Coming and Staying and Working and Stuff: Young Mobile Femininities in a Southern English Town

Master's Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: Globalization, Political Economics, grade: 1.0 , University of Southampton (School of Humanities), course: Transnational Studies, language: English, abstract: New Femininities are understood to have emerged as the ideal neo liberal subjects of post-modernity. As exemplars of the new competitive meritocracy today's young women are said to embody ambition, success and the agentic individualism required to prevail in insecure socioeconomic times. This dissertation examines contemporary notions of what it means to be young and female today by looking at the experiences of ten women in a Southern English town whose accounts provide an insightful commentary on social change and feminine subjectivity. Principally, this thesis is concerned with the discrepancy between representations of young womanhood in the public discourse and actual, lived femininities. Overall, it attempts to emphasise issues concerning contemporary feminine lifestyles with regards to mobility, consumerism and professional self-realisation, all in the light of feminist - and post-feminist theory.