Trans people are increasingly visible in society, yet remain highly vulnerable to ignorance and discrimination. This can be particularly damaging in the context of healthcare, where trans people often find it difficult to access both general and specialist services. However, trans people are not powerless; they frequently exercise agency in navigating and addressing challenges in healthcare settings. This thesis provides an ethnographic account of how discourses of trans health are negotiated in the UK within and between trans community spaces, activist groups and the professional sphere of medical practice. A descriptive and interrogative account of healthcare services and health literatures is provided; this is interwoven with an analysis of emotional and temporal narratives of patient experience, as constructed collectively on the Internet. Drawing upon conversations, articles and documents produced and/or published online, the thesis explores how competing and intersecting understandings shape not only the material conditions of healthcare, but also the means by which trans identities and experiences are defined and made possible. Trans possibility is conceptualised in terms of two overarching discursive repertoires: ‘trans as condition’ and ‘trans as movement’. The former emerges largely from medical accounts, and broadly positions ‘trans’ as clearly definable and delineated. The latter emerges largely from the ideas of the emergent trans social movement and broadly positions ‘trans’ as queer, fluid and flexible. Health professionals, trans patients and activists draw differently upon discourses of condition and/or movement within a range of contexts in order to justify, reify, survive or question modes of healthcare provision and understandings of trans possibility. This thesis concludes that interactions between trans patients and the practices of specialist ‘gender identity’ services play a particularly key role in mediating discourses of trans health. Through understanding this process, we might better understand and address the wider challenges that trans people face.

This research explores working mothers’ decisions on combining paid work with looking after children and the implications these have for their pensions, and whether they have changed over time. Two cohorts of mothers are interviewed. The first cohort are working mothers aged between 30-40 years with the aim to explore their decisions’ to combine paid work with looking after children and their current situation of financial planning for retirement. The second cohort are mothers who are in receipt of state and/or non-state pensions and are aged between 60-70 years with the aim to explore how they combined paid work with looking after children and how they had planned financially for their retirement. Empirically, this research compares an earlier cohort of mothers who started to receive state and/or non-state pensions with working mothers whose retirement is expected to be around 2050. This research analyses pension provision for women in the United Kingdom through a critical review of Conservative and Labour Governments’ policies between 1979 and 2010 in addressing gender inequalities in pension provision for women. The period 1979 to 2010 covers the beginnings of the gradual and long term shift from state to non-state pension provision by 2050. Welfare state/regimes and sociological theories are used in this research study in order to explore working mothers’ decisions on paid work with looking after children and the implications these have for their pensions, given the policy shift from state to non-state pension provision. Working mothers’ experiences in combining paid work with looking after children show that mothers can hold different gendered moral rationalities and shift between the ideal types of social policy over time. This is shaped by whether they have a choice to decide how to combine paid work with looking after children. This in turn shapes working mothers’ orientations towards paid work and opportunities to contribute towards state and occupational pensions. Combining paid work with looking after children by members of both cohorts varied and was not a straightforward to fit one type of the ideal types of social policy, and the gendered moral rationalities held are subject to change in the lives of working mothers over time.

When SlutWalk marched onto the protest scene, with its focus on ending victim blaming and slut shaming, it carried the promise of a renewed feminist politics. Focusing on SlutWalk London, this study examines representations and selfrepresentations of the protest in British national newspapers, blogs and Tumblr posts to explore how this promise has been negotiated in the contemporary media space. Building on the notion that contemporary media culture is characterised by a postfeminist sensibility, this study asks: how and to what extent is SlutWalk London represented as a feminist intervention in this culture? In particular, how do representations of the protest, by the media and by activists themselves, reproduce or challenge a postfeminist sensibility? Following Rosalind Gill, the thesis conceptualises the elements of postfeminist sensibility as: choice; individualism and empowerment; natural difference; irony and knowingness; and a view of feminism as passé or ‘done wrong’. The elements of feminist sensibility are conceptualised as: equality; solidarity and politicisation; intersectionality; anger and hope; and a view of feminism as current and relevant. To explore representations and self-representations of SlutWalk, texts and images from newspapers and social media platforms, as well as interviews with organisers and participants, are analysed using content, discourse and thematic analyses. The findings reveal that protestors’ self-representations (on social media and in interviews) are characterised more consistently by a feminist sensibility, while newspaper representations of protestors and of the SlutWalk protest display a more mixed picture of both postfeminist and feminist sensibilities. This indicates a process of negotiation between feminist and postfeminist sensibilities in social and mass media, and suggests that, while contemporary media culture maintains an overall postfeminist sensibility, SlutWalk is nevertheless represented in some spaces by a feminist sensibility. In particular, news items are characterised more consistently by a feminist sensibility, which marks a significant achievement; however, columns (especially by female, feminist authors) show a more postfeminist sensibility. This discrepancy highlights some surprising barriers facing feminist protestors seeking to intervene in the postfeminist media culture and fulfil their feminist promise.

