Abstract
This chapter enquires into ways that heterosexual feminine identities are articulated and negotiated through friendship and conversely, how ideas about female friendship are shaped by discourses of femininity. Among young and middle-aged urban, single and partnered women, conventional intimate dyads are gradually being supplanted by a new set of social dynamics characterised by group friendships. Women at leisure are now highly visible in single-sex groups in public metropolitan settings across Western societies: in pubs, clubs, cafes and bars. These public spaces have recently become important sites where young women are making claims for self-autonomy. Significantly, these trends are also being marked out by the media as anomalous and disturbing. Emergent forms of group female bonding among single career women are signifying women’s entrance into public space, a space once reserved for men. However, women unaccompanied by men in leisure contexts are being represented in various popular media representations as troubling. This chapter provides an analysis of British news reports of working-class single women who are condemned, in Western nations such as the United Kingdom, for binge drinking. It then provides a case study of the way shows like Sex and the City represent the friendships of 30-something singleton women as amoral, self-absorbed and needy. The idea of the ‘female crowd’ is then explored in order to trace the ambiguous relationship women have with postmodern associations of ‘elective’ associations and ‘liminal’ communities.
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Notes
The term ‘social capital’ is critically examined in Chapter 6.
See, for example, The General Household Survey (2000/1) in the United Kingdom: National Statistics, Living in Britain: Results from the 2000/01 General Household Survey (London: HMSO, 2001).
The study was funded by five UK government departments, and a recruitment consultancy: by the Cabinet Office, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office and the Department of Health, and also by the recruitment agency, Norman Broadbent.
Girls Gone Wild is a collection of DVDs and videos made by Mantra Films, a Southern Californian company famous for filming women flashing their breasts.
‘Raunch culture’ is a term publicised by New York journalist and author, Ariel Levy (2005). Her book, Female ChauvinistPigs documents, in indignant tones, the exploits of American college girls who have breast implants, flash themselves at men, engage in poll dancing, have casual sex and model themselves on celebrity figure, Paris Hilton: A. Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005).
‘Fat slags’ and ‘Tasha slappa’ are characters in the bawdy, satirical comic magazine called Viz which is aimed at a male readership and which originated in and satirised England’s Northern working-class culture.
Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy for England, Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, Cabinet Office, March 2004. Available at: www.strategy.gov.uk/ work_areas/alcohol_misuse/index.asp (accessed 18/12/2005).
Simon Lennon and David Brown, The People, 21 March, 2004, pp. 28–9.
Christen Pears, ‘Why Girls Drink Themselves Stupid’, The Northern Echo, 12 January 2004. p. 10.
Tasha Kosviner, ‘My night of booze and pub brawls’, The Evening Standard, 15 March, 2004, p. 9.
See E. Tincknell and D. Chambers (2002) ‘Performing the crisis: Fathering, gender and representation in two 1990s films’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 29:4 (Winter 2002), 146–55.
See, for example, ‘Action urged as under-performing boys eclipsed by girls in GCSEs’, The Guardian, 26 August 2004.
Aspects of this section have been published in D. Chambers, D., ‘Comedies of sexual morality and female singlehood,’ in M. Pickering and S. Lockyer (eds), Beyond a Joke: The Ethics of Humour, (Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2005).
See A. Oram, ‘Repressed and thwarted, or bearer of the New World? The spin-ter in inter-war feminist discourses, Women’s History Review, 1:3 (1992), 413–33.
Sex and the City (HBO) was aired from June 1998 to February 2004 on US and British television networks.
Quoted in K. Akass and J. McCabe (2004) ‘Introduction: Welcome to the age of un-innocence’, in Reading Sex and the City (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), pp. 8–9.
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© 2006 Deborah Chambers
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Chambers, D. (2006). Feminine Identities and Female Bonds. In: New Social Ties. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230627284_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230627284_5
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