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

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.

This pair, really high, really uncomfortable but classic, beautiful, sexy, they make my legs look so long, but I can’t wear them outside of the house, so every now and then I have a party where people are only allowed to wear ridiculous shoes and we all sit around in our ridiculous high heels, [laughs] comparing. Eva (32) ¹

This article explores the wearing and the not-wearing of high-heeled shoes among women who participated in a three-year project, ‘If the Shoe Fits: Identity, Transition and Footwear’. It asks how these shoes might enable emphasized femininity as a culturally dominant form of gendered being (Connell, 1987), and how women’s perspectives on footwear might mediate their engagement with femininities more broadly. In using Connell’s term ‘emphasized femininity’, we refer to femininity ‘oriented to accommodating the interests and desires of men’(1987: 183). In this view, gender difference is strategically manipulated by women in order to negotiate their femininity. Our data evidence this in the efforts expended by some female participants over their appearance, at particular life course stages and in the context of heterosexuality. This is not to suggest that something we might call non-emphasized femininity is any the less an outcome of social practice, nor indeed that shoe choice plays no part in its accomplishment. For example, some female participants described footwear that gave them a heavy tread as ‘manly’ and disliked it; some avoided wearing trainers outside the gym because they made their feet look bigger and thereby less feminine. This downplaying of similarities between women’s and men’s bodies is, however, but one element within the process of constructing gender difference (Connell, 1983, 1987). What concerns us here are the times when women chose to wear high-heeled shoes as part of what we will argue is a display of emphasized femininity which may not be lived out continuously.

Our interpretation draws on a dataset generated through focus group and case study work among 88 people, divided equally between women and men. Footwear allowed us to fulfil our aim to explore how identity is ‘done’, what the process of identification involves and how identities are recognized. While the embodied nature of identity is established (Hockey and James, 2003; James and Hockey, 2007; Jenkins, 2004), concern with its experiential dimensions remains ongoing. We therefore concerned ourselves with the body as the material site of human experience, a perspective that reflects Moi’s (1999) feminist development of Merleau-Ponty’s (1961) theories of embodiment. Focusing here on the gendering of the body, we draw on Connell’s view of gender as a structure of practice, ‘a social practice that constantly refers to bodies and what bodies do’ (2005: 71). Connell argues that gendered identities emerge through the negating, or downplaying, of bodily attributes shared by women and men, along with associated social practices which transform the biological body, for example, the longstanding effects of body-building or tattoos and piercings, the temporary outcomes achieved through the short-term wear of high heels. Thus transformed, the body resources or fleshes out the social categories through which gender is naturalized (see Connell, 1983, 1987).

As a process, identification involves change, fluidity and transition; the putting on and taking off of different shoes thus provided a lens through which to explore the dynamic quality of ‘being oneself’. Myths, fairy tales and contemporary popular culture which feature footwear as party to, or as an agent of transformation and change inspired us: Cinderella’s slippers, the red shoes that returned Dorothy to Kansas in The Wizard of Oz, 1970s boys’ comic character Billy Dane and his magic football boots. Shoe designer Brian Attwood says that ‘the relationship between women and shoes is magical: they can completely change the way a woman feels’ (Buys, 2006: 100); Natasha Morro, shoemaker, says ‘shoes turn you into someone else’ (Newman, 2006: 83); and Pond notes that shoes ‘seem to have magic power to make you into someone else, someone without skin problems, someone without thin hair; someone without a horsy laugh’ (1985: 13). Particularly in relation to femininity, Holland’s exploration of the contribution of the fairy princess figure to constructions of femininity led her to argue that the ‘qualities attendant on “true” femininity … are woven into the mythology and pleasures of the fairy tale’ (2004: 53).

These promises of transformation, as individuals make transitions from work to leisure, baby to toddlerhood, schoolgirl to disco diva, appear within at least three centuries of European popular culture and remain vital to modernity’s project of the self (Giddens, 1991). What an identity transition involves, particularly its temporality, is, however, less self-evident. Core to this article, then, is an exploration of transition as potentially erratic, partial, temporary, playful and easily abandoned – rather than an inexorable progression towards one transformative goal. With respect to emphasized femininity, our data suggest that for some women it may be engaged with on occasions. These may be actual ‘occasions’ – graduations, weddings or the ‘ridiculous shoe’ parties hosted by Eva (above), or particular periods of the life course. Our article takes its title from anthropologist Faris’s (1973) work on ‘occasions’ and ‘non-occasions’ within a Newfoundland fishing community, where he identified the qualities which made some events ‘occasions’ and others not. Focusing on transitions between categories, we are similarly concerned with occasions when women chose high-heeled shoes and those when they did not.

