Younger Self Research Articles

Fighting Like a Girl: A Letter to My Younger Self

Abstract: In this letter to her younger self, Danielle Rosvally explicates the complications of gender inherent in the world of stage combat and professional fight direction. She relates her experience of fighting (and teaching) while female and offers some hopeful direction for the future.

Lessons for a Broadway Wannabe

Abstract: This essay is a letter to my younger self, a reflection of where I was when I started the journey into being a professional musical theatre performer, and of those lessons I can now identify from my past experiences. It offers a glimpse into some of the ups and downs of my performing life as well as some advice for any students considering this path.

Adult life with congenital heart disease: a letter to my 10-year-old self

Reflecting on her experience of life with congenital heart disease, Beth Greenaway shares key lessons that may have helped her younger self and describes how she maintains a positive outlook on her condition.

Negotiating beauty: exploring beauty narratives of Chinese women in different life stages

ABSTRACT Under the one-child policy in China, post-80s women have experienced dramatic social, economic, and political changes that differ from previous generations. This article explores post-80s women’s experiences of beautification in their different life stages from a feminist perspective, drawing upon 14 in-depth interviews with post-80s women to examine their perception of beauty and beauty practices in different life stages. Three main themes emerged that were intricately associated with two distinct life stages. During their transition from schoolgirls to young women, (1) participants perceive their younger selves as naïve, passive receivers of the beauty culture. When transitioning from young women towards becoming wives and mothers, (2) their values regarding beauty shift from emphasizing outer beauty to emphasizing inner beauty. (3) They also transition to embracing natural beauty standards. This paper argues that these women’s perceptions of beauty and beauty practices are fluid and change across different life stages. ‘Trivialised’ everyday beauty discourse exists to enable them to negotiate beauty practices and gender roles. This research suggests that young Chinese women, especially those leaving high school and entering university, would benefit from readily accessible academic feminist knowledge and debate regarding beauty culture to facilitate critical thinking and informed decision making.

‘You’re really going to be fine’: celebrity cameos, toast (2010) and the British biopic

ABSTRACT When a biopic includes a cameo appearance from the subject themselves, it can serve as a persuasive claim to authenticity: what more powerful endorsement is there than figures appearing in their own life stories? Less common is the interaction between the subject and their on-screen surrogate which occurs in Toast (2010), an adaptation of food writer Nigel Slater’s memoir. Slater himself appears in the film as a Savoy chef who offers his younger self (played by Freddie Highmore) a job in a London kitchen. This interaction visualises characteristics of the memoir genre, the meeting between a past and present self, and affords rehabilitation: in representing visually the memoirist as witness to their own traumatic past, the adaptation suggests a ‘working through’ of childhood traumas associated with an abusive father. Toast also hints at the cameo’s capacity to intervene in the memoirist’s past in a manner which reflects the ‘corrective’ possibilities evident in different forms of life-writing. In having Slater offer his younger self reassurance – ‘you’re really going to be fine’ – the memoirist embodies the caring father he himself lacked. In Toast’s telling, time really is a great healer, provided you are willing to exploit the potential of the cameo appearance.

‘Dear younger self…’: using a photograph think-aloud method to explore the lessons university students would pass on to their teenage selves

‘Dear younger self…’: using a photograph think-aloud method to explore the lessons university students would pass on to their teenage selves

Perspective and sexual politics in Mémoire de fille

It is striking how often the first-person memories in Annie Ernaux's 2016 work of life-writing Mémoire de fille are rendered from a third-person perspective. Visual depictions of the author’s younger self are shown to us as if the older Ernaux who is narrating the story were present at the scene, seeing her former self from the outside. The events recounted include sexual exploitation and public shaming for falling foul of the era's sexual double standards, and, in the aftermath of this, an identity crisis and an eating disorder. How does Ernaux’s complex interplay of empathy and distance with regard to her younger self affect the social and political themes in the work, and the ethical stance of the text towards them? And how is the reader implicated by the perspective through which Ernaux has us view her teenage self of 1958?

Beware of New Ideas: Views on the Wave-Particle Duality

In an e-mail sent in the year 2000, Josephson offered the admonition: “Beware ye, all those bold of spirit who want to suggest new ideas.” His words apply to his younger self who, in 1962, was “bold of spirit” and “want(ed) to suggest new ideas”. What did he need to beware? Possibly – older scientists with established ways and conservative views … perhaps even his older, settled-into-tradition, self.

