Session 3: Old Traditions, New Mores
1st Global Conference
Friday 3rd July – Saturday 5th July 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford
Without a Centre that Holds: Contemporary Adulthood and the Devolving Life Course
Harry Blatterer
Department of Sociology, Macquarie University, Australia
My interest in the topic was piqued by newspaper headlines in the Australian press such as these: ‘Adults’ fail the age test, Kids who refuse to grow up and Forever young adultescents won’t grow up. This shows that while there is some concern about kids growing up too soon, about the ‘end of childhood’ with a perceived early sexualisation of children, their early exposure to violence, the imperative to make career choices at ever younger ages etc. – there coexists the exact opposite assumption, namely that young people either refuse to grow up, or delay that process by a number of years, especially when compared to their parents’ generation. So it seems that sometime in the 1980s or early 1990s a generation of teenagers, branded with the label ‘Gen Y’, suddenly thought to themselves: ‘marriage, mortgages, children and fulltime work ain’t for me; not now and not until I’m very old, say about 37.’ Not satisfied with an explanation that suggests a massive shift in the mindset of a large collective without consideration of possible alternative explanations, I set about investigation that other, often neglected, aspect of the human experience where individual actions intersect with the economic, political, scientific and cultural exigencies of the times. This paper is an attempt to clarify that alternative view by attending specifically to the notion of a prevalent delayed adulthood among people in their mid-20s to early 30s, and I do so with specific attention to transformations in the life course in affluent societies
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Theorizing Liminal Adulthood and its Consequences for Youth
Rebecca Raby
Brock University, Canada
Youth has been defined as a liminal, in-between phase before the stability of adulthood. Blatterer (2007) contends that with a shift towards neo-liberal economies and the marketing of youthfulness, adulthood is now also coming to be defined by liminality. I thus draw on several diverse positions on liminality to query its deconstructive and/or empowering potential. The first part of this paper presents three positions which challenge the modernist, binary positioning of young people as liminal and adulthood as stable: the emphasis on childhood agency in the present within the sociology of childhood; the emerging liminality of adulthood through neo-liberal individualization and flexibility; and the poststructuralist deconstruction of the modern, unitary self.
The second part of this paper considers what these positions imply for youth. I first reflect on the ramifications of focus on becoming, or developing, childhood/youth, particularly in terms of young people’s potential marginalization and/or protection. I then consider the ramifications of lifelong liminality, arguing that an individualization approach maintains a flexible, psychological adulthood which continues to position young people as psychologically incomplete. In contrast, a flexible poststructural subject has the capacity to displace the centrality of a unified, rational, self-knowing subject. Finally, agency and autonomy are fundamental to the modern (and neoliberal) concept of the self. I draw on several theorists to argue that both young people and adults can be conceptualized from a poststructural position as active in the process of being subjected in ways that can alter power relations. Yet this position leaves us with the question of what childhood and youth are if not “becoming adults”, and what might be lost by failing to distinguish them in this way.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Light and Shadow of ‘Active and Independent Senior’: From Life History of Japanese ‘pre-elderly’
Eiji Gon
Keio Research Institute at SFC, Japan
This paper targets people in their fifties or early sixties and defines them as ‘pre-elderly’. This study considers what ‘old age’ means to them today. 16 pre-elderly people were investigated in semi-structured interview method. The author focuses on how informants connect their lives’ trajectories to their future and how they place their familiar others in those trajectories.
Contemporary Japanese elderly stand at a crossroad. The circumstance around them has changed since 1990s: First, the image of ‘an active and independent senior’ has been propagated by the government, academics and mass-media. Second, social security system of care has been completed, which means socialization of care. These two processes, individualization and completion of the welfare state, brought both gain and loss.
These processes can be regarded as detraditionalization which characterizes the late modern society. The loss of tradition caused a loss of what is called ‘ageing culture’ which used to interpret the experience of ‘declining’ as something meaningful. That means the elderly today have no reference to rely on. This leads them to endless efforts to be subjective. It becomes difficult for ageing people without ‘ageing culture’ to accept their own aging bodies and imagine their own old age. That is ‘individualization of ageing’. Can ‘being subjective and independent’ be a new model of ageing to pursue?
The result shows that most informants cling to construct ‘private sphere’ to live their own old age. The informants repeated needs to be independent, because reflexive self-identity to construct ‘private sphere’ does not tolerates dependence on others or even mutual dependent relationship. Although old people go on to inevitable dependence on others, they disconnect inter-dependent relationship with others. Individualized ageing process appeared as ambiguous process.
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