Work

The Temporal Landscape of Shoes: A Life Course Perspective

Year: 2014

Type: article

Abstract: 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.

Source: The Sociological Review

DOI: 10.1111/1467-954x.12154

Authors: Jenny Hockey, Rachel Dilley, Victoria Robinson, Alexandra Sherlock

Institution: University of Sheffield

Language: English

Topic: Fashion and Cultural Textiles

Subfield: Museology

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,900

Funder: Economic and Social Research Council