Sue Sharpe

Inventing adulthoods: a biographical approach to understanding youth citizenship

Traditionally adulthood and citizenship have been synonymous. Yet adulthood is changing. In this paper we explore how young peoples evolving understandings of adulthood may contribute towards an understanding of citizenship within the broader context of increasingly extended and fragmented transitions. The paper draws on a unique qualitative longitudinal data set in which 100 young people, from contrasting social backgrounds in the United Kingdom, have been followed over a five-year period using repeat biographical interviews. We present first the themes that emerged from a cross-cut analysis of the first of three rounds of interviews distinguishing between relational and individualised understandings of adulthood. We then present a model we developed to capture the ways that young people sought out opportunities for competence and recognition in different fields of their lives. Finally a case study that follows a young woman through her three interviews illustrates how these themes can appear in an individual trajectory. We offer the model and case study as a way of exploring a more subjective approach to citizenship in which participation is not deferred to some distant future in which economic independence is achieved, but is understood as constantly constructed in the present.

Making Modern Mothers

What does motherhood mean today? Drawing on interviews with new mothers and intergenerational chains of women in the same family, this exciting and timely book documents the transition to motherhood over generations and time. Exploring, amongst other things, the trend to later motherhood and the experience of teenage pregnancy, a compelling picture emerges. Becoming a mother is not only a profound moment of identity change but also a site of socio-economic difference that shapes womens lives.

Pleasure, pressure and power: Some contradictions of gendered sexuality

The AIDS epidemic has encouraged public discussion of safer sex, but heterosexual young women have to negotiate sexual relationships with men in situations in which sex is defined largely in terms of mens needs and which lack notions of a positive female sexuality or female desires. Analysis of data from the Women, Risk and AIDS Project is interpreted to show both the range of pressures on young women to engage in sexual practices which are risky, violent or not pleasurable, but also the possibilities for young women to empower themselves in sexual relationships. Womens control over sexual safety is undermined by the dominance of male sexuality and womens compliance in satisfying mens desires. Empowerment is a contradictory and contested process requiring both critical reflection (intellectual empowerment) and the transforming of sexual experiences (experiential empowerment), but some young women are able to put into practice ways of negotiating safe and pleasurable sexual encounters with men.

Deconstructing virginity - young people's accounts of first sex

In their first (hetero)sexual experience, young people are enticed into the gendered practices, meanings and power relations of heterosexuality. This paper draws on findings from two primarily qualitative studies of young peoples sexual practices and understandings: the Women, Risk and AIDS Project and the Men, Risk and AIDS Project. The paper suggest that for young men, first (hetero)sex is an empowering moment through which agency and identity are confirmed. For young women the moment of first (hetero)sex is more complicated, and their ambivalent responses to it are primarily concerned with managing loss. By exploring and contrasting young peoples accounts of their first sexual experiences and the meanings that virginity hold for them, the paper reveals the asymmetry of desire, agency and control within (hetero)sex. The paper concludes by considering the implication of these findings for practice.

Power and Desire: The Embodiment of Female Sexuality

In recent years the study of the body has blossomed from a neglected area of social science to a focus of attention from feminists and others (e.g., Turner, 1984; Featherstone etal. 1991, Sawicki, 1991; Shilling, 1991; Scott and Morgan, 1993). Recently, feminists have been attracted to the work of Foucault and others which emphasizes that although physical bodies exist, bodies are primarily social constructions (e.g., Bordo, 1988). Looking on the bodies which engage in sexual activities as socially constructed has been a very productive way of thinking about how femininity and masculinity can be inscribed on the body. It has seemed to offer an escape from the trap of seeing sex as essentially biological. Feminists, however, have disagreed quite profoundly on how to take account of the physicality or embodiedness of social encounters (Ramazanoglu, 1993). There has been a tendency to associate any sense of bodies as material with a naive biological essentialism. This has pushed feminist theorists away from thinking about sex as both a gendered and an embodied experience, in which female embodiment differs from male embodiment (Bartky, 1990:65). The perceived opposition between essentialism and poststructuralism perpetuates a conceptual dualism between a natural, essential, stable, material body and a shifting, plural, socially constructed body with multiple potentialities. We do not have space to explore the debates over essentialism, but Fuss usefully points out that theories of the social construction of female sexuality do not escape the pull of essentialism: one can talk of the body as matter without assuming that matter has a fixed essence (1989:5, 50). In this paper we argue that there is no simple conceptual dualism which allows us to distinguish the material, biological, female body from the social meanings, symbolism and social management of the socially

Reputations: Journeying into Gendered Power Relations

In this chapter we reflect on some of the findings from two feminist research projects carried out between 1988 and 1992 in the UK. The Women, Risk and AIDS Project was based primarily on unstructured interviews with 150 young women in London and Manchester, and the Men, Risk and AIDS Project was a comparative study of 50 young men in London.1

Storying qualitative longitudinal research: sequence, voice and motif

We suggest here that the analysis, interpretation and representation of qualitative longitudinal (QL) data requires methodological innovation leading to new forms of representation that elude the usual temporality of writing research. To illustrate this argument, we outline a case history method-in-process developed to condense intensive volumes of biographical data generated over 12 years, and deal with the intersection of different timescapes through which individuals move (biographical, generational, historical). We describe changing strategies for managing, analysing and representing data employed by the Inventing Adulthoods team, examining our practice in the light of key methodological issues raised by qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) and making that reflexive and collective research practice explicit.

Family fortunes: an intergenerational perspective on recession

This paper draws on longitudinal qualitative data from a study of family dynamics arising from the arrival of a new generation. It begins by outlining a conceptual framework for exploring historical and economic events through the accounts of families. It then outlines some of the very different ways that individuals responded to questions about the recession, reflecting both their distinct generational positions as well as their relative exposure to risk. How the credit crunch is experienced varies considerably according to the situations of individuals and families, with meaning created retroactively. The way in which individuals narrate their situations depends in part on the kinds of stories that members of the family tell about themselves and their relationships, as well as the less conscious family dialogue that lies behind these. Through an in-depth longitudinal case study, it is shown how family narratives change over time in response to events, suggesting how events in the present resonate with the unresolved legacy of events in the past.

Acting up and acting out: encountering children in a longitudinal study of mothering

Despite a proliferation of research exploring children’s lives and relationships over the past two decades, there is a notable absence of research which explores family relationships from the perspective of very young children (age 0–3). This article reports on data emerging from a study of new mothering with a particular focus on very young children’s active engagement with wider family narratives. The study employs a qualitative longitudinal design, and women have been followed from pregnancy into motherhood. Most recently we have attempted to document a ‘day in the life’ of the mothers using participant observation techniques. This approach has enabled us to capture the emergence of the child (around 2 years old). This article focuses on examples of interaction between researcher, mother and child relating to food, exploring how researcher subjectivity can be interrogated as a source of evidence regarding the place of the child within the research and family dynamic including examples of ‘acting up’ and ‘acting out’ on the part of all participants.

The Making of Modern Motherhoods: Storying an Emergent Identity

The increasing participation of women in further and higher education and the labour force since the Second World War has transformed the shape and meaning of women’s biographies reflected in a trend towards later motherhood (Lewis, 1992). Yet stagnation in social mobility and widening inequality has also heightened differences between women, reflected in differential patterns of family formation depending on educational and employment status (Crompton, 2006). The transition to motherhood is not only an important site of identity change for women but also an arena where socio-economic differences between women are defined and compounded through the creation of distinct cultures of child-rearing (Byrne, 2006; Clarke, 2004; Tyler, 2008).