EPA (aka A-Traktor) Girl Greasers in Sweden: Girlhood in Motion?

Abstract

This article focuses on girlhood in one of the youth subcultures of rural Sweden, EPA greasers. The EPA, a car that Swedes aged 15 and older can legally drive, is at the centre of EPA culture. In this uniquely and previously male Swedish youth greaser culture, there has been a recent increase in the number of Swedish girls driving EPAs. Previous research has shown how EPA culture and EPA girlhood are shaped through distancing from hegemonic urban and middle-class norms and ideology. In this article, we seek to develop an understanding of EPA culture, specifically the ways in which it has been adopted by girls. Starting out from their online performances, we will explore how place, femininity and resistance intersect. The findings demonstrate how EPA girls use a playful way of troubling norms in their online performances, understood here as space and outlet to resist and mess around with dominant discourses and prejudice. This can also be understood as a way of talking back to masculinity, the majority society and urbanity.

Introduction

In this article, we focus on girlhood in one of the youth subcultures tied to countryside identifications in Sweden, EPA greasers (in Swedish, EPA-raggare). The public view of this culture has been embedded in a variety of stereotypical narratives about rural Sweden and rural youth; for example, it has been described as ‘at odds with urban modernity, out of place as well as out of date’ (Joelsson, 2015, p. 1253; see also Stenbacka, 2011).

The EPA tractor came into existence after the Second World War, when Swedish farmers, who lacked economic resources, started constructing tractors out of sturdy cars, such as Chevys and Fords. This new type of vehicle, with its speed regulated to 18 miles per hour, has become the only vehicle that 15-year-old Swedes can legally drive (18 is the legal age at which teens are allowed to begin driving a regular car in Sweden). The EPA youth subculture developed in the 1960s as youth started building a new kind of EPA tractor that, while still conforming to the rules for a farmer’s EPA tractor, were intended to be used on the streets (Trafikmagasinet, 1982). This subculture is closely tied to the rural periphery.

In many aspects, the EPA youth subculture is closely aligned with the phenomenon of Swedish raggare (also found in Norway and Finland)—loosely translated as greasers—that developed around the same time. Many modern EPA youths’ parents are also greasers, showing how EPA culture and raggare spans generations in rural Sweden.

Being associated with marginalized youth and street and road cultures, the Swedish raggare culture has strong ties to American vehicle cultures, especially the greaser and rockabilly subcultures. EPA greasers and their American counterparts likewise share a variety of cultural and ideological attributes, such as their preference for rock or rap music and rebellious attributes against mainstream society and urbanity (Joelsson, 2015; Lumsden, 2017).

On one hand, in the same manner as its American counterpart, EPA culture has often been criminalized and portrayed as pertaining to a dangerous, unruly and marginalized underclass. On the other hand, being uniquely Swedish, EPA culture has strong ties to both young people and rurality. It has been described as a more loosely structured culture than its American counterpart—that is, a sort of rural youth space on wheels. Driving an EPA does not intrinsically mean being involved in EPA culture; however, the farther out into the countryside the participants are located, the stronger their involvement in the youth subculture seems to be (Mis, 2019).

EPA culture has been described as highly gendered in both a quantitative and qualitative sense. A Swedish national television show in 1982 reported that the youth culture of EPAs was a solely male phenomenon (Trafikmagasinet, 1982). Following the logic of vehicle and street subcultures, EPA culture has been shaped by masculine norms, suggesting that it is a hypermasculine space. For example, Lumsden (2010) demonstrated that the very organization of car cultures depends on young women’s presence as sexual objects to affirm a heterosexist world of masculine competition and bravado and to help define the subjects of this world (young men) as men.

Thus, young women have been confined to passenger or girlfriend roles in this culture (cf. Joelsson, 2013, 2015). Earlier studies have similarly shown how ‘greaser chicks’ are spoken about and defined by men, thus having their position within greaser cultures delineated by men (e.g., Åhlström, 2009; O’Dell, 2001).

