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 Malmö, 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.