ABSTRACT
For young people in the twenty-first century, citizenship and participation are increasingly achieved through “validation in the money world.” As the distinction between states and markets blurs, public spheres for community debate disappear, and global economic forces shape local youth experiences of rights and opportunities, citizenship for young people is being radically altered. The so-called “individualization and monetarisation of everyday life”1 has meant that some key planks of citizenship, such as economic security and capacity for participation in civic life, are being eroded. Young people are newly obliged to create their own opportunities for livelihood, and civic engagement is difficult to operationalize in the absence of robust structures for participation. Consumption has come to stand in as a sign both of successfully secured social rights and of civic power. It is primarily as consumer citizens that youth are offered a place in contemporary social life, and it is girls above all who are held up as the exemplars of this new citizenship.
