Sociology of Personal Life [2 ed.] 9781352005035, 9781352005004

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second edition

sociology of personal life edited by vanessa may & petra nordqvist

‘This is an important and compelling introduction to the sociology of personal life, now updated to present chapters on a broad range of topics, which clearly illustrate the intersections and connections between public and private lives.’ —Jenny van Hooff, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK ‘The sociology of personal life comes of age in this compelling and highly readable second edition, which develops new and exciting insights into the politics and practices that link the individual and the social in both public and private worlds.’ —Raelene Wilding, La Trobe University, Australia ‘In this wonderful introductory text leading sociologists bring together insights from the sociology of families, sexuality, friendship, consumption and the body to lay out the developing field of personal life. By focussing on the interconnections between the personal and the public and the emotional and the material, a fresh perspective on everyday life emerges.’ —Jo Lindsay, Monash University, Australia ‘This wonderfully accessible new edition expands and deepens our sociological understanding of contemporary personal life. May and Nordqvist bring together some of the most exciting names in the field to demonstrate sociology in its most engaging and challenging form. This book is essential reading for anyone studying the ways in which complex, modern interpersonal relationships work.’ —Carol Smart, University of Manchester, UK ‘This is a fresh, timely and accessible contribution to the sociology of the family, intimacy and relationships. The authors bring to life the many and varied dimensions of personal life encompassing the relational and the socio-political. Destined to become a “must read” for teachers and researchers alike.’ —Deborah Dempsey, Swinburne University, Australia ‘Combining fascinating insights from current research with key theoretical concepts, this is an essential text for any student of family and relationships. Chapters on “home” and “the body” are welcome additions to this new edition which offers an accessible and engaging guide to the contemporary sociology of personal life.’ —Esther Dermott, University of Bristol, UK

SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE SECOND EDITION

EDITED BY VANESSA MAY AND PETRA NORDQVIST WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY KATHERINE DAVIES, BRIAN HEAPHY, SUE HEATH, HELEN HOLMES, DAVID MORGAN, DALE SOUTHERTON AND SOPHIE WOODWARD Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives University of Manchester, UK

© Vanessa May and Petra Nordqvist, under exclusive license to Springer Nature Limited 2019. Individual chapters © respective authors All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First edition published 2011 Second edition published 2019 by RED GLOBE PRESS Red Globe Press in the UK is an imprint of Springer Nature Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW. Red Globe Press® is a registered trademark in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–1–352–00503–5 hardback ISBN 978–1–352–00500–4 paperback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

CONTENTS

List of Tables, Figures, and Boxes

ix

Notes on the contributors

x

1

Introducing a Sociology of Personal Life

1

What is ‘personal life’? What is sociological about personal life? Some illustrations of personal life in sociology The ‘personal’ is relational Personal life is socially constructed The chapters

1 3 3 7 11 12

Conceptualising the Personal

16



2

Vanessa May and Petra Nordqvist

David Morgan

Introduction 16 17 The ‘social construction’ of ‘the personal’ Persons and selves 20 23 Personal practices Social distinctions and inequalities 25 27 Concluding remarks

3

Couple Relationships Petra Nordqvist

30

Introduction 30 Gender, sexuality and intimate life 31 ‘Doing’ couple relationships 34 To what extent have couple relationships changed? 40 Concluding remarks 44

v

Contents

4

Kinship: How Being Related Matters in Personal Life 46 Petra Nordqvist

Introduction 46 47 What does it mean to be related? 48 Kinship in everyday life 53 Is kinship a special connection between people? 55 New technologies, new families, new kinship 58 Concluding remarks

5

Friendship and Personal Life Katherine Davies

60

Introduction 60 What is a friend? 60 Friendship and technology 62 Social change and the significance of friendship 63 The social patterning of friendship and the limits of choice 67 Friendship as the ideal relationship? 70 71 Concluding remarks: Friends versus family?

6

Material Cultures Sophie Woodward

74

Introduction 74 75 What is material culture and how can we understand it? Material practices: Keeping, using, sorting, and disposing 77 81 Love and loss 83 Personal and global connections 85 Concluding remarks

7

Personal Life across the Life Course Vanessa May

87

Introduction 87 The life course: Stages and transitions 87 Temporal scripts 88 Personal life and the life course 89 Childhood 91

vi

Contents Adulthood 92 Later life 96 Concluding remarks 99

8

Consumer Culture Dale Southerton

101

Introduction 101 102 The emergence of consumer culture Consumer culture: The corrosion of personal life 104 Lifestyles: Consumer freedom and new forms of association 107 111 The commodification of love and intimacy 114 Concluding remarks

9

The Body in Personal Life Helen Holmes

117

Introduction 117 The body as a cultural symbol 118 The body as a project: Symbol over substance 120 The material of the body: Fleshy, lived experience 122 Bringing the body back in: Routines of bodily personal care 125 Concluding remarks 128

10 Home

Sue Heath

130

Introduction 130 131 Housing and home Family and home 135 Privacy and home 138 Concluding remarks 142

11 Personal Life in Public Spaces

Vanessa May

144

Introduction 144 What is public space? 144

vii

Contents Access to public space Relationships with strangers and acquaintances What’s so personal about public space? Concluding remarks

12 Sexuality and the Politics of Personal Life

Brian Heaphy

146 149 152 154

156

Introduction 156 157 Sexuality and the personal politics of emancipation Sexuality, biopolitics, and governance 160 162 Self-identities, sexual lifestyles, and life-politics 163 The politics of LGBTQ ways of living 168 The politics of marriage and civil unions 170 Concluding remarks

13 Conclusion: Why a Sociology of Personal Life?

Vanessa May and Petra Nordqvist

The personal and the social Treading a fine line A relational view of society The interconnectedness of spheres Concluding remarks

172 172 173 175 176 177

Glossary178 Bibliography189 Index215

viii

LIST OF TABLES, FIGURES, AND BOXES

Tables 2.1 7.1

Carol Smart’s (2007) core concepts Life expectancy at birth in selected world regions (in years, rounded figures)

28 96

Figures 3.1 3.2

Number of marriages, England and Wales, 1934–2014 Percentage of marriages preceded by cohabitation, Australia

35 36

Boxes 3.1 3.2 4.1

Are heterosexuality, femininity, and masculinity ‘natural’? How equal are men’s and women’s relationships? What responsibilities do people perceive themselves to have for one another in families? 4.2 Surrogacy 5.1 Researching homophily using social media data 5.2 Researching the ups and downs of friendship 6.1 Material abundance in US homes 6.2 Follow the things: personal and global connections 7.1 Drop out or time out? 7.2 Challenging ageist norms 8.1 Ageing, retirement, and lifestyles 8.2 Learning to consume: consumer culture and children 9.1 Being pregnant in the shopping mall 9.2 Everyday haircare practices 10.1 Home, housing, and financial insecurity 10.2 No place like home? 11.1 Ethnic concentration and social cohesion 11.2 Have people withdrawn from public spaces? 12.1 Adrienne Rich on compulsory heterosexuality 12.2 Monogamy and non-monogamy in same-sex relationships

32 42 52 57 69 71 80 84 94 98 110 112 123 126 133 140 148 153 158 166

ix

NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

Katherine Davies is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Sheffield and an Honorary Fellow of the Morgan Centre for the Study of Everyday Lives. Katherine has published in the areas of friendship, sibling relationships, and the relational features of shared living; she also has an ongoing interest in qualitative methods that are able to capture the intricacies and lived experiences of personal relationships. Katherine is currently working on a British Academy funded project; ‘Talking Politics?: Brexit and everyday (inter)generational family relationships’, which explores how the UK’s 2016 referendum on the European Union has been experienced within families. Recent publications include ‘Sticky Proximities: Siblings and Education’ published in The Sociological Review and the monograph Shared Housing, Shared Lives: Everyday experiences across the lifecourse published by Routledge with colleagues Sue Heath, Gemma Edwards, and Rachael Scicluna. Brian Heaphy is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, and a member of the Morgan Centre for the Study of Everyday Lives. His research interests include sexualities, gender, ageing, qualitative methodologies, and theories of social change. His publications include the books Same Sex Intimacies (Routledge, with Jeffrey Weeks and Catherine Donovan), Late modernity and Social Change (Routledge) and Same Sex Marriages  (Palgrave, with Carol Smart and Anna Einarsdottir). He is currently researching the ordinariness of ‘queer’ lives. Sue Heath is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester and is Co-Director of the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives. Her main research interests revolve around the themes of households, housing, and home, with a particular focus on shared living arrangements and the housing pathways and intergenerational dependencies of ‘Generation Rent’. Sue also has strong methodological interests, with a particular focus on research ethics and creative qualitative methods, including recent research on observational sketching as method. Helen Holmes is a Hallsworth Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of Manchester. Her current work explores contemporary thrift x

Notes on the contributors

through the lens of materiality, temporality, and practice. With a focus on the everyday, Helen’s work illuminates the minutiae and mundane, paying attention to the overlooked and ordinary of personal life. Her most recent publication in Sociology, ‘Material Affinities: doing family through the practices of passing on’, unites materiality and kinship to explore how mundane objects are passed on between families and produce potent affinities and connections. She also has several forthcoming articles and book chapters exploring how materiality is entwined with everyday life and personal practices. Vanessa May is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and a Co-Director of the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives at the University of Manchester. Her research interests include the self, belonging, temporality, ageing in place, family relationships, and qualitative methods. Vanessa has published in a number of journals including Sociology, Sociological Review, Time & Society and British Journal of Sociology, and is the author of Connecting Self to Society: Belonging in a Changing World (Palgrave Macmillan). David Morgan is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Manchester where he taught Sociology for about 37 years. He was written extensively on family and personal relationships, including Rethinking Family Practices (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). He has recently completed a book on snobbery to be published by Policy Press. Petra Nordqvist is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester and a member of the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives. She researches reproductive technologies, kinship, intimacy, and sexualities with a particular focus on donor conception, egg and sperm donation, and their impact on family relationships. She is currently the PI on a 30-month project funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) exploring the impact of donating egg and sperm on donors’ everyday life and relationships. This is a sister study to two earlier projects (funded by the ESRC 2010–2013, 2006–2009) exploring the different ways in which reproductive donation impacts recipient families. Publications include the co-authored book Relative Strangers: Family Life, Genes and Donor Conception (Palgrave Macmillan 2014, with Carol Smart); ‘Genetic thinking and everyday living: On family practices and family imaginaries’, Sociological Review (2017) and ‘Bringing kinship into being: Connectedness, donor conception and lesbian parenthood’, Sociology (2014). xi

Notes on the contributors

Dale Southerton is Professor of Sociology of Consumption at the U ­ niversity of Bristol and Adjunct Professor at Consumption Research Norway (Oslo Metropolitan University). His research focuses on ­ consumption, societal organisation, and change. He has ­published on a wide range of topics related to consumption i­ncluding: time and t­emporality; everyday lives; socio-technical transitions; ­sustainability; food cultures; and social practices. Previous publications include S­ ustainable Consumption: ­Multidisciplinary Perspectives (Oxford ­University Press, 2014) and Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture (Sage, 2011). Sophie Woodward is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester who carries out research into material culture, fashion, consumption, and feminism  and is currently carrying out research into Dormant Things within the home. She is the author of several books including Why Women Wear what they Wear and Blue Jeans: The Art of the Ordinary (with Daniel Miller) and the forthcoming book Material Methods: Researching and Thinking with Things (Sage).

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1 INTRODUCING A SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

VANESSA MAY AND PETRA NORDQVIST

What is ‘personal life’? What comes to your mind when you hear the words ‘personal’ and ‘personal life’? Take a moment to think about this, and perhaps to jot down what you associate with these words. Family and friends are probably on your list. But what about the laws which limit what we may or may not do, the ways in which the demands of work shape our lives, and the ways in which we participate in political life – did you consider these as part of personal life? The aim of this little exercise is to encourage you to think about how you would define ‘personal life’, but also to consider why you might define it in a particular way. In this second edition of Sociology of Personal Life we wish to question and extend conventional and narrow notions of the personal as comprising only ‘private’ issues such as close relationships. We argue that ‘personal life’ encompasses a broad range of issues, the following of which are examined in this book: the significance of couple relationships and relatedness; the role that friendships play in our lives; how personal life changes across the life course; the role that material culture and consumer culture play in people’s lives, and how new consumption patterns have influenced our relationships to our bodies; the meanings attached to and the distinctions drawn between the ‘private’ space of the home and public spaces, and the significance of these to personal life; and the interconnections between personal lives and politics, using sexuality as the case example. These arguments are also reflected in our choice of book cover, a sketch by Lynne Chapman, made during her time as Leverhulme Artist in Residence at the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives in 2015–16. This sketch can

1

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be read as a snapshot representation of a moment in someone’s personal life. In the sketch, the young man, sitting in a public space, is, we can assume, connecting with other people via his mobile phone. Our choice of chapter topics has been guided by the wish to cover a number of types of relationship to people, things, and places, and to include different settings in which personal life takes place. The topics included in the volume are by no means intended as exhaustive, but instead indicative of the range and complexity of what constitutes personal life. Our central aim is to show that the many different areas of personal life are interconnected, and we draw the reader’s attention to this interconnectedness in the chapters. In doing so, we wish to bring to the reader’s attention that personal life covers a multitude of spheres that are traditionally divided into discrete sociological ­sub-disciplines such as Sociology of Families, Sociology of the Life Course, Sociology of the Body or Sociology of C ­ onsumption, to name a few. By examining seemingly separate spheres of life in one volume, and by exploring some of the links between them, we seek to blur these distinctions that sociology textbooks tend to draw. We argue that this is an important thing to do because, in day-to-day life, personal life is ‘lived in many different places and spaces ... and it forms a range of connections’ (Smart, 2007: 29). For example, personal life includes not only family life at home but also going to school or to work, taking part in financial transactions in shops, and engaging with public policy – for example, by filling in official forms or by voting in elections. A further aim of the book is to provide conceptual tools for understanding the micro level of day-to-day personal life as well as the relationship between personal experience and wider social phenomena. However, by saying that we wish to question the primacy of family relationships as the stuff of personal life, we are not claiming that these are not central in personal life – quite the contrary. We still view these ‘traditional’ topics as major components of personal life, but we would argue that they can only be fully understood if explored in relation to other spheres significant to everyday personal life. Having said this, it is important for us to make it clear that we do not merely see this text as re-organising the implicit hierarchy of family studies. We are more ambitious than this. A sociology of personal life is not merely a field but also a way of seeing and sociologically conceptualising the everyday. This entails asking challenging and innovative questions with the use of cutting edge conceptual tools. 2

Introducing a Sociology of Personal Life

What is sociological about personal life? A sociology of personal life is concerned with investigating what is sociological about personal life; that is, what individual people’s personal lives say about society more generally. The aim of such a sociology is thus not only to understand the experiences of individual persons, but also how and why these experiences may in the aggregate follow some general patterns. For example, there are life course transitions that most Westerners go through in their personal lives, such as the transition from adolescence to adulthood, that many of our readers are probably familiar with (see May, ‘Personal life across the life course’, Chapter 7 in this volume). This transitional phase often involves moving out of the parental home, continuing in further education or seeking a job, and at some point setting up a home with a partner. Although many people may feel that the events in their lives are unique to them, taking a broader view enables us to see that in fact many aspects of people’s lives are socially shaped. In contemporary Western societies, the transition to adulthood is something that most people go through at roughly the same age, but the details of how they go through the different stages, in which order and at what age varies from country to country. For example, the provision of education or housing affect at what age young people transition from education to the world of work or set up an independent home. The aim of this volume is not only to highlight that a variety of ‘public’ issues such as politics and the economic sphere influence personal life, but that they are also in turn shaped by personal life. An example of the latter is the ways in which women have been able to influence legislation around marriage and women’s employment, or how non-heterosexuals have succeeded in pushing for legal recognition of same-sex relationships, as discussed by Heaphy in Chapter 12 of this volume. In other words, personal life matters not only on the level of the private lives of individual persons, but also more broadly on the level of the ‘public’ sphere.

Some illustrations of personal life in sociology The study of personal life is by no means novel within sociology – there are numerous examples of sociological studies that have focused on various aspects of personal life, though not necessarily by that name. In this section, we discuss a few key examples of such work. A good place to begin is the classic book Suicide (1970[1897]) by Emile Durkheim (often 3

SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

referred to as one of the founders of sociology). This is a sociological study of how a highly personal and private act (suicide) can be interpreted as a response to particular social conditions as well as be seen to be socially patterned (e.g., men are more likely to commit suicide than women are). Between 1918 and 1920, William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki published five volumes of their work called The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, which has since become a classic within sociology (the first two volumes were published in a new edition in 1958). This work dealt with a major social question that has strong resonance today, namely immigration. The authors sought to show that the problems faced by the immigrant community were due to the transition from one society to another very different one, which required a series of adaptations. Thomas and Znaniecki used a wide range of materials, including individual life histories and letters, accounts from Polish newspapers, as well as social work and court records. Thomas and Znaniecki were part of a sociological tradition called the Chicago School (named so because its members were based at the University of Chicago), which had its heyday in the 1920s and 30s. Studies within the Chicago School explored everyday life, and many of them used the life histories of individual people as a way of studying the social world. An example is Clifford Shaw’s (1966[1930]) study of Stanley, a Chicago delinquent. Stanley was part of a larger study of delinquents, but Shaw aimed to show how his life story could be used not only to understand how Stanley viewed his own life, but also to gain a picture of his social world – for example, how his background, his family and the gangs he belonged to had helped shape his life. C. Wright Mills’s book The Sociological Imagination (1959) is another important milestone in the study of personal life. Mills defined the task of sociology as the investigation of both individual biography and history, and of how these intersect within a society. He argued that sociologists should question the distinction that is generally drawn between ‘private’ and ‘public’ issues for two reasons. First, because ‘many personal troubles cannot be solved merely as troubles, but must be understood in terms of public issues’, and, second, because ‘the human meaning of public issues must be revealed by relating them to personal troubles – and to the problems of the individual life’ (Mills, 1959: 226). In other words, public issues such as gender equality cannot be understood in the abstract, but must instead be viewed in terms of relationships between individual men and women in the home or the workplace. Therefore, Mills proposed, sociology must include in its studies ‘both troubles and issues, both biography and history, and the range of their intricate relations’. 4

Introducing a Sociology of Personal Life

Mills’s call to study ‘personal troubles’ as a public issue has perhaps most famously been taken up by feminist researchers. Since the 1950s, feminists have conducted many important pieces of research into various aspects of women’s lives, with the aim of showing how ‘public’ definitions of what a woman should or could be (including, for example, social norms and legislation) have influenced the personal lives of women. Thus, women’s ‘personal troubles’ (to use Mills’s terminology), such as the gender inequality they faced within their couple relationships with men, were revealed as ‘public issues’ that originated from outside the individual women’s lives (e.g. Jamieson, 1999; Millett, 1970; Nordqvist, ‘Couple relationships’, Chapter 3 in this volume). In other words, heterosexual couples were living their lives within societies that were structured around gender inequality. Thus, women’s ‘personal troubles’ were revealed to be collective issues that therefore required collective action. Important areas of research have been family life and the unequal distribution of money, power and housework between husbands and wives, but also the restrictions that have historically been placed on women’s participation in ‘public’ life outside the home – for example, paid work and politics – and how these have affected women’s lives (e.g., Delphy and Leonard, 1992; Kanter, 1977; Smart, 1984). Perhaps the most clearly delineated area of sociology that has focused on personal life is the field of ‘family sociology’. Families have been the focus of social scientists from the outset. For example, in 1884, Friedrich Engels wrote in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1986[1884]) about the effects that capitalism had wrought on family life. Due to limited space, we cannot offer an exhaustive history of family sociology, but instead we discuss a few turning points in terms of its development. Family sociology, which could be defined as comprising those theoretical approaches that attempt to link family life to wider social influences, emerged as a distinct field in the 1950s and 1960s when it was largely dominated by Talcott Parsons’s functionalist theories (Parsons and Bales, 1955). The functionalist view on family was based on the idea that the modern nuclear family has a positive function in industrialised societies, and that each family member had a distinct role to play (men as breadwinners, women as caregivers). Mainstream functionalist family sociology was challenged in the 1970s, mainly by feminist and Marxist sociologists. They maintained that functionalism in effect held the male-breadwinner-and-female-carer nuclear family form as ideal; a family form that in fact benefited men and capitalism. Feminists and Marxists argued that this idealised modern nuclear family was a prime 5

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example of discrimination against women (who were relegated into roles as unpaid care workers) and the working classes (who could not hope to obtain such a way of life because many could not survive on one wage only). This feminist-Marxist challenge led to what David Cheal (1991) has called the ‘big bang’ in family sociology, and, since then, the field has been characterised by innovative theorising on how family life is lived, and on the connections between families and other social institutions (May and Dawson, 2018). There have also been debates over how families should be conceptualised. For example, David Morgan argued influentially in Family Connections (1996) that family is not one single pre-given ‘thing’, but rather families are something that people do. This means that families are also fluid and liable to change. Morgan’s exhortation that sociologists should focus on family life as emerging out of the activities that family members do together (what Morgan called ‘family practices’), inspired the so-called ‘family practices approach’ that aims to do just this. A further broadening of scope came with studies that focused on the family lives of non-heterosexual people, for example those conducted by Kath Weston (1991) in the United States and Jeffrey Weeks et al. (2001) in the United Kingdom. They argued that families are not necessarily restricted to blood relations, but can be created by choice – hence the term ‘families of choice’ that has since become widespread within family sociology and has also become widely used term in everyday speech. The research p ­ articipants in the studies by Weston and by Weeks et al. spoke of their families as having fluid boundaries, and consisting mainly of other lesbians and gay men, former lovers, partners, as well as relatives, biological or adoptive children, and people they lived with. A great deal of importance was placed upon creating networks of relationships that were conceived of as ‘families’ (in the sense of providing support, care, and commitment) but that were chosen. More recently, the increasingly widespread use of new reproductive technologies such as sperm donation has led to new kinds of questions about what being ‘family’ and being related mean (Nordqvist, ‘Kinship’, Chapter 4 in this volume). Of late, it has become customary for sociologists to talk of ‘families and intimacies’ (e.g., Jamieson, 1998) as a way of reflecting a move towards a broader perspective to include also non-familial relationships such as friendships. Carol Smart’s book Personal Life (2007) was, however, the first attempt to develop a coherent conceptual framework for an even broader field of study within sociology that looks beyond close relationships. In its approach and focus, Sociology of Personal Life is ­heavily indebted to Smart’s ground-breaking work. Since the publication of her 6

Introducing a Sociology of Personal Life

book, the concept of personal life has gained considerable traction in the field, but not without some debate. It is telling that upon its launch, the journal Families, Relationships and Societies decided to publish in its first issue a polemical piece by Edwards and Gillies (2012) on the emergence of the sociology of personal life and the potential marginalisation of ‘family’ as a consequence, and to invite two responses to this piece, by May (2012) and by Wilkinson and Bell (2012). Sasha Roseneil and Kaisa Ketokivi (2016) have also contributed to the conceptual debate around personal life, further theorising the concept of relationality that stands at the heart of sociology of personal life (see below). From this debate, and from the alacrity with which scholars have adopted the concept of personal life in their empirical research (e.g. Charles 2014; Duncan, 2011a, 2011b; Eldén, 2016; James and Curtis, 2010; Nordqvist, n.d.; Stenslund, 2015; Törnqvist, 2018), it is clear that the sociology of personal life has become an established sub-field in the discipline in the decade or so since the publication of Smart’s book. Below, we turn to discuss two further sociological traditions within which the present volume can be situated: a relational view of people and social constructionism.

The ‘personal’ is relational At this point the reader may be wondering why we have decided to talk about ‘personal life’ rather than ‘individual life’. On the face of it, you may think that there is little difference between the two terms. But within sociology, as in any other discipline, concepts come with a history of how they are used and in relation to which theories and arguments. Smart (2007) argued for the use of the concept ‘personal’ instead of ‘individual’ because of the theoretical baggage that is associated with the latter due to its usage in what is called ‘the individualisation thesis’, also known as the de-traditionalisation thesis. This individualisation thesis has been the focus of much debate within many areas of sociology since the 1990s, including those that focus on family, work, and consumption. The key argument of this thesis is the increase in individual choice (hence the term ‘individualisation’). In a nutshell, the individualisation thesis proposes that Western societies have undergone a significant shift that has led to the traditional social structures of, for example, gender, class, and family losing much of their influence. As a result, individuals have become ‘disembedded’ (Giddens, 1991) from traditional roles, allowing them more freedom (or agency) to decide how they wish to live their lives. In the past, the lives of, for example, women and working-class people were clearly defined so 7

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that many knew from an early age what their life would be like. In contrast, people in contemporary societies have fewer such certainties or fixed roles to follow. In Beck’s (1992) terms, the standard biography has been replaced by the ‘do-it-yourself’ biography that contemporary individuals must construct for themselves. One of the areas that the key theorists of individualisation, Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck have focused on is family life (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995; Giddens, 1992). They argue that marriage as an institution has weakened. Fewer people, for instance, feel they have to marry in order to live together or have children, while divorce is now a real option for married couples. In other words, marriage is neither a must, nor is it ‘til death do us part’. Giddens argues that this reflects a significant shift in how relationships are viewed by people. Traditional relationships were largely held together by external constraints such as the marriage contract and by powerful social norms against extra-marital sex and divorce. In contrast, contemporary relationships are, according to Giddens, founded on communication, openness, and trust, and survive only for as long as they satisfy both partners. Relationships are, in other words, based on a ‘rolling contract’ that can be terminated at will. Such a relationship Giddens calls ‘the pure relationship’: [The pure relationship] refers to a situation where a social relation is entered into for its own sake, for what can be derived by each person from a sustained association with another; and which is continued only in so far as it is thought by both parties to deliver enough satisfactions for each individual to stay in it. (Giddens, 1992: 58)

The individualisation thesis argues that such choice has become a prevalent element in most areas of life, including, for example, consumption. Zygmunt Bauman (1990) has proposed that people have more freedom to choose what they consume and how, and that these consumption choices are now a basis for identity. In other words, people no longer have to stick to a given identity pre-determined, for example, by their class background. Instead, they have more freedom to choose among the many ‘lifestyles’ on offer and to choose the one that they feel best represents who they think they are. As you will see in the chapters that follow, this individualisation thesis has been strongly criticised within sociology, among other things for its rather simplistic depiction of life in the past and for its exaggerated 8

Introducing a Sociology of Personal Life

emphasis on individual choice. Although there is some empirical evidence that supports the individualisation thesis (such as increased variability in the age at which people get married or have children, or the increases in divorce and cohabitation rates), there are also those who argue that the thesis underestimates the degree of variation in people’s life trajectories in the past (e.g. Scherger et al., 2016). Furthermore, traditional categories and norms have not weakened to the extent that the individualisation thesis claims. It still matters whether one is born into a working-class family or a middle-class family in terms of one’s future chances, and traditional institutions such as marriage have not lost their cultural and moral significance. Why else would we continue to have public debates about whether same-sex couples should be allowed to marry or about whether the children of divorced parents fare worse than children whose parents have stayed together? Another reason for preferring the term ‘personal’ above ‘individual’ is that the latter depicts people as autonomous, isolated individuals (Smart, 2007). Think back to Giddens’s pure relationship – what image do you have in your mind when you picture Giddens’s couple who are weighing the options of either staying together or splitting up? Here we have two individuals who seem somehow free-floating, not connected to other people in any significant way. The chapters in this book are, in contrast, based on the notion that people are fundamentally relational. This means that their sense of self is founded on and shaped by the relationships they are embedded in from birth, and that they make important life choices with significant others in mind (May, 2013). This means that in order to understand ‘individual life’, we need to also understand the lives of other people that matter to the individual, such as their partner, children, parents, siblings, and friends. Vern Bengtson et al. (2002) developed the concept ‘linked lives’ to show how people are intrinsically linked together, and to say that in order to grasp individual life, we must also grasp the lives that it crosses over with, impedes or is impeded by, or that run in parallel to it (Smart 2007). We are using the term ‘personal’ as a way of signalling that people are not isolated individuals, but rather inherently connected to others (Smart, 2007; Morgan, Chapter 2 in this volume). One of the most famous theorists to address the relational nature of people is George Herbert Mead (1934), who studied how children come to develop a sense of self (see also Roseneil and Ketokivi, 2016). According to Mead, a baby is not born with the capacity to understand herself as a person, but rather develops this in interaction with others. 9

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During these interactions, the child also learns how she ‘should’ behave (also called the socialisation process). A ‘real’ boy does not cry (at least not as much as his sister does), and a ‘moral’ person does not lie or cheat. At the same time, the child comes to understand herself as more (or less) extrovert, funny, or intelligent than those around her. Our sense of self is in other words relational, because it is constructed in relationships with others, and in relation to others and to social norms (May, 2013). ‘Others’ here refers not only to immediate family and friends, but also other children we interact with on the playground, our teachers and neighbours. And later in life, ‘others’ include also our colleagues at work. Relationships are thus fundamentally important to understanding personal life. However, we argue that rather than understanding them as ‘two-way’ modes of interaction as Giddens does in his conceptualisation of the ‘pure relationship’ (above), relationships need to be understood as complex and multifaceted. Take the example of a child growing up in a family. As part of that process, they do of course relate to their parents. When looking more closely, however, we see that the child’s relational world is far more complex than this. First, the parents relate to one another, and they may act in quite different ways in relation to the child. Second, the parents relate to their own families of origins: their own parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, and so on. Third, the child does not only relate to their parents, but also to their siblings, friends, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and so on. In other words, they are ‘embedded’ in complex networks of relationships (Nordqvist and Smart, 2014b; Smart, 2007). An important feature of these networks is that they are interlinked. This means that the people within them also tend to have individual relationships with one another. And so, for example, if a mother falls out with her own mother, then this may well affect the relationship between her children and this maternal grandmother, even though the children had little to do with the falling out in the first place. The impact of parental divorce on the lives of their children is a good case in point (Smart and Neale, 1999). Relationships are complex exactly because they are not two-way interactions, but embedded in complicated networks where everyone else is also connected together. Furthermore, the way that people relate to one another in these networks is multidimensional. Some relationships, such as those between partners (Heaphy et  al., 2013), or parents and grandparents (Mason et  al., 2007), might be said to come with particular sets of cultural ­expectations. But it is important to note that such expectations do not translate into practice in straightforward ways. Rather, individuals in couples and families negotiate with each other in a context where there 10

Introducing a Sociology of Personal Life

are no fixed rules but instead a mixture of hopes and aspirations, habituated modes of conduct, broad principles of relating, which in turn are situated within a wider cultural and social milieu (Finch and Mason, 1993, 2000). The  ways in which people relate to one another – what Mason and Finch have called ‘relationality’ – is shaped through layers of meaning, history, biography, and emotionality that reside within and between people (see also Roseneil and Ketokivi, 2016) Our approach to personal life is fundamentally based on the idea that people live connected lives (Smart, 2007). Broadly speaking, the chapters in this book build on the understanding that personal life, and the ways in which people make their way in the world and live their everyday lives, are fundamentally shaped by them being connected to other people. The chapters in this volume explore different ways in which we connect with others, noting how both face-to-face and, in more recent years, social media interaction interlink in shaping personal life.

Personal life is socially constructed Sociology of Personal Life falls, broadly speaking, within a sociological tradition called social constructionism. ‘Social constructionism’ is a term that describes a particular way of looking at the nature of reality. Whereas many people might assume that social reality as they have come to understand it ‘just is so’, a social constructionist approach wishes to explore how a particular way of defining something came about and why it continues to be so. A prime example of a socially constructed phenomenon is ‘sexuality’. The common belief is that sexuality is a given, and that a person’s sexuality defines their identity. Many people think that this ‘just is so’, and cannot conceive of any other way of looking at this issue. Yet the term ‘sexuality’ was invented in the nineteenth century by a new occupational group called ‘sexologists’ (Weeks, 1991). Before then, different types of sexual activity, such as heterosexual sex between people of different genders, and homosexual sex between people of the same gender, did take place and were given a name, but these were not seen to define a person’s identity. In other words, there was no conceptualisation of people as either ‘heterosexual’ or ‘homosexual’ because these terms did not yet exist. The above example hopefully illustrates that to propose that something is ‘socially constructed’ is not to say that it is simply a matter of ‘choice’ or that it can be changed at whim. As Weeks (1991) points out, a person cannot very easily decide not to be defined by their sexual practices if this is how people are defined in a society. In fact, not many 11

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people would even think of doing so because these socially constructed categories feel very real and inescapable to us. They inform our view of our self and of the surrounding social world at such a fundamental level that they seem unavoidable. The power and longevity of established social categories originates partly in the fact that they feel ‘natural’, even unquestionable. Sociology could be described as the art of shifting our perspective on the world and opening up fresh ways of looking at social reality (not unlike someone using a kaleidoscope), allowing sociologists to question and be critical about such taken-for-granted assumptions. As sociologists, we are interested in how socially constructed categories such as gender and class help pattern and structure personal life, but also in the variety that exists within these. Thus, we can see that women as a group or the working class as a group share on average some common characteristics. For example, women earn on average less and tend to do more housework than men do. But despite these general patterns, it is important to always keep in mind that not all women are the same. A sociology of personal life is interested in examining both the broader patterning of personal life in a society, and how individual persons live their lives within these structures.

The chapters Sociology of Personal Life consists of 13 chapters, including the present chapter. The book proceeds with Chapter  2 by David Morgan, which acts as a conceptual basis for the chapters that follow. Morgan focuses on the meaning of the concept of ‘personal’. A key question he poses is: how can a word, which seems so tied to ideas to do with possessive individualism and the private, be seen in relational terms and, therefore, as a key idea in understanding social life in modern society? These conceptual issues raised by Morgan are, in Chapters 3 to 12, examined in relation to different areas of personal life. These substantive chapters are organised in such a way that they move, though not necessarily in a linear fashion, from what is generally considered ‘private’, to issues seen to pertain to the ‘public’ sphere. In doing this, we also note that it is important to keep in mind that all of the chapters touch on aspects that are simultaneously private and public (Mills, 1959) and to recognise that intimacy may apply differently, and with different intensity, across the different topics that we discuss in the book. In the first few chapters we explore relationships between couples, kin, and friends, which are generally understood to be among the most private of matters and, as Morgan explains, closely associated with the 12

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concept of the personal. In Chapter  3, Petra Nordqvist explores how opposite-sex and same-sex couple relationships have changed recently. The focus is on marriage and cohabitation, divorce and separation, and how the ways in which couples ‘do’ their couple relationships have changed over time. Throughout, Nordqvist discusses these developments in light of sociological theorising about personal life in contemporary societies. The focus shifts from intimate relationships to extended kin in Chapter 4, where Petra Nordqvist examines what it means to be related in personal life. She challenges the idea that kinship, or being related, is necessarily a ‘fixed’ relationship based on biology. The chapter explores different sociological approaches to studying what it means to be related, and concludes that rather than understanding this as a ‘given’ relationship, sociological insights suggest that kinship is a process, something that people ‘do’, ‘live’, ‘know’ and ‘engage in’. Couple and family relationships are generally understood as the most intimate relationships in our lives. Chapter 5 moves on to discuss another form of relationship that is central in personal life, namely friendship. Katherine Davies explores the significance of friendship in personal life, looking at the meaning of friendship and the suffusions between different categories of relationships such as friend, colleague, family member and acquaintance, and questions the adage that ‘you can choose your friends but not your family’. She further discusses the role of social media in making and sustaining friendships. As noted above, relationships with the people that matter most to us are easily conceived of as central to personal life. But we wish to extend the notion of relationality to also encompass material objects. Chapter 6 by Sophie Woodward explores the role that material objects play in our personal lives and relationships. The aim of this chapter is to expand the understanding of personal life to incorporate the relationships we have with things, through things, and what the relationships between things can tell us about personal life in the contemporary world. In theorising the links between personal life and material culture, Woodward contributes to the theorisation of personal life as something more than relationships with family and friends. We then turn our attention to how notions of the personal shift across the life course. In Chapter 7, Vanessa May examines how the meanings attached to the stages of the life course can be understood not as biological facts but as cultural. The chapter explores these cultural meanings with the help of the concept of ‘temporal scripts’ that delineate a collective schedule for how we ‘should’ grow up and grow older. It then charts how children, adults, and old people negotiate such temporal norms in relation to their own lifetime. The next two chapters 13

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similarly explore how personal life is shaped by social and cultural forces, namely consumption and how people might express various aspects of consumer culture through their bodies. In Chapter 8, Dale Southerton turns our attention to the impact that one of the most profound social changes of the post-war period, that is, the rise of ‘consumer culture’, has had on personal life. He explores competing sociological accounts of the emergence of consumer culture and examines the implications of these social changes for personal life. An important site of consumption is the body, as discussed by Helen Holmes in Chapter 9. She explores the ways in which consumer culture and body ideals come to shape people’s relationships with their bodies. Holmes examines the body maintenance practices that people engage in as part of their personal lives and argues for the importance of appreciating the body as a material means through which everyday personal life is produced, experienced, and negotiated. What follows is a discussion of personal life as it is lived across different types of space, namely private and public. The home is the focus of Chapter 10 by Sue Heath, where she explores in particular the relationship between home and housing, home and family, and home and privacy. In popular imagination, the home is fundamentally associated with all of these areas, but Heath challenges these taken-for-granted assumptions and suggests that for some people and in some circumstances, home is not the haven of private life it is sometimes made up to be. It is customary to draw a distinction between the home as ‘private’ and ‘personal’ space and public space, a distinction that is critically examined by Vanessa May in Chapter 11. She argues that what goes on in public spaces, such as interactions with strangers and acquaintances, but also with intimates, is an important dimension of our personal lives. Instead of drawing distinctions between ‘private’ and ‘public’, it is fruitful to consider how our personal lives span many different types of space and relationship. By now, the volume has unmistakably taken the reader into the public sphere that might not conventionally be understood as personal, ending with a chapter considering the political dimensions of life through the lens of sexuality. Chapter 12, by Brian Heaphy, extends the discussion in the previous two chapters by focusing on the overlap between the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’ that are commonly seen as two distinct spheres. Focusing on the topic of sexuality, Heaphy outlines some of the ways in which personal life can be conceived as political. Finally, Chapter  13 by Vanessa May and Petra Nordqvist draws together and discusses central themes and concepts that have cut across the different chapters, focusing on the relationship between the 14

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individual and the social, and the impact that a sociology of personal life has on how we as sociologists view society. As we have outlined above, the chapters are organised following the logic of moving, though not in a necessarily linear manner, from issues most commonly understood as ‘private’ and therefore closely aligned with personal life, to aspects of personal life that are perhaps not as readily understood as such because they, to an extent, take place or originate in the ‘public’ sphere. There are also many links to be made between the chapters, and we have made most of these visible by referring to other chapters in the book, where relevant. Thus, the chapters as a whole make up a narrative that we hope will help the reader gain a coherent picture of personal life and of a sociological approach to the study of it. However, each chapter does also constitute an independent whole, and can therefore be read separately as well.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION yyWhat do sociologists mean when they say that something is socially constructed? yyWhat do you understand by the term ‘relational’? Try applying it to one of the topics covered in this book as an example. yyWhat do we mean when we say that personal life should be understood in terms of interconnected spheres?

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2 CONCEPTUALISING THE PERSONAL DAVID MORGAN

Introduction Consider the following: (a) A politician resigns from her office ‘for personal reasons’; (b) A senior military figure says, in a broadcast, that he is speaking ‘in a personal capacity’; (c) Passengers on a train are reminded to make sure that they ‘have all their personal belongings’ on leaving. Readers will be familiar with these, and many similar usages of the word ‘personal’. The word is, after all, used very widely; the Oxford English Dictionary online entry for ‘personal’ runs to 25 pages. What are people trying to convey when they use the word ‘personal’ in these ways? We can tease out the following strands of meaning: • We are dealing with something that is attached to a particular identifiable individual – this politician, this Army officer – and not to ­anybody else. • We are dealing with some kind of distinction between the public and the private. The politician’s resignation has nothing to do with her public position; the officer’s statement is not a statement of public military policy. This may mean that a particular statement’s importance is downgraded; it is ‘just’ my personal opinion. • In the first case, there is a sense of the individual saying, ‘Please keep off – no further questions!’ Listeners are being requested to accept this statement at face value and not to probe further. • There is some sense of ownership: these are my opinions, my reasons, my possessions.

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To sum up, three core ideas emerge from these and other common usages: • A sense of an individual ‘in the round’ as opposed to a role in an organisation or some public position. • A distinction between the public and the private. • An idea of ‘ownership’. It is worth noting that these core ideas often have strong moral or emotional connotations. Thus, a sense of the individual and a sense of ownership combine when someone reacts against what might be taken as ‘personal remarks’ or is seen to be taking something ‘personally’. A further moral dimension becomes apparent when the ‘personal’ is contrasted with ‘impersonal’, where the latter refers to abstract bureaucratic rules or unfeeling processes such as the operation of the global market. The central question which this chapter explores is this: how is it possible to provide a sociological account of an idea which seems to be so firmly attached to notions of the individual and individual ownership? Given that sociological enquiry seems to be centrally concerned with social processes, collectivities (communities, classes, states and so on) and social structures it would appear that research into the personal is more the responsibility of psychologists. What, in short, can sociological enquiry tell us about the personal?

The ‘social construction’ of ‘the personal’ One answer to this question might be to argue that the very idea of ‘the personal’ is socially constructed. This is an approach which is familiar within sociological enquiry and one which is used in relation to a wide range of institutions and practices. What is being suggested is that ‘the personal’ is not something unchanging, arising out of human nature, biology, or individual psychology but, rather, something which is shaped by particular historical or cultural circumstances. This is a challenging idea. What appears to be so strongly connected to individual lives and experiences can, in fact, be seen as arising out of particular social contexts. This chapter has already shown that the idea of ‘the personal’ is linked to a variety of other ideas; namely, the individual, the distinction between the public and the private, and with ownership. These ideas seem, naturally, to hang together. However, it can be argued that these ideas and the links between them are the products of modern societies where they 17

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are given a prominent place. Sometimes these ideas are challenged. Individualism may be thought to have gone ‘too far’ or becomes identified with a selfish ‘looking after number one’. The boundaries between the public and the private are often uncertain and contested. Nevertheless, the fact that these ideas are sometimes so vigorously debated attests to their continuing importance in modern cultures. There are two main ways in which modern societies might be seen to contribute to these aspects of the personal. First, it can be argued that capitalist economies are based upon particular understandings of the individual and individual ownership. We see these in the values and ideas associated with the individual entrepreneur, the individual consumer, the individual worker. Although all three have been undermined, the idea of the ‘individual’ and ‘individual choice’ remains powerful. At the same time, the operation of an abstract and remote global market, together with the development of rational and bureaucratic means of state control, create an intense longing for the comforts and support of personal life as a counterbalance to these distant and dominating impersonal forces. Rather than continuing to discuss these ideas, and their connections, in the abstract, let us look at one particular issue which brings them all together. This is the ideas and practices associated with home ownership. In a variety of modern societies, such as Britain and Australia (Richards, 1990; Savage et  al., 1992) the idea of owning one’s own home is very much emphasised. This is partly because the idea of home itself is so powerful – one which is frequently identified with security, warmth, and intimacy (Holdsworth and Morgan, 2005). It is also linked to ideas of family and of creating a good environment in which to raise children. Moreover, it is linked to the ideas of private property and ownership, key concepts in capitalist societies. How this works in actual practice is beautifully demonstrated in a study, conducted in the 1980s, of a newly developed Australian suburb (Richards, 1990). Nearly all the inhabitants of this suburb had bought their own home; rental was not seen as an option by the overwhelming majority. The author writes: ‘Home ownership, like motherhood, had until recently an almost unspotted record in Australia as a “good thing”’ (Richards, 1990: 94). The reference to ‘motherhood’ is not accidental. Home ownership, marriage and parenthood are seen as linked and this ‘package’ may be seen as desirable and even natural. Further, home ownership is identified, like the idea of home itself, with security, which means having a measure of control over one’s life and one’s immediate environment. This sense of personal control contrasts with the more 18

Conceptualising the Personal

abstract ways in which individuals are controlled by the market and the state in modern societies. Although this study relates to Australia in the 1980s, some of the key ideas not only remain valid, at least in Western contexts, but provide a key to anxieties about housing in the twenty-first century. The home can be seen as an environment where the idea of the personal can be realised and reinforced. Within the limits imposed by income and other circumstances, individuals choose the kind of property and location in which to bring up their families or to maintain a chosen way of living. The home is a personal space within which one’s personal taste and preferences can be displayed. It is where dominant ideas of family, ownership, individuality and privacy come together (see Heath, Chapter 10 in this volume). Much of this discussion linking the idea of the personal to home ownership is under challenge in the present century. Shocks to the global economy and the operation of the private property market have called into question the linking of personal security to home ownership. Mortgages may be less easy to obtain and homes can be repossessed. Rented accommodation or some forms of shared living become increasingly attractive. But even if some notions of ‘the home’ may become less feasible, it is likely that the idea of some kind of personal domestic space will remain important. I have chosen this idea of home ownership as an illustration of how dominant certain ideas are in modern societies and how they can be seen to influence what might otherwise be seen as individual decisions. These ideas are those of ownership and private property, privacy and individual lifestyle choice. Although these ideas have their own complex and different histories in different countries they can all be linked to capitalism and to much that is seen to characterise modern societies. Ulrich Beck and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim (2002), for example, see individualisation and increasing choice as distinguishing characteristics of modernity (this individualisation thesis is discussed in more detail in Chapters 1 and 3 of this volume). The paradox is that individuals are required to make choices at different stages of their lives; they are not free not to choose even if the options may not always seem very attractive. The argument, therefore (for which home ownership provides an important illustration), is that the idea of the ‘personal’ has a complex history through its connection with other ideas such as ownership, privacy, and the individual. We are dealing with complex and interwoven histories here but the main point is that the sphere of the personal does not arise out of basic individual needs or characteristics but must be understood as, in part, being shaped by wider social and cultural factors. 19

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The idea that what appears to be most individual is, in fact, a product of social circumstances is a familiar paradox within sociology. But is that all that there is to be said?

