Reconceptualising the Mundane and the Extraordinary: A Lens through Which to Explore Transformation within Women’s Everyday Footwear Practices

Introduction

Recognising the importance of the mundane or the everyday has a long, debated and complex sociological history, being what Lefebvre (1991 [1947]) calls the ‘common ground’ or ‘connective tissue’ of all human thoughts and activities. Chaney (2002) similarly suggests that the everyday acts as a space for ‘other ways of being’ that can be envisaged, while Moran (2005) contends that everyday life consists of the mundane, but that it goes beyond the habitual and routine, an assumption which is fundamental to my argument here.

Importantly, Gardiner (2000) argues that the point of studying the everyday is not only to describe it, but, also, to change lived experience, while Lefebvre (1991 [1947]) argues that the concept of leisure is a space from which to critique social life. As this article will go on to show, these sentiments speak to both a feminist theoretical and political project of gendered emancipation, of which a revaluation of femininity has been key. In this article, the everyday is seen here as constituting the normal routines and relationships and the transformative aspects of existence. Indeed, the transformative capacity of the everyday itself has sometimes been overlooked by theorists, especially in relation to how the extraordinary is both embedded within and in dialogue with the mundane, rather than having a separate and unmediated existence of its own. As Highmore (2002: 3) argues, the exceptional is ‘there to be found at the heart of the everyday’, going on to show that understanding the mysterious and the bizarre involves scrutinising the everyday, for that is exactly its site.

However, as Silva and Bennett (2004: 26) argue: ‘Yet it is precisely here, in this conception of everyday life as simultaneously the plane of a flattened single-dimensional social existence and the source of forces through which such an existence might be transcended, that the problem lies.’ Utilising Lefebvre, they conceive of the everyday as a site of repetition and ‘mechanical action’, where routine habits are uncritically reproduced but also where new meanings may be glimpsed. However, Lefebvre is also critiqued for denying women’s transformative agency within the mundane.

This erroneous (gendered) assumption that Silva and Bennett draw attention to in relation to Lefebvre’s ideas is important, but for my purposes, it is the unthinking justification of his views on women’s relationship to the everyday and their incapacity for understanding it, which are of specific interest: ‘they are the subject of everyday life and its victims or objects and substitutes (beauty, femininity, fashion, etc.) and it is at their cost that substitutes thrive’ (Lefebvre, 1971: 3). Furthermore, in my efforts to rethink the interaction of the mundane and the extraordinary through, I am mindful of an established tradition of a feminist critique of theorising of the everyday; for example, the work of Dorothy Smith (1988) and Rita Felski, who states that: ‘feminist scholarship is involved in a persistent questioning of the commonsensical, taken-for-granted and mundane’ (Felski, cited in Bennett and Watson, 2002: 352). What, therefore, in everyday life, in the context of Lefebvre’s conjuring up of an unreflexive femininity, can be more ordinary yet also more symbolic, than a pair of shoes? That is, given that shoes are mundane objects, yet their symbolic efficacy has allowed certain types to stand for the category ‘woman’.

Therefore, in order to explore my central concern of the potentially transformative nature of the everyday through a consideration of the mundane and the extraordinary, I will utilise data from a three year ESRC project on footwear, identity and transition, which asked how footwear contributes to the dynamic, contradictory and ambiguous process of identity formation in everyday life. In earlier work, with Dilley et al. (2014) I explored how women chose to wear high-heeled shoes as part of a display of emphasised femininity which may not be lived out continuously, but still has great purchase on footwear choices that sometimes had deleterious health implications for the wearer, including pain and also distress if the right kind of femininity was perceived as not having been achieved, by not wearing high enough heels. In addition, in Hockey et al. (2013: 6.1), I concluded that the data on footwear from the study indicated: ‘that the one-off transformation afforded by Cinderella’s glass slippers needs to be recognised as but a single moment within the dynamic processes of being and becoming who we are’.

