Jenny Hockey

Growing up and growing old : ageing and dependency in the life course

Introduction Infantilization as Social Discourse Constructing Personhood Changing Categories of the Child Young at Heart Dependency, Family and Community The Making and Sustaining of Marginality Weakness and Power

Beyond the Womb and the Tomb: Identity, (Dis)embodiment and the Life Course

Grounded in the authors’ theoretical and ethnographic work on pregnancy and social life after death, this article explores the ways in which the body is involved in processes of identification. With a focus on the embodied nature of social identity, the article nonetheless problematizes a model of the life course that begins at the moments of birth and ends at death. Instead, it offers a more extended temporal perspective and examines other ways in which identity may be claimed, for example, via material objects and practices which evoke the body as imagined or remembered. By documenting pre-birth and post-mortem identity-making of this kind, it demonstrates how the unborn and the dead may come into social existence. In addition, a cultural privileging of both the body and visuality is shown to shore up the capacity of material objects and practices to shape social identities in a highly selective fashion. The article therefore proposes that models of the life course need to accommodate the meanings of pre-birth and post-mortem materialities and so incorporate a conceptualization of social identity as contested, relational and inevitably incomplete.

Landscapes of loss: spaces of memory, times of bereavement

The qualitative study described in this paper explores later life spousal bereavement as a spatialised experience. It draws on interviews with 20 older widowed people who were living alone, half in owner-occupied accommodation and half in sheltered housing. Moving beyond the older adults ‘inner’ world of grief, it examines changes in the use and meaning of both public and domestic space in order to provide an holistic, culturally-located analysis. The following themes are identified as important: the type of housing, interviewees’ spatialised social relationships, the experience of spousal caregiving prior to bereavement and the ongoing relationship between the living and the dead partner.

‘What I Used to Do … On My Mother's Settee’: spatial and emotional aspects of heterosexuality in England

Using data from an ongoing project which investigates continuities and changes in the institution of heterosexuality across the twentieth century, this article brings a spatialised perspective to bear on the contradictions implicit within family‐based models of hegemonic heterosexuality. In this context we contribute to the growing focus by geographers on theorising the spatial and emotional aspects of heterosexuality. Via interviews with women and men from three generations in 20 families from East Yorkshire, England, we discover the difficulties experienced by individuals seeking to bring together their sexual and family lives. Focusing on two areas, the transmission of sexual knowledge between the members of different generations and between heterosexual partners and the use of space within the performance of gendered identities, the article shows how individuals both experience constraint and discover scope for agency in managing such contradictions. Via empirical data we therefore begin to identify the ways in which heterosexuality, as an institution, has provided an implicit organising principle through which materially‐grounded links between self, the emotions, other, body, home and the public sphere have been produced and/or negotiated over the last 80 years.

In the shadow of the traditional grave

Abstract This article draws on data from a qualitative study of the destinations of ashes now being removed in increasing numbers from crematoria, the practice of cremation, and particularly the private disposal of ashes outside crematoria. 1 It explores the case that such disposals may frequently be informed by the recollection, or awareness, of practices surrounding whole body burial. These include notions of bodily integrity, the creation and preservation of a clear, bounded space for the deceased, and expectations and negotiations about grave visiting and upkeep. The article therefore seeks to determine whether new ritual practice is being developed, or instead, whether a reformulation of traditional beliefs and practices is taking place. Data are presented which primarily demonstrate either a strong parallel between burial and cremation practice or a serious intention to stand clear of the shadow of the traditional grave. In addition we discuss a smaller body of material which reveals more ambiguous approaches that do not support either argument. By examining data within these categories, the article explores the varying degrees of alignment between traditional burial and cremation practices and asks whether cremation provides scope for a return to positively perceived aspects of burial, while side-stepping its less welcome aspects, such as slow bodily deterioration.

