Trailblazing the gender revolution? Young people's understandings of gender diversity through generation and social change

Kim Allen,Karen Cuthbert,Joseph J Hall,Sally Hines,Sharon Elley

doi:10.1080/13676261.2021.1923674

Kim Allen, Karen Cuthbert + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2021.1923674

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Abstract

ABSTRACT Against a backdrop of increasing cultural visibility of people who identify across, between or beyond the categories of male and female, young people have been positioned within the wider social imaginary as radical trailblazers for a new, progressive gender order. This paper provides original insights that empirically ground and interrogate such claims. Drawing on findings from focus group interviews held with 136 young people (aged 16–24) in the UK, the paper demonstrates how young people's understandings and narrations of gender diversity both support and contest linear progress narratives. We show how young people position their acceptance of gender diversity in contradistinction to older generations. However, this narrative of generational progress was undermined and complicated by tensions and ambiguities within young people's talk. Our findings suggest that, alongside being accepting of gender diversity, young people also experience confusion and misunderstanding which may mean that they are more comfortable with stable and binary forms of gender diversity. Moreover, some young people express ideological resistance to gender diversity, informed by wider debates around ‘identity politics’. Overall, we stress the importance of situating young people's gender talk amidst multiple discursive constellations through which increasingly politicised struggles around the meanings of ‘gender’ are currently playing out.

Highlights

The last decade has witnessed a rapid discursive proliferation of gendered terms and identities across much of the Global North, with a dramatic rise in the cultural visibility of people who identify across, between or beyond the categories of male and female
As other youth scholars have argued, young people are often positioned within media and public discourse as revolutionary figures and progressive agents of social change (Miles 2015; Threadgold 2019)
Whilst this often manifests in relation to protest and social movements, more recently such framings of youth have emerged in wider conversations about gender diversity

Summary

Introduction

The last decade has witnessed a rapid discursive proliferation of gendered terms and identities across much of the Global North, with a dramatic rise in the cultural visibility of people who identify across, between or beyond the categories of male and female. In complicating claims of a ‘liberation’ of young people from hegemonic gender norms, this scholarship echoes arguments made elsewhere in the field of youth studies that there is a tendency for young people to be romanticised within the wider social imagination as revolutionary ‘agents of change’ (Threadgold 2019, 7; see Miles 2015) Whilst this is traditionally manifest in a preoccupation with young people’s engagement with politics and protest, we can see how the figuring of youth as vanguards of social change is present in current discussions in which young people are positioned as ‘trailblazers’ of changing – and more progressive – attitudes towards, and practices of, gender.

Methods

Conclusion