Capacities for friendship and intimacy operate discursively as key markers of gender identity and difference. Feminism has sought to redefine the public/private split and interrogate the associated binaries of reason/emotion, serious/trivial and so on. For some feminists, however, inverting rather than deconstructing these oppositions has been the goal, so that women's distinctive ways of being-our capacity for care, concern and connection-are reclaimed as virtues, celebrated not denigrated. By inference, men are constructed as lacking these qualities, and as defined by detachment, autonomy, hard-headed rationality and emotional awkwardness.

In education, claims that women have a distinctive voice, morality, style of learning, and predisposition for 'care and connection' have been given a renewed focus since the mid-1980s onwards with the growth of gender-inclusive curriculum and girl-friendly schooling. These reforms drew on notions of distinctively and essential feminine ways of knowing, and of women's natural inclination for affective, co-operative and 'conversational' relationships-views whose lineage is both conventional stereotypes of femininity and forms of object-relations psychology (McLeod 1996). The growth of the men's movement and the question of 'what about the boys?' has also focussed attention on what is different or special about girls. One of the things boys appear to miss out on and men want to reclaim is the experience of being in touch with their feelings, of being expressive and able to forge close bonds with one another (e.g. Morton 1997; Hickey et al 1998). In other words, being able to conduct their personal and social relations with the kind of emotional openness that is said to characterise women's friendships and social interactions. Whereas women's affect was once commonly represented as deficiency or as a negative and debilitating excess of sentiment, it is now being represented through discourses of transformation and redemption . Women's and girls' capacity for friendship and ability to express emotions is being reformulated as (personally and socially) 'healthy' and desirable, as powerful qualities which men simultaneously lack and need And, if we pursue Giddens' line of analysis, the capacity for new forms of intimacy and the search for 'pure relationships' hold possibilities for the radical transformation of personal and social life.

In this paper, I address young people's recollected experiences of friendship and intimacy with two questions in my mind. The first is whether the conventional stories about female and male styles of social and personal relations continue to hold true. Are girls still being caught up in webs of intimacy while boys seek out detachment and autonomy? How useful is it to keep speaking in these categories of difference- to keep reinscribing the authority of the affect/reason binary? (And, in relation to this, can we observe the kind of (incipient) changes and possibilities about which Giddens writes?) And the second question is, what approaches and ways of seeing might be helpful in interpreting the significance and effects of (gendered) patterns of intimacy and friendship?

In 1993 Lyn Yates and I began the 12 to 18 Project, a qualitative, longitudinal study which is following a number of young people at four different Victorian (Australian) schools through each year of their secondary schooling. Twice each year, we interview twenty-four students (six students at each school) either alone or with their friends, and video- and audiotape the interviews. We are interested in following qualitatively their thinking and their pathways as they go through schooling and then enter life beyond this. At each interview we ask them a range of questions about how they see themselves; how they are relating to school; and whether and how they are thinking about their futures (see Yates & McLeod 1996; McLeod & Yates 1997).

A particular focus of the study is the construction of gendered subjectivity over the period of secondary schooling-from 12 to 18 years. We are exploring two dimensions to the 'construction of gender': the first is cultural meanings and public discourses on gender and the ways in which girls and boys articulate and negotiate these. The second sense, and to date the more problematic, is the way in which individual gender identity takes shape and develops over time. Here we are concerned with understanding gender identity as a process, and how this process develops. We are examining stages and patterns, differences and commonalities in the ways in which different girls and boys negotiate/fashion/regulate their gender identities; we are looking at both developments in individual biographies as well as cross-sectional comparisons of different groups of students at the same age or stage of schooling.

In terms of understanding 'gender' in responses to interview questions, we have focussed on what the feminist researcher Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen calls 'unacknowledged gender'. We have not explicitly asked students to talk about how or what they think of themselves as a girl or a boy, or to reflect on their 'genderedness' in direct and immediate ways. Rather, we have tried to read off 'gendered subjectivity' from the ways in which students respond to the full range of questions-even when gender is not for them an obviously foregrounded issue. Bjerrum Nielsen suggests that:

Students' attitudes to and retold experiences of friendship are thus also being explored in terms of what insights they also offer into the process and construction of gendered subjectivity. How does the experience and perceived significance of friendship change or stay much the same for young people as they 'grow up' during the adolescent years? We are interested in how students talk about their present situation and in how they represent, to us and to themselves, earlier experiences of friendship-both happy and unhappy times-and how these accounts fit within their overall narratives of themselves.