This thesis is a study of the cultures of children. Its principal perspective is sociological, though it draws heavily on the substantial body of work on children within the field of psychology. It also engages with work within the field of cultural studies, and in particular studies of youth cultures. The Gramscian perspective which informs much of the work in this area provides a theoretical framework for conceptualising children's cultures as partly autonomous from, but powerfully shaped by, ideologies and structures in the wider society. The study makes special reference to issues of 'race' within children's cultures. A theoretical framework derived mainly from studies of 'race' and youth within the 'cultural studies' tradition provides the context for a critical engagement with work on social identity within the field of social and cognitive psychology. The research on which the study is based was conducted with children in mainly- white primary schools. Most of them were aged 10 and 11. A smaller-scale follow-up study was carried out two years later when the children were at secondary school. The study adopts a qualitative methodology in order to explore the peer relationships and social interaction of children, and the extent and ways in which it may become racialised. Its findings confirm and extend previous research on friendship and conflict in children's cultures. They contribute to an understanding of 'race' in children's lives by identifying the principal forms it takes and situating them within the cognitive and social processes of children's cultures. The distinction between the expressive and instrumental functions of name-calling and other forms of racist behaviour provides the basis for a theorisation of the 'thematic' ideologies of 'race' which embody children's beliefs and the 'interactional ideologies' which govern peer interaction, and the complex relationships between them.

This thesis explores the social, political, and theoretical consequences that emerge when the contested category of “childhood” gets unequally applied to individuals and populations. The interdisciplinary theoretical project conceives of childhood as a technology of power that produces the contentious contours of various bodies and experiences, individuals and populations, and ways of life and forms of relation. It argues that childhood’s fantasmatic, figurative, and “real” subjects extend far beyond, and sometimes explicitly exclude, the early years of life. In conversation with childhood studies, feminist, trans, queer, critical-race, and psychoanalytic theory, this research is primarily concerned with the ways in which childhood is negotiated and re-imagined through discursive, institutional, and representational practices in the contemporary U.S. The analysis explores the psychic and political ambivalences of childhood, and attends to the investments in childhood’s uneven distribution. Asking specifically after the role of childhood in shaping and challenging the disposability of young black life, the queer life of children’s desires, and the steadfastness of the gender binary, this thesis outlines a theoretical framework of analysis that interdisciplinary scholars working in feminist, trans, queer, and anti-racist theory can use when addressing children and childhood, and it substantiates this framework through three case studies.

Marriage is one of the most private and critical decisions a person makes in their life. This has far reaching effects on an individual, their average quality of life and most importantly on the lives of their children. The development of young children, in terms of emotional, physical, social and learning skills, has a direct effect on their overall development and on the adults they will become. Comprehending the role played by marital unions and the elements that potentially shape children's human capital formation is intriguing and important, to acquire knowledge on where new initiatives are needed and how to design the optimal policies. This thesis consists of three chapters that all empirically investigate issues related to how families function in different environments, in order to understand the nature, causes and consequences of disparities in children's human capital. The first chapter focuses on India, while the second and third chapters are centred on the United States. Although different environments, different histories, varied cultures and different backgrounds, yet the one common theme of this thesis is the way in which families are rational players within households.

Asking people about their state of emotional well-being or their self-evaluations of life satisfaction represents a resource which can be used to contribute to knowledge concerning overall well-being and social progress, helping to avoid a narrow focus on purely economic indicators. Whilst concerns over measurement and validity have been raised, such measures have been used to research individual well-being across a vast range of topics, particularly in the field of economics. There has been much less attention from a more sociological perspective. This thesis aims to bring together the topics of well-being and sociology, via a focus on the family. The family is a long established area within sociological study, and contains a number of sub-areas that may lend themselves well to being connected to the topic of well-being. A focus on its inherent interrelations and dynamics may help to ascertain whether the ‘individual’ topic of well-being can be understood alongside the more ‘social’ topic of the family. This thesis utilises data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), a large scale survey which tracks the same people over 18 years. The BHPS was later incorporated into Understanding Society, and this data source is used for the third chapter. It is found that associations exist between a range of family related roles and experiences, and well-being. The importance of family bonds and relationships to well-being were suggested, between partners and also between parents and children. However also of note were the gendered differences that exist within these associations, and those between different dyads of family members. The impact of changes in family roles and responsibilities was also supported, and how these may impact upon well-being.

