Challenging Precarization: Maria Navarro Skaranger’s Portrait of a Young Mother in Emily Forever (2021)

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article argues that Maria Navarro Skaranger’s novel Emily forever (2021) can be interpreted as a comment on the situation of young mothers in contemporary Norway. The main character is a 19-year-old pregnant woman who works on a temporary contract in a grocery store in the beginning of the text. Instead of demanding a sick leave when feeling ill, she reduces her working hours. The text further shows how she is treated by her mother, health and social workers, the police, neighbours, and other young people, who all show concern. The analysis brings out how readers are made aware of processes of precarization that are affecting young mothers today. In part, such processes have been elaborated on by social scientists as being the result of changes in the sphere of work and a crumbling of welfare state institutions in Scandinavia. But they also need to be seen as the result of a certain type of classing gaze. Throughout the text, the narrator demonstratively lets people map Emily’s situation and thus, the novel provokes the reflection on these processes of precarization. At the same time Skaranger’s text invites readers to find out what they themselves should make of Emily’s life.