Persons and selves One response to the argument in favour of the social construction of personal life is that it seems very over-deterministic, perhaps pessimistically so. The idea that when we think we are making individual life decisions (partnering, having children, making homes) we are in fact conforming to a complex pre-determined social script is, to say the least, not a comfortable one. (But see Chapter 3 in this volume, ‘Couple Relationships’ by Petra Nordqvist, for an illustration of this argument). And, in fact, when we turn to current and recent sociological debates we find that the balance between individual life choices and pressures arising from the ways in which societies are structured and organised are among the key concerns (Cohen, 1994; Giddens, 1984). Further, these uncertainties about social constructionism are not simply present in sociological theory but also have their manifestations in everyday life. The clown whose painted smile hides a broken heart has been a familiar figure in Western popular culture for generations. When we look at powerful public figures we frequently find questions along the lines of ‘what is the Queen/the President/the Pope really like?’ In many areas of everyday life there is an awareness of the differences between the public presentations and a real person behind the mask. These everyday understandings and questionings point to a sense that individuals are more than the sum of the positions they occupy in social life. The mother in the suburban house may look like dozens of other women in similar positions but may feel that she is being a mother in her own particular, individual way. A very everyday experience, familiar to many readers, may illustrate this further. Consider a job interview. From time to time the individual undergoing this interview will get a sense of herself as presenting in a particular way to these other people on this occasion. She may have decided how to adjust her physical appearance so that it is in keeping with what, she imagines, the interviewers may expect and many of her answers may have been rehearsed in advance. From time to time she may get carried away in this performance but at other times she may be aware of herself trying to make an impression and wondering if this was, really, her ‘true’ self. Within the social sciences, perhaps the most influential statement of this distinction (one which readers may recognise from their everyday experiences) was George Herbert Mead’s discussion of the ‘I’ and the 20

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‘Me’ (Mead, 1934; Rose, 1962). In the course of their everyday lives, individuals encounter a variety of other individuals and institutions and adjust their behaviours accordingly. These responses to ‘external’ expectations or ‘roles’ constitute what Mead calls the ‘Me’. The individual’s reflections on these expectations and performances (so that, for example, some expectations or roles might be thought to be more important or more enjoyable than others) constitute the ‘I’. A little reflection will show that both the ‘I’ and the ‘Me’ are necessary for social and personal life and that some kind of balance needs to exist between them. The actor, the politician, or the salesman, totally absorbed in their performances at the expense of any sense of self or personal identity, is seen to be a tragic or a comic figure. But similarly, the person who makes no concessions to the expectations or responses of others would be impossible to live with. The ‘I’ and the ‘Me’ are not two completely distinct facets of an individual person but are in constant interaction with each other. We may find parallels to Mead’s theoretical distinction in several anthropological accounts from a range of different cultures. Here we shall look at what are sometimes described as ‘traditional’ societies before returning to modern societies. Traditional societies are frequently portrayed as societies where ideas of the individual self are muted and subsumed by complex sets of collective and kinship rules and expectations. Yet, the social anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt recorded encountering frequent expressions on the lines of ‘one never knows what is another person’s heart’; phrases pointing to some sense of a self that is apart from social roles (Lienhardt, 1985). In a similar vein, J.S. La Fontaine writes: ‘If the self is an individual’s awareness of a unique identity, the “person” is society’s confirmation of that identity as of social significance’ (La Fontaine, 1985: 24). One consequence of this distinction is that, in some societies, some individuals (often women and children) are not ‘persons’ or their sense of personhood is less than others within the same society: The personhood of women among the Tallensi [Ghana] is of a lesser order than that of men for women lack the domestic and lineage authority of men. For the Taiti [Kenya]…the full range of ritual powers is not open to women so that they reach the limits of their achieved personhood sooner than men. (La Fontaine, 1985: 130)

Yet, it may be suggested, because an individual is not in some senses defined as a ‘person’ does not necessarily mean that the individual concerned lacks a sense of self. In other cultures in history a slave, for 21

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example, may not be, legally speaking, a ‘person’ but numerous oral and written accounts can attest to a sense of ‘self’. This chapter has suggested that, in different ways, in sociological theory, in individual experience, and in anthropological fieldwork certain distinctions emerge. These distinctions revolve around the individual and the person (or the self and the person) and the ‘I’ and the ‘Me’. At this stage in the argument it is important not to get too involved in the finer details. The core idea is a distinction between the more social, interacting with others, aspect of an individual and the more internal, reflecting, self. Let us, for the sake of simplicity, state this as a distinction between the person and the self. With this in mind, we can return to the idea of the social construction of personal life as discussed in the previous section. When we talk about the social construction of personal life we are arguing that personal life is differently organised and valued in different societies. In some cases they may even entail denying some individuals the status of ‘person’. This does not mean that individuals in such societies do not possess a sense of ‘self’. Looking at modern Western societies and restating some points made earlier, the following considerations are important: • Ideas of the person and personhood are strongly linked to ideas of human rights and democracy. One consequence of this is that there are constant debates about whether particular categories (children, prisoners, refugees, immigrants) should be allowed the status of full personhood. • Ideas of the personal are strongly linked to notions of ownership and choice. To say that ‘this is my personal opinion’, for example, is to state some degree of ownership of that opinion. • There is a heightened awareness of the distinction between the ‘person’ and the ‘self’. This is partially a consequence of increasing rates of social and geographical mobility and more complex divisions of labour. Under these circumstances it is possible to argue that the sets of others with whom we interact are too diverse and, often, too weakly connected to each other to provide a stable sense of personal identity. • At the same time there appears to be an increasing value placed upon the ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ self and an increasing desire to discover this by whatever means are available. This is not a complete list but points to some of the ways in which the personal is understood in modern societies. To say that the personal is socially constructed, therefore, is to say that there are social, historical, or cultural causes of these various ways in which the personal is understood 22

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and valued. But at all times it should be remembered that these distinctions are not fixed and are frequently subject to challenge and debate.

Personal practices This chapter has explored some of the meanings associated with the word ‘personal’ and the links between these meanings and the way in which the idea of the person can be seen as being shaped by numerous social and cultural influences. It has also been argued that there are strong arguments in favour of seeing an individual as something more than an assemblage of roles. A possible source of the dissatisfaction with some versions of the social construction of personal life argument is that it is operating at a high level of abstraction. Notions such as democracy, choice, privacy, ownership and so on are ‘big’ words. They are no doubt influential and important but they seem far removed from, say, our example of the Australian suburban house-owner seeking to construct a living family environment. What needs to be done is to move from these public or scholarly discourses about personal life and to explore the actual practices of the personal. We need to see people in terms of all their actual interactions, past, present, and anticipated future, rather than simply in terms of more abstract categories or processes. In talking about ‘practices’, this chapter draws upon a wide range of social thought including symbolic interactionism, e­ thnomethodology, feminism, postmodern thought and the writings of Pierre Bourdieu (Morgan, 1996, 2011). At its simplest the core idea of ‘practices’ includes an emphasis on doing and upon the everyday. There is, however, a further dimension involved in the understanding of practices and this is the argument that practices are carried out in relation to certain specified ‘others’ (family members, workmates, fellow members of a sports club) and that, in carrying out these practices, these sets of others are defined and redefined. For example, I may be defined as a ‘neighbour’ simply through virtue of the fact that I live near a particular other person. But if I engage in ‘neighbouring’ I engage in a whole host of everyday practices such as keeping an eye on her house or watering plants if she is away. Sometimes these practices may involve not doing something, such as not peering too intently if my neighbours are having a row in their back garden. All these practices, positive and negative, are in relation to another person and, in constructing them, I am creating or recreating a neighbourly relationship. Practices, therefore, 23

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are loosely structured activities which define certain relationships such as those between neighbours, family members, friends, or colleagues. These examples of relationships point to one issue which is relevant in considering the personal – namely that it is a sphere of life which is built up over time through interaction with others who are, or who become, in some way significant. The sense of what is personal is established on a day-to-day, even moment-to-moment, basis through interaction with or through taking account of these others. The framework for these interactions are personal webs of relationships including intimates, friends, and acquaintances. I shall develop this theme with three examples: names and naming; shedding tears; and social distinctions and inequalities.

Names and naming Naming and the use of names constitutes one of the most everyday personal practices. In English-speaking countries the naming of individuals tends to follow the pattern of family name (surname) prefaced by a more freely chosen given name or names (Finch, 2008). Significantly, these other names may sometimes be described as ‘personal names’. As Janet Finch demonstrates, everyday naming practices (naming a child after a grandparent, for example) provide valuable insights into family and other personal connections and values. But there is a difference between allocating or ascribing an individual’s name and in using a name. On a day-to-day basis we are frequently engaged in making small decisions about what to call another person. Do we use some formal mode of address or do we, if we know it, go straight to the first name? Do we ask permission to use a more personal name? How do we address a person from some other culture where we are unfamiliar with their naming practices? The process of using or not using particular names or of giving permission to use a particular name (including nicknames) is part of the process of establishing personal relationships. Thus, the novelist E.M. Forster was known as ‘Morgan’ within his personal circles, a name possibly unknown to many of his readers. In my own case, I prefer not to have my name abbreviated to ‘Dave’ and, again, this personal knowledge is known to people within my circles. Everyday naming practices provide links between the self and the person. Over time, names and sometimes nicknames become part of our personal identities. They are both part of the way in which we present ourselves to the outside world, to significant or less significant others, but also part of the way in which we feel about ourselves and who we are. 24

Conceptualising the Personal

‘If you have tears, prepare to shed them now’ (Shakespeare Julius Caesar)

We feel sad, moved, distressed and the tears start to flow. Tears seem to be a natural, bodily response to inner emotions. And yet, the Shakespeare quotation suggests there might be more to it than a sequence of stimulus and response. Some people, it suggests, may not have tears and, in any event, we need to ‘prepare’ to shed them. Consider the following: • There are all sorts of ways in which people shed tears. They may shed them collectively when, for example, a popular political or religious leader dies. They may be shed openly, in public, or in private. They may require the encouragement by a tragic actor or a religious leader or they may appear to be more spontaneous. • Not weeping and being seen to be in control of one’s emotions may be the approved form of behaviour, especially in public. This may apply to particular categories of persons (men rather than women, adults rather than children) or at particular points of time. The ‘stiff upper lip’ (probably originally an American phrase) came to be associated with the militarism and imperialism of late Victorian Britain (Dixon, 2015). • It is sometimes argued that it is becoming more acceptable for public figures (politicians, sportspeople) to be seen to weep in public. At the same time, these public displays may be greeted with some scepticism. Are they ‘genuine’ displays of emotion or are they a more calculating presentation of a ‘feeling self’? In all sorts of ways, then, tears, while they might be seen as belonging to the natural order of things, reflect and are influenced by wider social and cultural currents and beliefs about what is appropriate and inappropriate. Tears are personal but they are also personal practices, ways of being in the world which are shaped by social factors.

Social distinctions and inequalities In the previous example, the shedding of tears, something distinctly ‘personal’, was shown to be within the scope of sociological analysis. In this last example, I aim to explore the opposite: something that is strongly sociological may seem, also, to have a personal dimension. This is the example of social distinctions and inequalities. 25

SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

The nature and importance of social class divisions in modern societies continues to be a central, but much debated, element in social analysis. Social class cannot be ignored but it is something more than the amount and source of your income (economic capital) and is also to do with your personal networks of social relations (social capital) and your tastes and preferences (cultural capital) (Savage, 2015). Already we can see that some aspects of personal life (social relations and tastes) are strongly implicated in the idea of social class as a lived experience. One of the increasing complexities of social class analysis is that it is realised that it does not stand alone as a social division. It came to be realised that members of a particular social class were also men and women, and these divisions were also of significance. Differences in terms of ‘race’ and ethnicity were also recognised as were divisions in terms of sexualities and (dis)abilities. To talk of social divisions is to talk of a complex web of interconnected and interrelated strands. Our understanding of personal life might lead to a conclusion that any one person is more than a simple assemblage of these, and other, social distinctions. But perhaps personal life is not so far removed from these categories of social analysis. A sense of social difference may be built up through numerous experiences of being snubbed or put down, being treated as if one were invisible, having it made clear that one does not really ‘belong’. Or, where there is some recognition of difference, these differences are treated as overriding considerations so that, in the eyes of others, one is ‘simply’ a Muslim, ‘just’ a woman, distinctively someone who is gay or disabled; a complex, multilayered personal life is reduced to the identification with one social category. The experience of social divisions is built up from numerous small ‘personal’ experiences, encountered over a lifetime. From many possible examples, consider the following. It is an account given by ‘Sarah’ an Irish woman born in 1946: I don’t know, I think the nuns were too snobbish. Any children whose fathers had good jobs or professional jobs were treated differently than we were. We were put to the back of the class – didn’t matter how good we were – we were always put to the back of the class and looked down on is all I can say. (Gray and O’Carroll, 2012: 704)

‘Sarah’ is giving her personal experiences of school after the passing of many years. But it can be argued that a sense of social distinctions and 26

Conceptualising the Personal

the wider social order is built up from numerous such experiences and personal practices. In this section, the idea of ‘personal practices’ has been developed as a way of maintaining what is understood to be the special quality of personal life while, at the same time, demonstrating that this life remains open to sociological analysis. Three different examples have been deployed to develop this argument. In the case of names and naming we are looking at something that is key to understanding personal life. Names and the ways in which names are used by different people in different circumstances are very much a matter of who we are, how we define ourselves, and how we are seen by others. Naming practices are personal practices. In the case of the shedding of tears we are again looking at something which is often viewed as intensely personal but which can also be seen as reflecting wider cultural and social values. To see tears as a personal practice is to recognise these wider influences without losing the special quality of tears. And finally, in the case of social divisions we are, in a sense, turning matters on their head. Social divisions are, as the term suggests, something outside any one individual, something which has a strength and a solidity that extends back into history. We are born into social settings where social class, gender, ethnic and other divisions are part of that social order. However, it is through personal practices that these divisions come to have their force, come to be felt as excluding or to create a sense of belonging and identity.

Concluding remarks In the course of this chapter a variety of usages of the word ‘personal’ has been considered. Some of these usages might seem to lead to the conclusion that the personal is more a matter for psychological rather than sociological enquiry. However, when we consider how the word ‘personal’ is frequently linked to other terms such as the individual, the public/private distinction and ownership we can see that social processes are heavily implicated in personal lives. This is not simply in terms of major historical shifts such as the development of global capitalism but also in terms of more immediate, day-to-day interactions. We can call these personal practices and in talking about such practices we can also retain some sense of the self. Indeed, what this discussion of personal practices illustrates is that the distinction, explored earlier, between the self and the person cannot 27

SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

be fully sustained. Carol Smart’s (2007) core concepts, which she develops in the course of her discussion of personal life, demonstrate this. These are memory, biography, embeddedness, relationality and imaginary (see Table 2.1). In different ways these core concepts direct us to consider both the person, in the sense of the individual in his or her ongoing sets of relationships and institutional ties, and the self, responding to, evaluating, and reflecting upon these others. Our memories, for example, are clearly both social and personal. What matters is not just what we remember (and the intensity or otherwise of these memories) but how we share them with others (friends, family, social researchers) and how, in this sharing, we create and recreate ourselves and our relationships. In the end, there is perhaps something mysterious and elusive about personal life, once we come to consider it closely. But this should not inhibit our attempts to understand this important sphere, so long as we conduct these attempts with sensitivity and tact. Table 2.1 Carol Smart’s (2007) core concepts Concept

Definition

Links to the personal

Memory

Individual and shared recollections of past events, feelings and other people.

Links past and present. Links individual and the social. Strong links to emotions and family.

Biography

The process of telling stories. About individual lives.

Links past and present. Links stories about lives with the processes of telling these stories.

Embeddedness

The strength and tenacity of the links we have with others.

Helps to understand the power and influence of our social ties.

Relationality

Links to other people and their significance.

Shows how the personal is built through relationships with others.

Imaginary

Our thoughts, desires and Links the personal life as it ideals about the relationships is actually lived with cultural (family, friends, acquaintances) ideals and values. that links us to others.

Source: Smart (2007: 37–52)

28

Conceptualising the Personal

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION yyWhat is social about personal life? yyIn what ways is G.H. Mead’s distinction between the ‘I’ and the ‘Me’ still relevant to the discussion of personal life today? yyWhat is your name? Consider the various ways in which your name is used (or mis-used) by other individuals and institutions and consider how these usages might illuminate the discussion of personal life. yyConsider any one form of social inequality and show how a discussion of personal life might be relevant to the analysis of your choice.

29

3 COUPLE RELATIONSHIPS PETRA NORDQVIST1

Introduction The focus of this chapter is couple relationships, by which I mean romantic relationships between partners that may, over time, become formalised as marriage. This aspect of life – being in a couple with somebody – is often perceived as central to personal life. It is also central to Western culture in the sense that the search for ‘true love’ is the theme of countless films and novels, music and theatre productions here. Culturally speaking, meeting ‘the one’ and living ‘happily ever after’ is a very powerful ideal echoed in stories, from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to the well-known fairy tale Cinderella. In popular culture, the story about love is often told as a meeting that is intensely personal and private; it might seem as though the way we choose our partner, and the way that we live our lives as couples, is simply a matter of personal preference. However, when we begin to look more sociologically at the way that people ‘do’ couple relationships, and how they live their couple lives together, a different picture of love relationships starts to emerge. This is a picture that suggests that whereas personal choice is certainly part of it, the way that people choose a partner and ‘do’ their couple relationships – for example, get married, move in together, or split up – is also socially patterned and shaped by the broader social and cultural context. In this chapter I argue that when we look at couple relationships sociologically, we see that they are shaped by strong social norms about who to love and how to love, and that these norms change over time. Social and cultural ideas or discourses about who to love are strongly linked to how gender and sexuality are understood in a particular society. 1 With the permission of the author, this chapter partly relies on and revises Carol Smart’s chapter ‘Close relationships and personal life’ from the first edition of Sociology of Personal Life (2011a). Where it does so is indicated through referencing.

30

Couple Relationships

This chapter looks at both same-sex and opposite-sex r­ elationships (I refer to the latter as heterosexual) and begins with a ­discussion about how ­couple relationships are shaped by social norms about g­ ender and s­exuality. It thereafter goes on to explore how people ‘do’ their r­elationships. One of the ways in which sociologists find out about how people live their couple relationships is by looking at the rates of ­marriages, cohabitation and divorce in a society. The chapter looks at such trends and draws on statistical data detailing these patterns in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. Statistical data show that patterns have altered dramatically over time. The extent to which couple relationships have actually changed, and how these changes should be interpreted is, however, not clear and has sparked much debate among sociologists in recent years. The final section of this chapter explores two key debates: first, the extent to which intimate life in the West is still governed by its traditions, and second, the degree to which heterosexual relationships remain the gold standard of couple ­relationships compared to same-sex relationships.

Gender, sexuality and intimate life The way that people enter into couple relationships is fundamentally shaped by sexuality, and by gender. This means that we do not simply freely choose who to love; our choices are structured by sexual and gender norms. Looking at sexuality first of all, there is a very strong social norm that says that men and women are heterosexual – in other words, there is a normative expectation on individuals to be heterosexual. This is referred to as ‘heteronormativity’ (Herz and Johansson, 2015; Nagle, 2003). Heteronormativity means that people are assumed to be heterosexual until they declare otherwise. You have probably heard of the concept ‘coming out’. In recent years, various celebrities, such as the American actress Ellen Page, or Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe, have ‘come out’ as gay. But have you ever heard of anyone ‘coming out’ as heterosexual? Heterosexuals never ‘come out’ because they are already assumed to be heterosexual. The perception of heterosexuality as normal is so strong it is commonly seen to be natural (see Box 3.1). Heteronormativity exists everywhere; that is, at home, in work, and in public spaces (e.g. Solebello and Elliott, 2011). Take public spaces as an example: expressions of heterosexual intimacy – such as a heterosexual couple holding hands whilst walking down the street – are so normalised that they warrant little attention. 31

SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

Box 3.1 Are heterosexuality, femininity, and masculinity ‘natural’? The expectation on men and women to be heterosexual, and to adhere to traditional expectations of what makes a ‘proper man’ or a ‘proper woman’, is socially so strong that it is often assumed to be grounded in nature. Culturally speaking, it is presumed that a person’s genitals (their sex) naturally give rise to their gender (them acting like a man or a woman), and also to a desire directed towards the ‘opposite sex’ (Fuss, 1989). This view that gender and sexuality are innate or natural qualities is referred to as ‘essentialism’. It proposes that men and women are biologically different creatures, and that any difference between them – for example, men and women doing different types of work – are naturally occurring and can be explained through their biological differences. This presupposes that gender and sexual expressions are universal; that is, timeless and unchangeable. It is now common to reject essentialism, because it is widely recognised that there are no timeless, universal or natural qualities to gender or sexuality. When exploring gender and sexual expressions across history and across societies, it becomes evident that there are major variations. For example, ethnographer Margaret Mead (1935 in Robinson and Richardson, 2015) discovered that masculinity and femininity vary across different societies. A large body of research now shows that rather than gender or sexuality being innate qualities, they are socially constructed (see e.g. Jackson and Scott, 2010; Robinson and Richardson, 2015). There are many different theories explaining the social construction of gender and sexuality. Simon and Gagnon (1974 in Jackson and Scott, 2010) suggested that heterosexuality is a ‘social script’; it functions as a roadmap or guide giving directions for how to conduct oneself sexually. Further, Butler (1990) suggested that gender and sexuality are constructed through performance: she argued that gendered and sexual norms are produced through the constant repetition of the smallest acts and gestures. These acts and gestures create the illusion of the ‘natural’ or ‘real’, meaning that male and female gender and heterosexuality are socially produced as though they were biological and innate qualities. Weeks (2010 [1986]), offering yet another perspective, linked gendered and sexual norms to a sexual division of labour. He suggested that sexuality and gender are constructed in order to meet society’s demand for reproduction, nurturance, employment, household activities, and sex.

32

Couple Relationships

The normative expectation on people to be heterosexual is also written into law in many countries. In some historical periods, sexual relations between two people of the same gender have been regarded as a criminal offence, and this remains the case in many countries today. For example, taking the British context, many will have heard of the famous Irish playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde. He was sentenced to two years in prison in 1895 for engaging in sexual acts with another man. In Britain, it remained a criminal offence for men to have sex with men until the Sexual Offences Act was passed in 1967 (it was never illegal for women to have sex with other women). But it was not until the 2000s that same-sex couples were offered protection in terms of their right to family life comparable to the rights enjoyed by heterosexual couples. The UK Adoption and Children Act 2002 gave, for the first time, samesex couples the right to jointly adopt children. The Civil Partnership Act 2004 made it possible for same-sex couples to legally formalise their relationship; they gained the right to marry through the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013. The possibility to formalise a same-sex relationship varies widely across the world. Denmark was first to offer formal recognition of ­same-sex relationships in 1989. In Europe, 28 countries to date offer some form of legal recognition to same-sex couples. A growing number of Latin American countries also offer same-sex couples formal ­recognition, and in North America, same-sex relationships are recognised in Canada, and, since 2015, in the whole of the United States. In Oceania same-sex ­marriage is nationally recognised in New Zealand (2013) and in ­Australia (2017). In Africa and Asia, it is quite rare to find formal recognition of same-sex relationships; Taiwan became the first Asian country to legally recognise same-sex relationships in 2017. Couple relationships are also gendered, which is to say that a person’s gender impacts on their experience of being part of a couple. Traditionally, women have been associated with the private sphere of home making, and men with the public sphere of work (Pateman, 1988; see May, ‘Personal life in public spaces’, Chapter  11 in this volume). This pattern is reinforced in heterosexual relationships, where men and women are often expected to take different roles. For example, in the 1950s, in most Western societies, a woman getting married might have expected to give up her job in order to become a full-time housewife and look after her husband (Mansfield and Collard, 1988). Even if she did not do this immediately, she would do so on becoming pregnant because of social expectations and, in any case, she was likely to lose her job (Smart, 2011a). This meant that marriage, particularly after children were born, 33

SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

was a gendered experience: it created a situation of economic dependence for wives upon their husbands. At the time, a married woman was not regarded as the legal equal of her husband; she had virtually no protection from domestic violence, and could only get a divorce with great difficulty (Smart, 1984). These patterns of gendered responsibility and gender inequality have not vanished from marriage altogether (Fagan and Norman, 2016; Vogler et al., 2006), despite women’s increasing economic activity outside the home, legal changes and changing social attitudes. We return to this discussion later in this chapter.

‘Doing’ couple relationships From the above section, it is clear that who people choose as a partner and their experience of couple relationships is socially patterned in terms of gender and sexuality. This section suggests that how people ‘do’ their couple relationships in terms of their decisions about getting married, cohabiting, or getting divorced, is also socially patterned. We know about such decisions because they are recorded by local registrars, and the data can be gathered and analysed at a national level.

Heterosexual marriages, cohabitation and divorce When studying statistical data on rates of marriage, cohabitation and divorce, it becomes clear that people ‘do’ their couple lives in different ways in different countries, at different points in time. Looking specifically at rates of marriage, it is of interest to note that people do not get married at the same rate across time and social context. There were 247,372 heterosexual marriages in England and Wales in 2014 (Office for National Statistics, 2017a). When you look at the number of marriages over many years, a broader pattern can be noted. Figure 3.1 shows that there is a long-term decline in people marrying in England and Wales. The 1940s was not a typical decade because World War II had a major impact on marriage rates. The popularity of marriage soared after World War II and it coincided with a baby boom in both countries in 1946 and 1948. This baby boom produced a wave of young people who themselves were of marriageable age in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and this in turn gave rise to another peak in marriage rates around that time (Smart, 2011a). However, since 1972 there has been a clear long-term decline in terms of the percentage of the population who marry (Office for National Statistics, 2017a). In England and Wales, the number of marriages registered in 2008 was the lowest since 1895 (Smart, 2011a). 34

Couple Relationships 500

Marriages %

400

300

200

100

14

09

20

04

20

99

20

94

19

89

19

84

19

79

19

74

19

69

19

64

19

59

19

54

19

49

19

44

19

39

19

19

19

34

0

Year

Figure 3.1 Number of marriages, England and Wales, 1934–2014 Source: Office for National Statistics (2017a) Marriages in England and Wales: 2014, p.  3. The marriage rate shows the number of marriages per 1,000 unmarried males/females aged 16 and over.

This decline in marriage rates is echoed across the Western world. In  the United States the marriage rate per 1,000 of the population in 1950 was estimated as 11.1. By 1995, it had reduced to 8.9 and in 2012 it had declined even further to 6.8 (Infoplease, 2017a). In Australia, the marriage rate per 1,000 of the population in 1950 was estimated as 9.2. By 1995, it had dropped to 6.1, and by 2013 it had fallen even further, to 5.1 (Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2017). This general trend is also echoed across Europe. Recent data from across 28 European EU member states suggest that in 2000, the general marriage rate was 5.2 per 1,000 of the population. By 2011, this had dropped to 4.2 (Eurostat, 2017). It is not just the rate at which people opt to marry one another which has changed, but other aspects about marriage have changed too. In England and Wales, the proportion of those who opt for a religious marriage ceremony has declined over time. In 1964, religious ceremonies accounted for 69 per cent of all marriages; in 2014, they accounted for 28 per cent. Since 1992, every year, more people have opted for civil rather than religious ceremonies (Office for National Statistics, 2017a). Men and women also tend to wait longer to marry. In the United States in 1970, the median age of women to get married was 20.8 years old; the median age for men was 23.2. By 2010, this had risen to 26.1 35

SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

years for women, and 28.2 years for men (Infoplease, 2017b). In Australia in 1975, the median age at which women got married was 21; for men it was then 23. By 2013, the median age for women had risen to 28 years, and for men to 30 (Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2017). In England and Wales as well, people are generally older now when they get married, compared to the 1970s. In 1974, the average age at which women got married was 26.2 years; for men it was 28.8. In 2014, this had risen to 34.6 year for women, and 37.0 years for men. This is not just a Western phenomenon, but brides also tend to be older than they used to in countries such as Japan, South Korea and Indonesia (The Economist, 2011). Another measure of how people ‘do’ couple relationships can be found when looking at the extent to which people cohabit. The presumption that prevailed in most Western countries in the 1950s and 1960s – that a couple would meet while still living at home with their r­ espective parents, then get engaged, then marry and only then start having c­ hildren – has become a much less dominant pattern of forming relationships (Smart 2011a). Today, it is much more common that people cohabit before they get married – something that was frowned upon in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, data from Australia show that whereas it used to be relatively uncommon for people to live together before marrying, it is now the norm (see Figure 3.2). Looking at the United Kingdom, Beaujoauan and Bhrolcháin (2011) suggest that whereas only one per cent of adults under 50 cohabited at any one time in the early 1960s, that proportion had risen to 17 per cent in 2007. In 2004–2007, 61 per cent of 25–44-year-old men and 64 per cent of women of this age had cohabited at some point in their lives. The rate Cohabitation

preceding marriage

1975 16%

1992 56%

2013 77%

Figure 3.2 Percentage of marriages preceded by cohabitation, Australia Source: Australian Institute of Family Studies. https://aifs.gov.au/facts-and-figures/livingtogether-australia

36

Couple Relationships

was slightly lower for people between the ages of 45 and 59 (­Beaujoauan and Bhrolcháin, 2011: 2). In the United States it has been estimated that in 1960 there were 500,000 cohabiting couples, but in 1997 that figure had risen to 4,250,000 (Smock and Gupta, 2002). In other words, cohabitation has become a normal part of the life course, particularly for younger people (see May, ‘Personal life across the life course’, Chapter 7 in this volume). If young people are now more likely to cohabit, does this mean that they simply cohabit instead of getting married? Statistical data show that although there has been a rise in cohabitation, this does not make up for the decline in marriage at younger ages. Rather, the figures indicate that something has shifted in terms of how young people think about couple relationships, and the age at which they enter into them. Between 1980 and 1984, 59 per cent of men and 78 per cent of women aged 25–29 had experienced at least one partnership by the age of 25. Between 2004 and 2007, however, these figures had dropped to 43 per cent for men, and 60 per cent for women (Beaujoauan and Bhrolcháin, 2011). In other words, young people do not enter into a partnership in the way they did in the early 1980s. Something has shifted in how young people nowadays regard and enter into couple relationships. It is important also to understand that not only are rates of marriage and cohabitation changing, but that the cultural meanings of marriage and cohabitation are changing too (Smart, 2011a). So, for example, to cohabit in 1950 was a totally different experience to cohabiting today. We know, for example, that there was very little ‘prenuptial’ cohabitation in many Western societies before the 1980s (Smart, 2011a). If couples cohabited without marrying they often concealed the fact, for example by the woman taking her partner’s surname. In the twenty-first century, however, cohabitation is not only commonplace but is a partnership form that most young couples go through. It is important to keep in mind, however, that young people’s patterns of cohabitation may vary with demographic factors such as ethnicity, so that it may be more prevalent in some ethnic groups compared to others. Another major shift that has taken place is the rate at which married couples break up. Patterns of divorce have changed markedly over the last 60 years. In all Western societies divorce rates have risen since the end of World War II. These rises have been due to changes in divorce legislation, the improved economic position of women (largely because of the rise in the number of women working outside the home), the decline in stigma associated with relationship breakdown, and possibly also to increased 37

SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

life expectancy. In the United Kingdom, and before the Divorce Reform Act in 1969, a couple could only get divorced with great difficulty. After this legal reform, the rate of divorce went up for some time, but this has levelled off in more recent years. In 1970, 22 per cent of marriages had ended in divorce by the 15th wedding anniversary, rising to 33 per cent by 1995 (Office for National Statistics, 2017b). In 2014, there were 111,169 divorces in the United Kingdom, a decline of 27 per cent from a recent peak in 2003, so divorce rates are currently declining (Office for National Statistics, 2017b). By looking at these data a little bit closer, we also learn some interesting facts about divorce. In 2014, the number of divorces was highest among men aged 45 to 49 and women aged 40 to 44 (Office for National Statistics, 2017b). Those who marry younger are more likely to divorce, compared to those who marry when they are older. Moreover, more women than men tend to apply to get a divorce; in 2010, 66 per cent of divorces were granted to the wife.

Same-sex couple formation and dissolution When looking at statistical data about how heterosexual couples live, marry, and divorce, it is possible to discern that, over time, major changes have taken place in how couples go about forming and ending relationships. What about same-sex couples? Has the way that they ‘do’ their relationships also changed over time? It is a very different proposition to explore the social patterning of samesex relationships, because the legal possibility of marrying or divorcing has simply not been an option for very long. Looking at the United Kingdom in particular, the first same-sex couples were able to formalise their relationships in December  2005 (following the Civil Partnership Act 2004). They have been able to formally marry since March  2014 (following the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013). At the time of writing, same-sex couples can choose to enter a civil partnership or marry. Because of these changes to the law, there now exists official statistical data on the number of same-sex couples that enter into (and dissolve) a civil partnership or marriage. But unlike the data about heterosexual couples, where it is possible to discern changes over decades, the United Kingdom data on same-sex couples only stretch back to 2005. Between December 2005 and the end of 2012 there were 60,454 civil partnerships registered (Office for National Statistics, 2017c). In 2006, and to some extent in 2007, more couples entered into civil partnerships than in later years, which was likely because many couples had waited a 38

Couple Relationships

long time to ‘marry’. Since then, the number of men and women forming civil partnerships has been relatively even: in 2012, 7,037 civil partnerships were formed and in 2011 the figure was 6,795. Looking at couples marrying under the new 2013 Act, 4,850 same-sex couples got married in England and Wales in 2014 (Office for National Statistics, 2017a). Forty-four per cent of these were male couples and 56 per cent were female couples. That year, the average age for women to enter a samesex marriage was 36.9 years, and for men 39.5, which is slightly higher compared to heterosexual couples. When it comes to relationship breakdown, those who are in a civil partnership can apply for a dissolution of their partnership, and those who are married can apply for a divorce. The number of dissolved civil partnerships is steadily rising. In 2007, not long after the introduction of civil partnership, there were 40 dissolutions. In 2010 there were 485 dissolutions and in 2015 there were 1,211 dissolutions. It is, however, still too early to make any predictions based on these data (Office for National Statistics, 2017c), or to look for long-term trends. Because the data available about same-sex couples span so few years, our knowledge about same-sex relationships and how they have changed over time is relatively limited. In addition, it is much more difficult, if not impossible, to collect data about the extent to which same-sex couples cohabit, and if that is something that has changed over time. This means that we still know relatively little about same-sex couple formation.

How partners ‘do’ relationships is socially patterned From looking at statistical data, and particularly the long-term trends in heterosexual couple formation, it is clear that the changes in how people ‘do’ relationships have been dramatic. Whereas couple relationships to some extent are about personal choice, the changes demonstrated here show that the way that people choose a partner and ‘do’ their couple relationship is deeply shaped by the broader social and cultural context. In other words, people do not just choose how to live their intimate life out of their own free will, but the choices that people make are shaped by their social context. It is clear that who we marry in terms of the person’s gender, and the rate at which people choose to marry, divorce or cohabit, is subject to influence by factors such as wars, economic conditions, shifts in moral and cultural values, and legal changes. The way that people approach couple relationships, and the options that are available to them at any given time and in any given context, vary. The choices available in 1958 were very different to those available in 2018, particularly for 39

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women and non-heterosexuals. In the early twenty-first century many heterosexual and same-sex couples have more choices available to them in terms of events such as marriage, cohabitation, and divorce. However, it is important to emphasise that such choices are not ‘free’ choices, but they are made in the prevailing context of economic conditions, the cost of housing, the availability of employment and, of course, such things as state or family support for parenting (Smart, 2011a). What might have caused these changes to take place? There are many factors that may have contributed. For example, women’s control over their own fertility and child bearing has increased, particularly since the development of the contraceptive pill in the 1960s (Clarke, 1998). Following changes in gender and sexual relations, linked to the rise of feminism and sexual politics in the 1970s (see Heaphy, Chapter 12 in this volume ‘Sexuality and the politics of personal life’), women are no longer satisfied being the junior partner in relationships, and social attitudes about same-sex relationships have shifted dramatically (Nordqvist and Smart, 2014a). Women now have other choices than becoming a mother and home maker, such as entering the labour market. Moreover, young people do not have to marry to leave home. Cohabitation is no longer shameful for many and it is possible to simply delay being part of a couple and marrying, if at all, until one is older. If a woman falls pregnant ‘out of wedlock’ (without being married), the stigma of being a single mother is much reduced compared to what it would have been in the 1950s, when the pressure to give the child up for adoption was considerable (Sales, 2012).

To what extent have couple relationships changed? Based on the above discussion, it might seem as though people are moving away from the traditional Western ways of ‘doing’ relationships, and also, with same-sex marriage becoming more available, that same-sex relationships are increasingly accepted as equal to heterosexual ones. Exploring the place of tradition in couple relationships in ­Euro-American societies, some social theorists of late modernity, such as Giddens (1992), Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) and Bauman (2000), argue that changes in intimate life are caused by increasing social and cultural ‘de-traditionalisation’ and ‘individualisation’. Fundamentally, they suggest that people are stepping away from traditional Western patterns of marriage and so on, in order to create their own lives according to their own choosing. The work of Giddens (1992) has been particularly influential. He suggests that late-modern couple relationships are characterised by what he calls the ‘pure relationship’. This is 40

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a relationship that is ‘continued only in so far as it is thought by both parties to deliver enough satisfactions for each individual to stay within it’ (Giddens, 1992: 58). Moreover, Giddens suggests that ‘romantic love’, which implicitly positions men and women in an unequal power relationship, has been replaced by a ‘confluent love’, which he argues ‘presumes equality in emotional give and take’ (p. 62). Giddens argues that the rise of the ‘pure relationship’ explains increasing divorce rates (p. 61). He sees all of this as linked to increased equality between men and women in personal relationships. According to Giddens, this gender equality will lead to a ‘democratisation’ of intimate life, and this will in turn generate more gender equality overall in society. But to what extent have couple relationships actually changed? Other sociologists are rather more cautious in their interpretations. Carter and Duncan (2017) for example, looking at couple relationships, suggest that traditional Western ideas of intimacy continue to be influential but also adapted. They argue that contemporary personal lives are lived through a briocolage of ‘the traditional’ and ‘the modern’. Crucially, however, they show that traditional ways of living personal life hold strong because as couples’ lives move away from the traditional (and become ­de-traditionalised), old habits and ways of relating tend to reassert themselves, meaning that a re-traditionalisation is simultaneously taking place. Lynn Jamieson (1999), and others writing from feminist perspectives (see e.g., Jackson and Scott, 2004; Smart, 2007), have been very critical of Giddens’s suggestions. Jamieson, for example, proposes that we need to be much more cautious in our interpretations of what has changed. For example, women still do the lion’s share of housework and childcare in heterosexual relationships (see Box 3.2), as well as the emotional labour in relationships (Duncombe and Marsden, 1995). If women give up work or reduce work to care for children, then men still have greater economic power in the household. Jamieson shows that upon marriage, men and women’s presumptions about gender equality weaken. Moreover, whereas cohabitation may be a sign of a progressive relationship, looked at from a gendered perspective, it is more likely to mean that women and children are economically vulnerable, especially if the man leaves. Jamieson also argues that the idea of ‘the pure relationship’ is likely to only fit certain groups such as those who do not have children together, who are metropolitan and who are financially well off. For example, if a woman cannot afford to live on her own and look after herself and her children, then it is unlikely that she can leave, whether the relationship remains satisfying or not. In other words, Giddens’s argument does not work for everyone: social class differences, regional differences, ethnic 41

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and religious differences, and so on, greatly affect the extent to which a relationship lasts only for as long as it is mutually satisfying (see e.g., Mason, 2004; Smart and Shipman, 2004; Turney, 2011). The birth of children also changes relationships considerably as women (usually) then become financially dependent on men. Once women are at home as carers, the old patterns seem to reassert themselves. Jamieson (1999: 490) notes that parent–child relationships signal long-term material dependency, not fluidity, thus challenging notions of an individualised intimacy. As shown in Box 3.2, this still holds true.

Box 3.2 How equal are men’s and women’s relationships? It might be assumed that as women have entered the workforce alongside men, men’s share in childcare and domestic work would also have increased. However, evidence suggests that although men are doing slightly more of the work at home now compared to what they used to, this is not at an equivalent rate. In other words, women now work outside the home, whilst also doing more of the housework compared to men; they are burdened with ‘a double shift’ (Fagan and Norman, 2013, 2016; Lyonette and Crompton, 2015). There is evidence from across Europe, Canada, the United States, and Australia to show that, on having children, women still become economically dependent upon their husbands because it is they who take time away from paid work to raise the children (Breen and Cooke, 2005; Kan et  al., 2011; Voicu et  al., 2009). Also, the amount of time they spend on caring and housework goes up dramatically. Recent data from Australia show that becoming a mother marks a great change in the lives of women. New mothers go from spending a weekly average of two hours caring for others, to 51 hours of caring per week. When women become mothers, they also increase the time they spend on housework from 16 hours per week to 25 hours per week (Australian Institute for Family Studies, 2016). A study by the Australian Institute for Family Studies (2007) also found that the ways in which mothers spend their time is very different from fathers. Men with children aged under five spend on average 43 hours/week in paid employment, whereas women with similar age children spend on average 11 hours/week in paid employment. Men in this group spend about 6 hours/week on housework,

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whereas women spend 23 hours/week. Men spend 16 hours/week on parenting and playing with children; women spend 38 hours/ week doing this. These patterns tend to remain similar also when the children are older. This shows very clearly the impact on paid work once a couple have children; the gender differences are very striking. And as soon as women lose their independent earning power they become vulnerable to inequalities, especially if they go on to get divorced. So marriage and parenthood continue to have very different consequences for men and women.

There is thus overwhelming empirical evidence to suggest that old patterns of gender inequalities persist. Jamieson (1999: 91) argues that rather than assuming that society is now more gender equal, it is more likely that men and women, rather than transforming old patterns of gender inequality in their relationships, are having to find ways of coping with the widespread persistence of gender inequality. In contrast to Giddens, she argues that it is much more likely that increasing levels of divorce and relationship breakdown are due to a tension between a cultural emphasis on equality, and the ongoing structural support for gender inequality (e.g. Kan et al., 2011). The key second debate that has emerged concerning the changes to intimate life has centred on the hierarchical relationship between heterosexual and same-sex relationships, and whether the stigma of being in a same-sex relationship is now reduced or even gone. Some sociologists argue that this is the case. For example, Roseneil (2000), drawing on Giddens’s (1992) ideas, suggests that the categories of ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ have weakened, with the hierarchy and distinction between them lessening as well (see also Stacey and Davenport, 2002). In a similar vein, Anderson (2010), looking specifically at men and masculinity, argues that men are now able to construct a softer version of masculinity, a so-called ‘inclusive masculinity’, which is no longer predicated on homophobia as more traditional forms of masculinity have been (see also McCormack, 2012). However, others challenge the idea that the boundary and hierarchy between heterosexuality and homosexuality is lessening. For example, Heaphy (2007a: 208) takes a more cautious approach and suggests that transgressions of the homosexual/heterosexual binary are coupled with continuous inequalities. Heaphy et al. (2013), in a study of same-sex couples’ experiences of married life, suggest that whereas the possibilities for 43

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living ‘ordinary’ everyday lives have expanded for same-sex couples, that expansion is uneven. For example, couples can still experience instances of marginalisation and symbolic violence. A sense of being ‘ordinary’ and not experiencing stigma was most easily achievable for white, able-bodied couples from liberal or secular backgrounds with access to economic resources: ‘the situated circumstances in which couples and partners live their day to day lives clearly influences the extent to which they can choose or achieve the ordinary ideals of relationships’ (Heaphy et  al., 2013: 169). These findings are echoed in many studies of gay and lesbian parents, which suggest that the heterosexual nuclear family continues to be regarded as the only ‘proper’ kind of family (e.g. Dempsey, 2013; Nordqvist, 2012b; Nordqvist and Smart, 2014b).

Concluding remarks Although forming and ending relationships is a very personal matter, indeed a core feature of personal life, these processes cannot be separated from the social, economic, and cultural contexts in which they occur. Who we love and how we love are socially patterned. This chapter has charted the changes in the patterns of relationships and domestic living in Western democracies over the past 60 years. Changing social values mean that more people feel able to consider non-traditional forms of relationships without the stigma and shame which may have been attached to them in previous times; new forms of relationships appear to have become feasible with changing economic and social conditions. However, the extent to which relationships have changed, particularly in terms of gender and sexual inequality, is much debated.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION yyWhat does it mean to say that the way that people ‘do’ couple relationships is socially patterned? Give examples. yyImagine that it is 1955. What choices would you have then in terms of the kind of couple relationship you might form compared to now? Consider this question from the perspective of a heterosexual man, a heterosexual woman, a gay man and a lesbian woman.

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yyHow far do you think Giddens’s proposal that we are witnessing the rise of the ‘pure relationship’ explains the decline in marriage and rise in divorce rates? yyThis chapter looks at couple relationship patterns in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States. To what extent do you think they are echoed in other parts of the world?

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HOW BEING 4 KINSHIP: RELATED MATTERS IN PERSONAL LIFE PETRA NORDQVIST

Introduction This chapter explores how being related to people matters in personal life. Relationships with parents, siblings, children, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins are at the very heart of the ‘personal sphere’ of personal life. These relationships can be positive or negative, and they matter deeply in people’s everyday life, forming the backdrop for how people live their individual lives (Bengtson et al., 2002). Relationships with parents, siblings and wider family can be hugely significant when children grow up, and it is through these kinds of relationship that people form a sense of home, self, and belonging in the world. They continue to matter throughout the life course, for example as people leave home as young adults, or go on to have children of their own. But they are also of deep social significance. Core sociological issues such as social solidarity and cohesion, as well as conflict, cannot be understood without recognising the importance of personal ties that individuals develop and sustain (Allan, 1996). Many areas of social activity, such as being at school or at work, health and leisure activities, and political views are shaped by one’s relationship with one’s family because of how they play a major part in shaping a person’s attitudes and behaviours. This chapter unpacks the concept of kinship and explores its meaning in everyday life. To begin with, it asks questions about popular assumptions about kinship as a ‘given’ and ‘fixed’ relationship. Questioning the idea that kinship is a ‘given’ relationship, it then draws on classical ­sociological studies about kinship in everyday life to suggest that important insights can be gained about kinship by exploring empirically how people experience being related. These studies suggest that it is important to go beyond popular assumptions and explore how people ‘live’ kinship, because this provides a different perspective on what constitutes 46

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kinship. The chapter then continues to develop the idea that people ‘live’ kinship and goes on to explore the kinship connection per se; how it is known and engaged in. In the third and final section, the chapter builds on this further and discusses an important new area of kinship studies, which focuses on new reproductive technologies and reproductive donation. The section takes a particular look at surrogacy, which is when a woman gestates a child for another person (or couple) and relinquishes the baby at birth. Throughout, it will put forward the argument that rather than understanding kinship as a ‘given’ and straightforward relationship, a sociological analysis shows that kinship is a process, something that people ‘do’, ‘live’, ‘know’ and ‘engage in’. In other words, kinship is not ‘self-evidently there’ but rather it is something that ‘comes into being’ through the way that people act.

What does it mean to be related? Culturally speaking, relationships with relatives are thought of as ‘given’ relationships rather than chosen. There are even well-known idioms that capture the sense in which family bonds are perceived to be ‘non-elective’ and ‘inevitable’. These include ‘you can choose your friends but not your family’, or the more recent alternative ‘you can’t choose your family, but you can ignore their phone calls’. Kinship is also perceived as a permanent or ‘fixed’ relationship in the sense that it is thought it cannot be ended, or ‘unchosen’. Carol Smart (2007) refers to these as ‘sticky’ relationships because they are relationships that cannot easily be got rid of, even if they turn difficult. The understanding of family relationships as ‘fixed’, ‘self-evident’ and ‘straightforward’ is associated with deep-seated cultural understandings that people in families are linked through a biological connection. This is a particular Euro-American construction of what it means to be related (Schneider, [1968]1980), where being related is perceived as based in biological reproduction. This also means that family relationships, for example one between a father and his son, are seen as ‘natural’ relationships (Carsten, 2004; Strathern, 1992). It used to be common that these ‘natural’ connections were conceptualised as ‘blood’ relationships, as denoted by powerful cultural idioms such as ‘blood will out’ or ‘blood is thicker than water’. Today, it is more common that they are understood through reference to genes or DNA. The idea that families are ‘natural’ communities of people who share blood or genetic DNA remains powerful, however, and is part and parcel of the idea that family bonds are in no sense ‘chosen’ but are simply ‘given’. 47

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A common cultural image of a kinship group that encapsulates both the idea that kinship is something ‘fixed’ and unending, and defined by biological connections, is the genealogical family tree. This is a representation of the family as a tree where the branches represent the link between a child, her or his parents, their parents, and so on. The tree conjures up the image of a family line that can be traced back through time, and also an image of family as a self-explanatory community that can be readily defined and which is ‘self-evidently’ there to look at. However, when looking at kinship and the meaning of being related (or relatedness) from a sociological perspective, a more complex picture starts to emerge. When we step away from the cultural idea of kinship as a natural and fixed relationship, expressed in the image of the family tree, and instead look at what being related means to people in terms of their everyday life and experience, a series of questions starts to emerge that troubles the idea that kinship is straightforward or ‘fixed’. For example, how do people relate within families? Do people relate in the same way to all their genetic siblings, or, for that matter, all their relatives? Are relationships positive and nurturing, toxic and difficult, or somewhere in between? Are there patterns to how people relate to one another, and are different things expected from different family members, for example sons and daughters? How do family members deal with responsibilities and obligations in the face of old age or ill health? Are family bonds really eternal, or can people be expunged from the family? How do new reproductive technologies, enabling people to have children using third party egg or sperm, negotiate becoming and being a family? These questions lead us to consider how kin relationships are lived in everyday life, as explored in the following section.

Kinship in everyday life Both classical and more contemporary sociological studies show that the popular discourse of kinship as ‘given’ becomes rather more complicated when we start to ask questions about how people actually understand what it means to be related, and how they experience being related in their everyday lives. To understand what kinship means for people, sociologists have studied people’s ideas, behaviour, and experiences through conducting social research. In other words, they have explored the meaning of kinship empirically. Historically, those who studied kinship sought to find out about how kinship mattered in a modern, industrialised world. Firth conducted 48

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two important studies in the 1950s and 1960s: Two Studies of Kinship in London (1956) and then, with colleagues Hubert and Forge, Families and Their Relatives (1970). In the latter of these studies, Firth and his colleagues sought to analyse what sort of relationship people had with different people in their wider family. This meant that they were looking into the social consequences of recognising someone as kin. In approaching kinship in this way, Firth and his colleagues already made the important point that people may be related, but unless they know themselves to be related, they do not engage with people as relatives. The consequence of this is that it is less meaningful to speak of relatives as a group of people connected in the abstract, and more meaningful to speak of a person’s ‘universe of kin’; in other words, the group that is recognised as kin. The ‘universe of kin’ is thus less like a family tree, going back in time, and more like the people in the family that a person knows about and recognises as family. Firth and his colleagues further analysed these social ties and discovered that ‘recognised kin’ could be categorised in a more detailed way. They found that social ties in families can vary and can range from quite distant to very intimate. Starting with the more distant relationships, they first learned that it is possible to distinguish between those in a kinship group that a person knows the name of, and those whose existence a person is aware of, but is not so familiar with as to know their name. These ‘named’ and ‘unnamed’ individuals are all part of a person’s kinship universe, but only those whose name is known are likely to be of importance in a person’s life. Second, Firth and colleagues also discovered that just because people are known by name, that does not mean that they are all equally close. Rather, ‘named’ kin folk can be separated into ‘effective’ and ‘non-effective’, in the sense that effective relatives are those with whom a person has a form of social contact, and the ‘non-effective’ kin are those a person has very little contact with. This is the difference between the aunt that you see every Christmas (an effective relative), and the aunt whose name you know but who you have not seen for 10 years (a non-effective relative). Third, and now looking more closely at effective relatives, Firth and colleagues discovered that there were important differences between ‘intimate’ effective relationships and ‘peripheral’ effective relationships. For example, a person may enjoy a closer relationship with their sister (intimate), compared to their aunt (peripheral), and so not all effective relationships are the same. This study thus showed that when you look at kin as a universe that people recognise, complexities and variations start to emerge. 49

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Another important sociological study was conducted by Rosser and Harris (1965), who also looked at the role of kinship in Britain. They found that although kinship remained an important and durable social entity, it was not a precisely defined social group. Rather, they discovered that a kin group is a ‘variable, amorphous and vague social grouping within which circulate – often over great [geographical] differences – strong sentiments of belonging’ (Rosser and Harris, 1965: 288 quoted in Allan, 1996: 33). Rosser and Harris found that a kinship group is neither static nor uniform. And so rather than seeing it as a ‘fixed’ and ‘given’ group, they found that its boundaries, and who belongs or does not belong to it, vary according to circumstance and the situation in which people find themselves. Consider, for example, a man who has two children in a heterosexual relationship. He and his wife then divorce, and the children go to live with their mum. After a few years he re-marries and has two more children in his new marriage. The changes brought about by the divorce in the nuclear family also generate change in the kinship group in terms of who belongs, and who does not. Is the first wife still part of the family after divorce? Does that change after the man ­re-marries and a new wife is on the scene? What is the relationship between the first two children and their step-siblings? If the first wife also goes on to have more children, are they somehow related to the husband’s second set of children? Birth, death, and divorce are some of the elements that change what a kinship group looks like. Rosser and Harries argued that the boundaries of a kinship group are not static, but permeable. These discoveries also led them to suggest that kinship is a ‘process’ rather than something that can be readily recognised – like a family tree. The insight that kinship group membership is an outcome of a process, rather than it being fixed and inevitable, is further illustrated in studies of non-heterosexual and non-white kinship. Traditionally, in Western societies, membership in a family was predicated on being heterosexual, and marrying within one’s ‘racial’/ethnic group. Studies of gay and lesbian kinship (Nordqvist and Smart, 2014a; Riggs and Peel, 2016; Weston, 1991) and of mixed heritage families (Frankenberg, 1993) have shown that people who came out as gay or married a person of a different ‘race’/ethnicity could find themselves ousted from their family of origin as a consequence. These studies detail the experiences of people whose own life trajectory illustrates that kinship membership is porous, changing and can be terminated. They also show that ‘race’/ethnicity and sexuality are key dimensions of kinship (Wade, 2007; Yanagisako and Collier, 1987). 50

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Adoption is another example of how kinship is porous and can be terminated, but also created anew. Signe Howell (2006), who explores transnational adoption in a Norwegian context, has suggested that families who adopt children go through processes of ‘making’ themselves into kin. They do so by engaging in practices which are aimed at creating links of kinship between their adopted children and themselves, a process that Howell calls ‘kinning’. By asking questions about how people experience being related, a much more complicated picture starts to emerge. These classic studies show that kinship matters in people’s lives, but also that the group that we recognise as our kin group is not static but permeable, porous, and changeable. In other words, being related is something we ‘do’, or ‘live’, rather than something we simply ‘are’. This point that kinship is something we ‘do’ is brought further to the fore when we consider kinship communities as communities in which people ‘do’ kinship by caring for one another. The issues of care, how people approach family responsibilities, whether they offer support of various kinds to one another, and how they navigate this process, are key aspects of being related (see Box 4.1). How support flows in families is an issue for individual families of course, but it is also a key question for politicians and policy makers. It taps into the question about whether it is the responsibility of the state to look after people’s needs, or whether families are responsible for this. In the English ‘Victorian Poor Law’, kin responsibilities were enshrined in law. The Poor Law was abolished in 1948, but before then, there was a legal expectation that children were responsible for assisting their parents, and parents and grandparents were obliged to care for immature children. The state provided little or no support to those whose families were unwilling or unable to support them. At the time, the authorities worked to enforce these obligations in order to ensure that as few people as possible became the responsibility of the state (Finch, 1989; Finch and Mason, 1993). Although this law is now abolished, the question about whether it is the state or the family that should shoulder caring responsibilities remains an important one. For example, who should provide for the growing number of young people who cannot afford to support themselves, or who should care for the elderly? Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s Britain had high expectations that family networks should be ready, willing, and able to shoulder the burden of providing for members of the family who could not fully support themselves. These ideas have not gone away, but have re-emerged in recent austerity policies in different countries. But to what extent are these expectations of duty and obligation reflected in real-life experiences of kinship? 51

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Box 4.1 What responsibilities do people perceive themselves to have for one another in families? Finch and Mason (1993) conducted important research at the end of the 1980s that was designed to explore how people in England worked through and perceived issues of responsibility in their own families, and if doing so was governed by a sense of duty and obligation. They found that the way in which people assumed and worked out responsibilities in families is more accurately described as a process of negotiation, rather than simply derived out of a sense of obligation. By this they meant that rather than assuming that care and support flow in predictable ways down (or up) the genealogical family tree, questions about care and responsibility are matters of interactive negotiation in families. In other words, just because a young man has a mother, a father, and three older sisters, we cannot know what kind of support he can count on. Mason (2008: 36) writes, reflecting on that study, that decisions about family responsibilities are ‘achieved in cumulative, situated interactions and negotiations between specific people, over time’. The study discovered that it is not that people choose completely freely whether or not to offer support to their relatives, but the manner in which they do so should not be understood as completely ‘fixed’ either. Rather, what is highly characteristic of kinship is that families engage in a process of working out ‘what the proper thing to do is’ under a particular set of circumstances. And so there is a sense in which families do feel that they have a responsibility towards one another – however, one needs to ask careful questions about what that means. Finch and Mason (1993: 166) found very little evidence that people experience themselves to have specific duties vis-à-vis one another. Thus, rather than speaking about rules of duties and obligations, it is more accurate to speak about there being a set of guidelines. This means that there is very little to support the idea that family members are somehow, because of their genealogical connection, obliged to care for and support one another. This also suggests that when social policies are based on assumptions about family responsibilities that do not align with how families operate in practice, they can contain unrealistic expectations about what relatives will do for one another.

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Is kinship a special connection between people? Just as the idea of the genealogical family tree tells us very little about what being related means in everyday life, it also tells us little about how people perceive and experience being connected to their relatives. Culturally speaking, it is assumed that kin connections are genealogical and determined through biology and genes. However, this widespread notion does not help us understand kinship as a kind of affinity between people, an affinity that likely differs from how a person experiences their relationship with friends or co-workers. If we agree that there is something distinctive about the connection a person has with their relatives, then how is it distinctive? Mason (2008) explores kinship affinities and suggests that, in real life, people feel and experience being connected as relatives in multidimensional ways. Indeed, Mason suggests that four kinds of affinities come into play when people settle on and define what kinship connections are. These are fixed affinities; negotiated and created affinities; ethereal affinities; and sensory affinities. Firstly, kinship can be experienced as a ‘fixed’ relationship, and this refers to the idea that kinship is thought to be a distinctive kind of connection because it is a relationship that is ‘in no sense chosen’ (Finch and Mason 1993); it is understood to be ‘undeniably there’ and a relationship that cannot be escaped from through choice. Kinship as a ‘fixed’ relationship is perhaps the form of connection that is most readily recognised, in Euro-American societies at least, because it resonates with the idea that a biological connection exists between relatives that can never be undone. Mason asserts, however, that the idea that kinship is special because it is a ‘fixed’ affinity cannot be reduced to a biological connection. That is to say, the way in which people experience the ‘fixity’ of kinship is not necessarily similar to the way that scientists define biological connections, nor is the understanding of it the same. Instead, ‘fixity’ is layered with creative interpretations. For example, people assume that because they resemble their mother in looks, that they are more likely to succumb to the same illness as her, even at the same age. My own work has also shown that people want relationships to seem as though they are ‘fixed’ (Nordqvist, 2010). For example, people who use an egg or a sperm donor to have a child often choose a donor who resembles them in looks, so that the child will look similar to them, thus creating a family that appears as though the parents and their child(ren) are genetically linked and therefore ‘fixed’ in their relationship to one another. This is true also for lesbian parents. This means that ‘fixity’ can be created. Rather than 53

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relationships ‘being fixed’, Mason (2008: 35) argues that kinship is a distinctive way of making relationships fixed and non-negotiable (see also Nordqvist, 2017). This means that it is a framework that allows people to interpret relationships as though they are non-elective. The second dimension of kinship connectedness is that it is a kind of affinity that also comes into being through creativity and negotiation. Notwithstanding that kin relationships may be experienced as ‘fixed’, the way that someone relates to people in their family does not follow a strict set of rules or obligations. For example, in his study discussed above, Firth (1956) showed that people do not relate to all their ‘named’ relatives in the same way; some are more ‘intimate’ and others are more ‘peripheral’. Not all siblings, aunts, uncles, parents, or grandparents are held in the same regard, but interpersonal relationships matter. Finch and Mason (1993, see Box 4.1) showed that assuming family responsibilities is a matter of negotiation rather than obligation. Moreover, the process of defining and communicating kinship contains a great deal of creativity. For example, Dempsey and Lindsay (2017) show in an Australian study that lesbian couples can use creative strategies when choosing their children’s surname to communicate that they and their children are a family. The third special dimension of kinship is the ‘ethereal’ dimension. This refers to the mysterious, magical, psychic or spiritual aspect of kinship affinities. For example, twins are often perceived to embody a mysterious and unexplainable connection that exists beyond communication and where they instinctively ‘feel’ one another’s state of mind or body. Another illustrative example is that it is not uncommon that people experience that a dear relative who has died shows themselves in another living form. This dimension of kinship is beyond rational explanation, and is an important way in which kinship is perceived as a particular kind of relationship. The fourth dimension of affinity embedded in kinship according to Mason (2008) is its sensory aspect. Sensory experiences such as smell, vision, taste, touch, and sound play a role in making kinship a distinctive form of relating. For example, the timbre, sound or volume of a relative’s voice can be a distinct part of a relationship, as Mason found when studying how children experience kinship. Another example of this sensory dimension was how catching the scent of a particular perfume could, in an instant, bring to mind a late grandmother. This marks how smell (and particular scents) can be an integral part of, and maybe even define, a relationship. An example of this sensory dimension can also be taken from material culture (see Woodward, Chapter 6 in this volume). Natalie 54

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Djohari (2016) shows how the particular feel of an object such as a ‘babywrap’ (a piece of cloth used to ‘wear’ babies between the ages of 0 and 3) is part of the kinship affinity between parent and child. Because the parent ‘wears’ the child in this wrap, the wrap can produce an ‘inter-body’ experience between the parent and child – a so called ‘skinship’ (Djohari, 2016: 303). This is more than just two bodies meeting; it is two bodies that are contained together. The love and labour of new parents shape the form of the body wrap itself. When the cloth becomes worn, its ‘buttery’ soft feel can bring to mind these sensory memories. This illustrates that kinship is a relationship that has a bodily dimension, not just because we are ‘related in the body’ and pass on substantive things (such as genes), but because we relate as kin with and through our sensory bodies (see Holmes, Chapter 9 in this volume). Mason (2008) argues that these different dimensions of kinship affinities interact and interlink in daily life. Together they are distinctive and yet interconnected dimensions of how real life kinship is lived and experienced. She calls them ‘tangible affinities’, because of their resonance in everyday life and how they often seem to have, if not a literally tangible character, a most palpable character.

New technologies, new families, new kinship Intimate and family life has changed over recent decades, and the way that people do family life is different now compared to the 1950s and 1960s (Nordqvist, Chapter 3 in this volume). People also have children in different ways than in the past because more options have become available. Two of the most significant changes to family life that have emerged over the last 30 years relate to sexuality and medical technologies. First, social attitudes and law governing same-sex relationships have changed (see Nordqvist, Chapter  3 in this volume and Heaphy, C ­ hapter  12). Many gays and lesbians now have children within the context of their same-sex relationship, and by the end of the 1990s a ‘gayby boom’ was taking place (e.g. Lewin, 1993; Nordqvist, 2012a). The second major change involves advances in medicine and technology. New reproductive technologies have opened up new possibilities for having children. Technologies such as in vitro fertilisation (IVF) assist when people are unable to conceive. In IVF, an egg is collected from a woman’s body, fertilised with a sperm in a laboratory and then inserted into the uterus of the woman. The first ‘test-tube’ baby was born in Oldham, UK, in 1978; now IVF is practised across the world (Franklin, 2013). Alongside IVF, egg, sperm, and embryo 55

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donation is also opening up new possibilities because people are able to have children using another person’s egg, sperm, or embryo. The number of people who conceive using donated gametes has increased significantly in recent decades. Today in the United Kingdom, about 2,000 children are born using donated gametes each year (Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, 2017). People who use these medical technologies include lesbian and gay couples, heterosexual couples, single women and single men who ‘go it alone’. These broader changes in family life also impact on people’s ­k inship practices. This is because both gay and lesbian families, and families formed through donation, transgress traditional ideas about being related. Cultural ways of thinking about kinship (also called discourses) are specifically heterosexual and gendered. Schneider (1980[1968]: 51f) summarises traditional kinship in this way: The members of the family are defined in terms of sexual intercourse as a reproductive act, stressing the sexual relationship between husband and wife and the biological identity between parent and child, and between siblings.

Families who diverge from this traditional family, because they are a same-sex couple, or because they have a child through egg, sperm, or embryo donation, or both, therefore also need to manage the implications this has for the kinship connections within their family. Just like families with adopted children (see above), they cannot in a straightforward way utilise kinship discourse for themselves, or within their families. A heterosexual couple with a child born through sperm donation (meaning that the father and the child are not genetically related), may, for example, struggle to navigate conversations about likeness between the father and the child. A series of questions emerge: How does one claim a non-genetic child as one’s own? Do the parents tell the child of her or his genetic origins? Do they tell other people in the family, such as the grandparents? Is the donor of importance, and if so, how? Research with families in these situations (e.g. Konrad, 2005; ­Melhuus, 2012; Nordqvist and Smart, 2014b; Riggs and Peel, 2016; Thompson, 2005) shows that families navigate their way through the dominant kinship discourse – such as the one outlined by Schneider above – by negotiating its meaning. Konrad’s study of UK egg donors and egg recipients, and Ragoné’s (1994) study of US surrogacy (see Box 4.2), 56

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Box 4.2 Surrogacy Surrogacy is among the most controversial of the new reproductive technologies (Teman, 2010). With a woman carrying a child for another, and relinquishing that child at birth to the intended parent(s), it stands in sharp relief to deeply held cultural ideas of motherhood as based in women’s nature, as well as ideas about women’s roles as mothers within the family, and marriage. In traditional surrogacy, a woman ­carries a genetic child for somebody else, but in gestational surrogacy, an egg donor is involved so that the surrogate mother is not genetically related to the child that she carries. Either scenario is often received with strong cultural uneasiness. Surrogacy is prohibited in many c­ ountries, including France, Germany, and Sweden. In the United ­ Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, only altruistic surrogacy is legal, meaning that women who act as surrogates cannot be paid. Commercial surrogacy is legal in Russia, India, and in some states in the US. Ragoné (1994) found in a study of surrogacy in the US that it raises a series of challenges for all involved. The surrogate herself, a woman who is willing to give up a child after birth, is going against deeply held views about motherhood and what is natural for mothers to do (see also Teman, 2010). The intended father engages in a practice where he has a genetic child with a woman other than his wife. The intended mother becomes a mother without having experienced pregnancy and birth, and will often not have a genetic relationship to the child either. It might thus appear that families formed through surrogacy challenge traditional ideas about kinship. However, studies from Israel (Teman, 2010) and from the US (Ragoné, 1994) show that both surrogates and parents do not engage with surrogacy as a radical departure from tradition, but as an attempt at achieving something very traditional: a nuclear family. Ragoné (1994: 137) suggests therefore that surrogacy is a practice cloaked in Western tradition, and the thornier issues of surrogacy are circumvented by ‘picking and choosing’ among cultural values of parenthood, family, and reproduction. These findings are also echoed in Dempsey’s (2013) more recent study of Australian gay men who become fathers through surrogacy. She found that despite the unconventional context, the symbols and metaphors conventional to the heteronormative family came into play as gay men were navigating, and settling on, how to manage genetic kinship within their own families, and in relation to a culture that emphasises genetic relatedness.

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for example, show that the meaning of conventional kinship discourse, including the meaning of genes, blood, and biology, is not given, but negotiated. Thompson (2005) and others have discovered that these families navigate through traditional kinship discourse by emphasising those aspects that they adhere to (e.g. being two parents, the importance of carrying a child) and de-emphasise aspects of the discourse that their family does not fit in with (e.g. the importance of having a mother and a father, or both parents being genetically related to the child). On the surface, families may look different from the traditional heterosexual nuclear family; for example, there might be two mothers and no father. However, these studies show that creating a sense of being related within such families is of no less importance. I discovered in a study about lesbian mothers that couples engage with fixed, negotiated, ethereal, and sensory kinship affinities (see Mason, 2008 above) in deliberate and creative ways, in order to make themselves and their children into relatives (Nordqvist, 2014). Kinship emerges through a process: it is ‘brought into being’.

Concluding remarks Sociological studies of kinship show that it matters deeply to people, but they also suggest that the genealogical connection, visualised in the cultural image of the family tree, tells us relatively little about what relationships people have with their relatives. When we look at kinship from a sociological perspective, it is clear that real-life kinship is quite different from the popular idea of kinship as a ‘given’ and straightforward relationship. In personal life, kinship is complex and multifaceted and, most importantly, a kinship group is not a stable social grouping, but rather one with porous and flexible boundaries. Kinship is produced and changes over time. Kinship is not something that is self-evident or ‘given’, but rather it is a relationship that is ‘lived’, produced, made, contested, constructed, and settled upon in everyday life (Mason, 2008; Nordqvist, 2014). Rather than understanding kinship as a thing, sociological studies show that it is a process. This becomes particularly clear when we consider how kinship is brought into being in families formed by same-sex couples, or through adoption or reproductive donation. In such contexts, people engage with and draw on traditional kinship discourse, in selective ways, to make themselves and their families into relatives. 58

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QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION yyDraw your own family tree. Do you find this easy or difficult? Why do you think that might be the case? yyWhat does it mean to say that assuming family responsibilities is a matter of negotiation rather than obligation? yyCritique the idea that kinship relationships are self-evident and ‘given’. yyHow do donor conception or surrogacy challenge conventional ideas about kinship? yyWhat does it mean to say that kinship is something that people ‘bring into being’, rather than something that is ‘a given’?

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AND 5 FRIENDSHIP PERSONAL LIFE KATHERINE DAVIES

Introduction What does it mean to be a ‘friend’ in contemporary Western society? Popular clichés, such as the well-known adage ‘You can choose your friends but not your family’, indicate that friendship is understood as a chosen relationship as opposed to a given tie and this is what seems to make it different from other relationships. But is friendship really so simply defined? Is it always such a distinctive sort of relationship and such a positive one? This chapter considers the significance of friendship for personal life, and examines how a sociological exploration of friendship can highlight the complexities of relationships with friends, from defining the term ‘friend’ to addressing the position of friendship relationships in a changing social world and challenging the notion that friendships are always positive relationships, characterised by choice and fundamentally different from relationships with kin. Some of the questions we will consider are: has friendship become more significant than family in recent times? Has there been a decline in face-to-face friendship, and are our friends really as freely chosen as we might think?

What is a friend? What exactly is it that defines a friendship? It is a difficult concept to pin down because friendship can take so many different forms. Think about the ‘types’ of friends in your life. Do you have different relationships with friends you have known from your school days and those you met at university? Are your social media friends and contacts always ‘real’ friends? Do you do different things with different friends? It is likely that you have a number of diverse and complex friendship relationships in your life and that these relationships are themselves constantly shifting and evolving. 60

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In their detailed empirical study into the meanings of friendships, Liz Spencer and Ray Pahl (2006) move beyond any simple definitions to explore the various practices and meanings associated with friendship. Because they find the term ‘friend’ rather limiting as a category of relationship, they favour the term ‘personal community’ to denote people’s networks of friends and associates. Within such networks, the boundaries between different relationship categories such as ‘friend’, ‘family member’, ‘colleague’, ‘neighbour’, or ‘acquaintance’ are often blurred: after all, you can be friends with family members and friends can become ‘like family’. Indeed, in an earlier article, Pahl and Spencer introduced the concept of ‘suffusion’ to describe how the boundaries between friends and family are often blurred (2004: 212–15). Spencer and Pahl found that the notion of a personal community got around the problem of applying definitive categories to relationships which often move between such boundaries and enabled them to think of friends in terms of a community of various social ties, as opposed to a relational form existing between two individuals. Their study also highlighted how many people have numerous friends in their lives who fulfil different roles at different times. For example, they identified different ‘repertoires’ (Spencer and Pahl, 2006: 54) of friendship which show how there are differences in both the types of friends people have in their personal communities and the constellation of these friendships (the range of relationships which make up the personal community). Spencer and Pahl also suggest that people have ‘friendship modes’ (2006: 54) in that their friendships shift (are formed, lost or maintained) throughout the life course. Elisa Bellotti (2008) took a similar approach in her research on what she calls the ‘elective communities’ of single people. Rather than focusing on defining a ‘friend’, Bellotti explored people’s networks of friends, pointing to the different ways in which these networks were structured. For example, some participants in the study were part of ‘small cliques’ of friends, some had a ‘core’ group of long-standing friends along with a ‘peripheral’ group of friends who offered social support, some had ‘contextualised networks’ of a number of small groups of friends who formed a cohesive group providing a specific kind of support, and some had a ‘company’ of friends who they spent time with every day and who were part of a whole entity or group. What is important is that, like Spencer and Pahl’s ‘personal communities’, Bellotti approached her study of friendships by considering the constellation of networks of friends and what this meant for the lives of her participants. 61

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In addition to their focus on communities and repertoires of friendship, Spencer and Pahl also found that there are different types of friendship ranging from the very simple to the highly complex. Simple friendships might include ‘associate’ friends who share a single common activity (such as someone you sit next to in a particular lecture or play tennis with once a week) but where the friendship does not continue outside the parameters of this particular activity. Similarly, ‘fun friends’ are more complex relationships than those with ‘associates’ but the friendship is still ‘simple’ because the relationship does not extend beyond fun forms of sociality. Complex friendships include ‘comforter’ friends who provide emotional support (which can be difficult or awkward to ask for in less complex relationships) and ‘soulmates’, the most complex and multi-stranded friendship of all, where friends confide, provide emotional support, help each other and have fun, and so on. Other sociologists have conducted studies focusing on particular types of friendship, exploring them in depth. Nick Rumens (2017), for example, explores how workplace friendships differ from other workplace relationships (such as those between co-workers or with managers) in that they involve conversations that span ‘work’ and ‘home’ life and can be understood as ‘personal relationships’ that help people to sustain their identities at home and work. Anne Cronin (2015) also focused on a specific type of friendship – what she terms ‘domestic friendships’ between women. For Cronin, ‘domestic friendships’ are based on the shared experiences and challenges of motherhood and can result in strong bonds. Thus it is clear that people are likely to have numerous different types of friends in their lives – relationships which may ebb and flow through the life course and be part of various configurations of friendship groups and repertoires.

Friendship and technology In thinking about what it means to be a ‘friend’ and what a ‘personal community’ might look like, it is important to consider how technological developments have affected how we conduct such relationships. The advent of social networking and mobile phone technologies mean that it is possible for friendships to be formed and practised without the necessity of face-to-face contact. On the surface, such technologies could be seen to be indicative of (or even responsible for) a demise in face-toface ways of relating. However, evidence suggests that the influence of 62

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technology on our friendships is more complicated than this (see also May, ‘Personal life in public spaces’, Chapter 11 in this volume). Eileen Green and Carrie Singleton (2009) explored the role and meaning of mobile phones in young Pakistani-British people’s friendships. They found that mobile phones are important for both virtual and face-to-face connection between friends, enabling young people to maintain friendships locally and also further afield, including in Pakistan. Green and Singleton found little evidence that mobile phones meant that young people were placing less importance on face-to-face encounters with their friends; instead they found that mobile phones enriched existing friendships, helping young people to organise activities with their friends. Green and Singleton also found gender differences in the ways men and women used their phones, with young men emphasising the importance of being ‘well connected’ in terms of business and young women in the study more likely to use their phones to have intimate conversations with friends. Lijun Tang (2010) also emphasises the complexities of the role of technology in shaping how friendships are experienced. Tang explores the ways in which online friends also meet face-to-face, focusing on the friendships formed among the partners of seafarers on a discussion website and the various online and offline spaces in which these friendships are managed. Thus, technologies are embedded in everyday life, meaning they can be understood as primarily mapping onto existing ties rather than replacing or transforming them. As Barry Wellman and Bernie Hogan state: Rather than only connecting online, in-person or by telephone, many relationships are complex dances of serendipitous face-to-face encounters, scheduled meetings, telephone chats, email exchanges with one person or several others, and broader online discussions among those sharing interests. (2004: 390)

Social change and the significance of friendship Has friendship become more significant than family in recent times and has its role in our lives changed? Much of the sociological work on friendship has focused on differences between relationships with friends and those with family and kin. This is because to some extent the sociological interest in friendship has come about as a result of wider debates about 63

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whether, in light of de-traditionalisation and social change, choice and reciprocity (commonly perceived preconditions for friendship) have become increasingly valued relationship characteristics in today’s post-industrial society. There have been many complex (and sometimes rather fiercely fought) debates in sociology about wider socio-cultural changes and their effect on our relationships. A number of social commentators (e.g., Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995; Giddens, 1992; Putnam, 2000) have concluded, on the basis of the demographic changes in the patterning of contemporary relationships in Europe and the US – such as the rise in divorce rates and the postponement of childbirth – that there has been a dramatic shift in the way people conduct their personal relationships. It has been argued that the traditional ‘nuclear’ family is diminishing. Anthony Giddens (1992) and Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth ­Beck-Gernsheim (1995), who are major proponents of the individualisation thesis (also called the de-traditionalisation thesis), argue that in a society where set traditions and social rules are understood to be on the decline, and where even family relationships are no longer fully prescribed, the role of individual choice in the way we do relationships is increasingly significant (see also Nordqvist, ‘Couple relationships’, Chapter  3 in this volume). In this context of ‘de-traditionalisation’, friendship has been heralded as an increasingly significant relationship form which best captures the zeitgeist (the spirit of the times). In a society where set ­traditions and social rules are understood to be on the decline, the role of individual choice in the way we do relationships is seen as increasingly significant. In his discussion of the ‘pure relationship’, Giddens argues that friendship is an example of a ‘pure relationship’ – a relational form ‘unprompted by anything other than the rewards that the relationship provides’ (1991: 90). For Giddens, friendship particularly captures the voluntarism and democracy of the ‘pure relationship’ and is seen as distinctive from kin relationships in that ‘one normally stays a friend of another only in so far as sentiments of closeness are reciprocated for their own sake’ (1991: 90). Therefore, friendship is understood as typifying the ‘pure relationship’ because it survives only for so long as both parties derive enough satisfaction from it. Thus, although his concept refers largely to dyadic relationships (between two people) and is often used to discuss romantic couple relationships (see Nordqvist, Chapter 3 in this volume), it is arguably the ideals of friendship (choice, intimacy, and personal disclosure) which reflect the ‘purest’ relational forms. Friendship, 64

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therefore, is seen as the ideal relationship form for p ­ ost-industrialised society, in contrast to ‘fixed’ or ‘given’ relationships with kin and community which are seen as diminishing in significance. This means that, as explored in the following section, the concept of choice has often been central to sociological discussions of the meanings and functions of friendships in personal life.

Families of choice In a study investigating friendships among non-heterosexual people, Jeffrey Weeks, Brian Heaphy, and Catherine Donovan (2001) highlight how in certain circumstances friends can take on some of the functions traditionally performed by family members, providing an example of how chosen ties can be seen to be replacing given ‘traditional’ ties in specific contexts. Because of their exclusion from the then exclusively heterosexual institutions of ‘family’ and ‘marriage’ (many had been rejected by their own family of origin due to their sexuality), non-heterosexuals in the study often described their communities of friends as being ‘family’ relationships because it was in their friendships that they experienced the support traditionally provided by families. A great deal of importance was therefore placed upon creating networks of relationships that were conceived of as ‘families’ (in the sense of providing support, care, and commitment) but that were chosen. The  voluntaristic nature of these relationships leant them a heightened sense of ethics and morals; because they were chosen they were not taken-for-granted and instead required work and nourishment (Weeks et al., 2001: 11). This is termed the ‘friendship ethic’, and means that there are particular features of friendship (for example choice, or the idea of being free to ‘be yourself ’ in a society which often fails to approve of this self ) which made such relationships especially valued in n ­ on-heterosexual communities at the time (Weeks et al., 2001: 51–52). The study indicates the centrality of the concept of choice to these understandings of friendship and highlights how friendships can become heightened at times of particular need. This study might seem to support Giddens in that it depicts a situation where elective relationships are taking over from more traditional given ties. The empirical evidence of a ‘friendship ethic’ also indicates that individual choice can be understood as a highly virtuous and desirable relationship feature in particular contexts. Weeks and colleagues’ study depicts friendship 65

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patterns in a particular context and, as we will see in the following section, it is important not to overstate the significance of friendship compared to relationships with family.

Critiques of de-traditionalisation and the ‘pure relationship’ There are many persuasive criticisms of Giddens’s work (see e.g. Jamieson 1998, 1999), and of the idea that society is becoming more individualistic in general. For example, despite Weeks and colleagues’ (2001) findings that friends can take on the role of family in a context where ‘traditional’ familial ties are challenged, it would be inaccurate to understand friendship and kin relationships as generally oppositional – with one clearly on the decline and the other increasing in importance. We have seen in Pahl and Spencer’s work that such categories overlap in people’s ‘personal communities’ and empirical evidence indicates that the extended family remains significant (see Nordqvist, ‘Kinship’, ­Chapter 4 in this volume). Although it would appear that there is some evidence for Giddens’s argument that de-traditionalisation has resulted in an increased significance being placed on the role of friendship (Pahl, 2000), his claim that ‘pure relationships’ based on choice and reciprocity are replacing more traditional ties with family seems less well supported by empirical evidence. Spencer and Pahl (2006), for example, whose study of personal communities we have already discussed, are careful to show that the categories of friend and family member are rarely mutually exclusive. They also show the various forms that friendship can take, with their definition of ‘soulmate’ friendships being the only friendship form identified in their study that is reminiscent of Giddens’s dyadic ‘pure relationship’. In addition, Pahl (2000) has argued that even friendship, the ‘pure relationship’ par excellence according to Giddens, is not something that can easily be discarded. This is because in the context of the de-stabilisation of ‘traditional’ relationships, having successful friendships that one sticks with is seen as a key way of ensuring a stable identity, as well as avoiding being viewed by others as fickle in one’s relationships: Parents die, children leave home, couples dissolve and reunite; the emotional traumas of contemporary life take place in different places with different key actors. Sometimes the only continuity for increasingly reflexive people is provided by their friends. Unwilling to be perceived as social chameleons

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Friendship and Personal Life flitting from one job or partner to another, men and women may come to rely on their friends to provide support and confirmation of their enduring identities. (Pahl, 2000: 69)

The social patterning of friendship and the limits of choice We have seen that what is often described as setting friendship apart from other relationships (particularly relationships with kin) in the sociological literature and in common parlance is the idea that it is the most voluntaristic of our social relationships. But are our friendships really such a free choice? Graham Allan (1996) argues that friendships are in fact governed by social factors as well as personal choice. He stresses the need for social scientists to pay attention to the ways in which an individual’s social environment structures and constrains the choices they make about their personal relationships: friendships are not just freely chosen. They are developed and sustained within the wider framework of people’s lives. The choices people make, in other words, are constrained by aspects of social organization over which they have relatively little control. (Allan, 1996: 100)

Allan points to the various ways in which an individual’s work situation, gender, domestic circumstances, and existing friendships influence their friendship patterns. For example, domestic circumstances, such as having young children to care for, can influence forms of sociality with friends, constraining one’s opportunities to make new friends or to maintain existing ties. Later in the life course when children are older, many parents find they are able to socialise with friends more freely and in different ways. There are a number of empirical studies which have examined friendship ties at key moments in the life course, such as Stephen Frosh, Ann Phoenix, and Rob Pattman’s (2002) study of male school friendships, Rachel Brooks’s (2005) work on university friendships and Sarah Matthews’s (1986) exploration of friendships in old age, indicating that practices and patterns of friendship are heavily influenced by factors such as age and stage in the life course. For example, in her study of the significance of work friends in later life, Doris Francis (2000) traces patterns of friendship among a group of women who had worked together in a US city from the late 1930s until the mid-1970s. Francis found that these 67

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long-lasting friendships helped the women to adapt to changes and discontinuities in their lives as they got older: Through their shared dialogue, interaction and pooled ­memory, they enable each other to give coherent meaning and empowerment to the present and also to mark new directions for the future. (Francis, 2000: 176)

Thus it is clear that the significance of our friendships ebb and flow through the life course, becoming increasingly significant at particular junctures, and that our social environment enables and constrains our friendship choices in complex ways. Friendship therefore must be understood as embedded within wider social contexts rather than as based entirely on personal choice. Another way in which the voluntaristic nature of friendship can be seen to be limited is that we tend to make friends with people who are socially similar to us. This idea that similarity breeds connection (McPherson et al., 2001: 415) is termed homophily and describes how we tend to interact with people who are similar to ourselves in terms of social class, education, ‘race’/ethnicity, age, religion, and so on. For example, Maria Papapolydorou (2017) conducted a study of friendship patterns between young people in four London secondary schools and found that students tended to have friends from similar social class backgrounds to themselves. This ‘sameness’ was seen by many young people as a positive aspect of their friendship because it meant they shared similar experiences and understandings with their friends. Although it could be argued that homophily is in fact a reflection of our freedom to choose our friends (in that people actively choose to be friends with people like themselves), much of the research in the area shows how homophily is also caused by structural and social limits to our capacity to freely choose our friends. Miller McPherson et al. (2001) reviewed many studies of patterns of friendship in order to explore some of the key ways in which homophily in ‘race’/ethnicity, age, religion, education, occupation, and gender limit our social worlds to differing degrees. They found that homophily is caused by a number of factors including geographical distance, the organisations we belong to, and occupational, family, and informal roles. Geographical distance was found to be a key cause of homophily because despite the advent of new technologies of communication we are still more likely to have closer ties with people who live in closer 68

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geographical proximity to us. This in turn influences our networks of friends in other ways, for example living in a predominantly white middle class area predisposes a person to have predominantly white middle class friends. Similarly, many of our non-kin ties are formed through our membership of organisations such as school, work, or clubs. People who attend the same university, for example, are more likely to come from a similar background and to have shared values (see Box 5.1). Finally, our roles at work, in the family or elsewhere, influence how we form social ties. For example, people are more likely to strike up friendships at work with those who perform similar occupational roles. Also, we have already seen how being a parent can affect the way we form friendships and socialise with existing friends. This makes it more likely that parents will form friendships with other parents. Box 5.1 Researching homophily using social media data In their quantitative study of US social networks, Andreas Wimmer and Kevin Lewis (2010) sought to explore the causes of high levels of racial and ethnic homogeneity amongst college students. In addition to thinking through the ways that different homophilous features might interact with one another; for example, how members of the same social groups may find themselves in similar social places, the authors analysed ‘naturally occurring social ties’ (ibid: 634) in the Facebook profile pages of 1,640 students in the Freshman class of a selective American private college with a racially and ethnically diverse student body. Wimmer and Lewis decided to use students’ Facebook photo albums to identify those appearing in photos as ‘picture friends’. They thought that these associates were more likely to be better indicators of a ‘real friendship’ than the list of official ‘Facebook friends’ which were large and likely to include acquaintances. ‘Picture friends’, on the other hand, had obviously had face-to-face contact with one another and presumably some shared pastimes. Wimmer and Lewis developed a coding scheme for the racial and ethnic categories of these ‘picture friends’ and analysed the friendship patterns of the students. The authors found that racial homophily did indeed exist and that students became friends with racially and ethnically similar others for numerous, intersecting reasons. The study also highlights the complexities of homophily, indicating that it works differently for different racial and ethnic groups.

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So it seems that ‘birds of a feather’ do indeed ‘flock together’ (McPherson et al., 2001: 415) and that the homogeneous nature of our networks of friends and associates (the fact that these networks often contain people with similar social characteristics) means that rather than being an entirely free choice, the range of individuals with whom we associate is socially structured. Thus, we can see how both the forms of sociality we experience with friends (the various ways we interact with friends) and the types of people who comprise our networks of friends (or our ‘personal communities’ ,as Spencer and Pahl would put it) cannot be put down to individual choice alone but are also governed by social structures and contexts over which we have less control.

Friendship as the ideal relationship? Friendship is often depicted (in academic research and in popular parlance) as a particularly positive relationship. Sociologists have often regarded friendship as a desirable, sometimes idealised, relationship. Giddens’s (1992) ‘pure relationship’ with its emphasis on choice and reciprocity is a good example of this. Also, Spencer and Pahl state that because their research focused on friendships that people consider to be important in their lives they did not find out much about ‘the dark side of friendship, about unsatisfactory, competitive or destructive relationships, though this is undoubtedly an important theme’ (2006: 2). As well as this sociological bias towards focusing on positive implications of friendships, there is also a cultural tendency towards a rather glossy understanding of friendship. By this I mean that culturally, friendship is understood as a largely positive, beneficial relationship. For example, describing a family member or partner as one’s ‘best friend’ is a way of adding value to the relationship by drawing upon the ideas of voluntarism and intimacy denoted by the term friend (at the same time describing a friend as ‘like family’ fulfils a similar purpose by implying that the relationship is permanent). The key difference here is that the negative aspects of familial relationships (conflict, inequality, abuse) have been widely investigated in academia whereas, until recently, investigations into friendship have not veered far from an understanding of its positive qualities. Friendship also implicates our sense of self and we have already seen how Pahl (2000) and Spencer and Pahl (2006) identified friendship as ensuring a ‘biographical anchor’ and an enduring sense of identity. In a society where having rewarding friendships is highly valued, it could also be risky or damaging to be seen to be a person who does not have 70

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good friends. If we are free to choose our friends then it follows that we are responsible for these choices and the quality of the relationships that develop. We have also seen in Weeks and colleagues’ (2001) study that to be a ‘good’ friend requires effort and work. Thus, if our friendships are failing it is often thought to be because we have not tried hard enough or behaved appropriately. So it seems that there are a number of ways in which friendships can be understood as socially desirable relationships which are in turn bound up with our self image. What we think of our friendships implies what we think of ourselves, and of course the concept of homophily means that our friends are likely to be similar to us, providing a sort of mirror on ourselves, reflecting our achievements, failures and behaviour (Pahl, 2000: 77). This connection complicates the idea of choice and voluntarism in friendship. Of course, it is because they are largely chosen ties that friendships are seen as socially desirable and as involving the self, but this link between sense of self and friendship challenges the presumption made by Giddens that people can drop relationships and walk away when they become unsatisfactory. Box 5.2 describes a research project undertaken by myself and colleagues which aimed to explore these links between friendship and the self and to disrupt taken-for-granted assumptions about the positive aspects of friendship. Box 5.2 Researching the ups and downs of friendship Carol Smart et al. (2012) conducted a qualitative study into the ‘ups and downs’ of friendship.1 The authors were keen to understand the lived realities of friendships, challenging prevalent understandings of friendships as egalitarian ‘resources for the self’ (Heaphy and Davies, 2012: 311); that is, as equal relationships that provide various types of support. Instead, the team focused on friendships as what they term ‘critical associations’: relationships that are critical both in the sense of their importance in people’s lives and in the sense that they are not always experienced as wholly positive relationships. The 1

1

The Critical Associations project is part of the Realities node of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods (RES-576–25–0022) based at the University of Manchester and was conducted between October 2008 and September 2011.

(www.manchester.ac.uk /realities/research/associations). The project team comprised Katherine Davies, Brian Heaphy, Jennifer Mason, and Carol Smart, all based at the Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life.

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project involved a number of methods, including written responses to a Mass Observation Directive on the ups and downs of friendship where a panel of volunteers responded to a request to write about, among other things, difficult friendships and friendships that had ended. The project also included in-depth qualitative interviews with people about their friendships, focusing on friendships in particular times and places, as well as group workshops which focused upon shared issues such as coming out as lesbian, or gay and feminist friendships (Davies and Heaphy, 2011). The researchers found that friendships can often become challenging, cloying, cumbersome, or damaging but that despite these difficulties people often tried very hard to maintain their friendships, often sticking with friendships that are no longer rewarding or beneficial (Heaphy and Davies, 2012; Smart et  al., 2012). Thus this study challenges Giddens’s idea that friendships are ‘pure relationships’ as they could not be easily abandoned when they became unsatisfactory.

Concluding remarks: Friends versus family? Previous sections of this chapter indicated that sociological debates about the role of friendship in society are often tied up with those about the role of family and wider kin. We have also seen how such simplistic distinctions between ‘friends’ and ‘family’ may not be entirely accurate. So, is there any truth to the adage ‘You can choose your friends but not your family’? On the one hand ideas put forward by theorists such as Giddens (1992) point to a rise in the importance of personal choice, equality, and freedom in our personal relationships. Weeks and colleagues’ (2001) study also shows how in the context of non-heterosexual associations, friendship can at key times replace the role of kin precisely because they are voluntary relationships. We have also seen how in Western cultures friendship is heralded as an idealised relational form because it is understood as based on personal choice. However, on the other hand it seems that our freedom to choose our friendships may be overstated and numerous studies of homophily and the social patterning of friendship indicate that friendship is governed by social structures and inequalities, as well as by personal choice. It is also clear that it is not always easy to leave friendships behind us if they become unsatisfactory. Furthermore, it is important not to overstate or simplify the differences between relationships with friends and family. After all, ‘friend’ and ‘family’ relationships shift and evolve over time and are not discrete 72

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categories, but often overlap. It is also problematic to assume that the significance of friendship is set against a decline in the importance of family relationships – the empirical evidence indicates that family relationships are still central. QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION yyThink about the people in your own ‘personal community’. To what extent do you see the homophily principle applying in your own life? yyTo what extent can friendship be understood as a relationship characterised by free choice? (Discuss with regard to the similarities/differences with kin relationships) yyWhy do you think people might stick with friendships that are no longer wholly positive relationships? yyThink about the claim that friendship has become more significant in contemporary Western society. Can you think of arguments both for and against this assertion?

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6 MATERIAL CULTURES SOPHIE WOODWARD

Introduction Previous chapters in this book have developed the idea that personal life is relational, as we are always embedded in relationships to others. This chapter sets our understanding of personal life in a broader context to explore how these relationships are negotiated, maintained, or broken through our relationships with objects. The most obvious colloquial connection between personal life and objects is the phrase ‘personal possessions’ (Morgan, Chapter 2 in this volume) which centres an individual and their relationship to the things they own. This chapter examines, instead, how our relationship to the things we own involves the negotiation of relationships to other people. To illustrate this, think about some of the objects you have encountered so far in your day. You may have been awoken by your alarm clock (which was a gift from someone), got up to have a shower only to find your flatmate in there and so had to wait for your turn on the landing, and then had your breakfast in a bowl given to you by your parents. As you left your flat, you may have shared a space with strangers on a bus, felt warm in a winter coat borrowed off a friend, or eaten lunch made from leftovers from last night’s dinner with your flatmates. All of these encountered objects are embedded in relationships to others; they may externalise an aspect of a relationship to someone else (such as dependence on a parent) or form part of the everyday relationships we negotiate (such as those with flatmates). This chapter explores how theoretical approaches of material culture that highlight how everyday objects create social relations (Miller, 2001a) have been taken up to enhance our understandings of personal life. Firstly, the chapter introduces the main theoretical ideas in this area and defines key terms such as material culture, materials, and agency. Secondly, these perspectives are connected to the literature on personal life to explore how everyday practices that constitute personal life can be understood as material practices. The chapter develops these ideas through the practices of keeping, sorting, and disposing of things to highlight how negotiations over which objects matter are also processes 74

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of deciding which relationships matter and in what way. Thirdly, the chapter explores the key themes of love and loss through empirical examples relating to death and memory. Finally, the chapter widens out the discussion of personal life to explore connectedness through objects in a global context of production and consumption. Taken together, the case studies of love/loss and production/consumption are developed to expand the understanding of personal life to incorporate the relationships we have with things, through things, and what the relationships between things can tell us about personal life in the contemporary world.

What is material culture and how can we understand it? The kinds of objects that ‘material culture’ refers to form a very broad category, ranging from things which we conventionally might think of as objects such as a table or a pair of shoes, through to much larger objects such as a bridge or a building. It can also include sounds, such as music, or materials, such as wool. To talk about material culture concerns not only the things themselves but is also an approach to studying objects; so, a photograph could be studied as an image through visual analysis as well as being approached as an object. To approach it as an image might involve looking at what the image means, whereas analysing it as an object means also thinking about the photo as a printed thing, to be placed in a frame or an album. In its broadest sense, material culture is taken to mean the study and understanding of how ‘the material’ (i.e. objects, materials, and material properties such as shininess or toughness) impact upon how personal and social relations are formed. In this formulation, objects are not seen as passive or inert things upon which people impose meanings but instead as ‘agentic’ (Gell, 1998). Put simply, to state that an object has agency means that the materiality of an object (what it is made of, its form and shape, what the object can do or allows us to do) has an effect on what it means and the kinds of relations it allows. The material capacities of objects impact upon the ways in which they can be used and the meanings that they have. And so, it is not just people who have agency (i.e., be able to bring about effects on the world) but also objects have agency as they ‘entrance, raise hopes, generate fears, evoke losses’ (Spyer, 1998: 5). A pair of high-heeled court shoes and a suit are not seen as business-like or powerful because of cultural connotations or the desires of people alone. Instead, the structure of a suit or the way a person feels wearing the heels enables and allows these meanings to be 75

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held. Saying that objects have agency is not the same as saying that they determine the meanings attached to them. For example, even if a fur coat has the same material properties in different contexts, it may have different cultural and personal meanings. The agency of things is understood (following Gell, 1998) in this chapter as the effects that an object, or objects in relationship to each other, have upon people as they interact with them in particular social and cultural contexts. Within the literature on ‘material culture’ there is a range of divergent theoretical approaches (such as actor network theory, assemblage theory, theories of objectification, non-representational theory, new materialism) which entail different theories, foci, methods, and even definitions of key terms. ‘Material culture’ is taken to mean the ways in which objects and their material properties impact upon how social relations and selfhood are created. However, there is some debate over whether ‘material culture’ is even a useful term, with a focus upon materials (such as plastics) being a more productive line of enquiry. Ingold (2010) suggests that we replace the focus upon material culture and objects (which he takes to be passive and closed) with a focus on things and materials that are more open to being transformed and changed. Drazin and Kuechler (2015) similarly suggest that centring materials rather than material culture allows a focus on transformations, as materials do not have a defined beginning or end because a material may be recycled into another material. The materials that things are made of matters, as does understanding how things change, but in order to really think about and understand the role that things have in personal life, this chapter contends that understanding their life as an object is important. And so, in thinking about a wooden kitchen table, the properties of wood are important in contributing to a particular aesthetic, which can be dynamic and changing as, for example, through sanding or waxing the surface appearance is altered. However, its life as a table (not just as wood) is significant as this may be a place where the daily clutter within a house resides as part of the organisation of daily life. For the purposes of this chapter, the terms ‘material culture’, as well as ‘things’ or ‘objects’ will be employed; these terms can still be used while maintaining an understanding of how things change (such as how materials degrade) as well as holding on to an understanding of their life as a thing – how a table is moved from storage to use, from special use to everyday use, or passed on to another family member. It is not just objects that change, but also relationships and even our sense of who we are. Miller’s theory of objectification (1987) – drawing 76

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from the philosopher Hegel – is a useful theory to help us to think about how people are able to construct their sense of self and identity through mass-produced goods. In this theory, our sense of self is externalised in an object – so for example we look at an item of clothing and ask ‘is this me?’ (Woodward, 2007). If on wearing the item of clothing we feel that it successfully objectifies our sense of who we are (i.e., we see that item of clothing as ‘being me’), there is a match between the person and the object. As this is a process, it allows for us to use objects to change our sense of who we are. Objects become, in Gell’s sense, part of our ‘distributed personhood’ (1998), as who we are is distributed through material objects. This is certainly true for how we might think of our most cherished possessions, as well as the things we use all the time. Theories such as objectification or distributed personhood are ones which allow us to think about the connection between things and people. These ideas can also be extended to think about how our connections to others are created through the relationships between people and objects as well as between different objects. Jane Bennett’s theorisation of an ‘assemblage’ (Bennett, 2009) is useful in thinking about the relationship between different things which can bring about effects. Assemblages can include people, objects such as a CD, but also dust, light, and a shelf; Bennett contends that it is not just that individual items have ‘thing power’ but the powers of the different elements in the assemblage shift and interact in different ways. A box of cherished items which gradually becomes filled with old pins, marbles, and elastic bands can become a box of junk as, taken as a whole, the box is no longer special and we no longer want to interact with the previously cherished items in the same way. We can use this approach to look at a range of things in everyday life, such as a wardrobe or a CD collection (Woodward and Greasley, 2015), a mantelpiece (Hurdley, 2006), or a handbag. Where individual items are placed changes the effects these things have upon us, so an item placed in a memory box is turned into something that ‘matters’; something stuffed in a box in the attic is rendered ‘dormant’ (Woodward, 2015), while an item placed in the bin becomes rubbish.

Material practices: Keeping, using, sorting, and disposing Having established the approach to material culture that will be taken in this chapter, I now explore how this approach can be, and has been, applied to think about personal and relational lives. All things are relational in 77

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the sense of being connected to other things and people, even if we are not always aware of the relational significance of these things. This book, as well as its predecessor (May, 2011) are part of a literature that builds upon Carol Smart’s connectedness thesis (Smart, 2007) in understanding personal life as relational. A particularly pertinent shift within the field is from thinking about the family as an institution to thinking about it as a set of practices (Morgan, 1996). These might include eating together, living together, and buying clothing for each other, and are the practices that create and reinforce family relationships. Finch (2007) suggests that display is a key way through which people show themselves to be a family; this might be through the shared stories families tell or the display of photographs on a wall. Thinking about personal and relational life as being constituted through practices such as display opens up the possibility that these practices are also material practices. Exchange, gifting, storing, using, disposing are all things that we do with objects. Take the example of family photography: Gillian Rose (2010) has explored how people take, print, order, and organise photos of families as a way of reinforcing and editing familial relationships. Photos that ‘make it’ to the album show which relationships matter. This is as true for other practices in the home, in particular practices such as how things are stored. Even things in storage are often actively maintained, as for example objects are placed in plastic storage boxes to ensure that they do not just degrade. Things that are unused may be moved around as issues such as the shared space in a house are negotiated, for example if a storage space needs to be freed for an elderly relative who is moving in, or a child who is coming back home again. The practices surrounding things have both spatial and relational dimensions; this is evident in the domestic mantelpieces that Hurdley (2013) researched, which range from deliberately curated display areas, to mantelpieces where things ‘end up’. Mantlepieces are a particularly British phenomenon and are seen to be a focal part of front rooms/living rooms. Hurdley argues that the practices around mantelpieces remake relations between people and things; these practices may be talking about the objects, dusting them, or reorganising things. In Britain, the mantelpiece is the locus of display, as well as a space for the negotiation of family relationships – Hurdley cites one couple who dispute over whether the mantelpiece is a place a keepsake can be dumped, and in another example the toys of bickering children are banished out of reach for a period of time. Focusing on material practices allows us to think about the dynamic ways in which objects are used, and how this changes in the production of family and other relationships. 78

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While display is a key way in which we think about the relationships that matter to us, so too is storing and keeping. My previous ethnographic research into women’s wardrobes (Woodward, 2007) highlighted that items that are never worn in public still matter because they can offer people the chance of exploring the possibilities of who they could be, or the items of clothing can be things they cannot get rid of because they have been passed down by a parent. The wardrobe seems to speak perfectly to the idea of ‘personal possessions’ in terms of being a set of things that belong to one person and that express the likes, desires, and indeed identity of that person. However, further interrogation makes clear that, as Smart (2007) notes, the personal is always relational: objects may have been given by or borrowed from someone else – they may be associated with other people through occasions on which they were worn, or just remind you of other people. Thus, in complex ways these objects form part of the everyday fabric of our relationships as we negotiate questions of closeness to others through an old clock on a mantelpiece, a photo in an album or an old pair of trainers. If, as the previous section suggested, objects externalise the self, or relationships, then sorting, ridding or hiding these things is a way of sorting or caring for these relationships. Questions over whether things are kept, or disposed of, where they are stored and what with are relational in the sense that they involve negotiations over space and who lives in the space, as well as questions over which relationships and aspects of a relationship need to be preserved (Gregson, 2007). These are questions that are negotiated in spring cleans, when redecorating a house, when living arrangements change or when moving house. In Marcoux’s ethnographic research (2001) on moving house in Montreal, Canada, this is an occasion for getting rid of things as well as reclassifying items to be kept. In his research, decisions over what to keep related to either how useful things were or how they are associated with events that have created a person’s or a family’s history. This is a question, then, of how things, in Miller’s sense, ‘objectify’ aspects of a relationship, as much as how the process of sorting is a site for the negotiation of relationships, as people disagree over what to keep or get rid of. When relationships are externalised through things we have to engage with this materiality, as things may be too big for us to keep or move, even if we still cherish the people who gave them to us. Objects can also be the source of ambivalence as an object may be useful but we do not wish to remember the person who gave it to us, and so the object acts as a reminder of a relationship that has turned toxic or been terminated. 79

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In this example as well as in other cases of sorting possessions, decisions over which objects matter is also a decision over which relationships matter to us. When something is designated as rubbish, this either arises from the materiality of the thing itself (such as things rusting or breaking down), or we are deciding that a particular relationship does not matter any more or is too tricky for us to manage. Household rubbish has been a focus of study which illuminates the everyday practices of personal life (Rathje and Murphy, 1992), and, inasmuch as the domestic sphere is never just ‘personal’ and private, highlights that we can understand personal life in settings beyond the home – an issue the next and final sections explore explicitly (see also May, ‘Personal life in public spaces’, Chapter 11 in this volume). Rathje and Murphy (1992) pioneered an approach to look at the significance of what people throw out of their homes as rubbish. The items thrown out are treated archaeologically and interpreted to tell us about how people organise their domestic lives. This archaeological approach to contemporary life is one that has been taken up by a group of social scientists at The Centre on Everyday Lives of Families at UCLA to explore the prolific amounts of material possessions that people live with and how they interact with them. One particular study that is of interest to how we think about what role things have in personal lives is Arnold et al.’s (2012) visual ethnographic study of 32 American household which took place between 2001 and 2005 (see Box 6.1).

Box 6.1 Material abundance in US homes Arnold et  al.’s research (2012) drew upon social scientific methods such as observations, interviews, visual diaries, and tours of the house, as well as archaeological methods of mapping the houses and the objects in them. The project developed a systematic picture of these 32 households, by documenting everyday visible objects in the house and where they were placed. Through the interviews, and timed observations of the house, the researchers tried to understand how people interacted with the objects and how they organised their shared relational lives. The project offers an in-depth look at these 32 houses to try to understand how people live with an abundance of things. In almost all of the houses, the garages become overspill areas, with an average garage having 300–650 storage boxes. Home life then becomes a way of living with this material saturation, as

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people negotiate the objects that are significant and meaningful as well as those which are seen as meaningless clutter. Exploring both what people possess as well as what is used or not is illuminating for how people share domestic spaces, in particular highlighting discrepancies between idealised visions of family life and the actual practices. For example, the backyard/garden area is idealised as an area for shared family life, with a range of things such as trampolines and swings, as well as high-investment items such as hot tubs or pools. However, many of these remain almost unused as many of the families in the study rarely, if ever, spend any leisure time outside in the garden. Another rarely used space is the en-suite facility of the main bedroom, which in cluttered houses is often minimally furnished and equipped and is idealised as a potential retreat in a busy family house. It is, however, rarely used other than for the functional purpose of showering. The kitchen is a hub of family life, despite the fact that the kitchen table is rarely a space where everyone eats together, but instead is a space to plan events, coordinate what everyone is doing, or to do homework. This is evident in the objects there: kitchens are the places for all calendars, key documents to be kept on the fridge, as well as phones and keys to be stored, permanently or temporarily dumped. Understanding what objects people possess, where they keep them, how they interact with them and how often can help us to understand the actualities of everyday personal lives as well as the ideals and dreams that are part of that.

Love and loss The previous section opened up the ways in which objects matter in the maintenance of everyday relationships through both what we do with things and also how things may externalise a relationship or an aspect of a relationship. This section focuses specifically upon the ways in which people negotiate love and loss through objects. Both themes speak to the ways in which we use objects to create and maintain connections to others; a particular type of object that highlights this is the gift. There is a vast literature on the gift (see e.g. Daniels on Japan (2009) which draws from Mauss’s (1992) seminal account on gift exchange and the idea that the gift always carries something of its giver). The relational meanings of gifts centre on both how they are acquired, given, kept or used. When buying a present, we may imagine the receiver and what we 81

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think they would like as we create or reinforce a connection to them. Purbrick (2014) argues that the memory of the situation in which a gift was given helps to create the associations and meanings that the gifted object comes to have. Associating objects with particular people comes from practices of giving and acquisition as well as from the materiality of the gift itself which we have to engage with, as we find space for it, dust it or use it. Even though gifts are often mass-produced commodities, they still come to carry memories and associations of others. Just as memories and relationships can be toxic or ambiguous, gifted objects can be cherished reminders of others as well as a burden if we feel unable to get rid of them. The ambivalences of love are also evident in practices of making gifts. Take the example of knitting clothes: when done for your children or grandchildren it is often taken as a cipher for an act of love, as the child is both metaphorically and physically clothed in that love. Turney (2014), in her research into knitting, has argued that we need to situate this practice within patriarchal structures as part of women’s unpaid provision within the home. Knitting is seen to establish familial connections (between different generations of women in particular) as the techniques and skills of knitting are often passed down within families. As the knitted garments are often woollen and so are soft and wrap around and ‘hug’ the body, they lend themselves to associations of cosiness and love – and yet this love can turn toxic when it smothers, an ambiguity always present in the knitted garment (Turney, 2014). Objects can help us to make connections to relations living far away, allowing a connection to other people as well as to other places. In Drazin’s research on Romanian people who negotiate their connections to ‘home’ (2014) through their possessions as, for example, someone may live in a sparsely furnished place in Ireland in order to save money to go back to Romania where they feel most connected. Parrott (2005) found that patients in secure psychiatric institutions adopted similar contrasting strategies in relation to their room decoration and clothing. Her participants had less investment in how their room is decorated yet were far more interested in the clothing they wore, as this connected them to the outside world and their hope of being able to return there. Objects are also central in negotiating connections to those who have died. A commonly used phrase is ‘to preserve someone’s memory’, which implies a fixity in both what we are remembering and how we remember through objects – as if the object, the memory and our selves will not change. Instead the process of remembering through things is a dynamic 82

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process as objects may change as they grow dusty or degrade and as we and our memories change. Hallam and Hockey (2001), in their study of death, memory, and material culture, explore the memory practices that people engage with. These memory practices are never just individual and personal but also draw on culturally specific traditions and modes of remembering, as personal and cultural practices of memory are interwoven. Remembering is not solely a private practice, as it may take place in public spaces. For example, a quiet place where people walk their dogs may also be an (unmarked) space where someone has spread a loved one’s ashes. Personal practices of remembering take place in socially marked spaces as well, such as a graveyard, which may become personalised as, for example, a child’s grave is surrounded with toys and objects from home as a way of connecting the child’s resting place to their homes (Hallam and Hockey, 2001). Hallam and Hockey’s work points to the ways in which the personal cannot just be equated with the home, but instead public spaces are personalised.

Personal and global connections The chapter has so far mainly engaged with how mass-produced goods that we encounter as consumers become part of the fabric of our personal and relational lives. Our engagements with objects take place in a wider context of ‘built in obsolescence’ (where goods are designed to become out of date or to break in order that we will buy another one). And so, our desire to remain connected to other people through particular objects may be thwarted by the object’s materiality as it is no longer fashionable, it no longer works, or it simply falls apart. Even before we encounter these objects as consumers, they have been designed and made – practices which impact upon the object’s materiality and our ability to form relationships through it. As discussed in the previous section, objects that are knitted (or crafted in other ways) or gifted by someone we know aids our ability to form personal connections through things. Even gifted items are often bought mass-produced items. Indeed, most of the objects we interact with every day are mass-produced goods, and as part of global economies of production, retail, and consumption, if we were to follow the good from our possession, through to purchase, how it is sold, how it is transported, how the different material elements are produced, we would probably find ourselves travelling around the globe. So, for example, a pair of jeans may be made from cotton harvested in Benin, dyed with indigo made in Germany, woven into denim in Italy, turned into 83

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jeans in Tunisia and then shipped to the United Kingdom for sale. The personal and the global are connected, even if these connections are not always ones we are aware of. As the example introduced by Cook et al. (2004) in Box 6.2 implies, the relationship a consumer has to things is often based upon a disconnection to how things are produced and made. Making these connections explicit and transparent points towards the need for thinking about consumption practices more ethically. However, it could be suggested that the more everyday objects become part of our personal and relational lives and so cherished that we do not want them to fall apart or break, the more ethical we are being in relationship to what we consume. This is challenging for a type of object like food, but much more possible for items such as clothing, furniture, or toys as we are able to develop longer-term relationships to these things. And so, how do we understand mass-produced commodities from the perspective of personal life that takes account of both the personal lives of those making them as well as thinking about personal lives as simultaneously global? One approach (introduced in Box 6.2) to be taken is to ‘follow-the-thing’ (Cook et al., 2004) from the materials, through to the stages of production and shipping and use. These movements and transformations of different materials to becoming mass-produced objects can also be mapped through the stories of different people at different stages, as the lives of people are inseparable from the lives of things. As Box 6.2 shows, by adopting a ‘follow-the-thing’ approach, we are able to see the connections between people and things in ways which may be ordinarily concealed to us. Box 6.2 Follow the things: personal and global connections Taking the example of the papaya fruit, Cook et al. (2004) follow the papaya from farms in Jamaica through to homes and supermarkets in the United Kingdom. The story of the papaya as it is grown, packaged, shipped, and consumed is also an account of how this commodity chain sheds light on the personal lives of different people who encounter – or even just imagine – each other through producing or consuming this fruit. This research juxtaposes people’s stories as a way of making connections between consumers and producers, and to allow us to see how our personal lives implicate upon globally disparate others.

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At the centre of the story is the papaya itself, whose materiality has to be negotiated and dealt with at all stages of the process. The farmers have to negotiate factors such as the papaya’s vulnerability to viral diseases, the ideal ripeness and size – a factor affected by the preferences of consumers – as it is picked at the ideal moment of ripeness, sprayed with fungicide, and wrapped carefully to be shipped. The people in the papaya’s story include Mina (the buyer), Tony (the importer), Jim (the farmer), Phillips (the foreman on the farm), Pru (the papaya packer) and Emma (the consumer). The research outlines the implications of farming and packing of papayas for the personal lives of people like Pru, who is unable to have any time with her children as she works such long hours packing the papayas. We also see how through this commodity change people connect, as, for example, the lives of the farmer or foreman are made visible to Mina the buyer, or Tony the importer on annual visits to Jamaica to the farms where they are grown. Yet most of their work is done on the phone or at a computer screen. The consumer, Emma, has no direct connection to any of the other people in the papaya’s history and has instead a relation to the food as she constructs her self image as someone who likes to taste exotic food. Through this one commodity people are all connected – explicitly or implicitly. In a globalised world, through consuming mass-produced commodities we are all connected through the goods we buy, even if consumption is predicated upon separation from knowing the personal lives of those who are involved in the production of goods. Personal lives are not just what we do in our homes, but have global ramifications and entanglements.

Concluding remarks This chapter has explored the role things have in making, maintaining and breaking connections to others. In understanding these objects as mostly mass produced in diverse global contexts, the chapter points to the ways in which these connections are personal, impersonal, proximate and global. Our relationships to objects may entail making connections as much as disconnections as this act of separating our own lives from those involved in production allows us to consume goods without thinking about how they were made. However, these histories and practices are embedded in objects themselves and their materialities, as it is impossible 85

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to disentangle the personal, social, relational, and global. One of the key arguments of the chapter is how the materiality of things (which includes the material properties of things as well as how they are designed and made) impacts upon the uses and meanings objects may have. This materiality also includes factors such as built-in obsolescence, whether objects are mass produced, as well as the global histories of manufacture and the routes the objects have travelled. And so, the role things play in ‘personal’ lives always comprises global, social and relational dimensions. Even if we do not ‘know’ about these materialities, such as what an object is made of, this does not mean that it does not matter: how we relate to things and how things help us to relate to others is a physical, tactile, and sensuous relationship. We learn to knit with our grandmother’s knitting needles and as we do so our hand and body engage with the needles and the wool in material rhythms that situate us in a relationship of closeness to our grandmothers. While for some objects, we may easily be able to see them as implicated in/connected to our relationship to someone else, often these relationships remain unspoken, as material culture plays a pivotal yet often unseen role in the everyday fabrics of our personal and relational lives.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION yyThinking about all the objects you have used today, how are they linked to other people? yyHouses are full of things we keep but do not use; why might this be and what does this tell us about why some things matter more than others? yyWhat might people’s rubbish reveal about a person’s personal life, consumption practices, and everyday habits? yyThink of an example of a mass-produced commodity you use – what do you know about how it is produced? Does knowing about who produced it affect how you might use it?

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LIFE ACROSS 7 PERSONAL THE LIFE COURSE VANESSA MAY

Introduction This chapter is concerned with the human life course; that is, people’s progress from infancy to later life, the stages of which many of us perhaps take for granted as biological ‘facts’. The interdisciplinary literature on the life course, however, shows us that how we understand and experience childhood or later life is also socially shaped, and varies over time and across cultures. The aim of this chapter is to bring the literature on life course into dialogue with Carol Smart’s (2007) theorisation of personal life. Smart urges scholars to focus on the ways in which personal lives are embedded in cultural meanings and connected with other people’s lives. In relation to the life course, this means paying attention to the ‘temporal scripts’ present in each society. These temporal scripts set out social norms that delineate how we ‘should’ grow up and grow older. Smart also highlights the importance of attending to how people themselves understand their lives. After introducing the key sociological terminology concerning the life course, time and personal life, the chapter charts how people at different stages of the life course negotiate such temporal norms in relation to their own lifetime. Throughout, the taken-for-granted age categories of ‘child’, ‘adult’, and ‘old person’ will be troubled and unpacked in terms of the complex meanings that can be attached to them.

The life course: Stages and transitions In the life course literature, human life has been depicted as a series of stages that people pass through (e.g. Erikson, 1982; Levinson et al., 1978). These stages of the life course are understood to derive not only from biology – for example, the way that children biologically develop and mature into adults – but to also be social in origin. In other words, what people take to be self-evident stages of the life course ‘are interpretations 87

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assigned to experience’ (Gubrium et al., 1994: 29), as discussed below. As a result, each culture will have its own way of understanding what biological development means. European life course scholars view the life course as a social institution; that is, ‘as a constructed social reality – with historically specific but socially plausible and normative meanings and definitions of the life course’ (Dannefer, 2012: 221) which come to define the ‘chronologically standardized “normative life course”’ (Kohli, 2007: 255). Much of the literature on life course focuses on transitions – such as the transition from youth to adulthood – and is quantitative, measuring the impact of one set of variables (e.g. education) on outcomes later in life (e.g. occupation, income, health). The approach taken in this chapter is somewhat different. Rather than trying to calibrate the different life stages and transitions between them, the focus is on the trajectories of individual lives, on ‘the personalised struggles of becoming, being and remaining “grown up”’ (Gilleard and Higgs, 2016: 310) and on how people ‘themselves make sense of their lives in time’ (McAdams, 2005: 238). Time thus lies at the centre of this chapter, as does an understanding of people as temporal beings who orient themselves with the help of their past, present, and projected future experiences. In doing so, as David Featherman and Richard Learner note, people are influenced by developmental timetables that set expectations regarding the age at which particular ‘developmental outcomes’ or life goals should be achieved (1985: 665). To investigate how people negotiate these cultural expectations, it is necessary to listen to the stories that people tell of their lives and to locate them in the broader social context.

Temporal scripts An important way in which people orient themselves in and make sense of the world is by telling stories about their experiences. These stories are ‘rarely of our own making’ (Somers, 1994: 606), because we are born into a ready-made culture that offers us a set of narratives that in turn predispose us to view the world in particular ways. According to Jerome Bruner (1987), such narratives reflect prevailing theories about ‘possible lives’ in our culture, and inform us, for example, of what the expected stages of a life course are (McAdams, 2005). Such cultural narratives ‘function as an instrument of cultural constraint’ (Bruner, 1995: 162), guiding our behaviour in such a way that we ‘fall in line’ with socially acceptable ways of living our lives. But people do not merely ‘acquiesce to 88

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prevailing cultural norms and standards’ (McAdams, 2005: 251). They have a wide array of cultural narratives to choose from, at times combining these in novel ways, and also regularly breaching them through innovation. An important function of these cultural narratives is to offer temporal scripts; that is, prescribed timetables that provide a road map for what kinds of things should happen at what point in life. Temporal scripts follow what Neugarten et al. (1965: 711) called ‘social clocks’; that is, social norms that define ‘age-appropriate’ behaviour and set a ‘prescriptive timetable for the ordering of major life events’ such as when to marry, have children, or retire. We are aware of our own timing in relation to these social clocks as ‘on time’ or as ‘off time’, either ‘too early’ or ‘too late’. Social clocks are, in other words, used to measure and make judgements about the tempo of our own and others’ lives (Lahad, 2017) and shape our understandings of what is ‘appropriate’ for someone of a particular age: how they should dress, behave and in which activities they should take part (Hazan, 1994). For example as I was writing this chapter, news media were marvelling at Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to have run the Boston Marathon in 1973, who was running it again in 2017 at the age of 70. Sports, especially extreme sports such as marathon running, are generally considered to be suitable pursuits for younger people. The 70-year-old Switzer’s participation in the Boston Marathon was therefore understood as something out of the ordinary. Temporal scripts ‘establish normative standards’ for behaviour (Gubrium et al., 1994: 192), and violations from such standards can give rise to ‘unremitting social criticism’ (Hazan, 1994: 62) as well as attempts to influence or control a person’s behaviour. Think for example of the stigma that is attached to being a teenage mother or an ‘older’ mother in most Western countries (Ellis-Sloan, 2014; Lahad and Hvidtfeldt, 2016).

Personal life and the life course Having discussed the life course as something that is socially derived and the tempo of which is measured with the help of temporal scripts, I now turn to examine conceptual tools offered by the sociology of personal life that can be used to add further dimensions to a sociological understanding of the life course. In her book Personal Life, Smart (2007: 28–30) identifies the following four characteristics of personal life that are relevant to the issue of how we understand and study the 89

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life course. First, as already discussed in relation to temporal scripts, the person is seen as ‘always already part of the social’, embedded in traditions and socio-cultural meanings, as well as social structures such as social class, ethnicity, and gender that help shape our ideas of how a life should be lived. Furthermore, being part of the social means being connected to other people. Human beings are thoroughly interrelated, meaning that we become the persons we are in large part thanks to the relationships we have with other people – our parents, siblings, teachers, friends, and so on (May, 2013; Roseneil & Ketokivi, 2016). For example, when we are children, other people teach us how to narrate our lives (Wang and Brockmeier, 2002). The stories that we tell about ourselves and our place in the world in other words act as ‘threads and links’ between the self and others, and as ‘bonds and bridges across generations’ (Smart, 2007: 83, 105). A sense of such connectedness is largely absent from the life course literature. The second characteristic of personal life identified by Smart is that it is cumulative, meaning that people’s memories, histories and their experience of the passage of time are important aspects of their lives. Consequently, Smart points out how important it is that sociologists attend to how people experience their own lives. Third, Smart proposes that whereas traditional studies of the life course focus on structured transitions, such as the transition to adulthood, it is also important to capture other kinds of motion, such as experiencing unemployment or divorce. In other words, it is crucial to understand the individual life trajectory, as pointed out by Gilleard and Higgs (2016) above. A fourth, and related, point is that personal life is flexible rather than ‘concerned with boundary marking’, which is why it makes more sense to trace flows through the structural systems of education or work rather than identify the boundaries between different stages of the life course. By adopting a personal life approach to the study of life course, we immediately begin to see the person as embedded in a culture and a network of connections that span across time. This chapter now goes on to engage with research that allows us to view the life course through such a lens that emphasises the embedded and connected nature of personal life. I examine the three stages into which Western lives are understood to fall under (and make some comparisons with non-Western understandings), namely childhood, adulthood, and later life. Throughout, the emphasis is on individual trajectories through these stages, examined with the help of the concepts delineated above: temporality and connectedness. 90

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Childhood In Western societies, children are viewed as innocent and vulnerably dependent on adults (Hockey and James, 1993). How children came to be regarded as such has been charted and debated by historians, for example Philippe Ariès (1962), but for a long time sociologists were not particularly interested in studying the lives of children. This changed in the 1990s with the emergence of the so-called ‘new’ sociology of childhood, the aim of which was to emphasise that childhood was not just a period of ‘becoming’ (an adult), but also of ‘being’, and that therefore it was important for researchers to speak to children so as to understand how they experienced and made sense of their own childhoods (e.g. Alanen, 1992; James et al., 1998; Qvortrup et al., 1994; see Smart, 2011b for a more detailed discussion). This focus on ‘being’ rather than ‘becoming’ has since been subject to some readjustment within sociological studies of childhood. Jens Qvortrup observes that the Western temporal script for children remains that they are ‘waiting’ for adulthood: It is the fate of children to be waiting. They are waiting to become adults; to mature; to become competent; to get capabilities; to acquire rights; to become useful; to have a say in societal matters; to share resources. (Qvortrup, 2004: 267)

Scholars now emphasise that childhood studies must capture both dimensions in the experience of being a child: being and becoming. Qvortrup, for example, reminds us that it is not just adults who look forward to the person the child is to become, also children themselves do. This is illustrated by Emma Uprichard’s (2008) study of children’s lives in the United Kingdom and France. The children Uprichard spoke to had a nuanced understanding of their past, present, and future selves, appreciating for example that while they would develop and mature as they grew up, something would also remain the same. As six-year-old Joseph in France commented: ‘I’m me now and later I’ll still be me. I’ll also be me when I’m old but just older, like I’ll just be an older me.’ These children were, in other words, ‘actively constructing themselves as “being and becomings”’ (Uprichard, 2008: 310). Uprichard urges scholars to view children as temporal beings who are making sense of their lives with the help of their past and present experiences as well as hopes and fears for the future, which then in turn shape the experience of being a child. I would here also like to 91

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note that it is not just children but also adults who experience the double movement of being and becoming, as discussed below. Sesilie Smørholm (2016) also questions the dualisms through which children in the West are viewed ‘as beings or becomings, as competent or incompetent, as independent or dependent, as resilient or vulnerable’ (Smørholm, 2016: 349) and remarks that these do not make sense in many other contexts, for example in Africa. On the basis of her fieldwork in Zambia, Smørholm describes a cultural understanding of babies as having agency and a will even before they are born, for example being unwilling to enter the world because of tensions in the relationship between the parents. The human life cycle in other words is understood to begin before birth (and to extend beyond biological death). Smørholm, however, warns us that we should not take this to mean that babies are viewed as having these capacities by virtue of being autonomous beings, but rather because they are part of ‘the world of God and the ancestors’ (Smørholm, 2016: 253). The new-born baby is understood to be a spiritual self that gradually develops into a social being and returns to a spiritual being after death. The Zambian understanding of personhood is thus distinctly different from the Western view of the linear life course with a beginning and an end, instead being rooted in a view whereby biological life is understood in cyclical terms. As a consequence, the process of ‘becoming’ extends beyond a person’s biological life. A personal life approach to the study of the life course in childhood directs our attention to the ways in which a person is always already part of the social, embedded in traditions, meanings, and structures, which help shape how children come to view their own personhood. Personal life is also continuously in motion; thus there is always a dynamic element of ‘becoming’ in our lives. Because the sociology of personal life attends to movement and flows, it also allows for a focus on the continuities that remain through a person’s life course.

Adulthood As noted above, being and becoming characterise not only childhood but adulthood as well. Yet the ‘becoming’ dimension of adulthood is rarely explored, except in connection with the transition phase from youth to adulthood, or what is known as ‘emerging adulthood’ (Blatterer, 2010). Harry Blatterer (2007) contends that adulthood remains a taken for granted category in sociology. The social actor is assumed to be an adult 92

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(if a child or an older person, this is specifically identified), and the category ‘adult’ itself is rarely analysed but is rather treated as self-evident. Yet, just like childhood, adulthood is a social category: being identified as adult requires meeting some culturally recognised key criteria of adulthood – including moving out of the parental home, getting a permanent job, finding a long-term partner, and having children – and doing so ‘on time’ in relation to social clocks (Arnett, 2001). A study by Cassandra Phoenix and Andrew Sparkes of British athletes aged 19 to 27 sheds light on how young adults use social clocks to orient themselves towards the future. The participants in this study made use of a life curve model that depicts life as an upside-down U-shaped curve of initial progress up until middle age and then decline into old age. They saw youth as a time of being carefree when one has the chance of ‘doing it all’. In contrast, the participants understood middle age to be when people ‘settle down’, ‘become sorted’ and ‘secure’. And finally, later life was perceived as a time for ‘reflection’ and of looking back at ‘good times’. In terms of their own futures, all of them believed that they would inevitably and inescapably ‘settle down’ with a career, home, and family. Symbols of such attainment, for example wedding rings, business suits, house keys and carrying baby photos, were seen to signal that one was getting it ‘right’. Rather than viewing adulthood as a social category, however, the participants in this study understood these markers of adulthood as set and as ‘a natural, ahistorical innate, fact of life’ (Phoenix and Sparkes, 2008: 220). Phoenix and Sparkes express some concern over the fact that none of the participants in their study acknowledged that things might not turn out as envisioned. Such an unquestioning approach to the culturally set plot lines does not, according to the authors, bode well in terms of challenging prevailing cultural narratives about ageing. Nor would such certainty that things would turn out as expected equip the young people to meet the possible challenges they might face if they were knocked off course by, for example, illness (see May, 2018). Box 7.1 discusses what happens when young people step off the expected stream of the life course, and the ways in which these disruptions are viewed differently depending on the social class background of the young person. The examples so far have focused on young adults, a key concern for studies of the life course. But as research by Erikson (1982) and Levinson (Levinson, 1996; Levinson et al., 1978) demonstrates, a person is never ‘fully developed’, and the transition to adulthood marks just one phase in 93

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Box 7.1 Drop out or time out? Hogne Øian (2004) studied young Norwegian adults who had disrupted the expected linear progression of their lifetime, by for example discontinuing their education or remaining unemployed. He argues that these disruptions are evaluated differently – as either ‘dropping out’ or taking a ‘time out’ – depending on the person’s social class background. Linda, a young working-class woman, had dropped out of high school and was, according to her parents and teachers, exhibiting a worrying lack of direction or ambition for the future. Karsten, a young man from an upper-middle-class background, who since graduating from high school had not gone on to university as expected but had instead embarked upon a life of travelling and working to fund his travels, is an example of someone who is perceived to be taking ‘time out’. Øian notes that an important difference between Linda and Karsten is the amount of financial and social resources that they have. While Karsten is likely to have the resources to jump back on the stream of time at some point in the future, Linda does not have access to such resources and is thus more likely to remain dropped out. Karsten – and his parents – interpret his ‘time out’ as merely postponing his future professional career and as a time of self-development that is instrumental in producing his future (Øian, 2004: 185). They construe it as at time of accruing valuable experiences that can be used as cultural resources later in life. In contrast, Linda’s dropping out is seen to entail a waste of time because she is not accumulating any capital, be it financial, social, or cultural.

life-long development. This also means that adults must negotiate myriad social clocks throughout their adult lives. This is exemplified by the work of Kinneret Lahad (2017) on how older single women are seen to contravene social norms around marital status. Based on an analysis of how a variety of Israeli and Anglo-American texts depict single women, Lahad notes that these women’s normative breach is described through the lens of time. Single women, and particularly single women over a certain age, are warned about ‘wasting’ time and their lives are perceived to be ‘on hold’. This is evident in such well-known exhortations such as ‘What are you waiting for?’ and warnings that a single woman will soon ‘miss her train’ if she waits any longer. The single woman is understood to be stuck in a state of limbo, her time on hold and frozen. Her time is empty, 94

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spent waiting rather than in productive activity (i.e., in a couple). Lahad argues that the disapproval that older single women face is an attempt to discipline women to follow normative timetables concerning couple formation as well as having children. These timetables reflect a culturally pervasive ‘middle-ageism’ according to which middle-aged women in particular are perceived to be entering a period of decline, marked by their reduced fertility (Lahad and Hvidtfeldt, 2016). Lahad explains that remaining single beyond a certain, culturally acceptable, age ‘disrupts the cultural expectations about life-course schedules’ (2017: 45). While a younger single woman might be advised to ‘take her time’ to find the ‘right one’, that is, to slow down, a midlife single woman, who is considered as having waited ‘too long’, is advised to ‘speed up’ her search for a partner because she is running ‘out of time’. Socially acceptable singlehood can only ever be a transitional status and thus constitutes merely a ‘time out’ before re-joining normative life schedules. Just like the ‘drop outs’ in Øian’s study, older single women are considered to have fallen off the stream of the prescribed life course and to be ‘failing’ to ‘keep up with normative schedules’ (Lahad, 2017: 47). Furthermore, these normative expectations are gendered, meaning that the expectations placed on men and women differ. While an older single man can be described as an ‘eligible bachelor’ – as George Clooney was while he remained unmarried up until the age of 53 – past a certain age, a single woman is demoted to the stigmatising status of ‘spinster’ (Simpson, 2006). Of course, such heteronormative temporal scripts do not remain unchallenged and have shifted over time – for example the age at which a woman is considered to be ‘past it’ has gone up, while feminists have long highlighted the ways in which such gendered norms contribute to gender inequalities. Examining adulthood from a sociology of personal life angle shows the variety of social clocks regarding relationships, education and work, among other things, that adults are embedded in and expected to adhere to throughout their lives. The examples above also show that personal life is continuously in motion – the adult is never ‘done’ but rather as we age, we are presented with new concerns and are expected to adhere to different social clocks. The cumulative nature of personal life has become apparent in the above examples in the ways in which a person’s lifetime is seen as something that they can ‘waste’, ‘save’ or even ‘produce’. Thus a personal life approach to the study of the life course highlights the importance of attending to a person’s biography and their trajectory through their life course, and how these reflect (or not) the temporal norms of a culture. 95

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Later life In this final section, I explore how temporal scripts shape the experience of ageing, but also how these scripts can be challenged. Ageing is an increasingly important topic for social scientists due to the ageing population structure in Western countries. Table 7.1 shows that life expectancy in the world has gone up from 47 years in 1950–1955 to 71 years in 2010–2015. The gap between the different regions of the world has started to close and is expected to diminish even further by the end of this century. Another global phenomenon is population ageing, meaning that the population aged over 60 is the fastest growing, with projections estimating that by 2050, in all regions of the world except Africa, at least a quarter of the population will be aged 60 or over (United Nations, 2015a: 7). Ageing is an embodied experience (see Holmes, Chapter  9 in this volume), yet the meanings that we attach to the signs of biological ageing can vary. Whereas for example in Taiwan ageing is understood in terms of cyclical growth and rejuvenation, in contemporary Western societies, later life tends to be depicted as a time of progressive decline and older people are understood as being separate from ‘active’ or ‘productive’ society (Gilleard and Higgs, 2016; Gubrium et al., 1994; Hazan, 1994). In this sense, borrowing Øian’s (2004) terminology, they are understood to have ‘dropped out’ from the stream of the cumulative life course, for good. As a result, old people are marginalised, symbolically and Table 7.1 Life expectancy at birth in selected world regions (in years, rounded figures). Region

1950–1955

2010–2015

2095–2100 (projected)

World

47

71

83

Africa

38

60

78

Asia

42

72

85

Europe

64

77

89

Latin America and the Caribbean

51

75

88

Northern America

67

79

90

Source: United Nations (2015b)

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concretely separated from mainstream society, even invisible (Hazan, 1994; Higgs and Gilleard, 2015; Hockey and James, 1993; Stalp et al., 2009). However, now that people are living longer (and in many cases healthier and under more affluent conditions than previous generations), the way ageing is understood and experienced is undergoing a transition (Higgs and Gilleard, 2015). In the research literature, for example, these shifts are delineated with the help of new terms such as ‘third age’, ‘successful ageing’, and ‘ageing well’ that are used to mark out a phase of ‘productive ageing’ from the last phase of life that is now named ‘deep old age’, ‘old-old’, or ‘fourth age’. Terminology such as ‘successful ageing’ reflects that later life can for some be a positive period during which they maintain a sense of autonomy and choice, for example devoting themselves to enjoyable leisure pursuits. It is important to keep in mind, however, that there exist inequalities among older people in terms of social dis/advantage, and that these inequalities in turn are linked to quality of life and health outcomes (Buffel et al., 2013). Furthermore, this terminology also implies a distinction between ‘successful ageing’ that is undertaken by autonomous, active, and healthy persons and ‘unsuccessful ageing’ – a distinction that is used to pass moral judgements on how people age (Higgs and Gilleard, 2015: 118). This is reflected in Ása Róin’s (2014) study of how older people, aged between 68 and 91, living on the Faroe Islands experience, live, and negotiate the category ‘old’. The people in her study distinguished between chronological age, what age they might appear to be based on their physical appearance, and how old they felt themselves to be. They understood being ‘old’ as deriving not necessarily from chronological age, or how wrinkled their skin was, but from the degree to which they were able to remain (relatively) healthy and active as opposed to people who have ‘just stopped’ and ‘don’t go anywhere’ (Róin, 2014: 88). Given the moral overtones imbued in social norms surrounding ageing, it is perhaps no surprise that older people aim to distance themselves from potentially stigmatising categories such as ‘frail old’. Western cultural scripts for later life represent it as an empty time of life waiting for death, and consequently, once people reach a certain age, they are viewed as part of a homogeneous group that is defined by ‘old age’ (Spector-Mersel, 2006). This means that social distinctions that are seen to matter in younger people’s lives, such as those based on gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, are thought to lose their significance. Be they men or women, white or black, gay or straight, older people are first and foremost seen as ‘old’. The gerontology literature has increasingly become 97

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interested in unpacking this ‘black box’ that is later life, identifying the diversity of experience among older people from a variety of backgrounds in terms of ethnicity, social class, and sexuality (e.g. King, 2016; Zubair and Norris, 2015). In terms of gender, Gabriela Spector-Mersel (2006) has investigated the cultural narratives that are available to Western men as they age. She refers to ‘hegemonic masculinity scripts’; that is, the exemplar stories that exist in each culture that define the social clocks for masculinity, thus defining ‘desired manhood at different points in a man’s life’ (­Spector-Mersel, 2006: 71). Western understandings of masculinity are tied to characteristics that are generally associated with younger adults, such as social power, physical prowess, and occupational success. As  Western men age, they are perceived to become less ‘masculine’, because they are less able to fulfil these masculine ideals. Spector-Mersel also identifies a lack of cultural masculine scripts for older men, meaning that there are no ‘clear cultural guidelines as to “how to be an aging man”’ (Spector-Mersel, 2006: 79). In Spector-Mersel’s words, the hegemonic masculine script in Western societies concludes in middle age and can therefore be characterised as truncated or amputated. It is, however, also important to remember that such cultural scripts can also be rewritten, because people have the ability to be reflexive about the conditions of their lives (see Box 7.2).

Box 7.2 Challenging ageist norms An example of how people can challenge constricting cultural narratives about ageing (and gender) comes in the form of the Red Hat Society, aimed at women aged 50 and over. The society originated in the US, and now has sister organisations across the globe. The website for the British Red Hatters (n.d.) urges women to ‘grow old disgracefully’. As the name implies, women who are members of this society have taken to wearing red hats (and purple clothing) as a way of drawing attention to their presence in public spaces so as to combat the invisibility that many older women experience as a result of not exhibiting the youthful appearance that is associated with attractiveness, dynamism, and productivity. Once women reach a certain age, their ‘value’ goes down, because they cannot compete with younger women in terms of appearance and reproductive capabilities (Lahad,

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2017). The aim of the Red Hat Society is to celebrate ageing and for ageing women and their bodies to become more visible in society, and thus to contribute towards a redefinition of what it means for a woman to be ‘old’ (Stalp et al., 2009). While members of the Red Hat Society challenge ageist notions that femininity wanes with age by wearing (ultra)feminine dress, they also challenge traditional notions of femininity by acting in non-feminine ways, such as being visually noticeable in public space and, at times, by being loud, thus drawing attention to themselves (see May, ‘Personal life in public spaces’, Chapter 11 in this volume).

Research that focuses on individual trajectories through later life shows how older people face diminishing options regarding the range of cultural narratives available to them. The dominant narratives in Western societies present later life through the normative dichotomy of successful and unsuccessful ageing, or as an ‘empty time’. But personal life is cumulative and the biography of a person helps define who they are, meaning that as they age, people do not merely become subsumed under the category ‘old’. In focusing on how older people negotiate cultural narratives, these studies also demonstrate the ways in which people can counteract them in the hope of effecting change in how later life is understood.

Concluding remarks The aim of this chapter has been to examine human life time from a slightly different angle than is usual in the life course literature which tends to focus on transitions, such as the transition to adulthood, and on individual outcome measures such as employment and health. I have argued that adopting a personal life perspective on the life course means attending to the social norms and structures in which our lives are embedded, studying people’s lives as trajectories through the life course, and understanding these from the perspective of the person. The chapter has done so by focusing on how temporal scripts instruct people as to what the normative timetable in their culture is, for example in terms of achieving ‘adulthood’, and the kinds of person they are expected to be at certain stages of their life course. By delineating how a person’s life can be judged as either one of successful accomplishment or a failure, these 99

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temporal scripts also exert social control, as exemplified by the experiences of people who are ‘off time’ and who face a variety of sanctions as a result. But people also have the capacity to reflexively be aware of and resist prescribed models of life. In conclusion, a personal life perspective on the life course can help us gain a better understanding of continuities and continuous change throughout the lifetime, and of how people negotiate and contribute to the social meanings and structures in which they are embedded from birth.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION yyConsider the following statements: yyJeff goes clubbing every weekend. yySusan would prefer to live with her parents than get her own place. yyKatie is pregnant with her first child. How would you react to someone aged 18 or aged 45 doing these things? How might you explain your reactions with the help of the concept of ‘social clocks’? yyHow do you envisage your own future in terms of the stages you expect to go through and the things you expect to achieve? Consider how your future projections reflect the temporal scripts in your own culture. Are these temporal scripts gendered or classed in any way? yyExamine the figures in Table 7.1. What can you observe in terms of a) differences between different regions and b) global trends? What do you think that such increases in life expectancy and corresponding population ageing might mean in terms of how later life is viewed?

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Introduction Consumer society, consumerism, commercialisation, and materialism are all popular phrases used to describe contemporary societies; societies in which consumption has become a critical feature of everyday life. The term consumer culture captures and encompasses all of these phrases by emphasising that consumption has become embedded in all aspects of everyday life: Consumer culture [is] a social arrangement in which the relation between lived culture and social resources, between meaningful ways of life and the symbolic and material resources on which they depend, is mediated through markets. (Slater, 1997: 8).

The emphasis on markets reflects the significant growth of one particular way in which goods and services are provisioned in society. Other modes of provisioning goods and services are through the state (such as healthcare, education and waste collection) and interpersonal networks (e.g., friends and family who often provide goods and services whether through informal help, giving gifts, or cooking meals). More generally, consumer culture can be understood as referring to a condition in which consumption is argued to influence most, if not all, aspects of everyday life. Theories of consumer culture share the central tenet that consumption replaces production as the principal source of our identities, in terms of how we relate to one another, and how we understand, interpret and relate to the world we live in. Following a brief outline of the emergence of consumer culture, this chapter considers different theories regarding the effects that consumer culture has had on personal life. First, I examine claims that it produces self-oriented, narcissistic and self-promoting individuals. Second, I consider theories that suggest consumer culture permits playful lifestyles and offers individuals greater freedoms of self-expression. Finally, 101

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I explore arguments that consumer culture commodifies intimacy and love. Despite varying degrees of positive and negative interpretations of the effects of consumer culture on personal life, all these accounts have in common the recognition that the ways in which we consume goods and services in contemporary society have profound implications for how people relate to one another. Consumer culture affords many lifestyle choices and means of self-expression, but whether consumerism is escapable and whether personal relationships are increasingly measured through the logic of consumer markets remain critical and contested questions.

The emergence of consumer culture The origins of consumer culture can be found in the rapid social changes that followed urbanisation and industrialisation in the nineteenth century, although contemporary forms of consumer culture really only took shape in the final third of the twentieth century. Industrialisation, which increased the volume of goods and services available for consumption, went hand-in-hand with urbanisation as people sought employment in the factories of cities. Moving from rural communities to urban centres meant a significant change in people’s everyday lives. In his classic essay ‘The metropolis and modern life’, Georg Simmel (1970[1903]) examined how people responded to living in cities. For Simmel, life in modern cities was characterised by frequent interactions with strangers, and individuals were little more than one person in a crowd. Being in the crowd had its advantages: it meant that individuals could effectively hide among the throng of people and observe modern life going on around them. The  downside of such anonymity was that because people no longer know personally the majority of the individuals that they see or interact with in their everyday lives, other people become faceless and social interaction impersonal. Simmel proposed that within this large anonymous urban environment, the only way to ‘stand out’ from the crowd and reassert any sense of individuality was through consumption. This required a delicate balance of imitating others (in order not to stand out too much) but without simply copying what those others in the crowd were doing (which would provide for no sense of individuality at all). The way to achieve this was through the pursuit of fashion, which provided some guidance on what to wear but offered enough variety for a sense of individuality (Gronow, 1997). Thus it could be argued that it was urbanisation that 102

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led to consumption becoming a means of expressing, to oneself and to others, a sense of individuality. Drawing from Simmel’s account of urban life, Thorstein Veblen (1925[1899]) considered the growing significance of consumption in expressing one’s social status. Discussing the American nouveaux riche at the turn of the twentieth century, he argued that a key mechanism for displaying wealth and status was to consume that which others could not afford. Expensive clothing, modes of transport, art, homes, and so on all became ways of conspicuously displaying wealth. For Veblen such ‘conspicuous consumption’ became the principal way to express social status. Furthermore, if trying to move up to a higher social status, those in lower-status groups began to imitate those with a higher status, who in turn responded by seeking new forms of conspicuous consumption to maintain their social distance. This endless cycle of consumer competition not only rendered consumption more important in people’s daily lives but also meant that consumption became critical to the way that people perceived and related to others. The process of industrialisation also had profound implications for the ways in which people related to the goods that comprise the material world which surrounded them. For Karl Marx (1976[1867]), industrial society transformed the meaning of goods. In pre-industrial societies, where goods were made by hand, the meaning of those goods was tied to their production. The value of a table, for example, was determined by the amount of time it would take to make it, the quality of the materials used, and by its usefulness, what Marx called ‘use value’. However, industrial production made it difficult to have any sense of the labour involved in producing a good. This created the space for goods to take on new meaning, meanings not associated with the conditions under which a good was produced. As a result, the meanings of goods came to be less associated with their ‘use value’, but instead they take on a ‘symbolic value’. This means that the value of a table, for example, is no longer determined by what went in to produce it or how useful it is, but rather it is valued for the symbolic meaning it might have, such as being an antique, a designer table, or a fashion item. From the 1950s onwards the emergence of mass production resulted in mass consumption on unprecedented scales. As the consumption of status goods became available to more members of Western societies, symbolic value became an increasingly important way to distinguish between goods. Advertising and marketing developed to convince 103

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consumers that the various goods being offered by producers differed from each other (e.g., that there is a significant difference between two brands of toothpaste), and consumers sought to create their personal styles of consumption that differed from that of the masses. By the 1960s, distinctive youth cultures began to take mass-produced goods and give them new symbolic meanings in order to create their own collective styles of consumption (a lifestyle). For example, in his study of 1960s Mod culture, Dick Hebdige (1979) found that young white working-class men subverted the meaning of several goods including the moped (originally designed for women), expensive Italian suits, and soul and rhythm and blues music, and combined them to produce a ­distinctive sub-cultural style. The acceleration of such processes in the final third of the twentieth century led Scott Lash and John Urry (1987) to argue that societies are no longer organised around the circulation and exchange of goods (production), but around the circulation and exchange of the signs and symbols that can be associated with them (consumption). In what they call ‘dis-organised capitalism’, what is significant is no longer the exchange and circulation of goods but that of signs and images. While somewhat simplified, the story of consumer culture is one of the emerging symbolic significance of goods for expressing individuality, identity, and status. Consumption became a source of social competition and of displaying social status. No longer was clothing understood only as a way of keeping warm and dry, but as a way of symbolically expressing identity, social aspirations, and difference (from other social groups). These processes reached a new level of maturity at the end of the twentieth century. Fuelled by the increasing range of consumer goods (thanks to mass production), the capacity for groups or sub-cultures to mould those goods so that they expressed a particular style, and the rise of advertising that seeks to symbolically differentiate goods, a consumer culture emerged in which style and image comes to dominate over the function and use of commodities.

Consumer culture: The corrosion of personal life The emergence of consumer culture has had profound, although hotly contested, implications for contemporary personal lives. Some accounts are less optimistic in their prognoses than others. One such set of accounts suggest that consumer culture has a corrosive effect on 104

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the quality of interpersonal relationships, where authenticity, how people relate to others, senses of self-identity, and feelings of belonging are undermined by the symbolic allure of goods and the pervasiveness of consumption. For Jean Baudrillard (1988), the kinds of processes where the meanings of goods get detached from their use value take a sinister turn in what he terms ‘postmodern’ consumer cultures. Baudrillard argues that the meaning of goods today can only be found in their symbolic value. He argues that the continual advertising of products removes goods from their use value such that consumer goods represent nothing more than a simulation. In other words, goods no longer refer to reality but simulate it, a process that Baudrillard calls hyper-reality. He used Las Vegas as an example: a place where nothing is real, everything is a replica. For example, the ‘Egyptian pyramids’ and ‘Parisian landmarks’ that can be found in Las Vegas represent a pastiche of the originals that are taken out of context and given new meanings as they are placed among a whole range of replicas that simulate other cultures. Shopping malls are also a good example of such simulation. Take the Trafford Centre in Manchester, England, as an illustration. Having walked around the huge range of multi-national and British chain stores one can walk into the food gallery and stroll through the French cafés and the Japanese, Italian, traditional British, and American fast food sectors and sit down in the main concourse, which is modelled on the deck of the Titanic. For Baudrillard, all this simulation of other cultures continues to the point where the simulations appear more real than that which is being simulated to the extent that when one actually goes to the real Paris it appears a poor copy of the Paris symbolised in movies, and the ‘French cafés’ found in shopping malls the world over. Andrew Wernick (1991), building on Baudrillard, argues that consumer culture and the dominance of commodities sold through marketing and advertising has deep-seated implications for how people view themselves and for personal life. He emphasises the central role that advertising and marketing play in circulating the hyper-real meanings of goods. He calls this ‘promotional culture’, where pop records, political candidates, art galleries, philosophical texts, news magazines, and sporting events are all intensively advertised and promoted. In consumer culture everything is up for promotion. For Wernick, promotional culture has profound effects on people’s sense of self and how people relate to one another. He states that people 105

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develop a hardened scepticism because they know that everything is effectively about promotion. The only way of resisting this is through cynicism and mass apathy, which according to Wernick explains for example why fewer people vote in elections in the United Kingdom and the United States than before. At the same time, everyone plays a part in promotional culture. Not only do many people actually work in ‘promotion industries’ such as advertising, but everyone engages in the promotion of the self. Wernick (1991: 192) states that ‘from dating and clothes shopping to attending a job interview, virtually everyone is involved in self-promotion’. And even when people are not promoting themselves, others interpret their actions as if they are. In this context of endless promotion and scepticism of others, a crisis of authenticity emerges, where people can no longer believe that others are behaving in an authentic manner. This leads Wernick to ask: ‘If social survival, let alone competitive success, depends on continual, audience-oriented, self-staging, what are we behind the mask?’ An answer to this question is provided by Christopher Lasch (1979) in his book The Culture of Narcissism, an account which pre-dates the works of Baudrillard and Wernick. Lasch suggested that consumer culture, where social differences can only be expressed through symbols of material wealth and hedonistic lifestyles, breeds a narcissistic personality structure. The narcissist is fundamentally insecure and needs the validation of others in order to feel any sense of self-esteem. This fragile sense of self-identity among individuals has led to, among other things, a fear of commitment and of lasting relationships, a dread of ageing and a boundless admiration for fame and celebrity. People’s relationships have become determined by the competition for obtaining the symbols of wealth and ‘the right’ lifestyle, and they relate to one another through intense forms of social competition. Every human activity is aimed at achieving the symbols of material wealth, which appear to provide protection against dropping down the hierarchical pecking order. The result of this is that any form of community (and by this Lasch means any form of collective grouping, including the family, professions, a team, and friendships) is undermined or destroyed by competition, and the individual becomes atomised and alone. People have become primarily focused on themselves, and the communities that once provided for a sense of identity, belonging, and security are systematically destroyed  by this self-obsession. As  communities are undermined, according to Lasch, interpersonal relationships are rendered shallow and superficial. 106

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Lifestyles: Consumer freedom and new forms of association The same processes identified above as eroding authentic personal relationships can, however, also be interpreted in a more positive light. Often characterised as theories of ‘late modernity’, theories of consumer culture together with theories of individualisation (see Chapter 1 in this volume for a discussion of the individualisation thesis) mean that consumption permits new opportunities for individuals to choose, buy into, and display a particular lifestyle as a form of ‘self expression’ (Bauman, 1988; Featherstone, 1987; Giddens, 1991). Central in these accounts is the claim that social class no longer provides the basis for a sense of self-identity and attachment to social groups. Industrialisation had produced societies where occupation, wealth, and collective interests were linked to social class. Social class became a fundamental basis of identity and association. Lash and Urry (1987) identify three key processes that have contributed to the diminished significance of social class in determining who a person can be or how they can live. First, mass production and consumption have resulted in the availability of a growing quantity and wider range of consumer goods at relatively affordable prices. Not only have high levels of consumption become available to the vast majority of people in Western societies, but the range of goods available offers many opportunities for consumers to express their personal tastes (as discussed above). Secondly, the emergence of sub-cultural lifestyles, particularly formed around young people, such as ‘Mod’ and ‘Hippie’ sub-cultures in the 1960s, transformed consumption into a means of expressing a collective identity, or group membership, irrespective of social class. The third key process is the decline of manufacturing and the rise of service and information-related occupations in advanced capitalist societies. These three processes have worked to blur the boundaries between traditional class cleavages, between blue collar (manual) and white collar (office-based) occupations. At the same time, traditional class-based political alignments have become weaker, and have been replaced by the politics of new social movements concerned with global crises and specific issues, such as the environment and animal welfare. For Zygmunt Bauman (1988), once the shackles of class-based identities have been loosened and the range of consumer goods and services has expanded and diversified, a ‘consumer attitude’ begins to form. The  consumer attitude has, according to Bauman, come to represent a fundamental orientation toward the consumption of things. It is an attitude in which the market, by which he means the places where people 107

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buy goods and services, provides solutions to all of life’s problems, and as such it becomes the consumers’ duty to avail themselves of those solutions: Bit by bit, problem by problem, the consumer attitude renders the whole of life to the market, it orients every desire and each effort in the search for a tool or an expertise one can buy. (Bauman, 1990: 204)

The consumer attitude creates a way of being that presents all of life as a set of problems to be solved by purchasing the right product or products from the shops. This attitude also comes to reflect self-identity so that consumption choices come to represent, both to the self and to others, who a person is. We do not make these choices on our own, however, because consumption choices have been formed into lifestyles (styles of consumption), from which consumers make the choice that they feel best reflects who they are (Giddens, 1991). And, according to Bauman, the various experts of the market – advertisers, celebrities, fashion forecasters, retailers, journalists, and the media – all offer advice, guidance, and persuasion to help coordinate consumer choices into a coherent lifestyle, and provide reassurance should the consumer make mistakes in their choices. As Bauman puts it, these ‘market experts’ provide r­eady-assembled lifestyle ‘models’ to help guide consumer choices: what he calls ‘DIY identitykits’. This freedom is, however, double-edged because consumers find themselves in a situation where they have no choice but to choose, and even opting out of a style of consumption becomes a lifestyle in itself. The new freedoms found in consumer culture thus become a duty to select the right goods in order to assemble a style of life reflective of one’s self-identity. For Bauman (1990: 205), the consumer attitude reduces identity to a matter of consumption: ‘It seems in the end as if I were made up of the many things I buy and own: tell me what you buy, in what shops you buy it, and I’ll tell you who you are’. Despite the inescapability of consumer culture and consumer choice, those who embrace it, described as ‘heroic consumers’ by Mike Featherstone, adopt a form of calculated hedonism to embark upon conscious projects of lifestyle creation. This involves taking the consumer attitude and applying it to all aspects of style through the ‘assemblage of goods, clothes, practices, experiences, appearance and bodily dispositions’ (Featherstone, 1987: 59). For Featherstone, this process of the 108

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‘aestheticisation of everyday life’ renders meaningful even the most mundane goods and practices. Heroic consumers turn their everyday lives into an expressive, playful, and unrestricted exercise in individual consumption. And it is not just youth sub-cultures or the affluent middle classes who enjoy expressive and playful lifestyles (see Box 8.1). Consumer culture is also understood to have significantly affected the ways that people associate with one another or build a sense of belonging to social groups. As consumer culture undermines traditional sources of identity and senses of belonging, such as those based around social class, new forms of group association – often described as ‘neotribal’ affiliations – emerge. Neo-tribes can be defined as specialised small groups that form around particular styles of consumption. They are elective (you choose to join or leave), affectual (create a strong sense of association and familiarity) and transitory (because anyone can join or leave at any moment). Conventional examples include New Age Travellers (Hetherington, 1992), youth ‘sub-cultures’ such as ‘ravers’, new social movements such as environmental groups, fans of sports clubs or music groups, gastronomes, and classic car enthusiasts. Contemporary examples include the forms of intense and affectual lifestyle groupings that form through digital technologies and especially social network apps, online video gaming and peer-to-peer content sharing services (Baym, 2010). Belonging to a neo-tribe requires little more than the adoption of a specific lifestyle by choosing from the range of different styles and images available. Given the sheer variety of styles available in the market place and afforded through digital media, together with the lack of restrictions to joining, individuals can also be affiliated to a number of neo-tribes at any one moment. Being a member of a neo-tribe is a matter of choosing and appropriating the ‘identity-symbols’ of that group or buying the right ‘DIY identitykit’. Theories of late-modern consumer culture present identity as a personal duty that involves choosing goods from the market place and assembling them into a lifestyle. People are free to choose who they are and who they want to be seen as, and are no longer constrained by traditional social structures such as social class. People are also free to associate with whichever lifestyle group they like, can choose more than one, and can change which ‘neo-tribal’ group they wish to belong to on the basis of their selection of consumer lifestyles from the market place. What they cannot do is escape the logic and framing of consumer culture: even those who explicitly reject consumerism and materialism are exercising lifestyle choices! 109

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Box 8.1 Ageing, retirement, and lifestyles The process of ageing has often been met with dread and fear, presented as a negative process as one’s body (and mind) prevents active engagement in social life (see May, ‘Personal life across the life course’, Chapter 7 of this volume). Since the 1970s, this assumption has come under increasing scrutiny, not least because of the emergence of consumer lifestyles for the elderly. Health clubs, diets, exercise machines, and sunbeds, together with a range of other goods and services that promise an ‘active lifestyle’ have all been harnessed for the promotion of positive images of ageing. Today, retirement is looked forward to as a period of leisure and consumption. Mike Featherstone and Mike Hepworth’s (1995) analysis of ­ageing builds on Featherstone’s (1987) earlier accounts of the ‘aestheticisation of everyday life’, whereby all aspects of lifestyle, even the most mundane of activities, can be turned into a s­ ymbolic, meaningful and expressive lifestyle. They analysed a magazine, called Retirement Choice, that was initially produced to provide information on planning for retirement. It emerged in a context of what was perceived as an ‘ageist society’. This ageism contained two key elements: old people were viewed with a mixture of negative emotions of pity, fear, disgust, condescension, and neglect; and there was age discrimination in areas like job markets and access to leisure services. Originally aiming to overturn negative images of old age, the magazine emphasised the importance of maintaining aspects of life associated with youth when reaching retirement. By 1974, the magazine shifted in emphasis. It was re-titled Pre-retirement Choice with the stated aim of the promoting ‘youthful old age’, with features on the ‘older’ celebrity, and an emphasis on making new leisure and lifestyle choices with retirement approaching. By the late 1970s and the 1980s the magazine had firmly established itself as a lifestyle magazine that informed about consumer lifestyles – filled with images of youthful retirement, hobbies, leisure, and consumption. Old age had become something to be embraced and viewed as: an extended plateau of active middle age typified in the imagery of positive aging as a period of usefulness and active consumer lifestyles (Featherstone and Hepworth, 1995: 46).

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While Featherstone and Hepworth can be criticised for their focus on media images and representations (as opposed to actual experiences of old age) and therefore overlook the reality that ageing bodies can and do restrict ‘youthful’ lifestyles, they do illustrate how consumer culture penetrates all ages and stages of life. In this example, ageing and retirement have become a matter of lifestyle choice where consumer goods and leisure practices are moulded into expressive styles of consumption that are unified by the aesthetic of ‘youthful retirement’.

The commodification of love and intimacy It is not only our senses of identity, belonging, and ways of interacting with others that are affected by the rise of consumer culture, but also love and intimacy. Consider the following quotation from Daniel Miller’s account of consumption as an expression of love: When a mother shops for her child she may feel that there are a hundred garments in that shop that would be fine for all her friends’ children but she loves her own child enough that the exact balance between what his or her school friends will consider ‘cool’ and what her family will consider respectable matters hugely to her, enough for her to reject the lot and keep on searching until she finds the one article that satisfies this subtle and exacting need. A woman who feels her boyfriend has paid sufficient attention that he can successfully buy her a pair of suitable shoes while unaccompanied feels she has a boyfriend to treasure. (Miller, 2001b: 231)

As the rising commercial significance of festivals such as Christmas (Belk, 1993), Easter and birthdays testify, love and intimacy are increasingly mediated by, and expressed through, markets (see also Chapter 6 of this volume for a discussion of the significance of material objects for personal relationships). Box 8.2 illustrates how the significance of consumerism in intimate relationships can also be located in the ways in which we learn to consume from an early age, how learning to consume has emerged in tandem with the development of consumer markets that 111

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Box 8.2 Learning to consume: consumer culture and children In his study of the emerging market of ready-made child clothing in the first half of twentieth century North America, Daniel Cook (2004) provides a detailed history of how consumer markets construct the boundaries between ‘adulthood’ and ‘childhood’. He reveals how the child clothing market utilised ‘medical-psychological’ theories of child development – particularly the importance of correctly sized and appropriately styled clothing to ensure that children ‘fit in’ with their peers – through which new childhood categories, such as ‘the toddler’, were produced. The child clothing market positioned itself as moral arbitrator of child (and mother) welfare, with turn-of-the-century retail spaces acting as forums for public discussion of child development issues. By the  1930s the category of toddler emerged within marketing parlance, and this was accompanied by a general shift towards seeing consumption from the ‘child’s point of view’. Ideals of consumer taste and individual choice were extended to the youngest members of society, and it was increasingly through their consumption that children developed their sense of who they are and how they might relate to others. The shift towards seeing consumption from the ‘child’s point of view’ indicates another important aspect of consumer culture in the lives of children and their parents: the parental role in teaching their children to become competent consumers. For very young children parents take the role of selecting styles of consumption on their children’s behalf, but as those children grow older they come to expect, if not demand, greater autonomy (Zelizer, 2002). As children grow older parents adopt many strategies to enable their children to learn and thus develop competent consumer skills. From selecting, within a given monetary budget, Christmas and birthday presents from catalogues through to offering pocket money that children can spend at their own discretion, parents guide children into developing their own tastes and styles of consumption (Schor, 2004). In doing so, parents impart their own judgements of ‘good taste’ thus, arguably, reproducing the social group differences (Martens, Southerton and Scott, 2004.) It is also interesting to observe how children relate to consumer culture and what their use of consumer goods reveals about the

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social group distinctions that are salient in their lives. Chin’s (2001) study is an example of the ways in which Afro-American girls personalised white Barbie dolls by working on their hair to make it look like their own and, in the process, reveal social group distinctions related both to gender and ethnicity.

have shaped contemporary ideals of childhood and parenthood, and how those processes of learning reproduce social group differences related to socio-economic status, gender and ethnicity. Miller’s account of consumption as love is also notable for its emphasis on the gendered dimensions of consumption. Celia Lury (2011) points out that it is women in heterosexual relationships who take the greater responsibility for household consumption activities, whether the more mundane and routine aspects of shopping such as groceries, the purchasing of gifts on behalf of the household and its members, and also with respect to leisure shopping for goods such as clothes. And, as Kathryn Wheeler and Miriam Glucksmann (2015) demonstrate, consumption creates time-consuming work – time spent shopping; arranging for  deliveries and returns of items (especially with the growth of online shopping); contacting call centres to register goods and resolve complaints; recycling and disposing of goods – which disproportionately falls  on women. Consumption, through domestic technologies and domestic services, might  have reduced the amount of time women spend  on domestic chores (Gershuny, 2000), but the consumption work associated with those activities has increased. It is the capacity of consumer markets to provide goods and services to mediate personal relationships that led Arlie Hochschild (2003) to argue that personal life has been commodified. Examples from her research include: gift-giving to repair an argument between a couple; hiring experts in the form of therapists; purchasing magazine advice columns on relationships and parenting; purchasing goods for children to alleviate and justify the long working hours of parents (see Thompson, 1996); and paying for childcare. To this can be added the use of mobile communication devices that, as Judy Wajcman (2015) demonstrates, offer new tools for coordinating personal relationships, maintaining contact across greater spatial distances (e.g. between grandparents and grandchildren or between partners living and working in different locations), and organising domestic lives from the workplace. All are examples where 113

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commercial markets come to increasingly mediate personal relationships. Hochschild does not deny that those markets offer numerous benefits and flexibilities in the lives of households. She does, however, argue that this commodification of personal life is difficult to escape as it creates a ‘time bind’. On the one hand, to be able to afford to engage in consumer culture ever-greater volumes of household income are required, which in Western societies has been met by the growing number of dual-earner households. On the other hand, the more that both parents work the less time that they have to devote to spending time together with those they care most about (see Southerton, 2003 for a discussion). Consumer markets present the solution by offering, for a price, the goods and services that deliver care, love, and time efficiency. A related account of the commercialisation of intimacy is Eva Illouz’s (2013) book Why Love Hurts. Extending the observation that consumer cultures are related to freedoms of choice, individualisation and ­non-committed lifestyle group affiliations, Illouz argues that even partner choice is subject to the logic of what she describes as ‘competitive marriage markets’. In such markets, desirable qualities of a prospective partner appear much like product attributes, which are interchangeable and exchangeable. Personal characteristics such as physical attractiveness, sexual prowess, humour, and intelligence together with personal resources such as affluence, education, and social networks are traded in the process of finding the ideal partner. This does not necessarily undermine romantic experience; indeed, the market for relationships can provide for intense romantic attachments. It is, however, when passions subside that desire and commitment to the relationship is weakened and, much like with Bauman’s account of the consumer attitude, the individual has a duty to the self to seek out alternative, perhaps more ideal, partner choices. According to Illouz, selecting a partner has become akin to selecting a lifestyle, based on a trade-off of identifiable attributes and the impossibility to absolutely commit because marriage markets offer such a wide range of choices, and the ideal partner might be just around the corner!

Concluding remarks This chapter began with a relatively simple observation that contemporary society is characterised by consumer culture, a condition in which consumption becomes increasingly central to our sense of 114

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i­dentity, associations, and personal relationships. Processes such as urbanisation and a shift toward the valuing of the symbolic properties of consumption were identified as critical to the emergence of consumer culture. Most accounts of the significance of consumer culture for personal life focus on its implications for people’s sense of identity and social group association. Postmodern accounts argue that the meanings of commodities have become so detached from reality that reality disappears to become little more than simulations, leading to a promotional culture, which in turn breeds an incessant scepticism about everything and everybody. In addition, consumer culture is thought to produce a narcissistic personality structure that results in feelings of personal isolation. Accounts that characterise consumer culture as a feature of ­late-modern societies present it as a form of freedom, albeit a freedom with certain conditions attached. The consumer attitude means that people have a duty to constantly seek out (with the help of market experts) the right consumer goods (or ready-to-assemble identitykits) that capture who they are as individuals. Any sense of group belonging and personal attachment is formed through neo-tribal lifestyles, which amount to little more than groups who share a playful affinity through the lifestyle goods that they acquire and display. The pervasiveness of consumer culture also reaches into the most intimate aspects of personal life. Consumption has become a medium for expressing love and care, with festivals celebrated by ever-greater levels of gift exchanges and relationships judged on the expressions of affection symbolised by those gifts. This commodification of intimacy is highly gendered, with women disproportionately responsible for household patterns of consumption and the work associated with it. The home and the intimate relationships within it are increasingly subject to the logic of consumer markets, with the rise of dual-income households enabling the consumption of goods and services that substitute for personal care. The  impact that consumer culture has on our personal lives is most profound when it comes to Illouz’s argument that marriage markets turn intimate relationships into matters of partnership choices based on personal attributes that are exchangeable, as is the case with all commodities, and where commitment to that relationship extends no further than the intense romantic flourishes that accompany a new set of partner choices.

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QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION yyWhat is consumer culture? What is meant by the term symbolic consumption? yyIn what ways might consumer culture lead to a promotional culture and a culture of narcissism? yyTo what extent do you agree with Bauman’s (1997: 88) claim that ‘Identities can be adopted and discarded like a change of costume’? yyIn what ways might consumption be an expression of love and intimacy? yyCritically assess Illouz’s account of ‘competitive marriage markets’ by drawing on the arguments presented by Petra Nordqvist on couple relationships (Chapter  3) and Katherine Davies on friendships (Chapter 5).

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Introduction This chapter explores the significance of the body within personal life. The body is, undoubtedly, the most intimate of personal sites. Yet it is only relatively recently that the body has become a key sociological concern. Prior to this, the body had been merely an afterthought within sociological research, not a primary object of analysis. Building upon Southerton’s chapter on consumer culture (Chapter  8) in this volume, this chapter uses the lens of consumption and personal life to explore how the body is not only socially constructed by our consumption habits, but also materially experienced through personal care for our bodies. The chapter begins by briefly examining the history of the body within social science including the influence of feminist studies and the effects of the cultural turn; that is, the move towards exploring the cultural dimensions of society (Devine and Savage, 2005). Drawing upon the notion of the ‘body as a project’ (Giddens, 1992; Shilling, 2003), the chapter engages with a variety of studies which explore the body as an outward symbol of our individual chosen consumption choices: from fashion, to tattooing, dieting, and eating. From this I consider feminist work which calls for recognition of the lived, everyday experiences of the ‘leaky’, ‘fleshy’ material of the body within personal life, such as being pregnant, or being ‘outsize’. The second half of the chapter brings these two previous approaches together, exploring how the body within personal life is a site of ongoing negotiation between conforming to cultural norms, while also managing the ever-changing material of the body. I consider the work undertaken in maintaining and repairing the body through daily grooming practices and the influence objects, technologies and the labour of others has on this. In all, by exploring the body through the lens of personal life we gain an appreciation of the body as not just a site where consumption is displayed and identities represented, 117

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but also as a material means through which everyday personal life is produced, experienced, and negotiated.

The body as a cultural symbol Theoretical approaches to the body have long considered the relationship between self and body. Plato (427–347 bc) understood mind to dominate matter (cited in Longhurst, 1997: 491). Similarly, the s­eventeenth-century philosopher Descartes argued that the body was merely a vessel controlled by the mind. This Cartesian dualism, as it is referred to, clearly separated ‘mind’ from ‘body’ and became instrumental in shaping later Western thought around modern medicine and the objectification of the body (Turner, 1996). In turn, this dichotomy was culturally entrenched with other dualisms affecting the body, such as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, or ‘public’ and ‘private’. Scholars have illuminated how the body has been associated with femininity, nature, and the private sphere, while the mind represents men, society, and public space. According to Elizabeth Grosz (1989), the latter are more highly valued than the former. Through these gendered dualisms, the body is marginalised and ‘othered’ at the expense of the mind. As Robyn Longhurst (1997: 494) argues, this ‘mind/body dualism plays a vital role in determining what counts as legitimate knowledge’, meaning that ‘dirty’, messy topics such as the body, reproduction, and sex (among many others) were for a long time ignored in sociology. It took feminism to bring these overlooked topics and dualistic thinking to light. As early as the turn of the twentieth century feminists from both England and the United States were writing about the personal politics of the body and confronting the politicisation and othering of the female body (Rossi, 1973; Rowbotham, 1977). From campaigning for women’s reproductive rights, such as access to abortion and contraception, to equal voting rights, to raising concerns about women’s economic status (e.g., access to the labour market, having financial independence), women’s bodies and what they did with them were viewed by feminists as political and contested issues. As the well-worn slogan of Second Wave feminism states, ‘the personal is political’, and nothing was more personal, or political, than women’s bodies and how they were controlled. From the 1960s onwards, feminist attention turned to the sexualisation and objectification of women’s bodies. Pornography, clothing, and beauty regimes were all critiqued for their production of patriarchal, idealised, and eroticised female bodily norms (Chapkis, 1988; Dworkin and MacKinnon, 1988; Wolf, 1990). 118

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This heightened feminist concern with the objectification of the female body occurred around the same time as an emerging turn towards studying culture within mainstream sociological studies. This ‘cultural turn’, as it is termed, saw a shift within the social sciences and humanities away from structural determinism; that is, approaches that understood society as governed by structural elements (e.g. the economy, government, religion, language) which pre-determine any outcomes. Instead, the cultural turn meant an appreciation for the importance of culture in understanding and making sense of social relations and identities (Nast, 2001). Early studies from this new sociological emphasis on culture explored the importance of the body as a cultural symbol. Such work looked at how people wore certain clothing, hairstyles, and accessories to identify with particular collective cultural styles. For example, punk had a very particular ‘look’, with spiky hair and ripped clothes which symbolised its collective cultural identity (McRobbie, 1980). The end of the twentieth century saw a move within social science towards a heightened focus on the individual within personal life. Theories of late modernity drew on significant societal transformations, such as rising consumption, pluralisation of family life, and women’s increasing role in the labour market. De-traditionalisation was seen to be removing traditional roles and values related to family, work, and religion, which were now understood to be shaped by consumption and the needs and desires of the individual. Proponents of this individualisation thesis (Beck, 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995; Giddens, 1992), as it has been termed, stressed the importance of the autonomous, reflexive self and with it the body as a project of the self. This shift saw scholars still focused on the body as a site of cultural symbolism, but the focus was on identity and how this was deemed individual, malleable, ‘plastic’, and something which could be bought and created. Academics argued that this era of late modernity had brought with it despair at the lack of structure within society which, it was suggested, ultimately left individuals feeling ‘out of control’ (Shilling, 2003). The body was in this context seen as the last sphere over which people could exert control over their personal lives and create a sense of self. With increased opportunities for consumption, major advances in technology, such as plastic surgery, and growth in expert knowledge regarding health and medical matters, the opportunities to enhance one’s physical self, and thus the identity one portrayed, appeared endless. As Chris Shilling notes (2003: 157), ‘self-identity and the body’ became ‘reflexively ­organised projects which have to be sculpted from the complex plurality of choices 119

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offered by high modernity’. Hence the body came to be seen as a project – a place to sculpt one’s identity, create individuality, and promote oneself to others.

The body as a project: Symbol over substance The individualisation thesis inspired a sea-change in how sociologists studied the body within personal life. The body was now understood as a means of expressing lifestyle choices, or adopting what Shilling (2003) refers to as particular body regimes – an outward, physical expression of choice, intended to signal specific symbolic meanings about one’s identity. One particular area of academic interest concerning such body regimes was how the body is disciplined and controlled to fit specific aesthetic ideals – such as being slim and appearing ‘fit’, or what has been referred to as ‘the tyranny of slenderness’ (Chernin, 1981). Particularly feminist scholars focused on how overweight bodies had begun to be perceived in Western society as unhealthy, excessive, and out of control (Valentine, 1997). Although it has been recognised that men are also under pressure to conform to body ideals regarding weight (Bell and McNaughton, 2007), women have predominantly been the focus of these debates, and, moreover, the intended recipients of bodily ideals about slimness. In keeping with ideas about individualisation, several feminist writers have argued that control over one’s weight is a way for women to feel a sense of value and power, in a society where they are oppressed (Orbach, 1984). Others have studied what happens when this sense of control and discipline is taken to extremes – such as through the illnesses of anorexia and bulimia (e.g. Gordon, 1990; Lupton, 1996). Exercise has been another key focus of study with regard to how the body is disciplined and controlled as part of the body project. Moya Lloyd’s (1996) work on aerobics looks at how the activity is positioned as a toolkit for women to gain control of their bodies and transform them to conform to idealised feminine beauty aesthetics. This is done through multiple narratives including: aesthetic narratives which emphasise bodily transformation; health narratives which position aerobics in contrast to other ‘unhealthy’ pursuits of slenderness, such as eating disorders; and scientific narratives which sanction aerobics as a safe method of cardiovascular exercise. Together these narratives help to present aerobics as an ‘ideal’ way of disciplining the body. Interwoven with discipline and control of the body as a project has also been the notion of choice within personal life. The contemporary 120

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era of accelerated consumption has been defined as one of individuality, an opportunity to be whoever one wants to be. The notion ‘you are what you buy’ reflects the ‘sign-saturated’ state of conspicuous, always on-show consumption, whereby what we eat, wear, and do makes a statement about who we are (see Southerton, Chapter 8 in this volume), albeit within the confines of societal ideals. Studies on fashion and the body have exemplified this, emphasising how clothing acts as a cultural symbol about who we are (Arthur, 2000; Entwistle, 2000; Wilson, 2003). From the spectacular heteronormative statements a big white wedding dress makes (Ingraham, 1999), to everyday fashions which indicate our chosen profession (Brydon, 1998; Entwistle, 1997), fashion has been perceived as a means of displaying identity choice, but within the confines of collective social norms about the body. Likewise, body modification, such as tattoos and piercings, has similarly been conveyed as a means of identity expression, albeit one which pushes the boundaries of social bodily norms. As Paul Sweetman (1999: 53) discusses, ‘as corporeal expressions of the self, tattoos and piercings might thus be seen as instances of contemporary body projects’. Yet, the physical intrusion and often permanency of these modifications means they are deemed something more than ‘free-floating’ commodities. Unlike clothes, tattoos are not something you can easily remove or replace. Yet as Sweetman observes, it is the permanency of such modifications which enhances their appeal as acts of self-creativity, creating marks of individuality that can also express something about the bearer’s biography and personal life. Tattoos are thus a way of ‘claiming an interest in self-control and bodily s­elf-ownership’ (Pitts, 1999: 298). Studying the body as a project can be a means of making sense of major changes within society, changes which according to many academics have led to increasing individualisation and a focus on reflexive self-identity within personal life. As the above has illustrated, consumerism offered the means with which to create particular bodies, be that through diet, clothing, exercise, or other forms of modification. The body is in these studies presented as a sphere onto which any number of cultural symbols could be displayed, often with complex and multifaceted meanings. Yet, whilst these studies were undoubtedly crucial in finding new ways to appreciate the impact of societal change on personal life, they were not without critique. Individualisation has been heavily critiqued for crudely making distinctions between traditional and non-traditional ways of life; for example, around issues such as marriage, parenting, and sexuality (Smart, 2007; Smart and Shipman, 2004). Likewise, choice biography 121

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and self-reflexivity are very Western, privileged positions that are not available to all (Brannen and Nilsen, 2005; Jamieson, 1998, 1999). Further critique has been levelled at this ‘symbol over substance’ approach (Gregson and Crewe, 1998: 40) whereby the symbolic meanings of consumption (owning particular goods, partaking in certain activities and what this says about identity) overshadow their material and, often bodily, substance. Calls were made for a ‘rematerialisation’ of social and cultural studies (Jackson, 2004: 172). In the main, this is about studying how objects and inanimate materials structure everyday life, but this ‘material turn’, as it has been known, has also had a significant influence upon how scholars think about the body within personal life (Clever and Ruberg, 2014; see also Woodward, Chapter 6 in this volume).

The material of the body: Fleshy, lived experience The material turn within social science prompted a focus on matter: not just the matter of objects but also that of the human body; in other words, biological matter. Turning away from thinking about the body simply as a site to signal identity through cultural symbols, this focus on bodily substance inspired a plethora of studies interested in the lived, embodied, and fleshy experience of the body within personal life. Such studies embraced a wider move within the social sciences to appreciate the everyday, and the embedded, relational and connected nature of personal life (Jamieson, 2013; Mason, 2008; Morgan, 1996, 2011; Smart, 2007; see also the Introduction to this volume). Through this lens the body is understood as an entity which is in constant flux, not something to which we can attach fixed, stable meanings (Mol and Law, 2004). Embodied feminist accounts of pregnancy (Longhurst, 1994), menstruation (Shail, 2007), and recurrent thrush (Overend, 2011) have demonstrated what Grosz (1994) terms the ‘leaky’ boundaries of the body. Such studies explore what it is like to experience a body, the boundaries of which are not fixed, but instead leak out matter. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Mary Douglas (2000), feminist scholars argue that bodily fluids, when outside the body, are perceived in contemporary Western societies as ‘matter out of place’ and therefore as a potential source of contamination and pollution. Such a view, Grosz (1994) argues, ensures that women’s bodies are consistently represented as ‘leakier’ than men’s because of bodily processes such as pregnancy and menstruation that only women experience. Consequently, women’s bodies are viewed as inferior due to their lack of containment. For many feminist scholars, 122

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this representation of women’s bodies as excessive, polluting and inferior contributes to notions of gendered differences within society. Box  9.1 examines these notions through the work of Longhurst (1994) on embodied experiences of being a pregnant consumer. Other work interested in the fleshy, lived body within personal life has considered the emotional dimensions of being embodied. Rachel Colls’s (2006) work on ‘bodily bigness’ examines accounts of women

Box 9.1 Being pregnant in the shopping mall Longhurst (1994) studied the stories and testimonies of pregnant women visiting the Centreplace shopping mall in Hamilton, New Zealand, paying specific attention to how being pregnant influenced their experiences of the space. Longhurst’s work revealed that pregnant women often felt out of place in the shopping centre because of changes to their body, and certain expectations on how pregnant bodies should behave. As Longhurst notes (1994: 219): ‘during pregnancy in some places women find that their usual behaviours in public became increasingly socially unacceptable the more visibly pregnant they became’. Behaving ‘inappropriately’ such as visiting a lingerie shop, dressing ‘inappropriately’ for a mother to be, or occupying particular places at ‘inappropriate’ times, such as bars or pubs at night, are all seen as transgressions of the unwritten cultural rules of pregnancy that govern how the pregnant body should behave. Longhurst notes how the body of a pregnant woman in the shopping mall is not just subject to the gaze and approval of others, but also how the woman must negotiate her new bodily state. Navigating stairs and escalators when one’s centre of balance has altered; finding and fitting into toilet facilities when there is an increased frequency in urination; and being able to engage in activities such as visiting the cinema where seating is cramped and not designed for pregnant bodies, are all examples Longhurst’s participants draw on to describe their embodied experience of being pregnant in the shopping mall. As one participant describes, with reference to accessing toilet facilities, ‘I hardly ever go out now, or if I do go into town, I try and stick to places where I know there are public conveniences’ (Longhurst, 1994: 219). These embodied accounts highlight how the pregnant body is experienced as a ‘leaky’ body within personal life.

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considered ‘outsize’ by consumer society, illustrating the varied ways participants emotively negotiate shopping for clothes. From remaining ambivalent about size, to feeling ‘normal’ in outsize clothes, to wearing alternative styles which ‘materialise’ the body differently, Colls conveys how having a body that challenges societal norms about what a body should look like and how it should behave can lead to a multiplicity of emotional experiences. By studying such lived, embodied accounts of the body, the social sciences have moved away from thinking about the body simply as a surface for cultural symbolism, instead appreciating its very substance; something that in and of itself impacts on our experience of everyday personal life. Driven in part by the material turn, and also by a greater emphasis on everyday personal life, these feminist approaches have brought the experiences of bodily matter to the fore. In what follows I consider contemporary accounts of the body, and their focus on the ever-changing material of the body. In doing so the chapter engages further with the material turn, exploring how our bodies in personal life are maintained and repaired through practices, objects, and the work of ourselves and others. As noted above, the material turn within the social sciences brought with it a renewed focus on objects and materials, and levied criticism at accounts which focused on ‘spectacular consumption’ and commodities as cultural symbols. Studies of material culture interweave objects with culture, concentrating upon the substance of things – their fibres, textures, patterns, and forms (Miller, 2005). Sophie Woodward’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 6) focuses on material culture within personal life, revealing the embodied, sensory nature of the everyday relationships we have with objects around us. These relationships are structured by practices; that is, the often routine or habitual activities we undertake with objects. Doing the laundry (Shove, 2003) or taking a shower (Hand et al., 2005) are examples of everyday practices which involve the appropriation of particular objects and technologies. Our daily routines and schedules ensure that we repeat the same activities and use the same objects (Southerton, 2013). Such routines, and the activities and objects which help structure them, only become noticeable when something disrupts the routine (Graham and Thrift, 2007). Maybe we get up late and miss our morning shower, or the kettle fuse blows and we cannot have our usual 11 o’clock cup of tea. In other words, we only start to question the objects and practices which are so crucial to our everyday personal lives when something happens to them. 124

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Bringing the body back in: Routines of bodily personal care A key criticism of scholarly accounts of material culture and material practices has been the absence of the body. While embodiment is ‘regularly re-iterated’ within these, ‘bodily experiences and their consequences’ remain unaccounted for (Warde, 2014: 294), and the body as an object of production and consumption is still largely neglected. The few studies that have considered the body in relation to practices and material culture have addressed topics such as sensory experiences of home air conditioning (Wilhite, 2012); the practices of motoring (Sheller, 2004); and Nordic walking (Shove & Pantzar, 2005). Furthermore, scholars in this area who do consider the body often do not engage with the notion of bodily maintenance and repair within personal life. Yet the body, as we know, is a form of lived everyday materiality, and we undertake bodily practices and routines to keep the body operational. As Mol and Law (2004: 56) note, the body is always in a state of flux and we are always working to create the ‘coherent body’ in personal life through ongoing maintenance and repair, such as sleeping, eating, taking a daily shower, and brushing our hair. In part, such bodily maintenance is about conforming to societal ideals about what constitutes an acceptable body and living an acceptable personal life. I suspect very few of us would feel comfortable going about our daily life unwashed, with dirty teeth, and knotty hair. Other practices are essential to staying alive, but are still wrapped up in societal norms – for example around acceptable foods to eat, and the right time and place to sleep. Nevertheless, these mundane activities are also driven by the materiality of the body. The body constantly changes and demands our attention – be it a grumbling stomach that alerts us that it is time to eat; or feeling sweaty, smelly, and in need of a shower after a long day at work. Hence, we cannot easily separate our fleshy, everyday experiences of the substance of the body from the societal ideals it is expected to display and symbolise. The two are intertwined and for us to fully appreciate embodied experience we must take account of this. Bodily grooming practices are one way in which we can begin to appreciate how the body is maintained and repaired, both as a means of creating the ‘coherent body’, while also conforming to societal norms. Box 9.2 draws upon my own work on haircare to explore this idea in more detail. A further interesting study by Jayoti Das and Stephen De Loach (2011) uses quantitative methods, drawing upon the 2009 American 125

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Box 9.2 Everyday haircare practices My own research (Holmes, 2014, 2015a, 2015b) has explored the bodily grooming practices of haircare. Focusing on women’s haircare, I have paid particular attention to how hair demands our attention. From getting greasy and needing washing, to growing so long that it obstructs our vision, to obvious roots and ‘twinkling greys’, our hair is always changing; as Nigel Thrift notes, hair ‘grows so it must be cut’ (2008:19). This specific temporality of hair – meaning that hair changes over time – means we must engage with it on a regular, if not everyday basis, attending to its materiality to keep it maintained. Many of my research participants would talk about instances when they felt their hair was ‘out of control’ and ‘doing its own thing’, and consequently requiring hair care to ‘tame’ it. Despite being located at the ‘dead margins of the body’ (Kwint, 1999:9), hair is often described as having a specific vitalism and potency; what Bruno Latour (2000: 119) would refer to as an ability to ‘act back’, objecting to things that we try to make it do. Haircare practices such as colouring, cutting, and washing are a means of taming hair’s materiality, and thus keeping control of the body. Yet, as my research has illustrated, these practices to ensure that hair and the body remain stable and ‘coherent’ are as much about conforming to societal ideals as they are about controlling the materiality of hair. One participant referred to not wanting to be perceived as a ‘dirty bitch’ for having greasy roots; another said she would look like ‘a troll’ if she turned up to a party with obvious roots (Holmes, 2015b). There are normative expectations around how hair should look and the practices one must undertake to control hair’s materiality. Thus, everyday bodily grooming practices are wrapped up in notions of morality, respectability, and conformity, which in turn vary according to for example gender and class background.

Time Use Survey, to investigate if time spent engaged in bodily grooming practices increases earning potential in the workplace. The authors explore the popular idea that working on one’s appearance equates to personality traits valued in the workplace. Yet they conclude that ‘the effect of grooming on earnings differs significantly by gender and race’ (2011: 26). For example, grooming negatively affects women’s earnings, 126

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while having a huge positive affect on the earnings of minority race men. This illustrates how societal ideals around the acceptable body are influenced by factors such as gender and ‘race’. Adding a further layer to these debates is that our everyday care of the body, and the routines and practices that constitute it, also involves and is influenced by the work of others, be those objects and technologies which enhance and enable the care of our body, or the paid/unpaid labour of other people. If we think about objects and technologies there are numerous items which form part of our everyday care of the body: toiletries, hair appliances, showers, baths, sinks, washing machines, and so forth. Likewise, there are societal ideals around the sort of objects and technologies we should be able to access to care for our bodies, and how often we should be using them. The shower, for example, is a feature in almost all modern homes, and the practice of daily showering has largely replaced the weekly bath of 50 years ago. As Hand et al. (2005) discuss, the introduction of showering technology has changed normative expectations around dirt and washing the body. The speed and convenience of the shower, as opposed to the bath, enables people to wash their bodies much more quickly. But an unintended consequence has been that people are now also perceived to get dirtier much sooner. In this respect we see how objects and technologies not only structure our bodily practices, but can also alter them. The introduction of the shower has changed how often we perceive the material of the body to be dirty, changing our lived, fleshy experience and societal ideals around bodily routines within personal life. Care and maintenance of our bodies is also structured by the work of other people. The hairdresser, the dentist, and the beautician are examples of people who we pay to maintain and repair our bodies. Such paid professionals conduct what has been termed ‘bodywork’ upon others. Originating from research on nursing and care work (Lee-Treweek, 1997; Twigg, 2000), the concept of bodywork has been widened to include activities such as beauty therapy (McDowell, 2009), hairdressing (Cohen, 2010; Holmes, 2015a), alternative therapies (Oerton, 2004), and also sex work (Sanders, 2005). Many studies note how bodywork is closely entwined with other forms of labour, such as emotional labour (Hochschild, 1984) whereby workers use their emotions to manage such service work situations. For example, Toerien and Kitzinger (2007) explore how beauty therapists must navigate between attending to a client’s emotional needs, while also attending to their body. Bodywork also entails aesthetic labour (Witz et al., 2003), meaning that workers ensure 127

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their own bodies aesthetically represent the organisations and professions they are part of. This is illustrated by Yeadon-Lee et  al.’s (2011) study of hair stylists in a high-end salon who were required to look the part by wearing fashionable clothes and sporting the latest hairstyles, and who encouraged their clients to do the same. Thus bodywork, emotional labour, and aesthetic labour are all seen to operate in the spaces and places where we may pay for the maintenance and repair of our bodies. For some, these different forms of labour create a purely ­transaction-based relationship between client and customer. As Cohen (2010) argues, with regards to hairdressing, waged stylists befriend their clients using emotional forms of labour because it encourages repeat custom. In other words, they ‘create’ superficial relationships with clients to ensure they keep coming back and paying for their services. However, my work on hairdressing has shown that over time these repeat visits and the embodied and trusting nature of such bodily maintenance interactions – one body working upon another – can result in enduring and lasting relationships (Holmes, 2018). For some of my participants their friendship with their hairdresser spanned several decades, held together by the repeat maintenance of their hair. Thus, everyday relationships with objects and with other people can be forged through the very personal practices of body maintenance and repair.

Concluding remarks This chapter has considered the body within personal life. It has charted how scholarly thought on the body and its connections to consumption have changed over the last 50 years: from perceiving the body as merely a site of cultural symbolism, to appreciating its lived, fleshy, and embodied substance. In doing so, we have seen how research on the ‘body as a project’ and notions of self-reflexivity have been critiqued by feminist accounts interested in the substance of the body and its leaky boundaries. In turn, such work has inspired studies interested in bodily practices, and how repair and maintenance of the body which is always in flux reveals how societal norms, objects, and technologies, and also the work of others, all structure our embodied experience. Focusing upon the most intimate of sites, this chapter has illustrated how the body in personal life is both socially constructed and materially experienced. 128

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QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION yyThis chapter has discussed bodily regimes such as body building and dieting. What other activities can you think of that might be considered to be bodily regimes and form part of the ‘body as a project’? yySpend one day paying close attention to all of the adverts you come into contact with (e.g., on TV, the Internet, in magazines). Think and make notes about the sorts of bodies and identities they are trying to promote. yyCan you think of any objects and technologies that have recently been developed specifically for maintaining/grooming the body? What new social norms have such objects and technologies created? yyThe chapter has discussed professionals who are involved in bodily maintenance practices, such as hairdressers and beauticians, and the relationships we may form with them. Think of some other examples and explore the different qualities of these relationships.

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10 HOME

SUE HEATH

Introduction Home … is a place, a site in which we live. But, more than this, home is an idea and an imaginary that is imbued with feelings. (Blunt and Dowling, 2006: 2 – emphasis in original).

Home is a deeply evocative concept which holds a very important place in most people’s lives: in its absence or presence, whether rooted in the past or in some form of imagined future, or linked to current hopes and dreams, fears and anxieties, pleasures and pains. Its very familiarity means that the idea of home has a common sense resonance in most people’s lives. Yet what becomes clear from even the most superficial engagement with the literature on home is that it is a complex, multidimensional and often contradictory notion, and one that is both historically and culturally specific. It has also been explored from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, including sociology, social anthropology, cultural geography, women’s studies, psychology, housing studies, architecture, literary studies, and history. Each perspective brings different nuances to our understanding of the concept, yet all speak to the centrality of ideas of home to the conduct of everyday life. This chapter unpacks the concept of home and its ambiguities by interrogating the commonly assumed links between, first, housing and home; second, family and home; and third, privacy and home. These are by no means the only common associations, but are perhaps the most ubiquitous and as such have been widely explored in existing research. It is impossible to cover the entire field within this short chapter, but Mallett (2004) provides a particularly useful overview of other key themes. In addition to the themes covered in this chapter, Mallett also discusses ‘the ideal home’; home as a haven; home as a place of origin and destination; being at home in the world; and home as the symbol of self, as expressed through the material culture of the home (see Woodward, Chapter  6 in this volume). All of these dimensions of home feed into our everyday understandings of the 130

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term, highlighting how ideas of home seep into, and are integral to, so many aspects of personal life.

Housing and home The association of home with a physical dwelling place has particular resonance for many people. At its most basic, we may think of our home as a place of shelter, meeting one of the fundamental physiological needs for human survival (Maslow, 1943). But beyond this minimal definition, and regardless of its physical form, which varies hugely across different cultural contexts, our dwelling place – ‘the place we live’ – provides a key setting for our domestic lives. It is where we begin and end the day, and it provides the backdrop to our everyday routines and habits. It is a key site for some of our most important and intimate interactions, both positive and negative. It can also be a fixed base in an otherwise transient world. Most students who live away from the parental home, for example, will probably talk about ‘going home’ after a day on campus, rather than ‘going back to my student house/halls’, even if they do not consider their student residence to offer much in terms of genuine ‘home comforts’. In countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States, this link between housing and home extends to a strong emphasis on home ownership. In the Australian context, the widespread desire to buy and own a property of one’s own is specifically referred to as ‘the Great Australian Dream’, and home ownership is also a key dimension of the much-vaunted ‘American Dream’. One need only look at the marketing of new housing developments in these countries to see how frequently housing is sold through appeals to dominant ideas of home and homemaking. Advertisements invariably refer to new homes for sale, rather than new houses, and typically feature aspirational images of ‘the ideal home’: stylishly furnished, and occupied by smiling, happy people. In countries with high rates of home ownership considerable emphasis is then placed on the desirability of owning a place to call one’s own, with research in such countries consistently highlighting that the vast majority of young adults aspire to future home ownership. In the United Kingdom, for example, a recent survey found that 81 per cent of 25- to 34-year-olds expressed a preference to be an owner occupier within the next two years (Panell, 2016), even though the reality of home ownership is rather different: only 34 per cent of this age group were actually living in their own houses in 2014/15, compared with 54 per cent 10 years earlier (DCLG, 2016). 131

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This last statistic reveals the effects of the 2008 global financial crisis on younger adults, and it is important to recognise that ­societal pressure to purchase a house almost at any cost was an important factor behind the crisis. The dream of home ownership in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom was held out as realisable to ­previously excluded groups through access to cheap ‘sub-prime’ m ­ ortgage ­products targeted at borrowers with weak credit histories and l­imited repayment capacity, until the sector eventually imploded with the global ­consequences with which we are now so familiar (Bone and O’Reilly, 2010). Yet these buyers were arguably only trying to secure for themselves what other, wealthier citizens in home-owning societies take for granted: somewhere safe and secure to call ‘home’. In a recent study of people who took out sub-prime mortgages in ­California in the run-up to 2008, Carolina Reid (2017) reveals some of the human ­stories behind the crash. She notes that most accounts of the ­sub-prime market focus too strongly on the financial allure of home ownership as an investment vehicle for poorer families. Instead, she argues that such accounts ‘preclude the multiple ways in which h ­ ousing is still c­onsidered a home by many, and that for those who are often tossed around in the rental market by bad landlords and forced to live in poorly maintained properties, owning a home means safe shelter’ (Reid, 2017: 803–4). Marnie, for example, a Filipino home owner interviewed in Reid’s study, noted that: We’d been renting a long time, six or seven years, all here in the same neighbourhood. But five or six different places, always moving. The landlord wants to sell. You get pushed out because they think you’re too noisy or have too many people living in the unit … I wanted to buy so we could just settle down, you know. And provide a home … A home for us is an anchor (Reid, 2017: 804).

Yet after the financial crash, many of Reid’s interviewees faced foreclosure and eviction, and became as insecure in their ‘own’ homes as they had been when living in privately rented properties. The promise of finding somewhere to call a home through ownership was, then, extremely shortlived and the threat of eviction was never far away. Box 10.1 likewise highlights the impact of eviction on one’s sense of home – this time eviction from rented properties. The examples above raise the question of whether housing of any kind – whether rented or owned – is necessarily synonymous with home. 132

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Box 10.1 Home, housing, and financial insecurity In a compelling ethnographic study of the housing experiences of America’s urban poor, Matthew Desmond spells out the devastating consequences of insecure housing for some of the most vulnerable members of US society. First published in 2016, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City follows eight poor white and AfricanAmerican families as they struggle to keep a roof over their heads in the notoriously unregulated private rented sector. All are in a constant battle for housing stability in a system that is stacked against them at every turn. Even having children is no protection against the constant threat of eviction; on the contrary, it often makes eviction more likely. Arleen, for example, is threatened with eviction for calling an ambulance when her son Jafaris suffers an asthma attack, on the grounds that visits by the emergency services exposed her landlord’s sub-standard apartment block to unwelcome scrutiny by officialdom. These are families in almost constant debt, and who are made to feel grateful for whatever housing they can secure, regardless of the poor conditions they invariably have to endure. These properties are rarely experienced as homes: they are simply what those on the margins of society must settle for, often offering only the most basic form of provision. Towards the end of the book, Arlene, Jafaris, and Jori move into yet another apartment, one which, remarkably, appears to have nothing wrong with it. Desmond movingly describes the family’s response: Arlene sat on the floor. She found a soft bag and leaned back on it. She felt at peace, at home. It had been two months since her eviction hearing with Sherrena [her former landlady]. Jori sat down beside Arleen and pitched his head into her shoulder. Jafaris followed, lying on Arlene’s legs and resting his head on her belly. They stayed like that for a long time (Desmond, 2016: 284, emphasis added).

Yet this is a rare moment of peace. Within days the family are forced to leave, as Jori is followed home from school by a police officer after having assaulted his teacher, again exposing the landlord to scrutiny. We leave the family at the end of the book in yet another sub-standard apartment, with Jori dreaming of his future: he wants to become a carpenter, so he can build his mother a house to call home.

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Robert Ginsberg (1999: 31) has argued that ‘our residence is where we live, but our home is how we live’ (emphasis added), suggesting that maybe there is not much overlap between the two categories. Mary Douglas (1991) has also questioned the link between housing and home. Elaborating on the idea that home is ‘a kind of space’, she argued that Home is ‘here’ or it is ‘not here’ … It is always a localizable idea. Home is located in space, but it is not necessarily a fixed space. It does not need bricks and mortar, it can be a wagon, a caravan, a boat or a tent. It need not be a large space, but space there must be, for home starts by bringing some space under control (Douglas, 1991: 289, emphasis added).

This point is illustrated in the following quotation from a woman interviewed by the author of this chapter about the spaces she considered to be ‘home’ when she was in her teen years and experiencing difficulties in her relationship with her parents: When I was 15 I was driving illegally and as soon as I was old enough I always had a car, so I know it sounds really stupid, but like my car was my home. Because I don’t do this at all now to my cars, but I’d make sure it had decent mats in, seat covers, I had a blanket, I had a fur rug, you know, a few personal bits and pieces and, you know, ornaments and nodding dogs and things. And I suppose my car was my haven, if you like.1

This response points to broader understandings of home that are independent of housing: the presence of personal possessions and, critically, access to a space to call one’s own, a point considered further in the later discussion of privacy. It also suggests that it is possible to experience a sense of home in the absence of a physical dwelling place. This is a disputed issue among homelessness researchers. Some argue that it is possible to attain a sense of home in the most inhospitable of spaces if one is nonetheless able to exercise some degree of control over that space (Kellett and Moore, 2002). Proponents of this view argue that life in temporary accommodation, or even on the streets, may for some homeless 1 Previously unpublished quotation taken from an interview conducted as part of the ‘Young adults and shared household living’ project, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) between 1998 and 2000 (award reference R000237033).

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people constitute home and may offer a greater sense of homeliness and emotional security than the houses they may have previously lived in with family members. Other researchers, such as Parsell (2012), have responded by arguing that housing is a basic prerequisite for attaining a sense of home, and to talk about home in the absence of a roof over one’s head makes little sense to most homeless people. Nonetheless, physical shelter appears not to be sufficient of itself to guarantee a sense of home – even physical shelter built to an extremely high specification. Consider the famous assertion of the French modernist architect Le Corbusier that the house is first and foremost ‘a machine for living in’. This is an idea that all too often conjures up images of a bare, cold, unhomely space, and rightly or wrongly modernist architecture has often been criticised precisely for its rebuttal of what many might consider to be essential home comforts (Heynen, 2005). So what else may be considered important in constructing a sense of home if a house itself is insufficient? The next section considers the link that has often been drawn between home and the presence of family.

Family and home According to Allan (1989: 141), home is ‘both a physical setting and a matrix of social relationships’, and the matrix of social relationships that is most commonly associated with home is that of the family. Again, this is a frequently exploited association in the commercial housing sector. The favoured narrative arc of television advertisements for building societies used to be, and all too often still is, the depiction of a young heterosexual couple peering into an estate agent’s window who, over the course of what follows, acquire the keys of a house, move in, decorate a nursery, have children, watch their children grow up and leave home, become ‘empty nesters’, acquire grandchildren, and get old together in the family home they have created – all in the space of 60 seconds! But the message is clear: it is the presence of close family that makes a house a home, a point well captured in the claim that ‘there is a discourse of home in western society, which suggests that a dwelling … becomes most keenly felt as home when it is a site of privatized nuclear family life’ (Gorman-Murray, 2007: 231). This conflation of home and family has strong historical roots. Processes of industrialisation in Britain during the late eighteenth and nineteenth century moved production out of the home and into designated workplaces such as factories and mills. This led to a separation 135

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of work and home, both in terms of people’s everyday routines and the meanings which they attached to these previously connected concepts. As a consequence, work and home became regarded as ‘separate spheres’: the former associated with the public sphere, linked to civic engagement, the market and the state, and the latter associated with the private sphere, linked to domesticity, intimacy, and the family. The private sphere was also strongly associated with women, who were expected to transform idealised notions of the home into reality through their emotional and moral labour as good wives and mothers (Laslett and Brenner, 1989). Victorian poet Coventry Patmore personified this figure in his narrative poem ‘The Angel in the House’, which became enormously popular both in Britain and the United States following its publication in the mid-nineteenth century. The writer Virginia Woolf later satirised Patmore’s ideal of the perfect wife – ‘She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was a chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it … ’ (Woolf, 2008[1931]) – yet Patmore’s ideas had a strong and enduring appeal in defining key features of the familial home during this period and beyond. As industrialisation took hold in Victorian England, the middle classes began to vacate overcrowded, polluted, and socially disordered urban areas by moving to new suburban housing developments serviced by equally new commuter train lines. This reinforced the gendering of the family home, with men commuting back into towns and cities during the day to pursue paid employment while women and children remained predominantly within the bounds of suburbia (Scott, 2013; see also May, ‘Personal life in public spaces’, Chapter 11 in this volume, for a further discussion of the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ spaces). There was a similar rush to the suburbs among the lower middle classes in the interwar years, alongside the development of suburban council housing for the working classes. This led during the 1950s to the promotion of home-centred lifestyles, grounded in a ‘modern domestic ideal’ that was characterised by the growth of home-based consumption and leisure (Crow, 1989). These shifts were underpinned by the separation from wider kin networks of many families living on new housing estates and by dominant ideologies of family-centredness and companionate marriage. Cumulatively, these developments further reinforced the conflation of home and family and, despite huge social change in the intervening years – not least in relation to women’s participation in the labour 136

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market as discussed by Nordqvist (‘Couple relationships’, Chapter 3 in this volume) – this association remains strong (Pilkey et al., 2017). Yet this conflation is problematic for at least two reasons. First, it assumes that family life is in fact experienced as ‘homely’, when this may be far from the case. This particular challenge lies at the heart of classic feminist critiques of home, whereby the so-called ‘family home’ may be experienced as cold and unwelcoming for at least some of its members: a potential site of violence, abuse, and oppression rather than of comfort, warmth, and security (Barrett and McIntosh, 1983). Globally, most acts of violence against women are committed not by strangers in public places but by intimate partners and relatives, usually in domestic contexts (United Nations, 2015c). Findings from the 2016 Crime Survey for England and Wales (based on self-report by sample members rather than on police records) suggest, for example, that 1.2 million women aged 16 to 59 had experienced domestic abuse in the previous year, equivalent to 7.7 per cent of all adult women (ONS, 2016). For those caught up in such a scenario, a sense of home might only ever be achieved by escaping from this oppressive environment. Similarly, LGBTQ young adults living in unsupportive families may choose not to disclose their non-heterosexual identities and so do not experience the family home as a place of authenticity and self-expression (see Heaphy, Chapter 12 in this volume, for a discussion of ‘coming out’). Alternatively, if they do come out to their family members they may experience hostility and even the threat or actuality of physical violence as a consequence (Tunåker, 2015; Valentine et al., 2003). The presence of family members is, then, by no means a guarantee of a sense of home. Nonetheless, a further important point of critique has been provided by some Black feminists, who have argued that for women of colour the home should not so readily be written off as a potential site of oppression. The writer bell hooks, for example, has observed that ‘we could not learn to love and respect ourselves in a culture of white supremacy, on the outside; it was there on the inside, in that “homeplace” most often created and kept by black women, that we had the opportunity to grow and nurture our spirits’ (hooks, 1991: 47). The second reason why the conflation of home and family is problematic is because it implies that those who live outside of the bounds of the traditional heterosexual family are unable to experience their domestic space as an authentic home. Various researchers have questioned this assumption. Andrew Gorman-Murray (2007), for example, has noted how the domestic spaces of same-sex couples are important sites of self-expression, providing validation of their sexual identities and (in an 137

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echo of hooks’ comment above) constituting a haven from an often hostile world. This assumption is also questioned in research on one-person households, a household type which has grown rapidly in recent decades, accounting for 29 per cent of UK households (ONS, 2015), 27 per cent of US households (Vespa et al., 2013) and 24 per cent of Australian households (ABS, 2016). Lynn Jamieson and Roona Simpson (2013) found that most of the ‘solo dwellers’ involved in their own extensive research in this field experienced home in very similar ways to those living in more familial settings, including through placing a strong emphasis on the social and collective meanings of home. This was achieved, for example, through regularly offering hospitality to friends and family members, and through surrounding themselves with objects and photographs that reminded them of those who were emotionally close to them. They concluded that ‘while living alone may encourage practices of “pleasing myself” that sometimes create resistance to living with others, it does not result in one type of home, and certainly not in the dominance of inhospitable homes or shrines to the self’ (Jamieson and Simpson, 2013: 121). The conflation of family and home thus masks a multitude of contradictions and ambiguities, despite its commonsense appeal and its long historical association. Yet various commentators have also noted that the historical separation of spheres was actually never as clear cut as it is often portrayed. Some have disputed the degree to which women were cloistered within the middle-class Victorian home and the extent to which the public sphere was kept out of it (Spencer-Wood, 1999), while others have pointed out that even during this period the presence of strangers and non-family members in the house was not at all unusual (Davidoff, 1995). So if neither physical shelter nor the presence of family is sufficient of itself to create a sense of home, what other factors have been cited? We turn now to another commonly cited association, that between privacy and home.

Privacy and home Peter Saunders and Peter Williams have argued that ‘it is barely an exaggeration to suggest that in British society the private realm is constituted by the home, and the home is constituted by the private realm; they entail each other and they are the conditions of each other’s reproduction’ (1998: 88). This idea is captured in the expression ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’, perhaps most perfectly realised in the home of Mr Wemmick, a clerk in Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations. Mr Wemmick lives in a cottage resembling a tiny castle, and protects his privacy through 138

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the addition of a drawbridge and a moat around his modest home. As he explains to the central character Pip when he invites him to visit his house, the office is one thing, and private life is another. When I go into the office, I leave the Castle behind me, and when I come into the Castle, I leave the office behind me. If it’s not in any way disagreeable to you, you’ll oblige me by doing the same. (Dickens, 1868: 286)

In contemporary sociological literature on housing and home, domestic privacy is often linked to the concept of ontological security, which has been defined as ‘confidence or trust that the natural or social worlds are as they appear to be, including the basic existential parameters of self and social identity’ (Giddens, 1984: 375). Ontological security has been widely associated with housing and its potential to offer the sense of a fixed place in an uncertain world – a sense of home – through offering privacy, a feeling of ‘settledness’, and a sense of control over one’s environment (Dupuis and Thorns, 1998; Easthope, 2014; Saunders, 1990). Under such conditions, it is argued, home then becomes perhaps the one place where we can truly be ourselves and feel a sense of certainty and rightness in the world. Conversely, this association also highlights why the absence of these conditions can be so distressing: for example, when faced with the threat of homelessness, or when leaving the parental home for the first time. Peter King has argued that domestic privacy is ensured in the context of a dwelling place through its ability to seclude and separate people from the public sphere: ‘the dwelling achieves this because it encloses us. It protects us from intrusion and unwanted attention’ (2004: 41, emphasis in original). In practice, though, freedom from the attention of others is often hard to attain. Moira Munro and Ruth Madigan (1993), for example, found that women in heterosexual marriages, especially those with children, often had few expectations of achieving privacy from other family members in their domestic space. Not only were these women rarely alone, but many felt that a desire for privacy and solitude went against the grain of ‘family togetherness’ and the ideal of the companionate marriage. Hence, for many there ‘was no vocabulary in which such needs could be expressed’ (Munro and Madigan, 1993: 37). They also found that children rarely experienced privacy in the family home, especially if they shared a bedroom. For many children, then, privacy may only be obtained in spaces outside of the family dwelling: in some sort of secret den or hideaway, perhaps, or at a friend’s house (see Box 10.2). 139

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Box 10.2 No place like home? How is home experienced by young people living in challenging family circumstances? This is a question that was explored in the Family Life Project,2 which focused on a group of young people growing up in families affected by parental drug and alcohol misuse, and who often struggled to distance themselves from the destructive behaviours of their parents. A paper by Sarah Wilson et al. (2012) reveals how the sensory and often intangible elements of domestic space deeply affected the young people’s sense of home: the smells and sounds, the heightened emotions, the look and feel of the places in which they lived. Even when they could not directly observe their parents’ substance misuse, the broader sensory atmosphere of the dwelling place often confirmed their suspicions and left them feeling unsafe and insecure. Bedrooms became important refuges for many of this group. These were places where they could deploy their own sensory strategies – such as playing loud music, watching television, drawing, or writing poems – to escape their parents and create a space over which they felt they had some (albeit limited) control. Wilson and her colleagues describe these sorts of strategies as ways of ‘privatising’ otherwise uncomfortable spaces. Bedrooms were also places where some of the young people felt it was safe to vent their anger and frustration towards their parents, through destroying personal possessions or punching teddy bears. Others, however, were only able to find safe spaces outside of the family house: at the homes of relatives and friends, for example. The researchers conclude that ‘this analysis points to the respondents’ ultimate lack of autonomy and control within their domestic environments, especially at younger ages’ (Wilson et al., 2012: 104). The study also demonstrates, yet again, that a roof over one’s head and the presence of family members is no guarantee of a sense of home, and that domestic privacy can be notoriously hard to achieve in practice.

1 2 ‘The Family Life Project’ was led by Professor Tim Rhodes of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and was funded by the Department of Health. The research was developed by Sarah Wilson into the ESRC-funded ‘Young People Creating Belonging’ project (RES-061–25-0501). For more details, see: http://www. researchunbound.org.uk/young-people-creating-belonging/

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The desire for privacy is further challenged when living with people to whom one is unrelated, who may even be strangers to each other on first moving into a property. Finding the right balance between privacy and interaction emerged as a key theme in recent research on shared living arrangements led by the author of this chapter (Heath et al., 2018). The Under the Same Roof project explored the experiences of sharers of all ages and in many different forms of shared housing.3 Sharers in privately rented house shares often told stories of housemates who failed to respect their privacy in various ways, whether through playing loud music at unsociable times, entering their bedrooms uninvited, or by expecting their housemates to become their best friends for the duration of their tenancy. Even when housemates were respectful of each other’s privacy, the close proximity that is a necessary feature of most shared living arrangements could be uncomfortable. As one young man noted, even if he went into his own room ‘you’re still like you’re, fifteen foot away from each other, you know what I mean’. Yet too much privacy was viewed equally negatively by many sharers and could in itself create the conditions of an unhomely environment, leaving residents feeling isolated and lonely. One sharer, for example, spoke of how the presence of a dining table in the lounge of a privately rented house share had influenced her decision to move in, as she had assumed that it held out the prospect of shared mealtimes with housemates, yet she had soon realised that the table was rarely if ever used for such purposes, and spoke rather mournfully of eating her meals alone. The concept of home is, then, often premised on a fine balance between privacy and communality. David Morgan (1996) points out that this is an embodied process, linked to the ways in which people who live in close proximity to each other tend to monitor, control ,and have intimate knowledge of each other’s bodies, which is also hinted at in the examples above (see also Holmes, Chapter 9 in this volume). In family contexts, these forms of scrutiny are often taken-for-granted aspects of everyday intimacy, and are frequently interpreted as practices of care. Yet they are more problematic in non-familial settings, where they may be more readily construed as intrusive. Bathroom privacy is a good case in point. A lodger interviewed for the Under the Same Roof project spoke of paying close attention to the daily rhythms of the other members of his household in order to carve out time for himself in the bathroom. 3

‘Under the same roof: the everyday relational practices of contemporary communal living’ was funded by the ESRC between 2013 and 2015 (award reference ES/ K006177/1).

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He commented that ‘that was the worst thing about it […]. I had to listen out, and see if I could listen out when somebody’s gone in, coming out, and just run downstairs…’. The idea that your housemates might in turn be listening out while you occupy the bathroom underlines the sense that private time is difficult to achieve under the threat of surveillance – whether surveillance of bathroom noise, cooking smells, or the noise of having sex in a private bedroom. All of these examples and more were cited as potential concerns in shared households, ‘allowing privately situated acts to potentially “leak” into public spaces, and undermine attempts at privacy’ (Heath et al., 2018: 110.) The association of the concept of home with privacy is, then, another problematic linkage. It may well be thought of as a desirable state by many people, but appears to be hard to achieve in practice, certainly if interpreted in terms of complete control of one’s domestic space. For others, a sense of home is more strongly associated with conviviality and the company of others, for good or ill. Privacy does not of course necessarily imply the complete absence of others, as we often crave privacy precisely in order to conduct our relationships behind closed doors (King, 2004: 42), but we may still hold out the hope that we can be free from intrusion when we want to be.

Concluding remarks This chapter has explored the concept of home by questioning the assumed links between housing and home, family and home, and privacy and home. Home can be all of these things and none of these things. Some of us may feel at home in multiple contexts, and in multiple dimensions of time. For example, many people, even decades after first leaving their parental home, may still refer to the house in which they were raised in terms of ‘home’. They may, for example, talk about ‘going home for Christmas’, referring not to their current home but to the house occupied by their parents. And even when their parents move house or are no longer alive, the home of their childhood may continue to exist in an intangible, almost ghostly, form alongside the home(s) of their adulthood. Others may feel that they have no place to truly call home, perhaps because they have never experienced a sense of home or because they are constantly striving to reproduce the idealised conditions of their childhood homes. Home, then, is a complex, multidimensional, and often contradictory notion, yet is fundamental to some of the most basic needs and longings, as well as to people’s sense of self in a constantly changing world. 142

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QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION yyIn your own experience, what makes a house a home? Conversely, what makes a house unhomely? yyIs it possible to experience a sense of home in the absence of a roof over one’s head? yyWhat do you understand by Ginsberg’s claim that ‘our residence is where we live, but our home is how we live’ (1999: 31)? yyWhat is ontological security and how does it relate to ideas about home?

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LIFE IN 11 PERSONAL PUBLIC SPACES VANESSA MAY

Introduction Many might assume that personal life is something that refers only to our relationships with family and friends, and that personal life takes place in our homes. However, this chapter argues that our personal lives are conducted also in public spaces and that the interactions we have with strangers and acquaintances while out in public are an important part of our personal lives. The chapter explores the history of the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’, and how this history is still visible today in the way certain groups, such as women and ethnic minorities, can feel excluded from some public spaces. Throughout, the aim of this chapter is to highlight the ways in which the ‘personal’ and the ‘public’ overlap and intermingle, and the consequences of this for personal life.

What is public space? Space tends to be divided into ‘public’ and ‘private’ (see also Heath, Chapter 10 in this volume). This distinction is often taken for granted, and it is assumed that people ‘just know’ what separates the two. Public space is generally understood to be open and accessible to all – think, for example, of streets, parks, and shops. In contrast, access to private space, such as the home, tends to be restricted to specific people such as friends and family. In practice, however, this distinction is not so clear-cut. For example, public space is not equally accessible to all groups in society (as discussed below), while the private space of home can be infiltrated by the public sphere – for example, in the form of state intervention in family life through family policy. The public/private distinction is also based on the assumption that, whereas many public spaces such as shops and bars are commercialised, private spaces are not. This assumption is, however, also problematic because few aspects of our personal lives remain untouched by consumer culture (see Southerton, Chapter 8 in this volume). 144

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In recent decades, the rapid rise in information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as email, mobile phones, and social n ­ etworking sites has given rise to a virtual public space, particularly prevalent in developed countries where the majority of the population have access to the Internet (Papacharissi, 2002). A virtual public space raises important questions for what personal life is and how it is lived in the virtual world, including the ways in which ICTs are changing the boundary between public and private (Baym, 2015). For example, political participation is now possible in the home by engaging in online debates on various social media platforms, thus bringing the public sphere into the home in new ways. Furthermore, it is now easier than ever to make personal issues public, for example by posting a video blog. Notions of what is ‘public’ and what is ‘private’ space and understandings of what constitutes ‘appropriate’ use of them change over time and vary across cultures – in other words, they are socially ­constructed. For example, industrialisation and the resulting division of domestic and production activities into the separate spheres of home and ­factory led to an intensification of the public–private divide in Western countries. But what is more, these different spheres became ‘gendered’ (e.g. Bondi and Domosh, 1998; Wilson, 1992). Men were more active in the public sphere of work and politics than women and, consequently, ­public spaces came to be seen as men’s spaces, while the home became the province of women (though as Wilson 1992 points out, even this sphere was ­organised for the comfort of men, not women, for many of whom the home was a workplace). Women were nevertheless present in public spaces, especially the many working-class women who worked outside the home. Middle-class women’s use of public space was more curtailed due to strict social norms around respectability which dictated that a ‘respectable’ woman did not venture out in public on her own, and, after dark, did so only in the company of a man (Bondi and Domosh, 1998; Wilson, 1992). Despite such attempts to restrict women’s presence and to delineate public space as male, paradoxically, women, especially working-class women, were being pulled into public space as workers. Moreover, thanks to the emergence of a new consumer culture, they represented an ­important group of consumers (Bondi and Domosh, 1998; Wilson, 1995; see also Southerton, Chapter  8 in this volume). New feminised public spaces were created, namely department stores and women-friendly cafes and restaurants, accommodating women’s entry into a clearly demarcated portion of public space. During the twentieth century, work outside the home became increasingly common for women in Western countries, and 145

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they also gained access to a wider range of public spaces. ­Nevertheless, as discussed below, public spaces continue to be gendered to this day.

Access to public space As mentioned above, the term ‘public’ space entails a notion of ­democracy in that it is accessible to all and a space where everyone is considered equal. There have in recent decades been increasing concerns expressed over a ‘loss of public space’, for example, through privatisation, which can exclude certain groups such as the poor and the homeless­ (Carmona, 2010). But there are also those who argue that public space has never been fully democratic, because no public space has ever been equally accessible to everyone (Bondi and Domosh, 1998). There are many groups that have experienced limited access to and levels of comfort in ­public spaces, including women, ethnic minorities, sexual m ­ inorities (Valentine, 2002), children and older people (Buffel et al., 2013; Németh, 2006), and ­disabled people (Imrie, 2012; Kitchin, 1998). There are also many examples of successful resistance to exclusion from public spaces through organised collective movements. For example, disability rights groups have in many countries successfully fought for legislation that requires any public building to provide wheelchair access. I now go on to explore two axes of difference in more detail, namely gender and ‘race’/ ethnicity.

Gender Although women’s access to public space is, in Western countries, now in principle equal to men’s and the proportion of women using public spaces has risen (Hampton et  al., 2015), the traditional distinction of public space as male space is still reflected in the differences between how men and women use and perceive public space. Studies have found that women tend to feel less safe in public spaces than men do, ­especially at night (see Logan, 2015 for an overview). This is partly due to the ­harassment (often of a sexual nature) that many women experience while out in public. In a survey conducted in the United States, Kimberly Fairchild and Laurie Rudman (2008) found that over 40 per cent of the women s­ urveyed had experienced sexual harassment such as catcalls every few days or so, while over a quarter of the women reported experiencing unwanted physical contact such as grabbing at least once a month. As a consequence, many women limit their use of public space for fear of being harassed, attacked, or raped. 146

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Studies have also shown that women prefer certain spaces over others. For example, Eileen Green and Carrie Singleton (2006) found that the young British women they studied preferred indoor spaces to outdoor spaces, where they felt less safe. Women have also been found to avoid spaces they consider ‘masculine’, such as sports bars that many women feel excluded from because they are often either ignored or treated as sex objects (Bird and Sokolofski, 2005; Jin and Whitson, 2014). One further issue is whether women feel comfortable entering a public space on their own. Xiumin Jin and Risa Whitson (2014) and Green and ­Singleton (2006) found that Chinese women in Beijing and British Asian women in the United Kingdom prefer to enter public spaces in the company of ­others rather than on their own. In a study of online texts written by women solo diners, Kinneret Lahad and I found that eating out alone can still be a difficult experience for many women, who can feel that their p ­ resence is in subtle and not so subtle ways noticed and remarked upon as out of the ordinary, making the solo diner feel like she is a body out of place­ (Lahad and May, 2017). But women are also organising to combat ­exclusion from public space. International movements and organisations, such as SlutWalks, the Take Back the Night Foundation and hollaback!, ­campaign for women’s rights to public spaces and offer women advice (hollaback!, n.d.; Kapur, 2014; Take Back the Night Foundation, n.d.).