In recent years, Sweden has witnessed an increase in the number of girls driving EPAs, which has sparked the media’s growing interest in this youth subculture. The number of local media articles about EPAs has increased from two to three articles in the 1980s to about 200 at the beginning of 2000 and 1,615 in the year 2020. The focus on girls driving EPAs has also increased the public debate on and interest in how this might transform the traditionally male EPA culture. The idea for this article originated from a seminar at the Forum for gender studies at Mid Sweden University. The theme of the seminar was the Swedish documentary EPA (Oskarsson & Arnevärn, 2020) about girls in EPA culture. The documentary specifically followed EPA girls hired as drivers for musicians travelling to a small town to perform at a music festival. The documentary portrayed girls picking up the musicians, driving them to the festival and showing them around their town. It provided glimpses into a wide array of the girls’ interactions, for example, hanging out in their EPAs, with their fathers in the garage, or at the kitchen table, where they talked and reasoned about their lives and futures. In many ways, the documentary challenges stereotypical ideas about gender and rural periphery and raises a number of questions about rural girlhood.

Rural girlhood has commonly been contrasted to urbanized femininity, and researchers have similarly discussed how ‘country girls’ are continuously overlooked and spoken about from the perspective of urbanity (Driscoll, 2002). Given the fact that the majority of EPA girls come from a working-class background and live outside urban areas, the focus on girls from the periphery is a key analytical point of departure. We have ultimately observed the need for a more nuanced understanding of EPA girlhood, starting from the girls’ online performances, to explore how place, femininity and resistance intersect. In a study on girls driving EPA tractors, the interviews illuminated how EPA girls negotiate norms and practices within the subculture as well as the larger societal norms related to being young women in contemporary society (Mis, 2019). The study showed that although the gender negotiations within EPA culture are constrained by the spatial and masculinized norms of the culture, the very same norms also create opportunities for girls to oppose conventional notions of femininity (Mis, 2019).

In other contexts, greaser girlhood has likewise been explained as a means for girls to gain greater agency beyond the limits imposed by broader society (Leblanc, 2006). Similarly, research has shown how EPA culture and EPA girlhood are shaped through distancing from hegemonic urban and middle-class norms and ideology (Joelsson, 2015; Mis, 2019).

In this article, we seek to develop an understanding of EPA culture, specifically the ways in which it has been adopted by girls. We similarly view it as an interesting standpoint, allowing us to shed light on marginalized girls and their lifeworlds as they negotiate strategies in the rural parts of Sweden.

Research Context and Analytical Points of Departure

Based on previous research showing how EPA girlhood is shaped through distancing from hegemonic urban and middle-class norms and ideology (Joelsson, 2015; Mis, 2019), a key entry point for our analysis is alternative girlhood. By alternative girlhood, we mean the range of ways that girls consciously position themselves against what they perceive as mainstream in general and conventional forms of femininity in particular.

Drawing on the contributions of girlhood theorists, a key understanding for our work is that girls are and become girls through their negation of multiple and often competing discourses, social meanings and practices—in turn, this positions and defines girls in different ways (Gonick & Gannon, 2014). Earlier explorations of girls and their involvement in subcultures have fruitfully combined Butler’s (1993) understanding of gender with Connell’s (1987) concept of emphasized femininities (see, e.g., Kelly et al., 2005; Leblanc, 2006; Mis, 2019) as a means of shedding light on how girls navigate male-dominated spheres and how, by rebelling against norms, they construct what we view as alternative girlhood or femininity. Butler’s (1993; see also Butler, 1990) explanation of how girls’ acts of opposing and disrupting gendered logic are punished allows for an understanding of the subversive practices and possibilities imbued in EPA girlhood. Gendered categories are made stable through performative acts, though performing a gendered parody can simultaneously disturb this fictitious stability. This aspect of Butler’s (1990, 1993) research is particularly relevant to emphasized femininity, which is understood here as a culturally valued form of femininity—not necessarily the most prevalent but the normative ideal. Following these lines of thought, our analysis centres on whether and how EPA girlhood disturbs and troubles norms in regard to both mainstream society and in the particular subcultural context. This is important because the (re)production of class and gender is by and large a question of knowing cultural reference points and how to deal with them.

