Abstract
This paper explores the gendered experience of singleness in Britain through a theoretical and empirical understanding of the abject. Drawing on the writings of Judith Butler, we argue that singleness is culturally pathologised as an abject ‘other’, a liminal state which renders the legitimation of the single subject unintelligible. Through 14 active interviews with British singles, we demonstrate how our participants negotiate their marginal status vis-à-vis the marketplace and the broader society that continue to uphold heterosexual partnership as a normative form of intimacy. Our data uncovers persistent and powerful gender stereotypes of how singles ought to organise their lives and conform both to social, as well as market-driven pressures. We therefore highlight research gaps in the experience of singleness and critique the heteronormative framework that remains dominant, yet concealed, in gender research.
Highlights
To date, there is surprisingly little research exploring single consumers and their participation in the marketplace
Burnett (2007) calls for the need to realise the ‘untapped’ potential of the singles market, suggesting that there has been an oversight by both academics and marketers to understand the consumption experience of singles (Wortzel 1977). We argue that such an oversight mirrors broader marginalisation of ‘singleness’ as a troubled cultural category (Reynolds and Wetherell 2003) in which single individuals are stigmatised as the ‘abject other’ since they do not conform to the dominant heterogender arrangements (Budgeon 2008; Ingraham 1996)
We argue that an understanding of the abject experience of singleness is important for marketing and consumption since it exposes how society and the marketplace are complicit in reproducing and concealing the heteronormative framework whereby ‘couplehood is implicitly privileged over singlehood’ (Kates 1999, p.33)
Summary
There is surprisingly little research exploring single consumers and their participation in the marketplace. According to Rich (1980), and reinforced more recently by Appleby (2013) and Martin (2009), the experience of singleness is overshadowed by compulsory heteronormativity - an ideological framework that institutionalises heterosexuality as a ‘natural’ sexual preference. Rich argues that such a framework implicitly sustains patriarchal capitalism by persistently espousing marriage (Roseneil and Budgeon 2004) and the nuclear family (Bryne 2003) as ideals, thereby preserving ‘male fantasies about women, and male interest in controlling women, in the realms of sexuality and motherhood’ (Rich 1980, p.634). By prioritising the ‘family/couple’ as a valuable unit of consumption (O’Malley and Prothero 2007), marketers have silenced those voices whose relational practices fall outside of the heteronormative framework (Wilkes 1995)
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