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 publica-

tion may be made without written permission.

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmit-

ted 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, reg-

istered 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 manufac-
turing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regula-
tions 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

Vanessa May and Petra Nordqvist

What is ‘personal life’? 1

What is sociological about personal life? 3
Some illustrations of personal life in sociology 3
The ‘personal’ is relational 7
Personal life is socially constructed 11
The chapters 12

2 Conceptualising the Personal 16

David Morgan

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

3 Couple Relationships 30
Petra Nordqvist

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

5 Friendship and Personal Life 60

Katherine Davies

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
Concluding remarks: Friends versus family? 71

6 Material Cultures 74
Sophie Woodward

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

7 Personal Life across the Life Course 87

Vanessa May

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 101

Dale Southerton

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

9 The Body in Personal Life 117

Helen Holmes

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 130
Sue Heath

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

11 Personal Life in Public Spaces 144

Vanessa May

Introduction 144
What is public space? 144

vii
 Contents

Access to public space 146

Relationships with strangers and acquaintances 149
What’s so personal about public space? 152
Concluding remarks 154

12 Sexuality and the Politics of Personal Life 156

Brian Heaphy

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

13 Conclusion: Why a Sociology of Personal Life? 172

Vanessa May and Petra Nordqvist

The personal and the social 172

Treading a fine line 173
A relational view of society 175
The interconnectedness of spheres 176
Concluding remarks 177

Glossary178
Bibliography189
Index215

viii
LIST OF TABLES, FIGURES, AND
BOXES

Tables
2.1 Carol Smart’s (2007) core concepts 28
7.1 Life expectancy at birth in selected world regions
(in years, rounded figures) 96

Figures
3.1 Number of marriages, England and Wales, 1934–2014 35
3.2 Percentage of marriages preceded by cohabitation, Australia 36

Boxes
3.1 Are heterosexuality, femininity, and masculinity ‘natural’? 32
3.2 How equal are men’s and women’s relationships? 42
4.1 What responsibilities do people perceive themselves to have
for one another in families? 52
4.2 Surrogacy 57
5.1 Researching homophily using social media data 69
5.2 Researching the ups and downs of friendship 71
6.1 Material abundance in US homes 80
6.2 Follow the things: personal and global connections 84
7.1 Drop out or time out? 94
7.2 Challenging ageist norms 98
8.1 Ageing, retirement, and lifestyles 110
8.2 Learning to consume: consumer culture and children 112
9.1 Being pregnant in the shopping mall 123
9.2 Everyday haircare practices 126
10.1 Home, housing, and financial insecurity 133
10.2 No place like home? 140
11.1 Ethnic concentration and social cohesion 148
11.2 Have people withdrawn from public spaces? 153
12.1 Adrienne Rich on compulsory heterosexuality 158
12.2 Monogamy and non-monogamy in same-sex relationships 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 relation-
ships, 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 meth-
odologies, 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 arrange-
ments 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 Uni-

versity 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 pro-
duce 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, tempo-
rality, ageing in place, family relationships, and qualitative methods.
Vanessa has published in a number of journals including Sociology, Soci-
ological 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 Prac-
tices (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, inti-
macy, 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 Macmil-
lan 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 les-
bian 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).

xii
 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 ‘per-
sonal 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 relation-
ships. 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 bod-
ies; 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 socio-
logical ­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 con-
ceptual 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 socio-
logical 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, con-
tinuing 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 contem-
porary 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 var-
ies 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 ‘pub-
lic’ 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 vari-
ous 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 indi-
vidual 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 Uni-
versity 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 biog-
raphy 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’ defini-
tions 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, heter-
osexual couples were living their lives within societies that were struc-
tured 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 dis-
tribution 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 fam-
ily sociology, but instead we discuss a few turning points in terms of its
development.
Family sociology, which could be defined as comprising those theo-
retical approaches that attempt to link family life to wider social influ-
ences, 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 industri-
alised 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 concep-
tualised. 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 ‘fami-
lies 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, how-
ever, the first attempt to develop a coherent conceptual framework for an
even broader field of study within sociology that looks beyond close rela-
tionships. 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 emer-
gence 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 per-
sonal 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 soci-
eties 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

that many knew from an early age what their life would be like. In con-
trast, 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 indi-
viduals 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 sur-
vive 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 indi-
vidual to stay in it. (Giddens, 1992: 58)

The individualisation thesis argues that such choice has become a preva-
lent 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 repre-
sents who they think they are.
As you will see in the chapters that follow, this individualisation the-
sis 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 evi-

dence that supports the individualisation thesis (such as increased var-
iability 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, tra-
ditional 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 weigh-
ing 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 con-
trast, based on the notion that people are fundamentally relational. This
means that their sense of self is founded on and shaped by the relation-
ships 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 part-
ner, 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 chil-
dren 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 par-
ents. When looking more closely, however, we see that the child’s rela-
tional 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, grandpar-
ents, 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 inter-
linked. This means that the people within them also tend to have indi-
vidual 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 net-
works 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, habit-
uated 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 peo-
ple. The chapters in this volume explore different ways in which we con-
nect 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 phenom-
enon 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 some-
thing 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 prac-
tices if this is how people are defined in a society. In fact, not many
11
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 catego-
ries 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 individu-
alism 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 simultane-
ously 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
 Introducing a Sociology of Personal Life

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’ relation-
ship, 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 signifi-
cance 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 contrib-
utes to the theorisation of personal life as something more than relation-
ships 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 bio-
logical facts but as cultural. The chapter explores these cultural mean-
ings 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 tem-
poral norms in relation to their own lifetime. The next two chapters
13
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 differ-
ent types of space, namely private and public. The home is the focus of
Chapter 10 by Sue Heath, where she explores in particular the relation-
ship 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 ‘per-
sonal’ 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
 Introducing a Sociology of Personal Life

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 read-
ily 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 there-
fore 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?

15
 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 iden-
tifiable 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 mil-
itary 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.

16
 Conceptualising the Personal

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 emo-
tional connotations. Thus, a sense of the individual and a sense of own-
ership combine when someone reacts against what might be taken as
‘personal remarks’ or is seen to be taking something ‘personally’. A fur-
ther 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 challeng-
ing 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, nat-
urally, 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

are given a prominent place. Sometimes these ideas are challenged. Indi-
vidualism 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 con-
sumer, 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 imper-
sonal 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 acciden-
tal. 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 immedi-
ate 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 circum-
stances, 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. Mort-
gages 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 feasi-
ble, 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 com-
plex 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, pri-
vacy, 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 per-
sonal 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 com-
fortable 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 pow-
erful 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 presenta-
tions 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 par-
ticular 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
 Conceptualising the Personal

‘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’ expec-
tations 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 individ-
ual 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 return-
ing 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 (Lien-
hardt, 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 confir-
mation 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 the-
ory, 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, refu-
gees, 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 ‘per-
son’ 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
 Conceptualising the Personal

and valued. But at all times it should be remembered that these distinc-
tions 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 Aus-
tralian suburban house-owner seeking to construct a living family envi-
ronment. 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, fel-
low 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 rele-
vant 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 frame-
work 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 distinc-
tions and inequalities.

Names and naming

Naming and the use of names constitutes one of the most everyday per-
sonal 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 individu-
al’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 rela-
tionships. 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 ‘per-
sonal’, 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 real-
ised 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 sexual-
ities 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 chil-
dren 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 nam-
ing 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 devel-
ops in the course of her discussion of personal life, demonstrate this.
These are memory, biography, embeddedness, relationality and imag-
inary (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, respond-
ing 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 research-
ers) 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 Links past and present.

recollections of past events, Links individual and the social.
feelings and other people. Strong links to emotions and
family.

Biography The process of telling stories. Links past and present.

About individual lives. Links stories about lives with
the processes of telling these
stories.

Embeddedness The strength and tenacity of Helps to understand the

the links we have with others. power and influence of our
social ties.

Relationality Links to other people and Shows how the personal is

their significance. 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 some-
body – 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. Cultur-
ally 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 pref-
erence. 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 edi-
tion 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 sim-
ply 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 nor-
mal is so strong it is commonly seen to be natural (see Box 3.1). Heter-
onormativity exists everywhere; that is, at home, in work, and in public
spaces (e.g. Solebello and Elliott, 2011). Take public spaces as an exam-
ple: 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 dif-
ferences. This presupposes that gender and sexual expressions are uni-
versal; 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, ethnog-
rapher Margaret Mead (1935 in Robinson and Richardson, 2015) discov-
ered 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 gen-
der 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 biolog-
ical 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 writ-

ten into law in many countries. In some historical periods, sexual rela-
tions 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, same-
sex 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. Tradition-
ally, women have been associated with the private sphere of home mak-
ing, and men with the public sphere of work (Pateman, 1988; see May,
‘Personal life in public spaces’, Chapter 11 in this volume). This pat-
tern 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 ine-
quality 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 specif-
ically 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 them-
selves 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

400
Marriages %

300

200

100

0
34

39

44

49

54

59

14
64

69

74

79

84

89

94

99

04

09
19

19

19

19

19

19

19

19

19

19

19

19

19

19

20

20

20
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 reli-
gious 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 Aus-
tralia 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 rela-
tively 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 1992 2013

16% 56% 77%

Figure 3.2 Percentage of marriages preceded by cohabitation, Australia

Source: Australian Institute of Family Studies. [Link]
together-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 fig-
ures 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 Bhrol-
cháin, 2011). In other words, young people do not enter into a partner-
ship 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 inter-
esting 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 relation-
ships. 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 same-
sex 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 partner-
ships 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 same-
sex 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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). Follow-
ing 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 satis-
fied 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 mar-
rying, if at all, until one is older. If a woman falls pregnant ‘out of wed-
lock’ (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 mov-
ing 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’. Fundamen-
tally, they suggest that people are stepping away from traditional West-
ern 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 relation-
ships are characterised by what he calls the ‘pure relationship’. This is
40
 Couple Relationships

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 relation-
ship, 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, sug-
gest 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, how-
ever, 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 them-
selves, 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 car-
ers, the old patterns seem to reassert themselves. Jamieson (1999: 490)
notes that parent–child relationships signal long-term material depend-
ency, 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 dif-
ferent 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 employ-
ment. Men in this group spend about 6 hours/week on housework,

42
 Couple Relationships

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 strik-
ing. 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 differ-
ent 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 cop-
ing 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 heter-
osexual 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 sim-
ilar vein, Anderson (2010), looking specifically at men and masculinity,
argues that men are now able to construct a softer version of masculin-
ity, 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 cou-
ples’ experiences of married life, suggest that whereas the possibilities for

43
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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-bod-
ied 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 liv-
ing in Western democracies over the past 60 years. Changing social val-
ues 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.

44
 Couple Relationships

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?

45
 4 KINSHIP: HOW BEING
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 per-
sonal life. These relationships can be positive or negative, and they mat-
ter deeply in people’s everyday life, forming the backdrop for how people
live their individual lives (Bengtson et al., 2002). Relationships with par-
ents, 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 recognis-
ing 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 assump-
tions 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 impor-
tant insights can be gained about kinship by exploring empirically how
people experience being related. These studies suggest that it is impor-
tant to go beyond popular assumptions and explore how people ‘live’
kinship, because this provides a different perspective on what constitutes
46
 Kinship: How Being Related Matters in Personal Life

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 dona-
tion. 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 rela-
tionship, 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’ rela-
tionships rather than chosen. There are even well-known idioms that cap-
ture 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 understand-
ings 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’ relation-
ships (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 power-
ful, however, and is part and parcel of the idea that family bonds are in
no sense ‘chosen’ but are simply ‘given’.

47
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 rep-
resentation 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 repro-
ductive 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, soci-
ologists have studied people’s ideas, behaviour, and experiences through
conducting social research. In other words, they have explored the mean-
ing of kinship empirically.
Historically, those who studied kinship sought to find out about how
kinship mattered in a modern, industrialised world. Firth conducted

48
 Kinship: How Being Related Matters in Personal Life

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 approach-
ing kinship in this way, Firth and his colleagues already made the impor-
tant 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 dis-
covered 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 exist-
ence 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 per-
son’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 relation-
ships 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 discov-
ered that a kin group is a ‘variable, amorphous and vague social group-
ing 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 pro-
cess, 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 het-
erosexual, 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 differ-
ent ‘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
 Kinship: How Being Related Matters in Personal Life

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 fami-
lies 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 pro-
cess 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 peo-
ple ‘do’ kinship by caring for one another. The issues of care, how peo-
ple 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 responsibil-
ity of the state to look after people’s needs, or whether families are respon-
sible 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 imma-
ture children. The state provided little or no support to those whose fami-
lies 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 respon-
sibilities remains an important one. For example, who should provide for
the growing number of young people who cannot afford to support them-
selves, 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 obliga-
tion. 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 man-
ner 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 respon-
sibilities that do not align with how families operate in practice, they
can contain unrealistic expectations about what relatives will do for
one another.

52
 Kinship: How Being Related Matters in Personal Life

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. Cul-
turally 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 rela-
tionship 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 multi-
dimensional ways. Indeed, Mason suggests that four kinds of affinities
come into play when people settle on and define what kinship connec-
tions 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 con-
nection 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’ rela-
tionship is perhaps the form of connection that is most readily recog-
nised, 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 connec-
tion. That is to say, the way in which people experience the ‘fixity’ of
kinship is not necessarily similar to the way that scientists define biolog-
ical 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

relationships ‘being fixed’, Mason (2008: 35) argues that kinship is a dis-
tinctive 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 chil-
dren’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 communi-
cation 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 stud-
ying 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
 Kinship: How Being Related Matters in Personal Life

Djohari (2016) shows how the particular feel of an object such as a ‘baby-
wrap’ (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 par-
ent ‘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 reso-
nance 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 rela-
tionship between husband and wife and the biological iden-
tity 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 implica-
tions this has for the kinship connections within their family. Just like
families with adopted children (see above), they cannot in a straight-
forward way utilise kinship discourse for themselves, or within their
families. A heterosexual couple with a child born through sperm dona-
tion (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
 Kinship: How Being Related Matters in Personal Life

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 fam-
ilies, and in relation to a culture that emphasises genetic relatedness.

57
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 impor-
tance 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, nego-
tiated, 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 straight-
forward relationship. In personal life, kinship is complex and multi-
faceted 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’, pro-
duced, 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 repro-
ductive 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
 Kinship: How Being Related Matters in Personal Life

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’?

