Noisy Girls

Abstract

Young women have taken up new subject positions in a historical period when the subject of modernity has been declared dead. Subject positions have been far from selfevident either in the cultural context, or in the young women themselves, a fact that may, paradoxically, have helped them produce modern reflexive subjectivities with greater ease. It has been more necessary for contemporary girls than for boys to ask who they are and who they want to become. By gradually changing the norms for how gender, body or sexuality can be represented in public space, by reframing sexuality and morality in public as well as private, young women over the last three generations have simultaneously carved spaces for new subjectivities for women that are not reducible to gender.Thus, the ‘work of culture’ has also been a ‘work of subjectivity’. General claims of what the processes of modernization entail need specification, not only in relation to gender and other particular identities, but also in relation to societal contexts and to lived life. The new subjectivities are contextualized as ‘made in Scandinavia’ as well as discussed in an ethical perspective as a new form for ‘relational individualism’.