Women, Partnership, and Parenting

Partners for success? Undergraduate women’s post-feminist constructions of intimate relationships Elizabeth E. Blair

Department of Educational Foundations, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Whitewater, WI, USA

ABSTRACT Past research suggests that undergraduate women have faced educational cultures in which their college experience is defined through romantic experiences. This study expands this literature by investigating how heightened achievement expectations for undergraduate women inform their broader conceptions of intimate relationships, by asking the following research question: how do high-achieving undergraduate women conceptualise intimate relationships? Through qualitative analysis of 76 semi- structured interviews, I find that study participants reject gendered narratives of romance and instead preserve their achievement by constructing two ideal relationship logics: independent and companionate logics. I suggest that participants’ conceptions of relationships have undergone a notable inversion: students’ constructions of positive intimate relationships centre on the maintenance of academic achievement and autonomy, and show the long reach of neoliberal, ‘post-feminist’ ideologies into women’s everyday lives.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 2 July 2015 Revised 4 March 2016 Accepted 11 March 2016

KEYWORDS Gender; young women; romantic relationships; higher education; neoliberalism; post-feminism; academic success; qualitative research

Introduction

In 1990, Educated in Romance, a now-classic study, captured a snapshot of American college life in which women negotiated undergraduate cultures centred on romance: dating, beauty rituals, and caring for boyfriends often usurped academic work and career aspirations (Holland and Eisenhart). This study joins literature that has documented the powerful ways ‘compulsory romance’ and heterosexual intimate relationships produce and maintain systems of gendered, heteronormative, oppression (Rich 1980; Fine 1988; Jackson 2001; Tolman 2002; Korobov and Thorne 2009). More than 25 years have passed since Holland and Eisenhart’s powerful critique of the ‘sexual auction block’ culture of college campuses, and educated women’s opportunities and life course have changed (212). Reflecting broader patterns in the Global North, more US women are attending and graduating from college, accessing a wider range of career opportunities, and marrying and having children later (Livingston and Cohn 2010; Snyder and Dillow 2010; Hymowitz et al. 2013). This opening of opportunity has coincided with the rise of economic uncertainty, destabilisation of the US middle class, and ratcheting up of pressures young women experience to compete for college admission and to build

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

CONTACT Elizabeth E. Blair [email protected]

GENDER AND EDUCATION, 2017 VOL. 29, NO. 6, 671–690 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2016.1166184

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‘successful’ futures (Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody 2001; Bound, Hershbein, and Long 2009; Benjamin 2010; Baker 2010b).

Theorists have posited that in late modernity, intimate relationships are potential sites of empowerment and emancipation: codependent, gendered, and idealised romantic love can be discarded through increased focus on autonomy, self-realisation, and boundaries between individuals (Giddens 1992). Others argue that while patterns and meanings of relationships are dynamic, relationships continue to be sites of gendered inequality as increasingly individualised ideologies of relationships limit possibilities for collective action and impede social change (Jamieson 1999; England 2010; Connell 2011; Graf and Schwartz 2011).

This study revisits the context of women’s experiences on a US college campus to con- tribute to work tracing the tangled patterns of gendered equality and inequality in relationships and their connection to social change. Taking up a lens that forefronts the influence of social, economic, and cultural forces on women’s everyday lives, this study explores how women attending a highly selective US college construct meanings of inti- mate relationships and how these meanings are shaped by cultural logics and legacies of women’s ‘liberation’. Purposively selected, this group of high-achieving, educated women are arguably best-positioned to leverage the new opportunities offered by shifting econ- omic and gendered social arrangements, so the understandings they construct may rep- resent the leading edge of social change (McRobbie 2007; Weis and Fine 2012).

While scholarship has begun to document the gendered complexities of academic achievement under neoliberalism in UK, Australian, Canadian, and US contexts (Walker- dine, Lucey, and Melody 2001; Aapola, Gonick, and Harris 2005; McLeod and Yates 2006; McRobbie 2007; Ringrose 2007; Baker 2010b; Pomerantz and Raby 2011), fewer empirical studies have considered how women’s meaning making around intimacy con- nects to these strict individualising and achievement-focused logics. Scholars suggest that for young women positioned as ideal neoliberal subjects, negotiations of sexuality (and intimate relationships) are complicated and present gendered contradictions (Walk- erdine, Lucey, and Melody 2001; Aapola, Gonick, and Harris 2005; Finn 2015). This study makes these connections and contradictions visible, exploring two emergent logics of positive intimate relationships, and suggests that neoliberal ideologies have extended beyond educational and occupational realms into our understandings of our most inti- mate interactions.

Mapping the micro/macro

Scholars argue that research that looks at either the broader sociopolitical context, or the individual production of everyday lives, misses opportunities to interrogate the nuances of growing inequalities in ways that can contribute to their undoing (Weis and Fine 2012). In their methodology of ‘critical bifocality’, Weis and Fine call researchers to hold together the micro ‘lives’ and macro ‘structures’ of social phenomenon in analysis to build connec- tions and show the complex ways privilege and marginalisation are constructed. My research approach aims to respond to this call and builds on feminist methodology by focusing on the intersection of the individual and sociocultural in women’s constructions of their experiences. Baker (2010b) explains that the feminist research tradition highlights ‘the essential importance of examining the lives of girls and women and particularly the

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way in which they are shaped by socio-political ideology and material conditions’ (4). In this study, I explore how participants construct positive intimate relationships and the ways participants negotiate broader cultural logics in these understandings.

Micro context: intimate relationships in college contexts

Researchers suggest that intimate relationships remain both a potentially distracting social focus and a key source of intimacy and support for many college students (Gilmartin 2005; Manning, Longmore, and Giordano 2005; Mosher and Danoff-Burg 2007; Bogle 2008; Sassler 2010). Developmental psychologists document emerging adults’ shifting beliefs and beha- viours related to intimate relationships. Research finds that emerging adults today seek to explore relationships, are more sexually active, often engage in patterns of ‘serial mon- ogamy’, are more likely to cohabitate with partners, delay marriage until the late twenties, and fear divorce (Arnett 2004; Cui et al. 2011; Stanley, Rhoades, and Fincham 2011). Among US undergraduates, students with high levels of agency are more likely to prioritise achieve- ment and less likely to prioritise relationships (Mosher and Danoff-Burg 2007). While research suggests that emerging adult women value emotional and sexual monogamy more than men (Schmookler and Bursik 2007), scholars also find that women with higher intelligence, who are better positioned to attain educational and career success, are more willing to engage in shorter-term sexual relationships, less tied to finding partners with wealth and status, and less supportive of traditional gender roles in relationships (Stanik and Ellsworth 2010). These psychological findings suggest relationship patterns and beliefs, particularly for high-achieving women, have undergone a historical shift.

Moving to a sociocultural perspective, scholarship exploring the relational lives of girls and young women broadly suggests that intimate relationships, and narratives of ‘compul- sory romance’, naturalise heterosexuality and position boys as sexually desiring and aggressive, and girls as yearning for love and relationships, which can set up girls to be victimised, isolated from their sexual agency, or dismissed for their sexual experience (Rich 1980; Fine 1988; Jackson 2001; Tolman 2002; Korobov and Thorne 2009). Work specifically exploring intimate relationships in US colleges both replicates and complicates these patterns. Described above, Holland and Eisenhart’s (1990) influential ethnography of two colleges in the 1980s finds that the institutionalisation of romantic culture was key to women’s continued academic and economic marginalisation. Gilmartin’s (2005) study of women attending their first-year at a selective US college mirrors Holland and Eisenhart’s (1990) narrative of gendered marginalisation through the primacy of intimate relation- ships. Despite their successful academic background, participants described diverting attention from their studies to focus on relationships. Some women attributed academic struggles to tumultuous romantic relationships, and others shared how less academically committed boyfriends were dismissive of their academic concerns. Overall, participants described heterosexual romantic relationships as consuming, pushing friendships and schoolwork to the margins.

In contrast, Hamilton and Armstrong (2009) present a more complicated picture of the pri- ority of relationships for college women. They investigated sexual and relational experiences of heterosexual college women attending a US public university and living in a ‘party’-oriented dormitory. Looking through the lens of the intersection of gendered and classed beliefs about romantic relationships, they describe a ‘relational double bind’ for economically privileged

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young women, who are held to a gendered ‘relational imperative’, to desire love and relation- ships, and a classed ‘self-development imperative’, to promote their own education and careers and put off relational commitment. They link this double bind to women’s willingness to participate in ‘hooking up’ culture, which gives them sexual gratification without the burden of relationships. In contrast, less privileged women were uncomfortable with the hook up culture and cited this culture in decisions to leave the university. These researchers argue that gendered expectations and inequalities in sexual and intimate relationships persist and complicate students’ educational experiences.

Recent work by Finn (2015) also highlights contradictory discourses and complex emotional work that emerges in women’s narratives of intimate relationships in UK univer- sity contexts. Finn explains that participants shared ‘cool and detached’ narratives of relationships to protect their ‘respectability’ by emphasising the benefits of singlehood and conveying the limited demands relationship partners could put on their individuality and freedom (97). Overall, the literature suggests that the patterns and meanings of relationships are shifting on campus, yet this change is uneven, and patterns of gendered inequality often remain (England 2010; Graf and Schwartz 2011).

Macro context: entwining neoliberalism and liberal feminism

Over the past 40 years, women’s academic access and achievement in higher education has substantially increased, coinciding with the rise of two entwined social forces – neoliberalism and liberal feminism – across many nations, including the US (Snyder and Dillow 2010). Scholars define neoliberalism as a powerful economic, cultural, and political force, characterised by the dominance of market-based logics, changing roles of the state, and intensifying responsibilities of individuals, which broadly influences how people make meaning of their economic and educational circumstances and futures (Harvey 2005; Apple 2006; Gonick 2006). Theorists suggest that as traditional social structures become less determinative, choice, individual responsibility, and self-regulation play greater roles in individuals’ lives (Giddens 1991; Beck 1992). Researchers document the powerful influence of neoliberal, managerial ideologies across educational contexts, including col- leges and universities, and show how shifting economic opportunities and increased focus on individual achievement, merit, and choice have influenced the schooling experi- ences and practices of the besieged middle class and young women (Apple 2006; McLeod and Yates 2006; Blackmore and Sawers 2015; Kreissl et al. 2015).

Liberal feminism is a part of the second wave movement for gender equality beginning more than 40 years ago (Tong 2009). Supporters used an equal rights framework to promote the individual rights of women in the home, school, and workplace (Ringrose 2007). These feminists were successful in making gender discrimination more visible and promoting women’s opportunities. However, the equal rights approach individualised the success and failure of women, scholars contend, often advocating for women to have equal opportunity to compete for and match the successes of men, rather than question- ing how these formulations of success are tied to larger structural inequalities and proble- matic aspects of the capitalist marketplace (Gonick 2006; Ringrose 2007). Critics suggest that by constructing feminism as the pursuit of individual equality for women, the rhetoric of women’s liberation was easily incorporated into the broader shift to neoliberalism (McRobbie 2007; Ringrose 2007).

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Liberal feminist and neoliberal ideologies have intertwined to locate girls’ educational and economic advancement as evidence of the efficacy of neoliberal reforms (Ringrose 2007). Scholars suggest that political and social rhetoric has positioned young women as ideal neoliberal subjects: women are seen as reflexive, mobile, and highly successful economic actors (Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody 2001; Gonick 2006). This positioning creates intense demands for women to seek success in all life domains through individual responsibility and hard work (McRobbie 2007; Ringrose 2007). However, these individua- lising discourses conceal how social structures and categories continue to complicate and constrain women’s achievement (Ringrose 2007; Pomerantz and Raby 2011).