Finch (2007) has argued that the fluid contours of ‘family’ within contemporary society can engender a need to ‘display’ as well as ‘do’ family. A family meal, gift-giving or story-telling, for example, potentially demonstrates ‘family’ in a qualitatively recognizable fashion. Alongside the new ambiguity of ‘family’ can be located ‘the personal and complex meanings of “femininities” ’ (Holland, 2004: 1). These are evident among the women who participated in Holland’s study of alternative femininities, who ‘negotiate a path between being “alternative” and being feminine’ (2004: 1); and less equivocally, in the 1990s desire for ‘grunge’ dressing when ‘the shiny, over-the-top glamour of the 1980s had begun to look out of date’ (Dyhouse, 2011: 181) and pop singers Madonna and Courtney Love and designer Vivienne Westwood popularized ‘the “kinderwhore look” among younger women’ (2011: 182). Similarly, Twigg’s (2013) study of older women and fashion produced detailed evidence of resistance to gendered norms in later life. This diversity of positions occupied by women in relation to being female, and the part played within them by dress, leads us to view emphasized femininity as a quality some women ‘display’ on occasions, but may not adhere to systematically. Establishing what prompts their choices can, we argue, offer nuanced insights into the nature of emphasized femininity and women’s relationship with it.

Happy ever after?

We may smile knowingly about the make-over happiness promised by Cinderella’s marriage, yet the story would lack dramatic tension if her magical transformation were more robust. Indeed, while transformations may be hard won, we recognize their fragility. Even in Giddens’s (1991) modernist ‘project of the self’, diets fail and gym attendance lapses. Yet modernity’s project has a goal: of ‘building/rebuilding a coherent and rewarding sense of identity’; a project that ‘forms a trajectory of development from the past to the anticipated future’ (1991: 75). Achieved through cultivated reflexivity, this process is ‘continuous’ and ‘extends to the body’ (1991: 76, 77). So, despite its potentially uneven progress, the project retains its goal, restimulated by the slimmer, fitter people encountered in everyday life or the media.

Budgeon’s (2003) critique of Giddens concerns its grounding in a mind/body dualism and she draws on Deleuze to argue for treating the body as an event, as becoming. For her, it is what the body does that allows mind and body to merge. Moreover, her concern is with ‘how [the body] becomes through a multiplicity of continuous connections with other bodies’ (Budgeon, 2003: 51). Core to our interests is the extent to which this process of becoming is linear or goal-oriented. As Holland (2004), Dyhouse (2011) and Twigg (2013) point out, women of different ages conform to, resist or simply ignore what Budgeon describes as ‘representation … as a space organized entirely by phallocentric logic’ (2003: 41). Similarly within our own data, women’s relationships with emphasized femininity often appear uneven, an observation that led us to examine the temporalities of ‘becoming’ and question an assumed linearity or goal-oriented ‘progression’. Emphasized femininity, we found, was displayed via high-heeled shoes on occasions: an important birthday, graduation, or sometimes privately, when returning home from an unglamorous job.

The concept of choice is important here, and often surfaced within our data. When Budgeon (2001) asked young women how gender inequality might constrain their choices, she found that, for them, ‘postfeminism’ is not anti-feminist, instead involving a recognition of gendered barriers to choice, albeit coupled with a belief that it is individuals who can ‘choose’ to challenge these. Considering how individualism might relate to a ‘popular’ feminism more associated with freedom and choice than collective critical action, she says ‘‘[w]hile individualism privileges the worth of the individual at the expense of the collectivity it can also be a source of agency at the micro-level of everyday practices’ (2001: 18). For her, the young women interviewed were neither apolitical nor ‘guided entirely by a liberal individualist ethic in the pursuit of individual goals’ (2001: 20). Rather, their feminist commitment to overcoming gendered inequalities was located at the micro-level of everyday personal interaction.

McRobbie (2007) is less persuaded, describing a new sexual contract offered to young women where feminist battles have been won or become redundant. Under the guise of equality comes freedom to consume within a ‘post-feminist masquerade’, to enjoy sexual freedoms previously restricted to men, and to access employment where merit rather than gender determines success. As a result, she says, ‘gender retrenchment is secured, paradoxically, through the wide dissemination of discourses of female freedom and (putative) equality’ (2007: 720). For her, ‘choosing’ femininity – and she mentions ‘spindly stilettos and “pencil” skirts’ (2007: 723) – constitutes a masquerade required of women who compete with men in the workplace. Without it, such women represent a critique of hegemonic masculinity that may disadvantage them at work and in opportunities to recreate the heterosexual family.

