The Girl and the Feminist State? : Subjectification Projects in the Nordic Welfare State

In this chapter Elina Oinas discusses girls’ subjectification projects in the Nordic welfare state. Contemporary girls are expected to embody the autonomous, neo-liberal subject ideal, as capable participants in the social, in this case Nordic society. The chapter focuses on a case study of publicly funded girls’ club projects in Finland in the 2000s, and discusses societal practices that frame and enable girlhoods and material subjectification. Oinas argues that contemporary girlhoods are constituted and regulated in the context of a Nordic paradox of post-feminist idealization of achieved gender equality, combined with a blindness regarding, and denial of, on-going conservative forces.