For over two decades, girls and young women in Western contexts have been depicted as a success story within education. School achievement, overrepresentation in higher education, and an increased role in the workforce have been held up as examples of a post-feminist society where gender inequalities no longer exist (McLeod & Yates 2006). Certainly, the notion of the ‘successful girl’ is a seductive image, though, equally problematic.  Such a discourse suggests that girls are without the gendered barriers of previous generations and can achieve anything if they set their minds to it. Furthermore, it ignores powerful intersectional identity vectors as well as significant structural issues. This discourse, which is neoliberal at its core, upholds the false notion of an uncomplicated trajectory and obscures how the realisation of success is not so readily available to all girls from all backgrounds (see McDonald 2021; McLeod & Yates 2006; Pomerantz & Raby 2017; Walkerdine et al. 2001). 

The research presented in this presentation is positioned in reference to this phenomenon and its critiques. I am interested in the tensions between social class and discourses of feminine success, and how these tensions impact how First-in-Family (FIF) girls negotiate belonging in higher education. Although belonging is an important area of focus within youth studies research (Harris et al. 2021), within education research there has been a less explicit focus on how working-class girls experience and negotiate feelings of belonging within higher education spaces. As an important aspect of how working-class girls experience the transition from secondary school into higher education, considering experiences of belonging offers “productive ways of thinking about the relational dimensions of youth experience in complex times, and young people’s connections to place, people, material spaces and objects” (Harris et al. 2021, p. 6). How belonging is conceptualised is often undertheorised in studies of young people (Noble 2020; Wright 2015); belonging is conceptualised in this research as a form of membership which is experienced as embodied and, often, as labour-intensive (Noble 2020). As such, belonging also functions as social capital.  

Drawing from a larger study examining the experiences of first-in-family (FIF) girls in one Australian city as they transition from secondary school into their first year of university, the aim of this presentation is to consider how gender and social class impact on how FIF girls navigate belonging during the transition to university. First-in-family students are commonly defined as students who are the first in their immediate family to enrol in higher education (O’Shea 2014; Patfield et al. 2022). I draw on critiques of the feminine success discourse (for example, see Archer et al., 2007; Harris, 2004; McLeod & Yates, 2006; Pomerantz & Raby, 2017; Renold & Allan 2006; Ringrose, 2007), particularly in relation to neoliberal aspects such as responsibilisation and individualism, to consider how girls may position a sense of belonging in terms of success and failure. University spaces can be experienced as unfamiliar and anxiety-inducing by working-class students and difficulties adjusting to university can lead to attrition. Furthermore, girls and young women can struggle to assert their rights to territory where such struggles – as a ‘contentious reality that shapes girls’ lives’ (Rentschler and Mitchell 2016, p. 2) – inform not only how girls navigate social spaces but how they experience girlhood.

The thematic analysis of this presentation is based on the narratives of two FIF girls, Kate and Christina. Central to this analysis is an exploration of how Kate and Christina navigate feelings of belonging through discursive understandings of university spaces that are regulated through regimes of gender and social class.

The research project examined the experiences of 22 FIF girls from diverse schooling sectors in Adelaide, Australia, as they moved from secondary school into their first year of university (McDonald 2021; Stahl & McDonald 2022). Participants were recruited through social media, in-school presentations and school leaders during their final year of secondary school. Data collection took place through multiple one-on-one semi-structured interviews in the first in the weeks after participants graduated from high school, and then three more times during the first two years of university. During the interviews, participants were invited to discuss their relationships with both their schools and universities, with a focus on how they negotiated gender relations and learner identities in the context of these sites. The interviews were digitally recorded, transcribed and then coded using the NVivo computer-aided qualitative data analysis package. Thematic analysis took place through coding of the data as a way to ‘cluster’ data so that sections of answers to specific questions could be read and understood within the larger cohort. At the same time, reading the interviews as narratives became important in building an overall picture of participant experiences where, often, a specific comment or experience shared by a participant was better understood when read within the context of their previous interviews rather than analysed within the theme under which it had been coded. During the interviews and thematic analysis, the way that some participants positioned university and social mobility as meaningful classed and gendered experiences became evident. The experiences reported to me during interviews with Christina and Kate are illustrative of narratives which highlight a nuance within the successful but at times precarious natures of their university transition experiences. In deciding to focus specifically on two young women for this presentation, I draw on Reay’s (2018, p. 18) suggestion that case studies allow for work which brings ‘working-class young people’s narratives to life’ through devoting ‘time and reflexivity in order to develop in-depth case studies’. Christina and Kate’s narratives are especially highlighted because they both discussed how they struggled to experience belonging, which they attached to very specific physical university spaces.

Christina and Kate experienced the transition into university as a series of negotiations of belonging in and across spaces and places within higher education. It becomes evident that the navigation of belonging can be contingent on understandings of both familiar and unfamiliar physical and discursive spaces. Furthermore, gendered and classed meaning making through subjective positioning is evident in the way that Christina and Kate locate themselves within, or outside of, university spaces. For Kate, a lack of familiarity with the discursive markers of different spaces constitutes feelings of awkwardness as she positions herself as out of place or inauthentic. Furthermore, this positioning is experienced through the social interaction of watching and being watched, as both Kate and Christina variously perceive the (middle-class) gaze of other students or as they gaze at others. It is through these social interactions that embodied performances in certain spaces constitute the ‘shaping of subjectivity’ (McLeod and Yates 2006) in terms of class and gender. Disjuncture between bodily performances and internalised subjectivity highlights how a sense of belonging, or of not belonging, is impacted by wider discourses of feminine success but is experienced at the level of the individual. Additionally, Christina and Kate’s narratives are a reminder that some girls are not only navigating the transition into a new space – the unknown of the university field from the known of compulsory schooling – but also experiencing their subjectivity in transition.

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