Abstract
American Millennials are inheriting a tumultuous world—one where their futures are exceedingly uncertain and subject to the whims of an increasingly interconnected global market that the U.S. no longer dominates. In this tense social milieu, the question “Where will the Millennials take us?” has generated much anxiety. Yet gender has seldom been centered in these debates. Barbara Risman addresses this oversight in her new book, exploring how Millennials come of age as gendered subjects at a time when the rules of both gender and adulthood are immensely unclear.
Risman sets the stage for this analysis by walking the uninitiated through the theory that has defined her career, making a compelling case that gender should not be analyzed exclusively as a matter of individual identity, primarily as a performance, or purely as an institutional phenomenon, but rather as a multilevel structure. She argues that individuals actively construct gendered selves, but that their attempts to do so are shaped by interactional-level processes (e.g., parental socialization and peer policing) and macro-level gender ideologies and institutions. She uses this framework to illustrate the diverse strategies that her sample of 116 Chicagoland Millennials utilize to navigate contemporary gender politics.
She first discusses the “True Believers”—conservative and religious Millennials who have mostly internalized the traditional gender norms of their parents and faith communities. She then contrasts these defenders of gender conformity with two groups of Millennials who are actively challenging gender norms—the “Innovators” who push back against the constraints of gender stereotypes and the “Rebels” who seek to undo the gender binary altogether. Finally, she compares these groups to “Straddlers” who feel caught between a belief in the inevitability of gender difference and a desire for a less gendered world. She takes care to illustrate how gender and sexual identity mediate these groups’ experiences with the gender structure (e.g., showing how cisgender men face higher sanctions for nonconforming behaviors, noting that cisgender women are more punished for their appearance and sexuality, and acknowledging that LGBTQ individuals are highly surveilled across all these dimensions).
Risman ends her book on a speculative note, questioning whether the actions of Millennials will lead to a “utopian world beyond gender.” She sees some evidence Millennials are moving us in this direction—from the intentionally transformative gender strategies of “Innovators” and “Rebels” to the reluctance of even “True Believers” to insist women belong in the home. However, she cautions that such progress is being undermined by the neoliberal mindsets of these Millennials and their consequent tendency to expect gender can be unmade through personal rejections of gender stereotypes. She asserts that unmaking gender on a broader scale will require collective mobilization that counters gender inequality at every level of society.
While this book makes powerful contributions to Sociology, it is not without flaws. The most notable of these is a disjuncture between the intersectionality of Risman’s theoretical framework and the largely gender-focused quality of her data analysis. While she nicely illustrates how heteronormativity structures respondents’ encounters with the gender binary, her treatment of race and class is more uneven. This was particularly apparent in the chapter on “True Believers” where there was a missed opportunity to explicitly explore how anxieties about being racially “othered” may have informed conservative Muslim respondents’ experiences with gender. Asking these questions could have led to a more nuanced analysis—one that powerfully shows how gender structures interact with racial and class structures to shape Millennials’ lives.
The claims Risman makes regarding whether Millennials will bring us closer to a “utopian world beyond gender” also require further reflection. It is unclear that the “Innovators” and “Rebels” in her study truly wish to live in such a post-gender world since many seem highly invested in their gender identities and performances. While many feminists share Risman’s dream of a future where gender is less relevant to people’s lives, these emerging adults seem more interested in expanding gender than undoing it completely. This suggests that many Millennials may be less invested in dismantling the gender structure than they are in modifying it to accommodate a greater variety of gender expressions. If the gender structure is indeed changing rather than crumbling, it is possible that new gender norms may emerge that could constrain the lives of Millennials in unexpected ways and derail the utopia Risman imagines.
Despite these critiques, Where the Millennials Will Take Us is clearly an essential read for scholars of gender, sexualities, masculinities, and social movements that has an important message about how gender is accomplished in a time when the rules for social life seem ever-changing.