While some accounts describe gendering processes as in flux, symbolising the potential power of neoliberal ideologies to create ‘possibilities of a self cut loose from tradition and required to make itself anew’, others argue that rather than interrupting gendered oppres- sion, neoliberalism has helped gender turn on new axes and reinscripted gender inequal- ity in new forms (McLeod and Yates 2006, 85; Baker 2010a; Connell 2011). Scholars exploring girls’ academic experiences suggest that the extreme construction of women’s individual success is both ‘impossible’ (Pomerantz and Raby 2011), and involves negotiating ‘massive contradictions’ in gendered expectations for behaviour and achieve- ment (Gonick 2006; Ringrose 2007). Young, economically privileged women report intense feelings of competition and stress, and scholars argue that women’s positioning is fragile, often painful, and needs to be weighed against the emotional costs (Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody 2001; Aapola, Gonick, and Harris 2005; Demerath 2009). Ultimately, theorists contend that this intertwining of feminist and neoliberal ideologies leads to the undermin- ing and replacement of feminism by competitive individualism and the ‘post-feminist’ depoliticisation of gendered inequalities (Gill 2007; McRobbie 2007; Baker 2010a).

This study aims to unpack the ways ‘post-feminism’ is translated and transformed in everyday lives by exploring the ways that women attending a highly selective, coeduca- tional, US college construct positive intimate relationships. In this study, I take the position that knowledge is constructed through language, social interchange, and action situated within a particular cultural, political, and historical moment (Holland et al. 1998; Wetherell 2001; McLeod and Thomson 2009). Through language and shared experience, individuals take up ‘commonsense’ ideas and assumptions about the ways the world works, or cultural logics, to ‘comprehend and organize experience, including their own thoughts, feelings, motivations, actions, and the actions of other people’ (Quinn 2005, 3). These logics form matrices of power and social inequality (Wetherell 2001; Foucault 1980; Butler 1990; Edley 2001). Theorists suggest discourse is central to the peformativity of gender: while gender may appear ‘natural’ and ‘fixed’, gender is a discursively constructed production of identity routed in language, social categories, and the heterosexual matrix (Butler). This paper closely analyses participants’ ways of constructing positive intimate relation- ships to link these constructions to broader cultural negotiations.

Methods

Participants

I conducted interviews with 29 diverse undergraduates, who identified as women, in their first and/or fourth years at a coeducational, small liberal arts college (see Table 1). All ‘traditional’

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college students, participants in this study ranged in age from 18 to 22. Of 29 participants, 17 (59%1) come from upper-middle-class backgrounds, 4 (14%) middle-class backgrounds, and 8 (28%) working-class backgrounds. Two (7%) of the participants were first generation college students and 22 (76%) of the participants had at least one parent with a graduate degree. Fifteen (52%) of the participants identify as women of colour (7 Asian, 2 black, 2 Latina, 4 mixed race/other) and 14 (48%) of the participants identify as white.

Twenty-two (76%) of the study participants identified as heterosexual. Seven (24%) identified as something else, including ‘questioning’, ‘it’s complicated’, and ‘bisexual’. Eight (28%) of the participants had no experience in a relationship, 3 (10%) had one short-term relationship, 2 (7%) more than one short-term relationships, 5 (17%) one long-term relationship, and 13 (45%) more than one long-term relationship.

Participants in this study all had strong academic backgrounds. All reported having at least a 3.5 grade point average in high school; almost all were in the top 10% or higher in their high school class. In college, participants’ grade point averages ranged from 3.1 to 4.0, with a median of 3.6 (an A- average). Participants’ academic interests were well distrib- uted across math/science, social science, and humanities.

College context

This highly selective (15% admission rate), relatively diverse (∼55% students of colour; ∼50% receive financial aid), coeducational (∼51% women) college in the Eastern US has a reputation for intellectual intensity. The college emphasises its commitment to

Table 1. Participant demographics (verbatim as reported by participants). Participant pseudonym Race/ethnicity Class background Sexual orientation

Aditi Indian-American Upper middle class Straight Olivia White Middle to upper Questioning Xue Chinese-American Working/middle class Straight Hannah Caucasian Upper middle class Straight Rory White Upper class Straight Whitney Multi-ethnic Lower middle class Straight Zadie Black Working, socially mobile Queer Quincy White Upper middle class Straight Lin Asian Privileged Straight Inez Latina Working middle class Straight Faith Korean Lower middle class Straight Veronica White Upper middle class Straight Sabrina Caucasian Mid-upper middle class Straight Jessica Mixed European Upper middle class Straight Darby White Lower middle class Straight Alesha Black (Jamaican) Lower middle Heterosexual Tabitha Asian Middle class Complicated/bisexual Yvette White Upper middle class Straight Gabriella Racially White, Ethnically Latina Middle to lower middle class 90/10 Straight Bryda Caucasian (European) Upper middle class Straight Kathryn White Middle class Straight Emily White Upper middle class Bisexual Cassandra White Middle/lower middle class Straight Nicole Half Caucasian, Half Chinese Upper middle class Queer Marilyn Asian-American and West Indian Lower middle class In flux right now Rena Asian-American, Indian Sub-Continent Upper middle class Straight Genevieve Asian, Chinese-Malaysian American Upper middle class Straight Ursula Caucasian Upper middle class Straight Paige Asian-American Middle/upper middle class Straight

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academics, social justice, and community. Students tend to live and socialise on campus and engage in a range of extracurricular activities.

In their own words, participants described their student peers as ‘very diverse’, ‘liberal’, ‘open’, aiming to appear ‘educated’, and the college context as a ‘pretty progressive place in terms of gender norms, people are not going to be, like, “that girl’s such a slut”’, where ‘people will hold you to a high standard to be race conscious, to be conscious of hetero- normativity, to be conscious about gender, all that kind of stuff’. Yet, some participants noted implicit bias, suggesting that ‘underneath’, students are ‘recreating the same [oppressive] structures here’. While some participants acknowledged what scholars have deemed ‘lad culture’ may exist in some male-dominated spaces, they also reported examples of students publically shaming others for misogynist behaviour (NUS 2013). In this context, rarely did concerns about misogynistic or intentionally sexist behaviour enter into participants’ accounts of current or future relationship partners.

Data collection and analysis

I recruited participants for a study about ‘how female college students talk about their close relationships and academic experiences’ through targeted emails sent by faculty to their class lists and a snowball approach, asking initial participants to share an email invitation with social contacts (Maykut and Morehouse 1994). I interviewed each participant 2–4 times (76 total interviews) about her academic background and experiences, family, and relationships. Open-ended relationship prompts included questions such as: ‘What do you think a good dating relationship should be like?’ ‘Do you know anyone that has a relationship like that?’ ‘Are you currently (or have you been) in a relationship? Can you tell me a little about that?’ ‘Can you tell me about a time in your relationship have you felt most close? Farthest apart?’ ‘Can you tell me a story about an important memory from your relationship?’ ‘Do you think about being in a relationship in the future?’ ‘Are there any aspects of your identity that you think influence your thinking about relation- ships?’ Interviews lasted 1–1.5 hours and were audio recorded and transcribed.

I conducted an inductive qualitative data analysis using grounded and thematic methods (Boyatzis 1998; Maxwell 2005; Charmaz 2006). I compiled participant profiles, identified themes grounded in the data around the meanings of intimate relationships, created a code- book, and systematically coded interviews (Seidman 1998; Boyatzis 1998; Charmaz 2006). I then revisited my analysis to focus on the participants’ use of cultural logics through their dis- course by searching for repeated, ‘commonsense’ understandings across the data analysis, as well as moments of incoherence and ambiguity (Edley 2001; Quinn 2005). I utilised systematic and transparent data analysis processes, engaged in reflexive memo-ing, member checks of emergent concepts, and received feedback from my interpretive community (Luttrell 2010; Maxwell 2005; Lincoln and Guba 1985; Tappan 2001).

Researcher perspective

I approached this research in many ways as an ‘insider’, as a woman raised in a white, middle-class, US household, steeped in values of individual achievement. I attended a competitive small liberal arts college much like the college in this study. Yet, I was often struck by the contrast between my own experiences and relationships and the ways the

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study participants talked about dating, intimacy, and romance. Compared to my college experiences over 15 years ago, it was clear that many of the participants were making sense of their experiences using a shifting set of gendered cultural tools. My positioning allowed me to forge relationships in which participants shared intimate and vulnerable stories of their relationship experiences within the shelter of study anonymity, retellings tinged by both generosity and urgency. I approached this work deeply mindful of my role as ‘instrument’ in the research process and built reflection on the ways my subjectivity shaped the study into each stage of the research process (Luttrell 2010).

Constructing relationships: everyday ‘post-feminism’

When I entered into this research, I anticipated that romantic relationship logics would have powerful sway on participants’ understandings. Instead, participants often explicitly questioned narratives of romance, romantic gestures, and soulmates, and the ‘emphasized femininity’ associated with these narratives (Connell 1987). Participants instead positioned their achievement and future goals, rather than their desirability as romantic partners, as central measures of their worth. The narratives participants shared about their relationship experiences and aspirations were rich and layered, evidencing complicated interpretations and sometimes-contradictory logics. In the main findings below, I describe two central relationship logics participants utilised to construct positive intimate relationships: inde- pendent relationship logics, in which relationships have no effect on participants’ prioritis- ing of achievement and moves for success, and companionate relationship logics, in which relationship partners engage in intimacy by supporting and bolstering each other’s achievement. I conclude the findings with a counterexample of one participant’s contra- dictory use of a romance logic. Overall, independent and companionate logics dominated participants’ talk about positive relationships, remained consistent across varied back- ground, experiences, and across multiple interviews. I argue that these relationship logics show the powerful, gendered, neoliberal, ‘post-feminist’ imperative to place individ- ual self-development and achievement at the centre of every part of life – even the most intimate (McLeod and Yates 2006; Gill 2007; Demerath 2009; Ringrose 2013; Finn 2015).

Independent relationship logics

Taking up independent relationship logics, participants described assuring the goodness of a relationship by prioritising their own academic, extracurricular, and social interests, and circumscribing the role and influence of a relationship partner. These logics centred on maintaining autonomy, rationality, and detachment, eschewing more traditionally fem- inine positions of care and subservience (Gilligan 1982; Connell 1987).

First, participants emphasised the importance of retaining independent power while in a relationship. Darby2 suggested that maintaining agency and a broad support network were critical to her relationship. She explained:

I’m a very independent person. I like to do what I want to do, and like I don’t really like to be told how to do things. I think one of the good things about Ted is like he, we both just allow each other a lot of independence. Um, and yeah. I don’t know. I don’t really like the thought of having one person that I depend on for things. Like, that’s sort of frightening to me.

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In this quotation, Darby claimed the goodness of her relationship through her own self- definition and agency and constructed independence as a kind of risk management strat- egy. Darby went on explain, ‘I don’t think um, I like need one person to be who I am or you know, to live the way I want to live. Like I want, I think that needs to come from me.’ Darby echoes Giddens’ (1992) envisioning of the modern confluent relationship, ‘Autonomy also helps to provide the personal boundaries needed for the successful management of relationships’ (189). Representing a pattern across participants’ talk, Darby’s response evi- dences the imperatives, under ideologies of neoliberalism and liberal feminism, that women intentionally craft reflexive selves and successful lives and futures (Rose 1999; McLeod and Yates 2006; Gill 2007; Ringrose 2007). Darby’s description implies that relationships must not get in the way of this project. However, this focus on autonomous agency neglects the complex structural factors and gendered power dynamics that con- tinue to be woven into the fabric of intimate relationships (Rich 1980; Aapola, Gonick, and Harris 2005).

Similarly, Olivia justified the goodness of her relationship by emphasising her indepen- dence and lack of sacrifice. She described:

We’re both, like – ‘cause it’s great. We both have really busy lives and really intensely do our own thing. So it’s not like we’re co-dependent in any sense. So I don’t feel like I’m sacrificing anything to be with him. Except maybe a little time that I would be spending with my friends.

