Coming and Staying and Working and Stuff

Master's Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject 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.