This book is concerned with the ways that lives unfold over time and identities change as young people grow into adulthood. Questions of gender are at the centre of the account: what it means to move from a being a boy into a man, from a girl into a woman. This chapter sketches the conceptual landscape for the book, framing the overall project and introducing a theoretical vocabulary. It is organised in two parts: the first considers the argument that gender identities have been subject to a process of detraditionalisation, outlining late-modern and feminist accounts as well as arguments emerging from studies of masculinities, sexualities and social change. The second locates young people within these debates about gender and sexual transformation.

Sociological interpretations of changing gender relations

The ‘fact’ of changing gender relations has become a key motif for a range of contemporary sociological theories of social change. Theories of individualisation (Beck, 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995) and detraditionalisation (Heelas et al, 1996) identify a transformation in the relations between the genders (in particular a transformation of the lives and expectations of women) as both evidence for and explanation of the processes of change that they seek to explain. Ulrich Beck describes the Risk Society as somewhere ‘people are being removed from the constraints of gender … traditional forms and ascribed roles’ (1992: 105). Writing with Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim, he uses marriage and divorce as a case study for an account of the expansion of individualisation. Divorce, they suggest, can be explained by the mismatch of two individualised work biographies, the integration of which ‘is a feat’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995: 6).

The continuing centrality of gender in contemporary life is not dismissed by the theorists of detraditionalisation. In Beck's view, ‘we are situated at the very beginning of a liberation from the feudally ascribed roles for the sexes’ (1992: 104) in which the mechanisms of reflexive modernisation undermine the very structures that industrial society was founded upon and has produced, such as the public/private divide and the sexual division of labour. Although he describes men and women as being freed from ‘gender fates’, in practice, consciousness of change outstrips material changes. In particular, the arenas of work and the division of labour in the home may be the sites of continuing inequality.