As we navigate the spectrum between the props of ‘adulting’ (such as the viral ‘girl dinner’) and our hard-set responsibilities, this exhibition tackles the question: Have we really arrived at adulthood, or are we all just playing a part? 

“Girl dinner is just snacks” – some random internet troll

Oxford defines adults as “fully developed; grown and responsible for one’s actions.” One of the first associations we made to address the question of how, when, and if one becomes an adult is the recent internet phenomenon, girl dinner. Alighting on the coattails of girl boss, hot girl summer, and the oh-so-problematic girl math, the red thread coursing through all these terms was an eminent and slightly self deprecating infantilisation of self – notably women.

Cue the similarly disparaging term adulting. Hashtag adulting chronicles the practice of behaving adult, and more specifically for the accomplishment of mundane tasks (like dinner). The vernacular suggests that one may, in lieu of actually embody being grown, simply perform it. Put on your adult pants, but only for the day. A moppet wearing adult pants can always take them off again. But why? Is it undesirable to be an adult, or is it just unaccessible? Are girls afraid of becoming women, or can they do both? Can we have our girl dinner and eat it too?

“Girl dinner is just snacks,” observes an anonymous troll. So… our adulthood is a snack-sized version of the real thing? To suggest that burgeoning generations fall short of the main course ascribes to an antiquated definition of adulthood; established in heteronormative, colonial, and patriarchal sets of circumstances. Using girl is a branding tool. So what exactly is being sold – what evaded? At least girls are allowed to be single. Women are expected to be mothers. Perhaps girlification is not a fear of womanhood, but a jubilant subversion of its constraints. 

As the parameters of adulthood stray further from physical, tangible indications, such as a full grown skeleton, a legal age, or a thirty year mortgage, it becomes ever more apparent that adulthood is not an absolute attribute, but rather a social construct. To that end, traditional milestones continue to become increasingly, in the best case scenario, obsolete. In the worst case they are harmful, not only morally but socially, not to mention to the health of the planet.

Against the backdrop of overpopulation and a cost of living crisis, dated framework for adulting becomes more than a gender question, but a class dilemma. Through a series of interviews and interventions, social scientist Jennifer Silva investigated what it means to come of age as a working class young adult in the current, contemporary landscape. Particularly influential is the economic and social instability shaped by neoliberal power structures and post industrial economies, meaning that to pursue one’s adult identity today is to come to terms with an absence of choices heretofore accessible to our mums and dads. 

Rejection of mainstream adulthood may be more than even just a coping mechanism for the moral problems of unrealistic social expectations, but a reclamation of lost childhood due to trauma, exodus, or crisis. Rapid maturation may also be the result of adultification, which refers to the presumption of maturity and is often perceived in tandem with racial bias. Need I go on? 

In the end, the prevailing question is what or whom are you going to allow to define passage into your own adulthood? Perhaps you are already there. Or maybe you have been there all along. Instead of assessing when, how, or where we will arrive at adulthood, we could just as well be asking when the denotation of adulthood will arrive to us. After all, one man’s snack is another’s girl dinner. 

This essay was written in collaboration with the exhibition, Are We There Yet, a partnership between Gallery No. 32 and Speed Curating.