59
 5 FRIENDSHIP AND
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 sim-
ply 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 chang-
ing social world and challenging the notion that friendships are always
positive relationships, characterised by choice and fundamentally differ-
ent 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
 Friendship and Personal Life

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 rela-
tionship, they favour the term ‘personal community’ to denote people’s
networks of friends and associates. Within such networks, the bound-
aries 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 high-
lighted 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 per-
sonal 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 focus-
ing 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 ‘con-
textualised 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 Spen-
cer 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

In addition to their focus on communities and repertoires of friend-

ship, 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 out-
side the parameters of this particular activity. Similarly, ‘fun friends’ are
more complex relationships than those with ‘associates’ but the friend-
ship 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 emo-
tional 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 work-
place 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 techno-
logical 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-to-
face ways of relating. However, evidence suggests that the influence of

62
 Friendship and Personal Life

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 friend-
ships. They found that mobile phones are important for both virtual and
face-to-face connection between friends, enabling young people to main-
tain 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 exist-
ing 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 web-
site 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 replac-
ing or transforming them. As Barry Wellman and Bernie Hogan state:

Rather than only connecting online, in-person or by tele-

phone, many relationships are complex dances of serendipi-
tous face-to-face encounters, scheduled meetings, telephone
chats, email exchanges with one person or several others,
and broader online discussions among those sharing inter-
ests. (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 friend-
ship 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 contempo-
rary 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 individualis-
ation 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 increas-
ingly 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 dis-
tinctive 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 par-
ties 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 per-
sonal disclosure) which reflect the ‘purest’ relational forms. Friendship,

64
 Friendship and Personal Life

therefore, is seen as the ideal relationship form for p ­ ost-industrialised

society, in contrast to ‘fixed’ or ‘given’ relationships with kin and com-
munity 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 spe-
cific contexts. Because of their exclusion from the then exclusively heter-
osexual 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 ‘fam-
ily’ 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 nourish-
ment (Weeks et al., 2001: 11). This is termed the ‘friendship ethic’,
and means that there are particular features of friendship (for exam-
ple 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 espe-
cially 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 relation-
ships 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

patterns in a particular context and, as we will see in the following sec-

tion, it is important not to overstate the significance of friendship com-
pared to relationships with family.

Critiques of de-traditionalisation and the ‘pure relationship’

There are many persuasive criticisms of Giddens’s work (see e.g. Jamie-
son 1998, 1999), and of the idea that society is becoming more individ-
ualistic 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 signifi-
cance 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 evi-
dence. 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 friend-
ship, 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 reu-

nite; 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

66
 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 con-
firmation 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 exist-
ing 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 friend-
ship 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 Mat-
thews’s (1986) exploration of friendships in old age, indicating that prac-
tices 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 signifi-
cance 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

long-lasting friendships helped the women to adapt to changes and dis-

continuities 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 under-
stood 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 back-
grounds to themselves. This ‘sameness’ was seen by many young people
as a positive aspect of their friendship because it meant they shared sim-
ilar 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
 Friendship and Personal Life

geographical proximity to us. This in turn influences our networks of

friends in other ways, for example living in a predominantly white mid-
dle 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 ‘pic-
ture friends’. They thought that these associates were more likely to
be better indicators of a ‘real friendship’ than the list of official ‘Face-
book 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 friend-
ship patterns of the students. The authors found that racial homo-
phily 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.

69
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 par-
lance) 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 relation-
ships, though this is undoubtedly an important theme’ (2006: 2).
As well as this sociological bias towards focusing on positive implica-
tions 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 add-
ing 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
 Friendship and Personal Life

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 volun-
tarism 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 presump-
tion 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 assump-
tions 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 Man-
chester and was conducted between October 2008 and September 2011.
([Link] /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.

71
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 aban-
doned 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 dis-
tinctions 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 Gid-
dens (1992) point to a rise in the importance of personal choice, equal-
ity, and freedom in our personal relationships. Weeks and colleagues’
(2001) study also shows how in the context of non-heterosexual associa-
tions, friendship can at key times replace the role of kin precisely because
they are voluntary relationships. We have also seen how in Western cul-
tures 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 differ-
ences between relationships with friends and family. After all, ‘friend’
and ‘family’ relationships shift and evolve over time and are not discrete

72
 Friendship and Personal Life

categories, but often overlap. It is also problematic to assume that the sig-
nificance 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?

73
 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 con-
nection between personal life and objects is the phrase ‘personal posses-
sions’ (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 negotia-
tion 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 relation-
ships we negotiate (such as those with flatmates).
This chapter explores how theoretical approaches of material cul-
ture 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
 Material Cultures

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 relation-
ships 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 tough-
ness) 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 under-
stood (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 diver-
gent 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 mate-
rials (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 mate-
rials 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 impor-
tant. 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
 Material Cultures

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 ‘dis-
tributed personhood’ (1998), as who we are is distributed through mate-
rial 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 dif-
ferent 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 mantel-
piece (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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 fam-
ily; 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 exam-
ple 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 plas-
tic 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
 Material Cultures

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 per-
fectly 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 hid-
ing 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 pre-
served (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, deci-
sions 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, ‘objec-
tify’ 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

In this example as well as in other cases of sorting possessions, deci-

sions 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

80
 Material Cultures

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 par-
ticular 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 poten-
tial 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 evi-
dent 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 inter-
act with them and how often can help us to understand the actuali-
ties 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 provi-
sion 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 knit-
ted 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 Draz-
in’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 contrast-
ing strategies in relation to their room decoration and clothing. Her par-
ticipants 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
 Material Cultures

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 interwo-
ven. 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 – prac-
tices 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 exam-
ple, 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 discon-
nection to how things are produced and made. Making these connec-
tions 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 rela-
tional 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 ship-
ping and use. These movements and transformations of different mate-
rials 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.

84
 Material Cultures

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 ripe-
ness, 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 out-
lines the implications of farming and packing of papayas for the per-
sonal 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 – explic-
itly or implicitly. In a globalised world, through consuming mass-pro-
duced 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 think-
ing about how they were made. However, these histories and practices are
embedded in objects themselves and their materialities, as it is impossible

85
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 mate-
riality 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?

86
 7 PERSONAL LIFE ACROSS
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 experi-
ence 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 per-
sonal 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 sociologi-
cal 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 peo-
ple ‘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 devel-
opmental timetables that set expectations regarding the age at which par-
ticular ‘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
 Personal Life across the Life Course

prevailing cultural norms and standards’ (McAdams, 2005: 251). They

have a wide array of cultural narratives to choose from, at times com-
bining these in novel ways, and also regularly breaching them through
innovation.
An important function of these cultural narratives is to offer tem-
poral 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 tim-
ing 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 meas-
ure 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 Swit-
zer, 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 suita-
ble 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 stand-
ards 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 per-
sonal life that can be used to add further dimensions to a sociologi-
cal 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

life course. First, as already discussed in relation to temporal scripts, the

person is seen as ‘always already part of the social’, embedded in tradi-
tions 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, teach-
ers, 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 adult-
hood, 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 educa-
tion 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 net-
work 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
 Personal Life across the Life Course

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 child-
hood, 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. Ala-
nen, 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 Qvor-
trup 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 compe-
tent or incompetent, as independent or dependent, as resilient or vul-
nerable’ (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 under-
standing 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 ele-
ment of ‘becoming’ in our lives. Because the sociology of personal life
attends to movement and flows, it also allows for a focus on the continu-
ities 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
 Personal Life across the Life Course

(if a child or an older person, this is specifically identified), and the cat-
egory ‘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 adult-
hood – 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 ath-
letes 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

Box 7.1
Drop out or time out?
Hogne Øian (2004) studied young Norwegian adults who had dis-
rupted the expected linear progression of their lifetime, by for exam-
ple 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 work-
ing 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 experi-
ences 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 contra-
vene 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
 Personal Life across the Life Course

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 cultur-
ally 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 pop-
ulation structure in Western countries. Table 7.1 shows that life expec-
tancy 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 51 75 88

Caribbean

Northern America 67 79 90

Source: United Nations (2015b)

96
 Personal Life across the Life Course

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’, ‘suc-
cessful 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 auton-
omy and choice, for example devoting themselves to enjoyable leisure
pursuits. It is important to keep in mind, however, that there exist ine-
qualities 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 dis-
tinction 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 peo-
ple, 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 sto-
ries that exist in each culture that define the social clocks for mascu-
linity, thus defining ‘desired manhood at different points in a man’s
life’ (­Spector-Mersel, 2006: 71). Western understandings of masculin-
ity 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, mean-
ing 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 hegem-
onic 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 rewrit-
ten, 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 nar-
ratives 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 attractive-
ness, 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,

98
 Personal Life across the Life Course

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 draw-
ing 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 cul-
tural 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

temporal scripts also exert social control, as exemplified by the experi-

ences 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 nego-
tiate 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?

100
 8 CONSUMER CULTURE
DALE SOUTHERTON

Introduction
Consumer society, consumerism, commercialisation, and materialism
are all popular phrases used to describe contemporary societies; soci-
eties 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 rela-

tion between lived culture and social resources, between
meaningful ways of life and the symbolic and material
resources on which they depend, is mediated through mar-
kets. (Slater, 1997: 8).

The emphasis on markets reflects the significant growth of one particu-

lar 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 consump-
tion 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 pro-
duces self-oriented, narcissistic and self-promoting individuals. Second,
I consider theories that suggest consumer culture permits playful life-
styles and offers individuals greater freedoms of self-expression. Finally,

101
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 life-
style 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 cen-
tury, 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 cit-
ies was characterised by frequent interactions with strangers, and individ-
uals 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 inter-
act with in their everyday lives, other people become faceless and social
interaction impersonal.
Simmel proposed that within this large anonymous urban environ-
ment, the only way to ‘stand out’ from the crowd and reassert any sense
of individuality was through consumption. This required a delicate bal-
ance of imitating others (in order not to stand out too much) but with-
out 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
 Consumer Culture

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 compe-
tition 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-indus-
trial 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 twen-
tieth century led Scott Lash and John Urry (1987) to argue that soci-
eties 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 competi-
tion 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
 Consumer Culture

the quality of interpersonal relationships, where authenticity, how peo-

ple 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 mean-
ings 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 exam-
ple, 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. Hav-
ing 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 sym-
bolised in movies, and the ‘French cafés’ found in shopping malls the
world over.
Andrew Wernick (1991), building on Baudrillard, argues that con-
sumer culture and the dominance of commodities sold through mar-
keting 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, polit-
ical 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 cul-
ture, where social differences can only be expressed through symbols of
material wealth and hedonistic lifestyles, breeds a narcissistic person-
ality 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 pro-
vided 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
 Consumer Culture

Lifestyles: Consumer freedom and new forms

of association
The same processes identified above as eroding authentic personal rela-
tionships can, however, also be interpreted in a more positive light. Often
characterised as theories of ‘late modernity’, theories of consumer cul-
ture together with theories of individualisation (see Chapter 1 in this
volume for a discussion of the individualisation thesis) mean that con-
sumption 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 pro-
vides 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 fun-
damental 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 avail-
able 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-cul-
tural 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, irrespec-
tive 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 bound-
aries 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 iden-
tities 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 ren-

ders 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 prod-
ucts 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, celebri-
ties, 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 con-
sumer choices: what he calls ‘DIY identitykits’. This freedom is, how-
ever, 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 Bau-
man (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 Feath-
erstone, adopt a form of calculated hedonism to embark upon con-
scious 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 dispo-
sitions’ (Featherstone, 1987: 59). For Featherstone, this process of the

108
 Consumer Culture

‘aestheticisation of everyday life’ renders meaningful even the most mun-

dane goods and practices. Heroic consumers turn their everyday lives
into an expressive, playful, and unrestricted exercise in individual con-
sumption. 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 ‘neo-
tribal’ 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 Travel-
lers (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 exam-
ples 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 mar-
ket 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 per-
sonal 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 cul-
ture: even those who explicitly reject consumerism and materialism are
exercising lifestyle choices!

109
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

Box 8.1
Ageing, retirement, and lifestyles
The process of ageing has often been met with dread and fear, pre-
sented 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 emer-
gence of consumer lifestyles for the elderly. Health clubs, diets, exer-
cise 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 ‘aes-
theticisation 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 neg-
ative 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 mag-
azine 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 life-
style choices with retirement approaching. By the late 1970s and the
1980s the magazine had firmly established itself as a lifestyle maga-
zine 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).

110
 Consumer Culture

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, age-
ing 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 Mill-
er’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 unac-
companied 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 increas-
ingly 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 con-
struct the boundaries between ‘adulthood’ and ‘childhood’. He
reveals how the child clothing market utilised ‘medical-psycholog-
ical’ 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 cat-
egories, 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 indi-
vidual 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 chil-
dren’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 cat-
alogues 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

112
 Consumer Culture

social group distinctions that are salient in their lives. Chin’s (2001)
study is an example of the ways in which Afro-American girls person-
alised 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 regis-
ter 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 com-
munication 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 grandchil-
dren or between partners living and working in different locations), and
organising domestic lives from the workplace. All are examples where

113
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 mar-
kets 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 con-
sumer cultures are related to freedoms of choice, individualisation and
­non-committed lifestyle group affiliations, Illouz argues that even part-
ner 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 attractive-
ness, 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 indi-
vidual 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 con-
temporary society is characterised by consumer culture, a condition
in which consumption becomes increasingly central to our sense of

114
 Consumer Culture

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 con-
sumer 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 disap-
pears 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 peo-
ple 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 lit-
tle 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 house-
holds 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.

115
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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).

116
 9 THE BODY IN
PERSONAL LIFE
HELEN HOLMES

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 sociologi-
cal 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 consump-
tion 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 cul-
tural 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 per-
sonal 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, technolo-
gies 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

but also as a material means through which everyday personal life is pro-
duced, 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 knowl-
edge’, 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 think-
ing 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 contracep-
tion, 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 per-
sonal, 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
 The Body in Personal Life

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, govern-
ment, 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. The-
ories 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 reli-
gion, 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, ulti-
mately 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

offered by high modernity’. Hence the body came to be seen as a

project – a place to sculpt one’s identity, create individuality, and pro-
mote 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 con-
trol (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 bod-
ily 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 cardio-
vascular 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
 The Body in Personal Life

era of accelerated consumption has been defined as one of individual-

ity, 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 state-
ment 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 sym-
bol 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 per-
ceived 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 bod-
ily norms. As Paul Sweetman (1999: 53) discusses, ‘as corporeal expres-
sions of the self, tattoos and piercings might thus be seen as instances of
contemporary body projects’. Yet, the physical intrusion and often per-
manency of these modifications means they are deemed something more
than ‘free-floating’ commodities. Unlike clothes, tattoos are not some-
thing 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 some-
thing 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

and self-reflexivity are very Western, privileged positions that are not
available to all (Brannen and Nilsen, 2005; Jamieson, 1998, 1999). Fur-
ther 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 study-
ing 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 per-
sonal 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
 The Body in Personal Life

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 preg-
nant women often felt out of place in the shopping centre because
of changes to their body, and certain expectations on how preg-
nant 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 occupy-
ing 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. Long-
hurst 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 facili-
ties, ‘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.

