‘You were imported with kebabs’: ‘Pisstaking’ as culture in interaction

Abstract

Through an ethnographic account of the ways that teenagers in a Stockholm school construct meaning through hard-hitting humor, that is, ‘pisstaking’, we investigate how collective representations play out in everyday life. This culture in interaction is analyzed as a form of ‘social art’ where participants sensuously negotiate visible and invisible power structures. The article depicts the interactions as embedded in a symbolic landscape of meaning, one where complex inequalities contained within bodies and played out in interaction can resist and (re)produce gendered and racialized orders and identities. Masculinities, femininities, sexualities, notions of the ‘right’ kind of modernity and being ‘the immigrant’ are put to use as cultural resources in an intersectional play around gaining and maintaining social value and self-worth. We show how ‘pisstaking’ works among teenagers: promoting situational solidarity while also allowing for differentiation and othering processes.