ORCID Profile
0000-0001-5917-2219
Current Organisation
RMIT University
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Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 05-2014
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.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 05-2013
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 12-2015
Abstract: ‘Trainers’ represent a form of footwear that has attracted academic attention, particularly in relation to the historical development of footwear since the 19th century, addressing various aspects, from the industrial application of rubber to the technologies of shoe manufacture. This article contributes to a literature on the intersection between trainers and the in iduals who have ‘made’ them. However, it asks a parallel question: how do trainers ‘make’ the in idual, that is to say: it addresses the embodied processes of everyday life and the contribution of technology to the body and its techniques. We argue that the ersification of the trainer parallels the unfolding of particular lives, offering a valuable, if under-utilised resource for making sense of everyday and life course processes of embodied identification.
Publisher: Intellect
Date: 10-2014
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 15-05-2015
Abstract: 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.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 02-2013
DOI: 10.5153/SRO.2897
Abstract: 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 in iduals 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.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 21-06-2022
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
No related grants have been discovered for Alexandra Sherlock.