The youth researcher Choak (2022) especially brought forward the importance of examining gendered and class-based youth subcultures as a notable means of resistance. Choak argued that contemporary (sub)cultures are still relevant to young women who experience similar structural inequalities as their male peers (in addition to sexism), for whom the (sub)culture has historically been a source of resistance. Similarly, Leblanc (2006) suggested that joining a masculine subculture offers a space for young girls to negotiate conventional norms and expectations.

In the context of EPA girlhood, we believe that locality is also central in this regard. Class circulates as a form of value as it attaches to different bodies and this, in turn, controls the boundaries of sexuality and femininity, where especially women from the periphery are judged and controlled in a different way (Skeggs, 2000). For example, Eriksson (2010) showed that the image of the countryside in Sweden not only expresses geographical differences but also constructs marginality in relation to big cities or metropolitan spaces in terms of class difference and hierarchy. Following Massey’s (2005) definition of place, we understand the way in which the EPA culture is tied to country side lifestyles in terms of its relations to what lies beyond it, as ‘a particular constellation of social relations’ (p. 130), which can also involve connections between disparate places and times. This creates what Massey called a global sense of place, from which references across different subcultures and peripheries can be drawn.

MacDonald and Marsh (2001) argued that it is important to not overestimate young people’s agency in terms of the situations in which they find themselves and their abilities to cope. Nonetheless, by applying this framework, we aim to provide insights into what it means to be girls in EPA culture, examining the variety of ways in which girls enact agency and how they challenge structural constraints. The issue is whether self-identifying as EPA girls offers the possibility of positioning themselves away from mainstream culture—particularly its hegemonic urban and middle-class norms—while transgressing gendered norms in the subcultural context.

Methods and Materials

A key point of departure of our study is our discussion of the issue from the perspective of the girls’ own positions and experiences, examining above all how they themselves express EPA culture. Driscoll (2002, p. 3) criticized and outlined how girls are commonly viewed as sensitive and fragile rather than involved in the production of their surrounding world. In this aspect, focusing on girls is a way to challenge one-dimensional portrayals that, in the same manner, constitute larger societal discourses about girls and girlhood (Mitchell, 2013). It also lays the groundwork for understanding girls in the periphery as active and central participants with regard to the production and negotiation of their surrounding world. Drawing on how EPA girlhood is performed online, we wanted to follow EPA girls’ own voices and lifeworlds as represented on social media, tracing their own positions and how they themselves describe EPA culture. Guided by Oakley’s (1994) question, ‘What would it really mean to study the world from the standpoint of girls and young women both as knowers and actors?’ (p. 25), we thus start with the view of these girls as actors with the potential to challenge, question and change practices and codes in society and EPA culture.

Following the media historian Susan Douglas’s (1995) suggestion to go where the girls are, we similarly wanted to locate the contested spaces of girlhood in venues as distinct as the girls’ online performances within the framework of the EPA subculture. Social media is a key field for youths’ self-expression, where they can communicate across space and time and create, recreate and develop culture (Standlee, 2017). The intensification of the practice of sharing content, such as photos, videos or stories, and of engaging with other users on social media platforms has been one of the most notable changes in visual culture in recent years (Serafinelli & Cox, 2019). Sharing content on social media, such as Instagram or Facebook, is a way of showing representations of identities online, maintaining social relationships (Serafinelli, 2017; Zappavigna, 2016) and creating a general sense of community. We thus view the social media sphere as a particularly important location for studying youth culture and identity and for highlighting girls’ own positioning. Centring our study on girls’ own expressions enabled us to explore how place, femininity and resistance intersect in their online performances. This means that we did not use their online performances as evidence of what it is really like to be part of the EPA subculture; rather, we acknowledged these as ways for girls to reflect on their signifying practices and to communicate their tacit knowledge.

