Ahmed has suggested that refusing to laugh may be used as a political strategy for oppressed groups. But what happens when it becomes a tool of discipline and exclusion? Drawing on a video ethnographic study of incarcerated boys and their staff in detention home treatment, this paper focuses on one of the boy's struggle for inclusion. Despite formal equal treatment, his exclusion was maintained by the others' refusal to laugh at his attempts to be funny. We thus aim to study, in interactional detail, how unlaughter may work as a subtle yet powerful affective practice.

Ahmed har diskuterat potentialen i den feministiska glädjedödarens vägran att skratta med som en politisk strategi. Men vad händer när icke-skrattet blir ett verktyg för exkludering? Med utgångspunkt i en videoetnografisk studie på ett ungdomshem undersöker artikeln ett fall där en pojke fick anstränga sig för att bli inkluderad i ungdomshemmets gemenskap. Formellt behandlades han på samma sätt som de andra, men hans exkludering manifesterades genom de andras frånvaro av skratt som svar på hans försök att skämta. Artikeln ger därmed ett bidrag till hur icke-skrattet kan förstås som diskursiv/affektiv praktik för disciplinering och exkludering i social interaktion.

This paper analyses a group of three 17-year-old Muslim girls attending an after-school youth club in a multiethnic area in Sweden. Based on an audio recorded conversation, as part of a seven-month long fieldwork, the study draws on interactional analysis of the girls’ humour practices to investigate the girls’ negotiations of, and shifts between, identity positions and taboo breaking. The analysis illuminates the discursive/affective flows within humour and how contradictory processes, such as making sexist jokes whilst identifying as a feminist, can coexist and evoke pleasure. Based on the findings we conclude that the girls do participate in transgressive humour practices, thus challenging the masculine connotations of taboo-breaking humour. Moreover, the girls’ humorous interaction further challenges stereotypes of the humourless Muslim and the non-laughing feminist, as well as popular notions of girls in multiethnic settings as either silenced or ascribed a specific assignment of being actively politically/subversively engaged.

Correctional institutions such as youth detention centres are highly emotional places, yet there are only a few studies of youth in locked institutions that take emotions as their starting point, and those who do primarily focus on explosive affects. Drawing on video ethnographic data from a Swedish youth detention home, this study highlights a mild form of joking, what we call ‘banal humour’, employed by staff and youth as a form of affective practice. Grounded in critical humour studies and affect theory, the paper demonstrates how banal humour contributes to maintaining positive affects, and to mitigate both anger and embarrassment, while simultaneously constructing social order and producing desirable subjectivities in the detention centre.

Total institutions such as detention homes or prisons are inevitably highly emotional places, and studies have illuminated the many negative affects circulating such as pain, aggression and sadness, often conceptualized as part of a construction of (hyper-)masculinity. This chapter draws on video-ethnographic data from a Swedish detention home for boys, in order to investigate, not only these negative affects, but also those of joy and playfulness in the incarcerated boy's humorous interactions. The chapter offers an overview of research on humour and laughter in interaction. Drawing on Wetherell's ( 2013 ) notion of affect as both an embodied and a social meaning-making practice together with Ahmed's ( 2014 ) thoughts on emotions as performative, the analysis explores the boys’ use of humour practices such as stylizations. The analysis illuminates how humour practices produce particular social hierarchies and social order through both laughter and unlaughter, as well as reproduce affective norms in line with previous findings on “hypermasculine” emotion work. However, the use of humour also allows for the boys to enact less tough affective practices such as joyfulness and intimacy between male friends. At the same time, through these humour practices, the participants play with various identity positions linked to age, criminality and masculinity.

Childhood adversities, such as abuse, neglect and parental alcohol and substance abuse, has been linked to higher rates of youth delinquency. Drawing on interviews with 33 young male offenders, incarcerated in Swedish prisons, this paper analyzes how they narrate their experiences of growing up, and particularly how they make sense of their childhood adversities in light of their present situation as incarcerated and convicted of serious crime. Three forms of narratives are identified: stories of childhood adversities affecting the present delinquent self; narratives where the problem child serves as the link between childhood and present self; and broken narratives where childhood adversities are depicted as not associated with the present self at all. The majority of the young men draw upon the latter two of these narrative types. The analyses conclude that in both of them the young men avoid presenting that their childhood adversities have affected their contemporary selves and criminal behavior, but rather emphasize individual responsibility tied both to street masculinity and to a discourse of responsibilization.

Studies of prison masculinities have often focused on adult men and the reproduction of aggressive, dangerous masculinities, involving men’s strategic management of emotions as a survival technique. This chapter takes a different perspective, engaging with subtle emotional aspects of young prison masculinities among incarcerated men at a Swedish youth prison, and highlighting complex and multiple prison masculinities. Furthermore, by drawing on a perspective on affect as productive of subjectivities and co-constructed in interaction, this study illuminates how prison masculinities are produced through subtle affective practices in an interview setting, rather than drawn upon intentionally. The analysis reveal subjectivities and affects as emergent from intricate interactional processes, and as intrinsically intertwined with discourse. Through the young men’s talk about their childhoods and emotions, and the interviewer’s empathetic responses, a less familiar young prison masculinity emerges–one of vulnerability. Several incarcerated young men resist this position though nuanced affective practices: indifference and irritation, which appear as more automatic than as strategic enactments, in response to being empathetically positioned as affected by trauma or loss of loved ones. Furthermore, the analyses highlight the importance of considering deviant cases, such as the few young inmates who did enact vulnerability.  

Aggressive, sexist humor is often understood as expressions of inner, misogynist attitudes. This article, however, investigates rape humor as a collective and interactive phenomenon. Drawing on an infamous Swedish podcast episode, we illuminate rape humor in terms of affect, desire, and repression (Butler 1987; Billig 1999), and as such, how taboo-breaking arouses both pleasure and fear among the participants. The analyses detail affective practices that both promote and discipline affects. The men in the group interpellate one of the participants as a clown, someone whose taboo-breaking they interactionally support and simultaneously distance themselves from. The article concludes that affects, like subject positions, are interpellated in interaction. Building on Wetherell’s (2013) understanding of affect as both discursive and embodied, we suggest a reintroduction of repression/desire into a discursively oriented framework. 

This article explores the challenges that were detected in the first evaluation of the violence prevention programme Mentors in Violence Prevention at senior levels of compulsory schools and upper-secondary schools in Sweden. In particular, we analyse how the gender-transformative dimension and the bystander perspective aspect of the programme played out in the classroom. What are the implications of implementing a gender-transformative violence prevention programme such as Mentors in Violence Prevention when it is carried out by teachers in the school setting? The empirical basis for this study includes classroom observations during all seven Mentors in Violence Prevention sessions in two schools, and group interviews with a total of 14 teachers and 26 pupils (aged 13‐19) from five schools. Our findings suggest that most teachers did not appear to be comfortable with either the Mentors in Violence Prevention programme’s pedagogical model or its theoretical approach. Consequently, they occasionally worked in manners contrary to the programme’s intentions. However, observations and interviews demonstrated that a learning process about gender-based violence had been initiated. It may be necessary to make further adjustments if Mentors in Violence Prevention is to be used in schools in Sweden, particularly if teachers are to be the programme leaders.

The threatening young man who speaks Rinkeby Swedish has become a culturally recognizable ‘figure of personhood’ (Agha, 2007) of linguistic and ethnic otherness in Sweden. Drawing upon Billig's theory of humour, we illustrate how this characterological persona is not monolithic; nor does it remain uncontested but is constantly being (re)negotiated in the media. By drawing attention to those humorous performances that rhetorically make fun of entrenched stereotypes, the article explores the subversive, as well as disciplinary, potentials of this kind of humour. Read together, the examples in this article indicate that the ‘exemplary speaker’ (Androutsopoulos, 2016) of Swedish contemporary urban vernaculars can be laughed at and with but cannot easily be fixed into a unified homogenous figure.

Sweden is often presented as a ‘gender-equal paradise’, but the nation’s gender-equality policies have had several unintended exclusionary consequences: rural men, alongside ethnic minorities, now constitute an exception to Sweden’s national self-image. In order to present Scandinavia as a progressive centre in a globalised world (as in gender-equal and egalitarian countries), men who do not fit this self-image are often described as the ‘other’. The highlighting of rural violence risks reinforcing perceptions of the countryside and its habitants as deviant. To avoid this scenario, we need to explore the social and cultural processes in which rural men are given both marginalised and privileged positions. Drawing on data from a school-based violence-prevention programme, we explore in this chapter how people discuss sexual violence in relation to a rape case in a small Swedish town; we also analyse a documentary, a motion picture and the media debate about the case. We argue that ‘othering’ works through an affective politics of disgust; in the classroom discussions, for example, people recurrently distinguished between ‘us’ and the rural other. Such othering is related to a history of the countryside as a peripheral place excluded from the modern urban Swedish project, which then enables the projection of negative affect towards rurality.