Middle-class Young Women Research Articles

Una Coscienza Coloniale: forging imperial women in the Fascist Colonial Institute of Bologna

ABSTRACT This paper studies the Fascist Colonial Institute (ICF) of Bologna as a local space in which fascist ideals of empire, gender and class collided and were reproduced. Founded shortly before Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, the ICF served to transmit colonial consciousness to the Italian people, and, most especially, to young middle-class women. Analysis of the local Bolognese ICF, however, reveals a more complex reality. Courses designed to create fascist imperialists out of middle-class women and forge a ruling settler class for the colonies evidence that the institute used the empire as a tool to shore up gender norms in fascist Italy. The author argues that an unintended outcome of these courses was that the ICF became a space of limited freedom and of social and professional mobility for its young women participants. In addition to learning transgressive skills, these women took advantage of their affiliation with the institute, using it as a springboard for further employment opportunities. The paper is based on a rich collection of sources from the Bolognese branch of the ICF, held in the Museo Civico del Risorgimento di Bologna in the Archivio dell’Istituto Fascista dell’Africa Italiana – Sezione di Bologna.

Fanfiction as a New Social Media, or For What Reason the Youth Write and Read Non-Professional Literature

Fanfiction is the literary work of fans who use the plots lines and characters from their favorite work — “canon”. It arose with the advent of the Internet, because the Internet is the place where such works can be published and discussed. Assessments of this phenomenon are very ambiguous: from low-grade graphomania to a school of literary excellence. In any case, fan fiction is an important element of popular / convergent culture, including Russian, which has a noticeable socializing influence on its participants. The purpose of the study is to describe the specifics of fanfiction as a new social media in modern Russian speaking community. Objectives: 1) Characterize the readership of Russian-language fanfiction; 2) Determine the motivation of fan fiction readers; 3) Describe the nature of reader preferences; 4) Highlight the functions of fanfiction as social media and their implementation by Russian readers. Theoretical framework: G. Jenkins’ theory of convergent culture and M. McLuhan’s broad approach to understanding media. Empirical base — online survey of 1007 respondents, secondary analysis of fanfiction research data. Results. The main readers of fan fiction are young middle-class women living in cities and big cities; they study or work in the field of education, science, art and IT. The functions that fanfiction performs correlate with the functions of social media: first of all, entertainment, recreation and leisure, secondly, new emotions and new impressions. Combined with the opportunity to communicate with like-minded people, share your opinion or publish your own texts, fanfiction becomes a space in which each individual user plays important role in the concrete fanfic’s history. It reveals Fanfiction’s convergent nature. Directions for further research: studying the influence of stereotypical ideas about fanfiction on its development, analyzing the reasons for the ambivalent attitude of readers and authors of fan fiction towards cruelty, finding out the reasons for the gender homogeneous composition of the online fanfiction community.

'Delhi is a hopeful place for me!': young middle-class women reclaiming the Indian city

In a city where violence against women is an everyday reality and a highly contested subject, gendered claims to the city are also fraught with possibilities and problems. This paper evaluates some of these issues through speech act and resilience of young, unmarried, middle-class women in Delhi, India. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores how these women navigate public spaces, respond to violence and fear, and claim their rights to the city. I argue that these women’s speech act and resilience are forms of everyday resistance to the violent gender order in the city. The paper also demonstrates that violence, fear, speech act and resilience are interlaced into women’s everyday lives. In turn, I argue, the divide between gendered violence and women’s agency is not discreet spaces but are relationally produced in a city where pluralities, contradictions, and contestations are embodied realities for women. Speech act and resilience thus provide spaces for meaningful discussions on how women (re)articulate their place in the city amidst gendered violence and fear.