Evans and Riley’s (2013) study of white middle-class heterosexual women’s responses to female celebrities reveals their reflexive critique of this masquerade of sexiness. Yet their ambivalent sense of sharing a celebrity’s social location – for example, through reality television – but without her resources for body maintenance, engendered feelings of failure when they subjected themselves to the same scrutiny applied to celebrity women.

If McRobbie (2007) fears a reinstatement of gender hierarchies under the appearance of choice, more empirically grounded authors highlight women’s reflexive awareness of longer-standing gender regimes. Groeneveld notes that US magazine BUST’s fashion issue offers ‘the reclamation of feminism as stylish and sexy and the representation of feminist politics as a set of individual lifestyle choices’ (2009: 179). Her data provide an ambivalent account of the conditions of women’s lives within neoliberal societies where choice, freedom and opportunity are emphasized in spheres such as education and consumption (McRobbie, 2013). BUST appears to propose a ‘politics-lite’ version of feminism grounded in choice; a 2006 issue asserts: ‘We know that in the life of today’s modern gal, there’s room for crafting and sex and music and fashion and politics and, most importantly, that an interest in one doesn’t preclude an interest in the others’ (Groeneveld, 2009: 187). Yet in blog responses, readers debate the implications of this position. Whether, for example, ‘for all its empowerful sass, it’s really just another philosophically empty fashion rag hawking “girly stuff” in the traditional style’ (2009: 186) or, ‘since there are still women who are on the fence about feminism; BUST’s light hand and inclusive stance may be a useful introduction to the great world of patriarchy blaming’ (2009: 187).

In an article entitled ‘Sluts and riot grrrls: Female identity and sexual agency’, Attwood (2007) acknowledges the difficulty of disentangling the political complexities of young women’s lives. Reviewing empirical studies concerned with ‘making sense of what looks like younger women’s engagement with elements of a consumerized, sexualized culture which an earlier women’s movement saw as a key source of women’s oppression’ (2007: 243), she cites a 2004 study described by Gleeson and Frith, where young women evasively resisted acknowledging their clothing’s sexual significance. The authors suggest that the ambiguities surrounding the young women’s choice of dress may, in themselves, constitute a resource for identification ‘which allows women to negotiate meaning and position’ (Gleeson and Frith, cited in Attwood, 2007: 243).

In the data below, women describe both the pleasures and pains of high-heeled shoes, older women recalling earlier, embodied experiences. Within empirically based research of this kind, issues surrounding corporeality, fashion and choice are often complex; evidence of women’s reflexivity and agency cannot easily be reconciled with arguments for a largely intractable phallocentric gender regime where cultural values are defined exclusively within patriarchal terms. Reflecting on the texture and depth of some women’s desire for cosmetic surgery, for example, Davis adopts ‘a kind of feminist balancing act … situated on the razor’s edge between a feminist critique … and an equally feminist desire to treat women as agents who negotiate their bodies and their lives within the cultural and structural constraints of a gendered social order’ (1995: 5).

Davis’s (1995) interpretive balancing act resonates with Lövgren’s (2013) and Nicholls’s (2013) shoe-based research. In both cases, emphasized femininity emerges as a context-specific practice or accomplishment. Lövgren’s older female participants showed her high-heeled shoes they no longer wore, yet retained despite limited storage, testimonies to a cultural accomplishment they had relinquished but now displayed, rather as grandparents arrange family photos on the mantelpiece (Finch, 2007: 77). Nicholls (2013) describes young women participating in Newcastle’s night-time economy whose outfits would be ‘overdone’ by day – or at risk of negative ‘gender assessment’ – but for whom a night out with other women occasioned ‘making an effort’. The fact that ‘effort’ can be evidenced was also important for Lövgren’s older women. Perhaps less steady on their feet, however, they wore flatter shoes when ‘making an effort’, potentially aware of the ‘fragile’, ‘hazardous’ nature of display, the lack of any guarantee of success (Finch, 2007: 75).

What follows is an exploration of the agency of our own participants, expressed through engagement with shoes that brought pleasure and pain, not only in a pleasurable wearing of shoes with pain as their corollary, but also in a painful not-wearing of shoes perceived as seductively beautiful, plus the pleasurable refusal of not only high heels but any shoes at all. Our contribution to debates around gender and choice foregrounds the temporalities of women’s decision-making, a perspective enabled by year-long case study work that revealed the transitions and contradictions that patterned their lives.

