Gender Manoeuvring in Swedish Skateboarding: Negotiations of Femininities and the Hierarchical Gender Structure

Abstract

The Nordic countries score high in gender equality ratings and we have a long tradition of working with feminist agendas promising liberal futures to both young women and men. Still, contemporary young women struggle to make room for female participation in male-dominated spaces. Based on ethnographic research, this article explores gender manoeuvring, that is, manipulations of the relationship between masculinity and femininity in the patterned beliefs and activities of Swedish skateboarding. The three most apparent femininities in the empirical material, ‘the tomboy’, ‘the bitch’, and ‘the lesbian’, are discussed and how they sometimes give rise to gender manoeuvring and sometimes not. I argue that the formation of a national network harnessing feminist strategies has been successful in making space for female skateboarding in local skateparks and the mainstream media. The negotiations these actions result in have the potential to transform the hierarchical gender order between and among masculinities and femininities. However, simultaneous tendencies to preserve the unequal gender structure through valuing both hegemonic masculinity and femininity become visible.