With these objectives in mind, we were mainly guided by a multi-sited ethnographic approach that allowed us to examine the circulation of cultural meanings, objects and identities (Marcus, 1995). However, we should mention that our research positions are those of observers watching the performances of EPA girlhood from an outside perspective; therefore, we do not claim that our interpretations are exactly what the girls were communicating and seeing. Thus, we only partly start out from the lives of the girls, as we have not complemented our interpretations as observers with interviews with the girls. Our study takes their performances as its starting point, but the interpretations and readings are ours, not those of the girls.

There are many ways to conduct this kind of study, such as following people, things, lives or biographies, metaphors, plots or conflicts (Marcus, 1995), which suits it well because EPA culture is not coherent and can contain many different elements. The primary elements are that it is a youth culture, it revolves around EPA tractors, it is present online in a highly visual way and images and movies seem to be central features of how it is performed. In our search for the girls’ expressions of EPA culture, we spent hours screening diverse social media sites, covering Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. To reveal a deeper sense of the girls’ EPA culture and how they perform it, we particularly looked for online materials where girls were the main characters and expressed their own EPA interests.

The sample of the materials used in our analysis was found through looking at the open profiles of young women engaged in EPA culture as well as searching and following hashtags. Thereby, we analysed both specific accounts and hashtags. Hashtags, symbolized by the pound (#) sign and followed by one or more words, make public content searchable. The hashtag feature allows users to search for images that circulate under a common, user-selected hashtag. The hashtags are used as ways of communicating among different accounts, and within the culture, we found several hashtags used to signal that the content had been uploaded by a girl or was about girls. However, since we did not ask for the girls’ consent to participate in this study, and in order to maintain their anonymity, we do not refer to any specific accounts or postings here. Instead, we focus on describing the content and ways in which visuals, audio recordings and texts interact to convey different messages. We are interested in the messages about EPA girlhood that the EPA girls communicated as well as how gender-transgressing practices were conveyed in that context. Moreover, our approach focuses on the content of the performances, not their reception by viewers.

For our qualitative content analysis, we mainly focused on the hashtags #Epabrud (EPAchick; 23 posts), #Tjejkörd (Girldriving; 22 posts), #Plåtluder (Sheetmetalhoe; 505 posts) and #volvogirls (609 posts). We conducted the empirical gathering of data during November and December of 2020. Following these hashtags, we examined photos, video logs (vlogs), videos and blogs.

We analysed the vlogs produced between 2019 and 2020 by drawing on Lomborg’s (2012) ‘selective archiving’ (p. 222), which entails searching for, choosing and archiving specific social media texts over a particular period. Using the hashtags as search terms also led us to two different blogs created by girls with EPAs that we also analysed. In total, approximately 100 different videoclips on TikTok and/or YouTube were analysed. The TikTok videos that we analysed also provided information about how many times the material had been viewed; for example, in total videos with the tag #Epabrud on TikTok had been viewed 1.1 million times.

The different materials collected (videos, texts and audio) were read as a whole, assembled and treated as a single document about the EPA girlhood subculture. Consequently, it is the content, rather than the different postings and individual statements, that is the principal subject of analysis here. Each of us authors followed the screening procedures that we had previously agreed upon, looking for the specific meanings that emerged in the process of viewing the content. In the overall analysis, we paid specific attention to the settings, symbols, use of emojis, captions, composition and how the content was labelled with hashtags. We focused on the following topics while examining the materials: (1) what the girls communicated with their texts, images and vlogs; (2) how these were related to particular places; and (3) how they were performative in relation to different categories such as place, gender and class.

During the first stage, focusing on the texts, images and symbols, we wrote down our findings as concretely as possible. Focusing on the message of the content, we asked: What is it about? Examples of content included videos of girls driving their EPAs, hanging out with friends (inside or outside the EPA), in garages doing repairs and in their homes, discussing their EPAs or activities they planned to do using their EPAs.

