Dramatic lives and relevant becomings: Toward a Deleuze- and Guattari-inspired cartography of young women’s violent conflicts
| Author | Jody Miller,Ann-Karina Henriksen |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480612443378 |
| Published date | 01 November 2012 |
| Date | 01 November 2012 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
443378TCR16410.1177/1362480612443378Henriksen and MillerTheoretical Criminology
2012
Article
Theoretical Criminology
16(4) 435 –461
Dramatic lives and relevant
© The Author(s) 2012
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becomings: Toward a Deleuze-
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480612443378
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and Guattari-inspired
cartography of young
women’s violent conflicts
Ann-Karina Henriksen
Roskilde University, Denmark
Jody Miller
Rutgers University, USA
Abstract
The article explores how violence works to produce young women’s precarious
positions in social milieus characterized by multiple marginalization. By paying attention
to the micropolitics of violent engagements we argue that violent conflicts can be
viewed as strategies for escaping positions of marginality into positions of relevance.
The analysis builds on empirical data from Copenhagen, Denmark, gained through
ethnographic fieldwork with the participation of 20 female informants aged 13–22. The
theoretical contribution proposes viewing conflicts as multi-linear, multi-causal and non-
chronological to account for the emotional tension and lived experience of violent
conflicts. Finally we identify the need for further studies on how technosocial forms of
communication play into violent conflicts among youth.
Keywords
Everyday life, gender, social marginality, violence, youth
Girls’ violence is at once sensational, contentious, and enigmatic. In the 1990s, the popu-
lar press (re)‘discovered’ a seemingly ‘new violent female offender’ (Chesney-Lind, 1993;
Males, 2010), whose image continues to be reinforced by the increased popularity of ‘girl
Corresponding author:
Ann-Karina Henriksen, Roskilde University, Universitetsvej 1, Bygn. 25, Roskilde, 4000, Denmark
Email: ankahe@ruc.dk
436
Theoretical Criminology 16(4)
fights’ posted on You Tube and other internet sites. A decade on, the focus expanded to
so-called ‘mean girls’ and their engagement in relational violence (Brown, 2005; Sim-
mons, 2003; Wiseman, 2009). In the meantime, in light of periods of increase in girls’
arrests and incarcerations for violence, academics began revisiting old debates (Adler,
1975; see Alder and Worrall, 2004) about whether girls’ violence is on the rise and what
alternative factors might explain these official trends (Chesney-Lind and Jones, 2010;
Lauritsen et al., 2009; Steffensmeier et al., 2005). Simultaneously, we have witnessed a
burgeoning of scholarship that examines causes, correlates, and pathways contributing to
girls’ violence (Gaarder and Belknap, 2002; Heimer and De Coster, 1999; Steffensmeier
and Haynie, 2000), as well as investigations of situational and environmental contexts
in which it emerges and takes meaning (Jones, 2010; Kruttschnitt and Carbone-Lopez,
2006; Miller and Mullins, 2006; Mullins and Miller, 2008; Ness, 2010; Zimmerman and
Messner, 2010).
The enigma of girls’ violence is very much tied to the cultural equation of violence
with men and masculinities. Girls’ involvement in violence has long been argued to be
‘doubly deviant’: not just a violation of cultural norms about civility, but also a violation
of expectations about the performance—and ‘essense’—of femininity itself. Among
feminist scholars, debates continue to swirl about whether girls who use violence are
positioning themselves as ‘one of the guys’ (Miller, 2001), are reflective of a ‘masculine
mimicry’ (McRobbie, 2006, in Renold and Ringrose, 2008: 316), engaged in ‘bad girl
femininity’ (Messerschmidt, 2002: 462), or, perhaps, something more complex is taking
place in relation to girls’ agency, resistance, and strategic decision making within con-
texts of multiple marginalizations (Burman et al., 2003; Jones, 2010; Miller, 2002;
Schaffner, 2006; Waldron, 2011).
We are mostly engaged here with this latter body of scholarship, which seeks to under-
stand and place girls’ violence in context. Yet, our goal is to add a new layer to the conver-
sation. We are inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze, especially his collaboration with
Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). And we see great promise in the ways this
work has been put to use by feminist and other social science scholars in theorizing topics
as diverse as cyber-bullying (Kofoed, 2009; Kofoed and Ringrose, forthcoming), graffiti-
writing (Halsey and Young, 2006), anorexia (Bray and Colebrook, 1998), the heterosexual
matrix (Renold and Ringrose, 2008), mothers’ political protest (Baydar and İvegen, 2006),
selfhood (Sermijn et al., 2008), social identity (Brown and Lunt, 2002), responses to sui-
cide (Isaac, 2007), and wartime losses (Biehl and Locke, 2010).
Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking offers up new ways of looking at girls’ violence, as it
leads us to ask: What does this violence do? Asking this question in a Deleuzian way
involves ‘an intellectual shift from a preoccupation with questions of significance and
meaning to a concern with questions of function and use’ (Zayani, 2000: 95). Moreover,
as with other poststructural approaches to investigating social life, Deleuze and Guattari’s
work ‘aims to shake up the orderedness of things’ (Ferguson, 1991: 333). Much of the
criminological tradition, including research on girls’ violence, is oriented toward the
creation of linear story-telling, whether in the form of presentations embedded within
‘cause and effect’ storylines, or those drawing orderly connections between past or cur-
rent life circumstances and offending behaviors (but see Ferrell et al., 2008; Lippins and
Van Calster, 2010; Milovanovic, 2002). This is true, not just among those with more
Henriksen and Miller
437
positivist orientations, but is also the case within the social constructionist orientation
that guides a great deal of feminist scholarship in our field (see Ferguson, 1991). In con-
trast, Deleuze and Guattari’s approach to social life and the micropolitics within it cues
us to pay careful attention to affect, desire, and temporality, with an eye toward dynamic
flows, multiplicities, and moments of becoming.
We believe these ways of examining girls’ violent conflicts are particularly well suited
for opening up creative lines of thinking that help shed new light on these events and the
social milieus in which they are embedded. Here we explore conflicts with moments of
physical violence. Analytically we distinguish between conflicts, physical violence, and
violence in a broader sense. Conflicts are conceptualized as protracted, complex pro-
cesses taking place across people, time and space, including those offered by new tech-
nologies. Conflicts involve acts of aggression, which we distinguish here from acts of
physical violence as forms of non-physical violence that serve to establish control and
dominance in conflicts. Physical violence involves aggressive physical contact between
at least two people, including such acts as hitting, kicking, pulling hair and using all
forms of weapons. Finally we apply violence in a broad sense, defined as being reduced
to mere object status against one’s will (Jackson, 2002). This broad definition enables us
to approach the interconnection between different forms of violence that can be struc-
tural, institutional, relational, and even symbolic (Schepher-Hughes and Bourgois,
2004). Empirically, distinctions between conflicts, physical violence, and violence are
blurry and locally constructed.
To explore girl’s violent conflicts, we draw from an ethnographic investigation with
violence-involved young women in Copenhagen, Denmark, conducted by the first
author. Data were collected over a six-month period, including participant-observation,
interviews, and conversations with 20 girls who served as key informants, as well as oth-
ers involved in their social worlds. Specifically, we utilize analytic tools emerging from
Deleuze and Guattari’s work to examine how violence functions to rupture, produce, and
reproduce young women’s precarious positionings in social milieus characterized by
multiple forms of marginality.
Young women, conflict, and violence: interactionist and
rhizomatic understandings
Despite persistent gender gaps in the use of violence, evidence suggests that girls’
‘involvement in physically aggressive behavior seems to be rather more common than
previous work would suggest’ (Phillips, 2003: 713). Feminist scholars often highlight the
‘blurred boundaries’ of young women’s victimization and offending, linking their vio-
lence to gendered and other forms of marginalization (Batchelor et al., 2001; Gaarder
and Belknap, 2002). In addition, scholars have recently paid increased attention to the
situational, interactional, and environmental contexts in which girls’ violence takes
place. While this has led some to emphasize relational aspects of girls’ conflicts, includ-
ing ‘indirect, relational forms of aggression’ (Hagan and Foster, 2003: 75; see also
Batchelor et al., 2001; Steffensmeier and Allen, 1996), others have suggested that some
young women navigating within multiply marginalizing settings attempt to negotiate
safety by establishing violent social identities (Batchelor, 2005; Jones, 2010; Ness,
438
Theoretical Criminology 16(4)
2010). Some scholars argue that such identities provide girls with status and respect
among their peers, and moreover, that issues of respect—rooted in reputational chal-
lenges and status hierarchies—are often central for understanding girls’ aggression,
including their engagement in violence (Batchelor, 2005;...
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