DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF “BEING AN ADULT” BY FRENCH YOUNG WOMEN: A DYNAMIC PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

What is being an adult? There is not much discussion about this issue in the academy. This and other related questions were submitted to French young women from Rennes, in comprehensive interviews. After screening the interviews for sound quality and depth of approach to the topic, we were left with a corpus of fourteen samples, generating approximately 250 minutes of recorded documents. These documents were analyzed from the perspective of discourse semiotics, in order to detect the discursive construction of being an adult, in each of the age ranges and between them. It was shown that the idea of what being an adult is does not remain the same at 16, 20 and 25 years of age. From a highly idealized representation, for the group at age 16, the adult is gradually humanized. However, it is still the traditional image of the male breadwinner that reigns. Thirteen out of the fourteen interviewed young women say they are not and do not want to become adults. We attribute this reluctance to a change in perspective: in the past, the young were thought of in relation to adults, preparing to be so; today, it is the adult who is thought of in relation to the young, as the one losing a number of privileges.