Coming of age in America: the transition to adulthood in the twenty-first century

2012 ◽  
Vol 49 (08) ◽  
pp. 49-4769-49-4769
Keyword(s):  
Transition To Adulthood ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
First Century ◽  
Twenty First Century

scholarly journals Transitions to adulthood in flux. Assessing coming of age through an historical lens in Finland and France

Sociologija ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-185
Author(s):  
Aurelie Mary
Keyword(s):  
Transition To Adulthood ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
First Century ◽  
Transitions To Adulthood ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Societal Context ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Post War

According to youth experts, a significant number of contemporary young people in Western societies reach adulthood at a later age than previous generations. This phenomenon is generally perceived as a temporary misstep on the path to default patterns of transition established in the 1950s and 1960s. Given the current societal context, should the transition to adulthood today really conform to that model? This paper provides an historical analysis of transitions to adulthood to enquire whether the post-war model can still be considered a meaningful reference today. Were routes of transition similar or different in earlier times, or has the model always existed? To answer this question, the paper looks at demographics in two case countries, Finland and France, in three periods: the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the 1950s-1970s, and the early twenty-first century. The paper argues that the post-war generation?s rapid patterns of transition w ere unique, resulting from a sustained period of economic growth in developed societies. This has generated new pathways of transition and a model of adulthood still used as a standard point today, even though the current socio-economic context has changed. Transitions to adulthood are not static. They have always evolved, mirroring the wider historical context within which individuals operate.

Modern/Mecca: Populist Piety in the Contemporary Urdu Novel

2021 ◽  
pp. 165-208
Author(s):  
Maryam Wasif Khan
Keyword(s):  
Young Women ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Century ◽  
Vernacular Literature ◽  
Discursive Formation ◽  
Twenty First Century

By the twenty-first century, seventy odd years into Pakistan’s existence, the cobbled ideals of nationhood and state implode into a radically reimagined Muslimness enabled and legitimized within a number of popular novels and television serials authored by bestselling writers, Umera Ahmad, Nimra Ahmad, and Farhat Ishtiaq. Among them, the “new” Muslim, predominantly signified by young women, is the contemporary reincarnation of a salafī, an early convert and companion of the Prophet Muhammad. In these religio-populist novels, the true Muslim protagonist actively rejects those outside the fold of Islam—minorities, for example—renounces all that is Western—clothing, occupations—while reinventing the self in the image of the early Meccan community of converts to Islam. This exclusionary, often violent discursive formation marks the coming-of-age of a widespread religious populism in the domain of vernacular literature.

Grrrl Revlonution: Cosmetics, Ugly Beauty, and Grrrling Women in Emma Forrest’s Cherries in the Snow and Thin Skin

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-143
Author(s):  
Megan Sormus
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
First Century ◽  
Feminine Identity ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Thin Skin ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Needy

Abstract Thin Skin (2002) and Cherries in the Snow (2005) are coming-of-age novels set in reverse. This is to be expected when considered in conjunction with the “needy and attention seeking” narratives so typical of Emma Forrest’s oeuvre (Forrest, Thin Skin 123). Alighting on a deliberate confusion of girlhood and womanhood, both novels anticipate a contemporary (and postfeminist) rhetoric that, as Stephanie Harzewski identifies, is “uncomfortable with female adulthood itself, casting all women as girls to some extent” (9). As Forrest’s protagonists all carry an unease about being grown-up, despite the fact that they are grown-up, her work makes a timely intervention that both celebrates (and problematizes) the postfeminist trend and cultural phenomenon of girling women in the twenty-first century. Thin Skin, even down to its title, alludes to the simultaneous and often volatile encounters of girlish and grown-up, ugly and beautiful feminine identities through its twenty-something failed actress and self-proclaimed fucked-up girl, Ruby. In Cherries in the Snow, grown women are resold their former grrrlishness through the ugly makeup central to the fictional cosmetic company, Grrrl Cosmetics. In both novels, the girl/grrrl is instrumentalized by Forrest to tinker with established structures of feminine identity. I examine the extent to which the grrrling of women is politically, socially, or culturally progressive: does it really change anything or suggest a pathway to change? Or is it evidence not of resistance or rebellion but of a predictable tinkering with interpretations of femininity that have gained traction in contemporary consumer culture.

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