123
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 fur-
ther 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, tex-
tures, 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 appro-
priation 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 dis-
rupts 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
 The Body in Personal Life

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 ‘regu-
larly 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 stud-
ies 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 soci-
etal 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 keep-
ing 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 mate-
riality 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 mate-
riality. 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 groom-

ing 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
 The Body in Personal Life

while having a huge positive affect on the earnings of minority race men.
This illustrates how societal ideals around the acceptable body are influ-
enced 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 technolo-
gies 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 expec-
tations 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 peo-
ple 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 exam-
ples 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), hairdress-
ing (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 cli-
ent’s emotional needs, while also attending to their body. Bodywork also
entails aesthetic labour (Witz et al., 2003), meaning that workers ensure

127
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

their own bodies aesthetically represent the organisations and profes-

sions 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, emo-
tional 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 ser-
vices. However, my work on hairdressing has shown that over time
these repeat visits and the embodied and trusting nature of such bod-
ily 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 sev-
eral 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 consump-
tion 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
 The Body in Personal Life

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.

129
 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 peo-
ple’s lives. Yet what becomes clear from even the most superficial engage-
ment 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 disci-
plinary 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
 Home

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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 short-
lived 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
 Home

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 African-
American 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.

133
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 inter-

viewed 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 inde-

pendent 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 dis-
puted issue among homelessness researchers. Some argue that it is possi-
ble 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 (Kel-
lett and Moore, 2002). Proponents of this view argue that life in tem-
porary 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 ref-
erence R000237033).

134
 Home

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 modern-
ist 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 archi-
tecture 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 sec-
tor. 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 hous-
ing for the working classes. This led during the 1950s to the promo-
tion 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 con-
flation of home and family and, despite huge social change in the inter-
vening years – not least in relation to women’s participation in the labour

136
 Home

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 com-
fort, 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 con-
texts (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 authen-
ticity 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 cul-
ture 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 prob-
lematic is because it implies that those who live outside of the bounds of
the traditional heterosexual family are unable to experience their domes-
tic 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

echo of hooks’ comment above) constituting a haven from an often hos-

tile 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 house-
holds (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 exam-
ple, through regularly offering hospitality to friends and family mem-
bers, 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 inhos-
pitable homes or shrines to the self’ (Jamieson and Simpson, 2013: 121).
The conflation of family and home thus masks a multitude of con-
tradictions 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 exag-
geration 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
 Home

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 pri-

vacy 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 asso-
ciated 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 con-
text 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 exam-
ple, 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 companion-
ate 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, espe-
cially 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

Box 10.2
No place like home?
How is home experienced by young people living in challenging fam-
ily 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 sen-
sory and often intangible elements of domestic space deeply affected
the young people’s sense of home: the smells and sounds, the height-
ened 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 strat-
egies – 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 frus-
tration towards their parents, through destroying personal posses-
sions 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 respond-
ents’ 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: [Link]
[Link]/young-people-creating-belonging/

140
 Home

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 liv-
ing 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 pri-
vately 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 iso-
lated 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 influ-
enced 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 commu-
nal living’ was funded by the ESRC between 2013 and 2015 (award reference ES/
K006177/1).

141
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

He commented that ‘that was the worst thing about it […]. I had to lis-
ten 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 surveil-
lance – 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 oth-
ers, 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 dimen-
sions 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
 Home

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?

143
 11 PERSONAL LIFE IN
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
 Personal Life in Public Spaces

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 under-
standings 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 experi-
encing 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
 Personal Life in Public Spaces

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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 c­oncen-
tration 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 con-
centration 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 heterogene-
ity 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 det-
rimental 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.

148
 Personal Life in Public Spaces

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, particu-
larly 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 cit-
izen 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 diver-
sity; 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

offer the quintessential public spaces. A classic sociological text consid-

ering 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 develop-
ing 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 indiffer-
ence towards fellow citizens. While Simmel’s essay has been critiqued
for its anti-urban sentiment, it does raise the important, and still rel-
evant, 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’ relation-
ships 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, engag-
ing 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
 Personal Life in Public Spaces

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 exclusion-
ary 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 them-
selves 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

our local swimming pool, café or pub with whom we might be on a first-
name 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 rela-
tionships 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 part-
ner, 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
 Personal Life in Public Spaces

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 com-
pany 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. pro-
pose 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 breast-
feeding (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 residen-
tial 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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. Cosmo-
politan 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 peo-
ple’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 conversa-
tion, 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 one-
self. 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 study-
ing personal life have ignored a rich and meaningful aspect of our everyday
lives: the interactions we have in public both with our friends and fam-
ily, 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
 Personal Life in Public Spaces

rights as citizens – and also help inform our view of the world. Further-
more, 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.

155
 12 SEXUALITY AND THE
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 poli-
tics 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
 Sexuality and the Politics of Personal Life

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 same-
sex 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 fam-
ily, friendship and couple relationships) is subject to state, legal, and more
subtle forms of social regulation. This notion has had a long-term influ-
ence 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 pow-
erful constituencies (in contemporary Western cultures, those compris-
ing 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. mar-
riage and family) that support existing social hierarchies and inequalities.
There are various strands of thought within feminist politics and soci-
ology that highlight the role of sexuality in the subjugation of women and
in perpetuating gender inequalities. Some argue that the social organi-
sation 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

women and is crucial to the persistence of male dominance in the oper-

ation 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 het-
erosexuality, a system imposed on women throughout history, reg-
ulates 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 gen-
der 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 defini-
tions, and heterosexuality is a social organisation of power that is
crucial for maintaining gender inequalities. In this sense, heterosex-
uality 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 prac-
tices that make it seem natural and inevitable. At the same time it
punishes those who do not conform (e.g. through economic sanc-
tions, 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 con-
straints that shape their lives and that support the patriarchal orders
in which they live.

158
 Sexuality and the Politics of Personal Life

even in national contexts where gender equality is most advanced, het-

erosexuality 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 Richard-
son, 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 politi-
cal 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 relation-
ships with men – as well as the creation of critical feminist communities
that campaigned for and supported the sexual ‘rights’ of women. In con-
trast, LGBTQ politics were in large part focused on the politics of ‘com-
ing 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-colo-
nial jurisdictions still criminalised homosexuality and a range of punish-
ments existed for identifying as LGBTQ or engaging in homosexual acts.
These included legal, social, and cultural punishments such as impris-
onment, unfavourable child custody decisions, loss of employment,
being defined as deviant, being subjected to conversion therapies, vio-
lence, 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, there-
fore 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 oth-
ers and in safe spaces carved out by LGBTQ people themselves. These
could also be viewed as political communities, as they became the focus

159
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 knowl-
edge 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 con-
stant 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 popula-
tion through techniques such as sex education, birth control, the manage-
ment of diseases constructed as sexual, and the defining and monitoring
of ‘normal’ sexual, family, and relational life. On the other hand, indi-
viduals are also incited to recognise and take responsibility for themselves

160
 Sexuality and the Politics of Personal Life

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’ sex-
uality). 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’ anal-
ysis, 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 sex-
ual interactions and self-identities are intrinsically bound up in public
discourse. For example, what might be termed disciplinary discourse usu-
ally produces ‘counter discourse’. One way in which we can understand
this, and how the personal is political, is to think about how the indi-
vidual and collective sexualities created by expert knowledge have pub-
licly ‘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 com-
plex working of power and politics with respect to personal life.

161
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

Self-identities, sexual lifestyles, and life-politics

One influential strand of European sociological thinking about the con-
temporary politics of personal life is that which argues we are entering a
post-emancipatory era, meaning that in some respects sexual emancipa-
tion 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 moder-
nity 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 peo-
ple 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 Nord-
qvist, ‘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 interper-
sonal negotiation and lifestyle choice as it is about the politics of emanci-
pation 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 relat-
ing (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
 Sexuality and the Politics of Personal Life

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 ideo-
logical 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 per-
sonal life: not least criticisms of the idea that people today must grap-
ple 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 polit-
ical movements, the cultural image of LGBTQ lives was one of lonely
and isolated individuals who lived secretly in the shadow of the het-
erosexual 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 liv-
ing 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 primar-
ily 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 eman-
cipatory arguments about compulsory heterosexuality, biopolitical the-
oretical 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’, les-
bians 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-het-
erosexual models of relating. They formed the basis of what has else-
where been termed ‘affective’ communities that are made up of people
who share similar desires, identities, and experiences of exclusion. Such

164
 Sexuality and the Politics of Personal Life

communities are political in that they provide an alternative ethico-

moral basis for everyday living that is distinct from that of the heterosex-
ual 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 relat-
ing. 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 inde-
pendence – 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 rela-
tionships can include agreed monogamous and n ­ on-monogamous cou-
ples, 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 polit-
ical 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’ gen-
der 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

Box 12.2
Monogamy and non-monogamy in same-sex
relationships
Prior to the availability of civil unions and same-sex marriage sev-
eral 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 emotion-
ally 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, pub-
lic 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

166
 Sexuality and the Politics of Personal Life

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 his-
torically supported compulsory heterosexuality by making same-sex rela-
tionships 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 les-
bian 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 Plum-
mer defined it, intimate citizenship is about: ‘the control (or not) over one’s
body, feelings, relationships: access (or not) to representations, relation-
ships, public spaces etc.; and socially grounded choices (or not) about iden-
tities, 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 inven-
tive 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 insti-
tutional privileging of heterosexuality, others are concerned with how
sexual and relational dissidence is tamed by the inclusion of same-sex

168
 Sexuality and the Politics of Personal Life

relationships within an institution that has been the lynchpin of gen-

der 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 conven-
tional 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 relation-
ships. This shores up the institution of marriage in an era when many
commentators argue that it is in decline, and simultaneously neutralises

169
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 fam-
ily 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 recog-
nition 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 con-
ventional, 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 het-
eronormativity 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 chang-
ing in interlinked ways and what the political consequences of this are.
While Judith Butler’s (2002) emphasis on the need for double think-
ing 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 leg-
islative jurisdictions, context is everything in considering how the per-
sonal is political. What in some contexts might seem to be retrograde
steps in claiming certain sexual and relational ‘rights’ can in other con-
texts appear radically transgressive. The study of the politics of sexuality

170
 Sexuality and the Politics of Personal Life

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?

171
 13 CONCLUSION: WHY
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 indi-
vidual 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
 Conclusion: Why a Sociology of Personal Life?

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 Chap-
ter 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 per-
sonal 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 chil-
dren 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 interac-
tion 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 cam-
paigning 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 individu-
alisation (or de-traditionalisation) thesis, which claims that old struc-
tures have given way to increased individual choice in almost all aspects

174
 Conclusion: Why a Sociology of Personal Life?

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 pro-
posed 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 inde-
pendent 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
 SOCIOLOGY OF PERSONAL LIFE

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 individ-
ual 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 sig-
nificant 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
 Conclusion: Why a Sociology of Personal Life?

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-in-
hand 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

178
 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
179
 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

180
 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

181
 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 A thesis that has become a central focus of
(also called de- debate within the social sciences. The main
traditionalisation thesis) 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

182
 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.

183
 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.

184
 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

185
 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

186
 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

187
 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)

188
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alanen, L. (1992) Modern Childhood? Exploring the ‘Child Question’ in

Sociology, Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä.
Allan, G. (1989) ‘Insiders and outsiders: Boundaries around the home’,
in G. Allen and G. Crow (eds), Home and F­ amily: Creating the Domestic
Sphere, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Allan, G. (1996) Kinship and Friendship in Modern Britain, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Anderson, Elijah (1990) Streetwise: Race, Class and Change in an Urban
Community, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Anderson, Elijah (2004) ‘The cosmopolitan canopy’, ANNALS of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science, 595: 14–31.
Anderson, Elijah (2011) The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in
Everyday Life, New York , NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
Anderson, Elijah (2015) ‘The white space’, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity,
1(1): 10–21.
Anderson, Eric (2010) Inclusive Masculinitiy. The Changing Nature of
Masculinities, London: Routledge.
Ariès, P. (1962) Centuries of Childhood, London: Cape.
Arnett, J. J. (2001) ‘Conceptions of the transition to adulthood: Perspectives from
adolescence through midlife’, Journal of Adult Development, 8(2): 133–43.
Arnold, J., Graesch, A., Ragazzini, E. and Ochs, E. (2012) Life at Home in the
Twenty-First Century, Los Angeles, CA: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press.
Arthur, L. B. (2000) ‘Introduction’, in Linda B. Arthur (ed.) Religion, Dress and
the Body, Oxford: Berg.
Australian Bureau of Statistics (2016) ‘Census of Population and Housing:
Australia Revealed, 2016’, [Link]
mf/2024.0.
Australian Institute for Family Studies (2007) ‘A snaphot of how Australian
families spend their time’, [Link]
publication-documents/[Link].
Australian Institute for Family Studies (2016) ‘Mothers still do the lion
share of housework’, [Link]
lions-share-housework.

189
 Bibliography

Australian Institute of Family Studies (2017) ‘Marriage in Australia’, ­https://

[Link]/facts-and-figures/marriage-australia.
Barrett, M. and McIntosh, M. (1983) The Anti-Social Family, London: Verso.
Baudrillard, J. (1988) Selected Writings, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bauman, Z. (1988) Freedom, Milton Keynes: Open U ­ niversity Press.
Bauman, Z. (1990) Thinking Sociologically, Oxford: Blackwell.
Bauman, Z. (1997) Postmodernity and Its Discontents, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Baym, N. K. (2010) Personal Connections in the Digital Age, Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Baym, N. K. (2015) Personal Connections in a Digital Age (2nd edn), Malden,
MA: Polity Press.
Beaujouan, É. and Bhrolcháin, M. (2011) ‘Cohabitation and marriage in
Britain since the 1970s’, Population Trends no 145, Autumn Issue 35–59.
Bécares, L., Stafford, M., Laurence, J., and Nazroo, J. (2011) ‘Composition,
concentration and deprivation: Exploring their association with social
cohesion among different ethnic groups in the UK’, Urban Studies,
48(13): 2771–87.
Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage.
Beck, U. and Beck-Gernsheim, E. (1995) The Normal Chaos of Love,
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Beck, U. and Beck-Gernsheim, E. (2002) Individualization: Institutionalized
Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences, London: Sage.
Belk, R. (1993) ‘Materialism and the making of the modern American
Christmas’, in D. Miller (ed.) Unwrapping Christmas, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Bell, K. and McNaughton, D. (2007) ‘Feminism and the invisible fat man’,
Body & Society, 13(1): 107–31.
Bellotti, E. (2008) ‘What are friends for? Elective communities of single
people’, Social Networks, 30(4): 318–29
Bengtson, V. L., Biblarz, T. J. and Roberts, R. E. L. (2002) How Families Still
Matter: A Longitudinal Study of Youth in Two Generations, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Bennett, J. (2009) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke
University Press.
Bibi, R. (2018) ‘Gendered Islamophobia: Intersectionality, religion and
space for British South Asian Muslim women’, in Nayak, S. and Robbins,
R. (eds), Intersectionality in Social Work: Activism and Practice in Context,
London: Routledge.

