| Sumario: | Digital mediation is the context in which we propose to look at the aspirational lives of young women in Asia's neoliberal cities. However, this context emerges out of longer histories of social change through which gendered modernities have taken shape. Modernity within non-Western contexts, we propose, unfolds in uneven and distinctive ways, whether the society in question has been formally colonised or not. To understand contemporary transformations, we need to grasp the dynamics of what we could call the national-modern (a modernity with national or quasi-national features) as they shape our four cities. As female selves re-make themselves today through education, consumption and labour, they draw on much longer histories inter-referenced by our research. These are histories of how the discourses of nation and modernity are entwined with the re-shaping of gender and sexuality nineteenth and early twentieth century debates around culture, tradition and modernity crucially hinge on the "woman question" that this essay discusses in comparative perspective and brings into the present day via the formation of nation-states in the post-colonial world. And today, as older pathways of social reproduction are transformed through neoliberal restructuring, new ideas of selfhood and subjectivity generate states of uncertainty, risk and ambiguity that highlight the production of aspirational selves.
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