Globalization, Individualization and Gender in Adolescents’ Texts

Abstract

IntroductionGlobalization has been variously defined, sometimes including a cultural, political, and/or economic element and frequently linked with the dominance of consumer culture and a focus on global media products. However, it has also been widely noted that this focus on transnational processes and technologies underestimates variation in the meaning and assimilation of global products and symbols within particular local cultural contexts (Bennett, 2000;Paulgaard, 2002). The methodological purpose of this article is to illustrate the way in which globalization can be explored in young people's written texts and other visual data. In addition, it highlights the difficulties of looking at individualization in such texts, and in particular differentiating between it and the persistence of stereotypical ways of 'doing boy/girl'.A number of theorists (such as Beck, 1992Beck, , 1994 Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002;Giddens, 1991) have suggested that young people's experiences can best be explored in the context of a theory of individualization. Thus, rather than identity being expressed in terms of structural categories (such as age or class position), the focus is on individual choice and on 'becoming' in a context where information and knowledge are being rapidly absorbed and revised. In this reflexive context, Giddens (1991, p. 217) suggested that: 'What gender identity is, and how it is expressed, has become itself a matter of multiple options'. However, although gender is seen as 'part of a collective moulding of individual behaviour' that has been rendered obsolete, it is not consistently referred to as an outdated category (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002, pp. xxiv and 203, respectively). Thus, conceptually as well as methodologically, there are difficulties in differentiating between individualization and stereotypical ways of 'doing boy/girl'.The texts that are the focus of this article were part of a wider sample of texts written in a school context by those in Fifth Class in First Level (typically aged 10-12 years) and those in Transition Year in Second Level (typically aged 14-17 years) in response to an invitation, to 'tell their life stories', to write a page 'describing themselves and the Ireland that they inhabit' so as to 'to provide a national data base' 'an invaluable archive'. Thus, they can be seen as similar to solicited diaries (Bell, 1998) or externally required texts (Stanley, 2000). In addition to these main texts, the young people were given the option of using the reverse side of the sheet creatively for drawings, poems, songs, lyrics, or anything else that they wished to include. The latter type of data has begun to be seen as a way of stepping outside a particular verbal culture (Prosser, 1998) and providing insights into young people's concepts of health (Wetton & McWhirter, 1998); family (O'Brien, Alldred, & Jones, 1996); examinations (Leonard, 2003) and self image (Wakefield & Underwager, 1998). It has been argued that the difficulties posed by such material are not necessarily much grea...