190
 Bibliography

Bird, S. R. and Sokolofski, L. L. (2005) ‘Gendered ­socio-spatial practices

in public eating and drinking establishments in the Midwest United
States’, Gender, Place & ­Culture, 12(2): 213–30.
Blasius, M. (1994) Lesbian and Gay Politics: Sexuality and the Emergence of a
New Ethic, Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia University Press.
Blatterer, H. (2007) ‘Adulthood: The contemporary redefinition of a social
category’, Sociological Research Online, 12(4): 3, [Link]
sro.1563.
Blatterer, H. (2010) ‘The changing semantics of youth and adulthood’,
Cultural Sociology, 4(1): 63–79.
Blunt, A. and Dowling, R. (2006) Home, London: Routledge.
Bondi, L. and Domosh, M. (1998) ‘On the contours of public space: The tale
of three women’, Antipode, 30(3): 270–89.
Bone, J. and O’Reilly, K. (2010) ‘No place called home: The causes and social
consequences of the UK housing “bubble’”, British Journal of Sociology,
61(2): 231–55.
Brannen, J. and Nilsen, A. (2005) ‘Individualisation, choice and structure: A
discussion of current trends in sociological analysis’, Sociological Review,
53(3): 412–28.
Breen, R. and Cooke, L. (2005) ‘The persistence of the gendered division of
domestic labour’, European Sociological Review, 21(1): 43–57.
British Red Hatters (n.d.), [Link]
Brooks, R. (2005) Friendship and Educational Choice: Peer Influence and
Planning for the Future, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bruner, J. (1987) ‘Life as narrative’, Social Research, 54: 11–32.
Bruner, J. (1995) ‘The autobiographical process’, Current Sociology, 43(2):
161–77.
Brydon, A. (1998) ‘Sensible shoes’, in A. Brydon and S. Niessen (eds),
Consuming Fashion: Adapting the Transnational Body, Oxford: Berg.
Buffel, T., Phillipson, C. and Scharf, T. (2013) ‘Experiences of neighbour­
hood exclusion and inclusion among older people living in deprived
innercity areas in Belgium and England’, Ageing & Society, 33(1):
89–109.
Burkitt, I. (2004) ‘The time and space of everyday life’, Cultural Studies,
18(2–3): 211–27.
Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,
New York, NY: Routledge.
Butler, J. (2002) ‘Is kinship always already heterosexual?’, Differences: A
Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 13(1): 14–44.

191
 Bibliography

Carmona, M. (2010) ‘Contemporary public space: Critique and classification,

part one: Critique’, Journal of Urban Design, 15(1): 123–48.
Carsten, J. (2004) After Kinship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carter, J. and Duncan, S. (2017) ‘Wedding paradoxes: Individualised
conformity and the “perfect day”’, Sociological Review, 65(1): 3–20.
Cassanello, R. (2008) ‘Avoiding “Jim Crow”: Negotiating separate and equal
on Florida’s railroads and streetcars and the progressive era origins
of the modern Civil Rights Movement’, Journal of Urban History, 34(3):
435–57.
Chapkis, W. (1988) Beauty Secrets: Women and the Politics of Appearance,
London: The Women’s Press.
Charles, N. (2014) ‘“Animals just love you as you are”: Experiencing kinship,
across the species barrier’, Sociology, 48(4): 715–30.
Cheal, D. J. (1991) Family and the State of Theory, New York, NY: Harvester
Wheatsheaf.
Chernin, K. (1981) The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness,
New York, NY: Harper and Row.
Chin, E. (2001) Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture,
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Clarke, A. E. (1998) Disciplining Reproduction: Modernity, American Life
Sciences and “The Problems of Sex”, London: University of California Press.
Clever, I. and Ruberg, W. (2014) ‘Beyond cultural history? The material turn,
praxiography, and body history’, Humanities, 3(4): 546–66.
Cohen, A. P. (1994) Self Consciousness: An Alternative Anthropology of Identity,
London: Routledge.
Cohen, R.L. (2010) ‘When it pays to be friendly: Employment relationships
and emotional labour in hairstyling’, Sociological Review, 58(2):
197–218.
Colls, R. (2006) ‘Outsize/outside: Bodily bignesses and the emotional
experiences of British women shopping for clothes’, Gender Place and
Culture, 13(5): 529–45.
Connell, R. (2014) ‘The sociology of gender in Southern perspective’,
Current Sociology, 62(4): 550–67.
Cook, D. (2004) The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing
Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer, Durham: Duke University
Press.
Cook, I. et al. (2004) ‘Follow the thing: Papaya’, Antipode, 36(4): 642–64.
Cronin, A. (2015) ‘“Domestic friends”: Women’s friendships, motherhood
and inclusive intimacy’, Sociological Review, 63(3): 662–79.

192
 Bibliography

Crow, G. (1989) ‘The post-war development of the modern domestic ideal’,

in G. Allan and G. Crow (eds), Home and Family: Creating the Domestic
Sphere, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Daniels, I. (2009) ‘The ‘social death’ of unused gifts: Loss and value in
contemporary Japan’, Journal of Material Culture, 14(3): 385–408.
Dannefer, D. (2012) ‘Enriching the tapestry: Expanding the scope of life
course concepts’, The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological
Sciences and Social Sciences, 67(2): 221–25.
Davidoff, L. (1995) ‘The separation of home and work? Landladies and
lodgers in nineteenth- and twentieth-century England, in L. Davidoff
(ed.) Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class,
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Das, J. and De Loach, S.B. (2011) ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall: The effect of time
spent grooming on earnings’, The Journal of Socio-Economics, 40(1): 26–34.
Davies, K. and Heaphy, B. (2011) ‘Interactions that matter: Researching
critical associations’, Methodological Innovations Online, 6(3): 5–16.
Delphy, C. and Leonard, D. (1992) Familiar Exploitation: A New Analysis of
Marriage in Contemporary Western Societies, Cambridge: Polity.
Demerath, L. and Levinger, D. (2003) ‘The social qualities of being on foot:
A theoretical analysis of pedestrian activity, community, and culture’,
City & Community, 2(3): 217–37.
Dempsey, D. (2013) ‘Surrogacy, gay male couples and the significance of
biogenetic paternity’, New Genetics and Society, 32(1): 37–53.
Dempsey, D. and Lindsay, J. (2017) ‘Surnaming children born to lesbian
and heterosexual couples: Displaying family legitimacy to diverse
audiences’, Sociology, OnlineFirst, DOI 10.1177/0038038517696218.
Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) (2016) English
Housing Survey: Headline Report 2014/15, London: Department for
Communities and Local Government, [Link]
statistics/­english-housing-survey-2014-to-2015-headline-report.
Desmond, M. (2016) Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, London:
Penguin Books.
DeVault, M. (2000) ‘Producing family time: Practices of leisure activity
beyond the home’, Qualitative Sociology, 23(4): 485–503.
Devine, F. and Savage, M. (2005) ‘The cultural turn, sociology and class
analysis’, in F. Devine, M. Savage, J. Scott and R. Crompton (eds),
Rethinking Class: Culture, Identities and Lifestyle, Basingstoke: Palgrave
MacMillan.
Dickens, C. (1868) Great Expectations, Cambridge: Riverside Press.

193
 Bibliography

Dixon, T. (2015) Weeping Britannia: A Portrait of A Nation in Tears, Oxford:

Oxford University Press.
Djohari, N. (2016) ‘Trading in unicorns: The role of exchange etiquette in
managing the online second-hand sale of sentimental babywearing
wraps’, Journal of Material Culture, 21(3): 297–316.
Douglas, M. (1991) ‘The idea of a home: A kind of space’, Social Research,
58(1): 287–307.
Douglas, M. (2000) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution
and Taboo (2nd edn), London: Routledge.
Drazin, A. (2014) ‘The problematic decision to live: Irish-Romanian home-
making and the anthropology of uncertainty’, in A. Moran, S. O’Brien
and C. Swan (eds), Love Objects, London: Bloomsbury.
Drazin, A. and Kuechler, S. (2015) Social Life of Materials, London:
Bloomsbury Academic.
Duggan, L. (2002) ‘The new homonormativity: The sexual politics of
neoliberalism’, in Castronovo, R. and Nelson, D. D. (eds), Materializing
Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, London: Duke University
Press.
Duncan, P. (2017) ‘Gay relationships are still criminalised in 72 countries,
report finds’, The Guardian, 27 July 2017, ­­[Link]
world/2017/jul/27/gay-relationships-still-criminalised-countries-report.
Duncan, S. (2011a) ‘The world we have made: Individualisation and
personal life in the 1950s’, Sociological Review, 59(2): 242–65.
Duncan, S. (2011b) ‘Personal life, pragmatism and bricolage’, Sociological
Research Online, 16(4): 13.
Duncombe, J. and Marsden, D (1995) ‘“Workaholics” and “whingeing
women”: Theorising intimacy and emotion work – The last frontier of
gender inequality?’, Sociological Review, 43(1):150–69.
Dupuis, A. & Thorns, D. (1998) ‘Home, home ownership and the search for
ontological security’, Sociological Review, 46(1): 24–47.
Durkheim, E. (1970[1897]) Suicide: A Study in Sociology, London: Routledge.
Dworkin, A. and MacKinnon, C. (1988) Pornography and Civil Rights: A New
Day for Women’s Equality, New York, NY: Organizing Against Pornography.
Easthope, H. (2014) ‘Making a rental property home’, Housing Studies,
29(5): 579–96.
Edwards, R. and Gillies, V. (2012) ‘Farewell to family? Notes on an argument
for retaining the concept’, Families, Relationships and Societies, 1(1): 63–9.
Eldén, S. (2016) ‘An ordinary complexity of care: Moving beyond “the family” in
research with children’, Families, Relationships and Societies, 5(2): 175–92.

194
 Bibliography

Elias, N. (1991) The Society of Individuals (Translated by E. Jephcott), Oxford:

Blackwell.
Ellis-Sloan, K. (2014) ‘Teenage mothers, stigma and their “presentations
of self.”’, Sociological Research Online, 19(1): 1, [Link]
[Link]/19/1/[Link].
Engels, F. (1986[1884]) The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the
State, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Entwistle, J. (1997) ‘Power dressing and the construction of the career
woman’, in M. Nava, A. Blake, I. MacRury and B. Richards (eds), Buy This
Book: Studies in Advertising and Consumption, London: Routledge.
Entwistle, J. (2000) The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social
Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Erikson, E. H. (1982) The Life Cycle Completed: A Review, New York, NY:
WW Norton & Company.
Eurostat (2017) ‘Marriage and birth statistics – New ways of living
together in the EU’, [Link]
[Link]?title=­Marriage_and_birth_statistics_-_new_ways_of_living_
together_in_the_EU&stable=0&redirect=no.
Fagan, C. and Norman, H. (2013) ‘Men and Gender Equality: Tackling Gender
Segregation in Family Roles and in Social Care Jobs’, in Bettio, F., Plantenga, J.
and Smith, M. (eds), Gender and the European Labour Market, London:
Routledge.
Fagan, C. and Norman, H. (2016) ‘Which fathers are involved in caring for
pre-school age children in the UK? A longitudinal analysis of the influence
of work hours in employment on shared childcare arrangements in
couple households’ in Crespi, I. and Ruspini, E. (eds), Balancing Work
and Family in a Changing Society: The Fathers’ Perspective, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Fairchild, K. and Rudman, L. A. (2008) ‘Everyday stranger harassment and
women’s objectification’, Social Justice Research, 21(3): 338–57.
Featherman, D. L. and Lerner, R. M. (1985) ‘Ontogenesis and sociogenesis:
Problematics for theory and research about development and
socialization across the lifespan’, American Sociological Review, 50(5):
659–76.
Featherstone, M. (1987) ‘Lifestyle and consumer culture’, Theory, Culture &
Society, 4(1): 55–60.
Featherstone, M. and Hepworth, M. (1995) ‘Images of positive aging: A case
study of retirement choice magazine’, in M. Featherstone and A. Wenick
(eds), Images of Aging: Representations of Later Life, London: Routledge.

195
 Bibliography

Finch, J. (1989) Family Obligations and Social Change, Cambridge: Polity

Press.
Finch, J. (2007) ‘Displaying families’, Sociology, 41(1): 65–81.
Finch, J. (2008) ‘Naming names: Kinship, individuality and personal names’,
Sociology, 42(4):709–25.
Finch, J. and Mason, J. (1993) Negotiating Family Responsibilities, London:
Routledge.
Finch, J. and Mason, J. (2000) Passing On: Kinship and Inheritance in England,
London: Routledge.
Firth, R. (1956) Two Studies of Kinship in London, London: Athlone.
Firth, R., Hubert, J. and Forge, A. (1970) Families and Their Relatives, London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Francis, D. (2000) ‘The significance of work friends in late life’ in J.F. Gubrium
and J. A. Holstein (eds), Aging and Everyday Life, Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Frankenberg, R. (1993) White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction
of Whiteness, London: Routledge.
Franklin, S. (2013) Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells and the Future of
Kinship, London: Duke University Press.
Frosh, S., Phoenix, A. and Pattman, R. (2002) Young Masculinities:
Understanding Boys in Contemporary Society, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Foucault, M. (1979) The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Fuss, D. (1989) Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference,
London: Routledge.
Gadsden, B. (2010) ‘“The other side of the Milliken Coin”: The promise and
pitfalls of metropolitan school desegregation’, Journal of Urban History,
36(2): 173–96.
Gaule, S. (2005) ‘Alternating currents of power: From colonial to post-
apartheid spatial patterns in Newtown, Johannesburg’, Urban Studies,
42(13): 2335–61.
Gell, A. (1998) Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Gershuny, J. (2000) Changing Times: Work and Leisure in Postindustrial
Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of
Structuration, Cambridge: Polity.
Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late
Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Giddens, A. (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and
Eroticism in Modern Societies, Cambridge: Polity Press.

