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The Changing semantics of youth and adulthood

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Title: The Changing semantics of youth and adulthood
Related: Cultural sociology, Vol. 4, Issue 1, (2010), p.63-79
DOI: 10.1177/1749975509356755
Publisher: Sage Publications
Date: 2010
FoR/RFCD Code(s): 200200 Cultural Studies 160800 Sociology
Author/Creator: Blatterer, Harald
Description: This article analyses a contradiction: while living up to a selective image of youth has become imperative for the maximization of life chances, doing so attracts the discursive misrecognition of young adults' personhoods. This cultural evaluation evinces a misapprehension of the meaning of adulthood whose increasing ambiguity is inseparable from changes in the semantics of `youth'. I begin by analysing the normative model `standard adulthood' from a recognition-theoretical perspective and then outline transformations in the semantics of youth that undermine that model's empirical validity. I argue further that labour and commodity markets have `liberated' youthfulness from its biological, age-determined delimitations and have recast select, desirable (i.e. profitable) characteristics of youth as necessary for the maximization of individuals' life chances. I conclude that the normative foundations of contemporary adulthood are ambiguous because the market has appropriated, altered and then sold back to us the dream of eternal youth.
Description: 17 page(s)
Subject Keyword: 200200 Cultural Studies
Subject Keyword: 160800 Sociology
Subject Keyword: adulthood
Subject Keyword: age
Subject Keyword: generation
Subject Keyword: life course
Subject Keyword: life stages
Subject Keyword: recognition-theoretical perspective
Subject Keyword: semantics of youth
Resource Type: journal article
Organisation: Macquarie University. Dept. of Sociology

Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.14/133276
Identifier: ISSN:1749-9755
Identifier: mq-rm-2009011423
Language: eng
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