This article examines new conceptions of gender and sexuality in China, asking how and why they have become so integral to the organization of service work regimes there. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in three urban Chinese retail settings, this article demonstrates how essentialized conceptions of gender and sexuality powerfully communicate class distinctions in service settings through associations with the imagery of China’s shift from socialism to a marketized society. A shift from the socialist “iron rice bowl” to the “rice (...) bowl of youth” infuses youthful, feminine, urban bodies with value while simultaneously devaluing middle-aged and rural women. This article argues that an essentializing discourse of gender legitimates new inequalities in urban China by masking the class distinctions simultaneously produced. (shrink)

Women’s right to exercise choice has been one of feminism’s central political claims. Where second wave feminism focused on the constraints women faced in making free choices, choice feminism more recently reorients feminist politics with a call for recognition of the choices women are actually making. From this perspective the role of feminism is to validate women’s choices without passing judgement. This article analyses this shift in orientation by locating women’s choices within a late modern gender order in which the (...) ideal of choice has increasingly been associated with a new form of femininity characterized as self-determining, individuated and ‘empowered’. Instead of offering an effective analysis of the changing social conditions within which the relationship between feminism, femininity and individual choice has become increasingly complicated, choice feminism directs criticism at feminist perspectives characterized as overly prescriptive. This critique fails to appreciate how feminist ideals have been recuperated in the service of late capitalism and neoliberal forms of governance. By failing to engage critically with processes currently impacting on the social organization of gender choice feminism aids in the constitution of an individuated neoliberal feminist subject which performs cultural work vital to the reproduction of neoliberal governmentality. (shrink)

Although the meaning and usefulness of Erving Goffman’s work are still being debated today, few would doubt the importance of his contributions to the sociological study of the self, emotions, deviance, and social interaction. Less well known to most contemporary sociologists is his effort to provide a sociological account of voluntary risk taking—participation in gambling, high-risk sports, dangerous occupations, certain forms of criminal behavior, and the like—activities he classified as ‘action’. While Goffman’s study of action anticipated the expansion of volitional (...) risk taking in Western societies in recent decades, most contemporary research on this trend has been guided by a different concept—the notion of ‘edgework’. Contrasting the action and edgework approaches along three key parameters—fateful action versus corporeal edges, embodied semiotics versus embodied experience, and dramaturgical reflexivity versus hermeneutic reflexivity—reveals how the action and edgework concepts capture conflicting motivations for voluntary risk taking. Finally, this article considers how Goffman’s action framework can be reoriented to contemporary social conditions and integrated with the edgework perspective to yield a multidimensional theory of risk agency in late modern society. (shrink)

The concept of the ‘material’ was the focus of much feminist work in the 1970s. It has always been a deeply contested one, even for feminists working within a broadly materialist paradigm of the social. Materialist feminists stretched the concept of the material beyond the narrowly economic in their attempts to develop a social ontology of gender and sexuality.Nonetheless, the quality of the social asserted by an expanded sense of thematerial – its ‘materiality’ – remains ambiguous. New terminologies of materiality (...) and materialization have been developed within post-structuralist feminist thought and the literature on embodiment. The quality of ‘materiality’ is no longer asserted – as inmaterialist feminisms – but is problematized through an implicit deferral of ontology in these more contemporary usages, forcing us to interrogate the limits of both materialist and post-structuralist forms of constructionism. What really matters is how these newer terminologies of ‘materiality’ and ‘materialization’ induce us to develop a fuller social ontology of gender and sexuality; one that weaves together social, cultural, experiential and embodied practices. (shrink)

This article offers a discursive and ethnomethodological approach to analysing the interplay between class, discourse and talk. Drawing on feminist and sociological work that foregrounds the cultural dimensions of class, this article moves beyond the cultural approach by using the insights of discursive psychology and ethnomethodology. Conceptualising class as a ‘doing’, this article analyses empirical examples that emerged from a qualitative study on young women's relationships with feminism. Providing a novel theoretical framework, but also a close, empirically grounded analysis, the (...) article argues that a discursive and ethnomethodological approach can offer useful insights to the study of class in general, and the cultural approach in particular. (shrink)