196
 Bibliography

Gilding, M. (2010) ‘Reflexivity over and above convention: The new

orthodoxy in the sociology of personal life, formerly sociology of the
family’, British Journal of Sociology, 61(4): 757–77.
Gilleard, C. and Higgs, P. (2016) ‘Connecting life span development with the
sociology of the life course: A new direction’, Sociology, 50(2): 301–15.
Ginsberg, R. (1999) ‘Meditations on homelessness and being at home: In
the form of a dialogue’, in G.J.M. Abbarno (ed.) The Ethics of Homelessness:
Philosophical Perspectives, Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Goffman, E. (1963) Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization
of Gatherings, New York, NY: Free Press.
Gordon, R. (1990) Anorexia and Bulimia: Anatomy of a Social Epidemic,
Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Gorman-Murray, A. (2007) ‘Reconfiguring domestic values: Meanings of
home for gay men and lesbians’, Housing, Theory and Society, 24(3):
229–46.
Gotham, K. F. (2000) ‘Urban space, restrictive covenants and the origins of
racial residential segregation in a US City, 1900–50’, International Journal
of Urban and Regional Research, 24(3): 616–33.
Graham, S. and Thrift, N. (2007) ‘Out of order: Understanding repair and
maintenance’, Theory, Culture & Society, 24(3): 1–25.
Grant, A. (2016) ‘“I.. .don’t want to see you flashing your bits around”,
Exhibitionism, Othering and Good Motherhood in Perceptions of Public
Breastfeeding’, Geoforum, 71: 52–61.
Gray, J. and O’Carroll, A. (2012) ‘Education and class formation in Twentieth
Century Ireland: A retrospective q ­ualitative longitudinal analysis’,
Sociology, 46(4): 1–16.
Green, E. and Singleton, C. (2006) ‘Risky bodies at leisure: Young women
negotiating space and place’, Sociology, 40(5): 853–71.
Green, E. and Singleton, C. (2009) ‘Mobile connections: An exploration of
the place of mobile phones in friendship relations’, Sociological Review,
57(1): 125–44.
Gregson, N. (2007) Living with Things: Ridding, Accommodation, Dwelling,
Oxford: Sean Kingston Publishing.
Gregson, N. and Crewe, L. (1998) ‘Tales of the unexpected: Exploring
car boot sales as marginal spaces of contemporary consumption’,
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 23(1): 39–53.
Gronow, J. (1997) The Sociology of Taste, London: Routledge.
Grosz, E. (1989) Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists, New South
Wales: Allen & Unwin.

197
 Bibliography

Grosz, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington,

IN: Indiana University Press.
Gubrium, J. F., Holstein, J. A. and Buckholdt, D. R. (1994) Constructing the Life
Course, New York, NY: General Hall.
Hallam, E. and Hockey, J. (2001) Death, Memory and Material Culture,
Oxford: Berg.
Hampton, K., Goulet, L. S. and Albanesius, G. (2015) ‘Change in the social
life of urban public spaces: The rise of mobile phones and women,
and the decline of aloneness over 30 years’, Urban Studies, 52(8):
1489–504.
Hampton, K., Livio, O. and Goulet, L. S. (2010) ‘The social life of wireless
urban spaces: Internet use, social networks, and the public realm’,
Journal of Communication, 60: 701–22.
Hand, M., Shove, E. and Southerton, D. (2005) ‘Explaining showering: A
discussion of the material, conventional and temporal dimensions of
practice’, Sociological Research Online, 10(2): [Link]
[Link]/10/2/[Link].
Hazan, H. (1994) Old Age: Constructions and Deconstructions, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Heaphy, B. (2007a) ‘Sexualities, gender and ageing: Resources and social
change’, Current Sociology, 55(2):193–210.
Heaphy, B. (2007b) Late Modernity and Social Change: Reconstructing Social
and Personal Life, London: Routledge.
Heaphy, B., Smart, C. and Einarsdottir, A. (2013) Same Sex Marriages. New
Generations, New Relationships, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Heaphy, B. and Davies, K. (2012) ‘Critical friendships’, Families Relationships
and Societies, 1(3): 311–26.
Heaphy, B., Smart, C. and Einarsdottir, A. (2013) Same-Sex Marriages,
Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Heath, S., Davies, K., Edwards, G., and Scicluna, R.M. (2018) Shared
Housing, Shared Lives: Everyday Experiences across the Lifecourse, London:
Routledge.
Hebdige, D. (1979) Subcultures: The Meaning of Style, London: Routledge.
Herz, M. and Johansson, T. (2015) ‘The normativitiy of the concept of
heteronormativity’, Journal of Homosexuality, 62(8): 1009–20.
Hetherington, K. (1992) ‘Stonehenge and its festivals: Spaces of consumption’
in R. Shields (ed.) Lifestyle Shopping: The Subject of Consumption, London:
Routledge.

198
 Bibliography

Heynen, H. (2005) ‘Modernity and domesticity: Tensions and contradictions’,

in H. Heynen and G. Baydar (eds), Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial
Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture, London: Routledge.
Higgs, P. and Gilleard, C. (2015) Rethinking Old Age: Theorising the Fourth
Age, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Hochschild, A.R. (1984) The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human
Feeling, London: University of California Press.
Hochschild, A. (2003) The Commercialization of Intimate Life, Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Hockey, [Link] James, A. (1993) Growing up and Growing Old: Ageing and
Dependency in the Life Course, London: Sage.
Holdsworth, C. and Morgan, D. (2005) Transitions in Context: Leaving Home,
Independence and Adulthood, Maidenhead: Open University Press.
hollaback! (n.d.). Street Harrassmnet: Know Your Rights (No. 2014), ­https://
[Link]/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Street-Harassment-
[Link].
Holmes, H. (2014) ‘Chameleon hair: How hair’s materiality affects its
fashionability’, Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, 5(1): 95–110.
Holmes, H. (2015a) ‘Transient craft: Reclaiming the ­contemporary craft
worker’, Work, Employment & Society, 29(3): 479–95.
Holmes, H. (2015b) ‘Self-time: The importance of temporal experience
within practice,’ Time & Society, 27(2): 176–94.
Holmes, H. (2018) ‘Transient productions; enduring encounters: The
crafting of bodies and friendships in the hair salon’, in Price, L. and
Hawkins, H. (eds), Geographies of Making, London: Routledge.
hooks, b. (1991) Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, Boston: South
End Press.
Howell, S. (2006) The Kinning of Foreigners. Transnational Adoption in Global
Perspective, New York, NY: Berghahn Books.
Human Fertilisation and Embryology Anonymousity (2017) ‘Fertility
treatment in 2013. Trends and figures’, [Link]
HFEA_Fertility_Trends_and_Figures_2013.pdf.
Humphreys, L. (2005) ‘Cellphones in public: Social interactions in a wireless
era’, New Media & Society, 7(6): 810–33.
Hurdley, R. (2013) Home, Materiality, Memory and Belonging: Keeping Culture,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hurdley, R. (2006) ‘Dismantling mantlepieces: Narrating identities and
materializing culture in the home’, Sociology, 40(4): 717–33.

199
 Bibliography

Illouz, E. (2013) Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation, London: Polity.

Imrie, R. (2012) ‘Auto-disabilities: The case of shared space environments’,
Environment and Planning A, 44: 2260–77.
Infoplease (2017a) ‘Marriages and Divorces, 1900–2012’, https://
[Link]/us/marital-status/­m arriages-and-divorces-
1900a2012.
Infoplease (2017b) ‘Median Age of First Marriage, 1890–2010’, https://
[Link]/us/marital-status/­m edian-age-first-marriage-
1890-2010.
Ingold, T. (2010) ‘Bringing things to life: Creative entanglements in a world
of materials’, Working Paper no. 15. Manchester: Realities ESRC Centre
for Research Methods.
Ingraham, C. (1999) White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular
Culture, London: Routledge.
Jackson, P. (2004) ‘Local Consumption in a globalizing world’, Transactions
of the Institute of British Geographers, 29(2): 165–78.
Jackson, S. and Scott, S. (2004) ‘Sexual antinomies in late modernity’,
Sexualities, 7(2): 233–48.
Jackson, S. and Scott, S. (2010) Theorising Sexuality, Maidenhead: Open
University Press.
James, A. and Curtis, P. (2010) ‘Family displays and personal displays’,
Sociology, 44(6): 1163–11.
James, A., Jenks, C. and Prout, A. (1998) Theorising Childhood, Oxford: Polity
Press.
Jamieson, L. (1998) Intimacy: Personal Relationships in Modern Societies,
London: Polity Press.
Jamieson, L. (1999) ‘Intimacy transformed? A critical look at the “pure
relationship”’ , Sociology, 33(3): 477–94.
Jamieson, L. (2013) ‘Personal relationships, intimacy and the self in a
mediated and global digital age’, in K. Orton-Johnson and N. Prior (eds),
Digital Sociology: Critical Perspectives, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jamieson, L. and Simpson, R. (2013) Living Alone: Globalization, Identity and
Belonging, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jin, X. and Whitson, R. (2014) ‘Young women and public leisure spaces in
contemporary Beijing: Recreating (with) gender, tradition, and place’,
Social & Cultural Geography, 15(4): 449–69.
Johnson, A. M. and Miles, R. (2014) ‘Toward more inclusive public spaces:
Learning from the everyday experiences of muslim Arab women in New
York City’, Environment and Planning A, 46: 1892–907.

200
 Bibliography

Kan, M., Sullivan, O. and J. Gershuny (2011) ‘Gender convergence in

domestic work: Discerning the effects of interactional and institutional
barriers from large-scale data’, Sociology, 45(2): 234–51.
Kanter, R. M. (1977) Men and Women of the Corporation, New York, NY:
Basic Books.
Kapur, R. (2014) ‘Brutalized bodies and sexy dressing on the Indian street’,
Signs, 40(1): 9–14.
Kellett, P. and Moore, J. (2002) ‘Roots to home: Homelessness and home-
making in contrasting societies’, Habitat International, 27(1): 123–41.
King, A. (2016) Older Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Adults: Identities, Intersections
and Institutions, London: Routledge.
King, P. (2004) Private Dwelling: Contemplating the Use of Housing, London:
Routledge.
Kitchin, R. (1998) ‘“Out of place”, “knowing one’s place”: Space, power and
the exclusion of disabled people’, Disability & Society, 13(3): 343–56.
Kohli, M. (2007) ‘The institutionalization of the life course: Looking back to
look ahead’, Research in Human Development, 4(3–4): 253–71.
Konrad, M. (2005) Nameless Relations. Anonymity, Melanesia and
Reproductive Gift Exchange between British Ova Donors and Recipients,
Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Kwint, M. (1999) ‘Introduction’, in M. Kwint, C. Breward and J. Aynsley (eds),
Material Memories, Oxford: Berg.
La Fontaine, J. S. (1985) ‘Persons and individuals: Some anthropological
reflections’, in M. Carrithers, S. Collins and S. Lukes (eds), The Category
of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lahad, K. (2017) A Table for One: A Critical Reading of Singlehood, Gender and
Time, Manchester: University of Manchester Press.
Lahad, K. and Hvidtfeldt, K. (2016) ‘“Like having new batteries installed!”:
Problematizing the category of the “40+ mother” in contemporary
Danish media’, NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research,
24(3): 181–95.
Lahad, K. and May, V. (2017) ‘Just one? Solo dining, gender and temporal
belonging in public spaces’, Sociological Research Online, 22(2): 12,
[Link]
Lasch, C. (1979) The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of
Diminishing Expectations, New York, NY: Norton.
Lash, S. and Urry, J. (1987) The End of Organized Capitalism, Cambridge:
Polity Press.

201
 Bibliography

Laslett, B. and Brenner, J. (1989) ’Gender and social reproduction: Historical

perspectives’, Annual Review of Sociology, 15: 381–404.
Latour, B. (2000) ‘When things strike back: A possible contribution of
“science studies” to social sciences’, British Journal of Sociology, 51(1):
107–23.
Lee-Treweek, G. (1997) ‘Women, resistance and care: An ethnographic
study of nursing auxiliary work’, Work, Employment & Society, 11(1): 47–63.
Levinson, D. J. (1996) The Seasons of a Woman’s Life, New York, NY: Ballantine
Books.
Levinson, D. J., Darrow, C. N., Klein, E. B., Levinson, M. H. and McKee, B.
(1978) The Seasons of a Man’s Life, New York, NY: Albert A. Knopf.
Lewek, M. (2016) ‘Spaces of fear and their exclusionary consequences:
Narratives and everyday routines of Sub-Saharan Africans in Berlin’,
in T. Blokland, C. Giustozzi, D. Krüger, and H. Schilling (eds), Creating
the Unequal City: The Exclusionary Consequences of Everyday Routines in
Berlin, Farnham: Ashgate.
Lewin, E. (1993) Lesbian Mothers. Accounts of Gender in American Culture,
London: Cornell University Press.
Lienhardt, G. (1985) ‘Self, public, private: Some African representations’, in
M. Carrithers, S. Collins and S. Lukes (eds), The Category of the Person:
Anthropology, Philosophy, History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lloyd, M. (1996) ‘Aerobics, feminism and the politics of the body’, Body &
Society, 2(2): 79–98.
Lofland, L. H. (1973) A World of Strangers: Order and Action in Urban Public
Space, New York, NY: Basic Books.
Lofland, L. H. (1998) The Public Realm: Exploring the City’s Quintessential
Social Territory, Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction.
Logan, L. S. (2015) ‘Street harassment: Current and promising avenues for
researchers and activists’, Sociology Compass, 9(3): 196–211.
Longhurst, R. (1994) ‘The geography closest in – the body … the politics of
pregnability’, Australian Geographical Studies, 32(2): 214–23.
Longhurst, R. (1997) ‘(Dis)embodied geographies’, Progress in Human
Geography, 21(4): 486–501.
Lupton, D. (1996) Food, the Body and the Self, London: Sage.
Lury, C. (2011) Consumer Culture (2nd edn), Cambridge: Polity Press.
Lyonette, C. and Crompton, R. (2015) ‘Sharing the load? Partners’ relative
earnings and the division of domestic labour’, Work, Employment and
Society, 29(1): 23–40.
Mallett, S. (2004) ‘Understanding home: A critical review of the literature’,
Sociological Review, 52(1): 62–89.
202
 Bibliography

