Taking back the Swedish night: making and reclaiming space

Abstract

With a spatial analytical framework, we study Take Back the Night demonstrations as a way of mobilizing for safety and claiming the right to the city. The marches are a symbolic display of women's distress about living in fear of violence. It is a critique of society's inability to handle the problem of prevailing gendered power relations and the unequal access to city spaces that stem from these. The aim of this paper is to examine feminist struggles to challenge gendered spatial power relations, focusing on Take Back the Night mobilization. Hence, this qualitative study focuses Take Back the Night demonstrations as a phenomenon and as an actual spatial strategy, by analysing representations regarding Take Back the Night in Sweden at large, and in Malm€ o, Sweden's third largest city, in particular. We discuss feminist efforts to create temporary safe spaces in terms of the demonstrations' emancipatory potential and how these spatial claims provoke resistance. The demonstrations and the reactions they create reveal existing inequalities and power structures.

Gender differences in unsafety perception and precautionary behaviour among adolescents: Case study of a small peripheral town in Slovakia

“…There, empowerment strategies are mentioned in relation to resisting representations and feelings of fear and risk and are mostly represented by telling yourself there is no reason to be afraid and claiming public space (insisting on ones right to the city) -for more details of related studies see e.g. Koskela (1997), Panelli et al (2005), Sandberg and Coe (2020) and Sandberg and Rönnblom (2013).…”

Bibliometric Analysis: Symbolic Power Publication Trens in Scopus.com

“…used to express the life experiences of parents as they interact with food policy, rejection of stigmatization; and implications for policy and practice (Noonan-Gunning, 2019). The fear and violence experienced by women symbolized in the mobilization of marches as social spaces, is a criticism of society's inability to solve problems of gender relations and limited access (Sandberg & Coe, 2020). Research on the interaction of many young people's drinking habits and exercise and their implications, social and physical health is produced by the dominance of masculine (Cowley, 2019;Törrönen et al, 2021).…”