Consumer economies of late capitalist societies have come to be dominated by a powerful cultural narrative of the successful life. Success has increasingly been defined in terms of material attainment, the achievement of status and what might be described, in popular language, as the pursuit of the ‘snazzy life’. This model of what constitutes ‘the good life’ avoids recognizing the shadow that haunts such narratives; namely the possibility that one may not succeed and as a result be deemed a failure. (...) This paper suggests that engaging with the often neglected theme of failure enables a contemporary feminist theology of loss to emerge; a theology that helps, moreover, to shape richer understandings of what it might mean to live a ‘good’ life. (shrink)

This article critically examines what might be titled the feminisation of success that is ascribed to optimistic characterisations of new constructions of femininity for young women in the UK, particularly in relation to classed positions. In order to do this it is necessary to understand the complex relationship between feminism, post-feminism, neoliberalism and femininities, especially since the millennium. Young women have been positioned as the beneficiaries of successful social and political change which, together with ideas of individualism and reflexive constructions (...) of identity, almost mandate young women to embody success. The article seeks to examine and assess the discursive constructions of ‘successful femininities’ in relation to their normative limitations and asks in particular whether the putative existence of ‘new femininities’ is attainable for all young women. With the impact of over a decade of neoliberal policies and austerity measures being felt by many, it is argued that the discourses of ‘successful femininities’ work to obscure the recalibrated inequalities that have been forged by neoliberal conditions. (shrink)

Interrogating the oft-stated emotion of ‘guilt’ amongst young female activists, I develop a theoretical account of why young women seem to be more burdened with such negative emotions than young men. Drawing on feminist theorising, I posit that young women’s emotional accounts of activist work highlight the retraditionalisation of gender under neoliberal modernity. I provide evidence of the gender-differentiated demands that heightened forms of reflexivity place on women, young women in particular. I then consider alternative conceptions of politics, grounded in (...) the work of Hannah Arendt, and extending my own earlier work on relational agency (Kennelly, 2009). Drawing on phenomenology to offer an account of political engagement grounded in the lived experiences of activists, I suggest that social movements might be bolstered through a deepened understanding of the role played by webs of relations and world-building practices, without losing sight of the gendered implications of such a turn. (shrink)

Women have outnumbered men as followers of Christianity at least since the transition to industrial capitalist modernity in the West. Yet developments in women's lives in relation to employment, family and feminist values are challenging their Christian religiosity. Building on a new strand of gender analysis in the sociology of religion, this article argues that gender is central to patterns of religiosity and secularization in the West. It then offers a case study of evangelical Christianity in England to illustrate how (...) changes in women's lives are affecting their religiosity. Specifically, it argues that evangelical Christianity continues to be important among women occupying more traditional social positions, but adherence is declining among the growing number whose lives do not fit this older model. (shrink)

In this article, the authors draw on two qualitative, longitudinal studies of young people’s transitions to adulthood and how they construct these transitions over time in social, cultural and material terms. The authors focus on the hopes, anxieties and imagined futures of young women. They discuss the individualization thesis, and the contradiction for female individualization between expectations of equality and the reality of inequality between the genders. The debate is moved beyond ‘pitiful girls’ and ‘can-do girls’ by exploring how young (...) women in the UK and Finland anticipate and try to avoid being locked into the lives of adult women. (shrink)

As has been widely observed, histories of feminism have often been conceived via notions of generation where feminism is positioned as a kind of familial property, a form of inheritance and legacy which is transmitted through generations. Thus feminism and its history have been imagined as following a familial mode of social reproduction. Despite the dominance of this model, it has nonetheless been subject to critique, not least because of its reliance on teleological and progressive notions of history. Judith Roof, (...) for example, has called for new conceptualizations of temporality in an attempt to decouple histories of feminism from a generational model. This need to move away from a generational model is also underscored by what commentators such as Angela McRobbie have identified as a dispersal of feminism – a broad-scale circulation of feminist values in popular culture – as well as by the emergence of a certain kind of reflexivity whereby past and current feminist practices are increasingly subject to critique. For McRobbie such developments are understood as part of the articulation of a post-feminism in which feminism can no longer be passed on as it is positioned as having already passed away. However, in this article via an exploration of recent accounts of the passing of feminism it is suggested that what allows for a declaration of this passing is an attachment to feminism as a particular way of knowing as well as to a particular arrangement of the social. Indeed, it will be suggested that recent histories of feminism and commentaries on the state of contemporary feminism are driven not only by generational logics but also by these attachments – attachments which lose and fix both feminism and women in time. (shrink)