During the second stage, we paid attention to the setting, asking: Where is the text or image taking place? Is it a city context? A rural context? Is it daytime or night? We arrived at these questions through our first analysis of the content and a deeper theoretical analysis. Guided by the questions generated by the theoretical framework, we paid attention to if and how the girls negotiated conventional norms and expectations (Leblanc, 2006), navigated male-dominated spheres, constructed an alternative girlhood or femininity (Kelly et al., 2005) and challenged one-dimensional portrayals (Driscoll, 2002; Mitchell, 2013).

For the third stage, we re-read the content and wrote down and shared our reflections about performativity in the content. We discussed these reflections in both personal meeting and email conversations. We subjected these reflections to a theoretical approach that was attentive to the concept of girlhood and how this issue might be connected to EPA culture as displayed in the content. By asking the initial questions of the content and conducting the analytical steps, we found the underlying politics of the content. This was evident in how rurality was expressed in the content via particular symbols, the music they listened to and their undertakings. Together, these expressions led to the theme of ideologies of or against ‘others’. The analysis also revealed specific acts that signalled both adaptation to and challenges against the culture, visible in for example the how they are decorating their EPAs in different ways. This led to the theme of (de)stabilizing the EPA culture as masculine. The themes will be further described and elaborated. Thus, we found the contents of the profiles, groups and online communities to be important representations of EPA girlhood.

Analysis

In our online screenings, the materials—content, pictures and movies—produced a picture of EPA culture not only as closely connected to rural identification but also being on the move. Most of the images we viewed focused on the EPA tractor; however, the environments surrounding the tractors differed. At times, the tractor was parked on a sports field or in a parking lot. Similarly, the pictures often gave the impression of being in motion on the road, for example, showing a young female driving her EPA with friends riding with her and taking selfies of their adventure. Many of the pictures were taken in the evenings, depicting dark scenery, often in a small-town environment—at a gas station, on a street, in a parking lot outside a local grocery store or at an EPA meet in the Swedish countryside. The captions were often about cruising (in Swedish, ströga), and the texts accompanying the pictures were usually single sentences followed by numerous hashtags. At times, the images also displayed girls without their EPAs, being happy, taking pictures outdoors in the countryside or in the forest or taking selfies indoors in front of the mirror. In the process of reviewing the materials, we identified themes and patterns in and across the video makers’ channels and videos that are presented in the themes below.

Ideologies of or Against ‘Others’

The image of EPA youth positioning themselves as being at odds with modernity and urbanity, as described by Joelsson (2015, p. 1253), was strengthened by our observations. By constructing themselves against ‘others’, social markers of race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexual identity and ability became visible (Harris, 2004; Skeggs, 2004). To explore what would emerge through this process of identity construction while paying attention to how rurality was expressed in the content, we analysed the particular symbols used by the girls to decorate their EPAs, the music they listened to and their undertakings. Taking these together, we were able to trace the underlying politics on which EPA culture is built, which presented us with a complex and telling picture. Much of the content referred to the girls as being ‘farmers’, plastering their tractors with stickers stating, ‘We are farmers’. In this context, it was a concept equivalent to referring to themselves as ‘hillbillies’ or ‘white trash’, something that we understood as a way of both taking ownership of how they might be perceived by others and positioning themselves against both urbanized and middle-class ways of life.

Furthermore, the music promoted and displayed in the materials would be regarded as outdated and ‘trashy’ in many other instances. The music was relatively old (with artists from the 1990s and genres associated with older people) or with little cultural capital or both. At the same time, the music bordered on being racist. Combined with the use of symbols, such as the Swedish flag, the American flag and the American southern states’ confederate flag as well as pins with references to racist and nationalistic parties, our materials also pointed to an implicit performance of racism and nationalism that could not be overlooked. When combined with the observation that all the pictures and movies we watched centred on white people, in a country embroiled in a heavy debate regarding immigration, this could also be interpreted as a way of embracing the ‘whiteness’ of ‘white trash’. By bringing together rural and nationalistic pride as a way of ‘othering’, the girls performed their identities in opposition to not only the middle class but also non-White, non-rural others.

