Gendering Gangs: Critical Perspectives on Youth, Masculinities, Violence, and the Gang Ethos in Sweden

Gendering Gangs: 

Critical Perspectives on Youth, Masculinities, Violence, and the Gang Ethos in Sweden 

Research seminar, Department of Sociology, Lund University 17 September 2025 

Contrary to international research on gangs there is remarkably little focus on gendered aspects of contemporary Swedish gangs. This is an opportunity missed. Masculine ideals and homosociality are clearly central to gangs’ self-representation and practices, very much in the same way as in male-dominated far-right milieus.

In most gangsta rap, it takes mere seconds for ideas about “how to be a man” to surface, including explicit notions of women’s roles and purposes. The same applies to social media posts or casual conversations among gang members. However, despite Sweden’s long-established approach to issues of gender and sexuality in both society and academia, there is a lack of research examining gendered underpinnings of the gang ethos that can help us better to understand the reality of Swedish gang crime.  

The aim of this research symposium is to facilitate a dialogue between researchers of both criminal subcultures and gender. Hosted by scholars from the Divisions of Gender, Social Anthropology and Sociology at Lund University, it is part of an effort to stimulate further research into gendered structures and cultural expressions of criminal gangs in Sweden.

Programme

Room: R240

9:00 Introduction

9:05  Keynote Ann Phoenix: Hegemonic masculinities and gangs in intersectional perspective

Abstract: It is a commonplace that it is impossible to understand gangs without considering masculinities and, frequently, ‘hegemonic masculinities’. Just as many researchers have critiqued and elaborated the concept of hegemonic masculinity, so the gendering of gangs and masculinities have to be broadened to consider the plurality of masculinities and how its intersections with other social characteristics including social class, racialisation and ethnicities. This talk explores how concepts of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ illuminate the gang violence, particularly in contexts shaped by exclusion and marginalization. The talk draws on research from different continents to consider the gendering of gangs. It first considers issues of hegemonic masculinity and then discusses how gangs operate as social arenas where ‘hypermasculine ideals’ such as toughness, aggression, domination, are valorised and violence becomes a tool for proving manhood, earning respect, and asserting group status through coercive power relations. The paper draws comparisons with military masculinities and highlights the mechanisms by which "protest masculinity" arises, explaining why young men facing blocked opportunities and social vulnerability may turn to gangs and violence as alternative pathways to masculine recognition. It also considers what we know about leaving gangs.

09:40  Keynote Jonathan Ilan: Re-evaluating Street Masculinities

Abstract: Where the lens of gender is used to understand the behaviour of socio-economically marginalised and criminal / criminally adjacent young men, we tend to deploy a conceptualisation of ‘street masculinity’ (even where we do not call it such). This model sees such men as embracing what has too often been represented as a kind of crude,  ‘3 Ps’  masculinity. Whilst these traditional lenses of ‘procreating’, ‘providing’ and ‘protecting’ certainly provide some explanatory purchase they often fail to represent the richer forms of ethical reasoning, emotional reflection and multiple experience that have been explored in more recent research. Moreover, mainstream society has increasingly adopted tropes from street masculinity, in particular that of the ‘hustler’, rendering traditional distinctions between inclusion/exclusion more difficult to make. This talk seeks to explore what insights from traditional ideas of ‘street masculinity’ might be retained without triggering the kinds of pathologization that are risked by the discourse.

10:15 Discussion Ann Phoenix and Jonathan Ilan, moderated by David Sausdal

11:00 Panel discussion: Atreyee Sen, Anna Hedlund, Sofia Ulver and Ov-Cristian Norocel. Moderator: Jens Rydström

12:00 Lunch

13:15–15:00 Internal discussion among the invited participants

18:30 Dinner 

Speakers

Ann Phoenix is Professor of Psychosocial studies at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, Social Research Institute, UCL Institute of Education and a Fellow of the British Academy and the Academy of Social Sciences. She is on the Nuffield Foundation Trust Board and has been on many journal editorial boards. Her research is about the ways in which psychological experiences and social processes are linked and intersectional. It includes work on racialised and gendered identities; mixed-parentage, masculinities, consumption, the transition to motherhood, families, migration and transnational families. It draws on mixed methods and includes narrative approaches. Recent books include Environment in the Lives of Children and Families: Perspectives from India and the UK. Policy Press, 2017. (with Janet Boddy, Catherine Walker and Uma Vennan) and Researching Family Narratives. SAGE, 2020. (with Julia Brannen, Corinne Squire and the Novella project research team). Nuancing Young Masculinities (with Marja Peltola), 2022, Helsinki University Press. 

Jonathan Ilan is Assistant Professor of Criminology at University College Dublin’s Sutherland School of Law. He is a cultural criminologist with an interest in the ways in which social structures, systems of meaning, crime and justice are intertwined. He is a keen scholar of street culture, theoretical criminology and urban ethnography, analysing phenomena as diverse as drill rap music, radicalisation and the policing of marginalised communities

Anna Hedlund is social anthropologist and senior lecturer in human rights at the department of Global Studies. Her current research primarily focuses on youth involved in criminal networks and methods to prevent gun violence in Sweden. She is currently involved in a Nordic comparative research project on gang desistance in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, and in a research project about Group Violence Intervention (GVI), a gun violence reduction strategy. She is also the project leader for a project which focuses on young people who want to leave a criminal environment. Her previous research focuses on collective memories of the genocide in Rwanda among armed rebel groups in eastern Congo and the significance of history, ethnicity, and propaganda for understanding narratives and expressions of violence in ongoing conflicts.

Atreyee Sen is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen with a focus on the political anthropologist of urban South Asia. She completed her PhD in Social Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (2003), University of London. Between 2004-2015, she held prominent academic positions at the University of Sussex and the University of Manchester in the UK. Her research and publications trajectory focuses on large-scale militant political movements in the city that create micro-cultures of violence in confined urban spaces. She have conducted projects on right-wing activism, communal conflict and guerrilla movements in Indian cities (Mumbai, Hyderabad, Calcutta and Dharamsala), and explored the impact of these movements on slums, refugee colonies and prisons.

Sofia Ulver is associate professor within marketing and have a sociological, cultural, critical and idea-historical background and perspective. Her research domain is consumer culture theory (CCT) focusing on larger shifts and social trends in society by looking at how we live, consume, produce and innovate at the global and local market, often with the theoretical lens of social distinction (status), gender theory and narrative or discourse analysis. This can for example be by exploring the globalization of western taste within the urban middle-class, the masculinization of taste within the foodie culture, how markets are created through consumer taste refinement, or the shift towards ethical (e.g. sustainability-related) and political consumption (e.g. buycot and boycot-related). She is currently working on a project on gang culture, dreams and consumption. 

Ov Cristian Norocel is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology (division of Gender Studies) at Lund University. His expertise lies in the wider field of political sociology of gender. Of relevance in this context, Norocel is interested in the political construction of masculinities (and femininities) in and through social media-saturated contexts. In so doing, he deploys theoretical concepts from critical masculinity studies to examine critically far-right extremism and anti-gender mobilization. Among others, he is part of the international advisory committee of the Horizon Europe project "Masculinities for the Future of European Democracy" (Men4Dem). His research has been published in such international peer-reviewed journals as Men & Masculinities; International Journal for Masculinity Studies; Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power; Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies.