Victoria Robinson

My baby just cares for me: Feminism, heterosexuality and non‐monogamy

Abstract This paper is centrally concerned with examining feminist debates around heterosexuality, monogamy and non‐monogamous relationships. A feminist critique of monogamy is considered, and differing feminist views on the meaning of the 1960s sexual revolution for women, inform the debate. Jealousy is considered in terms of how it upholds the institution and ideology of monogamy. Popular conceptions of monogamy and non‐monogamy are examined and recent feminist debate on heterosexuality is used as a case‐study to discuss gaps and silences in current feminist theorising. I conclude with a critical argument of the potential of non‐monogamy for informing and transforming heterosexual relationships and other social relations.

‘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.

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.

Introducing Gender and Women's Studies

PART 1: THEORY AND POLITICS Conceptualising Gender D.Richardson Feminist Theory S.Hines Feminism, Social Movements and the Gendering of Politics N. Charles Men, Masculinities and Feminism V.Robinson PART 2: BODIES/IDENTITIES Gendered Bodies: Gendered Lives K.Woodward Racing the Feminist Agenda: Exploring the Intersections Between Race, Ethnicity and Gender K.Reed Sexuality Y.Taylor PART 3: INSTITUTIONS Families, Domesticity and Intimacy S.Jackson Gender and Schooling: Contemporary Issues in Gender Equality and Educational Achievement J.Ringrose & D.Epstein Gender and Work Z.Irving PART 4: CULTURES AND CONTEXTS Media and Popular Culture R.Holliday Cyberspace/technologies: Of Cyborgs and Feminism S.Gillis PART 5: DOING FEMINIST RESEARCH Feminist Methodology Matters L.Stanley & S.Wise Postscript V.Robinson & D.Richardson Bibliography Index

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.

Reconceptualising the Mundane and the Extraordinary: A Lens through Which to Explore Transformation within Women’s Everyday Footwear Practices

This article explores the transformatory potential of the lived realities of people’s everyday social lives, seen here to be patterned by a dynamic interplay between the ‘mundane’ and the ‘extraordinary’. Their interaction acts as an interpretive device that can generate new, empirically grounded theoretical insights. Thus, I argue for greater recognition and focus on relationality and connectedness, or rather, that is to say, a meso-level in between structure and agency that individuals both contribute to and are influenced by within everyday life. Using data from a qualitative three year ESRC-funded study of identity, transition and footwear, the article weaves these concerns together with a focus on women’s agency, as seen through the interpretive capacity of the mundane and the extraordinary. In so doing, the boundaries and relationship of the mundane and the extraordinary are reconceptualised.

The temporal landscape of shoes: a life course perspective

This empirically grounded article draws on an ESRC-funded project on footwear, identity and transition to offer new understandings of how a linear model of the life course may, in practice, be disrupted, subverted or reconfigured. Combining the insights of material culture and life course studies, it develops the notion of a temporal landscape of shoes within which their scope for interrupting life course temporalities can be explored. In particular, it identifies four temporal strategies made possible through the symbolic efficacy of footwear: the retrieval of an earlier identity through the purchase of styles previously worn; the deferral of later life by rejecting comfortable shoes that might symbolically reposition someone as ‘old’; the release of former age-based identities and the embracing of freedom from a felt need to wear impractical or painful shoes; the appropriation or reconfiguring of the past as a contemporary resource through the wearing of vintage/hand-me-down shoes.

Occasions and non-occasions: Identity, femininity and high-heeled shoes

This article addresses theoretical problems around the notion of ‘choice’, using empirical data from a three-year, ESRC-funded study of identity, transition and footwear among both women and men. With a focus on female participants who wore, or had worn high-heeled shoes, it draws on Budgeon’s argument for viewing the body as event, as becoming, and Finch’s use of the concept of display, to explore the temporalities of high-heeled shoe wear, particularly as an aspect of ‘dressing up’. Data from both focus groups and year-long case studies allowed everyday and life course patterns of high-heeled shoe wear to be explored – in many cases, as they unfolded. This material has led us to critique the linear, goal-oriented nature of a modernist ‘project of the self’, and to argue that identification, as a dynamic process, may often be erratic, partial and temporary. Emphasized femininity, it is suggested, can be ‘displayed’ episodically, as an aspect of ‘doing gender’, a perspective that problematizes notions of a ‘post-feminist masquerade’ that inevitably secures gender retrenchment. Through an examination of the occasions and non-occasions that pattern the temporalities of women’s lives, therefore, the article demonstrates a distinction between displaying femininity and doing gender, one that simultaneously sheds light on their relationship with one another.

'I'm a sex kitten, aren't I...' : Relocating Agency and Pleasure in Older Women's Narratives about Sex

Abstract This article draws on data collected as part of a two-year funded study concerning the making of modern heterosexuality in the East Yorkshire region of England. The starting point for our family-based empirical project has been to problematise feminist theorising that has conceptualised heterosexuality as a monolithic and static category in which women (and men) are denied agency. Via participants’ nuanced accounts of being and becoming heterosexual, we identify the existence of a multiplicity of heterosexualities and begin to appreciate differences in meaning and experiences, acknowledging the creative capacity of some of our women participants to subvert the structural conditions they are assumed to be subordinated to. Sexuality and sexual practice have long been argued to be the cornerstone of womens subordination, and our data are laden with examples of mothers, daughters and grand-daughters ‘giving in’ to male sexual desires. But these were not the only stories. This paper focuses on the experiences of women, now aged 50+, who spoke of sex not only as pleasurable but also as something they actively pursued, both as young women and in their later years. In recognising a diversity of heterosexual experiences, this allows for a more inclusive feminist politics which might speak to a wider group of women than previously.