At the same time and quite paradoxically, the content of the girls’ online performances was filled with symbols found and originating in subcultures where racialized youth perform subversive acts against middle-class and hegemonic whiteness norms, for example, through the use of a baddie aesthetic with roots in the Afro-American or the Latina community, which has taken a particular expression in the Swedish context. We observed some deviant conduct and boundary-crossing fashion trends, such as drinking Powerking (a caffeinated drink) or wearing acrylic nails, fake lashes, specific clothes and slippers, all often worn in Swedish urban suburbs as a means of performing opposition to the white majority society. Furthermore, although racist and nationalist music comprised the displayed repertoire, the girls also listened to music associated with resistance and ‘the hood’, such as hip-hop.

Another performance that might be understood as transgressive depicted being in conflict with the police, which was manifested through negative statements about the police. The labelling of the police as ‘aina’ also travelled from the hoods to the woods. The word derives from the Turkish word ‘ainaziz’ and can be explained as being without a mirror. The police are called this because they are viewed as so disgusting that they must not possess a mirror. It is also often used in the expression ‘fuck aina!’, which is the equivalent of ‘fuck the police!’ In this way, the materials showed strong connections to the way that the resistance of youth in different peripheries is manifested. Perhaps these connections are possible entry points into the exploration of alternative types of femininity—young women pushing beyond the constraints of society (cf. Lumsden, 2010; Mis, 2019)—as well as a global sense of place, where cross-references between subcultures and peripheries are drawn (Massey, 2005).

When watching the content, we also paid attention to which heterosexist practices and discourses were visible in the materials. They were explicit in the visual materials, with the girls presenting their bodies, long acrylic nails, tight clothes, tattoos and piercings—showing how their reactions to restraint can be understood as turning the ‘unrespectable’ to their advantage. When looking at the images found on social media and in hashtags, the use of words and stickers with phrases connected to unconventional sexual habits seemed to be an important performance. This was also often accompanied by images showing girls in revealing clothes or with sexualized body language. Such postings show that although some forms of EPA girlhood performances opposed class-based and restrained sexuality, they were definitely not subversive, only serving to reinforce existing heterosexual power structures.

Both boys and girls used the hashtag #Plåtluder (Sheetmetalhoe) as captions on their pictures as a way to describe ‘their gang’. Skeggs (2004, p. 169) explored how ‘low-class’ morality is coded on girls’ and women’s bodies through practices of revealing the wrong type of cleavage, which marks out the bodies in question as both tasteless and sexually shameless. The appropriation of such terms includes an awareness of stereotypes while indicating a kind of performative practice that both exaggerates and dismisses cultural biases. Such sexualized displays can also be understood as an articulation of subversion in terms of abject identity (cf. Willem & Arauna, 2019). We also saw displays of drinking alcohol and smoking, which may be perceived as troubling femininity, as this is not what respectable girls are supposed to do (cf. Ambjörnsson, 2004; Skeggs, 2000). Through the use of sexualized hashtags, such as the term ‘hoe’, which is often ascribed to lower-class and unrespectable behaviour and femininity, in a sense, they renegotiated and debunked these stereotypes. Through a variety of performances, the materials we observed portrayed a particular type of sexuality and femininity that could be interpreted as a disidentification with emphasized femininity (cf. Kelly et al., 2005).

In this way, the type of femininity they expressed was connected to our understanding of troubling and disrupting hegemonic and emphasized femininities. However, Leblanc (2006) discussed how teenage girls and young women increasingly start to be controlled and restricted by societal norms, and resisting such constraints is not unique to youth disidentifying with urban or middle-class lifestyles.

