Study title

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...