Rejecting the position of traditional femininity by specifically denying the role of sacrifice in her relationship (Connell 1987), Olivia cited two pieces of evidence to prove the ‘great’- ness of her relationship: having independently productive ‘busy lives’ and focused auton- omy – ‘intensely do[ing] our own thing’. However, Olivia reluctantly implied the closure of her social world because of the time she spends with her boyfriend. In these examples, we see how the neoliberal construction of the primacy of individual self-development and choice is made ‘natural’ in participant discourse (Edley 2001; McLeod and Yates 2006; Ring- rose 2007). Representing robust patterns across the data, these participants position them- selves as agents of their lives and futures, evoking their position as ideal neoliberal subjects even within their discussion of intimate relationships (Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody 2001; Gonick 2006; Finn 2015).

Participants also underscored rational, strategic decision-making as central to ‘good’ relationships. They often framed relationships in utilitarian terms: needs and desires of a relationship partner were made invisible or were framed as a potential threat to be mini- mised. Gabriella told the story of her recent break up, explaining how she managed her relationship so that her schoolwork could take priority. She described:

Midterms were coming up, so I didn’t really want to break it off with him, ‘cause you know, other times when we had been on the rocks he would just call me every day, and we would talk for three hours. And like I really just couldn’t afford to do that over midterms. But I think that he knew, you know … he kinda knew what was coming. And um, I guess, I just, I called him after like my last midterm or something. And, you know, the first thing he says is you know, ‘Are you breaking up with me?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’

Using a pecuniary metaphor, Gabriella described strategically minimising the impact on her academic work by waiting until completing midterms before ending her relationship. In this description, Gabriella flipped gender conventions, positioning her boyfriend as needy, requiring too much of her time and emotional resources, while simultaneously

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rejecting the gendered discourses of emotion, care, and sacrifice required in gendered narratives of romance (Holland and Eisenhart 1990; Jackson 2001). This cost-containment discourse reflects gendered and classed patterns identified by scholars: ‘A central strategy in the regulation of middle-class girls has been a form of rational argument which converts powerful inner feelings into apparently rational positions’ (Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody 2001, 176). Gabriella separates herself from her partner and her emotions by taking up neoliberal logics focused on rationality, cost/benefit calculus, and outcomes maximisation (Brown 2003; Gonick 2006; Demerath 2009; Connell 2011).

Participants often framed relationships in instrumental terms. When I asked Marilyn, who was currently single, why she would want to be in a relationship, she responded, ‘It’s access to regular sex, in very blunt terms.’ Arguably, this perfunctory reference to sex positions Marilyn outside of ‘emphasized femininity’ by naming her sexual desire and could be viewed as a sign of women’s sexual empowerment (Connell 1987; Tolman 2002). However, this declaration could also be construed as evidence of ways that neoli- beralism has co-opted feminist rhetoric: women have equal rights to prioritise their indi- vidual needs and evaluate relationship partners through their utility for providing sexual gratification (McRobbie 2007; Lamb 2010). Across these examples, participants use rational, utilitarian approaches that maximise their self-interests and achievement identi- ties, reject gendered relationship scripts, and provide protection by managing the uncer- tainty of relationships (Swidler 2001; Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody 2001; Demerath 2009; Baker 2010a).

While rational approaches were one way participants silenced emotion, they also reported maintaining emotional control through cognitive approaches, intentionally shift- ing the content of their thinking to change their affective experience (Beck 1997). Sabrina explained that following a recent break up with a boyfriend:

I just started doing this thing like whenever anything related to Dan popped into my head, I would just like think about something else. I’d like replace it with something. I would like think about someone else. So I like trained myself to like not even think about it.

By engaging in cognitive management to avoid experiencing painful loss, Sabrina, along with other participants, evidenced her tacit acceptance of neoliberal expectations that individuals should autonomously and reflexively control their experiences and practices by taking up a highly controlled and managed disposition (Beck 1992; Rose 1999; McLeod and Yates 2006; Ringrose 2007; Baker 2010a).

Similarly, Veronica suggests one should tightly manage feelings of attraction and passion. She explains:

But if you’re in love with someone and they don’t love you back, like you have a choice about whether you allow that passion to keep growing, or to stay alive, or whether you like make choices to not think about that person that way … I made a decision to control my emotions. And like, you can do that … .You can choose whether you, like, when you start thinking about them, whether you allow yourself to keep thinking about them. Or then be like, yeah, he’s a great guy; now I’m going to think about math again.

Like Sabrina, Veronica positions herself as having the cognitive control and intellectual power to effectively manage her emotional connections, negating lack of agency inherent in ‘falling’ in love (McCollum 2002). Echoing Finn’s (2015) description of women’s ‘cool and detached’ relationship narratives, these participants position emotions as a controlled

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choice, taking up neoliberal logics that construct everyday experiences as individualised, active choices (Giddens 1991). Furthermore, Veronica suggested that she avoids emotional distraction through academic commitments, in this case ‘think[ing] about math’, rejecting gendered representations of women as ruled by emotion (Jackson 2001). Yet, demands for emotional regulation act as a disciplining force that regulates women’s sexuality in new ways: women are positioned as individually responsible to strictly monitor not only their emotional expression, but also their emotional cognition (McLeod and Yates 2006; Gill 2007; McRobbie 2007).

In this section, I have shown how participants taking up independent relationship logics described strategies of detachment, rationality, utilitarianism, and control to limit a relationship’s effects on their achievement, to take individual responsibility for their relationships, to position themselves as independent and empowered, and to reject gen- dered, romantic scripts. We can view these individual practices as part of a larger pattern: ‘The regulation of feminine sexuality for middle-class girls has to be understood as part of a wider regulation of their achievement and academic success. Nothing is allowed to obstruct the academic path’ (Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody 2001, 194). Across interviews, participants suggested that the purposes of these practices of intensive self-management were to reduce threats of intimacy and desire and to preserve achievement.

