Project 4:21 Transitions to Womanhood: Developing a psychosocial perspective in one longitudinal study

Abstract

In this short piece we discuss how we approached the messy and intractable issues of objectivity and reflexivity, fiction, fantasy and the production of knowledge in the qualitative, longitudinal study of girls growing up, ‘Project 4:21 Transitions to Womanhood’ (Walkerdine and Lucey 1989, Walkerdine 1996, Walkerdine et al. 2001). We try to give a sense of how we worked with conscious and unconscious psychological processes and theorized their place, not only in the research process but in the very constitution of contemporary gendered and classed subjectivities. This kind of approach, though it does require a willingness on the part of the researcher to look inward, is not a turning away from an engagement with the social world (May 1998), but rather an attempt to take account and make sense of that which tends to be denied or refused in researchers’ and participants’ rational accounts of the social world and linear accounts of history (especially the history of the working and middle classes). For instance, sociological accounts which assert the death of class because of the lack of evidence of ‘class consciousness’ amongst the working classes are silent on the overwhelming evidence of the ‘unconscious’ aspects of social class; of the kinds of identifications, ‘dis’identifications (Skeggs 1997), disavowals and desires that go towards the blurring and the breaching of contemporary class boundaries and the persistent reproduction of class difference. In order to engage with psychological processes in individual and social life, we had a number of interconnected starting points: that there are hidden aspects of human mental and emotional life which are active at the dynamic level of the unconscious; that the human subject is not an entirely rational subject (Cohen 1999, Hollway and Jefferson 2000); that anxiety and the psychic mechanisms developed to defend against it are central to the