The study

Undertaken between 2010 and 2013, our project used methods that revealed beliefs and values associated with shoes, along with insight into everyday embodied experiences of shoe wear. A research associate conducted 12 focus groups among people of different ages, from diverse backgrounds, including parents responsible for buying their children’s shoes, people whose health problems compromised their footwear choice, self-defined ‘shoe lovers’ and bereaved people faced with someone’s residual belongings. All participants lived in a large post-industrial city in the north of England. Discussion encompassed experiences of shoe shopping, the impact of ageing on choice, the pleasures and pains of going barefoot and the tension between fitting in and standing out socially. Though the researcher gave high-heeled shoes no special emphasis, as a discussion topic they proved highly emotive.

From among focus group members we invited a similar mix of 15 people to become case study participants. With some additional recruitment, these individuals began a year-long series of activities that included: listing their footwear, keeping a three-week log of whenever they changed their shoes that explained each change, choosing a pair of shoes and an activity that typified them and allowing us to film them, including us in a shoe shopping trip, compiling a scrapbook about their shoe lives, and participating in three interviews where these activities were discussed. Working with 88 people overall, our methods generated the considerable body of textual and visual material that we draw on here.

To address the research question of how footwear contributed to everyday and life course identification, we drew out participants’ perspectives on themes such as: the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ shoes; desired and ‘best’ shoes; shoe shopping, maintenance, gifting, sharing, disposal; memorable shoes; ethical and health issues; work and leisure; and transitions of all kinds.

Displaying femininity/doing gender?

As indicated, we have explored women’s engagement with emphasized femininity by drawing on Finch’s (2007) concept of ‘display’ to examine behaviours tailored to particular occasions. Finch’s (2007) distinction between displaying and doing family – or ‘family practices’ (Morgan, 1996) – is relatively well-defined; display reflects a requirement that ‘the meaning of one’s actions has to be both conveyed to and understood by relevant others if those actions are to be effective as constituting “family” practices’ (2007: 66). However, as we show, the parallel relationship, between displaying femininity and doing gender, varies depending upon women’s relationship with emphasized femininity.

Certainly Young (1990), drawing on de Beauvoir (1974), differentiates femininity from being a woman, arguing that femininity per se is not ‘a mysterious quality or essence … [i]t is, rather, a set of structures and conditions that delimit the typical situation of being a woman in a particular society, as well as the typical way in which the situation is lived by women themselves’ (1990: 143–144). Femininity is not, however, an inevitability for many women: ‘some women escape or transcend the typical situation and definition of women in various degrees and respects’ (Young, 1990: 144), a statement to which we would add, at the intersection of various times and occasions.

Woodward’s (2007) work on women’s relationships with their wardrobes illuminates the potential role of ‘displaying femininity’ within gendered embodiment. West and Zimmerman argue that both women and men involved in any activity ‘may be held accountable for performance of that activity as a woman or a man’ (1987: 136). In other words, they are ‘at the risk of gender assessment’, a process Woodward exemplifies by citing a teacher’s words about her headmistress’s puffer jacket and bum-bag, ‘why didn’t she just get a handbag, like any other woman?’ The teacher herself wore shirts but felt a need to ‘display’ femininity, by carrying a handbag and choosing shirts in ‘feminine’ colours like lilac (Woodward, 2007: 143).

Woodward goes on to show how ‘occasions’ and ‘non-occasions’ mirror the distinction between women’s habitual wardrobes and the glamorous clothes worn at charity dinners, or a 21st birthday or engagement party. Thus, when Marie (28) chose a strappy black dress for a charity ball, she joked about ‘turning into a real woman’; how she stood and walked in it made her feel ‘different, more “feminine” ’ (2007: 140). Woodward says, ‘Marie had always been female in the sense of her lived embodied relationship to her gender’; that is, in terms of gender assessment she met the criteria of being a woman (West and Zimmerman, 1987). Yet, as Woodward continues, in her wardrobe of trousers, shirts, jeans and t-shirts, ‘[Marie] was not explicitly feminine’ (2007: 140). Her display of emphasized femininity was thus an event-specific occasion.

In Holland’s study of women who defined themselves as ‘not conforming to popular ideals of femininity’ (2004: 205) through their appearance, her participants not only challenged gendered sartorial norms (for example, through tattoos and piercings), but also pursued recuperative strategies, at times employing ‘frilly underwear, perfume, make-up’ to ‘flash’ femininity and so reassure others as to its authenticity (2004: 46). Such practices drew Holland’s attention to a ‘safe arena of traditional femininity’ (2004: 46) that women remained conscious of, along with the risk of negating their femininity through an alternative appearance. The notion of risk resonates with what our participants said about both wearing and not-wearing high-heeled shoes. As Finch argues, in relation to the family, ‘the processes of displaying family relationships are essentially fragile, even hazardous … the process has to be actively engaged with and worked at, but is not guaranteed success’ (2007: 75).

In Finch’s (2007) view, successful display emerges from the intermeshing of immediate interactions with broader values and understandings. However, what our study underscores is the importance of a meso-level of influence in differentiating between different women’s shoe choices (Robinson, 2012). Rather than macro-level structures such as class, ethnicity and sexuality, a less generalizing focus on embodied relationality at a meso-level reveals much about women who, as Young (1990) reminds us, ‘escape’ or ‘transcend’ normative structures. In the case of our participant Luna, described below, her social location as the daughter of Fijian-Indian parents and the partner of a Muslim man resulted in a highly contradictory orientation towards high-heeled shoes. As her data reveal, it was at the meso-level of family, work, friendship and immigration that her shoe practices unfolded, a finding which resonates with Budgeon’s statement that the body ‘becomes through a multiplicity of continuous connections with other bodies’ (2003: 51).

Enabling (im)mobility

Associated with our focus on transition is the question of footwear’s relationship with (im)mobility. Mauss’s (1973) concept of bodily techniques highlights the way apparently ‘natural’ bodily movements such as walking or marching are taught: at school or in the armed forces. Within our data, women of all ages described learning to walk in high-heeled shoes and made disparaging assessments of those who performed badly. They recalled practising at home, or with friends, before risking public display. Far from heels revealing an intrinsic ‘femininity’, they potentially undermined its display, an accomplishment or skill to be taught and learnt. The availability of classes on how to walk in high heels testifies to this experience: a six-week ‘Sexy Heels in the City’ course at South Thames College, London for example, plus YouTube videos. ²

‘Feeling feminine’ was therefore the outcome of effort, an accomplishment, even if self-taught. Many participants could articulate this embodied sensation – the effect of high heels on the body as a whole, its posture and mobility. Eva (32) lived in a social housing apartment block. Her day job was in the accounts department of a local college and on regular occasions she worked in the evenings as a DJ at a burlesque club. She said:

… it’s the dressing up and if you’re wearing a fantastic evening dress … and also [high heels] do make you stand in a different way, usually more upright and you’re more conscious of yourself when you walk in them and if you, again if you’re wearing a nice dress, they’re all things that you want, you want to feel tall and, well not tall, but you know, upright and straight and confident in what you’re wearing.

Her comments were echoed by Shaun (23), a male participant who lived in a flat on the periphery of the city centre. Shaun defined himself as gay and worked both in customer services and as a performance artist. High-heeled shoes featured in his performances where, as with Eva, they made him more conscious of his body: ‘all of my artwork is about how you can fulfil an action with something … stopping you from doing the actions … I have to complete the action with something changing the way that it’s going to happen’.

This affordance of high-heeled shoes not only transcended differences of gender but also age and marital status among women who described showing off shapelier legs and adopting a different posture when wearing them. When the researcher asked an older widows’ focus group how high-heeled shoes had made them feel, they said: ‘Oh you were dressed glam, you were glam’. Emphasized femininity and its association with gendered difference were evident in statements such as: ‘any man’ll say it used to make your calves of your legs look better … all men used to say … get them heels on because it definitely altered all your leg didn’t it?’

However, a group of fourth age women at a luncheon club also carried embodied memories of the painfulness of high-heeled shoes. That said, they too described how high-heeled shoes made them feel ‘dressed up’, they were ‘elegant’ and made you feel more ‘womanish’ because ‘your stomach seems to go in when you stand, wear them …’ and ‘you walked straighter as well didn’t you?’

Young women often used different language, but their statements echo these points:

… it does make you feel a bit more dressed up and smart wearing, just being taller, because I’m tall anyway but I just whack on the height but yeah, it makes you, yeah, it just makes you feel different I think in heels, it’s weird, what that difference can do … because it makes you walk different.

Their focus on the gendered body in motion was evident in comments such as: ‘makes you kind of, not strut but kind of like … a bit of a swagger’. Another young woman agreed:

I think if you had a better posture … Like sometimes if I’m wearing flats or something and I’m just kind of a bit more casual I’d kind of just be kind of like, okay, not slomp around like I’m like dragging my …

This allusion to the practice of an appropriate style of walking prompted someone to say:

I get paranoid about those girls that can’t walk so they’re walking like chickens.

