Life Course Staging as Cultural and Subjective Practice: Review, Critique, and Theoretical Possibilities

Abstract

This paper identifies and critically assesses various research approaches to subjective and cultural-historical notions of life stages through the lens of comparative-cultural, psychometric, discursive psychological and ethnographic perspectives. Included is an overview of 48 studies of subjective attributions of life stages (1984—2007) covering 14 national settings, with a discussion of their limitations. Possibilities for cross-fertilizing critical gender theory with life stage theory are briefly discussed. It is suggested that analytic notions of citationality and hegemony, both pioneered in the context of gender studies, may be productively appropriated in cultural psychology.