Giddens' sociological attention to 'feelings' and intimacy is itself one part of a large and diverse body of research (much of it feminist inspired) which attempts to make sense of the private, messy, and non-instrumental. In such work, intimacy and friendship are positioned as central objects of analysis, no longer trivial or incidental 'noise' in the serious business of explaining the rational and public dimensions of social life. For example, there has been a growth of interest in work broadly characterised as the 'sociology of emotions' (e.g. Stephenson et al 1996) and there are numerous ethnographic and other qualitative studies of young people and friendship which, often drawing on critical traditions within Cultural Studies, elaborate the political and sub-cultural significance of friendship practices (e.g. Nilan 1992; Taylor 1993; Hey, 1997). In major ethnographic study of girls and friendship, Valerie Hey argues for example that, 'The so-called private, marginal realm of schoolgirl friendships is a significant place where the "social" is indexed. It is between and amongst girls as friends that identities are variously practised, appropriated, resisted and negotiated' (Hey 1997, p.30).

Another related body of research addresses popularity, friendship cliques, tension in friendships, bullying and processes of inclusion and exclusion (Eder 1985; Kinney 1993; Giordano 1995; Tulloch 1995; Leckie 1997). There is also a strong tradition of psychologically-based research which examines friendship patterns and the ability to initiate and maintain close personal ties in terms of psychological adjustment, self-esteem, and other measurable traits (ref). In such work, friendship becomes a symptom or a way of measuring the (successful) passage through normative stages of adolescent social-psychological development. Coming out of object-relations and developmental psychology, the influential work of Carol Gilligan and the Harvard Project on Women's Psychology and Girl's Development identifies the force of gender differences in interactions. A central focus of the 'Harvard Project' is the exploration of patterns and developmental crises faced by young girls growing up in Western cultures in the late twentieth century-prominent themes are the loss of voice as girls enter adolescence, and the juggling of their desires for autonomy and connection (e.g. Gilligan et al 1990; Taylor et al 1997).

There are as well many survey-based studies documenting that although friendship is important for both young women and men, there remain significant gendered patterns (e.g, Wilks 1992; Hartley 1994). A recent Australian report concludes that 'Women's friendships are a sharing of themselves, men's are more a sharing of activities'.

These are unsurprising findings, striking only insofar as they repeat what is already popular and feminist common-sense. Indeed, disappointingly, much of the research on gender and friendship offers few new insights into either friendship or gender difference/identity. At the beginning of the 12 to 18 Project, we wanted to see if, at the end of the twentieth century and after over two decades of feminism and of gender equity work in schools, the familiar patterns persisted; and we wanted to reconsider some of the standard analyses of these apparent differences, particularly the work of the 'Harvard Project' and the themes and dilemmas it identifies.

From our research, it is unequivocally clear that for both girls and boys (from very different schools and backgrounds) friendship is a central part of their experience of growing up and of being at school. In Years 7 and 8 students frequently described seeing your friends as one of the best things about school.

And, as the Australian survey noted above found, there are many responses indicating that boys conduct friendship through activities such as sport, that for girls being friends involves a lot of talking and 'mucking around' and the swapping of confidences; and that both girls and boys describe their friendships along these lines of difference.

We have also found many examples of boys in junior and middle school longing for friends and feeling isolated, struggling to find a vocabulary to express their despair. Contrary to a common view that affective relations are of little importance to adolescent boys, our findings suggest that the issue is rather one of emotional awkwardness and uncertainty. There are some strong indications that when friends fall out or there is friendship trouble girls and boys react differently. For girls it tends to be an all-consuming trauma, and it is difficult for them to focus on school work or on any other issue. For many girls, especially in junior and middle school, there is an intense pre-occupation with being a good friend and displaying the right qualities of friendship: trust, honesty, loyalty. And there is an equally intense pre-occupation among them with what counts as betrayal, and with processes of inclusion and exclusion.

For boys, in contrast, the reaction to friendship trouble is more often to look beyond the immediate upset and focus more single-mindedly on school work and looking to a future and a world of work away from school (see McLeod & Yates 1998).

In some respects, the experience of being bullied or having trouble with friends serves to sharpen boys' sense of their own identity, setting them apart from others, and forcing them to focus more on a life and a future away from school. In Year 7, one of the boys, who was from an ethnic-minority background, was finding it hard to make friends and to work out the patterns of social relations at his school. But, he determined not to let his loneliness and uncertainty distract him from his school work. Instead, he reported spending his lunchtimes sitting by himself under a tree memorising the distance between the planets as he believed that this would help him to fulfil his long-term aim to study science at university.

We have found, then, the persistence of certain conventional gender differences but evidence also that friendship, and especially working out how to foster close relationships is an important issue for boys, even if they speak about it in awkward ways, and in ways quite different from the girls.

