Introduction

This book provides a new take on the debate in the West about young women’s cultural and political action. A familiar lament about youth in general, and girls in particular, is that they are no longer socially aware, politically active or critical of popular culture. There is a considerable amount of research that indicates young people’s move away from both formal political engagement and resistance politics as expressed through subcultural formations (for an overview, see Manning and Ryan 2004; Bennett and Kahn-Harris 2004). Curiously, this research is not typically gender-differentiated, and with just a few exceptions, very little has been said about either the political participation or nonparticipation of young women in particular. An important exception to this has been the interrogation of young women’s specifically feminist engagements. Since the eruption of the so-called “generation wars” within the women’s movement, there has been a focus on young women’s shift from traditional feminist activism to something more diffuse and less organized (Harris 2001; Bulbeck 2006). At the same time, there is an acknowledgment that young people today live in times and under conditions that make political activity and cultural critique difficult to engender (see Furlong and Cartmel 1997). New ways of thinking about cultural and political engagement face the challenge of understanding the impact on youth cultures of the forces of fragmentation and decollectivization that characterize social and political life in late modernity. As many social theorists have illustrated, the contemporary late modern socioeconomic order mitigates against social action by dismantling the social ties that were once forged through clear class identities, requiring individuals to make personal and disembedded projects of their lives in order to succeed, and absorbing critique into popular culture (see Giddens 1991; Beck 1992; Klein 2001). Whereas once young people’s resistance politics, and young women’s feminist activism in particular, could be easily identified, today these seem obscure, transitory and disorganized. This book demonstrates that young women have new ways of taking on politics and culture that may not be recognizable under more traditional paradigms, but deserve to be identified as socially engaged and potentially transformative nonetheless. These engagements reflect the changing times within which they live by highlighting both the limitations and opportunities afforded by the globalization of youth consumer culture, the co-option of styles of youth resistance by the market (for example grrrlpower, hip hop culture), the emergence of new technologies and media, and the decentralization and dispersal of power and resistance from the national to the global.