From Butler’s (1993) perspective, the process of sexualizing women can be understood as a way of making the masculine gender visible within a heterosexist framework. On one hand, EPA girls accepted certain facets of the ideology that Leblanc (2006) described as a means of showing belonging. They likewise challenged a kind of middle-class form of heterosexist ideology with sexualized, ‘unrespectable’ content. On the other hand, they also played with this aesthetic, likewise showed representations of themselves as ‘ordinary’ teenagers. We argue that in this way, they played with their visual self-representations, as well as with expectations of being ‘white trash’, ‘hillbillies’ or ‘hoes’, as ways of talking back to urbanity.

(De)stabilizing EPA Culture as Masculine

In line with the results of Mis’s (2019) study interviewing EPA girls, it was also evident in our observations that although the girls belonged to a traditionally masculine subculture, they had different ways of destabilizing EPA culture as masculine. One way of performing what we interpret as a gendered power play within the EPA culture (cf. Ferreday, 2008) was the establishment of gendered collective identity, for example, by placing stickers on the backs of their EPAs. These stickers made declarations such as ‘girls drive better’ or that girls with ‘good taste drive Volvos’ (or some other car brand).

Although they used the things that seem significant for EPA culture, our observations revealed different ways that the girls made their tractors gender-specific, such as putting stickers with their names on their EPAs. Videoclips showing how they decorated their EPAs as well as pictures of decorated EPAs were common, and in these posts, we identified several important signifiers of EPA culture. Vaaranen and Wieloch (2002), who studied street racers in Helsinki, understood such behaviour as an attempt to bring elements of femininity into the culture through the modification of their cars; however, the symbols and the language they used conformed to the values of the culture.

Another prevalent practice in EPA culture was the use of air fresheners, which appeared in two types. The first, mostly known as ‘wonderbaums’ (a kind of fragrant spruce), came in many shapes and forms, most commonly as spruce trees but also as soft drink bottles, such as Coca-Cola or Sprite. The second type was ‘poppies’, which are small bottles placed on the front bumper of the EPA. In one of the vlogs, a girl explained how she bought 40 poppies and placed them on the windshield of the EPA, all at the same time.

In EPA culture, its members seemed to mix conforming to its values and challenging them. Through the use of aesthetics, they played around with the gendering of the EPA tractor, decorating it with pink and sparkling details, thus creating a feminized EPA. By doing so, they destabilized it as a masculine phenomenon. The girls also referred to their EPAs with feminine pronouns, for example, posting an image of a styled EPA with the heading, ‘Isn’t she pretty?’ or ‘Me and my baby’. On one hand, this could be interpreted as conforming to a masculine culture in which the love for a car is established within a heterosexist frame. On the other hand, it could also be read as an act of destabilizing this heteropatriarchal relationship.

However, the girls’ videos about mechanical maintenance and repairs and building EPAs depicted their congenial relationships with the opposite sex. Many of the videos showed them working on their car engines and sharing tips and tricks on how to improve or fix EPAs. In these videos, the garage was portrayed as a space for building relationships with both father figures and male friends within the subculture. Garage performances and motor vehicle craftmanship seemed to be central elements of EPA culture, and displaying mechanical labour is here understood as an important signifier of membership in the culture. As we conducted our observations, we discussed how to read the differences between the performances of creating girl spaces within EPA culture and the portrayals of relationships with guys in garages. As stated in many different studies of motor vehicle cultures (e.g., Balkmar, 2012; Best, 2006; Lumsden, 2010; Vaaranen, 2004), women have been assigned marginal, peripheral or supporting roles, which, to some extent, the garage postings could be seen as reproducing. In contrast, when reading how the girls performed agency in these postings and how they framed their garage posts, the central theme was about doing activities together, for example, under the heading ‘Me and my dad’, where the relationships with their dads revolved around motor culture, the EPA, the garage and doing mechanical work.