My Husband and Me

Do you owe your spouse sex? Is it ethical to replace a human relationship with an artificial one? A woman writes to an advice columnist about her marital struggles due to her diminished sex drive after a hysterectomy. Her husband, still sexually active, purchases a lifelike doll designed to resemble his wife’s younger self. The story explores themes of intimacy, desire, and the challenges of maintaining a long-term marriage when faced with changing needs and desires.

Lessons to your former self

Paul Morris is inspired by the recent College diploma ceremony to visit his younger self

Feud: Bette and Joan. The representation of ageing in TV series between crisis and wardrobes

The article’s goal is to analyse the ageing-related crisis in the TV series Feud (FX 2017) through the story of two entertainment icons, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. On-screen, advancing age is narrated as a critical moment for Hollywood of the period. In those years, women after the age of 40 no longer appeared attractive in the movies. The narrative complexity therefore recalls the set of issues related to sexism and misogyny present in the film industry of the time. That is, age challenged the very aura of celebrity, accentuating a rivalry towards the antagonistic actress as towards a younger self. In the television series, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford are played in turn by two other major film personalities: Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange. On-screen, the two leading ladies express their personalities already by the clothes they wear and the colours they favour, which refer to specific meanings and values. The presence of these two great actresses also defines a further level of interpretation of the text, linked to contemporaneity. The advancing of age, so well highlighted in Feud as a source of crisis, capable of creating a path of lonely struggles in the narrative, becomes off-screen in the current landscape, an opportunity for confrontation and complicity among many actresses and women.

Post-Postfeminist Witnessing: Sexual Violence and 9/11 in Claire Vaye Watkins’s “Rondine Al Nido”

Abstract “Rondine al Nido” is part of the Nevada-based first short story collection by Claire Vaye Watkins, Battleborn (2012). The third-person narrator focuses on a woman in her thirties who recounts her lover the experience of being sexually abused when she ran away at sixteen years old with a former friend to Las Vegas. Set in the backdrop of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the story dwells on the moment when the two girls could have escaped from the hotel room of their abusers but decided not to. The embedded story exemplifies Rosalind Gill’s idea of the late 1990 s and early 2000 s postfeminism (2008), and compliance with male standards of a pornified sexual experience (Nikunen 2007). I argue that the use of temporality in the story allows for a revision of gender demands and stereotypes reinforced through nationalistic discourses surrounding 9/11, and foregrounds a “crisis ordinariness” (Berlant 2011: 10) with regards to sexual violence. Further, understanding the act of the telling as an ethical encounter with the Other allows the narrator to come to terms with her younger self and the friend whom she did not protect from sexual violence in the past.1

A New Approach to Augustine's Dialogues

Nearly all twenty-first-century readers of St. Augustine of Hippo become interested in him after reading the story of his Confessions. Yet when nonspecialists want to read more of him, they are directed to the later and more magisterial writings whose author is not immediately recognizable as the young searcher from the Confessions: City of God, On The Trinity, On Christian Doctrine, the scriptural commentaries, the anti-Pelagian tracts. The bishop of Hippo, unlike his younger self—and also unlike his philosophic predecessors, as he well knew—was obligated not to let so much as his word choice cause scandal to pious and uneducated ears.1

Speaking My Mind: A Letter to a Young English Teacher

A veteran English teacher gives advice to her younger self.

Benefits of volunteering on resilience with aging: a case study

ABSTRACT As the study of volunteering among older adults continues to evolve, questions related to the benefits of volunteering are of growing interest. Volunteering may create opportunities to develop resilience in older adults as it can serve as a coping strategy. This case study explored the perceived benefits of volunteering on resilience and various dimensions related to aging among elderly volunteer dancers. In this qualitative study, 13 volunteer performers of Korean traditional dance were recruited for in-depth interviews. The analysis of the transcripts generated five themes related to the benefits of volunteering that were unique to older volunteers: (1) finding a sense of self-worth through serving others, (2) finding a sense of purpose, (3) experiencing gratitude, (4) renewing a younger self, and (5) building companionship. The findings revealed that regular volunteering promoted the experience of resilience in the face of the challenges associated with aging.

