Exploring consumer culture and girlhood: A step towards understanding young women’s acquisitive offending

Abstract

This dissertation - which is presented as a step towards a larger PhD project on young women, consumer culture and crime – explores the role of consumer culture in the everyday lives of young women. The broad research emphasis on ‘ordinary’ young women, as opposed to young women who offend, permits a more general exploration into the features of contemporary ‘girl culture’ (Driscoll, 2002) and ‘growing up girl’ (Walkerdine et al., 2001) in times that are influenced by postfeminist and neoliberal discourses (McRobbie, 2008; Gill 2007). The research adopts a qualitative methodology and works from a feminist perspective, foregrounding the views and experiences of seven young women who took part in a focus group discussion. Overall, the findings of this study suggest that young women have a complex relationship with consumer culture, a relationship that is at times discrete and can be performed via dominant modes of identity construction such as friendship groups/peer group interaction both online, through social media, and offline through consumer experiences and school participation. Notably, the role that consumer culture plays in young women’s lives cannot be understood in isolation from more ‘localised’ (MacDonald, 2016) social, material and gendered experiences of their everyday lives (Chesney-Lind & Shelden, 2014). These findings have key implications for the researcher’s future enquiry into young women, consumer culture and crime. By acknowledging that the role of consumer culture is intertwined within the particular circumstances of a young women’s life and can be performed through online and offline friendship groups/peer interactions, the researcher can seek to understand the lives of young women who commit acquisitive offences through these specific frames of reference. This insight will place her in a more informed position to examine the relevance and/or influence of consumer culture (or otherwise) on young women’s acquisitive offending.