Mansfield, P. and Collard, J. (1988) The Beginning of the Rest of Your Life? A
Portrait of Newly-Wed Marriage, Houndsmill: The Macmillan Press LTD.
Manzo, J. (2005) ‘Social control and the management of “private” space in
shopping malls’, Space & Culture, 8(1): 83–97.
Maslow, A. (1943) ‘A theory of human motivation’, Psychological Review, 50
(4): 370–96.
Mason, J. (2004) ‘Personal narratives, relational selves: Residential histories
in the living and telling’, Sociological Review, 52(2): 162–79.
Mason, J. (2008) ‘Tangible affinities and the real life fascination of kinship’,
Sociology 42(1): 29–45.
Mason, J., May, V. and Clarke, L. (2007) ‘Ambivalence and the paradoxes of
grandparenting’, Sociological Review, 55(4): 687–706.
Marcoux, J-S. (2001) ‘The refurbishment of memory’, in Miller, D. (ed.) Home
Possessions, Oxford: Berg.
Martens, L., Southerton, D. and Scott, S. (2004), ‘Bringing children (and
parents) into the sociology of consumption: Towards a theoretical and
empirical agenda’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 4(2): 155–82.
Marx, K. (1976[1867]) Capital, Vol. I., London: Penguin.
Matthews, S. H. (1986) Friendships through the Lifecourse: Oral Biographies
in Old Age, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Mauss, M. (1992) The Gift, London: Routledge.
May, V. (2012) ‘Are we really saying farewell to family? A response to
Edwards and Gillies’ “Farewell to family?”’, Families, Relationships and
Societies, 1(3): 415–21.
May, V. (ed.) (2011) Sociology of Personal Life (1st edn), Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
May, V. (2013) Connecting Self to Society: Belonging in a Changing World,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
May, V. (2018) ‘Belonging across the lifetime’, British Journal of Sociology,
69(2): 306–22.
May, V. and Dawson, M. (2018) ‘“Families and relationships” e-Special Issue
Introduction’, Sociology, 0038038518760427, [Link]
0038038518760427.
McAdams, D. P. (2005) ‘Studying lives in time: A narrative approach’,
Advances in Life Course Research, 10: 237–58.
McCormack, M. (2012) The Declining Significance of Homophobia. How
Teenage Boys are Redefining Masculinity and Heterosexuality, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
McDowell, L. (2009) Working Bodies: Interactive Service Employment and
Workplace Identities, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.
203
 Bibliography

McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L. and Cook, J. M. (2001) ‘Birds of a feather:

Homophily in social networks’, Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 415–44.
McRobbie, A. (1980) ‘Settling accounts with subcultures: A feminist
critique’, Screen Education, 34: (Spring): 37–50.
Mead, G. H. (1934) Mind, Self and Society, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
Melhuus, M. (2012) Problems of Conception. Issues of Law, Biotechnology,
Individuals and Kinship, Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Miller, D. (1987) Material Culture and Mass Consumption, Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
Miller, D. (ed.) (2001a) Home Possessions, Oxford: Berg.
Miller, D. (2001b) ‘The poverty of morality’, Journal of Consumer Culture,
1(2): 225–44.
Miller, D. (2005) ‘Introduction’, in S. Kuchler and D. Miller (eds), Clothing as
Material Culture, Oxford: Berg.
Millett, K. (1970) Sexual Politics, Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Mills, A. (2007) ‘Gender and mahalle (neighborhood) space in Istanbul’,
Gender, Place & Culture, 14(3): 335–54.
Mills, C. W. (1959) The Sociological Imagination, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Mol, A. and Law, J. (2004) ‘Embodied action, enacted bodies’, Body and
Society, 10(2–3): 43–62.
Morgan, D.H. J (1996) Family Connections: An Introduction to Family Studies,
Cambridge: Polity.
Morgan, D. H. J. (2009) Acquaintances: The Space between Intimates and
Strangers, Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Morgan, D. H. J. (2011) Rethinking Family Practices, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Munro, M. and Madigan, R. (1993) ‘Privacy in the private sphere’, Housing
Studies, 8(1): 29–45.
Nagle, J. (2003) Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden
Frontiers, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nast, K. (2001) ‘The “cultural turn” in social theory: Towards a theory of
cultural politics’, Sociology, 35(1): 77–92.
Neugarten, B. L., Moore, J. W. and Lowe, John C. (1965) ‘Age norms, age
constraints, and adult socialization’, ­American Journal of Sociology, 70(6):
710–17.
Németh, J. (2006) ‘Conflict, exclusion, relocation: Skateboarding and public
space’, Journal of Urban Design, 11(3): 297–318.

204
 Bibliography

Nordqvist, P. (2010) ‘“Out of sight, out of mind”: Family resemblances in

lesbian donor conception’, Sociology, 44(6): 1128–44.
Nordqvist, P. (2012a) ‘Origins and originators: Lesbian couples negotiating
parental identities and sperm donor conception’, Culture, Health and
Sexuality, 14(3): 297–311.
Nordqvist, P. (2012b) ‘“I don’t want us to stand out more than we already
do”: Complexities and negotiations in lesbian couples’ accounts of
becoming a family through donor conception’, Sexualities, 15(5–6):
644–61.
Nordqvist, P. (2014) ‘Bringing kinship into being: Connectedness, donor
conception and lesbian parenthood’, Sociology, 48(2): 263–78.
Nordqvist, P. (2017) ‘Genetic thinking: Family practices and family
imaginaries’, Sociological Review, 65(4): 865–81.
Nordqvist, P. (forthcoming) ‘Un/familiar connections: On the relevance
of a sociology of personal life for exploring egg and sperm donation’,
unpublished manuscript submitted to Sociology of Health and Illness.
Nordqvist, P. and Smart, C. (2014a) ‘Troubling the family: Ongoing
problems of coming out as lesbian or gay to families of origin’, Families,
Relationships and Societies, 3(1): 97–112.
Nordqvist, P. and Smart, C. (2014b) Relative Strangers: Family Life, Genes and
Donor Conception, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Oerton, S. (2004) ‘Bodywork boundaries: Power, politics and
professionalism in therapeutic massage’, Gender, Work & Organisation,
11(5): 544–63.
Office for National Statistics (ONS) (2015). Statistical bulletin. Families and
households: 2015, London: Office for National Statistics, [Link]
[Link]/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/
families/bulletins/familiesandhouseholds/2015-11-05.
Office for National Statistics (ONS) (2016) Statistical bulletin: Domestic
abuse in England and Wales: Year ending March 2016, [Link]
[Link]/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/
domesticabuseinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2016.
Office for National Statistics (ONS) (2017a) ‘Marriages in England and
Wales: 2014’, [Link]
birthsdeathsandmarriages/marriagecohabitationandcivilpartnerships.
Office for National Statistics (ONS) (2017b) ‘Divorces in England and
Wales: 2014’, [Link]
birthsdeathsandmarriages/divorce/bulletins/divorcesinengland
andwales/2014.

205
 Bibliography

Office for National Statistics (ONS) (2017c) ‘Civil partnership dissolutions: By

year, quarter country of dissolution and sex, 2007-2015’, [Link]
[Link]/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/
marriagecohabitationandcivilpartnerships/datasets/
civilpartnershipstatisticsunitedkingdomcivilpartnershipdissolutions.
Øian, H. (2004) ‘Time out and drop out: On the relation between linear
time and individualism’, Time & Society, 13(2–3): 173–95.
Orbach, S. (1984[1982]) Fat Is a Feminist Issue II, London: Hamlyn.
Overend, A. (2011) ‘Leaky bodies and the gendering of c­ andida experiences’,
Women’s Health and Urban Life, 10(2): 94–113.
Pahl, R. (2000) On Friendship, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Pahl, R. and Spencer, L. (2004) ‘Personal communities: Not simply families
of “fate” or “choice”’, Current Sociology, 52(2): 199–221.
Panell, B. (2016) Home-Ownership or Bust? Commercial Research into Tenure
Aspirations, London: Council for Mortgage Lenders.
Papacharissi, Z. (2002) ‘The virtual sphere: The internet as a public sphere’,
New Media & Society, 4(1): 9–27.
Papapolydorou, M. (2017) ‘“When you see a normal person…”: Social class
and friendship networks among teenage students’, British Journal of
Sociology of Education, 35(4): 559–77.
Parrot, F. (2005) ‘“It’s not forever” The material culture of hope’, Journal of
Material Culture, 10(3): 245–62.
Parsell, C. (2012) ‘Home is where the house is: The meaning of home for
people sleeping rough’, Housing Studies, 27(2): 159–73.
Parsons, T. and Bales, R. F. (1955) Family, Socialization and Interaction
Process, Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Pateman, C. (1988) The Sexual Contract, Polity: Cambridge.
Phoenix, C. and Sparkes, A. C. (2008) ‘Athletic bodies and aging in context’,
Journal of Aging Studies, 22:211–21.
Pilkey, B., Scicluna R.M., Campkin, B. and Penner, B. (2017) Sexuality and
Gender at Home: Experience, Politics, Transgression, London: Bloomsbury.
Pitts, V. (1999) ‘Body modification, self-mutilation and agency in media
accounts of a subculture’, Body & Society, 5(2–3): 291–303.
Plummer, K. (1995) Telling Sexual Stories, London: Routledge.
Purbrick, L. (2014) ‘I love giving presents’: The emotion of material culture’
in Moran, A. and O’Brien, S. (eds), Love Objects: Emotion, Design and
Material Culture, London: Bloomsbury.
Putnam, R. (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American
Community, New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.

206
 Bibliography

Qvortrup, J. (2004) ‘The waiting child’, Childhood, 11(3): 267–73.

Qvortrup, J., Bardy, M., Sgritta, G. and Wintersberger, H. (eds) (1994)
Childhood Matters: Social Theory, Practice and Politics, Aldershot:
Avebury.
Ragoné, H. (1994) Surrogate Motherhood: Conception in the Heart, Oxford:
Westview.
Rathje, W. and Murphy, C. (1992) Rubbish! the Archaeology of Garbage,
Tuscon: University of Arizona Press.
Reid, C.K. (2017) ‘Financialisation and the sub-prime subject: The
experiences of homeowners during California’s housing boom’, Housing
Studies, 32(6): 793–815.
Rich, A. (1983) ‘Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian experience’ in
Snitow, N, Stansell, C. and Thompson, S. (eds) Desire: Politics of Sexuality,
London: Virago.
Richards, L. (1990) Nobody’s Home: Dreams and Realities in a New Suburb,
Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Riggs, D and E. Peel (2016) Critical Kinship Studies: An Introduction to the
Field, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Robinson, V. and Richardson, D. (eds) (2015) Introducing Gender and
Women’s Studies (4th edn), Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Róin, Á. (2014) ‘Embodied ageing and categorisation work amongst
retirees in the Faroe Islands’ Journal of Aging Studies, 31: 83–92.
Rose, A. M. (1962) ‘A systematic summary of symbolic interaction theory’, in
A. M. Rose (ed.), Human Behaviour and Social Processes: An Interactionist
Approach, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Rose, G. (2010) Doing Family Photography: The Domestic, the Public and the
Politics of Sentiment, Kent: Ashgate
Roseneil, S. (2000) ‘Queer frameworks and queer tendencies: Towards an
understanding of postmodern transformations of sexuality’, Sociological
Research Online, 5(3), [Link]
Roseneil, S. and Ketokivi, K. (2016) ‘Relational persons and relational
processes: Developing the notion of relationality for the Sociology of
Personal Life’, Sociology, 50(1): 143–59.
Rosser, C. and Harris, C. (1965) The Family and Social Change. A Study of Family
and Kinship in a South Wales Town, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Rossi, A. (1973) The Feminist Papers: From Adams to De Beauvoir, London:
Columbia University Press.
Rowbotham, S. (1977) Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression
and the Fight against It, London: Pluto Press.

207
 Bibliography

Rumens, N. (2017) ‘Researching workplace friendships: Drawing insights

from the sociology of friendship’, Journal of Social and Personal
Relationships, 34(8): 1149–67.
Sales, S. (2012) Adoption, Family and the Paradox of Origins: A Foucauldian
History, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Samara, T. R. (2010) ‘Order and security in the City: Producing race and
policing neoliberal spaces in South Africa’, Ethnic and Racial Studies,
33(4): 637–55.
Sanders, T. (2005) Sex Work: A Risky Business, Devon: Willan Publishing.
Saunders, P. (1990) A Nation of Home Owners, London: Unwin Hyman.
Saunders, S. and Williams, P. (1988) ‘The constitution of the home: Towards
a research agenda’, Housing Studies, 3(2): 81–93.
Savage, M. (2015) Social Class in the Twenty-First Century, London: Pelican.
Savage, M., Barlow, J., Dickens, P. and Fielding, T. (1992) Property,
Bureaucracy and Culture: Middle-Class Formations in Contemporary
Britain, London: Routledge.
Scherger, S., Nazroo, J. and May, V. (2016) ‘Work and family trajectories:
Changes across cohorts born in the first half of the twentieth century’,
Journal of Population Ageing, 9(1): 131–55.
Schneider, D. ([1968]1980) American Kinship: A Cultural Account (2nd edn),
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Schor, J. (2004) Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer
Culture, New York, NY: Scribner.
Scott, P. (2013) The Making of the Modern British Home: The Suburban Semi
and Family Life between the Wars, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shail, A. (2007) ‘“Although a woman’s article”: Menstruant economics and
creative waste’, Body & Society, 13(4): 77–96.
Shaw, C. R. (1966[1930]) The Jack-Roller, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
Sheller, M. (2004) ‘Automotive emotions: Feeling the car’, Theory, Culture &
Society, 21(4–5): 221–42.
Shilling, C. (2003) The Body and Social Theory (2nd edn), London: Sage.
Shove, E. (2003) Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social
Organisation of Normality, London: Berg.
Shove, E. and Pantzar, M. (2005) ‘Consumers, producers and practices:
Understanding the invention and reinvention of Nordic walking’, Journal
of Consumer Culture, 5(1): 43–64.
Simmel, G. (1970[1903]) ‘The metropolis and mental life’, in D. Levine (ed.)
On Individuality and Social Form, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

208
 Bibliography

Simmel, G. (1950) ‘The field of sociology’, in G. Wolff (ed.) The Sociology of

Georg Simmel, New York, NY: Free Press.
Simpson, R. (2006) ‘The intimate relationships of contemporary spinsters’,
Sociological Research Online, 11(3), [Link]
uk/11/3/[Link].
Simun, M. (2009) ‘My music, my world: Using the MP3 player to shape
experience in London’, New Media & Society, 11(6): 921–41.
Slater, D. (1997) Consumer Culture and Modernity, Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Smart, C. (1984) The Ties that Bind: Law, Marriage and the Reproduction of
Patriarchal Relations, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Smart, C. (2007) Personal Life: New Directions in Sociological Thinking,
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Smart, C. (2011a) ‘Close relationships and personal life’, in V. May (ed.)
Sociology of Personal Life (1st edn), Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Smart, C. (2011b) ‘Children’s personal lives’, in V. May (ed.), Sociology of
Personal Life (1st edn), Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Smart, C., Davies, K., Heaphy, B. and Mason, J. (2012) ‘Difficult friendships
and ontological insecurity’, Sociological Review, 60(1): 91–109.
Smart, C. and Neale, B. (1999) Family Fragments?, Cambridge: Polity.
Smart C. and Shipman, B. (2004) ‘Visions in monochrome: Families,
marriage and the individualization thesis’, British Journal of Sociology,
55(4): 491–509.
Smith, G., Bartlett, A. and King M. (2004) ‘Treatments of homosexuality in
Britain since the 1950s – An oral history: The experience of patients’,
Bmj, 328: 427.
Smock, P. J. and Gupta, S. (2002) ‘Cohabitation in contemporary North
America’ in A. Booth and A. Crouter (eds), Just Living Together: Implications
of Cohabitation on Families, Children and Social Policy, Hillside, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Smørholm, S. (2016) ‘Pure as the angels, wise as the dead: Perceptions of
infants’ agency in a Zambian community’ Childhood, 23(3): 348–61.
Solebello, N. and Elliott, S. (2011). ‘“We want them to be as heterosexual as
possible”: Fathers talking about their teen children’s sexuality’, Gender &
Society, 25(3): 293–315
Solomon, S., Rothblum, E. and Balsam, K. (2004) ‘Pioneers in partnership:
Lesbian and gay male couples in civil unions compared with those
not in civil unions and married heterosexual siblings’, Journal of Family
Psychology, 18(2): 275–86.

