Our bodies and food consumption are increasingly becoming markers of social identity in contemporary societies. We often participate in diet culture by monitoring and controlling our food intake through eating restrictions and physical exercise to keep a bulging body in check. This contemporary diet culture has been criticized for embodying impossible fitness ideals and producing a pathological obsession with food. In this article, we will analyze the growing contemporary phenomenon of intuitive eating (IE) as an alternative to diet culture and explore how it is explained, promoted, and legitimized on the social media platform TikTok. By using the Foucauldian concept of self-transformative practices, we illustrate how self-discipline is performed by IE content creators. The analysis shows that the IE approach is psychologized as part of a therapeutic discourse and, at the same time, it is a way for young women to resist the diet culture to become empowered in their self-transformation. The analysis illustrates how the IE approach can be understood as a part of a self-transformative project, and how achieving the position as an intuitive eater requires an increase in self-awareness. As such, we argue that the content creators produce a specific psychologized discourse of hunger and an affectively-disciplined subject, all represented as freedom from diet culture.

Over the past decade, a plethora of online safe spaces have emerged on social media and have gained significant popularity amongst Swedish youth. Focusing on social injustices, these safe spaces operate as accessible discussion forums for youth across the country and highlight some of the key issues faced by youth. This chapter examines how issues relating to online activism, anti-Blackness and decoloniality can be explored drawing on the concepts of Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism. This is exemplified through empirical data from online safe spaces and how participants in these spaces conceptualize what activism is, how it relates to theories on decoloniality and anti-racism and how conflicting views are discussed and negotiated. The chapter pays particular attention to discussions of anti-Blackness and topics closely related to the Black Lives Matter movement, capturing the overlap with and influences from a global social movement. Further, the chapter illustrates how these safe spaces are conceptualized by the ‘adult’ world outside of them by analysing debates on anti-racism in news press. This section discusses how youth activism in general, and anti-racist youth activism, is framed as provocative, identity political and founded in distorted understandings of political theory.

Syftet med artikeln är att undersöka representationer av latinopojkar i amerikanska romaner, författade av amerikanska latinos. Särskild fokus läggs på hur gränserna för de maskuliniteter som idealiseras utmanas och hur pojkskap således skevas. Materialet består av de två romanerna Chulito och Aristotle and Dante discover the secrets of the universe, som båda är författade av amerikanska latinos med amerikanska latinopojkar som protagonister. Med utgångspunkt i bland annat Sara Ahmeds queera fenomenologi studerar jag hur olika livslinjer reproduceras eller bryts, hur gränsdragningar mellan olika kategorier störs och skevas och hur olika mellanpositioner (inbetweenness) skapar skeva subjekt. Normer kring pojkskap utmanas på en mängd olika sätt i romanerna och i artikeln läggs särskild fokus vid hur sexualitet utforskas och förhandlas i relation till maskulinitetsideal. I artikeln studeras även hur huvudkaraktärernas komma ut-processer framställs, samt vilka reaktioner de väcker bland övriga karaktärer. Slutligen analyseras representationer av föräldrarna och deras betydelse för pojkarnas självacceptans och omorientering och artikeln argumenterar för att föräldrarna bidrar till en normalisering som minskar eller upplöser pojkarnas upplevelse av att vara skeva.

This dissertation examines identity performances amongst racialized youth in online ‘safe spaces’. Using a netnography-inspired approach to study communities online, the study employs decolonial and narrative theories to analyse identity performances through everyday interaction. During the 2010s, along with the increased use of social media, different kinds of safe spaces were created online. This study centres on two such safe spaces on Instagram which operate under ‘separatist guidelines’ through which only racialized people are allowed to participate, while simultaneously being open and accessible to anyone. In three analytical chapters, the dissertation focuses on the creation, negotiation, and challenging of boundaries and community in the discussion threads. Additionally, the dissertation focuses on the notion of safe spaces and how this ‘safety’ is performed by the participants. In a fourth chapter, the study examines editorials and op-eds in Swedish news press debates on identity politics and safe spaces published leading up to and during the time of data collection from the safe spaces. By analysing news media debates, the study seeks to capture contemporary ideas not only of ethnicity, race, and belonging in the society wherein the studied spaces operate, but also illustrate anti-racist positions and cultural ideals.

The study finds that these safe spaces are complex, heterogeneous and paradoxical spaces, where ‘safety’ is constructed through inclusion and exclusion. In order to feel safe to some, others must be excluded, but the spaces must simultaneously be constructed as inclusive spaces where critical debates can take place. In combining narrative analysis and a small stories approach with decolonial and affect theories, the study also makes theoretical contributions. By combining these perspectives, the study examines how affect can be employed as a linguistic resource in constructing reliable and convincing narratives, and how the ‘smallness’ of interaction draws on both local narratives and racial stories and global master narratives of the colonial order.

This article criticizes the idea of schools as institutions of anti-racist knowledge and values, as well as schools as institutions of equal opportunity for all students, by examining how youths retell experiences of racism within the Swedish education systemin online discussion fora. The study focuses on youths’ experiences of racism in meetings with teachers, in particular, as teachers are positioned as representatives of schools and often regarded as carriers of anti-racistknowledge and values to be taught to their pupils. Using a phenomenological approach, the study focuses how pupils attempt to reproduce institutional lifelines promoting school success and upwards social mobility and how such attempts are interrupted by teachers, all the while forcing the pupils to embody a “happy diversity”. The article uses netnographic data from two online forums for racialized youth to highlight their experiences as shared online in a “safe space”, created specifically for them, and how such spaces constitute an alternative educational space beyond the limitations and regulations of their everyday school environments.