Abstract
Analyses of young feminine identities have often focused on consumption, career and intimate life as separate spheres. In this article, we bring these together to nuance the concept of the ‘top girl’. Drawing on a qualitative study of young Norwegian ‘top girls’’ alcohol consumption and lifestyles we explore how ‘appropriate’ feminine identities are configured in the present and in the future. We analyse how the egalitarian context shapes the contours of the ‘top girl’ and find that ‘progressive’ values are central to our participants’ present lifestyles. However, these progressive lifestyles are expected to collide with the ‘square’ lives the participants see awaiting them as middle-class adult women and mothers. We argue that as the participants grow older, the range of legitimate, middle-class femininities is narrowing. Further, we suggest that in an egalitarian context such as the Norwegian context the ‘top girl’ lacks an attractive, adult equivalent.
Highlights
In contemporary western societies, young women are objects of both high expectations as well as intense scrutiny (Gill, 2007; Gill and Scharff, 2011; McRobbie, 2007)
These progressive lifestyles are expected to collide with the ‘square’ and rigid lives the participants see awaiting them as middle-class adult women and mothers, generating ambivalence towards this future
The research participants were recruited through the first author’s extended network using a targeted sampling strategy that focused on female participants who lived in cities, held higher education degrees and were without children; characteristics associated with higher alcohol consumption (Horverak and Bye, 2007)
Summary
Young women are objects of both high expectations as well as intense scrutiny (Gill, 2007; Gill and Scharff, 2011; McRobbie, 2007). The post-feminist discourse of ‘female success’ (Crofts and Coffey, 2016: 503) links young women with ‘capacity, success, attainment, enjoyment, entitlement, social mobility and participation’ (McRobbie, 2007: 721) – attributes conventionally associated with masculinity (Budgeon, 2014; Ringrose, 2007) While these may be progressive identities, they are ‘consummately and reassuringly feminine’ (McRobbie, 2009: 557), thereby not upsetting the broader gender structure (Budgeon, 2014). What is argued to be ‘Norwegian’ is to follow a code of ‘modesty’ (Gullestad, 1992), distance oneself from what is seen as ‘snobbish’ or ‘elitist’ (Jarness, 2017) and even elites are expected to display this ‘downto-earthness’ (Jarness and Flemmen, 2019) What this literature is less clear about is how gender plays into these culturally specific ways of drawing (middle-) class distinctions.
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