Participants used independent logics to escape traditional gendered binds, to claim their ‘equal rights’ (under liberal feminist ideologies) to ‘masculine’ positions of agency, rationality, and detachment, and to assert neoliberal individualism (Jackson 2001; Walker- dine, Lucey, and Melody 2001; Tong 2009; England 2010). At the same time, the self-man- agement and discipline required to meet the demands of these independent logics seem to be constructed with a gendered rigour not typically required of men: ‘The discourse of female sexual maturity is built around the concept of responsibility … [h]owever, the meanings of responsibility for women often undercut its association with freedom,’ young women are still expected to act ‘rationally and cautiously, whereas young men’s sexual desires are seen to be beyond control’ (Aapola, Gonick, and Harris 2005, 149– 150). Participants’ relationships and sexuality were deeply disciplined by these expec- tations for full autonomy, rationality, and independent success. Further, these logics made persistent gendered inequalities invisible by naturalising the neoliberal privileging of the individual, neglecting of the full humanity of relationship partners, and ignoring the influence of sociocultural contexts and structural forces (Lamb 2010; Ringrose 2013). These logics show the translation of neoliberal, ‘post-feminist’ ideologies into participants’ everyday lives.

Companionate relationship logics

When participants took up logics of independence in relationships, I was often surprised by what seemed missing in these descriptions – a connection to their partners. This missing element emerged in participants’ use of companionate logics of relationships, which were grounded in friendship, mutuality, and egalitarian ideals. Notably, this mutual- ity often remained centred on promoting achievement and success, and despite rhetoric of equality, participants often took up a singular, gendered responsibility to police the impact of their relationships.

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Rejecting narratives of seduction, pursuit, or falling, participants emphasised the impor- tance of engaging in a mutually rewarding friendship to maintain their control and auton- omy in relationships. Some participants even claimed there was no difference between friendship and an intimate partnership. Cassandra described her desire to shift from romantic to companionate logics:

I just think now I need to reconceptualize a romantic relationship as being more of a partner- ship and that kind of thing, and being less of a like magical moment and more of a just like we’re really good friends. You know, there’s some kind of connection here and we relate on a whole bunch of different levels and we want similar things, and value similar things.

In a pattern reflected across participants, Cassandra emphasised the need to connect with a partner, to match interests and values. This approach is amenable to liberal feminist dis- courses of equality, rejecting gendered romantic narratives of passivity and submission (Swidler 2001; Tong 2009). Across the study, participants drew on friendship as a way to build communication and ‘connection’, not only to ensure the egalitarian nature of the relationship, but also as a way to promote self-understanding, aiding in participants’ reflex- ive crafting of self (McLeod and Yates 2006).

Further, Whitney, like many other participants, suggested that forming a relationship based on friendship is protective. She describes:

I think it just has to start out as something good friendship, and I mean like if it starts out as a good friendship, like you’re, it starts out more platonic, I think is the word. Like it, you don’t have, kind of this fake stuff or some like some guys like acting a certain way because he likes you. Well you know, what if when you start dating him he ends up being like, you know, some abuser, and if you’re friends before then, um yeah, that might still happen, but if you’re friends or getting to know each other without like the cloudiness of love in the air or whatever, kind of making everything all confusing.

Here Whitney argues that a foundation of friendship provides a more controlled deepen- ing of intimacy, without the problematic ‘cloudiness’ of affect. This approach aligns the evolution of a relationship with the individual control, autonomy, and reflexivity required under neoliberalism, while also protecting women from gendered risks of abuse or ‘invo- luntary’ love (Fine 1988; Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody 2001; McCollum 2002; McLeod and Yates 2006; Demerath 2009).

Some participants suggested that ideal relationship partners should have a sense of responsibility to care for one another, often by supporting academic achievement. Vero- nica explains:

I think that both people should be able to support each other. Like I think it would be an unhealthy relationship if like one person was like, ‘Hey, let’s go out and party all the time, I don’t care that you have work to do.’ … My roommate’s boyfriend understands when she needs to do work that she has to do work. She makes sure he gets up and goes to class. Like, I think that’s good. Yeah, they take care of each other.

Veronica justified the ‘good’-ness of this relationship because both partners support each other’s academic success, albeit in different ways. Unexamined are the gendered expec- tations that emerge here: the woman in this relationship prioritised her own academic work over socialising with her boyfriend and also ‘care[d]’ for her boyfriend by supporting his academic engagement and, like a mother, making sure he went to class, while the man ‘support[ed]’ her academic success by not pressuring her to party. Implicit in this

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construction is the assumption that women should embody the ideals of neoliberalism, including unwavering commitment to hard work, self-sacrifice, and academic success, while parallel demands are not asserted for men (McRobbie 2007; Ringrose 2013).

In another example, Darby shared a story about how her boyfriend supported her when she received harsh feedback on her high school graduation speech. She explained, ‘Just being with him made everything better,’ and that his support was central in shifting how she thought about the quality of her valedictory speech, ultimately redeeming her sense of worthiness for the first place prize in her high school class. In this example, the intimacy of their relationship helped Darby to overcome her sense of shame evoked by her teacher’s critique to re-engage with the work of performing success. Across their descriptions of companionate relationships, participants emphasised the importance of relationship partners supporting their academic achievement and career advancement. While this theme was linked to the preservation of individual success, a value firmly established under neoliberalism, it was constructed through therapeutic and gendered discourses of care and support, which reject the view of relationships on purely instrumen- tal terms and instead promote companionship as holding intrinsic value (Gilligan 1982; Baker Miller and Stiver 1997).

Participants taking up companionate logics also described relationships as requiring gender equality and respect: the aims, goals, and resources of each partner should be valued and shared equally. Drawing on discourses of gender equality and egalitarianism grounded in both liberal feminist discourses and neoliberalism, participants depicted the careful management of their relationship ‘investments’ to ensure they are not giving more resources, time, or caring than their partner (Gill 2007; McRobbie 2007; Tong 2009). Inez suggested that her relationship history has convinced her of the central role of equality:

I’ve been in such one-sided relationships, whether it be equality, like paying for things. I don’t feel like the guy should pay for everything. I think the girl should pay too. Like if we’re going on dates, and I know it’s expensive to go out, we’ll pay equally. Being there for the other person and calling the other person as much as you call them. It’s just, I feel like it’s a give and pull. Like you give. They give back. You give. It’s just, I feel like, I think that’s a central theme for me just because of my past experiences, that’s really important as well.