Building on this previous work (including also further work with Hockey et al. (2014a) on footwear and the life course), shoes, I would suggest, especially high heels in commonsense terms and the cultural imaginary, have been routinely characterised as the most potent symbol of the ‘feminine’ and ‘frivolous’. Yet the data here reveal that if shoes are approached as a mundane, material object and also seen in relational and social contexts which are indeed sometimes simultaneously strange and unfamiliar, in order to allow us to understand the dynamics of the everyday, that this then necessitates ‘a form of sociological analysis that is able to give insight into processes, meanings and interpretations’ (Bennett and Watson, 2002: xxii).

Essential to such a sociological framework for investigating the everyday, I argue, is a meso-level analysis (Smart, 2007) which recognises both the constraints and pleasures of dress, in this case footwear, and importantly, examines the contribution of relationality and connectedness to attempts to understand the ambiguous and nuanced implications of how gender identity is constructed in everyday life. This is enabled by a problematising of how the mundane and extraordinary elements of everyday life interact and combine to produce contexts and relationships that can, sometimes, afford agency.

To take this realisation further, it is my argument that the transformation of the mundane through footwear choice and wearing can only be fully theorised and the intricacies of the data recognised, if the boundaries of, and relationship between, the mundane and the extraordinary are problematised and reconceptualised. Led by the data, I start by considering some of the apparent contradictions around the everyday footwear practices and the performance of femininity for female participants, for example, the participants’ concern both to avoid shoes that somehow single them out within a social context – that is, that transform the mundane beyond its expected boundaries as they conceived of it, and their desire to look special and attract admiration. Indeed, to embrace the extraordinary. As one of the participants, Luna (a 29-year-old British Muslim and a community project worker living in a mixed urban neighbourhood with her husband) said, in a sensuous appreciation of a pair of heeled, strappy shoes:

I must have been having a, a sexy day that day [when I bought them]. [laughs] … I really like these shoes, I think they look so like trendy but … these shoes are funny … I put them on and I look at my feet and I love the way that they look and then I take them off, it’s not like they hurt … more than any other types of heels but I think as I’m quite plain and simple most of the time I feel that they’re a bit too much for me, but I won’t get rid of them, I’ll keep them.

Considering how to interpret both individuals and society, Simmel (1957: 543) refers to two antagonistic forces which act to limit one another mutually, arguing that fashion is one of the forms of life through which: ‘we seek to combine in uniform spheres of activity the tendency towards social equalization with the desire for individual differentiation and change’.

Simmel’s recognition of the contradictions and complexities that dress introduces, demands that we approach the question of what different shoe styles mean with caution and open-mindedness. As I have argued (Dilley et al., 2014) discursive theories of fashion often privilege communication; what we wear on our bodies ‘says’ then something about us (Barnard, 1996; Calefato, 1997; Rubinstein, 1995). In the study, shoes were invested with diverse meanings by participants, that is, a ‘special’ pair made them appear younger, knowledgeable about ‘on trend’ fashions, allowed them to exhibit a heterosexual identity, challenged the boundaries of what was considered as ‘age appropriate’, gave them prowess and expertise in a specific sport or leisure activity such as dancing, keep fit or ice skating, made them appear invisible, or elevated them, sometimes literally, above other people. An individual’s shoe choice could also reveal, sometimes unproblematically for them, their mundane everyday lives. This was symbolised, for instance, by wearing flat or much loved comfy shoes as well as more extraordinary moments being recalled by the wearing of heels, or a cherished pair of shoes that were only worn for a special occasion, for example, or even not worn at all, but, instead, still proudly displayed for others to admire.

However, to see the relationship between shoes and identity as simply, for example, the outcome of straightforward consumption practices and to give only a literal reading of what shoes mean for the individual neglects the mediating roles played by other relationships and their intersections across everyday life and more extraordinary situations. Miller and Woodward (2012) argue in research on blue jeans, among north Londoners that the relationship to clothes is in essence mainly an instrument in people’s relationship to others, as well as to their personal life history. Therefore, cherishing and/or wearing a beloved dead relatives’ old shoes that transforms the everyday into something out of the ordinary, or wearing shoes which the individual knows will offend the cultural sensibilities of other family members, in a bid to make everyday, mundane interactions memorable, if not unforgettable (as I detail below), allows for conscious agency to be recognised. In addition, the boundaries of the mundane and extraordinary themselves are challenged through the data.

The Study

Footwear was chosen as the focus of the project as a way of developing my existing work on the importance of the body to identity transition (Robinson and Hockey, 2011), since shoes contribute fundamentally to how we stand, move and get about in everyday life. They influence how we perform our daily work and partake in leisure activities. In addition, they importantly hold an important symbolic significance in popular culture which, arguably, is not accorded to other material objects in quite the same way.

As I have explained elsewhere, with Hockey et al. (2013: para. 1.2):

Shoes are thus being ascribed the capacity to transcend the functional and even the fashionable to have implications for identity itself. Through the skills of designers and advertisers, they are seen to achieve symbolic efficacy and transformative, even magical powers. Viewed from this perspective, shoes might seem to be having a ‘moment’, one that is commonly associated with women. Yet within European popular culture a long tradition of story-telling has foregrounded the potency of footwear in relation to both male and female characters.

Examples were identified from the data that allow for the transformation of the ordinary individual into something ‘rich and strange’, which release them from the mundane grind of poverty, non-celebrity, the routines of unsatisfying work or heterosexual singledom to extraordinary heights of notoriety or fame and fortune. Furthermore, examples which were familiar in the cultural imaginary included Cinderella’s glass slippers, the footwear of Puss-in-Boots, the red shoes that Hans Christian Andersen conceived of to allow a life of poverty to be transcended, the red-hot shoes that ensure the demise of Snow White’s stepmother, the ruby red slippers that let Dorothy enter an extraordinary universe in The Wizard of Oz, but also return her transformed, to ‘home’ and the everyday, and the comic book hero Billy Danes and his magic football boots which allow him to play spectacularly. Currently, at a global level, trainers could be taken as a particularly potent symbol of a desirable sporting or fashionable image transformation for the individual (see Hockey et al., 2014b).

As well as these representations of shoes which reflect, as well as fuel the popular cultural imagination, the project has been informed by the knowledge that consumption of shoes has grown enormously in recent times. In 2011, Mintel reported that the UK the footwear market in 2010 was valued at an estimated £4.3 billion, which represented an expansion of 30 per cent over the last decade of an industry which continues to grow at a rapid pace annually. ¹ Given this phenomenon, it is surprising that the sociology of footwear is still an underdeveloped field (for a recent exception to this see Knowles, 2014).

Combining breadth with depth, the project’s team have carried out 12 focus groups with 80 people, including older people (over 65), young women, women who like shoes, young men, those with health/foot problems, a mixed sex bereaved group, rock climbers, men who like shoes, a group of parents and a group of Muslim women. To elicit the diverse narratives of the shared cultural imaginary which surrounds and also arises out of everyday experiences of shoes, open-ended discussion was facilitated in the groups, with the emphasis placed on the views, connections, emotions and experiences that participants associated with footwear.

The team also conducted case studies with 15 participants, who all produced a ‘shoe key’ – a record of all the shoes they own, with information regarding how long they have had them, where they were bought, the brand, where they are kept/stored. Along with two in depth interviews, the researcher also accompanied them on a shoe-shopping trip and each participant was asked to keep a scrapbook on the theme of ‘Shoes and Identity’. In addition, each kept a ‘shoe log’ for three weeks and were filmed undertaking an activity of their choice, ‘doing’ everyday life, such as being a DJ at a burlesque evening, going for a walk, in the workplace, going climbing or horse riding. A professional documentary film was made at the end of the project. Thus, through diverse methods, the study investigated people’s everyday identification as an embodied social process explored through a situated bodily practice (see Woodward, 2003), here shoe wearing, and via an item of material culture, the shoes themselves.

The Meso-Level and the Everyday

The approach to interpreting the data on shoes and shoe wearing has been informed by an increasing emphasis on the relationality and processual complexity of everyday life within sociology (see, for example, Gabb, 2011; Pink, 2012). In Smart’s (2007) work on personal life, she addresses the problematic practice of generating structural theories which are then applied with limited success to empirical studies, and argues for the need to make sense of personal life in terms of connectedness. Or, in other words, the meso-level. Without this, theoretical understanding risks estrangement from people’s everyday lives, and, moreover, the personal tends not to be seen as a reason for amending ‘grand’ theory. At worst, the richness and complexity of individual experience is reduced to mere illustrations of a dominant theoretical position The meso-level is situated in between structure and agency, a level we both contribute to and are influenced by (for example, through the interaction the embodied human actor has with family, friends and colleagues). It also affords a more nuanced and conceptual way in which to address Gardiner’s (2000: 6) view that ‘everyday life is not as impoverished or habit-bound as conventional social science (of both a macro- and microsociological persuasion) usually assumes’. In relation to the data on footwear, I would also extend the definition of the meso to encompass a consideration of how women relate to a cultural imaginary, and the complex relationship they have to a perceived ‘male gaze’, either embodied, or operating at the level of discourse or the imaginary.

The empirical work on shoes, for example, has explored the deleterious effect of high-heeled shoes upon women’s feet. This was revealed through the project’s relationship with podiatrists, and also through listening to the women speak with passion about the beautiful high-heeled shoes they desire so intensely, and the pain they suffer wearing them (see Dilley et al., 2014). Yet, macro-level theoretical interpretations too readily reduce women to victims of a male gaze. Moreover, as Brannen and Nilsen warn:

when theoretical concepts are not grounded in local contexts they more easily lend themselves to rhetorical purposes and can take on an ideological aspect … when such theories chime with dominant political discourse, they feed back into society and gain even greater ideological and rhetorical power. (cited in Smart, 2007: 9)

So, if we perceive of the participants in the study as victims of oppressive gender hierarchies, we risk shoring up populist imagery that depicts women as helplessly insatiable consumers of whatever shoe designers choose to seduce them with. Such perceptions are indeed familiar to women themselves as evidenced by Luna, the 29-year-old female participant already referred to. Talking of the high hoof shoes that the popular cultural icon Lady Gaga wore recently, she said:

I saw Beyonce wearing them and that’s what scared me …, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen what Chinese foot binding was like, it looks like a bound foot. And that scares me because I think to myself is that what we’re going to be forced to wear next, do you know what I mean?

Elsewhere in her interview, Luna consistently described her determination not to wear such extraordinary shoes that damaged her feet, despite finding certain high-heeled shoes ‘absolutely stunning’. Yet in this extract, she expresses the belief that she and other women could be ‘forced’ to wear something that evoked Chinese foot binding, a perception which in many ways echoes a macro-level sociological interpretation.

Therefore, if we are wary of macro-level theorising, particularly its capacity to be appropriated for rhetorical or ideological purposes, how do the case studies of 15 individuals enable a meso-level theoretical understanding that is truer to the participants’ lives? It was apparent that their testimonies are peopled, with partners, parents, colleagues and others; and these are the advisers, sounding boards and audiences in relation to whom shoes are assessed and experienced. Rather than mechanically buying shoes featured in Vogue or Bella magazines, or generating pick and mix identities through quirky individualistic choices, the participants chose and wore their shoes with an awareness of their fit with particular social contexts and events. Indeed, they readily reanimated the voices of relatives and friends in relation to whom a pair had been chosen or worn. A number of female participants in the focus groups and interviews spoke about how their boyfriends commented negatively on their shoe choice of trainers, as they were not seen as ‘feminine’ enough, or, sometimes a pair of shoes that were chosen were not viewed as appropriate for family gatherings, for example, where cultural sensibilities were anticipated by others to be duly offended. Utilising Goffman’s work on the presentation of self and Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, Jenkins (2004) refers to the improvisational nature of this kind of social interaction, a field within which habit, or the habitus, operates to make the presentation of self something that ‘operates neither consciously nor unconsciously, neither deliberately nor automatically’. And, relevant here, is his emphasis that the habitus is ‘simultaneously collective and individual and definitively embodied’ (2004: 20).