The EPAs gave the girls freedom in the sense of mobility, allowing them to go out in the evenings and travel. Contrary to earlier research about masculine car culture (e.g., Leblanc, 2006; Lumsden, 2010), the girls were not passengers but drivers. This offered them a space to explore themselves beyond conventional forms of femininity, experimenting with freedom and rebelliousness and taking up (public) space. This could be understood as a way of taking ownership of their girlhood.

The highly mixed content on how EPA girlhood appears on social media shows that the dominant discourse on EPA culture is changeable and resistible. Examining the content reveals the girls as both aligned with and resisting the dominant heterosexist and masculine discourses.

Conclusion

In this article, our aim was to develop an understanding of the ways in which EPA culture has been adopted by girls. Since its beginning, EPA culture has been a youth subculture grounded in resisting not only adulthood but also the majority society, especially in terms of class and urbanity norms. In our analysis, we saw how EPA girls also used a playful way of troubling while toying with concepts such as ‘hoe’ and other attributes connected to the culture; this was continuously made visible in their social media content. In this sense, joining EPA culture could be understood as a space and an outlet for resistance and play with these dominant discourses and prejudices. It could be understood as a way of talking back—not only to masculinity and the majority of society but also to urbanity. Many of the girls’ online performances illuminated how they confirmed their membership in the culture, telling stories about what it means to be ‘authentic’ EPA girls. Such an identity seemed to be particularly centred around being passionately invested in the car, using certain symbols and language, displaying a class and non-urban loyalty, as well as following a gendered script specific to the culture. The type of femininity expressed through images (strong sexuality, makeup and long fingernails) could be perceived as performances conforming to the gender regime of the culture on one hand or interpreted as resistance against the hegemonic ideals of middle-class conventional forms of femininity on the other hand. In the same way, the images depicted a disidentification with urban girls, which also shows loyalty to the culture, including affinity with non-urban EPA guys. While the EPA girls conformed to the masculine EPA culture, they also destabilized it as only masculine by claiming their own space within the culture and invoking a girl collective, for example, by using ‘girl’ in their hashtags. Another instance was how the girls modified and decorated their EPAs.

EPA girls can be understood as breaking norms by being part of a counterculture and defying expectations about what it means to be girls while taking pride in their particular expressions of femininity and position in society. Leblanc (2006) argued that the right way to be a girl, the hegemonic understanding, is similarly connected to the class, where middle-class and (we argue) urban and conventional girlhood and its expressions are regarded as the norm (see also Driscoll, 2002, p. 62). In our view, EPA girls thus represent and express a sort of resistant girlhood. By this, we refer to the range of ways that the girls consciously and unconsciously positioned themselves against mainstream and conventional forms of femininity and sexuality. Through such an understanding, we acquire a more nuanced sense of their location as a standpoint against the hegemonic, urban and ultimately limiting norms and expectations shaping young women’s lives.

In our materials, the images and language used by the girls broke and played with middle-class norms, pointing to how girls should be understood as performing a central role in troubling girlhood and what it means to be girls at large. These EPA girls successfully explored female modes of resistance and multiple feminine positionings, whereas patriarchy—that is, feminist theory dealing with women’s subordination—and dominant discourses on femininity constitute structural axes that set limits and offer possibilities for feminine subjectivities and empowerment.

We view EPA girls as resisting hegemony and power in both spatial and gendered terms. Inspired by Brännström Öhman (2020, pp. 21–22), we argue that the burning tires, the smell of oil and the different femininities performed might represent the sounds of rurality talking back with the voices of young females from inside their EPAs. When we perceive women’s bodies as containers of societal norms, one way of renegotiating womanhood is by breaking those boundaries. Acting as deviants or ‘others’ is also done in relation to class. Along the lines of skater girls in the study by Kelly et al. (2005), EPA girls could also be understood as producing a particular gendered, feminized and alternative type of EPA culture and ‘EPAness’ that is solely their own. Our analysis of the online content posted by the EPA girl greasers themselves shows how they are on the move with their EPAs, not only defying the image of EPA culture as solely masculine but also depicting how they move girlhood.