Gendering transitions: future directions and intersectional approaches

The transitions model in youth studies has been extensively critiqued as outdated. An important corrective has been a gender-sensitive perspective that illuminates alternative forms of transitions as well as the limits of universalising and normative theories of youth pathways in conditions of individualisation, choice and risk. In this chapter we outline some of these gendered approaches and critiques, and ask are there other ways of thinking through youth, gender and life-making? We explore the possibility that the transitions model, including its alternative manifestations in notions of reflexive biographisation, may obscure nuanced gendered power relations and inequalities that are central to young people’s lives. We consider how a more critical intersectional analysis of the classificatory systems of race, class and gender and their interrelations that young people face can further understandings of the contemporary realities of making a life beyond the transitions metaphor.