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Grin and Bear It! Downplaying Sexual Harassment as Part of Nordic Girlhood

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Nordic Girlhoods

Abstract

This chapter examines young people’s understandings of sexual harassment as part of Nordic girlhood. It focuses on how 15 to 16-year old girls define boundaries of sexual harassment between acceptable and non-acceptable sex-based attention and behaviour. Sanna Aaltonen contemplates the ambivalence girls have to deal with when they are reacting to or downplaying unwanted heterosexual behaviour in the context of the Nordic understanding of gender equality. Tolerance, a notion arising from the research data, is used in the chapter to capture the agentic ambivalence of girls in relation to being targets of sexual harassment.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Finnish Youth Research Network, Helsinki, Finland

    Sanna Aaltonen

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  1. Sanna Aaltonen
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Correspondence to Sanna Aaltonen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Umeå Centre for Gender Studies (UCGS), Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Bodil Formark

  2. Finnish Youth Research Network, Helsinki, Finland

    Heta Mulari

  3. Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Myry Voipio

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Aaltonen, S. (2017). Grin and Bear It! Downplaying Sexual Harassment as Part of Nordic Girlhood. In: Formark, B., Mulari, H., Voipio, M. (eds) Nordic Girlhoods . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65118-7_5

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