209
 Bibliography

Somers, M. R. (1994) ‘The narrative constitution of identity: A relational

and network approach’, Theory and Society, 23: 605–49.
Southerton, D. (2003) ‘“Squeezing time”: Allocating practices, coordinating
networks and scheduling society’, Time & Society, 12(1): 5–25.
Southerton, D. (2013) ‘Habits, routines and temporalities of consumption:
From individual behaviours to the reproduction of everyday practice’,
Time & Society, 22(3): 335–55.
Spector-Mersel, G. (2006) ‘Never-aging stories’ Journal of Gender Studies,
15(1): 67–87.
Spencer, L. and Pahl, R. (2006) Rethinking Friendship: Hidden Solidarities
Today, Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Spencer-Wood, S. (1999) ‘The world their household: Changing meanings
of the domestic sphere in the nineteenth century’, in Allison, P. (ed.) The
Archaeology of Household Activities: Dwelling in the Past, London: Routledge.
Spyer, P. (ed.) (1998) Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces,
London: Routledge.
Stacey, J. and Davenport, E. (2002) ‘Queer families quack back’, in D.
Richardson and S. Seidman (eds) Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies,
London: Sage.
Stalp, M. C., Williams, R., Lynch, A. and Radina, M. E. (2009) ‘Conspicuously
consuming: The Red Hat Society and midlife women’s identity’, Journal
of Contemporary Ethnography, 38(2): 225–53.
Stenslund, A. (2015) ‘Noget i luften – Mellem tavshed og latter’, Sosiologi I
Dag, 45(2): 11–32.
Stonewall (2016) Facts and Figures, [Link]
lgbt-facts-and-figures.
Strathern, M. (1992) After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth
Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sweetman, P. (1999) ‘Anchoring the (postmodern) self? Body modification,
fashion and identity’, Body & Society, 5(2–3): 51–76.
Take Back the Night Foundation. (n.d.), [Link]
Tang, L. (2010) ‘Development of online friendship in different social spaces’,
Information, Communication and Society, 13(4): 615–33.
Teman, E. (2010) Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant
Self, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
The Economist (2011) ‘The flight from marriage’, [Link]
com/node/21526329.
Thomas, W. I. and Znaniecki, F. (1958) The Polish Peasant in Europe and
America, Volumes 1 & 2 (2nd edn), New York, NY: Dover.

210
 Bibliography

Thompson, C. (1996) ‘Caring consumers: Gendered consumption

meanings and the juggling lifestyle’, Journal of Consumer Research, 22:
388–407.
Thompson, C. (2005) Making Parents. The Ontological Choreography of
Reproductive Technologies, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Thrift, N. (2008) ‘The material practices of glamour’, The Journal of Cultural
Economy, 1(1): 9–23.
Toerien, M. and Kitzinger, C. (2007) ‘Emotional labour in action: Navigating
multiple movements in the beauty salon’, Sociology, 41(4): 645–62.
Tonkiss, F. (2003) ‘The ethics of indifference: Community and solitude in
the city’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 6(3): 297–311.
Tunåker, C. (2015) ‘No place like home? Locating homeless LGBT youth’,
Home Cultures, 12(2): 241–59.
Turner, B. (1996) The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory,
London: Sage.
Turney, L. (2011) The denial of paternity: Pregnancy as a risk to the ‘pure
relationship’, Sociology, 45(6): 1110–25.
Turney, J. (2014) ‘(S)mother’s loves, or baby knitting’ in Moran, A. and
O’Brien, S. (eds), Love Objects: Emotion, Design and Material Culture,
London: Bloomsbury.
Twigg, J. (2000) ‘Carework as a form of bodywork’, Ageing and Society, 20(4):
389–411.
Törnqvist, M. (2018) ‘Rethinking intimacy: Semi-anonymous spaces and
transitory attachments in Argentine tango dancing’, Current Sociology,
66(3): 356–72.
Yanagisako, S. and Collier, J. (1987) ‘Toward a unified analysis of gender
and kinship’, in J. Collier and S. Yanagisako (eds), Gender and Kinship.
Essays toward a Unified Analysis, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Yeadon-Lee, T., Jewson, N., Felstead, A., Fuller, A. and Unwin, L. (2011)
‘Bringing in the customers: Regulation, discretion and customer
service narratives in upmarket hair salons’, International Journal of
Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, 6(3): 101–14.
United Nations (2015a) World Population Prospects the 2015 Revision: Key
Findings and Advance Tables. New York, NY: United Nations, [Link]
[Link]/unpd/wpp/Publications/Files/Key_Findings_WPP_2015.pdf.
United Nations (2015b) World Population Prospects The 2015 Revision,
Volume II: Demographic Profiles. New York, NY: United Nations, https://
[Link]/unpd/wpp/Publications/Files/WPP2015_Volume-II-
[Link].

211
 Bibliography

United Nations (2015c) The World’s Women 2015, New York, NY: The United
Nations.
UN Sustainable Development Goals Goal 5: Achieve gender
equality and empower all women and girls, [Link]
sustainabledevelopment/gender-equality/.
Uprichard, E. (2008) ‘Children as “being and becomings”: Children,
childhood and temporality’, Children & Society, 22: 303–13.
Valentine, G. (1997) ‘Body’, in D. Bell and G. Valentine (eds), Consuming
Geographies: We Are Where We Eat, London: Routledge.
Valentine, G. (2002) ‘Queer bodies and the production of space’, in D.
Richardson and S. Seidman (eds), Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies,
London: Sage.
Valentine, G. Skelton, T. and Butler, R. (2003) ‘Coming out and outcomes:
Negotiating lesbian and gay identities with, and in, the family’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 21(4): 478–99.
Veblen, T. (1925[1899]) The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of
Institutions, London: Allen & Unwin.
Vespa, J., Lewis, J. and Kreide, R. (2013) ‘America’s Families and Living
Arrangements: 2012 Population Characteristics’, Suitland, MD: US Census
Bureau, [Link]
Vogler, C., Brockmann, M. and Wiggins, R. (2006) ‘Intimate relationships
and changing patterns of money management at the beginning of the
twenty first century’, British Journal of Sociology, 57(3): 455–82.
Voicu, M., Voicu, B. and Strapcova, K. (2009) ‘Housework and gender inequality
in European countries’, European Sociological Review, 25(3): 365–77
Weeks, J. (2010[1986]) Sexuality (3rd edn), London: Routledge.
Wacquant, L. (2008) Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced
Marginality, Cambridge: Polity.
Wade, P. (2007) (ed.) Race, Ethnicity and Nation: Perspectives from Kinship
and Genetics, Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Wajcman, J. (2015) Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital
Capitalism, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Wang, Q. and Brockmeier, J. (2002) ‘Autobiographical remembering as
cultural practice: Understanding the interplay between memory, self
and culture’ Culture & Psychology, 8(1): 45–64.
Warde, A. (2014) ‘After taste: Culture, consumption and theories of
practice’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 14(3): 279–303.
Weeks, J. (1991) Against Nature: Essays on History, Sexuality and Identity,
London: Rivers Oram Press.

212
 Bibliography

Weeks, J. (2014[1989]) Sex, Politics and Society, Harmondsworth: Routledge.

Weeks, J., Heaphy, B. and Donovan, C. (2001) Same Sex Intimacies: Families
of Choice and Other Life Experiments, London: Routledge.
Wellman, B. and Hogan, B. (2004) ‘The internet in everyday life’ in W.
S. Bainbridge (ed.) The Berkshire Encyclopedia of Human Computer
Interaction, Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing.
Wernick, A. (1991) Promotional Culture: Advertising, ­Ideology and Symbolic
Expression, London, Sage.
Wessendorf, S. (2013) ‘Commonplace diversity and the “ethos of mixing”:
Perceptions of difference in a London neighbourhood’, Identities, 20(4):
407–22.
Weston, K. (1991) Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays and Kinship, New York,
NY: Columbia University Press.
Wheeler, K. and Glucksmann, M. (2015) Household Recycling and
Consumption Work: Social and Moral Economies, London: Palgrave.
Wilhite, H. (2012), ‘Towards a better accounting of the roles of body, things
and habits in consumption’, Collegium, 12(5): 87–99.
Wilkinson, E. and Bell, D. (2012) ‘Ties that blind: On not seeing (or looking)
beyond “the family”’, Families, Relationships and Societies, 1(3): 423–9.
Wilson, E. (1992) ‘The invisible flâneur’, New Left Review, 191: 90–110.
Wilson, E. (1995) ‘The rhetoric of urban space’, New Left Review, 209: 146–60.
Wilson, E. (2003) Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (revised edn),
London: I. B. Tauris.
Wilson, S., Houmøller, K. and Bernays, S. (2012) ‘“Home, and not some
house”: Young people’s sensory construction of family relationships in
domestic spaces’, Children’s Geographies, 10(1): 95–107.
Wimmer, A. and Lewis, K. (2010) ‘Beyond and below racial homophily: ERG
models of a friendship network documented on Facebook’, American
Journal of Sociology, 116(7): 583–642.
Witz, A., Warhurst, C. and Nickson, D. (2003) ‘The labour of aesthetics and
the aesthetics of prganisation’, Organization, 10(1): 33–54.
Wolf, N. (1990) The Beauty Myth, London: Chatto & Windus.
Woodward, S. (2007) Why Women Wear What They Wear, Oxford: Berg.
Woodward, S. (2015) ‘The hidden lives of domestic things: Accumulations in
cupboards, lofts and shelves’ in Casey, E. and Taylor, Y. (eds) Intimacies, Critical
Consumption and Diverse Economies, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Woodward, S. and Greasley, A. (2015) ‘Personal collections as material
assemblages: A comparison of wardrobes and music collections’,
Journal of Consumer Culture, 17(3): 659–76.

213
 Bibliography

Woolf, V. (2008[1931]) Selected Writings, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Zelizer, V. (2002) ‘Kids and commerce’, Childhood, 9(4): 275–96.
Zubair, M. and Norris, M. (2015) ‘Perspectives on ageing, later life and
ethnicity: Ageing Research in Ethnic Minority Contexts’ Ageing & Society,
35: 897–916.

214
INDEX

adoption, 51, 58 biopower, 160, 165

Adoption and Children Act 2002, 33 Blasius, Mark, 164–5, 167
adulthood Blatterer, Harry, 92–3
as being/becoming, 92 body, 14, 117
as a social category, 93 bodywork, see bodywork
as taken for granted, 92–3 and consumption, 117, 120–1
aestheticisation of everyday life, 109 as a cultural symbol, 118
affective communities, 163, 164–5, and discipline, 120
167 and fashion, see fashion
ageing and grooming/maintenance, 125–7,
and consumption, 110 128
and gender, 98–9 and identity, 119–120
meanings of, 96–8, 110 the ‘leaky’, fleshy body, 117, 122,
ageing population, 96 125
agency, 7, 74, 75–6, 92, 162, 163, 174, materiality of, 127
178 objectification, 118–9
Allan, Graham, 67 the pregnant body, see pregnancy
Anderson, Elijah, 148–9, 151, 154 and size, 120, 123–4
Arnold, Jeanne, 80 the sensory body, 54–5, 124–5,
assemblage, 76–77 140
body regimes, 120, 178
Baudrillard, Jean, 105 bodywork, 127
Bauman, Zygmunt, 8, 107–8 Butler, Judith, 32, 170
Baym, Nancy, 152
beauty aesthetics, 120 capitalism, 5, 18, 19, 27, 104, 107, 157,
Bécares, Laia, 147–8, 149 177
Beck, Ulrich, 8, 19, 64 Cartesian dualism, 117
Beck-Gernsheim, Elisabeth, 8, 19, 64 Cheal, David, 6
Bellotti, Elisa, 61 Chicago School, the, 4
Bengtson, Vern, 9 childhood
Bennett, Jane, 77 as being/becoming, 91–2
biological connections, 47, 53 and consumer culture, 112–3
egg, sperm and embryo donation, 56 meanings of, 91
blood, 47 Chin, Elizabeth, 113
genes, 47 citizenship, 157, 164, 167, 168, 169
biopolitcs, 160, 163, 164, 165, 178 civil inattention, 150–1

215
 INDEX

Civil Partnership Act 2004, 33, 38 Cronin, Anne, 62

civil partnerships, 38–39, 166–7, 169–70 cultural turn, the, 119
Civil Rights Movement, 147
Dempsey, Deborah, 54, 57
civil unions, see civil partnerships
Descartes, René, 117
cohabitation, 36, 40–1, 163, 170
Desmond, Matthew, 133
attitudes towards,
detraditionalisation thesis, see
rates, 36–7
­individualisation thesis
Cohen, Rachel Lara, 128
Dickens, Charles, 138–9
Coll, Rachel, 123
discourse, 23, 30, 36, 48, 56, 58, 135,
commodification, 114, 115, 178–9
160, 161, 167, 180
compulsory heterosexuality, 158, 159,
distributed personhood, 77
164, 167
divorce, 37–8
connectedness, 9, 10, 11, 28, 75, 78, 86,
and kinship, 50
87, 90
rates, 38
conspicuous consumption, 103, 121,
179 Divorce Reform Act 1969, 37
consumer attitude, 107–8, 115 Djohari, Natalia, 54–5
consumer culture, 14, 177, 179 Donovan, Catherine, 65, 167–8
and the body, 121, 177 Douglas, Mary, 122, 134
and choice, 8, 108 Drazin, Adam, 76, 82
definition of, 101 Duggan, Lisa, 168
origins of, 102 Durkheim, Emile, 3–4
impact on personal life, 104–9, 115 egg donation, see new reproductive
and relationships, 111, 113–4, 115 technologies
and social class, 107, 109 Elias, Norbert, 174, 175–6
consumption embeddedness, 10, 28, 87, 90
and ageing, 110–1 embryo donation, see new reproductive
and gender, 113, 115 technologies
and the home, 136 emotional labour, 41, 127, 128, 136,
and identity, 104, 105, 107, 108, 180
109, 114–5, 177 emotions, 25, 28, 127, 140
and individuality, 102–3, 104 Engels, Friedrich, 5
and lifestyle, 104, 107, 108, 109, essentialism, 32
110–1, 177 ethics of indifference, 151, 154
and neo-tribes, 109, 115 ethnicity, 90, 97–8, 137, 173,
and social class, 104, 107–8, 109 180
symbolic meaning of, 122 and cohabitation, 37
Cook, Ian, 84 and consumption, 113
Cook, Daniel, 112 and friendship, 69
cosmopolitan canopy, 151, 154 and home, 137
couple relationships, 1, 5, 9, 12–13, 30, and kinship, 50
95, 162, 165–6, 169–70, 174 and public space, 144, 146,
‘doing’ of, 34–40 147–9

