Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores how girls' concepts of their future adult identity are powerfully shaped by their desires for a cosmopolitan and/or fictional future.

Paper long abstract:

What must one have to be a better person? The answers vary not simply by culture and community, but also by age. I examine becoming a "better human" through children, who struggle to imagine a future life beyond that of their family, school, and routine. The concept of "desire" is paramount, as it emphasizes not what one already owns or practices, but rather what one "wants." Specifically focusing on girl cultures, I examine how desires— especially for people, places, things, and identities far away from their everyday lives—influences girls in their imaginings of that ideal future. This presentation examines two examples of girl's future desires: one from fieldwork conducted in Northern Thailand in the 1990s, and the other from current "cyber-ethnography" exploring the effect of new and emerging mediascapes (like social media sites, chat rooms, fan fiction, fan conventions, and "booktube") on Western girls. I argue that, in terms of becoming better (older, wiser, richer, prettier) humans, girls are shaped by their longings for a specific type of future, which are significantly influenced by fantasy images of faraway places. This research brings a new perspective on the world, focusing on a combination of the real and the fantastic, but I argue that this is children's experience of the world today—they are growing up with a normalized perspective of how the real and the fantasy combine to make the everyday. The new resultant identities define new important cultural factors: new kinships, new rituals, new beliefs, and new politics.