The four case histories that lie at the heart of this book represent singular lives, formed through the articulation of social location through time, and in relationship with the lives of others. Each presents a different combination of gender identity, subjectivity, and social and cultural possibility – giving rise to distinct narrative themes. For example, in Sherleen's case history (Chapter Four) we see the importance of the intergenerational family in a project of upward social mobility. In Stan's case history (Chapter Five) we encounter how downward social mobility may be mediated through shifting masculinities. In Chapter Six, Devon's transition from a bullied teenager to a competent and confident gay man highlights the importance of boundary drawing to this process. In Chapter Seven we followed Karin's project of rebellion, within which the disruption of conventional gender identities is implicated in a wider family story of social class and migration. Each case history details the microprocesses of gender detraditionalisation, the ways in which young people construct their own gender projects over time, and how these are constrained by and disrupt wider formations of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity. This has entailed exploring the operations of agency, the factors that contribute to the ability of young people to innovate in the construction of gendered identities, and the extent to which these innovations are recognised by others.

In this final chapter I ask some questions about the role of young people as agents of social change. In doing so I revisit the debates concerning the detraditionalisation of gender that I touched on in Chapter Three, in order to understand the different forms of innovation encountered in these four lives. I do this through a focus on reflexivity – a concept that appears to transcend the conceptual boundaries between the individual/social, temporal/spatial, public/private. In the final discussion of reflexivity and heresy I attempt to capture something of a four-dimensional sociology in which the young person and the social, the temporal and the spatial are all simultaneously in play.

Reflexivity?

Reflexivity plays a central role in theories of social change. It is argued that, in the move from fate to choice biographies, conscious reflection on previously unthought categories is the central mechanism through which detraditionalisation takes place (Beck, 1992).