The Point of View of Stigmatised Young Girls: Managing Class, “Race” and Place in Polarising Copenhagen

Abstract

Just over twenty years ago, Pierre Bourdieu (et al. 1999) used life histories to carve out the petit misère of contemporary society, bringing into “public space the private discourses of those deprived of public discourse” (Bourdieu 2008: 226). In this article, we explore and expose the everyday difficulties and social conditions of suffering among racialised girls from a deprived neighbourhood in Copenhagen. We also draw on the notion of territorial stigmatisation coined by Loïc Wacquant in order to analyse the social injuries and practical management of this particular form of consequential categorisation. Using material taken from an ethnographic study among a group of girls living in Tingbjerg, which is a neighbourhood in Copenhagen with a poor reputation, we focus on how these girls aim to deflect and negotiate class, ethnicity, gender and territory in everyday life.