Abstract
This paper seeks to demonstrate the importance of bringing sexuality more to the fore in scholarly work on the transition to adulthood. Sexuality not only brings needed attention to the commonplace sexual minorities that are largely overlooked in existing literature, connection with queer theory’s elemental insights stands to enrich the very frameworks through which transitions to adulthood are articulated. To that end, this paper provides a preliminary sketch of a “queer” vision of “emerging adulthood” and begins to elaborate the potential benefits of its deployment in scholarly treatments of transitions to adulthood. Inasmuch as a queered emerging adulthood lays a base for understanding additional forms of identity instability and perspectives on adulthood, it perhaps also indicates that scholarship on transitions to adulthood can profit by continuing to look to other theoretical perspectives that might shed added light on the shifting and manifold contours of (transitioning to) adulthood in the twenty-first century.
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Notes
Although “emerging” and “young” adulthood have come to possess somewhat divergent meanings, I take an ambivalent stance and utilize these terms relatively interchangeably by instead focusing upon how these concepts have jointly inspired, influenced, and anchored inquiry into departures from more segmented transitions between traditional notions of adolescence and adulthood.
See also Shanahan et al. (2005).
Estimates of the ages where “emerging adulthood” is experienced range from roughly 18–25 to 18–30.
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The author would like to thank Arlene Stein, Patrick Carr, Sarah Rosenfield, the anonymous SRSP reviewers, and the 2006 cohort RSC writing crew for their valuable feedback at various points in this project.
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Torkelson, J. A Queer Vision of Emerging Adulthood: Seeing Sexuality in the Transition to Adulthood. Sex Res Soc Policy 9, 132–142 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-011-0078-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-011-0078-6