Suave făpturi, cerbere, blânde mume, diletante agreabile, vivandiere… Femeile în publicațiile periodice ale Serviciului Social, România 1935–1939

Between 1934 and 1939, several hundred voluntary student teams went to Romanian villages to perform “cultural work,” i.e., to help and guide peasants to work more productively and to live healthier lives. In 1938, the Law of the Social Service was passed, stipulating that all university graduates, irrespective of gender and academic specialization, were required to take part in social intervention activities in villages to obtain their diplomas. In this paper, I argue that a new constellation of gender ideas, norms and expectations was drawn up in order to allow for enough room for young middle-class women to be part of student teams that were going to spend a couple of months away from their families and in the unknown settings of the rural areas. Therefore, I explore the discourses used in the main information and propaganda periodical published by the Social Service and I identify and illustrate some strategies and mechanisms employed in the production of the gender model needed for the social and national construction of the new and improved Romanian village.

Intersections of class and gender in learners’ conceptualisations of sexuality education at a private, all-girls school

In this article I explore the role that class, and its intersections with gender, play in shaping the way that learners at a private, all-girls school in South Africa conceptualise their sexuality education. Drawing on data from focus group discussions with 2 friendship groups of Grade 10 learners, the evidence reveals the multiple, intersecting and contradictory ways in which middle-class young women navigate class and gender. Firstly, learners, in drawing on a discourse of middle-class excellence, reproduced class difference in their discussion of attending a private school. Secondly, they drew on this class capital to position themselves as immune to many of the issues dealt with in sexuality education, particularly teenage pregnancy. Finally, a discussion of the gender exclusivity of their school revealed that this class capital was not always available to them, as they prioritised a discourse of heterosexual desirability over middle-class excellence in speaking about their interactions with boys. The findings reveal the complex and changing ways in which young middle-class women discursively reproduce, resist and navigate the intersecting classed and gendered systems of power that shape their particular schooling context.

Out of thin air: emerging Muslim fashion entrepreneurs and the spectre of labour in Indonesia

ABSTRACT Indonesia’s bid to be the world’s Muslim fashion capital involves a growing number of female Muslim fashion designers and business owners. With more urban Indonesian young women adopting modest clothing, increasing state support for creative and digital economy, and ease of access and distribution, the market expansion of the Muslim fashion industry allows young Muslim women to become successful entrepreneurs and good virtuous Muslims at the same time. Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines how Indonesia’s emerging female ethical entrepreneurs frame their successes using highly individualistic and virtuous registers. Muslim women’s fashion entrepreneurs seem to be concerned primarily with their passion, talent, and hard work combined with their commitment to religious practices to receive ‘blessings’ from God for their businesses. Labour conditions of mostly lower-class Muslim women working in home-based garment workshops or konveksi, manufacturing the new styles of hijab or veil and modest dresses for the industry, were treated as dismissible and small adjustments were quick to be celebrated as improvements. This paper calls for a critical reading of Muslim women’s economic participation and argues that the visibility of middle-class young women as aspiring entrepreneurs conceals the exploitation of lower-class young women’s labour.

Negotiating neoliberalism in the private sphere: narratives of Estonian single mothers

ABSTRACT Most studies on the processes and effects of neoliberalization concentrate on the public sphere. Some feminist scholars argue that young middle class women are increasingly becoming the bearers of neoliberalism – encouraged to achieve success in multiple areas of life. There is, however, a lack of empirical research on how women engage with neoliberal ideals in post-socialist settings. This article draws on 25 interviews with single mothers in Estonia to discuss how neoliberal ideology manifests itself in the private sphere. Our findings suggest that single mothers have an ambivalent relationship with neoliberalism as they are both challenging as well as reproducing this ideology in their everyday practices of gender and motherhood.

Blurring life and work: the predicament of young middle-class women in Shanghai

ABSTRACT The article examines the positioning of young middle-class women in the dispositif of creativity in China. Based on empirical fieldwork, it argues that the call to be creative – as a form of governmentality – directs the middle-class youth to work and live with limited social protections. The discourse of creativity marks a tendency whereby young middle-class women are subject to an increasingly flexible, informal, and precarious condition. Instead of being taken merely as victims of such a ‘creativity dispositif’, the young middle-class women in this research reject the stable jobs within the system and prioritize the value of flexibility promoted by the cultural and creative industries. Besides, they embrace the self-enterprising culture as a new norm and engage themselves actively in multiple ways of capitalizing their skills, lived experience, and social relations. Such activities eventually dissolve the boundaries between life and work, both formally and informally. Thus, under the joint forces of state and market, the discourse of creativity operates as a self-motivating mechanism that facilitates these women to embrace flexibility and entrepreneurship in acts of self-actualization. Consequentially, all pain and risks emerging from the tiring and unbearable working life are perceived as personal problems to be dealt with by the individuals alone. These young middle-class women seek recourse in the market and their families to solve their problems.