For some participants, wanting to fit in and to stand out, as both an individual and a collective experience is an ongoing push/pull process, one that is mediated by the intersection of gender and age-based embodied identity in relation to others. This was exemplified by Catherine, a white female, in her early 60s, who was a retired teacher living in a well-furnished apartment in an affluent suburb, whose foot problems make high-heeled shoes very painful, yet who loves glamorous shoes. Catherine writes in her scrapbook of friends who can wear high heels:

I felt quite envious of these friends, so I am more determined than ever to lose enough weight to make high heels a possibility, … another week goes by and I am just the same, no thinner and still in pretend heels.

She longs to fit in among women who are younger than she is, striving to diet and so minimise the weight bearing down on her feet. In so doing, she could be seen to exhibit a desire to accept traditional notions of femininity in relation to constructing her appearance, and so subscribe to a patriarchal ideology which engenders competition between women based on their looks and thus ability to attract a (male) partner. Yet when she sings in a choir, and therefore in a relational context, she clearly is able to see the contradictions in wearing high-heeled shoes:

I’m a soprano and I’m very proud of the fact … I should really sing alto but I won’t … so when I go to choir I like to look the part … I smarten up when I go to choir, but, yes… if they (the shoes) hurt, you don’t sing as well I think … or maybe sometimes it sharpens you up so you’re … the high notes.

Of the ‘soprano temperament’, she says:

I think we tend to be more dramatic … you have to be expressive, you’re the person that everybody hears most … if I sang a supporting role … like the altos … I’d probably go insane really, not a chance to show off … I’m a born show-off really.

And it is the realisation of these contradictions which imbue her everyday life with extraordinary moments of embodied transcendence and joy, the shoes giving her courage to sing out and be heard, despite, or even because of the pain.

Yet, unlike Catherine who can afford the shoes of her choice, such transformations in the realm of the mundane can come at a price literally, which many others cannot afford to pay. One participant in the study, Jenny, a young British Chinese woman, speaks with longing about the expensive Christian Louboutins she dreams of owning, which are beyond her financial reach but which will, she imagines, transform her current and mundane work situation as she perceives it. More macro-level theories can be utilised here, as Schiermer (2010: 91) notes, when he cites Bourdieu’s (2003) notion of ‘legitimate taste’ which serves as a tool of power wielded by the ‘artistic elite’ to maintain their positions in the field of cultural production, and where fashion can be seen as a ‘form of coercion’ as well as considering how habitus, status and class continue to hold sway in this context. This is a view that has parallels with some feminist theorising on dress and consumption. Wolf (1991) argues that women compulsively pursue the ‘beauty myth’ in ways which are both consuming and destructive. She further contends that increased consumer power is falsely represented as a backlash against feminism, arguing, specifically in relation to shoes, that aspects of a working women’s wardrobe, including high heels, have been appropriated as ‘pornographic accessories’ (1991: 45).

Conversely, Miller (2002) concludes that fashion can simultaneously objectify women, be a source of imagination and creativity and be used as a ‘political skill’, for example, in the workplace, as well as undermine hegemonic ideals of beauty. This view goes some way to recognising the need not to fall into the old deterministic trap of demonising fashion (particularly shoes) as essentially symbolic of women’s lack of power and agency in relation to the creation of identity and self (see also Wilson, 1985; Woodward, 2007).

