If the shoe fits: footwear, gender and identity

Emeritus Professor Jenny Hockey, Dr Victoria Robinson, Reader, and Dr Rachel Dilley, Research Associate, Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield

Wednesday 7 March, 2012
1pm - 2pm
Room 109, Elmfield Building, Northumberland Road

Abstract

The ‘If the shoe fits’ project contributes to work on identity, particularly the processes of identification. To say that identity is embodied is not new but what this means experientially or phenomenologically is less well understood. If it is treated as a process, this necessarily involves change, fluidity and transition – and this is where shoes come in. Our presentation describes the methods we are using and explores the complex contribution of shoe wear to learning to ‘do’ one specific aspect of identity: gender. It draws on particularly rich and nuanced data from those female participants who described how feeling like a woman could be achieved by wearing high heels. That this also involved pain was an experience that women responded to differently, their data shedding light on issues of agency and choice, as well as class, disability, sexuality and age-based exclusions from normative femininity.