Performing Beauty: Femininity Ideology, Neoliberalism and Aesthetic Labor Among Young Women in Mexico

This research is motivated by the norms and practices of femininity that individuals create through performances and bodily practices. It investigates the levels of women’s acceptance of the femininity ideology and neoliberalism in the upper middle class, their effects on aesthetic labor and the objectification of their bodies. It examines how the logic and techniques associated with neoliberalism shapes the construction of current femininities and shifts in the relationship between the self and the body. Through the use of quantitative analysis from data based on young middle class women in Monterrey, Mexico, this study aims to determine how women are making sense of their bodies through selfdiscipline and self-regulation, as well as the ways in which neoliberal and postfeminist constructions of the sexual self and body are made meaningful in women’s everyday lives.

Post-feminism and chick flicks in China: subjects, discursive origin and new gender norms

ABSTRACT Most research on post-feminist culture has been conducted in the Western context. Within the very limited scholarship on post-feminism in China, the conception of globally transmitted and duplicable post-feminism is dominant, which is usually rationalized in the global expansion of neo-liberalism. This article, however, argues that post-feminism in China exists but encapsulates notable distinctions from its Western counterpart, in terms of the class of its subjects, female elites’ relationship with the state, and post-feminism’s entanglement with local feminisms. To emphasize the transnational perspective, I would like to coin a new term for the Chinese equivalent of post-feminism, what I will call “consumerist pseudo-feminism” (消费主义伪女权), acknowledging the buzzwords ‘consumerism’ and ‘pseudo-feminism’ that are frequently used in the Chinese media. Anchored to this reconceptualization, Chinese chick flicks, burgeoning genre films with its niche audience of middle-class young women are analyzed. Through close-reading, I would like to investigate how consumerist pseudo-feminism is represented in terms of middle-class women’s fantasies, the rhetoric of women’s empowerment, and new gender norms.

World Upside-Down: The Carnivalesque Studio in Entre visillos

Entre visillos by Carmen Martín Gaite follows the lives of several middle-class young women living in Francoist Spain during the nineteen-fifties, portraying the restrictive and conservative confines of both traditional Spanish culture and fascist dictatorship in which these women lived. This essay, however, examines how Martín Gaite uses place and setting to define the characters’ behavior and their adherence to norms under Francisco Franco’s authoritarian, reactionary rule. Specifically, the essay analyzes the spatial conditions for liminal anomie, the temporal dissolution and subversion of norms, in the novel. Through an approximation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesqueand Michel de Certeau’s theory of everyday resistance, I argue that the characters employ tactics of resistance (de Certeau) to establish the bohemian party at the top-floor studio apartment of Yoni, the eccentric artist, as a carnivalesque that acts as a safe haven for anomie, the expression of hidden transcripts (James Scott) that constitute resistance against hegemonic Spanish society, and the reimagination of Spanish identity during the epoch. By studying how the characters stray from norms through their interpersonal relations, absurd values, and paradoxical and parodical behavior, it becomes clear that the studio is a unique, free space for contesting conventions of modesty and patriarchy under the Spanish dictatorship. The inclusion in the novel of such themes as promiscuity, infidelity, and immodest behavior further reveals that Entre visillositself is a carnivalesque work that reimagines the values, norms, and conscience of Spanish society.

