Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen

Noisy Girls New Subjectivities and Old Gender Discourses

Young women have taken up new subject positions in a historical period when the subject of modernity has been declared dead. Subject positions have been far from selfevident either in the cultural context, or in the young women themselves, a fact that may, paradoxically, have helped them produce modern reflexive subjectivities with greater ease. It has been more necessary for contemporary girls than for boys to ask who they are and who they want to become. By gradually changing the norms for how gender, body or sexuality can be represented in public space, by reframing sexuality and morality in public as well as private, young women over the last three generations have simultaneously carved spaces for new subjectivities for women that are not reducible to gender.Thus, the ‘work of culture’ has also been a ‘work of subjectivity’. General claims of what the processes of modernization entail need specification, not only in relation to gender and other particular identities, but also in relation to societal contexts and to lived life. The new subjectivities are contextualized as ‘made in Scandinavia’ as well as discussed in an ethical perspective as a new form for ‘relational individualism’.

Gender, Love and Education in Three Generations The Way Out and Up

The paths to adulthood for the last three generations of young Norwegian women have been accompanied by significant geographical and social changes. How has this process of modernization been experienced from ‘below’: from the perspective of everyday life and through the eyes of the young women themselves? This article presents results from a three-generational study consisting of interviews with a sample of 18-year-old Norwegian girls, their mothers and grandmothers. The significance of upbringing, parental identification and management of gender for young womens processes of modernization is analysed. These issues affect choices made in education and romantic relationships – choices crucial to social mobility. The study looks at how the processes of socialmobility and culturalmodernization have been associated with the psychologicalproject of becoming adults for these young women.

Potential Spaces - Subjectivities and Gender in a Generational Perspective

Most social and cultural researchers emphasize the way people use cultural concepts to organize their social world and to constitute themselves and others in meaningful ways. In this article, this is taken one step further through taking into account the way that such cultural constructions are animated and loaded with personal meaning and emotions that stem from specific psycho-biographies. Making use of object-relational theory in general, and Chodorow’s theory of ‘power of feeling’ in particular, the authors analyse the self-talk of two young women, positioning themselves in a ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ discourse respectively, relating these discursive positions to the generational context in which they seem to have evolved. The aim is to contribute to a more concrete and historically situated understanding of subjectivities as ongoing processes interweaving both cultural demands and personal constructions, which always involve emotional meaning.

Situated Affect in Traveling Data Tracing Processes of Meaning Making in Qualitative Research

This article brings psychosocial methods into conversation with methodological and ethical debates arising from the reuse of qualitative research material, and with issues of ethnographic practice. Our empirical grounding came from the psychosocial technique of reading research texts aloud in a group, listening in an affectively attuned way, and sharing our responses. The texts we revisited—infant observation notes of interactions between a young mother and her baby—were originally gathered for the Becoming a Mother project. We identified affectively dense and compelling episodes in the data and, as we detail with examples, examined the textual sources of the experienced meanings and affects that these events evoked in group members. We discuss the epistemological and ethical complexities and challenges of this approach to the archiving and reuse of qualitative empirical material and show how the process of slow, affectively attuned reading of field notes and interviews may enrich qualitative research practices.

Fun in Gender—Youth and Sexuality, Class and Generation

Is the norm of love as a prerequisite for sexual relations becoming less prominent among girls today? The article looks into the changing cultural framing of young, heterosexual, female desire during the last three generations, and how class differentiation among women was established in new ways in these processes. The analysis draws on a study of young Norwegian women over three generations (born in the 1910s and 1920s, the 1940s and early 1950s, and in 1971–72). Throughout all generations young women have been looking for the fun in gender—for the grandmothers connected to innocent infatuations, for the mothers to romantic love, while the daughters seem to be on their way to discover the fun of sex. It is argued that this quest for fun in gender has been a progressive force of social change, however often neglected both by feminists and in discourses on gender equality. The aspects that are highlighted, to different degrees in the different generations, seem to circulate around three themes: firstly, the relation between sexuality and reproduction; secondly, the relation between sexuality and love; and thirdly, the relation between sexuality and independence. The grandmothers had to navigate between being seen as nice or cheap, the mothers between cheap and prim, the daughters between liberated and exposed. In all generations, however, there is a specially designed category for young girls who have too much sex or sex under the wrong circumstances, and this category has almost inextricably been connected to working‐class girls and in this way simultaneously worked as a double threat for middle‐class girls.