Further empirical work, however, is still needed to explore how women negotiate agency in relation to dominant notions of femininity through their everyday practices. Nicholls (2012) has found, in her research on young women in Newcastle upon Tyne, that their ‘responsible’ and controlled consumption of alcohol, often when dressed in the requisite high heels on a night out, is being used to create positive, fun and sociable feminine identities. As she argues, to some extent at least, her findings challenge traditional conceptualisations of drinking as a threat to women’s safety, health and ultimately their femininity. In this way, as Schiermer (2010: 97) observes, through focusing on the phenomenological interplay between sociality and materiality, that is, how social energies and relations are invested in mundane everyday life and everyday objects (here shoes), we can navigate: ‘between superficial “bricolage” theories (of identity) on the one hand and materialist and determinist reproduction theories on the other’. Moreover, a consideration of the interplay between the mundane and the extraordinary allows for a more fine- grained investigation of how femininity is embodied and also experienced. Something Nicholls’ young women’s use of the material artefacts of the everyday attests to, as their everyday worries are, albeit momentarily, left behind as they enter the unknown and extraordinary world of the night time economy.

The Relational and the Cultural Imaginary

In contrast, Eva, a white British woman in her early 30s, speaks fondly about how wearing a pair of shoes she had previously longed for, has allowed her to transform the everyday, and thus how she conceives of her identity, in a seemingly unproblematic way. That is, the shoes allow her to leave her unnoticed, even at times invisible self behind and so too the world of the mundane:

I saw these shoes and made a [sharp intake of breath] noise, and this was several years before you could get hold of two tone brogues in the shops and I’d always dreamed of owning a pair and then there they were, bit thin for dancing and striding about in but I wear them when I’m getting proper dressed up and I want to feel, feel, you tend to wear them for, when I’m going to for a kind of 1940s Joan Crawford style look and I always feel a million dollars in them.

However, in imagining this glamorous identity, she is also both knowing and ironic when pressed by the interviewer on her day dream which enables her to leave the everyday realm behind:

Her escapist fantasy is one which is also tempered by her careful recognition of women’s cinematic roles in general, and how the strong, independent female character in this genre is allowed to display her tough and sexy femininity, but then is punished for this performance in the last reel. As Holland (2004: 42) notes, feminist debates in relation to popular culture ‘about role models, negative messages, stereotypes, the “beauty myth”, and the perpetuation of gender roles and attitudes, have raged for decades’. Yet, here Eve’s embodied wearing of high heels allow her simultaneously to inhabit the extraordinary realm of the imaginary and, at the same time, recognise both the pleasures and the ironies there are to be had here, when women’s material position in the everyday is considered. In addition, though her longed for brogues are the material means which can be seen to transport her away from the mundane into an extraordinary imaginary realm, at other times, Eve’s choice of footwear instead invigorates the everyday itself in a very conscious and pragmatic manner:

Usually I just have one pair at work, something plain and black usually that will go with everything but … the ones that I’ve got at work at the moment have got a very thin heel which is all right for walking round the college in but not for walking on the streets in, so I can wear those at work and get, get the pleasure from wearing them and get my money’s worth, although they only cost two quid or something, whereas I know if they were at home on the wall they would never get selected.

As well as shoes enabling the participants’ life course transitions as they grow up and age, for instance, in Catherine’s case, or not, as in Jenny’s transition into the world of work, some of the participants in the study made transitions between very different occasions and activities, enabled by their passion for collecting shoes, or by conceiving of a ‘special’ pair of shoes as opening up the realm of the imaginary and therefore the extraordinary for them, as Eve’s data attest to. Thus, in the data, identity in relation to footwear choices and embodiment is seen as constituted within the flow of everyday life in a way which encompasses the material (see Schiermer, 2010; Sherlock, 2014) but also one which draws on a cultural imaginary, and revealing of the participants’ aspirations, dreams and even rebellions, while also signifying an ability to refresh oneself anew within the realm of the everyday through the mundane practice of selecting which shoes, and when and where to wear them.

The Relational and the Male Gaze

Eva also holds shoe parties where her and her female friends come together to socialise and wear shoes they may not otherwise do. These parties are ‘extraordinary’ occasions, created to allow the women to wear shoes that cannot or no longer fit into their everyday lives, where she and her friends dress up in vintage outfits and a male waiter is hired for the night, to serve drinks, as they are unable to move due to the outlandish and exaggerated shoes many of them wear. A woman present at one of these occasions, reported in the documentary film of the project (2013), that since she had children she is unable to wear ‘impractical’ shoes as she did before, demonstrating how the boundaries of and engagement with the mundane and the extraordinary are not fixed, and shift across the life course. Another woman speaks of being able to wear her ‘big heels’ once she lost weight, though as her weight has remained the same, her shoes only have a place within the extraordinary event of the party away from possible condemnation of her size in public.