Young Middle-Class Women, Consumption and Fitness in Contemporary India: ‘To Tackle All That is Thrown Her Way’

This article examines the intersections of fitness, consumption, the middle class and the female body in contemporary India. Having grown up exposed to and interacting with global markets, brands and commodities, young middle-class Indian women seek to engage in cultural practices that distinguish them as members of an upwardly mobile class of urban professionals. For many young women, working out at a gym or fitness centre has become an important performative act that signifies ability to successfully navigate the globalised and cosmopolitan worlds. Drawing mainly from ethnographic fieldwork, the article suggests that the fit, young, middle-class body has become the ‘right’ female body in contemporary India and functions to reinforce a privileged social location. It underpins moralities of self-care and marks the rise of the global Indian woman prepared to tackle multiple roles and responsibilities.

Flight from the Womb

Although chick lit, epitomized by novels such as Bridget Jones’s Diary, has been analyzed by feminist critics as an example of postfeminist culture, the transnational spread of the genre has resulted in transformations that invite fresh consideration. In the Indian context, chick lit emerged in the aftermath of economic liberalization, contributing to the configuration of a new feminine subjectivity—“the single woman in the city.” This article argues that the discourse of singleness in Indian chick lit is deployed not so much to solve the problem of singleness through marriage but to resolve the tension between the demands of “Indian tradition” on middle-class young women and their desire for a selfhood inflected by neoliberal discourses of autonomy. This dichotomy is symbolized in the novels in the tension between mothers and daughters and plays out primarily across the domains of choice of spouse, food, and dress. While tradition and modernity are conceptualized as binaries, the single women in these novels seem to be wrestling with a way of articulating a selfhood without having to pick a side. In their refusal to conform to ideas of Indian selfhood wherein individualism is circumscribed by autonomy, the “single woman” presents, if not ideally represents, the idea of synthesis.

Negotiating Respectability: Comparing the experiences of poor and middle-class young urban women in India

AbstractThis article draws together two studies: one that explores the intimate relationships of young slum-dwelling Dalit women in Mumbai and the other of young middle-class women in Baroda, Gujarat. Using an intersectional lens, we trace the ways that gendered ideals of respectability shape women's freedom of movement and relationships. The comparison produces new insights into the ways that class, caste, and location cut across gender to shape young women's lives in India. We argue that the distinctive positionings of the women structure the ways in which they react to gender norms and the means with which they strategize around them. Middle-class young women strike a ‘passive bargain’, upholding ideals of respectability by shoring up symbolic capital for a ‘good’ marriage and class privilege. The Dalit women show more active resistance to an ideal that they struggle to achieve, despite heavy control and surveillance over their movement and relationships. However, contrary to previous research, we show that both groups are beholden and lay claim to similar gendered and intimate ideals.

Grappling with Live-in-relations: Respectability, Dutifulness, and Sexual Desire among Migrant Young Middle Class Women in Bangalore

Grappling with Live-in-relations: Respectability, Dutifulness, and Sexual Desire among Migrant Young Middle Class Women in Bangalore

Aproximaciones a la figura materna a través de las narrativas de feminidad de mujeres jóvenes de clase media emergente en Lima

This article describes and analyzes the representations of maternal figures in femininity narratives in five cases of emerging middle-class young women in Lima, Peru. To do so, in-depth interviews were conducted between 2017 and 2018, and a snowball sampling technique was used to find people who met these criteria. The article finds that, for women of this socio-economic status, maternal representation takes a particular form in the mother-daughter generational handover. Not only are femininity models transmitted, but also class aspirations. The generation of these new femininity narratives is analyzed through the concept of heretical discourse developed by Pierre Bourdieu.

Rethinking School-Based Ties: Social Class and the Role of Institutional Agents in Adolescents’ College Plans

