Neighbourhoods that are populated by a racially diverse working-class and by society marginalized are places often associated with violence and crime; phenomenon intimately intertwined with masculinity. Less is known about the lives of girls in these areas. Rooted in an intersectional perspective, using Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘girling’, together with theories on doing gender, this article aims to explore what meaning gender plays in girls and young women’s narratives of growing up in racially diverse and marginalized neighbourhoods in Sweden. Thematic analysis was used to analyse 21 interviews with girls and young women aged 13–22 years old. The results show how be(coming) a girl in these neighbourhoods entails having their bodily lives circumscribed by the way they are being addressed as girls, and being restricted in their movements. Regardless of this, the girls claim it is easier being a girl than a boy, although this comes with the price of self-restraining, occupying normative femininity as a necessary way of direction towards a pursued future. Resistance, then, is rather directed against discriminatory spatial expectations, than specifically gendered restrictions, at the same time as such expectations always intersect space, gender and race.