This thesis is concerned with children as familial caregivers. To date 'young carers' have received limited attention from researchers, and the current body of literature has mainly developed from the social welfare field. This is in contrast to a vast body of research, which has established the psychological impact of care giving on adults. The first paper critically reviews the concept and research on 'parentification'. This is a systemic/dynamic perspective on the psychological and developmental implications of children's involvement in caring roles. It has been submitted to the Journal of Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry (see Appendix A for instructions to authors for all papers). The brief paper is a qualitative study employing focus groups and individual interviews to consider the views of twenty young carers. The aim was to gain an insight into their perceptions of the caring experience and to provide data which might be helpful in developing a measure of 'young carer stress' to be used in the main study. This paper has been prepared for the journal 'Qualitative Health Research'. The main research focused upon the application of a stress- coping model to a study of 108 adolescent young carers. It was found that those children who felt devalued in their caring role, overloaded, and used avoidant coping styles to manage their stress were most at risk of suffering from psychological distress. The results are considered in the context of the adolescent stress-coping literature and implications for prevention and intervention are discussed. Papers are prepared in accordance with the instructions to authors, although small changes to the formatting have been made to ensure consistency across all the papers. The whole thesis is less than 20,000 words (excluding references, and tables).

This thesis analyses the construction and negotiation of ‘the tween’ and tween cultural spaces online, forming part of an emerging field of digital girlhood studies. The research is situated in two online ‘tween’ spaces: Stardoll, a commercial website, and The Ugly Side of Stardoll, a blog run by members of Stardoll. Combining a ‘cultural analysis’ approach with ethnographic traditions such as ‘immersion’ and ‘mapping’, this thesis interrogates articulations of tween culture through interlinking online case studies. The key findings of this thesis are centred on three themes. First, the construction of an explicitly tween culture on Stardoll that situates the site within a commodified pinkification of girl culture. Second, the governance of boundaries of tween girlhood, examined through two features of the site. (1) I argue that the production of Cyrus as a tween celebrity, by Stardoll and the girls’ who consume her, are moderated within a 'tween speech’ genre; and (2) interrogating discourses of risk I argue that the boundaries of Stardoll’s tween culture are governed by understandings of risk within the site and from the girls’ blog The Ugly Side of Stardoll. The third theme is the articulation of tween femininity; I argue that Stardoll produces a neoliberal, postfeminist tween identity on the site. Interestingly, the girls who use Stardoll (re)position other, younger girls within Romantic discourses of childhood in their governance of tween girlhood. However both Stardoll and the girls are invested in similar constructions of tween girlhood based on ‘wholesomeness’ and framed by understandings of age, through complex discourses of postfeminism and Romantic childhood.

This thesis places respectable femininity at the centre of the construction and performance of new womanhood among affluent middle-class women of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Using qualitative research methods, combining audio-visual materials, focus group discussion and multiple in depth interviews, I examine the complex and heterogeneous constructions of new womenhoods in relation to women’s negotiations with public and private sphere roles and Bangladeshi norms of female propriety. My conceptual framework facilitates analysis of the everyday interactional negotiations of new women in relation to their gendered and classed practices of respectable femininity, and the potential for this boundary work to enhance their agency. My analysis illuminates three aspects of the dialogical nature of respectable femininity and new womanhood. First, new women are part of the neoliberal affluent middle class and they construct their class identity as a status group, claiming inter-class and intraclass distinction from other women. Their claims to distinction rest on their levels of higher education, types of paid employment and exposure to transnational lifestyles, alongside their gendered, classed and culturally attuned selfhood performed through their ‘smart’ aesthetic practices, 50-50 work home life balance and female individualism. Secondly, new womanhood is legitimized by alternative and multiple practices of respectability, varying according to women’s age, stage of life, profession, household setting and experience of living in western countries. Finally, as new women forge alternative forms of respectability theirs is not a straightforward abandonment of old structures of respectability; rather they conform to, negotiate and potentially transgress normative conceptions of middle-class respectable femininity, substituting, concealing, or legitimizing particular practices in particular fields. Nonetheless, these processes enable them to practice increased autonomy and agency, and while their gains are vested in the self, rather than a wider feminist politics, they have the potential to positively influence the terrain of possibilities for other Bangladeshi women. Overall, my thesis shifts the focus of respectability research in South Asia from exploring the binary of respectable and unrespectable practices to evaluating how women make and remake their respectable status and class privilege in neoliberal Bangladesh, and the implications for gender relations.