‘It Feels Like Life Is Narrowing’: Aspirational Lifestyles and Ambivalent Futures among Norwegian ‘Top Girls’

Abstract

Analyses of young feminine identities have often focused on consumption, career and intimate life as separate spheres. In this article, we bring these together to nuance the concept of the ‘top girl’. Drawing on a qualitative study of young Norwegian ‘top girls’’ alcohol consumption and lifestyles we explore how ‘appropriate’ feminine identities are configured in the present and in the future. We analyse how the egalitarian context shapes the contours of the ‘top girl’ and find that ‘progressive’ values are central to our participants’ present lifestyles. However, these progressive lifestyles are expected to collide with the ‘square’ lives the participants see awaiting them as middle-class adult women and mothers. We argue that as the participants grow older, the range of legitimate, middle-class femininities is narrowing. Further, we suggest that in an egalitarian context such as the Norwegian context the ‘top girl’ lacks an attractive, adult equivalent.

Future-Making in an Uncertain World: The Presence of an Open Future in Danish Young Women’s Lives

“…However, the majority of the interviews were conducted by Sharon Kishik, who is a multi-ethnic male in his mid-20s and thus relatively close to the participants in age, which might have created a sense of shared experience and promoted the trust-building necessary for the participants to share their thoughts, concerns and doubts more freely. However, this may also have enhanced a felt expectation to match the interviewer's presumed social position (Vaadal and Ravn, 2021). Discussions on aspirations can be highly susceptible to social desirability and risk producing the expectation that participants must give 'successful' accounts of themselves (Allen, 2016).…”

“…A rich body of literature on how young people shape their futures has focused on aspirations, arguing that they are formed in intersections of social structures such as family and class (Archer et al, 2012b;Ball et al, 2002), gender (Archer et al, 2012a(Archer et al, , 2013Vaadal and Ravn, 2021) and nationality and ethnicity (Archer and Francis, 2006;Devadason, 2008). Driven by questions of how dominant discourses (Mendick et al, 2015), spheres of influence (Archer et al, 2014) and formational logics (Zipin et al, 2015) condition aspirations towards particular educations and occupations, this work has been hugely important in challenging a conception of aspirations as individual cognitions, seeking instead to firmly embed such formations 'in the thick of social life' (Appadurai, 2004: 67).…”

“…Several studies have emphasised that neoliberal discourses are gendered, showing how young women in particular have become positioned as neoliberal subjects (Gill and Scharff, 2011;Ringrose and Walkerdine, 2008;Scharff, 2016). Addressed as agentic, individualised and entrepreneurial, young women have been cast as objects of high expectations and called upon to excel in education and career-making as well as in constant self-improvement as part of their future-making (Allen, 2016;Gill and Scharff, 2011;McRobbie, 2007McRobbie, , 2015Vaadal and Ravn, 2021).…”

“…A rich stream of sociological work has explored how young women, in particular, have become positioned as neoliberal subjects par excellence, expected and expecting themselves to build ‘successful’ futures by flexibly and resiliently overcoming structural constraints (Allen, 2016; Gill and Scharff, 2011; Ringrose and Walkerdine, 2008; Scharff, 2016). With ‘good lives’ awaiting hard-working and self-responsible individuals, future-making for young women has been shown to be ridden with demands, contradictions and affective tensions as neoliberal promises do not converge with contemporary conditions of diminished possibilities and prospects for the future (Sellar and Zipin, 2019; Thomson and Østergaard, 2020; Vaadal and Ravn, 2021).…”

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