Women's Reproductive Lives as a Symbolic Resource in Central and Eastern Europe:

When Communism collapsed in Central and Eastern Europe women seemed to lose the control they had gained over their reproductive lives. Abortion rights became more limited as did access to childcare and maternity benefits. The authors argue that this picture conceals two key points. First, the effects of both Communism and post-Communism for womens reproductive lives need to be understood as byproducts of state initiatives geared towards the fulfilment of quite different political goals – and not attempts to intervene in womens health and well-being per se. Second, these effects are very varied and cannot be attributed to a single cause. ‘Central and Eastern Europe’ comprises a whole range of political, ethnic and religious groupings, the result being that womens reproductive lives have been shaped within a diversity of political processes. Some women have faced pressures from the state to reproduce, some have lost the conditions necessary for them to continue paid work after childbirth, others have lost abortion rights. To understand these very different outcomes of post-Communism, this article looks beyond womens issues per se to unravel their role as symbolic resources which have been drawn upon in power struggles taking place in political arenas which exclude the majority of women. This argument is elaborated through empirical evidence from Poland, Serbia and East Germany.

Masculinities, Sexualities, and the Limits of Subversion: Being a Man in Hairdressing

Drawing on data from a U.K. study of ‘‘masculinities in transition,’’ this article considers whether hairdressing, a largely feminized working culture, affords men the space to challenge, reaffirm, and play with dominant understanding of what it is to be a man. We ask whether ‘‘another masculinity’’ is possible in this sphere and beyond. Using qualitative interviews and observation in the workplace, men’s feelings about working in ‘‘a woman’s world’’ and the extent to which their intentional and unintentional ‘‘feminization’’ provides scope for challenging gender norms is explored. As Brickell’s discussion reminds us, those who subvert the prevailing values surrounding masculinity are at constant risk of being ‘‘misunderstood.’’ For hairdressers, the parody of femininity and campness is always at risk of being misinterpreted. The data suggest that contextual realignments of ‘‘acceptable’’ gendering create the possibility for change, but there are limits to subversion; ‘‘feminized’’ men find themselves reaffirming the gender order as well as contributing to its disorder.

Worn Shoes: Identity, Memory and Footwear:

This article raises questions about the role of footwear within contemporary processes of identity formation and presents ongoing research into perceptions, experiences and memories of shoes among men and women in the North of England. In a series of linked theoretical discussions it argues that a focus on women, fashion and shoe consumption as a feature of a modern, western ‘project of the self’ obscures a more revealing line of inquiry where footwear can be used to explore the way men and women live out their identities as fluid, embodied processes. In a bid to deepen theoretical understanding of such processes, it takes account of historical and contemporary representations of shoes as a symbolically efficacious vehicle for personal transformation, asking how the idea and experience of transformation informs everyday and life course experiences of transition, as individuals put on and take off particular pairs of shoes. In so doing, the article addresses the methodological and analytic challenges of accessing experience that is both fluid and embodied.

Closing in on death? Reflections on research and researchers in the field of death and dying

Abstract This paper provides a critical overview of recent arguments within the field of research on death and dying. In so doing, it explores reasons for researchers choosing to work in this area, and how these might relate to questions of personal experience and the wider cultural and social contexts of researchers’ everyday lives. It discusses not only the sequestration of death thesis, but also arguments which suggest there has been a revival of Romanticism associated with the maintenance of bonds between the living and the death. Finally, it explores the critique that the anomic terror arguably associated with death, has been assumed rather than examined.

What's sex got to do with it? A family-based investigation of growing up heterosexual during the twentieth century

This paper explores findings from a cross-generational study of the making of heterosexual relationships in East Yorkshire, which has interviewed women and men within extended families. Using a feminist perspective, it examines the relationship between heterosexuality and adulthood, focussing on sexual attraction, courtship, first kisses, first love and first sex, as mediated within family relationships, and at different historical moments. In this way, the contemporary experiences of young people growing up are compared and contrasted with those of mid-lifers and older adults who formed heterosexual relationships within the context of the changing social and sexual mores of the 1960s/1970s, and the upheavals of World War Two.