Conflicts in the habitus: the emotional work of becoming modern

This article argues that Bourdieus concept of habitus, and, in particular, the way habitus is transmitted intergenerationally, can be enhanced by considering conflictual conscious and unconscious processes that emerge in relationships. We suggest that Christopher Bollass discussions of the ‘unthought known’ and of ‘transformational objects’ add relational depth to the concept of habitus and thus contribute to developing a more psycho-social understanding of the relation between agency and change. Drawing on in-depth interviews with a socially mobile chain of a middleclass grandmother, mother and daughter in a period of rapid change, we describe how conflicts in the habitus are produced relationally and can either impede or motivate desires for change. Relational and object relational psychoanalytic theories offer a way to move beyond what we consider a problem in Bourdieus theory of habitus that derives from his assumption of a subject who either consciously opts for change in habitus when faced with new social demands or non-consciously and unconflictually reproduces habitus.

European Gender Lessons: Girls and Boys at Scout Camps in Denmark, Portugal, Russia and Slovakia

The article investigates the tensions between and within models of gender equality and gender complementarity by studying children who are in the midst of learning to apply these gender models in practice. Children (aged 11–15 years) were observed and interviewed while they participated in scout camps in Denmark, Portugal, Slovakia and Russia. Through structural and symbolic gender splits in spaces, positions, activities and competences, children create, reproduce and sometimes challenge the specific gender hierarchies of their culture: they learn the gender lessons of ‘heroes and mothers’, ‘soldiers and waitresses’, ‘father and child’ and ‘adult and boy’. The article is based on the project ‘One of the Boys? Doing Gender in European Scouting’.

Historical, cultural, and emotional meanings: Interviews with young girls in three generations

People use cultural concepts to organize and construct their social worlds. The question asked in this paper is how such constructions are infused with personal meaning and emotions from specific psychobiographies, and how this may facilitate or impede cultural and social changes, for instance in the form of what one could call a certain inner psychological readiness for some discourses and not for others, for some structural changes and not for others. Using examples from an on-going study of young girls in three generations, the paper discusses the relations between historical context, discursive constructions and emotional reality as they appear in texts of interviews. The interaction between these three levels of meaning is also illustrated in an analysis of the housewife of the 1950s.

Gender recipes among young girls

Interviewed in connection with her fiftieth birthday, the well-known feminist pioneer Germaine Greer said that she had but one hope for the future, namely that she would grow up before growing old. Women’s access to modernity has in fact been understood as just that, as a sort of arrival at the kind of independence and individuality which will finally give them the status of grown-ups. There have been two main discourses two stories of awakening (Johnson, 1993) in this modern feminist project: one says that a woman should grow up by becoming an individual resembling a man, thus implying that femininity is a burden (cf de Beauvoir, 1972, about women lacking transcendence). This view has been criticized for mimicking the male discourse on femininity as the deficient ’other’. The reaction has been to say that there are alternative ways of development: one can become a grown-up in a feminine way, through listening to the ’different voice’ of women (Gilligan, 1982; Irigaray, 1993, against de Beauvoir). However, questions about the relationship between such discourses and the desires of women are rarely asked: why are these discourses accepted by women, and why do they work in a given historical context, while at the same time as they are rejected as extremely old-fashioned in another? How does the discourse fulfil the needs and tastes of the subjects, whose needs the discourse also formulates and partly produces? In our project Girls and Boys in Change? ‘ we see that these discourses are in fact quite vital as ’recipes’2 for the way that gender is constructed among young girls of today. In this article we shall take a closer look at the ways in which these discourses are lived, and the reasons that they become psychologically potent for certain girls.

Gender, body and beauty in adolescence: Three psychological portraits:

two grannies will begin by telling us in a rather moralizing tone of voice that they had neither the time nor the money to engage in such futile activities. Nevertheless, they have quite vivid and detailed recollections of their own development, their physical assets and flaws just as they can give us entrancing descriptions of the lovely dresses and hats that were made for them. Thus, it seems that body and beauty are themes with