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This ethnographic study explores norms and practices concerning motherhood among 37 drug-using female sex-sellers in Denmark. It is based on extended fieldwork in a drop-in center and narrative interviews with clients and staff in this center from 2001-2005. A strong norm guiding the staff's relation to the users is that drug-use, prostitution, and motherhood are incompatible. The women meet such institutional expectations and norms about motherhood either by constructing norm-conforming narratives or by opposing the institutional view. As the institution offers no 'backstage', the women's self-representations often appear chaotic and inconsistent. Either way their strategies often become contributions to the reproduction of the structures they resist.

This paper is based on narrative interviews with 60 young Danish students. It analyzes two strategies (normalization and augmentation) that students use to meet the expectations in the Danish educational system. A special focus is on how different non-medical use of prescription pharmaceuticals for cognitive enhancement (NMPCE) is related to these two different strategies. The paper uses two paradigmatic, narrative cases to explore and discuss whether and how the 'male strategy' of augmentation is more in accordance with the overall requirement to perform and to be 'special' in the educational system and the 'performance society' than the 'female' strategy of normalization. Of key interest is how recent media discourses affect young male and female students respectively. Is seems, that both media discourse and the young students' narratives produce and re-produce quite traditional gender stereotypes. The paper concludes that crafting a successful self may be a very ambivalent process, often with a sense of insufficiency. The students use pharmaceuticals when they experience a discrepancy between their individual capacities and competences and the outer demand to realize a perfect and well-performed self. On the one hand, the students experience an imperative to perform, on the other hand, they feel that the 'finishing line' is constantly moving and hard to reach. Finally, the paper discusses how gender differences in the ways students negotiate the demands in the educational system, may reflect a normative system of gendered praxis and relations.

Drawing from an ethnographic study in a drug treatment wing for women in a Danish prison, the authors explore how femininity is negotiated between prisoners and staff. It is shown how the staff view the prisoners as both passive and disruptive and how the treatment aims to teach them what staff consider to be an ‘appropriate’ femininity characterised by the women being cooperative, feeling a sense of community, and being less masculine in their appearance. While the prisoners accept the identity constructions imposed upon them by the therapy regime, they also attempt to create alternative femininities. The article discusses whether gender-sensitive treatment approaches can work towards better integration of the women’s past experiences with the new dispositions learned in the treatment programme.