Verbal mobbning och normerande praktiker i flickors relationsprat

Abstract

In this study data are drawn from ethnographic research combined with audio-recordings of everyday peer interactions in a multiethnic elementary school in Sweden. The analysis is based on longitudinal work among five preadolescent girls with low income and mixed ethnicities. Special attention is given to the social process (conflict talk, accounts, insults, threats, forms of membership categorization-work) of social exclusion in a girl group. The analysis combines ethnography with examination of talk-in-interaction (CA) and ethnomethodological concerns for membership categorizations (MCA). As will be demonstrated the targeted girl was affiliated with multiple negative categorizations such as “bad friend”, “bad girl”, ”friendless”, “insane” and “bullied”, and eventually socially excluded from the girl-group. In constructing such categorizations the girls’ engaged in relational talk in which they deployed diverse forms of judgmental work (complaints, accusations, justifications, insults, recycling, accounts, negative person descriptions). As a result, the girls arranged social relations of power, indexed social identities, policed gender-deviant behaviours and justified social exclusion. Overall the analysis provides a critical perspective on peer victimization that accounts for the complexities, dynamics and contradictions inherent in girl-bullying and feminine morality.