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To cite this article: Torun Elsrud (2020) Resisting social death with dignity. The strategy of re-escaping among young asylum-seekers in the wake of Sweden's sharpened asylum laws,

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This paper deals with long-term budget travelling from different time perspectives. Narratives of travel, given by women backpackers and interpreted through `time lenses', lead to an analysis of the journey as an individualized time-space in which the traveller regains control of her own time and movement. It is argued that this control, sensed as `freedom', opens up both mind and body to a complexity of different time experiences. These vary depending on context and speed of movement. Thus, the long-term journey into different and diversified cultures is discussed as a move away from clock-time and other structuring devices into a space and time where the traveller is, to a certain extent, left alone to do her own structuring. The backpacker is both living and creating her own time.

This chapter looks at the idea of adventure and risk taking among backpackers. Beginning with the observation that women are as likely as men to go backpacking, the chapter also notes dominant narratives that frame adventure as predominantly masculine. The adventuress therefore is a transgressive figure who, by virtue of her gender alone, is viewed as exceptional. The adventuress crosses more than the boundaries of space; the act of travel is seen in these cases as an 'identity project' but one where the adventuress crosses the boundaries from feminine modes of behaviour to modes of behaviour more generally thought of as masculine. It is noted that the act of journey itself, as time away from the usual norms, acts as a period of reflexivity and an area in which the norms and expectations that accrue to gendered roles can be challenged, even if the challenge is concealed under a protective layer of irony.