'I believe in ketchup!': Girlhood, punk, and Moodysson's we are the best!

This article engages with the field of girlhood studies to offer a reading of Lukas Moodysson's feature film Vi är bäst! (We are the Best!, 2013). Two intertwined yet apparently political and cultural systems are examined: the Swedish secular, egalitarian welfare states of the 1930s to the 1970s, often called Folkhemmet (the People's Home), and the first-wave Punk movement from the late 1970s and early 1980s, imported from abroad but itself a significant youth subculture in Sweden. Punk offers the possibility of new forms of inclusion and participation within a musical subgenre or movement for girls and young women; in the Swedish context, this allows girls and young women to imagine a position outside the consensus culture. However, in line with Moodysson's other films, We are the Best! does not challenge heteronormative paradigms in ways that are unproblematic or necessarily radical.