That these bodily experiences were gendered was underlined by many participants: ‘I think it’s a feminine image as well’; ‘You just feel a bit more sexy’.

Fitting in

These data attest to the hard work undertaken by individual wearers of high-heeled shoes. Yet their accomplishment resides within a meso-level of social interaction and cultural appropriateness. Barnes and Eichler describe how dress creates communal identities in that it ‘includes and excludes’ (cited in Woodward, 2007: 138). Similarly, historians Riello and McNeill (2006) differentiate between shoes’ physical and social dimensions, arguing that: ‘[i]f women in society encountered barriers against free movement, such barriers often had little to do with real bodily limits. The limits were social, and shoes played their role in constructing and reinscribing these roles’ (2006: 5). As at Eva’s ‘ridiculous shoe’ parties, social inclusion can be achieved through shoes that simultaneously undermine physical mobility.

Here, Emma (19), a student who lived with her mother and sister in an affluent area of the city, describes her intercorporeal experience of ‘dressing up’. While painful high-heeled shoes inhibited her physical mobility, they promoted social inclusion by allowing her to sit down with fellow sufferers:

… even if like, you know, your feet hurt and like but it’s like you kind of share that, everyone else’s feet hurt so you’re all, you know, you go to sit down and all the other girls are sat like, you know, like wincing because their feet hurt, so but now I can’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t go out on a night out without them …

How, then, might we reconcile such pain with choice? For some participants, removing painful shoes would wreck their display of femininity. Yvonne (46), a self-defined shoe lover who worked in customer services and was married with two children, described shoes she wore to Ascot:

… they were killing me, they were absolutely killing me and this were with a contorted face I’d got but no way were I taking them off and all around me there were all women oh get these off, you know, and straight away the whole look, the hat, every, all that time and effort you’d put into … that outfit and it were just like, oh your look’s totally, you look rubbish now without your shoes on … you’ve rubbished it … I couldn’t have took them off. Couldn’t do it, and me feet were killing, couldn’t take them off.

Again, demonstrating ‘effort’ was intrinsic to dressing up and displaying femininity for an occasion. Some women were, however, bemused when others accepted foot pain and damage that risked both choice and physical mobility. Julie (25) worked in marketing and shared a flat with a partner in a mixed area of the city. She had suffered leg and back pain as a child and remained limited in her footwear choice. Feeling excluded and frustrated by always ‘compromising’, she still empathized with other women’s embodied experience:

… if I wanted to wear a dress to work and I wanted to wear the shoes I thought went with the dress I’d have to be taking them off all day and rubbing my feet and that’s not practical so … I have to compromise one way or the other … it’s quite annoying … I end up not looking as I would like to look and I look around me at other people who all seem perfectly happy in what they’re wearing and I think they look really nice … it may well be that all my friends who look so lovely are also in agony and have feet covered in plasters and so on but I’m not going to ask them [laughs].

How might we understand the women who ‘look so lovely’, but potentially suffer the ‘agony’ Julie describes? Certainly, our participants reflected on the practice of wearing high heels as discussion between Yvonne and Carla (27), a self-defined shoe lover, shows. Carla was single and a support worker for people seeking employment. For her, displaying femininity within a heterosexual relationship was important – but she wondered whether trainers might accomplish this:

… my boyfriend said to me the other day why don’t you ever wear trainers? And I said well I just don’t, I just don’t really like them, he said oh, because he showed me some Adidas shell toes, big round toe, I was like even, even my New Balance ones are a bit pointy and they’re trainers. [laughter] And I was like Steve, there’s no way that I could wear them, they’ve got a big round toe and he was like, [laughter] alright then, well have some more pointy ones, and I said well I don’t want to wear them, he said well I think girls look cute in trainers … and I thought, maybe I’ll buy some trainers, that’s a bit sad isn’t it?

Yvonne replied: ‘Oh so that would be to please him wouldn’t it?’, to which Carla responded: ‘So then it did make me think, yeah. Do I just dress for other people? I don’t know’. Yvonne affirmed the importance of this issue: ‘This is always the question isn’t it’.