Here Inez, like many of the participants, argued that each partner must equally give resources and care in relationships, requiring constant monitoring and careful self-man- agement within a relationship. Inez explicitly resisted gendered tropes in this quotation, suggesting men should not have to invest more financially, nor should women have to invest more emotionally, and she explained that problems from her past relationships informed this protective stance.

Genevieve suggested that equality and respect should be at the centre of an intimate relationship and she explicitly tied these characteristics to supporting gender equality. She explained:

I think that fairness and equality between these two people would be pretty important to me. And I mean that in a sense of, I mean I guess it would be expected for me that um, like defi- nitely in … In terms of like respect. Um, and for me respect is tied to like gender issues. Um, and then I think there should also be an equality of like expectations about the other person. Um, and how much they’re willing to put into the relationship. Um, so the equality there

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would be how much of yourself is, there would be an equal amount of self of both people invested in it.

Here Genevieve, along with other participants who described evaluating relationships using cost/benefit ratios, evoked metaphors of capitalist markets to describe relationship equality, showing the long reach of economic logic and neoliberal ideology into their sense-making of intimate relationship (Brown 2003; Harvey 2005; Demerath 2009). Further, evidencing the familiar partnership of liberal feminism and neoliberalism in popular discourse, here neoliberal tools were presented as a solution for gender inequality – equal individual respect and ‘invest[ment]’ solves the pernicious problem of ‘gender issues’ (McRobbie 2007; Ringrose 2013).

Emily shared that she often felt angry about the gendered burden she carries of poli- cing equality in her relationship. For example, she interrogates herself when she completes household chores. She explained:

I even check myself like when I’m washing the dishes in Andy’s apartment. I’m like ‘Do you actually want these clean? Or are you just doing it ‘cause you think you ought to?’ You know. Or like when um … There’s just lots of like little things in relationships. Like, when he’ll ask me to do something, when I’m like ‘You have two hands. Just do it yourself.’ And like I think sometimes that pisses me off more than it ought to, because I’m like conscious of myself as a woman, and of like the way that that comes off.

Emily, along with some other participants, took an empowered, feminist stance here, while vigilantly placing limits on her acts of care for her partner to maintain equality in her relationship. This focus on equal division of labour also took up neoliberal expectations that individuals reflexively monitor their contribution to the relationship (Giddens 1991; Gonick 2006; Demerath 2009; Finn 2015). Emily continued,

I get really defensive in moments when I’m like, just kind of like hit me in the face with the fact that I’m a woman. And like that just really pisses me off. Like something’s being denied me like because I’m a woman.

Here Emily used a metaphor of violence, constructing society as abusive, ‘hit[ting]’ her ‘in the face’ with her gendered position. Emily went on to argue that she has not had to grapple with larger inequalities, but she imagined that the ‘practicality of having kids’ and having a career will ‘collide’ and become a ‘frustrating’ part of a future relationship. Across these excerpts, Emily suggested that she was constantly on guard to protect the equality in her relationship. While she argued that her relationship was relatively equal, she anticipated the gendered bind of career and motherhood in the future. Emily troubled the notion that equality is now inherent in relationships, rather she took on the gendered responsibility of constant vigilance of equality. This burden was infused with language of anger and she positioned threats of inequality, and responsibility to contain those threats, as a kind of violence against her. Across these examples, participants made equality central to their understandings of companionate relationships, while simultaneously holding themselves individually responsible to monitor the implementation of this equality.

Participants also emphasised that relationships required diligent work, particularly when they talked about their ideas for future marriage. Sabrina explained, ‘I guess like a quality that’s important is sort of like working together to move through the world.’ Simi- larly, Emily described the focus in her relationship on ‘making it work. Um, that we’re like

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putting effort into it, and that we’re you know maintaining something’. In these construc- tions, undergirded by neoliberal values of work and production, relationships require indi- vidual responsibility, work ethic, and are positioned as a ‘product’ to be developed (Giddens 1991; McLeod and Yates 2006; Demerath 2009; Baker 2010b). Other researchers have noted the ways Americans apply ‘bootstrapping’ narratives to their intimate relation- ships (Quinn 1996; Hackstaff 1999; Swidler 2001; Dunn 2004). As in debates about econ- omic inequality, this emphasis on the work of relationships serves to secure participants’ worthiness for, and naturalise the privileges of, long-term heterosexual relationships (Demerath 2009; Kahn 2011).

Companionate relationship logics centred on building a foundation of friendship, sup- porting academic achievement, requiring equal investment, and mutually working on the relationship. Overall, participants’ constructions of companionate relationship created room for connection and mutuality within intimate relationships, while still giving primacy to their individual achievement (Swidler 2001). Taking up logics of care, partici- pants emphasised the importance of support in their relationships and link this support to both partners’ continued academic productivity and success, suggesting the persistent claim neoliberal ideologies make on their relationship understandings, even when they are tacitly resisted (Gilligan 1982; Demerath 2009).

Romance and resistance

While independent and companionate logics predominated participants’ visions of ideal relationships, many participants suggested that as younger girls they had hoped for inti- mate relationships that followed more traditional, romantic scripts. Some still expressed a kind of fond nostalgia for romantic ideals, but they now positioned romance as naive, unrealistic, or unattainable. For example, Hannah explained,

ideally it’s nice to think that there’s that one person who will sweep you off your feet and make you happy for the rest of your life. But realistically, like, people change and, like, that’s not going to happen. [laughs] Or at least in my mind that’s, like, it is completely unrealistic.

