Julia Cook

The Discursive Construction and Performance of Gendered Identity on Social Media

This article looks at the construction and performance of gendered identity through a sub-section of Facebook web pages belonging to the Slut Walk movement. The authors’ analysis suggests that gender is constructed through the subjects’ participation in the ‘post-feminist masquerade’ through which their gendered identity is defined in relation to a hegemonic masculine ideal. This situates the web pages within a space characterized through the ambivalent and appropriative treatment of feminism and further, coiled within an acute tension between feminist and post-feminist discourses. Acts of resistance are framed as individual, momentary ruptures of Judith Butler’s heterosexual matrix of ‘cultural intelligibility’. The online context of these ruptures is found to vest a creative potential, by removing the constraints of time and location, indicating that the impact of these ruptures may extend beyond its immediate environment.

Young adults’ hopes for the long-term future: from re-enchantment with technology to faith in humanity

ABSTRACT Recent scholarly research has claimed that young people are predominantly concerned with their immediate ‘horizon of planning’, resulting in an outlook upon the future that is dominated by present-day concerns. By distinguishing between choices and plans, on the one hand, and hope and faith, on the other, this article analyses how young people relate to the future through their attitudes about responsibility and technology in order to complicate this narrative. The data are drawn from an interview project in which 28 young adults (aged 18–34) discuss both their own future and a general idea of the future of society. Two key findings are discussed. Firstly, respondents are found to place faith in the potential of technology to mitigate future predicaments, and secondly, respondents are found to ascribe mystical or magical qualities to technology. Drawing on these findings, this article suggests that the oft-cited attitude that technology will develop in time to meet the needs of the future does not simply signify a deferral of responsibility onto future generations. Instead, by drawing on scholarship on re-enchantment it is argued that for young adults technological development can represent a refuge of faith and hope for the future.

Young people’s strategies for coping with parallel imaginings of the future

Sociological work has often characterized the contemporary future horizon as a space crowded with risks and contingencies. This view has prompted a number of claims that young adults conceptualize the future predominantly in terms of the choices and plans that they make to mitigate against such concerns. As an extension of this logic, a number of studies have suggested that young adults conceptualize the long-term future extending beyond their own lives separately from their more immediate horizon of planning (Leahy et al., 2010; Toffler, 1974). This paper discusses how young adults relate to the long-term and more immediate future concurrently, and in doing so considers the points at which the strategies that they use to cope with contingency in their own lives may intersect with the ways that they approach their fears, hopes and imaginings of the long-term future. The data for this paper are drawn from an interview project in which young adults (aged 18–34) were asked to discuss their own futures, and a general idea of the future. The findings are used to form the beginnings of a typology of the approaches that young adults may adopt when engaging with the future, which is then drawn upon to propose that the ways in which they engage with the long-term future are often related to the strategies that they employ when facing their own futures.

Strategies for Relating to the Personal and Societal Future

While the previous chapter presented an overview of popular theoretical accounts which have laid claim to the character of the contemporary future horizon, due to their macro-focus, these accounts do not allow for consideration of the relationship between perceptions of the future and individuals or subjectivities. As such, this chapter considers how subjectivities can be theorised in the context of the study that informs this book. After considering a number of competing theoretical accounts, the work of Margaret Archer is chosen for the purposes of this work. Drawing on Archer’s modes of reflexivity, this chapter considers how—and indeed if—outlooks upon the future may be related to specific types of selves.

Discourses of the Long-Term Future

This chapter continues to present the results of the empirical study informing this book and in so doing considers how individuals imagine the future of their society. The respondents are found to use discourses—specifically, those of apocalypse, technology and intergenerational continuity or decline—to depict the future. These discourses are, however, not used homogeneously. They are instead interpreted in ways that reflect two opposed accounts of the future, one depicting a narrative of decline ending in an eventual point of crisis, and the other animated by a broad sense of hope. This chapter argues that these competing accounts of the future each constitute a viable social or future imaginary as they are socially shared and provide both factual and normative accounts of the societal future.

Future Imaginaries in Theory and Practice

This chapter considers whether the ways in which the respondents in this study imagined the societal future had any overlap with popular theoretical accounts of the contemporary era (and by extension, its future horizon). Rather than simply comparing the respondents’ imaginings of the future to these macro accounts, the future imaginaries that were identified in the previous chapter are considered alongside these accounts with the aim of comparing units of similar generality. Although the imaginary premised on a narrative of societal decline and eventual crisis aligns with some of the main tenets of these accounts, the second, hope-infused imaginary does not appear to be compatible with their claims. This chapter therefore proposes an alternative way of interpreting the contemporary future.

The Utility of Hope

This chapter considers how the strategies for coping with long-term uncertainties employed by the respondents in the study informing this book can be conceptualised. The discussion focuses specifically on the use of hope in coping with uncertainty due to both the prominence of hope in the findings, and the prevailing association between uncertainty and fear which has, until recently, sidelined hope as a serious object of study in this area. Empirical and theoretical studies of hope are used to address issues such as the relationship that hope may have with agency or action. Ultimately, this chapter concludes that hope has utility for future thinking not because it has a specific moral orientation, but because it is comparatively more productive than other expressions such as denial.

Gendered expectations of the biographical and social future: young adults’ approaches to short and long-term thinking

ABSTRACT Numerous studies have found that although young adults are arguably less constrained by gendered norms and expectations than previous generations, they have nevertheless continued to imagine their biographical futures in highly gendered ways. In this paper I draw on an analysis of 28 in-depth interviews in which 16 women and 12 men (aged 18–34) were asked to discuss their expectations for both the biographical and social future. The results of this study largely confirm the findings of previous scholarship, with young women often viewing childbearing and caring responsibilities as compulsory, while young men largely viewed these commitments as complementary to their chosen careers. This paper extends existing findings in this area by examining, firstly, whether these perceptions of the biographical future are mirrored in the participants’ views of the long-term, social future, and secondly, what implications such views may have when they are extended into this register. In so doing it ultimately finds that the gender norms that shape young adults’ expectations for their own futures are echoed in their outlooks upon the social future.

Staying, leaving and returning: Rurality and the development of reflexivity and motility:

Studies of rural areas have necessarily been occupied by discussions of migration, the experience of which is often concentrated among young adults in the years immediately following the end of secondary education. This dynamic has been attributed to a mobility imperative that equates leaving rural areas for the opportunities offered by urban centres with success, and staying in rural areas with failure. This article interrogates the distinction between those who leave rural areas and those who stay, drawing on life-course research that contextualises the post-secondary mobility imperative within individuals’ wider biographies in order to challenge claims that mobility is associated with the development of personal resources that lie outside the reach of those who are not mobile. The article presents data taken from a 20-year longitudinal panel study of individuals’ post-school pathways, drawing specifically on interviews conducted with participants who grew up in rural areas. By focusing on the significance of relational considerations, the authors contend that the mobility decision-making process results in the development of reflexivity about one’s mobility irrespective of its outcome.