“I Just Wanna Be a Woman”: Some Not So Simple Ways: Families, Femininity and/as Affective Entanglement

Abstract

Catherine is age 21 years. She is part of a research project that has followed her life from age 4 until 21 years. She is driving along in her car and we hear a song, with the lines “I just wanna be a woman” sung plaintively over and over again. This article considers what the song might mean in the context of what we learn from a very close reading of observation and interview data with her, her parents, and teachers at various stages of her life. The article describes the process of conducting a slow reading and argues that it presents to us an approach to what I call “affective entanglement” as an antidote to classificatory prescriptions of causality. We begin to understand how the complexity of the entanglement of family lives, lived at particular historical periods and in specific geographical locations, gives us a detailed insight into not only the entanglements that shape Catherine’s life, but also allow us to understand something about the affective transmission of class, gender, and sexuality in all its complexity.