THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Departmental Colloquium
Title: Best Laid Plans: Women Coming of Age in Uncertain Times
Abstract: Given the range of possibilities open to women today, what futures do
adolescent girls dream of and pursue? Drawing on qualitative interview data from a five-year study, Best Laid Plans examines the lives of poor, working-class, and middle-class Black and White young women as they navigate the transition to adulthood, following them from high school, when they make plans for the future, into young adulthood, when many of their plans fall apart. Hardie shows how social capital, either possessed or lacked, is not simply a resource for planning for the future but a structure whose form and function varies by social class and race. As these inequalities persist into adulthood, high aspirations, social capital, and careful planning bolster some young women while hindering others. Best Laid Plans makes the case for why we need to move beyond the individual appeal to “dream bigger” and “plan better” and toward systematic changes that will put young people’s aspirations within reach.
Title: Coming Up Short: Aesthetic Distance and Peformances of Turner Syndrome
Abstract: Drawing from more than 24 months of U.S.-based ethnographic fieldwork with
individuals who have the genetic condition Turner Syndrome (45,X), I examine the most visible, and arguably most socially salient, manifestation of this one in 2,000 sex chromosome
difference: short stature. My interlocutors with Turner Syndrome ambivalently categorized
short stature as a disability yet shared a sentiment that it was the "most disabling" aspect of
the condition. I term this oscillation between aligning with and distancing from disability
as aesthetic distance, which is steeped in aesthetic valuations of height and the rippling impacts of its representations. Expanding Tobin Siebers’ (2010) concept of disability aesthetics, I argue that aesthetic distance is a kind of ambivalent disability aesthetics that emerges when
literally coming up short as a kind of visible, embodied difference becomes mapped onto
personal and social experiences of coming up short in gendered expectations of intelligence,
capacity, and productivity in the U.S. With excerpts from my interlocutor Barb's monologue
"My TS Life," I demonstrate how my interlocutors transformed short stature into subversive
performances of value and a feminist ethic of care that afforded intersubjective meaning-
making.
Title: Sexual and Gender Diversity in 21st Century America: Stories of Radical Authenticity and Radical Exclusion
Abstract: The twenty-first century has been a time of extraordinary changes in cultural and scientific understandings of sexuality and gender. From the increased recognition of the legitimacyof same-gender relationships to the rise of nonbinary thinking about gender and more fluid and expansive understandings of sexuality, individuals in the USA now engage with a more complex set of discourses than in the prior century. Resistance to these changes has also grown considerably, with the rise of discourse and policy hostile especially toward gender diversity. This presentation situates these changes within the frameworks of narrative, cultural psychology, and life course development that have anchored my empirical work. These frameworks emphasize the social context of human development through the foregrounding of generation-cohort and the mutual constitution of persons and settings through the concept of narrative engagement (i.e., the process by which individuals appropriate or repudiate cultural narratives as they construct their own life stories). I argue that the twenty-first century is best understood as an era of
radical authenticity in gender and sexual identity development—a time of heightened capacity for individuals to align their inner experience of sexuality and gender with external presentation and embodiment and to construct personal narratives framed within a discourse of “authenticity.” I present five “big stories” of authenticity to which individuals now have broad access and engage with as they construct their personal narratives, highlighting the role of social technologies as cultural tools that have facilitated the dispersion of these stories this century. Paradoxically, stories of radical exclusion that delegitimize sexual and gender diversity and seek a reprisal of hierarchical thinking about gender can also be situated within a larger framework of authenticity and have flourished in the same technological conditions. I discuss the way in which the political context and rapidly changing nature of social technologies in the 2020s might be contracting possibilities for narrative identity development, while at the same time offering a provocation about how empirical trends continue to suggest the expansiveness of sexual and gender diversity beyond “minority-identity” frameworks.