For Emma (19), cited above, matters were apparently clear-cut: ‘let women want to look pretty if they want to be, as long as they’re doing it for themselves and not anyone else’. Michelle (19), single and a student, tried to distance herself from women who participated in the masquerade of femininity that McRobbie (2007) argues for, yet still asserted that:

… you can kind of use that [femininity] in a positive way to sort of like be more, I don’t know, don’t know how to describe it, like, bit more powerful against the men kind of thing, so you can use it, like you can get, if you act dumb or whatever, not that I do, you can get the man to do something for you, so you can kind of use it in a positive way, it’s not necessarily that we’re sort of like belittling ourselves.

Are we then at a theoretical and political impasse where social and economic disadvantage means women settling for costly pleasures that pay dividends only within a patriarchal gender regime where hegemonic heterosexuality – that is, the marginalization of other sexualities (Hockey et al., 2007) – constitutes their primary goal? As noted, Budgeon’s (2003) treatment of the body as event, as becoming, highlights issues of temporality. Our data suggest that processes of becoming or transformation can be partial or temporary. ‘Emphasized femininity’ and ‘doing gender’ cannot always be elided. Moreover, the distinction between ‘occasions’ and ‘non-occasions’ underscores the potentially episodic nature of such displays, the contingent nature of identity. Although the office party or hen night might resonate with hegemonic heterosexuality as an institution and a practice (Jackson, 1996), it may not be systematically adhered to by women who nonetheless ‘dress up’ for the occasion.

The patterning of everyday or calendrical time is, however, only one way in which the temporality of emphasized femininity manifests itself. Life course transitions also intersect with its display. Luna (29), referred to above, was a community project worker living in a mixed urban neighbourhood with her husband. She linked wearing high-heeled shoes in early adulthood with her relationship status, noting their sporadic reappearances on subsequent special occasions:

… when you wear flats or … no shoes at all you feel this freedom and I just can’t go out of the house without feeling that. So I’ll, like … my birthday, we went out, it was a two hour thing, I know I had to put heels on, I walked to the car, from the car I walked to the restaurant, sat back in the car, took them off, got out, put them back on, walked home … that was my maximum exposure … I’ve got nice heels and I find that when I’m single I … go out and I buy shoes but since I’ve been married and even before, like in a relationship I, I just don’t because I don’t feel that need to …

While single and open to new relationships, high-heeled shoes allow Luna to display emphasized femininity, a contingent dimension of her participation in heterosexuality not systematically sustained within the longer process of ‘doing gender’. Her strategic approach is, however, risky; wearing high-heeled shoes requires practice and Luna periodically reassured herself that her skills are intact:

I’ll go to really nice shoe shops and I’ll try them on and not even try them on, ask somebody to, you know, get me this size, I’ll try one on and I’ll look at myself and I’ll lift up my, my trouser leg, [laughs] and I’ll go oh they look pretty nice, you know, I’ve got nice, nice feet, you know … I’ll look at myself in the mirror, I’ll take them off and I’ll put them back … it’s kind of that confirmation that okay I can do it and I, this is the way that I look in them …

These data have a ‘real-time’ temporality that underscores Luna’s episodic relationship with emphasized femininity. Her birthday was another ‘occasion’ that called for high-heeled shoes. Patterning her life course, it also carried associations with ageing and the spectre of future limitations on her scope for display. Birthdays that launch a new decade may have more implications still for gendered identity and when Luna went shoe-shopping with the researcher, just before turning 30, she wanted high-heeled shoes like her friends, footwear she had worn when younger. As a teacher, Luna wore flat shoes – and now she wished to reinstate a previous age-specific, gendered identity. Along with an association between high-heeled shoes and heterosexual status, age therefore occasioned other processes and moments of ‘becoming’.

Pauline (42) was a shop assistant who also wore flat shoes in early adulthood, as a young parent. Turning 40, she wanted to display an emphasized femininity once achieved through high-heeled shoes. Chronological age provided a rationale when explaining the 40 pairs she bought in four weeks, around that time:

I think I got to 40 and I thought well might start wearing high heels again … I adore my heels and my partner’s like you’ve never worn them for years, what’s got into you woman? I say age, it must be something because I wore them from … 16 right up to the age of 30, had my son and I wouldn’t wear them for like, 12 … then … something went to my head when I got to 40, I need high heels … and I bought 40 pairs of shoes in … I think it were four weeks.

High-heeled shoes can thus intersect sporadically with heterosexuality and ageing. Entry to adulthood was another important life course transition. Whilst at school, Emma, cited above, wanted high-heeled shoes to go clubbing, to dance and share pain other young women. During a focus group, she asserted women’s freedom to dress as they pleased, and disparaged feminist critiques of ‘restrictive’ footwear. Her case study data, however, revealed a longer trajectory; when interviewed at university, high-heeled shoes no longer contributed to her gendered identity. Living independently, she cycled some distance into university and mainly wore boots.

