Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.
This study represents the first major UK-based empirical study of the making of heterosexual relationships over the last 80 years. Making intimacy and the practices of everyday life its core focus, it asks how women and men manage and subjectively experience the institution of heterosexuality. Taking up VanEvery's (1996) argument that marriage and the family are heterosexuality's hegemonic manifestations, the study uses a life course perspective to investigate the processes through which women and men have identified and constituted themselves as 'heterosexual' at various points across the last 80 years. Drawing on interviews with 71 women and men across three generations in 22 families (all families had to have some connection with East Yorkshire), it was asked how heterosexuality as an institution is reproduced, resisted and reinvented through the practices of everyday life (consent was not given by all respondents, the deposited data consist of 54 interviews from 20 families). Key areas of focus include embodiment, emotionality and the centrality of heterosexuality as an implicit principle underpinning the organisation of both public and private space. With the focus on the extended family, also considered are the temporalities of heterosexuality, exploring the meshing of historical, familial and biographical time. Key heterosexual moments identified within these data include: the acquisition of sexual knowledge through talk and practice; courtship, weddings and home-making; parenthood, work and family life; separation and divorce; redundancy and retirement; death, dying and bereavement. While these data provided extensive scope for cross-generational comparison, of perhaps greater significance is their contribution of an account of the transmission of heterosexual practice within the family and across generations. The study provides an account of how individuals seek to navigate the uncertainties of contemporary heterosexual life, thus describing not only the practice of heterosexuality, but also the reflections of members of different generations upon the values and experiences of older and younger family members. Further information about the study may be found on the project's web page The Making of Heterosexual Relationships.
Main Topics:
This dataset provides an empirical account of how the institution of heterosexuality is lived out and reproduced across different generations within the same families in urban and rural areas within East Yorkshire. It complements feminist research on heterosexuality which has developed largely at a theoretical level. In-depth qualitative interviews were used to generate emotional narratives as they are drawn on by women and men. As a cross-generational study the project’s historical perspective reveals both changes and continuities within the living out of heterosexuality across the twentieth century. As such it explores the diversity of options and gendered identities which heterosexuality now encompasses. In particular, the data detail twentieth century heterosexual social arrangements: dating, courtship, marriage, family life, divorce and widowhood. Particular emphasis is placed on the ways in which people found out about growing up and making heterosexual relationships, what their initial experiences were like, if and how they formed a permanent heterosexual relationship, when they left home and how they set up homes and families of their own. In many cases interviewees describe relationship breakdown and a sequence of subsequent partners. In all, 71 interviews were conducted within 22 families, each of them focusing on life course transitions. This means the data also show the intersection of history and biography, and the impact of macro-level cultural change upon contrasting periods of the life course. In reading these data it is important to bear in mind the methodological implications of age, class and gender-based differences and commonalities between a researcher in her early 30s and male and female participants of different ages.
Volunteer sample
Face-to-face interview