Re/visiting

In the summer of 2023, I received a surprising proposition from TURBA's managing editor, Dena Davida, inviting me to republish the chapter I contributed to the 2019 Curating Live Arts anthology (Davida et al. 2019) and reframe it in the context of the present issue. I accepted with enthusiasm, enticed by the opportunity to revisit an earlier piece of writing and understanding that such a privilege rarely presents itself to writers, let alone to early career writers! But as I gave the proposition more thought, I realized that it fittingly presented itself ten years after the inception of the curatorial project I discussed in my original text, Collective Walks / Spaces of Contestation. The exercise then provides an incentive to critically reflect on what has happened in the last decade, from both personal and socio-political perspectives. And indeed, there is much to take stock of. Re-reading my article, I am struck by the naiveté that transpires through the ideas I devised at the age of twenty- five, when I was taking my first leaps into the world of professional arts curation. Enamored with theory, unencumbered by convention, and moved by boundless energy, my younger self thought of artistic practice as a prism through which aesthetics can effectively mold the social. I wasn't so naïve as to believe that art can change the world, but I was convinced that the radical power of art lay in its capacity to disrupt, if only momentarily, the seemingly natural order of things. I thought of site-specific performance as a means to breach the surface of banal sociability. I conceived of aesthetic interventions into everyday life as tools for the creation of interstitial pockets of possibility.

JEB@100: an interview with Monitoring Editor Stuart Egginton

Journal of Experimental Biology is celebrating 100 years of discovery in 2023 and, as part of our reflections, we are inviting Journal Editors to tell us their thoughts about the journal and to look to the future. In this Conversation, Monitoring Editor Stuart Egginton tells us why he thinks comparative physiology has a lot to offer the biomedical field and that he would advise his younger self to trust his instincts more.

Accomplished women leaders in informatics: insights about successful careers.

We sought to learn from the experiences of women leaders in informatics by interviewing women in Informatics leadership roles. Participants reported career challenges, how they built confidence, advice to their younger selves, and suggestions for attracting and retaining additional women. Respondents were 16 women in leadership roles in academia (n = 9) and industry (n = 7). We conducted a thematic analysis revealing: (1) careers in informatics are serendipitous and nurtured by supportive communities, (2) challenges in leadership were profoundly related to gender issues, (3) "Big wins" in informatics careers were about making a difference, and (4) women leaders highlighted resilience, excellence, and personal authenticity as important for future women leaders. Sexism is undeniably present, although not all participants reported overt gender barriers. Confidence and authenticity in leadership point to the value offered by individual leaders. The next step is to continue to foster an informatics culture that encourages authenticity across the gender spectrum.

“Be Confident”, “Creative” and “Careful”: Advice from Multiracial Adults

As the U.S. and international multiracial populations have increased, so has research in this area. Despite a multitude of studies about the unique struggles of being multiracial, little empirical data has been published about specific strategies that multiracial individuals use to navigate a monoracial (single-race)-oriented society. In this article, I offer insights and suggestions to cope with discrimination involving family, friends, and others from 28 multiracial Americans with various racial backgrounds, although all participants have white ancestry. In advising their younger self and/or the next generation of multiracial people, participants suggested cultivating confidence, resilience, and assertiveness to withstand the onslaught of marginalization that multiracial people endure. Other respondents recommended creatively engaging with media to actualize affirmation, connection, and consciousness to generate space between themselves and others’ perceptions of them. White-presenting participants proposed being careful about sharing their backgrounds, considering they are frequently questioned. This article offers strategies to navigate being multiracial in a racially tumultuous society that was designed by and for monoracial citizens.

Can the drag queen turn back time to give advice to her younger self?

This article explores the dynamics of inter-generational conversations between queer and trans youth and queer and trans adults through an analysis of a routine segment on the reality show, RuPaul’s Drag Race. At the end of each season, the drag queen contestants are asked to give a piece of advice to photos of their younger selves and, by proxy, the young people who may be watching the show from home. This article positions this segment as a pedagogical moment where the queens are forced into the role of teacher. However, like the categories of child and youth, RuPaul’s request of the queens is not as innocent as it appears. In turning to address children directly, the queens must reckon with cis-heteronormative expectations of how adults can speak to children, about what topics can be discussed, and the tones such conversation must take. To explore these issues, the article examines this segment alongside scholarship about drag and ballroom cultures to place the show within larger contexts of queer and trans kinship structures. Then, turning to queer and trans studies in education and queer and trans childhood and youth studies, the essay examines the factors impacting how and when queer and trans youth and adults are allowed to be in conversation with youth, if at all.