In contrast with these data, some women experienced not-wearing high-heeled shoes as a problematic dimension of their identity. For them, ‘becoming’ had stalled in one particular mode and they felt painfully excluded from displaying femininity, something that then impacted on their capacity to ‘do gender’. Sarah (48) lived in a well-off area near the city centre and had been a successful teacher, a profession she chose thinking it would help her manage her congenital foot and lower-leg deformity, one later coupled with arthritis. She could not walk far, despite multiple operations. Her physical pain was ongoing, though the callipers she wore in childhood had been replaced by a prosthetic foot. During a focus group she said:

… I always wore trousers obviously … because I never wore skirts and that’s really had an impact … on my life because if you don’t wear skirts there’s certain jobs you wouldn’t go into, you know, you wouldn’t be an air hostess for example. [laughs] … and social situations that you don’t go to and it affects your clothes as well so I’ve never been a very glamorous person, always been a bit tomboyish … You know, I look at you over there with your glasses on your head and scarf, because I always wore trousers and things and had horrible shoes I’ve, I’ve never really developed … I don’t even wear make-up or … and I think it’s been in, the impact of my shoes and how I think that my shoes work.

And I’m sure that’s, you know, that’s, that’s, I’m not saying I’m, I’m unhappy … but I’ve got … down. … I noticed when the cards went round that, those sort of Cinderella pictures and the princess and things, I was attracted to that, I’d like to wear clothes like that [laughs].

Whereas Sarah felt excluded even from ‘doing gender’, for another participant, Catherine (61), high-heeled shoes had contributed significantly to her identity, particularly whenever she ‘dressed up’. A retired teacher living in a well-furnished apartment in an affluent suburb, Catherine’s multiple foot problems now made this aspect of identification impossible and she felt marginalized, particularly from collective displays of emphasized femininity. Describing her husband’s birthday party in her scrapbook, she represented their female guests as:

… attractive and glamorous, they are mostly very slim and wear clothes which are expensive and close fitting, their dresses are just above the knee and they accessorise them with high heeled stiletto shoes, they all can walk in them and they all look better in them than in low heels or flats …

While many women describe their occasional choice of high-heeled shoes as freely made, Sarah and Catherine felt problematically ‘grounded’ in flat shoes. Their scope for displaying emphasized femininity had no lived temporality and appeared to curtail their agency in relation to footwear – and therefore clothing. This interpretation, however, neglects other forms of becoming within both their lives. At 48, Sarah said she had now become ‘a bit more of a normal girl’ after working with a physiotherapist to develop new walking strategies through closer engagement with her feet. As a child she was told never to draw attention to them, to pretend they were the same as other children’s. As a result she became detached from them. Now she had overcome the threat of becoming a wheelchair-user by 50 and with a high-quality prosthetic foot she had bought fashion boots and was considering some sandals.

Catherine too had discovered creative responses to her constrained footwear choices. For a formal dinner she adapted low-heeled shoes by binding ribbon around the arch of her foot. She also achieved a modest display of femininity by wearing comfortable sandals with decorative embellishments.

Conclusion

Rather than a functional necessity, shoes emerge within these data as items that position us, socially and culturally. As sociologists, we might imagine that foot pain would make us aware of this, along with the need to actively learn how to walk in high-heeled shoes. Yet, as data indicate, these most challenging shoes can induce a closer sense of fit with a ‘natural’ or biologically based femininity for some women. By considering data from women of different ages, all of whom could articulate the ‘feeling of femininity’ engendered by wearing high-heeled shoes, this article contributes to an understanding of the experiential dimensions of embodied identity. In addition, data which testified to the pain accompanying this experience, as well as the distress induced by a permanent inability to wear such shoes, reveal the complexities and contradictions of this process.

Logs which charted women’s transitions between shoes showed that no one wore high-heeled shoes continuously. When they were selected, what kind of choice was being made? As our review of feminist debates in this area revealed, empirically grounded studies often produce data that are difficult to reconcile with an intractably phallocentric gender regime. Here, we argue, an exploration of the temporalities of women’s engagement with emphasized femininity can take us forward. Drawing on Budgeon’s (2003) argument for treating the body as event, as becoming, and Finch’s (2007) concept of display, we have demonstrated the episodic, partial and sporadic nature of women’s displays of emphasized femininity and argued for an awareness of how this practice might be situated in relation to the broader category of ‘doing gender’.