Where the Millennials Will Take Us

Bibliographic Data

ID20031337
AuthorsBarbara J Risman (corresponding author)
Year2018
Publication date2018-03-22
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueWhere the Millennials Will Take Us (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/oso/9780199324385.001.0001
OpenAlexW2792429354
ISBN9780199324385
LanguageEN
Citations received127

In this book Barbara J. Risman uses her gender structure theory to tackle the question about whether today’s young people, Millennials, are pushing forward the gender revolution or backing away from it. In the first part of the book, Risman revises her theoretical argument to differentiate more clearly between culture and material aspects of each level of gender as a social structure. She then uses previous research to explain that today’s young people spend years in a new life stage where they are emerging as adults. The new research presented here offers a typology of how today’s young people wrestle with gender during the years of emerging adulthood. How do they experience gender at the individual level? What are the expectations they face because of their sex? What are their ideological beliefs and organizational constraints based on their gender category? Risman suggests there is great variety within this generation. She identifies four strategies used by young people: true believers in gender difference, innovators who want to push boundaries in feminist directions, straddlers who are simply confused, and rebels who sometimes identify as genderqueer and reject gender categories all together. The final chapter offers a utopian vision that would ease the struggles of all these groups, a fourth wave of feminism that rejects the gender structure itself. Risman envisions a world where the sex ascribed at birth matters has few consequences beyond reproduction

Argument (complex analysis) · Doing gender · Face (sociological concept) · Feminism · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Reproduction · Social science · Sociology · Typology · Variety (cybernetics) · Gender Studies · Law · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics