The flailing self: A study of how young women become workers
基于2019-2023年对93名年轻女性的纵向访谈，研究她们如何在不确定的劳动市场中应对新自由主义和后女权主义规范，提出“挣扎的自我”概念来描述其矛盾的工作主体性。
Contemporary youth are increasingly exposed to work and career norms, and despite mounting inequality, instability and precarity, the promise of self-realisation through work has retained its allure and influence. Against this backdrop, this paper draws on a 4-year (2019–2023) longitudinal interview study ( n = 93) to explore how 16 young women ‘become workers’ by managing pressures to inhabit neoliberal and postfeminist norms of individuality, progress and aspiration that shape contemporary ideals of ‘successful’ work and career. Theoretically, the paper draws on Lauren Berlant to develop an understanding of work subjectivity as performed within attachments to the promissory object of future work and career. Through empirical analysis, we offer the notion of ‘the flailing self’ as a manifestation of youth work subjectivity amidst conditions of unclarity towards neoliberal and postfeminist norms. Flailing names an ambivalent mode of managing one’s future work and career where notions of ‘success’ are held both close and at a distance. By advancing the concept of the flailing self, the paper contributes new theoretical and empirical understandings of the complex relationship between young women, work and the self in the present historical moment.