Across their interviews, participants overwhelmingly constructed romance narratives as ‘immature’, embarrassing, and ‘contrived’. However, Inez’s description stood out as an exception. In addition to utilising independent and companionate logics in her discussion of positive relationships, at one point in the interviews, Inez firmly claimed her belief in romance. She explained:

I’m a hardcore romantic. I love The Notebook. I love all of these types of things. And I feel also because like my parents even though they’ve had a very like rocky road, my dad is still very romantic 28 years into – 29 years into the marriage. Like brings my mom flowers for no reason, brings her chocolates. Just is really thoughtful and takes her out. … I think romance is a big part of the relationship. … People say romance is dead, but it shouldn’t be. Chivalry isn’t dead.

For Inez, the defence of romance was a way to preserve the goodness of her parents’ ‘rocky’ relationship and the more traditionally gendered values of her parents, who, as working-class immigrants from Mexico to the US, stood outside of the circle of elite privi- lege into which she had entered. Yet, while romance narratives were still clearly a part of the cultural milieu for these women, participants broadly associated romance with a kind of gendered spectacle and naïveté that they actively rejected.

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Relationship transformation as post-feminist success or neoliberal subjugation?

Overall, participants’ conceptions of relationships have undergone a notable shift: Rather than putting intimate relationships at the centre of their undergraduate experience, study participants forefronted their achievement identities and positioned intimate relationships as secondary to their academic success and future goals. This research brings a new set of understandings of how women in one context were making meaning of intimate relation- ships in a ‘post-feminist’ and neoliberal era (Gill 2007; Ringrose 2007). Across differences of race, class, and sexual identity in this group, participants largely rejected ‘emphasized fem- ininity’ and gendered notions of romance and suggested that ideal relationships are those that either stay out of the way of, or support, their individual achievement. Translating neoliberal ideals into discursive practice, participants argued that one’s own success and reflexive self-development should not be obstructed by relationships (Rose 1999; McLeod and Yates 2006; Ringrose 2007; Demerath 2009). Both the independent and com- panionate logics regulated women’s sexuality in new ways, as desire and intimacy must be vigilantly managed and circumscribed (Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody 2001; Aapola, Gonick, and Harris 2005; McLeod and Yates 2006; McRobbie 2007). Notably, as in Emily’s account above, many participants did not find living up to these ideals an easy process and highlighted their struggles to negotiate their lives and relationships in ways that pre- served their goodness as neoliberal subjects (Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody 2001).

Yet, one interpretive caveat is that the intensive self-management practices participants described in their relationships may also have been at work at moments in our interview relationship. Indeed, in the romance commentary above Inez surveiled and named her vio- lation of the expectation to discard romance, even as she resisted it. Scholars suggest young women are profoundly aware of the implicit expectations to live up to neoliberal ideals and eschew vulnerability (Baker 2010a; Stringer 2014; Finn 2015). While many par- ticipants resisted silencing described in other studies by sharing vulnerable, emotional stories of their lives and relationships, their performance of the logics of ideal relationships, like all cultural logics, crafted organised representations of messy, and often contradictory, lived experiences (Quinn 2005, 1996). Yet, the robust ways that independent and compa- nionate relationship logics predominated, emerged unprompted across sequential inter- views, and remained consistent across participants with varied backgrounds, suggests the power of these logics, and the neoliberal, post-feminist ideals with which they are associated, to define and regulate participants’ understandings of intimate lives (Edley 2001; Ringrose 2013).

In his 1992 book, The Transformation of Intimacy, Giddens postulated that modern ega- litarian relationships could sow the seeds of social emancipation. By constructing relation- ships in active, autonomous, and conditional terms, partners will find both sexual pleasure and true intimacy. In this study, women did report that they felt more empowered sexually and relationally and that their relationships were often based on egalitarian ideals. However, the ideal relationships they described did not seem to chart a clear path to ending oppression. Rather than learning to ‘open out’ to another (Giddens 1992), the dis- ciplining forces of neoliberalism informed women’s choices to tightly regulate their inti- mate experiences. As McLeod and Yates (2006) suggest, everyday experiences of ‘freedom’ from gendered inequality actually serves to dominate women in new ways:

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Seeing young women’s desire for autonomy as evidence of the freedom of women from pas- sivity and emotional dependence invokes the success of feminism, but tends to neglect the ways in which the practices of autonomy are linked to the emergence and regulation of par- ticular kinds of individuals. (208)

The women’s rights movement radically altered the educational and occupational land- scape, providing a range of new opportunities for women (Tong 2009). The participants in this study are the beneficiaries of these shifts, and their priorities reflect the seriousness with which they have adopted calls to ‘have it all’. In the US, modernity and feminism have changed the structure of and opportunities in women’s lives: women in this study no longer feel beholden to a college culture centred on romance. But these moves have not eradicated underlying social and political structures that marginalise women. Instead, participants take up neoliberal ideologies to address gendered threats, which sub- jugate them in new ways (Gill 2007).

Across participants’ discussion of relationships, we see how ‘post-feminist’ neoliberal constructions giving primacy to individual self-development and self-regulation is made ‘natural’, even in the most intimate contexts, and how gendering processes shift and change, yet remain powerful forces in students’ everyday experiences (Edley 2001; McLeod and Yates 2006; Ringrose 2007; Connell 2011). When taking up neoliberal logics, women’s autonomy in relationships is both a hard-fought accomplishment and a potential trap. The participants in this study narrate these everyday ambiguities and con- tradictions. These findings suggest that feminists need to advocate not only for the ethical project of ‘sex-positive’ educational spaces for young women to explore and embody their individual desires (Lamb 2010), but also to propagate spaces for ‘gender “undoings” [to] emerge, and other understandings and convictions [to] jostle for authenticity’ (Ringrose 2013, 147). In this political moment, we are all challenged to name these rifts and contra- dictions, to interrogate the structural and ideological projects at work underneath our everyday meanings, and to create possibilities to ‘artfully’ expand, crack open, and reassemble these meanings in educational contexts (Hekman 1995; Ringrose 2013).

Notes

1. All reported percentages are approximations. 2. All names are pseudonyms.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This project was funded through support by an AAUW American Dissertation Fellowship.

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