek a reprieve from the chaos of ongoing conflicts and positionings, Selma’s use of phone calls and SMSs to rally back-up and demonstrate relevance, or Rebekka’s use of Facebook to disrespect Miranda, and provoke Miranda’s ‘real’ world responses. A growing body of research deals with this emerging technoscape both in its everyday use (Katz and Aakhus, 2002) and in conflicts mainly researched as cyber-bullying (Hinduja and Patchin, 2009; Kofoed, 2009; Kofoed and Ringrose, forthcoming; Shariff, 2008). As presented and analyzed here, violent conflicts between young women include face-to-face communications as well as the use of Facebook, mobiles, and chatrooms. The interplay between face-to-face and technosocial forms of communication is intricate and more research needs to take account of how an evolving technoscape informs violent conflicts among youth.
Finally, despite the growth in feminist scholarship on young women’s violence, research on violence has tended to place emphasis on male experiences of offending and female experiences of victimization (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 2004). This leaves violence research and the wider study of crime, law, and deviance highly gendered, albeit mostly presented as generalized explanations (Mazerolle, 2008). Yet, our and other research on female violence challenges the relevance of a concept like ‘real’ violence: many of the harms incurred by girls in this investigation were less about the physical acts themselves, and more about the ongoing contexts within which these were embedded. As such, our analysis speaks to the relevance of considering how violence—broadly defined—works to produce different forms of harm, rupture, and disorganization of social life. In this way, we believe Deleuze and Guattari’s call for analyses that are grounded in flux, flow, and folding, and their insistence on considering function and use—in asking what does violence do?—offer important tools for improving our understandings of these phenomena.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Yvonne Mørck (Roskilde University) and Henrik Vigh (University of Copenhagen) for relevant discussions and comments. We also thank the editor and anonymous reviewers of Theoretical Criminology for their comments on previous drafts. The research was generously funded by the Danish Council of Independent Research (Humanities and Social Science).