Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/2440/77500
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Type: Book
Title: Imagining the future: young Australians on sex, love and community
Author: Bulbeck, M.
Publisher: University of Adelaide Press
Publisher Place: Australia
Issue Date: 2012
ISBN: 9781922064349
Statement of
Responsibility: 
Chilla Bulbeck
Abstract: Do young Australians understand and live ‘equality’ and ‘difference’ differently from older generations? Is Australia the gender equal society that many claim it to be? How do we understand and explain growing economic inequality when our dominant ideologies are individualism and neoliberalism? What are or should be the limits of tolerance in our negotiation of cultural difference? Imagining the Future explores our contemporary complex equality narrative through the desires and dreams of 1000 young Australians and 230 of their parents from diverse backgrounds across Australia. This ‘extraordinary’ data set affords analysis of the impact of gender, socio-economic disadvantage, ethnicity, Aboriginality and sexuality on young people’s ‘imagined life stories’, or essays written about their future. An intergenerational comparison assesses how different young people really are from older generations. The book offers a compelling and subtle engagement with the sometimes ‘deeply moving’, sometimes ‘hilarious’ voices of young people to deliver insight into the challenges and complexity of gender and other social relations in early 21st Australian society. Young people yearn for and believe in equal opportunities, but their ‘imagined life stories’ indicate massive inequalities in the personal resources that will allow them to achieve their goals. They claim to live in a world of gender equality, even as they continue to cherish performances of gender difference. The gulf between young men’s and young women’s imagined intimate lives together suggest that many are bound for conflict. They (and indeed their parents) do not understand the world in terms of class relations, but proclaim that everyone is ‘the same’, even as they are aware of fine distinctions in economic resources and cultural capital. Alongside proclaimed acceptance of cultural diversity, the advantages experienced by virtue of being white challenges many young Australians. In an increasingly individualistic world, some young people perform in ‘intimate citizenship’, or personal engagements based on shared experiences. Like their parents, few understand obligations towards unmet others, which form the basis of national solidarity.
Rights: © 2012 Chilla Bulbeck
DOI: 10.1017/9781922064356
Description (link): http://www.adelaide.edu.au/press/titles/imagining/
Published version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/9781922064356
Appears in Collections:Aurora harvest 4
Gender Studies and Social Analysis publications
University of Adelaide Press Publications

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