‘Race’/ethnicity Belonging to a racialised or ethnic minority can also lead to feeling excluded from public spaces. Up until the 1960s, most public spaces such as public transport and schools were racially segregated in the United States and, more recently, one aspect of apartheid in South Africa was that the government enforced a policy of racial segregation that affected most aspects of life (Gaule, 2005). During the 1950s and 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement in the United States successfully challenged laws that allowed racial segregation of residential areas and of public spaces such as schools and public transport (Cassanello, 2008; Gadsden, 2010; Gotham, 2000). Desegregation of public space has, h ­ owever, not been fully realised in practice in W ­ estern c­ ountries. For ­example, people from different racial or ethnic groups tend to be ­concentrated in different areas, particularly in the United States (Samara, 2010; Wacquant, 2008). Such ethnic concentration is partly the result of differences in levels of affluence – ethnic minority groups being on average poorer – and partly the result of discrimination and hostility experienced by ethnic and racialised minorities in areas that are mostly populated by whites, thus reducing the likelihood that they would move to such an area (Anderson, 1990; 147

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Wacquant, 2008). But Bécares et al. (2011) argue that ethnic concentration can also bring positive benefits, as discussed in Box 11.1. Bécares et al. (2011) also raise the important question of why ­public debates tend to only be concerned with the concentration of ethnic minority groups, while ignoring the effects that white ethnic c­oncentration has on other groups. The work of Elijah Anderson (2015) sheds light on how black Americans experience living in a country where most public spaces – including neighbourhoods, schools, workplaces, churches and courthouses – are dominated by whites. While these remain unremarkable spaces for white people, black people experience them as ‘white space’ that must be approached carefully. Because of the ­pervasive negative ­stereotype of the black ghetto and its supposedly violent and Box 11.1 Ethnic concentration and social cohesion Set in the context of debates about weakening social cohesion as a result of ethnic and racial segregation, Bécares et al. (2011) used data from the UK Citizenship Survey and the 2001 Census to investigate the relationship between ethnic concentration and social cohesion. Social cohesion was measured according to the degree to which ­survey respondents felt that they could trust people living in their area, that ethnic differences were respected, and that residents got on well together. The  results show that as own-group ethnic concentration increased, ethnic groups tended to report higher social cohesion and more trust (Bécares et al., 2011: 2781). They also found that in areas with a white majority population, that is, most areas in the United Kingdom, an increase in an area’s ethnic heterogeneity was associated with an increase in respect for ethnic differences. Bécares et al. explain that the apparent association between ethnic minority concentration and decreased social cohesion is in many cases reversed once area deprivation is taken into account. In other words, it is poverty rather than ethnic concentration that has a detrimental effect on social cohesion, but this effect is most frequently found in areas with higher proportions of ethnic minorities because these groups are more likely to live in deprived areas. Reasons for why ethnic concentration can lead to higher social cohesion include psychosocial benefits such as being able to rely on support from local social networks, as well as having culturally specific institutions such as shops and religious centres nearby.

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criminal residents, many whites view unknown black people, and ­particularly young black men, with suspicion and even hostility. Similarly, Lewek (2016), in her study of Sub-Saharan Africans living in Berlin, uses the concept ‘spaces of fear’ to describe areas that her participants felt were ‘no-go’ areas because of the visible presence of far-right extremists and the reported violent attacks that had taken place there against racialised minorities. In the current atmosphere of Islamophobia, Muslims, particularly women who wear Muslim dress such as the niqab (veil) or hijab (headscarf), can experience everyday public spaces as threatening. ­ While all women must negotiate the various risks of public space, these can be accentuated for Muslim women. British South Asian Muslim women who veil report feeling ‘hypervisible’ and facing high levels of hostility as they go about their everyday lives (Bibi, 2018). Through subtle and not so subtle acts of hostility, the majority white population convey to these women that they have ‘less right’ to be in public spaces such as supermarkets and public transport. Asai Mohamadi Johnson and Rebecca Miles (2014) found in their study of Muslim Arab women living in New York that the extent to which these women experienced a space as being ‘public’ and therefore open to them depended on the degree of ethnic diversity, particularly the proportion of other visibly Muslim women. This is, in other words, one of the positive effects of ethnic concentration noted by Bécares et al. (2011), namely that living in proximity to others who are like one decreases the chances of meeting negative reactions whilst out in public. Access to public space has consequences for people’s personal lives, because it determines where they can shop and work, the degree of ­freedom of movement they have, and their ability to be a fully fledged citizen taking part in and influencing the public sphere. Their ­interactions with strangers and acquaintances are crucial factors in determining these aspects of personal life.

Relationships with strangers and acquaintances A public space is one where ‘the proportion of copresent others clearly leans towards the unfamiliar’ (Hampton et al., 2015: 1490). A further aspect of public space is that we are more likely to encounter diversity; that is, people who are different from us in terms of, for example, ­ethnicity or social class, than we are in our networks of friends (see Davies, ­Chapter 5 in this volume). Cities, with their large populations, 149

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offer the quintessential public spaces. A classic sociological text considering how living among strangers affects people is Simmel’s essay ‘The metropolis and mental life’ (1971[1903]), written in the wake of rapid urbanisation in many European countries. He argued that while the city resident could enjoy new freedoms compared to rural residents of old, this came at a price. According to Simmel, the anonymous nature and sheer number of urban encounters led to urban residents developing a blasé attitude in order to protect themselves from the onslaught of stimuli with which the urban environment bombarded them. As a consequence, modern city life was one of mutual reserve and indifference towards fellow citizens. While Simmel’s essay has been critiqued for its anti-urban sentiment, it does raise the important, and still relevant, question of whether public space exists outside the ‘personal’. A widespread assumption is that we only interact with people we barely know and, therefore, few meaningful personal relationships take place there. In other words, our experiences in public spaces are not generally considered to be a part of our personal life. In contrast to Simmel, Lynn Lofland proposes that city dwellers have not lost the capacity for ‘deep, long-lasting, multifaceted’ relationships but have ‘gained the capacity for the surface, fleeting, restricted ­relationship’ (1973: 178). Urban residents have, in other words, developed particular skills to conduct these fleeting relationships with strangers and acquaintances (Lofland, 1998). The seeming effortlessness of these encounters, which often only last seconds or minutes, belies the degree of competence that is required for them to go smoothly. Erving Goffman’s work on the patterning of face-to-face interactions has been influential in this regard because it sheds light on the (unwritten) ground rules of co-mingling, and enables us to see that rather than leading to a shutting down as described by Simmel, urban environments require us to operate according to ‘shared expectations … and cooperation.’ (Lofland, 1998: 26). An example of this is what Goffman (1963) called ‘civil inattention’. When entering a crowded public space such as a bus, people tend to scan it with their eyes to signal that they are aware of other people’s presence (this is the ‘civil’ part), but then proceed to avoid staring at others, engaging them unnecessarily in conversation or openly eavesdropping on their conversations (i.e., ‘inattention’). A further example is the way in which others tend to respect the ‘quasi private’ spaces that we demarcate while out in public, for example by placing personal possessions on nearby chairs and tables in a café or by creating an invisible group b­ oundary through forming a circle with the people in our company (Bird and Sokolofksi, 2015; DeVault, 2000; Manzo, 2005). Thus what may, on the 150

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surface, look like indifference and avoidance is in fact a form of sociality that requires silent cooperation. Lofland (1998) and Tonkiss (2003) further propose that people can also derive pleasure from the sense of solitude they experience in a crowd. ­Tonkiss views anonymity as a right and speaks of the ‘exquisite solitude of cities’ that stems from knowing that no one is looking or listening (2003: 298, 300). The indifference with which urban residents can regard one another does not have to be interpreted as a sign of underlying repulsion, as Simmel does, but can be viewed as an ethical stance: learning to ‘look past a face’ is part of an ethics of indifference whereby ‘differences go unremarked because [they are] unremarkable’ (Tonkiss, 2003: 301, 300). Such an ethics of indifference, or what Lofland (1998) calls civility towards diversity, is of great importance on city streets where people come in contact with people from a variety of different backgrounds. At the one extreme, noticing the differences of other people can be expressed in aggressive forms, such as sexual harassment or racist attacks. In contrast, anonymity, if it takes the form of an ethics of indifference, can help weaken antagonisms, as opposed to the fragmentation and potential conflict described by Simmel. So as not to get too optimistic about the liberating potentials of urban public spaces, it is worth reminding ourselves of the exclusionary nature of many public spaces, as detailed above. Peaceful and even sociable co-existence across lines of difference is more likely to occur in particular kinds of public space. Anderson (2004, 2011) has coined the term ­‘cosmopolitan canopies’ to describe ‘neutral social settings, which no one group expressly owns but all are encouraged to share, situated under a protective umbrella, a canopy’ (2011: 275). In the United States, such canopies offer ‘a diverse island of civility located in a virtual sea of racial s­ egregation’ (Anderson, 2015: 11). Under a cosmopolitan canopy, it is likely that diverse people get along because everyone who finds themselves within such a canopy is expected to ‘treat others with a certain level of civility’ and to ‘positively acknowledge one another’s existence in some measure’ (Anderson, 2004: 15, 16). As a consequence, visitors to such spaces can expect not to be harassed or singled out for negative attention, which allows them to relax and feel relatively safe and secure, and consequently to converse more freely with strangers. Another key category of people that we come into frequent contact with in public spaces comprises acquaintances; that is, people who we are not intimately acquainted with, but who are more than strangers to us (Morgan, 2009). Our acquaintances can include fellow students who we might see on a weekly basis yet know little about apart from the fact that they are studying the same subject as we are. Or they may be regulars at 151

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our local swimming pool, café or pub with whom we might be on a firstname basis. With such people we might start exchanging nods or a few words of greeting, perhaps even a few pleasantries, but we rarely engage in any c­ onversation that would reveal our more private thoughts or intimate aspects of our biography. Contrary to the prevalent notion that our relationships with strangers and acquaintances are not important because they are not long in duration or high in emotional content, Lofland (1973) and David Morgan (2009) have argued that this kind of anonymous sociability is s­ ignificant in and of itself, especially in contemporary urban life where we can expect to interact with large numbers of strangers and acquaintances on a daily basis. These interactions help make up the fabric of e­ veryday life and to a degree determine the quality of people’s personal life. There are currently widespread concerns that ICTs are contributing to social isolation as people have fewer reasons to leave their homes, and when they do, they are believed to be engrossed in their mobile devices and therefore less engaged with other people (see Carmona, 2010 and Hampton et al., 2015 for reviews of this literature). Baym (2015) criticises such views as overly simplistic and argues that online communication and virtual spaces are not replacing offline activities, but are instead interwoven in almost all aspects of our everyday lives. ‘Online’ and ‘offline’ should in her view not be juxtaposed, but instead scholars should strive to understand the ways in which the online world is becoming part of our offline world and vice versa. She even proposes that one day, the whole distinction between online/ offline might lose its meaning. Box 11.2 explores findings from a study on the impact that mobile phones have had on interactions in public space that helps demonstrate how digital technologies are interwoven in people’s use of public space and have in fact not led to increased social isolation.

What’s so personal about public space? Above I have explored the significance of our encounters with strangers and acquaintances for personal life. Contrary to the generally held view that public spaces are generally devoid of the personal, sociological research shows that public space is where the public and the private intermingle in many ways. Some of the strangers we encounter in public spaces can become our friends (Hampton et al., 2010). We also carry on our personal relationships in public, for example when we go to see a movie with a partner, take our children to the swimming pool, or visit a relative in hospital. Loren Demerath and David Levinger (2003) contend that our interactions in public spaces are overwhelmingly with friends rather than with strangers. 152

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Box 11.2 Have people withdrawn from public spaces? Hampton et al. (2015) decided to put the theory of people’s increased withdrawal from public life to the test by comparing the level and nature of activities in public spaces in four American cities over a 30-year period. To do this, they compared film footage shot in the same spaces 30 years apart. The analysis revealed that contrary to common beliefs, people are nowadays more likely to be in the company of others while out in public. Moreover, people who were in the company of others were less likely to use their mobile phones than were those who were alone, and face-to-face social interaction was rarely interrupted to use a mobile phone. The authors conclude that general fears about mobile phones acting as a disconnecting force between people seem unfounded. In contrast, Hampton et al. propose that using mobile phones in public may be a way for women to feel safer and more connected while out in public (e.g., being able to talk to a friend while walking down the street), thus reducing social isolation. The reason why it might seem that the use of mobile phones in public spaces is increasing could be that those who are on their phone tend to linger in public spaces. They conclude that instead of a shift towards social isolation and spending time alone, the broader trend in public spaces may be towards spending more time together.

In the process, we can make public spaces feel private (DeVault, 2000). This can also be achieved by engaging in other private (and at times contentious) activities such as using our mobile phone, listening to music, or even breastfeeding (Grant, 2016; ­Humphreys, 2005; Simun, 2009). A further example of how the boundaries between the private ‘personal’ space of home and public spaces are blurred comes from Amy Mills’s (2007) study of traditional Turkish neighbourhoods or mahalle. Here, the residential street of the neighbourhood becomes an extension of private family space, thus blending ‘the spaces of the public arena of the main street and the inside of the house’ (Mills, 2007: 340). Not only do neighbours, particularly women, who traditionally stayed at home, regularly interact with each other in public spaces such as shops and sidewalks, but they also ­frequently visit each others’ homes: ‘Doors are always open to a visiting komşu (neighbor), and visitors come without calling first’ (Mills, 2007: 341). Mills goes on to observe that tensions arise from the intimate ‘knowing’ that is characteristic 153

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of mahalle life, which offers not only safety, but also operates as a form of social control by restricting deviance from collective norms. Public spaces are also important because it is here that people can derive information about others different from them – information that can then help them form a view of the world and people within it. Cosmopolitan canopies, which are likely to engender interaction across difference (Anderson, 2011), or an ‘ethos of mixing’ (Wessendorf, 2013), are a good example of this. Susanne Wessendorf (2013), on the basis of her study in London, is cautious about the effects that such mixing can have on people’s attitudes because ‘encounters in public and associational space do not ­necessarily enhance deeper intercultural understanding’, yet she does note that ‘the absence of such encounters can enhance prejudice’ (2013: 410). ­Anderson (2011) is more optimistic and proposes that cosmopolitan ­canopies are places where people can conduct informal studies across lines of ­difference that might not be traversed in other settings. It is possible, for example, to observe how people behave and to catch snatches of conversation, which in turn can help ‘humanise’ people who would otherwise be just seen as abstract strangers and members of a category that is ‘other’ to oneself. As a result of seeing ‘others’ as persons, the observer might even change their mind about previously held stereotypes (though it is also possible that ­stereotypical views are strengthened on the basis of such observations). What is more, people can then bring this experience back to their home turf, telling others of it. What Anderson is proposing goes beyond what Tonkiss (2003) terms an ethic of indifference – this is an ethic of engagement and of trying to understand across lines of difference. In sum, public spaces offer important fora where our ‘private’ personal lives and the public sphere intertwine, and where we come into contact with difference that then helps inform our view of the world.

Concluding remarks By drawing a distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres and by mainly focusing on interactions with intimates, many sociologists studying personal life have ignored a rich and meaningful aspect of our everyday lives: the interactions we have in public both with our friends and family, but also with strangers and acquaintances. This chapter has argued that while generally considered to be of little importance, these fleeting encounters with strangers and acquaintances are a significant part of our personal lives, because they can make us feel either welcome or unwelcome in a public space – access to public spaces being important in terms of our 154

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rights as citizens – and also help inform our view of the world. Furthermore, we conduct many seemingly private aspects of our lives while out in public, and the public sphere also has a presence in our private space of the home. In other words, this chapter has argued that instead of drawing distinctions between ‘private’ and ‘public’, it is more fruitful to consider how our personal lives span many different types of space and relationship.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION yyWhat do you understand by ‘private’ and ‘public’ space? What differentiates the two? Are there any similarities between them? yyAre there any public spaces you are aware of that have restricted access to certain groups of people? Why do you think that is? How are these restrictions made known? Are there any public spaces you feel you might not have access to? How do you become aware of this and how does this make you feel? yyHow do you think that mobile phones have changed the use of public space? Think for example about the rules of social interaction in public spaces and how mobile phones might have changed how some people feel about being in public spaces. yyNext time you are at the student cafeteria, pay attention to who decides to sit where, whether there are larger groups who take up a lot of space, how they demarcate ‘their’ space and how they signal to others their group boundaries, and how others react to this.

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AND THE 12 SEXUALITY POLITICS OF PERSONAL LIFE

BRIAN HEAPHY

Introduction In parts of Europe, North America and elsewhere, changes with respect to the decriminalisation of homosexuality, anti-discrimination legislation, the lifting of bans on LGBTQ people (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer) in the military, trans recognition, and a host of other developments with respect to LGBTQ relational ‘rights’ (including same-sex marriage, civil unions, adoption, next-of-kin status, inheritance, pensions, and so on) seem to suggest that LGBTQ lives are now seen as worthy of the same or similar ‘rights’ as heterosexuals. In 2017, however, 72 states across the world continued to criminalise ­non-heterosexuality and support and perpetuate discrimination against LGBTQ (Duncan, 2017). Some states, for example, have introduced legislation that forbids the representation of LGBTQ lives as legitimate ways of living, while other states punish same-gender sexual practices by imprisonment, public violence, and even death (Duncan, 2017). In terms of changes in legislation, the global political gains of sexual ‘rights’ movements are therefore uneven. This is also the case for the everyday opportunities that exist for living ‘freely’ as LGBTQ people. Even in the most liberal legal jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom, living openly as LGBTQ people can be replete with dangers and risks – of family exclusion, the loss of friendships, harassment, violence, job insecurity, and so on (Stonewall, 2016). As far as living openly as LGBTQ people is concerned, the everyday politics of ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ is not a job that is done. This chapter outlines some influential ways in which the politics of the personal can be understood by focusing on LGBTQ lives. In  doing so, it considers the sociological value of different approaches to understanding the contemporary politics of sexual and personal life 156

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in everyday life. First, it considers different ways of understanding how the ‘personal is political’ with respect to sexuality. Second, it considers studies of LGBTQ ways of living and relating, how they have historically differed from heterosexual ones, and the implications this had for the everyday politics of sexual life. Third, by drawing on the case of samesex civil unions and marriages, it reflects on more recent developments in sexual ‘rights’, and illuminates the challenges that intimate citizenship (Plummer, 1995) raises for both the sociology and politics of personal life. Overall, the chapter seeks to illustrate how the most intimate aspects of our personal lives have political dimensions.

Sexuality and the personal politics of emancipation The feminist and sexual liberationist movements of the 1960s and 1970s were partly founded on the belief that the personal is political in the sense that what we experience as highly personal (for example, our family, friendship and couple relationships) is subject to state, legal, and more subtle forms of social regulation. This notion has had a long-term influence on gender and sexual politics, and has been incorporated into the sociological study of sexualities in diverse ways. It is a notion that chimes with sociological concerns about the links between personal problems and public issues (see May and Nordqvist, Chapter  1 in this volume), and it points to the ways in which our most intimate interactions are not politically ‘neutral’. Rather, our intimate and sexual lives operate according to social norms and conventions that support particular kinds of social order, be they capitalist, patriarchal, liberal, colonial, or otherwise. These social orders are based on particular hierarchies and inequalities, including gendered and sexual ones, where the most powerful constituencies (in contemporary Western cultures, those comprising white, heterosexual, middle-class men) benefit from the subjugation and control of others. Emancipation, put simply, can be conceptualised as ‘freedom’ from such subjugation and control, and the dismantling of social structures (e.g. capitalist-patriarchal) and institutions (e.g. marriage and family) that support existing social hierarchies and inequalities. There are various strands of thought within feminist politics and sociology that highlight the role of sexuality in the subjugation of women and in perpetuating gender inequalities. Some argue that the social organisation of sexual relations through heterosexuality (where people are defined as gender and sexual ‘opposites’ and expected to live according to gender-specific norms and rules) has historically worked to oppress all 157

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women and is crucial to the persistence of male dominance in the operation of patriarchal societies (see also Nordqvist, ‘Couple relationships’, Chapter  3 in this volume). Adrienne Rich (1983), for example, coined the term ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ to discuss how heterosexuality is an historically formed social institution, as opposed to a ‘natural’ one, that has been key to the subordination of women to men (see Box 12.1). While arguments like Rich’s may seem to be outdated with respect to subsequent developments associated with legal gender equality in Europe, North America, and other national contexts, viewed through the lens of a global perspective, legal gender equality has yet to be achieved. Indeed, in terms of the more subtle operations of gender power and inequalities,

Box 12.1 Adrienne Rich on compulsory heterosexuality The feminist philosopher Adrienne Rich (1983) has argued that heterosexuality, a system imposed on women throughout history, regulates women’s experience, history, culture, and values, which are distinct from dominant patriarchal heterosexual culture. Women are subordinated through devices such as heterosexual romance and violence. Heterosexual romance idealises a form of romantic love, this analysis suggests, that leads women into unequal personal relationships with men, naturalises dominant and subordinate gender roles and unequal labour within the home, and privileges men’s autonomy and pleasure over women’s. Sexuality, in this view, is a key site of patriarchal power that is constructed from male definitions, and heterosexuality is a social organisation of power that is crucial for maintaining gender inequalities. In this sense, heterosexuality is seen as something that is ideologically imposed on women as ‘compulsory’. ‘Compulsory heterosexuality’ implies that women are coerced or ideologically coaxed into heterosexuality by social and cultural practices that make it seem natural and inevitable. At the same time it punishes those who do not conform (e.g. through economic sanctions, harassment, and violence). For theorists and activists like Rich, personal sexuality is therefore highly political, with the challenge being to emancipate or liberate women from the ideological constraints that shape their lives and that support the patriarchal orders in which they live.

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even in national contexts where gender equality is most advanced, heterosexuality is still often assumed; gender inequality persists in personal relationships between women and men; and women continue to be the primary victims of sexual violence or harassment and to suffer most from the financial consequences of failed marriages (Robinson and Richardson, 2015). Coupled with this, women’s sexual autonomy and pleasure continues to be regulated and judged by different cultural standards to men’s (Robinson and Richardson, 2015). Emancipation, therefore, is not simply a case of legislation, but involves both international political dimensions of collective organisation to improve women’s social and economic conditions (see UN Sustainable Development Goals), as well as the more local interpersonal interactions between women and men in everyday life (Connell, 2014). While the concept of compulsory heterosexuality initially stemmed from a concern with the historical regulation of women’s sexuality, it is also relevant to understanding the regulation of sexuality generally and of LGBTQ lives more specifically. The everyday emancipatory or liberationist politics of feminism with respect to sexuality could involve a critical rethinking, reimagining, or withdrawal from intimate relationships with men – as well as the creation of critical feminist communities that campaigned for and supported the sexual ‘rights’ of women. In contrast, LGBTQ politics were in large part focused on the politics of ‘coming out’. ‘Coming out’ was seen as important because the personal was deemed political and was therefore first and foremost about a personal politics of visibility. In the 1960s and 1970s European, North American and post-colonial jurisdictions still criminalised homosexuality and a range of punishments existed for identifying as LGBTQ or engaging in homosexual acts. These included legal, social, and cultural punishments such as imprisonment, unfavourable child custody decisions, loss of employment, being defined as deviant, being subjected to conversion therapies, violence, harassment, family and community ostracism, and so on (Weeks, 2014[1989]; Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan, 2001). The personal politics of ‘coming out’, of openly identifying as homosexual or LGBTQ, therefore posed very real risks to the lives and life circumstances of those who refused to live their sexual lives in secret. LGBTQ identities, practices and lives therefore entailed constructing communities of support, where people could live their lives openly and socialise with like-minded others and in safe spaces carved out by LGBTQ people themselves. These could also be viewed as political communities, as they became the focus 159

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for the everyday construction of personal-political sexual identities (e.g. ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, ‘bisexual’, ‘queer’) that, in turn, became the basis for organised political movements that focused on broader structural change (Weeks, 2014[1989]). In these respects, the institutional and everyday ‘emancipatory’ politics of LGBTQ lives were inseparable, focused as they were on disrupting the heterosexual assumption in everyday life, law, and the broader culture.

Sexuality, biopolitics, and governance One of the influential ways in which sociologists have conceptualised the politics of the personal in terms of sexuality is through a focus on how biopower (the exertion of power over life itself through claims to know the truth about human life; for example, the claim that ­non-heterosexuality is ‘unnatural’) and its associated concept of biopolitics (the politics of whose knowledge counts as the truth about certain aspects of life; for example, that of scientific experts) have come to shape personal lives. This focus draws on and develops Michel Foucault’s work, especially The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 (1979), and his concern with expert knowledge and practices (or discourses) and the claims to ‘truths’ that they made about sexuality. Foucault focused on discourse that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that enabled the subtle regulation of sexual, personal, and social life. He saw the expert invention (as opposed to discovery) of sexual problems and identities as part of new approach to the governance (or ordering) of social life through the personal. For Foucault, the formation of expert knowledge about the body, and especially sexuality, was one of the key ways in which power is exercised over life. In contrast to the hitherto predominant notion that sexuality was repressed or forbidden in early modern societies, Foucault analysed how sexual desires, identities, and practices had been a topic of constant theorising, investigation, definition, and discussion by all manner of experts (sexologists, psychologists, educationalists, clinicians, and so on). Sexuality, he argued, emerged historically as a form of governance (or social ordering) linked to biopower. He saw biopower as having two modes of operation in relation to sexuality. On the one hand the focus is on governing (or ordering) the population through techniques such as sex education, birth control, the management of diseases constructed as sexual, and the defining and monitoring of ‘normal’ sexual, family, and relational life. On the other hand, individuals are also incited to recognise and take responsibility for themselves 160

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as sexual subjects – as people who ‘possess’ sexual desires, orientations, and identities that require personal expression and management (or ordering in line with what is deemed ‘natural’, ‘normal’, or ‘healthy’ sexuality). Throughout the twentieth century a host of experts produced knowledge about sex and sexuality that is aimed at guiding people in their self-monitoring and the production of their selves as sexual beings. The result is the production of bodies that are organised, managed, and produced in specific – socially useful – ways. This goes hand-in-hand with the production of categories of sexual deviance (such as the pervert, the sodomite, the homosexual, the nymphomaniac, the fetishist) that were attributed to individuals and groups who were deemed to be unable or unwilling to regulate their sexual practices in line with heterosexual norms. In such cases, expert intervention could be called upon to correct the deviant behaviour (e.g., through psychotherapy, conversion therapy, or the chemical castration of homosexuals; see Smith et al., 2004). Although theorists have made much of Foucault’s ‘disciplinary’ analysis, Foucault himself argued that it was mistaken to view power with respect to sexuality as repressive, because this undermines the ways in which power is productive: of bodies, identities, and order, but also of resistance. His analysis also shows how the most intimate social and sexual interactions and self-identities are intrinsically bound up in public discourse. For example, what might be termed disciplinary discourse usually produces ‘counter discourse’. One way in which we can understand this, and how the personal is political, is to think about how the individual and collective sexualities created by expert knowledge have publicly ‘talked back’ to and troubled expert and legal categories by refusing them (for example, the expert category ‘the homosexual’ was countered by the self-defining categories of ‘lesbian’ by women and ‘gay’ by men). The history of LGBTQ people is not only the history of repression and oppression, but also of developing their own sexual and relational norms and practices, and of making their own claims to knowledge. On the one hand, the politics of resistance and of ‘talking back’ has contributed to more liberal legal and social developments, of the kind that are currently associated with LGBTQ equality. On the other hand, however, the idea that sexuality should be a primary defining device for who we are – an anchor for our identities, relational practices, and ways of living – is testament to the continuing significance of sexuality for governance and the social order. In this respect, the counter-politics of sexuality has not led to emancipation or freedom, but illustrates the complex working of power and politics with respect to personal life. 161

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Self-identities, sexual lifestyles, and life-politics One influential strand of European sociological thinking about the contemporary politics of personal life is that which argues we are entering a post-emancipatory era, meaning that in some respects sexual emancipation has been achieved. This strand has focused on sexuality and intimate life as key examples of what is termed ‘life-politics’ (the politics of life choices), where people are brought together by making lifestyle choices (as opposed to abiding by ‘imposed’ rules and norms) that have moral consequences. This strand of thinking is most closely associated with Anthony Giddens’s work on self-identity and intimacy in late modernity which, in turn, is often linked to work on family, personal life, and same-sex relationships (see Heaphy, 2007b). One theme that links these different approaches is the diverse and negotiable nature of personal lives and the increased agency, or capacity to empower themselves, that people have in respect to their everyday lives. Put briefly, Giddens’s argument is that in the contemporary era of modernity sexuality has been released – or emancipated – from the need for reproduction; nowadays it is a route to intimacy, pleasure, and the focus of self-identity. At root, the control that women now have over reproduction, notably through the contraceptive pill, has enabled them to participate in the labour market as equals to men. For women and men, late modernity is marked by a shift towards intimate and sexual democracy, where women have increased opportunities to enter into relationships with men as economic and gender equals (see also Nordqvist, ‘Couple relationships’, Chapter 3 in this volume). Thus, they can negotiate or choose the kinds of sexual and intimate relationships they want with men, and indeed if they want to have emotional and sexual relationships with men at all. This puts men on the back foot in terms of assumptions about male dominance in relationships with women. This, in turn, implies that women and men have little choice but to negotiate how they ‘do’ their sexual and intimate relationships. Coupled with this is the idea that sexuality, as identity and as practice, is itself now also subject to choice. In the above respects, sexuality is as much about the politics of interpersonal negotiation and lifestyle choice as it is about the politics of emancipation or the politics of governance and resistance. In the ­‘post-traditional’ world that Giddens sketches out, people are searching for anchors that can provide a stable sense of self-security. When traditional models for relating (e.g. ‘traditional’ life-long marriages based on clearly defined gender roles) fail to provide the goods, they turn, as LGBTQ people have long 162

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done, to alternative models or engage in experiments in living. It is in this context that we can understand the normalisation of cohabitation, and newer developments such as l­ iving-together-apart, reconstituted families, friendships families, affective communities, do-it-yourself relationships, and so on (Nordqvist, ‘Couple Relationships’, Chapter 3 in this volume). It is also in this context that we can understand the increased visibility of intimate and sexual experiments in polyamory, agreed non-monogamy, BDSM, trans and queer identities, and so on. In contrast to the politics of emancipation and biopolitics which would be suspicious of the ideological effects of ever-growing expert claims to know the ‘truth’ about sexual relationships, life-politics sees such growth as an indicator of the diverse resources that are available to empower individuals by enabling and guiding their relational and sexual choices. Several criticisms have been made of life-politics as the focus of personal life: not least criticisms of the idea that people today must grapple with the loss of tradition; and that individual life-political agency is becoming as, if not more, significant as collective agency once was. A common criticism is that life-politics as described above ignores the fact that gender and sexual relations vary across cultures, as well as according to factors such as social class and ethnicity. In addition to this, critics contest the empirical basis of the life-politics argument and the way it has ignored much of the existing theory and research on gender and sexualities. Nevertheless, several strands of the existing research on gender and sexualities also have similar weaknesses in terms of imposing their Western, white and middle-class meanings on the practices they observe and analyse. They can also be criticised for their rootedness in more or less wholly oppressive analyses of power, and their denial of the political agency inherent in everyday life. The point, therefore, is not to focus on one model for answering the sociological questions that the contemporary politics of personal life raises with respect to sexuality. It is to construct sociological ways of examining sexuality and its implications for the politics of everyday living that bring existing different ways of understanding sexuality into conversation so as to explore the politics of sexual lives as they are: dynamic, emergent, and multidimensional.

The politics of LGBTQ ways of living This section considers some late twentieth-century analyses of LGBTQ ways of living and relating and how they differed from heterosexual ones. It considers the implications of denigration, exclusion, and inequality for 163

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the everyday politics of sexual life, and aims to show how LGBTQ people responded to these in a combination of emancipatory, biopolitical, and life-political ways. Prior to the development of active LGBTQ communities and political movements, the cultural image of LGBTQ lives was one of lonely and isolated individuals who lived secretly in the shadow of the heterosexual mainstream. While this image simplifies the life experience of older LGBTQ people, it was the case that legal and social sanctions against homosexuality could have devastating personal effects. Although LGBTQ lives had become more acceptable in many parts of globe by the late twentieth century, there are still constituencies for whom living an open LGBTQ life is a risky or near-impossible task. Phrased in Ken Plummer’s (1995) terms, not everyone lives under the conditions where they can openly tell their ‘sexual stories’. At the same time, in parts of Europe, North America and elsewhere, relatively new sexual stories about openly and freely choosing from diverse LGBTQ lifestyles and having such choices recognised as valid abound. In terms of the politics of personal life as they concern sexuality, it would be mistaken to see the shift from ‘stories of LGBTQ exclusion’ towards ‘stories of LGBTQ rights and citizenship’ as stemming primarily from more beneficent attitudinal change on the part of law makers, politicians, and in everyday life. A combination of personal, community, and broader collective political responses to LGBTQ marginalisation underpinned such attitudinal changes and have made certain kinds of LGBTQ sexual stories strong ones in terms of the political work they do. One interesting analysis of such developments, which combines emancipatory arguments about compulsory heterosexuality, biopolitical theoretical analysis about power and resistance, and a life-political theme about lesbian and gay ethico-moral (or cultural-personal conceptions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’) relating practices is provided by the North American political theorist Mark Blasius (1994). In brief, Blasius (1994) argues that through their ‘coming out’, lesbians and gay men created lesbian and gay community. For most of the second part of the twentieth century, coming out of the heterosexually gendered self that is attributed from birth implied ‘coming into’ lesbian and gay community and culture. Such communities provided the basis for alternative social networks, sources of personal support and non-heterosexual models of relating. They formed the basis of what has elsewhere been termed ‘affective’ communities that are made up of people who share similar desires, identities, and experiences of exclusion. Such 164

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communities are political in that they provide an alternative ethicomoral basis for everyday living that is distinct from that of the heterosexual mainstream. Blasius argues that an ethic of interpersonal equality, independence and personal freedom – or an ethic of friendship (see Davies, Chapter 5 in this volume) – lies at the heart of lesbian and gay approaches to relating. Such an ethic recognises the independence of intimate partners, who by nature of being same-sex are gender equals. This implies that, unlike their heterosexual counterparts, lesbians and gay men must make up, negotiate, and agree the rules of their relationships. Also, as partners are gender equals, their relationship is founded on a commitment to independence – not co-dependence as in heterosexual relationships – with either one of the partners free to leave the relationship if it serves its course. Phrased another way, because same-sex relationships have not historically had access to the institutional supports and cultural guidelines available to gendered heterosexual relationships, lesbians and gay men have had a degree of freedom in developing their own cultures of relating, which tend to be structured by an ethic of friendship. In principle, such relationships can include agreed monogamous and n ­ on-monogamous couples, polyamory, casual sexual relationships, non-sexually active intimate relationships and so on (see Box 12.2). Again in principle, these operate according to interpersonally negotiated desires and perceived needs, and not according to assumed ­gendered-heterosexual social norms and rules. They are inherently political because they counter arguments about the needs of such norms and rules for social order and the innate nature of gendered roles and inequalities. Blasius explicitly draws on the concept of compulsory heterosexuality to mobilise his arguments. He does so to delineate the core values and practices that underpin heterosexual modes of relating or, phrased another way, to illustrate and develop his argument about the social arrangements that the personal politics of lesbian and gay life troubles. His emphasis is on how heterosexual relationships are rooted in ideas of ‘natural’ gender roles and inequalities, the family as the natural focus of relational life, ideologies of natural romance, the monogamous couple, life-long commitment and an ethic of co-dependence (see also Nordqvist, ‘Couple relationships’, Chapter 3 in this volume). Lesbian and gay ‘emancipation’ in this respect is freedom from heterosexual models of family, intimate, and sexual life. Blasius also draws explicitly on the concepts of biopolitics and biopower to develop his analysis of the political nature of lesbian and 165

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Box 12.2 Monogamy and non-monogamy in same-sex relationships Prior to the availability of civil unions and same-sex marriage several studies from the last quarter of the twentieth century noted that, unlike heterosexual relationships, same-sex relationships (especially gay male ones) did not assume emotional and sexual monogamy (see Weeks et al., 2001). While these relationships could be monogamous in practice, in the absence of social norms and cultural guidelines for same-sex relationships, partners needed to be explicit with each other about the nature of the emotional and sexual relationship they wanted: emotionally and sexually open, sexually open but emotionally monogamous, emotionally and sexually monogamous. Where partners agreed on some form of non-monogamous or open relationship the tendency was to agree clear ground rules about what kind of sexual/emotional interaction was allowed outside the relationship (e.g. anonymous, safe-sex, one-off, not more than a certain number of times, and so on); who one could sexually interact with (e.g. not mutual friends, ex-lovers, those who sought more than sex); where one could engage in sex with others (e.g. saunas, public sex environments, within the home, and so on); how couples or sexual units would respond to changing desires and emotions (e.g. jealousy, love) (Weeks et al., 2001). Although monogamy is generally thought to be essential for a ‘good’ and ‘stable’ couple relationship, there is evidence that long-term same-sex relationships can include sex with people outside of the couple. In contrast, a more recent study of younger same-sex couples in civil partnerships in the United Kingdom by Heaphy et  al. (2013) – discussed in more detail below – found that the majority of participants had assumed monogamy. While some had discussed and agreed the (non-)monogamous nature of the relationship early on, only a very small number had agreed on a sexually open relationship. Of the few that did, only one couple had not engaged in the kinds of negotiation that were described in earlier studies. Although the 2013 study is not directly comparable with earlier studies, nevertheless it does raise a number of interesting sociological questions, including: to what extent is generation significant in LGBTQ expectations of and assumptions about relationships? In what ways are same-sex

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relationships different to heterosexual ones, and are they becoming more similar? Does the legal recognition of same-sex relationships influence how they operate in practice, and if so how? Is same-sex marriage an indicator of the achievement of sexual citizenship or not? In what ways are the everyday and personal politics of sexuality linked to social and legal change?

gay counter-discourses of relating (encompassing both the ways in which they talk about and practise their relationships). Key to this is the way in which coming out and living openly as lesbians and gay men disrupts the ‘heterosexual panorama’ (or assumed heterosexuality) that has historically supported compulsory heterosexuality by making same-sex relationships invisible. The personal politics of lesbian and gay life is conceived as relying on the everyday personal practice of coming out, and coming into contact with socio-cultural, emotional and material resources that lesbian and gay communities offer. Blasius is explicitly concerned with the specific nature of the lesbian and gay politics of personal life – the politics that stems from a shared history of sexual exclusion, denigration, criminalisation, punishment, and so on. Empirically, a number of high-profile North American and European studies seem to support the kind of theoretical argument that Blasius puts forward and extend it beyond sexual relationships, to family and other personal relationships more generally. These include research of lesbian and gay sexual friendships, friendship families, elective and chosen families, and affective and personal communities. The most well known of these includes Kath Weston’s North American research as outlined in The Families We Choose (1991). Weston’s ethnographic study, undertaken in the early 1990s, focused on the ways in which lesbian and gay men in San Francisco included partners, lovers, ex-lovers, friends, and accepting family of origin in their definitions and practices of family. Politically, the significance of these families lay in countering legal, biological, and broader cultural definitions of family, and the dominant meanings of family in everyday life. One of the best-known European studies is that by Jeffrey Weeks, Brian Heaphy and Catherine Donovan that was undertaken in the latter part of the 1990s, published as Same Sex Intimacies (2001). This focused on what the authors termed ‘non-heterosexual’ families, relationships, and sexualities. It was distinct from Weston’s study in that it argued that same-sex relationships and chosen families needed to be understood in 167

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terms of a turn to intimacy in LGBTQ cultures in combination with changes in personal life more generally, whereby heterosexual norms and rules of relating had loosened. The authors argue that these shifts gave rise to diverse claims for sexual and intimate citizenship, of which LGBTQ claims were the most high profile in the 1990s and 2000s. Thus, a relational understanding of developments in the homosexual and heterosexual world was essential to comprehending the rise and ‘success’ of the contemporary politics of sexual and intimate citizenship. As Plummer defined it, intimate citizenship is about: ‘the control (or not) over one’s body, feelings, relationships: access (or not) to representations, relationships, public spaces etc.; and socially grounded choices (or not) about identities, gender experiences’ (Plummer 1995: 151, emphasis in the original).

The politics of marriage and civil unions In gender and sexualities studies, same-sex marriage has been one of the most contentious issues of recent decades (see also Nordqvist, ‘Couple relationships’, Chapter 2 in this volume). While empirical studies have generally found a large degree of support for marriage among LGBTQ ‘on the ground’, several theorists have adopted a more sceptical view of the extent to which marriage does or should represent a definitive moment of equality or citizenship for LGBTQ. These include feminist and some queer sociologists of LGBTQ lives who argue that marriage is fundamentally a heterosexual institution, and that the inclusion of LGBTQ within it reasserts heterosexual models of living as those we should aspire to (Robinson and Richardson, 2015). This is thought to neutralise the radical potential that LGBTQ once offered for more inventive and critical ways of living. A central concept in this debate is what Lisa Duggan (2002) terms ‘homonormativity’, which refers to the politics of claiming and being granted citizenship on the basis of heterosexual norms. In the case of same-sex marriages, this implies that claiming and being granted the legal right to enter into such an arrangement requires a commitment to core heterosexual relational norms, including: taking legal, financial and caring responsibilities for a partner; the intention to enter into a ‘life-long’ monogamous relationship; the privileging of legal and biological kin over friendship and ‘chosen’ families; and so on. Summarised briefly, while some analyses of same-sex marriage suggest that it challenges the institutional privileging of heterosexuality, others are concerned with how sexual and relational dissidence is tamed by the inclusion of same-sex 168

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relationships within an institution that has been the lynchpin of gender and sexual inequalities. The latter point out that same-sex marriage could leave the door open to labelling married lesbians and gay men as ‘good’ and ‘responsible’ citizens and the unmarried as ‘immature’, ‘bad’ or ‘irresponsible’ (and assumed to be promiscuous). Is the same argument relevant to civil unions? There are important differences between civil unions and marriages, where the former can still include exclusions from many of ‘rights’ and ‘responsibilities’ automatically available to heterosexual married couples (often in terms of adoption, fostering, joint parenthood, and reproductive ‘rights’). This idea informed an empirical study published as Same Sex Marriages (Heaphy et  al., 2013) that analysed the relationship narratives of 50 couples (100 individuals) who were aged up to 35 when they entered into civil partnership in the United Kingdom. Because civil unions are legally distinct from marriage, they could offer the opportunity to claim rights and responsibilities without what one participant described as ‘the baggage’ of heterosexual assumptions, norms, and expectations. Yet, almost all of the participants in the study used the terms ‘civil partnership’ and ‘marriage’ interchangeably when referring to their legally formalised relationship, with the majority stating that they believed their relationship to be ‘like’ a marriage or to be a marriage in practice. On the surface it seemed that the majority were more than willing to go along with many of the recognisable norms of marriage, including emotionally and sexually monogamous commitment. In addition, they saw each other as the primary source of material, emotional, and practical support, and viewed their couple relationship as the most central one. They privileged relationships with legal and biological family over friendships. In line with contemporary norms of marriage, the majority had cohabited before making a formal commitment, agreed that trust and communication were central to a good ‘marriage’, and attempted to organise their relationships in accordance with an ‘egalitarian’ ideal. Couples tended to view their relationships as similar to, or the same as, heterosexual marriages and tended to emphasise the ‘ordinariness’ of their relationships. In many respects the young couples appeared to have highly conventional marriage-like relationships. On the one hand, this could appear to add weight to sociological arguments about how claiming and being granted rights to citizenship in the form of ‘marriage-like’ arrangements goes hand-in-hand with the normalisation of sexualities and relationships. This shores up the institution of marriage in an era when many commentators argue that it is in decline, and simultaneously neutralises 169

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radical critiques of the institution as exclusionary. On the other hand, the very conventionality of same-sex marriage-like relationships could be interpreted as posing a radical challenge to heteronormativity, in that it challenges the cultural primacy of the heterosexual couple and family unit, problematises the naturalness of heterosexuality as the basis for social order, and makes visible relational possibilities that hitherto have been marginalised and denigrated as ‘unnatural’, ‘sick’, and dangerous.

Concluding remarks What insights does the discussion in this chapter provide into how we should analyse the sexual politics of personal life? It seems clear that no one sociological approach to understanding these – be it an emancipatory, biopolitical, or life-political one – can explain the multifarious nature of such politics. In studying the politics of sexuality, and the politics of personal life more generally, we would therefore do well to follow Judith Butler’s (2002) suggestion that as far as LGBTQ claims to legal recognition of non-heterosexual kinship (through civil unions and marriage) are concerned, we need to engage in ‘double thinking’. This implies that while same-sex couples, civil partnerships, and marriage may appear conventional, they are simultaneously post-conventional; that is, challenging conventional meanings as discussed above. In questioning the personal politics of sexuality and relationships, we need to go beyond the question of whether developments like same-sex marriage are symptomatic of heteronormativity and homonormativity, and whether same-sex marriages are conventional or not. Rather, the task of the sociology of personal life is to explore how, and in what historical, legal, and broader socio-cultural contexts, are same-sex and heterosexual norms and conventions changing in interlinked ways and what the political consequences of this are. While Judith Butler’s (2002) emphasis on the need for double thinking provides a pointer for what the critical sociological study of sexuality and personal life might entail, I would go further than this and suggest that such sociology needs to incorporate and engage multiple ways of thinking. This can be achieved by adopting an eclectic approach to our frames and concepts, and to our ways of seeing, listening, and thinking. This is necessary because globally, and even within the most liberal legislative jurisdictions, context is everything in considering how the personal is political. What in some contexts might seem to be retrograde steps in claiming certain sexual and relational ‘rights’ can in other contexts appear radically transgressive. The study of the politics of sexuality 170

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and personal life therefore needs to be a contextualised one: one that is socio-culturally, historically, legally and socio-biographically situated.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION yyIn what ways is sexuality an aspect of the politics of personal life? yyIs there any one sociological approach to making sense of how the personal is political that you are most convinced by, and are there elements of that approach that are unconvincing? Why is this? yyDo you agree that LGBTQ lives are by necessity ‘political experiments in living’? yyWhat do you understand ‘sexual citizenship’ to mean?

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WHY 13 CONCLUSION: A SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE?

VANESSA MAY AND PETRA NORDQVIST

The personal and the social In this chapter, we return to some of the key ideas introduced by David Morgan in Chapter 2, and bring together and develop further some of the theoretical concepts that have constituted the backbone of this book. Our aim has been to introduce the reader to a sociology of personal life – that is, to what is sociological about personal life. As the study of people in society, sociology tries to understand the relationship between the individual person and the social. The chapters in this book have in various ways charted how the experiences that people have in a variety of domains of personal life are shaped by the social context in which these experiences take place. Take sexuality for example, as discussed by Brian Heaphy in Chapter  12: changes in social norms and legislation around sexuality have made new ways of living LGBTQ lives possible. But not only that – how individual people live their lives shapes society. The changes in how LGBTQ people are treated by mainstream society are the result of action by LGBTQ people themselves. A core argument running through the book is thus that although broad social patterns and individual experience may seem like completely separate, they are, in fact, intertwined. To use Georg Simmel’s (1950: 7–9) analogy, if we think of society as a painting, the closer we get to it, the more clearly we can distinguish the individual people in the picture. But as we move further away, we can no longer see the details so clearly, and can instead appreciate the overall structure of the painting. We may interpret this as observing two separate entities (individual people and society), but both are, in fact, views of the same thing seen differently, depending on our distance from it. If we view people and society in this manner, it becomes clear that the two cannot be understood independent of each other. 172

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Concerning personal life, which tends to feel private and unique, a sociological approach is thus interested in exploring the ways in which even the most ‘private’ of experiences are shaped by (and in turn help shape) the socio-cultural context in which they occur. For example, how a person views her or his marriage is not only the consequence of how well they get on with their spouse, but is also coloured by social expectations around marriage, as discussed by Petra Nordqvist in Chapter  3. In contemporary Western societies, where marriage is meant to be based on romantic love and mutual emotional disclosure, a person not experiencing these things in their own marital relationship may feel that their marriage is not as it should be. As pointed out in the Introduction, this is true also for the term ‘personal’ itself – what we mean by it and how we experience it is not a universal given, but culturally and socially shaped. If we look at personal life in the aggregate, we can see patterns and structures emerging. For example, as outlined by Vanessa May in Chapter 7, people in a particular society or section of society tend to do things similarly and at similar times in their lives. There are trends regarding when people in a given society marry and how many children they have, and the age at which they do so – and these trends shift over time. It is this shifting patterning or social change that sociologists are interested in describing and explaining. But, in addition, a sociologist studying personal life is also interested in understanding how this aggregate picture affects how individuals live their lives and the meanings they attach to their experiences. It is then possible to discern, for example, changes in how ‘old age’ is defined and understood, and in the kinds of things that older people do in their everyday lives.

Treading a fine line As pointed out in the Introduction, sociologists are always treading a fine line between saying that individual lives are socially shaped and that they are pre-determined. In other words, while exploring how the ways in which people understand fundamental aspects of their self (such as their gender, sexuality, social class or ethnicity) are socially constructed (that is, had they been born into another culture or in another historical period, they would understand themselves differently), it is also important to remain mindful of the fact that people’s lives are not fully determined in advance. If they were, there would be little to distinguish between people from the same background and children would become carbon copies of 173

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their parents. Consequently, people’s lives would be highly predictable and there would be no social change. How can we then claim that people’s lives are, to an extent, socially shaped if Mary, a daughter of working-class parents, goes to university and becomes a lawyer, while her sister Ann leaves school at 18 and works in a shop? Elias (1991) argues that this is because the instincts of every child are unique, and consequently each child responds differently to the socialisation processes that they are subject to. For example, two children will respond differently to being scolded or to receiving affection. According to Elias, it is this individual dialogue between a person and his or her environment that helps shape the person they are. In other words, when explaining what becomes of a person, we cannot explain this as the result of social shaping or individual choice alone. Instead, we must appreciate that a person’s life is the result of a complex interaction between individual personality, social context, as well as pure luck and circumstance. Hence, the different paths that Mary’s and Ann’s lives follow. People are, thus, not mere automatons or puppets to be shaped by social forces, but have a degree of volitional control over their lives. In other words, they have agency. It is partly thanks to this individual agency that people react to their surroundings in not only varied but also unpredictable ways, which in turn helps explain why society is constantly changing. Take the example of marriage discussed above. Not only do existing understandings of what marriage is and how married people should conduct their relationships influence how people think about and ‘do’ their individual marriages, but people can also be critical of such social norms and decide to do things differently. As a result of campaigning for same-sex partnership rights, many countries now offer legal recognition to same-sex couples. Whereas previously, marriage meant a legal union between a man and a woman, it now encompasses same-sex unions as well. And at times, the change happens in less conscious ways, such as the shifts that have occurred in heterosexual couple relationships as a result of women becoming more active in the labour force. It is this interplay between individual agency and being shaped by social forces beyond our control that is of key interest within sociology, and is also the focus of much sociological debate (sometimes called the ‘structure–agency’ debate). You will, in this volume, have read about this issue in relation to, for example, the debate surrounding the individualisation (or de-traditionalisation) thesis, which claims that old structures have given way to increased individual choice in almost all aspects 174

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of life. You will also have gathered that a sociology of personal life is always mindful of the mixture of individual choice and social shaping, but also coincidence, that is involved in making personal life what it is.

A relational view of society One key concept that has run through this book is that of relationality. In previous chapters we discussed how people are relational, gaining their sense of self in relationships with and in relation to other people. What a sociology of personal life aims to do is to seriously take into account the relationships that matter to people, rather than merely focusing on relationships between family members (Smart, 2007). In Chapter  5, Katherine Davies explored the significance of friendships, as well as highlighting that these are not always the ideal relationships based on mutual respect and care that some would believe. A further aim of this book has been to extend this relational view to encompass also how we understand society. While reading sociological accounts, one would be forgiven for thinking that society is a ‘thing’, an entity that ‘really’ exists out there, independent of the human interactions that constitute it. It is such a reading that leads some students to depict society as an entity that can act – as exemplified by statements such as ‘society makes us do X’. However, according to Simmel (1950: 9–10), this is a misunderstanding of the nature of society; it is something that individuals do rather than a thing or a concrete substance. Simmel proposed that society is the result of interactions between individuals, and the elements of society we have come to see as ‘permanent’ (such as the state, family, or social class – also called social structures) are nothing but actions that have become to some extent fixed (Burkitt, 2004: 220). Society can therefore be understood not as something that is, but as something that we do in our personal lives. Society is also relational because it is something that we do in interaction with other people. To take the example of family: ‘family’ does not exist out there as a thing independent of the family practices that constitute it (Morgan, 1996, 2011). In other words, if people did not do family – by, for example, getting married, having children and calling this ‘family’ – there would be no family. These social structures also often become institutionalised. That is, they become regular practices of established social institutions – for example, in the form of family policy or legislation on marriage. Elias (1991) made a similar point by proposing that society should not be viewed as something separate from the relationships that constitute 175

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it. In other words, society is not a force that exists outside of people, but is rather made up of the relationships between people. Consequently, neither individuals nor society can be understood independently of each other, which is why Elias urged sociologists to focus on the relationship between them. He used an analogy comparing society to a house and individuals to the bricks that constitute it (Elias, 1991: 19). Elias argued that we cannot understand the shape of the house by examining individual bricks independently of their relations to each other, and, conversely, we must understand the structure of the whole if we are to understand the relationship between the individual parts. Furthermore, he warned against thinking of either society or the individual as more important than the other, because society could not exist without individuals, while individuals do not exist separate from society.

The interconnectedness of spheres As noted by David Morgan in Chapter 2, the word ‘personal’ carries with it several meanings, many of which contrast with the meanings attached to the word ‘public’. Questioning and critically exploring this distinction that is generally drawn between ‘private/personal’ and ‘public/official’ is also a key theme running through this volume. As we have seen, this distinction has led to a particular view of the world which is divided into ‘personal’ home and ‘public’ work and politics. These in turn tend to be gendered so that the home has traditionally been seen as women’s sphere, while the public sphere remains masculine. This has had a significant impact on personal life, for long restricting women’s access to paid employment or political life, as well as leaving women with the main responsibility for unpaid work such as childcare and household work. The effects of these gendered divisions can still be felt today. What the chapters in this book have also demonstrated are the many ways in which this often taken-for-granted distinction between public and private, and all of its consequences, are socially constructed and therefore liable to change. In addition, the authors have discussed many examples of how the boundary between public and private is porous. The home is a good example of this. Although it is usually considered the quintessential private sphere, there are many people who do not experience privacy in their homes, as discussed by Sue Heath in Chapter 10. And, as explored by Vanessa May in Chapter  11 and Brian Heaphy in Chapter  12, not only are the public and private spheres interconnected, in that ‘public’ 176

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actions such as politics affect personal life (and vice versa), but personal activities take place in public settings and vice versa. Capitalism is a prime example of a shift that has occurred in the ‘public’ sphere that has had a significant impact on personal life. Capitalism evolved hand-inhand with industrialisation, and particular modes of producing goods, mainly in factories. This had a significant impact on the lives of countless people who moved from the countryside into towns and cities in order to work in factories for a wage. Industrialisation also led to the production of increasing volumes of goods. We now live in societies dominated by consumption to the extent that even our identities or lifestyles can, according to some theorists, be bought, as explained by Dale Southerton in Chapter  8. Furthermore, Helen Holmes explored in Chapter  9 the ways in which this consumer culture has come to influence how people relate to their own bodies. Think of the ways in which you signal who you are – for example, through the clothes you wear, the music you listen to, or the food you eat. Thus, it can be argued that even our identity, which probably, to many of us, feels purely ‘personal’, is in fact to some extent the product of capitalist market forces. And, as noted by Sophie Woodward in Chapter 6, material objects are closely implicated in our relationships, being one aspect of how we conduct relationships, for example by giving each other gifts, as well as symbolising them, such as when we keep hold of a gift because it reminds us of a beloved family member or friend.

Concluding remarks To sum up, our argument in this book has been that it is important to understand both the personal and the social in order to examine not only personal life but also society. Although ‘the personal’ is seemingly private and therefore not ‘social’, and consequently perhaps not something that sociology could or should study, in fact the most private moments of our lives are, to an extent, shaped by social forces. In other words, personal life says something about both us as individual people, and the social context in which we live. Conversely, what we do in our personal lives has an impact on the social – social structures or broader patterns in society are nothing more than the aggregate of numerous individual acts. In this way, the study of personal life opens up vistas into dimensions of social reality that are often treated as separate within sociology, but also offers the possibility of exploring how these come together and intertwine in the life of the person. 177

GLOSSARY

Agency

A term that refers to people’s capacity for free thought and action. In sociological debates over agency, individual choice has been defined as important. Agentic action is often mistakenly taken to denote action that in some way goes against or breaches social constraints. However, also following norms can be seen as agentic action; namely the result of choosing to act according to expectations. In some approaches to the study of material objects, objects are also seen to have agency in that they have an effect on people and events.

Biopolitics

Primarily associated with the work of Michel Foucault and refers to politics associated with trying to govern life itself and to regulate the whole of the population, as well as inciting people to recognise themselves as sexual subjects. His analysis of biopolitics relates to, for example, the development of the science of demography and the will by states to record births, deaths, and marriages, which aimed to measure not just the quantity of the population, but also its quality. A related term is ‘biopower’ (also associated primarily with Foucault’s work), which refers to the state’s power to control both the physical and political bodies of the population.

Body regimes

Regimes in which people engage in relation to their bodies, for example exercise or diet regimes, in order to make themselves look and feel a certain way. Sociology highlights how, although these regimes may feel like something we ‘choose’, they are also the result of powerful social and cultural influences, such as the media and the health professions. Feminists would also point out that women’s body regimes are influenced by patriarchal ideologies.

Commodification

A term denoting the process whereby something becomes a commodity. In this process, something that was previously

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Glossary not given a monetary value now becomes measured in terms of economic value. As a result, this thing can now be bought and sold at a certain price. Not only concrete products but also abstract ideas (such as time) can become commodified. Conspicuous consumption A form of consumption the aim of which is to convey wealth and social status visibly. As such, it must be conspicuous; that is, clearly noticeable by others who are then meant to draw the right conclusion as to the person’s social status. In addition, what is consumed must be expensive, luxurious, or otherwise unattainable to the large majority of people. Expensive sports cars are an example of conspicuous consumption. Consumer culture

Contemporary Western societies are said to be consumer cultures; that is, they are characterised by high volumes of goods produced and consumed. In consumer culture, more and more things are available for consumption, and consumption has become increasingly important in people’s lives. Even lifestyles and identities can be said to be bought in the form of, for example, clothing and music.

Demography

A discipline that studies statistical data, for example aggregate patterns of birth, death, marriage, income, and so on.

De-traditionalisation

See individualisation.

Discourse

Refers to characteristic ways of describing and understanding the world, a ‘way of speaking and thinking’ about something. Usually associated with the work of Michel Foucault who explored, among other things, the dominant ways in which sexual behaviour, such as for example masturbation or homosexuality, was interpreted and understood within a dominant framework of speaking and thinking in the nineteenth century.

Emotional labour

A term coined by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild in her book The Managed Heart The Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983). Hochschild observed that increasingly, employees, particularly in service occupations, were expected to manage their emotions

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Glossary according to rules set by their employers. In other words, emotions become an important part of how an employee’s job performance is evaluated, by employers and by clients, and employees must manage their emotions accordingly. Employers demand such emotional labour in the interests of financial profit. ‘Emotional labour’ is also used in relation to relationships to describe the work that parties do to look after the emotional wellbeing of each other. Empirical research

Research that is based on data that have been collected through qualitative or quantitative methods.

Ethnicity

A group that shares ethnicity is one that claims descent from common ancestors. People of the same ethnicity also often share a common language, religion, or culture.

Ethnomethodology

A school of thought within sociology that is interested in studying the common-sense knowledge within a society. For example, the focus can be on how people use language to make sense of their everyday experiences. Or, an ethnomethodologist can be interested in how people create social order, for example social order on the streets, where most people can be seen to behave as if according to some unwritten and taken-for-granted rules.

Families of choice

A term that is used by sociologists to highlight the fact that families are not necessarily defined by blood and marital ties, but rather who counts as kin can also be a question of choice. A person’s family of choice is made up of people who matter most to them, irrespective of whether they are related by blood or marriage.

Femininity

Refers to the social construction and expression of being a woman; in other words, the social ‘acting out’ of what it means to be a ‘woman’. Socially constructed as the opposite of masculinity (see also Gender)

Feminism

Both a social movement and a theoretical tradition. Second-wave feminism began in 1960s in the United States and the United Kingdom, and has had a significant impact on

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Glossary women’s lives by campaigning for equal rights in working life and in families. The theoretical strand of feminism has been closely linked to the social movement side, and many feminist theorists have also been political activists. There are many different schools of thought within feminism, but one of the key foci has been to analyse critically the nature and workings of inequalities between men and women, and the impact these have had on women’s lives. Functionalism

A school of thought within sociology that dominated the discipline in the 1950s and 1960s. Depicts society as an organisation (much like an organism) where every constituent part (or social institution) has its own function to perform that helps ensure the proper functioning of the whole. So, for example, the family is seen to have a key function in ensuring the stability and social cohesion of society.

Gender

Refers to the range of characteristics pertaining to masculinity and femininity, and how the two are constructed as different in society. It is a concept that seeks to capture the social aspects of what it means to live as a man or a woman. This differs from the term ‘sex’, which refers to how bodies are coded as ‘male’ and ‘female’ based on their genitalia. A person’s gender as, say, a woman, may or may not correspond to their bodily sex.

Gendered

A term used to describe a) the way in which some activities and practices, such as household work, are generally seen to belong more to one gender than the other, and b) how one’s gender can affect what is expected of one or how one experiences something.

Genealogical

Refers to the idea that each family has a lineage and that this can be traced back in time. The related term genealogy is the practice of tracing the family linage by engaging in so called ‘family history’ research, which is when people try and uncover the history of their own family.

Genetic tie

Refers to a connection between people based on them being connected in the body. This

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Glossary bodily connection used to be spoken of as ‘blood’ or biology, but nowadays it is more common to speak of it as a genetic connection and the sharing of DNA. In popular culture, this bodily connection is often thought of as a defining feature of what it means to be related (compare with Social tie). Heteronormativity

Refers to the fact that the majority of social norms related to sexual behaviour, couple relationships, and family life are based on the assumption that heterosexuality is the norm. Heteronormativity means assuming that people are heterosexual, while being non-heterosexual is seen as deviating from the norm.

Heterosexuality

(see Sexuality)

Homophily

A term that is used to describe the fact that people tend to associate with – i.e. be friends and enter into intimate relationships with – people who are similar to them. So, for example, people’s networks of friends tend to consist of people from a similar social class background, or a similar ethnic background.

Homosexuality

(see Sexuality)

Individualisation thesis (also called detraditionalisation thesis)

A thesis that has become a central focus of debate within the social sciences. The main thrust of the argument is that, as a result of the weakening of traditions in contemporary societies, individuals are freer to make their own life choices.

Industrialisation

A process that began in the eighteenth century in Europe that transformed pre-industrial societies into industrialised ones. Central to this process was the development of machine-based forms of production which meant that production was increasingly centralised in large factories that produced hitherto unseen volumes of goods. In addition, developments in transportation meant that these goods could be transported across vast distances by train or boat. Industrialisation also led to significant social change, as increasing numbers of people moved to towns and cities and incomes rose (see Urbanisation).

Islamophobia

A term that refers to the fear and hatred of Muslim people. The term has become

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Glossary increasingly widespread since the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and on the Pentagon in the United States and the ensuing ‘war on terror’, whereby ‘terrorist’ became practically synonymous with ‘Muslim’ in public discourse. As a result, anti-Muslim prejudice has strengthened in many Western countries. Kinship

A term widely used within anthropology to denote a person’s ‘extended family’ as it were; that is, relatives beyond the nuclear family group (for example, grandparents, aunts, and cousins).

Late modernity

A term that is used to describe contemporary Western societies, which are said to have moved to a new stage of modernity that can be characterised as late modern, i.e. a continuation of some of the aspects of modernity. For example, some institutions such as capitalism continue to be in a key position within late modern societies. (Compare with Postmodernity)

LGBTQ

Acronym for ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer’. Has now become a widely used term in everyday speech.

Life-politics

A term coined by Anthony Giddens in his book Modernity and Self-Identity (1991). By life-politics, Giddens was referring to political issues which related to ‘processes of self-actualisation in post-traditional contexts’ (p. 214). In such post-traditional contexts, Giddens argues, where traditions no longer dictate who we should be or how we should live our lives, many formerly prescribed aspects of our identity are now open to reflexive choice as well as political action and contestation. Such life-political issues pertain for example to sexual identity or lifestyle.

Masculinity

Refers to the social construction and expression of being a man; in other words, the social ‘acting out’ of what it means to be a ‘man’. Socially constructed as the opposite of femininity; that is, being a woman. (See also Gender)

Material culture

Refers to the physical objects that help make up a culture. These objects may include everyday objects such as buildings, clothing, and utensils but also various forms of art.

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Glossary Material turn

The material turn refers to a broad intellectual project in the social sciences that seeks to explore how artefacts and the materiality of things and organisms, for example the human body, have an impact on the social world in their own right and cannot be regarded only on the level of ‘the symbolic’. It emerged in the late 1990s as a reaction to the ‘cultural turn’ of the 1980s, which tended to emphasise the role of the symbolic, language, and culture in social life.

Materiality

A term that refers to the material capacity of an object; that is, what the object is made of, its form and shape, what the object can do or allows us to do.

Modernity

Through industrialisation, Western societies are said to have entered a stage of modernity that was characterised by an increasing emphasis on rationality, reason, and science; the rise of capitalism and nation-states; and the increased social mobility of people.

Objectification

A term that refers to the process whereby an object comes to represent or symbolise a person or relationship.

Patriarchy

The systematic domination of women by men that extends to all areas of life, including family, work, and politics. This is understood as an overarching patriarchal structure: it is not necessary for every man to dominate every woman, but rather patriarchy should be understood on a broader scale of men as a group in society dominating over women as a group. This is still clearly visible in statistical data that show that women earn on average less than men (even for the same work), women are less likely to reach top positions in business or politics, and women take care of most of the housework or domestic labour such as childcare and cleaning.

Post-industrial

A term used to describe contemporary Western societies that are no longer dominated by the manufacturing industries (as they were when they were industrialised nations). Instead, the service sector has increased in significance and the countries are now more reliant on the financial sector as well.

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Glossary Postmodernity

A term that is used to describe contemporary Western societies, which are said to have emerged from a period of modernity into a new period of postmodernity. In contrast with theories of late modernity, the concept of postmodernity is used to indicate that there has been distinct break away from modernity to a period characterised by fragmentation, insecurity, and superficiality. (Compare with Late modernity)

Private sphere

The private sphere is most commonly associated with activities and relationships that take place in the home. The private sphere is usually depicted in contrast to the public sphere. The origins of how this distinction is understood in contemporary Western societies can be traced to industrialisation, which separated production away from homes into factories, thus creating a sharper division between life inside and outside the home.

Public space

Public space is generally understood to be ‘open’ and accessible to everyone, such as streets, public squares, and parks.

Public sphere

The public sphere is understood in juxtaposition to the private sphere as those spheres of life that fall outside the home, such as politics and work.

Pure relationship

A term coined by Anthony Giddens to describe what he saw as a key characteristic of contemporary intimate relationships, namely that they are no longer bound by tradition such as marriage, but last only for as long as the two parties are satisfied with the relationship.

Qualitative

Refers to research that is conducted with the help of qualitative methods of data collection and analysis. The label ‘qualitative research’ covers a range of approaches and methods. Broadly speaking, qualitative research aims to understand the meanings that people attach to their experiences, and to understand thought and action in their social context.

Quantitative

Refers to research that is conducted with the help of quantitative methods of data collection and analysis. Quantitative research aims to quantify the extent to which a social

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Glossary phenomenon occurs within a society, and to locate where in society it is taking place, as well as how it relates to other social phenomena. Quantitative data are presented in numerical form. One way of analysing quantitative data is through the use of statistical methods. Relationality

A term that refers to the fact that as social beings, much of what we do is in connection with other people and much of what we understand is derived from relationships with other people.

Sexuality

Refers to the desire in people that finds expression through sexual activity, sexual relationships, or sexual identity. Heterosexuality refers to sexual desire between two people of opposite genders (a woman and a man) and homosexuality refers to sexual attraction between people of the same gender (two men or two women).

Social change

This is a broad term that in sociology is used to denote not only significant shifts in how people think and act (i.e. in social norms and practices), but also in social institutions (such as religion or industry) and systems of governance (for example, the shift from feudal states to democratic republics).

Social class

A group of people who share a similar social and economic position. The division of society into different social classes is one key cause of social inequalities.

Social constructionism

An approach within the social sciences that takes a particular view of the nature of reality. Rather than accepting social reality at face value, social constructionists would argue that much of the social reality we come to know and take for granted is in fact socially constructed, i.e. the product of human thought and activity. For example, ‘adolescence’ is a stage in the life course that many would take to ‘just exist’ – but in fact the concept of adolescence emerged at a particular time and in a particular place and is therefore not a universal concept. Instead, it is socially constructed.

Social norm

A term used to describe how there exist in any society certain socially shared expectations as

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Glossary to how people should behave. For example, the expectation that people not laugh at a funeral reflects a social norm of appropriate behaviour, and norms around sexuality shape expectations about what constitutes a socially acceptable intimate relationship (see Heteronormativity). Social order

This is a key interest of many sociologists, namely how society and social life are ordered along particular patterns. This happens both on the macro level (as seen if we look at statistical data on, for example, men and women’s employment patterns) and on the micro level (exemplified by, for example, studies of how people tend to interact with each other according to certain unwritten rules while out in public).

Social script

A term that refers to the ways in which personal lives are ‘scripted’; that is, are expected to follow set forms and patterns, often according to social norms. These scripts can, for example, concern the expected timing of life events such as getting married or having children; that is, temporal scripts.

Social structure

A concept used within sociology to describe (semi-)permanent patterns of social life. An example of a social structure is gender: our societies are to an extent organised around gender. Men and women are seen to have different roles, for example within families and at work. These social structures are perhaps most clearly visible if we use statistical data to examine the patterning of social life. It is, for example, clear that women look after children more than men do, while a higher proportion of men work outside the home, and command bigger salaries at work than women do.

Social tie

Refers to a feeling of connection between people based on them having a social relationship (compare with Genetic tie).

Socialisation

A process that children go through as they learn the ‘correct’ manner of behaviour for their particular society. In other words, children become socialised (in the first instance by their parents) to become acceptable members of

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Glossary their social group who can act ‘appropriately’ in social situations (see Social norm.) Statistical

(see Quantitative)

Symbolic interactionism A sociological tradition that investigates how meaning is created in interaction. Symbolic interactionists tend to be interested in studying face-to-face interactions between individuals; focusing, for example, on how those individuals come to define the situation. Symbolic value

If a good such as a table has symbolic value, its value is in other words determined by the symbolic meanings attached to it, such as whether or not the table is an antique or a fashion item. (Compare with Use value).

Temporal script

See Social script

Urbanisation

A process that occurred in conjunction with industrialisation, beginning in Europe in the eighteenth century. Early urbanisation resulted from the pull factor of towns becoming increasingly industrialised, requiring ever growing numbers of workers, and the push factor of the mechanisation of agriculture, which meant that farm labourers in rural areas found themselves without the means to earn a living. Urbanisation has been uneven across the globe, but over half of the current global population lives in urban areas.

Use value

The use value of a good such as a table is determined by the quality of craftsmanship and raw materials that went into producing it, as well as by its usefulness to the person buying it. (Compare with Symbolic value)

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214

INDEX

adoption, 51, 58 Adoption and Children Act 2002, 33 adulthood as being/becoming, 92 as a social category, 93 as taken for granted, 92–3 aestheticisation of everyday life, 109 affective communities, 163, 164–5, 167 ageing and consumption, 110 and gender, 98–9 meanings of, 96–8, 110 ageing population, 96 agency, 7, 74, 75–6, 92, 162, 163, 174, 178 Allan, Graham, 67 Anderson, Elijah, 148–9, 151, 154 Arnold, Jeanne, 80 assemblage, 76–77 Baudrillard, Jean, 105 Bauman, Zygmunt, 8, 107–8 Baym, Nancy, 152 beauty aesthetics, 120 Bécares, Laia, 147–8, 149 Beck, Ulrich, 8, 19, 64 Beck-Gernsheim, Elisabeth, 8, 19, 64 Bellotti, Elisa, 61 Bengtson, Vern, 9 Bennett, Jane, 77 biological connections, 47, 53 egg, sperm and embryo donation, 56 blood, 47 genes, 47 biopolitcs, 160, 163, 164, 165, 178

biopower, 160, 165 Blasius, Mark, 164–5, 167 Blatterer, Harry, 92–3 body, 14, 117 bodywork, see bodywork and consumption, 117, 120–1 as a cultural symbol, 118 and discipline, 120 and fashion, see fashion and grooming/maintenance, 125–7, 128 and identity, 119–120 the ‘leaky’, fleshy body, 117, 122, 125 materiality of, 127 objectification, 118–9 the pregnant body, see pregnancy and size, 120, 123–4 the sensory body, 54–5, 124–5, 140 body regimes, 120, 178 bodywork, 127 Butler, Judith, 32, 170 capitalism, 5, 18, 19, 27, 104, 107, 157, 177 Cartesian dualism, 117 Cheal, David, 6 Chicago School, the, 4 childhood as being/becoming, 91–2 and consumer culture, 112–3 meanings of, 91 Chin, Elizabeth, 113 citizenship, 157, 164, 167, 168, 169 civil inattention, 150–1

215

INDEX Civil Partnership Act 2004, 33, 38 civil partnerships, 38–39, 166–7, 169–70 Civil Rights Movement, 147 civil unions, see civil partnerships cohabitation, 36, 40–1, 163, 170 attitudes towards, rates, 36–7 Cohen, Rachel Lara, 128 Coll, Rachel, 123 commodification, 114, 115, 178–9 compulsory heterosexuality, 158, 159, 164, 167 connectedness, 9, 10, 11, 28, 75, 78, 86, 87, 90 conspicuous consumption, 103, 121, 179 consumer attitude, 107–8, 115 consumer culture, 14, 177, 179 and the body, 121, 177 and choice, 8, 108 definition of, 101 origins of, 102 impact on personal life, 104–9, 115 and relationships, 111, 113–4, 115 and social class, 107, 109 consumption and ageing, 110–1 and gender, 113, 115 and the home, 136 and identity, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 114–5, 177 and individuality, 102–3, 104 and lifestyle, 104, 107, 108, 109, 110–1, 177 and neo-tribes, 109, 115 and social class, 104, 107–8, 109 symbolic meaning of, 122 Cook, Ian, 84 Cook, Daniel, 112 cosmopolitan canopy, 151, 154 couple relationships, 1, 5, 9, 12–13, 30, 95, 162, 165–6, 169–70, 174 ‘doing’ of, 34–40

216

Cronin, Anne, 62 cultural turn, the, 119 Dempsey, Deborah, 54, 57 Descartes, René, 117 Desmond, Matthew, 133 detraditionalisation thesis, see ­individualisation thesis Dickens, Charles, 138–9 discourse, 23, 30, 36, 48, 56, 58, 135, 160, 161, 167, 180 distributed personhood, 77 divorce, 37–8 and kinship, 50 rates, 38 Divorce Reform Act 1969, 37 Djohari, Natalia, 54–5 Donovan, Catherine, 65, 167–8 Douglas, Mary, 122, 134 Drazin, Adam, 76, 82 Duggan, Lisa, 168 Durkheim, Emile, 3–4 egg donation, see new reproductive technologies Elias, Norbert, 174, 175–6 embeddedness, 10, 28, 87, 90 embryo donation, see new reproductive technologies emotional labour, 41, 127, 128, 136, 180 emotions, 25, 28, 127, 140 Engels, Friedrich, 5 essentialism, 32 ethics of indifference, 151, 154 ethnicity, 90, 97–8, 137, 173, 180 and cohabitation, 37 and consumption, 113 and friendship, 69 and home, 137 and kinship, 50 and public space, 144, 146, 147–9

INDEX families of choice, 6, 65–6, 167–8, 181 family, 2, 5–6, 7, 8, 10, 13, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 70, 71–3, 81, 165, 169, 179 and the body, 141 being related to, 46 ‘doing’ family, 6, 175 displaying family, 78 and home, 135–8, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144 nuclear, 5–6, 44, 50, 57, 58, 64, 135 practices, 78, 175 regulation of, 157, 160 relationships, 10, 49, 140, 167, 169 responsibilities, 51–2, 54 substance abuse in, 140 family sociology, 2, 5–6 fashion, 121 Featherstone, Mike, 108–9, 110 feminism, 5–6, 40, 157, 159, 179 and the body, 118 and the home, 137 and intimate relationships, 41–2 Finch, Janet, 11, 24, 52, 78 Firth, Raymond William, 49 Forge, Anthony, 49 Foucault, Michel, 160–1 Francis, Doris, 67–8 friendship, 13, 167, 169, 175 and choice, 67–70, 71 idealization of, 64–5, 70–1 and individualisation, 63–4, 66–7 through the life course, 61, 67–8 negative aspects of, 70, 71–2 and new technologies, 62–3 and ‘race’/ethnicity, 68, 69 as socially patterned, 67–70 types of, 60, 62 friendship ethic, 65, 165 friendship networks, 61 functionalism, 5

Gagnon, John H., 32 Gell, Alfred, 77 gender, 7, 32, 33, 63, 95, 97, 98–9, 173, 181 and ageing, 98–9 and child care, 42 and consumption, 113, 115 and division of labour, 42 and family, 34, 42–3 in/equality, 4, 5, 12, 42–3, 157–8, 159, 162, 165 and nature, 32 and public space, 145–7, 176 and responsibilities, 34 and sexuality, 33, 43–4 gender studies, 163, 168 Giddens, Anthony, 8, 40–1, 64, 65, 71, 139, 162 Ginsburg, Robert, 134 Glucksmann, Miriam, 113 Goffman, Erving, 150 Gorman-Murray, Andrew, 137–8 Graham, Allan, 135 Green, Eileen, 63, 147 Grosz, Elizabeth, 118, 122 Hampton, Keith, 153 Hallam, Elizabeth, 83 Harris, Christopher, 50 Heaphy, Brian, 43, 66, 166, 167–8 Hebdige, Dick, 104 Hepworth, Mike, 110 heteronormativity, 31, 121, 183 of the life course, 95 of marriage, 168, 169, 170 heterosexual norms, see heteronormativity heterosexual relationships, 165, 166–7, 174 heterosexuality, 31–2, 157–9, 164, 167 Hochschild, Arlie, 113–4 Hockey, Jenny, 83 Hogan, Bernie, 63

217

INDEX home, 14, 130–2, 138–9, 176 children’s and young people’s experiences of, 139–140 and consumption, 136 and ethnicity, 137 and family, 135–8, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144 as gendered, 137, 145, 176 and housing, 131, 141 the ‘ideal’ home, 131, 136 and material objects, 13, 80–1, 82, 124, 130, 138 meanings of, 14, 18, 19 ownership, 18–9, 131–2 physicality of, 134–5, 139 and privacy, see privacy and private space and relationships, 137–8 rented homes, 133 and sexuality, 137 and social class, 136, 138 homonormativity, 168, 170 homophily, 68–9, 71, 182 homosexuality, 156, 159, 161, 164 hooks, bell, 137 household, 138 one-person household, 138 Hubert, Jane, 49 Hurdley, Rachel, 78 Illouz, Eva, 114, 115 individualisation thesis, 7–8, 19, 64, 107, 119, 121, 174–5, 183 and the body, 120–1 critiques of, 8–9, 66–7 and gender, 7–8 and marriage, 40–1 and social class, 7–8 industrialisation, 183 and consumption, 102 and the public–private distinction, 135–6, 145, 177 information and communication technologies, 62–63, 68, 109, 145, 152, 153

218

Ingold, Tim, 76 interactions in public, with friends and family, 152–3 rules of, 150, 151 with strangers and acquaintances, 149–52 intimate relationships, 13, 162 Islamophobia, 149, 183–4 Jamieson, Lynn, 41–2, 138 Jin, Xiumin, 147 Johnson, Asai Mohamadi, 149 Ketokivi, Kaisa, 7 King, Peter, 139 kinning, 51 kinship, 13, 46, 184 and adoption, 51, 58 affinities, 53–57 biological connections, see biological connections and birth, 50 blood, 47 and care, 51, 141 and creativity, 54, 58 and death, 50 and divorce, 50 and ethnicity, 50 and everyday life, 48, 49 as a ’fixed’ or given relationship, 47–8, 53–4 and law, 51 ’living’ kinship, 46, 51, 55, 58 and medical technologies, see new reproductive technologies as process, 50, 58 and sexuality, 50, 55 and surrogacy, see surrogacy universe of, 49 Kitzinger, Celia, 127 Kuechler, Susanne, 76 La Fontaine, J.S., 21 Lahad, Kinneret, 94–5, 147

INDEX Lasch, Christopher, 106 Lash, Scott, 104, 107 Latour, Bruno, 126 Law, John, 125 Lewek, Mirjam, 149 Lewis, Kevin, 69 LGBTQ, 184 experiments in living, 162–3 communities, 164–5 and the home, 137 legislation, 19, 164 politics, 159–160, 163–4, 168, 170 rights, 156, 161, 164, 170 Lienhardt, Godfrey, 21 life course and gender, 95, 97, 98–9 as normative, 88–9, 94–5 through a personal life lens, 89–90, 92, 95, 99–100 and social class, 90, 93, 94 as a social institution, 88 as socially constructed, 92 life course stages, 13, 87–8 life course transitions, 3, 88, 90, 93 life-politics, 162–3, 164, 167, 170, 184 Lindsay, Jo, 54 living apart together (LATs), 163 Lofland, Lynn, 150, 151, 152 Longhurst, Robyn, 118, 123 Lury, Celia, 113

Marx, Karl, 103 Marxism, 6 masculinity, 184 Mason, Jennifer, 11, 52, 53, 54, 55 mass consumption, 103–4, 107 material culture, 13, 74, 75, 76, 124, 184 material objects, 13, 127 as agentic, 75–6, 127 and global connections, 84–5 in the home, 80–1, 82, 124, 130, 138 mass production of, 83–4 materiality of, 75, 86 meaning of, 77 in personal life, 76, 78 and relationships, 78–80, 81–3, 86, 177 and self, 77, 79 material turn, 122 materiality, 75, 86, 125 McPherson, Miller, 68–9 Mead, George Herbert, 9–10, 20–1 Miles, Rebecca, 149 Miller, Daniel, 76–7, 111, 113 Mills, Amy, 153–4 Mills, C. Wright, 4 Mol, Annemarie, 125 monogamy, 163, 165, 166, 168, 169 Morgan, David, 6, 12, 141, 152 Munro, Moira, 139 Murphy, Cullen, 80

Madigan, Ruth, 139 Mallet, Shelley, 130 Marcoux, Jean-Sébastian, 79 marriage, 8, 157, 169–70, 172, 174 cultural meanings of, 37 and gender, 33–4 median age at marriage, 35–6 rates, 34–5, 37 and religion, 35 and romantic love, 30 same-sex, see same-sex marriage Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act, 2013

naming, 24–5 nature, 32 biological differences, 31 and blood, 47 the body, 123 as innate quality, 32 and kinship, 47 new reproductive technologies, 6, 47, 55 egg, sperm and embryo donation, 56 In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF), 55 reproductive donation, 47, 56, 58 non-monogamy, 163, 165, 166, 168, 169

219

INDEX objectification, 76–7, 79, 118–9, 184 Øian, Hogne, 94 ontological security, 139 Pahl, Ray, 61, 62, 66–7, 70 Papapolydorou, Maria, 68 Parrott, Fiona, 82 Parsell, Cameron, 135 Parsons, Talcott, 5 Patmore, Coventry, 136 patriarchal, 82, 118, 157, 158, 184 person, 20–2, 174 as distinct from the self, 20–2, 27–8 and material objects, 77 social construction of, 22, 92 personal, 7, 9, 27–8, 176, 177 definition of, 16–17 social construction of, 17–8, 19–20, 22–3, 27, 173 personal communities, 61, 66, 70, 167 ‘personal is political’, 157, 170 personal life, 14, 15, 18, 172, 176, 177 definition of, 1–2, 11 and material objects, 74–5, 76, 84 as political, 14 politics of, 156–7, 162–71 in public spaces, 83, 144, 149, 150, 154 and social class, 7–8, 25–7 social construction of, 11–2, 22–3, 173–4 sociology of, 2–3, 6–7, 17, 20, 170, 172, 173, 175, 177 personal practices, 23–4, 27 personal ties, 46 personhood, see person Phoenix, Cassandra, 92 Plato, 117 Plummer, Ken, 164, 168 politics of personal life, 156–7, 162–71 pregnancy, 123 privacy, 138–139, 141–2 private space, 1, 136, 144, 145, 150, 155 and home, 134

220

private sphere, 3, 33, 118, 136, 145, 176–7, 185 and the home, 138–139 promotional culture, 105–6 public–private distinction, 16, 144, 145 critiques of, 4, 14, 144, 154–5, 176–7 and gender, 136, 145, 176 social construction of, 145, 176 public space, 14, 141, 185 and the body, 118, 123 and close relationships, 152–3 definition of, 144 and diversity, 149, 151, 154 exclusion from, 146–9, 151 and gender, 145–7, 176, 123 and information and communication technologies, 145, 152, 153 interactions in, 150–152, 153–4 and pregnancy, 123 and ‘race’/ethnicity, 144, 146, 147–9 and strangers and acquaintances, 14, 149–52, 154 public sphere, 3, 33, 118, 136, 145, 155, 176–7, 185 pure relationship, 8, 9, 40–41, 64, 70, 185 critiques of, 10, 66–7, 71–2 Qvortrup, Jens, 91 ‘race’, 26, 68, 146, 147–9 Ragoné, Helena, 57 Rathje, William, 80 Reid, Carolina, 132 relatedness, see kinship relationality, 7, 9–11, 13, 28, 77–8, 79, 175, 185–6 relationships, 13, 162, 165, 166–7, 174 and consumption, 111, 113–4 as created through practices, 23–4 and gender, 162 as negotiated through objects, 78–80, 81–3, 86 with strangers and acquaintances, 149–52

INDEX ‘sticky’ relationships, 47 suffusion of, 61 with things, 13, 74, 84 Rich, Adrienne, 158 Róin, Ása, 97 Rose, Gillian, 78 Roseneil, Sasha, 7, 43 Rosser, Colin, 50 same-sex marriage, 33, 157, 167 arguments for and against, 168–70 average age at marriage, 39 divorce, 39, 43 legislation of, 156, 174 rates, 38–9 same-sex relationships, 31, 33, 38–9, 43, 56, 165, 166–7 formal recognition of, 33, 38, 169–70 and home, 137–8 same-sex marriage, see same-sex marriage social patterning of, 38 stigma of, 43 ‘separate spheres’ thinking, 136, 145 critiques of, 4, 14, 144, 154–5 sex, 11, 33, 142, 166 sexuality, 1, 14, 26, 157, 160–161, 162, 164, 172, 173, 186 and biopower, 160–1 and kinship, 50, 55 social construction of, 11, 158, 161, 173 and politics, 162–71 Sexual Offences Act 1967, 33 sexualisation, 118 shared housing, 141 Shilling, Chris, 119 Simmel, Georg, 102, 150, 172, 175 Simon, William, 33 Simpson, Roona, 138 Singleton, Carrie, 63, 147 Smart, Carol, 6, 7, 28, 47, 71–2, 78, 87, 89–90

Smørholm, Sesilie, 92 social class, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 17, 26, 27, 90, 93, 94, 98, 136, 186 and consumption, 104, 107–8, 109 and friendship, 68, 69 and the home, 136, 138 and personal life, 25–7 and public space, 145 social clocks, 89, 93, 94, 98 social construction of gender and sexuality, 32 of personal, 17–18, 19–20, 22–3, 173 of personal life, 11–2, 22–3, 173–4 of personhood, 22 social constructionism, 7, 11, 20, 186 critiques of, 23 social divisions, 26, 27 socialisation, 10, 174, 187 social order, 27, 157, 161, 165, 170, 186 social structures, 7, 17, 70, 72, 90, 109, 157, 175, 177, 187 social ties, 49 sociology, 17, 172 of families, 2, 5–6 ‘new’ sociology of childhood, 91 of personal life, 2–3, 6–7, 17, 20, 170, 172, 173, 175, 177 Sparkes, Andrew, 93 Spector-Mersel, Gabriela, 98 Spencer, Liz, 61, 62, 66, 70 sperm donation, see new ­reproductive technologies suburbia, 136 surrogacy, 56–7 symbolic value of goods, 103–4, 105, 187–8 Sweetman, Paul, 121 Tang, Lijun, 63 temporal scripts, 13, 87, 89, 95, 188 Thomas, William I., 4 Thompson, Charis, 58 Thrift, Nigel, 126

221

INDEX Tonkiss, Fran, 151, 154 Turney, Lyn, 82 Uprichard, Emma, 91 urbanisation, 102, 115, 150, 188 Urry, John, 104, 107 use value of goods, 103, 105, 188 Veblen, Thorstein, 103 Victorian Poor Law, 51 Wajcman, 113 Weeks, Jeffrey, 6, 11, 32, 65, 66, 70, 167–8 Wellman, Barry, 63

222

Wernick, Andrew, 105–6 Wessendorf, Susanne, 154 Weston, Kath, 6, 167 Wheeler, Kathryn, 113 white space, 148–9 Whitson, Risa, 147 Wilde, Oscar, 33 Wilson, Sarah, 140 Wimmer, Andreas, 69 Woolf, Virginia, 136 Yeadon-Lee, Tray, 128 Znaniecki, Florian, 4