‘It Feels Like Life Is Narrowing’: Aspirational Lifestyles and Ambivalent Futures among Norwegian ‘Top Girls’

Analyses of young feminine identities have often focused on consumption, career and intimate life as separate spheres. In this article, we bring these together to nuance the concept of the ‘top girl’. Drawing on a qualitative study of young Norwegian ‘top girls’’ alcohol consumption and lifestyles we explore how ‘appropriate’ feminine identities are configured in the present and in the future. We analyse how the egalitarian context shapes the contours of the ‘top girl’ and find that ‘progressive’ values are central to our participants’ present lifestyles. However, these progressive lifestyles are expected to collide with the ‘square’ lives the participants see awaiting them as middle-class adult women and mothers. We argue that as the participants grow older, the range of legitimate, middle-class femininities is narrowing. Further, we suggest that in an egalitarian context such as the Norwegian context the ‘top girl’ lacks an attractive, adult equivalent.