Alongside girls' immersion in the intricacies and demands of emotional life we have also found quite striking narratives and fantasies of escape and adventure. There is, we have argued (McLeod & Yates 1998) an apparent tension for girls between a desire for personal freedom and a compelling sense of emotional responsibility. This observation resonates with some key findings of the Harvard Project on Women and Girls. Carol Gilligan writes:

The Harvard Projects have been criticised for their normative, universalising and essentialising tendencies and for the ways in which the work itself silences and excludes the voices of different groups of women (e.g. Feminism & Psychology 1994, especially Davis 1994). Feminist poststructuralists-and, for different reasons, feminist psychoanalytic critics (e.g Rose 1986)-have been particularly critical of this and related forms of feminist object-relations psychology. In her ethnography of girls' friendship, Valerie Hey writes that although she had some initial attraction to the arguments about girls loss of voice-'of the confident voice of childhood replaced by the diminished and un/voiced self of adolescence' (1997, p.11), these findings were not confirmed by her own research: 'my own data were more ambiguous, representing fragmented and contradictory feminine subjects with contextually variant assertive as well as diminished voices-findings which were impossible to reconcile with the conceptualisation of the 'Harvard' authentic self-validating girl subject' (Hey 1997, p.11).

Hey's comments encapsulate some significant themes in both the (poststructural) study of girls' friendship patterns and the construction of gendered identities, and the current reception of Gilligan's work. I support many of the standard poststructural critiques of the Harvard Project and, like Hey, in the 12 to 18 Project we too can find examples which contradict and complicate the patterns and stages it proposes. But, in the haste to interrogate psychological work (as variously humanist, essentialist and normative) and to assert the truth of poststructuralist propositions, there has been a tendency to overlook some of the substantive themes and insights raised by the work of the Harvard Project. For example, the Harvard Project underlines questions about processes of identity and gendered development: and, like the 12 to 18 Project, it is concerned with understanding gender over time, not simply the discursive construction of gender at one particular time. It focuses on patterns and recurring tensions, and while this can produce a normative analysis of development, this is not to say that some of the identified themes and tensions are irrelevant or meaningless. For example, the Harvard Project's elaboration of the autonomy/connection dilemma resonates with some of our findings in the 12 to 18 Project. While this tension is a well-established theme in psychology, especially in the object-relations tradition (e.g. Hollway 1995), the culturally and historically specific form this drama takes (or even transformed) needs to be explored.

In the 12 to 18 Project, the conflict between autonomy and connection is very strong for girls in junior and middle school, not just in terms of how they think about their friends and intimacy but also in how they think about themselves now and in the future. For example, a girl in year 9 told us that she was really worried about her maths teacher, feared that she wasn't going so well at maths, and was falling behind. She had had the same teacher for three years (this was at a elite private school) and felt she was not learning much from him-he did not explain things in a way she could understand. But when we asked her if she or her parents had considered seeing whether she could be in another class, she said of the teacher 'he's the sort of person that would be upset if he thought you didn't understand'. In other words she was taking responsibility for not hurting his feelings, even if it undermined her own chances of doing well.

We also came across a number of examples of girls trying very hard to please their fathers and being hurt in the process. In one case, a girl gave as her unhappiest memory a time when her father (who was a doctor) had tried to explain a maths problem to her. She had not understood, but pretended she had, and went away desperately unhappy. Again she was trying to protect him and not to hurt his feelings (that he had not really explained it very well). Another girl was obsessive about horseriding and had had quite a lot of success in it. She had also made the effort to get up early and go running with her father and do other things that he liked, but he was not making any similar effort to attend her horse riding events or any of the other things in which she was involved.

What we are finding here, then, are examples of adolescent girls working out some apparently persistent dilemmas in being a young woman-negotiating tensions between desires for personal success and a sense of obligation to and responsibility for others. It would be a mistake, however, to surmise from this that feminism and gender equity reforms in schools have somehow failed girls, have not given them enough self-confidence or encouraged them enough to pursue their own ambitions. Indeed, in some respects, it is precisely the possibilities for personal success and public achievement opened up and emphasised by feminist reform that has heightened these tensions between 'connection' and 'autonomy' for young girls today.

On the one hand, the Harvard Projects and related work address themes which continue to speak to the ways in which young girls construct their identities and experience intimacy and growing up in Australia today. On the other hand, however, the critiques made of this work and of object-relations more generally cannot be ignored: the tendency is to be normative and to privilege psychological processes over social/cultural context and individual life history. While poststructuralism has generated some valuable insights for the study of gender difference, it has also foreclosed others; it works against (for good reasons) universalising and generalising analyses, and it has inspired a persuasive body of literature that repudiates the normative and dangerous frameworks of developmental psychology (Hollway 1989, Henriques et al 1984, Walkerdine 1990). But in relinquishing the psychologised, humanist subject, it has also produced some fairly reductive theorisations of subjectivity. 'Discourses produce subjectivity': such discourse determinism can lead to a poststructuralism that is often no more insightful than socialisation theory (Hollway 1994; McLeod 1993; McLeod forthcoming). In the 12 to 18 Project, the challenge is thus to develop an approach to 'gender' which holds together developmental concerns with patterns and processes (we are studying gender subjectivity over time), poststructuralist arguments about discourses as constitutive, and subjectivity as produced and regulated, and the idea of a developing, in time and space (psychological) subject who is not coterminous with discourse.

One suggestive approach has been developed by Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen in her interview-based study of women across three generations. Like us, Bjerrum Nielsen find much that it is helpful in poststructuralism, but she too is critical of its thin and deterministic account of subjectivity (see McLeod forthcoming). She is also critical of the universalising and inexorable stages and laws of developmental psychology and of object-relations and Lacanian psycho-analysis. In order to develop a way of understanding gender identity, Bjerrum Nielsen extends Freud's metaphor of 'psychic apparatuses' as a 'magic writing pad' in which the subject is understood as a kind of palimpsest. 'The magic writing pad consists of two layers: a soft wax slate and over it a thin, transparent leaf of paper'. This magic writing-pad 'all the time receives new inscriptions upon it without having the old ones erased', even though the older ones may not always be immediately apparent and may need to be read and deciphered under special lighting (1996, p.7).

For Bjerrum Nielsen (and for us) the usefulness of this metaphor is that it 'makes it possible to maintain a certain developmental perspective on subjectivity, without ending up in either determinism or universalism' (ibid). It enables us to conceptualise the construction of gender identity as a recursive process which is neither characterised as a 'linear advancing and logic' nor as 'randomly constituted' (ibid). It offers a way of thinking about the uneven intersections and overlay between stories and narratives about the self, recollections, imaginings and fantasies, and so on, as well as the relative impact of these 'inscriptions' at different ages and stages. While still analysing subjectivity as produced and discourses as constitutive, it suggests a way of thinking about how discourses, in conjunction with psychic processes, actually work to produce subjectivity over time. In this formulation, we can see how at different times and stages some discursive traces are more pronounced than at other times, that their influence is not neatly predictable but that their markings are never completely erased. The self remains a psychological category but it is not irrevocably fixed or only shaped by psychological processes or dramas.

The metaphor of the self as a magic writing pad is a highly useful one for investigating the process/development of gender identity in a longitudinal study. It registers the self as both having a history, and as being ongoing, in-process. Significantly, returning to Giddens, it also helps us to see the making of the self as a self-reflexive project (Giddens 1991). That is, it makes it possible to think of the self as shaped by reflective and self-reflexive moves between older and newer 'inscriptions' (which include the stories we tell ourselves). For example, while we are interested in how girls and boys negotiate friendship and intimacy in the present, we are also examining how they recollect earlier experiences, and the narratives they tell themselves, and us, about these incidents. In reflecting back on their schooling, students in years 9 and 10 frequently mark out friendship troubles as defining moments. For girls especially (but not exclusively) friendship troubles form part of their narrative of growing up, represented as a loss of innocent happiness and pleasure, an incident which keenly and painfully signifies that 'everything changes'. (Interestingly, the girls were more likely to talk about troubles and falling out sometime after the event, to construct it as a memory, as something from which they have recovered or left behind, rather than as an unhappiness they are still experiencing.)

Such narratives, when pieced together with other recurring themes in their talk about themselves, their futures and their everyday school experiences, begin to tell us something about both friendship, intimacy and loss and processes of gender identity development.

Feminists inside and outside of education have often praised girls and women's intrinsic capacity for friendship and affective relations. Significant educational reforms have been based on such presumptions. Care, conversation and connection have been thought of as unassailable virtues, as self-evidently good for girls, and for boys, if only they weren't so bound up in detachment and autonomy. But, as I have suggested, the desire for friendship and intimacy is not always easily satisfied or achieved without tension. Indeed the desire for intimacy can engulf girls, and dominate their experience of schooling, especially in the junior and middle school years. Here we have a dilemma for feminism. On the one hand, feminism expects and rewards girls for being affective and sensitive, and on the other, it demands that they succeed at school and in the world beyond. These twin imperatives thus exacerbate, rather than resolve, the autonomy/connection conflict for girls.

Finally, Giddens speaks optimistically of the possibilities afforded by the transformation of intimacy, and of the impact of feminism in enabling such change. Again, the shifts he writes about do not necessarily make it easier for young women to negotiate affective and intimate relations. Indeed, they too could work to increase rather than dissolve tensions between affect and autonomy. He writes: 'In a post-traditional order, the narrative of the self has in fact continually to be reworked, and life-style practices brought continually into line with it, if the individual is to combine personal autonomy with a sense of ontological security' (Giddens 1992, p.75). It is in the context of these kind of large-scale sociological changes that we also need to interpret girls' and boys' friendship patterns and the social-psychological and gendered resolutions to the dilemmas of autonomy and connection.

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