216
 INDEX

families of choice, 6, 65–6, 167–8, 181 Gagnon, John H., 32

family, 2, 5–6, 7, 8, 10, 13, 46, 47, 48, Gell, Alfred, 77
49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, gender, 7, 32, 33, 63, 95, 97, 98–9, 173,
60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 70, 71–3, 81, 181
165, 169, 179 and ageing, 98–9
and the body, 141 and child care, 42
being related to, 46 and consumption, 113, 115
‘doing’ family, 6, 175 and division of labour, 42
displaying family, 78 and family, 34, 42–3
and home, 135–8, 139, 140, 141, in/equality, 4, 5, 12, 42–3, 157–8,
142, 144 159, 162, 165
nuclear, 5–6, 44, 50, 57, 58, 64, and nature, 32
135
and public space, 145–7, 176
practices, 78, 175
and responsibilities, 34
regulation of, 157, 160
and sexuality, 33, 43–4
relationships, 10, 49, 140, 167, 169
gender studies, 163, 168
responsibilities, 51–2, 54
Giddens, Anthony, 8, 40–1, 64, 65, 71,
substance abuse in, 140 139, 162
family sociology, 2, 5–6 Ginsburg, Robert, 134
fashion, 121 Glucksmann, Miriam, 113
Featherstone, Mike, 108–9, 110 Goffman, Erving, 150
feminism, 5–6, 40, 157, 159, 179 Gorman-Murray, Andrew, 137–8
and the body, 118 Graham, Allan, 135
and the home, 137 Green, Eileen, 63, 147
and intimate relationships, 41–2 Grosz, Elizabeth, 118, 122
Finch, Janet, 11, 24, 52, 78
Firth, Raymond William, 49 Hampton, Keith, 153
Forge, Anthony, 49 Hallam, Elizabeth, 83
Foucault, Michel, 160–1 Harris, Christopher, 50
Francis, Doris, 67–8 Heaphy, Brian, 43, 66, 166, 167–8
friendship, 13, 167, 169, 175 Hebdige, Dick, 104
and choice, 67–70, 71 Hepworth, Mike, 110
idealization of, 64–5, 70–1 heteronormativity, 31, 121, 183
and individualisation, 63–4, 66–7 of the life course, 95
through the life course, 61, 67–8 of marriage, 168, 169, 170
negative aspects of, 70, 71–2 heterosexual norms, see
and new technologies, 62–3 heteronormativity
and ‘race’/ethnicity, 68, 69 heterosexual relationships, 165, 166–7,
as socially patterned, 67–70 174
types of, 60, 62 heterosexuality, 31–2, 157–9, 164, 167
friendship ethic, 65, 165 Hochschild, Arlie, 113–4
friendship networks, 61 Hockey, Jenny, 83
functionalism, 5 Hogan, Bernie, 63

217
 INDEX

home, 14, 130–2, 138–9, 176 Ingold, Tim, 76

children’s and young people’s experi- interactions in public,
ences of, 139–140 with friends and family, 152–3
and consumption, 136 rules of, 150, 151
and ethnicity, 137 with strangers and acquaintances,
and family, 135–8, 139, 140, 141, 149–52
142, 144 intimate relationships, 13, 162
as gendered, 137, 145, 176 Islamophobia, 149, 183–4
and housing, 131, 141
the ‘ideal’ home, 131, 136 Jamieson, Lynn, 41–2, 138
and material objects, 13, 80–1, 82, Jin, Xiumin, 147
124, 130, 138 Johnson, Asai Mohamadi, 149
meanings of, 14, 18, 19
Ketokivi, Kaisa, 7
ownership, 18–9, 131–2
King, Peter, 139
physicality of, 134–5, 139
kinning, 51
and privacy, see privacy and private
kinship, 13, 46, 184
space
and adoption, 51, 58
and relationships, 137–8
affinities, 53–57
rented homes, 133
biological connections, see biological
and sexuality, 137
connections
and social class, 136, 138
and birth, 50
homonormativity, 168, 170
blood, 47
homophily, 68–9, 71, 182
and care, 51, 141
homosexuality, 156, 159, 161, 164
and creativity, 54, 58
hooks, bell, 137
and death, 50
household, 138
and divorce, 50
one-person household, 138
and ethnicity, 50
Hubert, Jane, 49
and everyday life, 48, 49
Hurdley, Rachel, 78
as a ’fixed’ or given relationship,
Illouz, Eva, 114, 115 47–8, 53–4
individualisation thesis, 7–8, 19, 64, 107, and law, 51
119, 121, 174–5, 183 ’living’ kinship, 46, 51, 55, 58
and the body, 120–1 and medical technologies, see new
critiques of, 8–9, 66–7 reproductive technologies
and gender, 7–8 as process, 50, 58
and marriage, 40–1 and sexuality, 50, 55
and social class, 7–8 and surrogacy, see surrogacy
industrialisation, 183 universe of, 49
and consumption, 102 Kitzinger, Celia, 127
and the public–private distinction, Kuechler, Susanne, 76
135–6, 145, 177
information and communication technol- La Fontaine, J.S., 21
ogies, 62–63, 68, 109, 145, 152, 153 Lahad, Kinneret, 94–5, 147

218
 INDEX

Lasch, Christopher, 106 Marx, Karl, 103

Lash, Scott, 104, 107 Marxism, 6
Latour, Bruno, 126 masculinity, 184
Law, John, 125 Mason, Jennifer, 11, 52, 53, 54, 55
Lewek, Mirjam, 149 mass consumption, 103–4, 107
Lewis, Kevin, 69 material culture, 13, 74, 75, 76, 124, 184
LGBTQ, 184 material objects, 13, 127
experiments in living, 162–3 as agentic, 75–6, 127
communities, 164–5 and global connections, 84–5
and the home, 137 in the home, 80–1, 82, 124, 130, 138
legislation, 19, 164 mass production of, 83–4
politics, 159–160, 163–4, 168, 170 materiality of, 75, 86
rights, 156, 161, 164, 170 meaning of, 77
Lienhardt, Godfrey, 21 in personal life, 76, 78
life course and relationships, 78–80, 81–3, 86,
and gender, 95, 97, 98–9 177
as normative, 88–9, 94–5 and self, 77, 79
through a personal life lens, 89–90, material turn, 122
92, 95, 99–100 materiality, 75, 86, 125
and social class, 90, 93, 94 McPherson, Miller, 68–9
as a social institution, 88 Mead, George Herbert, 9–10, 20–1
as socially constructed, 92 Miles, Rebecca, 149
life course stages, 13, 87–8 Miller, Daniel, 76–7, 111, 113
life course transitions, 3, 88, 90, 93 Mills, Amy, 153–4
life-politics, 162–3, 164, 167, 170, 184 Mills, C. Wright, 4
Lindsay, Jo, 54 Mol, Annemarie, 125
living apart together (LATs), 163 monogamy, 163, 165, 166, 168, 169
Lofland, Lynn, 150, 151, 152 Morgan, David, 6, 12, 141, 152
Longhurst, Robyn, 118, 123 Munro, Moira, 139
Lury, Celia, 113 Murphy, Cullen, 80

Madigan, Ruth, 139 naming, 24–5

Mallet, Shelley, 130 nature, 32
Marcoux, Jean-Sébastian, 79 biological differences, 31
marriage, 8, 157, 169–70, 172, 174 and blood, 47
cultural meanings of, 37 the body, 123
and gender, 33–4 as innate quality, 32
median age at marriage, 35–6 and kinship, 47
rates, 34–5, 37 new reproductive technologies, 6, 47, 55
and religion, 35 egg, sperm and embryo donation, 56
and romantic love, 30 In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF), 55
same-sex, see same-sex marriage reproductive donation, 47, 56, 58
Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act, 2013 non-monogamy, 163, 165, 166, 168, 169

219
 INDEX

objectification, 76–7, 79, 118–9, 184 private sphere, 3, 33, 118, 136, 145,
Øian, Hogne, 94 176–7, 185
ontological security, 139 and the home, 138–139
promotional culture, 105–6
Pahl, Ray, 61, 62, 66–7, 70 public–private distinction, 16, 144, 145
Papapolydorou, Maria, 68 critiques of, 4, 14, 144, 154–5,
Parrott, Fiona, 82 176–7
Parsell, Cameron, 135 and gender, 136, 145, 176
Parsons, Talcott, 5 social construction of, 145, 176
Patmore, Coventry, 136 public space, 14, 141, 185
patriarchal, 82, 118, 157, 158, 184 and the body, 118, 123
person, 20–2, 174 and close relationships, 152–3
as distinct from the self, 20–2, 27–8 definition of, 144
and material objects, 77 and diversity, 149, 151, 154
social construction of, 22, 92 exclusion from, 146–9, 151
personal, 7, 9, 27–8, 176, 177 and gender, 145–7, 176, 123
definition of, 16–17 and information and communica-
social construction of, 17–8, 19–20, tion technologies, 145, 152, 153
22–3, 27, 173 interactions in, 150–152, 153–4
personal communities, 61, 66, 70, 167 and pregnancy, 123
‘personal is political’, 157, 170 and ‘race’/ethnicity, 144, 146, 147–9
personal life, 14, 15, 18, 172, 176, 177 and strangers and acquaintances, 14,
definition of, 1–2, 11 149–52, 154
and material objects, 74–5, 76, 84 public sphere, 3, 33, 118, 136, 145, 155,
as political, 14 176–7, 185
politics of, 156–7, 162–71 pure relationship, 8, 9, 40–41, 64, 70, 185
in public spaces, 83, 144, 149, 150, critiques of, 10, 66–7, 71–2
154
Qvortrup, Jens, 91
and social class, 7–8, 25–7
social construction of, 11–2, 22–3, ‘race’, 26, 68, 146, 147–9
173–4 Ragoné, Helena, 57
sociology of, 2–3, 6–7, 17, 20, 170, Rathje, William, 80
172, 173, 175, 177
Reid, Carolina, 132
personal practices, 23–4, 27
relatedness, see kinship
personal ties, 46
relationality, 7, 9–11, 13, 28, 77–8, 79,
personhood, see person 175, 185–6
Phoenix, Cassandra, 92 relationships, 13, 162, 165, 166–7, 174
Plato, 117 and consumption, 111, 113–4
Plummer, Ken, 164, 168 as created through practices, 23–4
politics of personal life, 156–7, 162–71 and gender, 162
pregnancy, 123 as negotiated through objects,
privacy, 138–139, 141–2 78–80, 81–3, 86
private space, 1, 136, 144, 145, 150, 155 with strangers and acquaintances,
and home, 134 149–52
220
 INDEX

‘sticky’ relationships, 47 Smørholm, Sesilie, 92

suffusion of, 61 social class, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 17, 26, 27, 90,
with things, 13, 74, 84 93, 94, 98, 136, 186
Rich, Adrienne, 158 and consumption, 104, 107–8, 109
Róin, Ása, 97 and friendship, 68, 69
Rose, Gillian, 78 and the home, 136, 138
Roseneil, Sasha, 7, 43 and personal life, 25–7
Rosser, Colin, 50 and public space, 145
social clocks, 89, 93, 94, 98
same-sex marriage, 33, 157, 167
social construction
arguments for and against,
of gender and sexuality, 32
168–70
of personal, 17–18, 19–20, 22–3,
average age at marriage, 39
173
divorce, 39, 43
of personal life, 11–2, 22–3,
legislation of, 156, 174 173–4
rates, 38–9 of personhood, 22
same-sex relationships, 31, 33, 38–9, 43, social constructionism, 7, 11, 20, 186
56, 165, 166–7
critiques of, 23
formal recognition of, 33, 38,
social divisions, 26, 27
169–70
socialisation, 10, 174, 187
and home, 137–8
social order, 27, 157, 161, 165, 170, 186
same-sex marriage, see same-sex
marriage social structures, 7, 17, 70, 72, 90, 109,
157, 175, 177, 187
social patterning of, 38
social ties, 49
stigma of, 43
sociology, 17, 172
‘separate spheres’ thinking, 136, 145
of families, 2, 5–6
critiques of, 4, 14, 144, 154–5
‘new’ sociology of childhood, 91
sex, 11, 33, 142, 166
of personal life, 2–3, 6–7, 17, 20,
sexuality, 1, 14, 26, 157, 160–161, 162,
170, 172, 173, 175, 177
164, 172, 173, 186
Sparkes, Andrew, 93
and biopower, 160–1
Spector-Mersel, Gabriela, 98
and kinship, 50, 55
Spencer, Liz, 61, 62, 66, 70
social construction of, 11, 158, 161,
173 sperm donation, see new ­reproductive
technologies
and politics, 162–71
suburbia, 136
Sexual Offences Act 1967, 33
surrogacy, 56–7
sexualisation, 118
symbolic value of goods, 103–4, 105,
shared housing, 141
187–8
Shilling, Chris, 119
Sweetman, Paul, 121
Simmel, Georg, 102, 150, 172, 175
Simon, William, 33 Tang, Lijun, 63
Simpson, Roona, 138 temporal scripts, 13, 87, 89, 95, 188
Singleton, Carrie, 63, 147 Thomas, William I., 4
Smart, Carol, 6, 7, 28, 47, 71–2, 78, 87, Thompson, Charis, 58
89–90 Thrift, Nigel, 126
221
 INDEX

Tonkiss, Fran, 151, 154 Wernick, Andrew, 105–6

Turney, Lyn, 82 Wessendorf, Susanne, 154
Weston, Kath, 6, 167
Uprichard, Emma, 91
Wheeler, Kathryn, 113
urbanisation, 102, 115, 150, 188
white space, 148–9
Urry, John, 104, 107
Whitson, Risa, 147
use value of goods, 103, 105, 188
Wilde, Oscar, 33
Veblen, Thorstein, 103 Wilson, Sarah, 140
Victorian Poor Law, 51 Wimmer, Andreas, 69
Woolf, Virginia, 136
Wajcman, 113
Weeks, Jeffrey, 6, 11, 32, 65, 66, 70, Yeadon-Lee, Tray, 128
167–8
Wellman, Barry, 63 Znaniecki, Florian, 4

222