BackgroundPlanning for college is an increasingly common rite of passage for high school students. Institutional agents—nonkin adults who possess institutional resources—are important sources of support and guidance in this process.PurposeThis mixed-methods study examines social class differences in the involvement of school-based institutional agents such as teachers and school counselors in helping young people plan for college and the future.PopulationInterviews were conducted with 61 middle-class, working-class, and poor young women to collect information regarding their future plans, social ties, and role of social ties in guiding their plans. In addition, the author uses survey data from the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) to examine the association between social class and the role of school-based ties in adolescents’ college planning.Research DesignAnalyses of in-person interview transcripts involved inductive coding and the development of effects matrices to compare coding output by class. Quantitative models were constructed based on qualitative findings. Based on these findings, analyses of ELS data used hierarchical models to estimate the association between social class background and receiving encouragement and information regarding college from social ties.FindingsAnalyses of interview transcripts reveal that disadvantaged young women see school-based ties as their primary means for college planning, whereas middle-class young women often discount advice from these ties when other sources of advice are available. Quantitative models also show that disadvantaged youth rely on school-based ties for information in the college planning process to a greater extent than do middle-class youth. However, disadvantaged youth receive less encouragement to attend college from school and nonschool ties, even after accounting for academic performance.ConclusionsInequality in access to college stems in part from differences in the resources available to high school students as they plan for the future. Disadvantaged youth look to schools to help them plan; if schools marshal their resources to assist these young people, they can help address existing inequality in access to college.

‘We must give them an education, large, liberal and comprehensive’. Catherine Vale Whitwell: teacher, artist, author, feminist and Owenite communitarian

ABSTRACTThis article was provoked by the author’s conviction that its subject was a great deal more significant than a marginalised woman on the fringes of Owenism, the reformist movement promoted by Robert Owen during the early nineteenth century. It examines the life of Catherine Whitwell, formally identified in studies of Owen and in histories of education as teacher cum artist in the school at New Lanark, Owen’s factory community in Scotland, and also one of several women writers on astronomy. Otherwise little was known of her activities or the contexts in which they occurred. There are many gaps in the record and her footprint is often illusive, but much new information in widely dispersed archives, periodicals, digitised newspapers and secondary sources helps cast further light on her background, a career embracing work as proprietor of girls’ schools, author of works on astronomy and mathematics, promoter of sciences for women, advocate of women’s education, artist and communitarian. The context of Whitwell’s work is reviewed with reference to recent relevant literature and followed by a case study explaining her association with Owen, speculating on her role in visualising his plans for communities of co-operation designed to relieve distress and create greater equality, then describing her teaching career both at New Lanark and later at Orbiston, the first British Owenite community near Glasgow. The study concludes with a brief review of her post-Owen work running girls’ schools and an assessment of her role in the development of education and disseminating knowledge, particularly for young middle class women and working class children in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Beauty class and the practice of beautification among lower middle-class young women

Beauty class is a place for a woman to share experiences in applying makeup. The participants in the beauty class obtain tips and trick or some specific ways of applying makeup. The participants in this class can directly practice the knowledge on how to apply makeup on their faces. The beauty class phenomenon has existed in Indonesia since 2000. Beauty class becomes a trend which attracts young women. Beauty class becomes a place where ideal beauty is constructed, for instance, white skin for body and face, thick eyebrows, long eyelashes, pointed nose, oval face, and pink lips. This research aims to see the consumption practice by lower-class young women at the beauty class in Yogyakarta. This research uses ethnography method by attending and observing the beauty class and having an interview with two active participants in the beauty class. This research shows that 1). Makeup has become a part of the everyday lifestyle of young women. 2). Beautification practice is determined by some beauty standards identified by the other party, in this case, cosmetics industry, and beauty blogger. 3). Beauty class opens an access for lower-middle-class women to use a wide range of cosmetics palette and tools that beyond what they can afford.

Middle-class young women: agentic sexual subjects?

There are a number of gaps in current understandings of the links between young femininities, agency and social class. Building on recent work, we examine how closely young middle-class women in one fee-paying school in England take up so-called top girl discourses and explore whether and how such discursive positions are linked to agentic practice within sexual and intimate relationships. Only one young woman in our study appeared to relatively successfully embody the idea of a ‘top girl’ and, through the use of an ‘I am powerful’ narrative voice, appeared also to demonstrate the most sustained, agentic approach to her sexual and intimate relationships, as well as many other parts of her life. Although other young women also drew on this idea of themselves as powerful, their narratives demonstrated fewer moments of agency, largely because they desired equally confident, assertive men as their partners (whom they understood would be dominant to them).