Gendering transitions: future directions and intersectional approaches

The transitions model in the sociology of youth has been extensively critiqued as economic and state restructuring, in tandem with global environmental, health and migration crises, have created conditions of chronic insecurity and precarity for young people, requiring new ways of thinking about youth, inequality and the everyday processes of making a life and imagining a future. Central to the critique of ‘transitions’ is that this is an outdated model predicated on a universalist, masculinist and modern vision of the individualised self on a sequential pathway that is generally less applicable to some segments of society, including many young women. An important corrective in the field has been a gender-sensitive perspective that illuminates gender bias in transitions approaches to young people’s lives, the gender inequalities within transition pathways and outcomes, and the gendered nature of changing forms of transitions in late modern conditions of individualisation, choice and risk. In this chapter we outline some of these gendered approaches and critiques. We review how gender has been explored across the youth transitions literature, including work that takes a greater regard for how young women and young men may transition differently and the unequal outcomes that ensue, analyses of postfeminist configurations of gender and the constitution of young women’s reflexive biographies, and perspectives on gender and transition in Southern and transnational contexts. We then develop considerations for future directions for gendered transitions research. We suggest that it is helpful to go beyond efforts to simply expand or adapt the scope of the transitions model to account for gender-specific disruption, alternative contexts or cultural and structural conditions that differently affect young people owing to gender. We suggest that it is also important to ask, how does the transitions model rely upon and produce gendered assumptions about youth in the first place, and how does it make young people and youth experience meaningful and knowable in gendered ways? We look at relational and intersectional approaches that disrupt these conventions to see how they offer a different way to ‘see’ transitions and gender. In the final section of the chapter we reflect on a case study of a young woman named Aja. Through her story, we provide a critical intersectional analysis of the classificatory systems of race, class and gender and their interrelations that young people face, engage with and negotiate in order to further understandings of youth, gender and the contemporary realities of making a life beyond the normative transitions paradigm.