Eva justifies her orchestrating the shoe parties thus:

Well every woman has a pair of shoes in their cupboard that they just, they’re like these, you can’t really walk in them but you just like them and if anybody said to you just get rid of them, you don’t wear them, why, why do you still have them? Usually a man says something like that, sorry to stereotype you fellas but it’s quite hard to explain why you have them, because, because every now and then there’ll be that occasion where you just want to put them on and go oh look, oh look at them, … but it’s good to all get together and sit, sit around and admire all the shoes that you can’t actually wear out of the house so your friends don’t get to see them.

This example of a collective relational identity is echoed in Bancroft et al.’s (2014) work on female students and alcohol consumption, which explored a predominant neo-liberal concept of pleasure as a demand which was navigated alongside the students’ own desires. They found that it was in preparation for going out, getting ready and using makeup such as fake tan, that many participants found the most pleasure rather than drinking in the public sphere of bars and clubs:

Some mainstream clubs would refuse women entry if they were not wearing makeup or had casual clothes rather than revealing ‘party gear’ and heels. There was formal and informal surveillance and policing of feminine performance through means such as these. (2014: para. 9.1)

But moreover, they also indicate a more active and critical response is possible: ‘Certainly some respondents were aware and explicitly resisted the “masquerade” in a way which could be seen as a “resistant promenade”’ (para. 14.4). Similarly, Eva and the women who come together socially in her tiny council flat also reveal their agency in terms of how the mundane act of shoe wearing allows them to take pleasure in their footwear practices, away from the potentially judgemental male attitudes implicitly referred to by Eva, when they are daring to wear footwear that could face disapproval or mockery in the public sphere.

Thus, Chaney’s (2002) view that the everyday acts as a space for envisioning ‘other ways of being’ (here specifically for my argument, the diverse ways of embodying, challenging and resisting normative femininity) and, his argument that to trace the significance of such change, we need to look at everyday life and represent what is orderly or disorderly about it is pertinent. The common experience of normality he sees as giving our lives order and stability and this can be considered to be what makes our experiences meaningful, highlighted here in the participants’ everyday footwear routines, for instance, with the cleaning of shoes in a particular way, shoes stacked in neat rows or stored in labelled boxes, shoes kept lovingly even when no longer used due to an emotional connection to themselves or others, or routinely thrown away due to a proliferation of the availability and consumption of shoes in current western culture. But what, we might ask, in relation to the choice and wearing of shoes, is a ‘common experience’ of the normal and everyday, if normality includes imbuing the mundane, through the material object of the shoe with extraordinary significance, as Eve and her friends attest to?

The Relational across and within Spheres

In comparison, Jenny, the young British Chinese girl referred to earlier, uses her choice of footwear and other aspects of her appearance to shock her parents and family by interrupting and challenging their conception of what a mundane, everyday feminine identity should be for a young Chinese woman, as perceived through a traditional gendered and cultural lens:

I think identity and appearance is also quite a big thing with Chinese culture, I remember how angry they were when I came back in my Mohican and my Doc Martens and my nose piercing and my second ear piercings as well, it was just sort of like oh my God Jen, what are others going to think? Others being like other family members, other friends and it was just sort of like I didn’t care and I think the reason why I didn’t care and I wanted to put up a fight that I didn’t care is because I didn’t like the way that Chinese culture was.

After a period of time though such identity performances, which are achieved partially through footwear choice, lose some of their shock value. Eventually, the capacity of the Doc Marten boot to transform the mundane into the realm of the extraordinary lessens, as family members may become more accepting and Jenny, who initially rejected aspects of a cultural stereotype, decides to choose a more acceptable shoe or boot to make another personal identity statement, because of life course transitions such as growing older and entering paid employment.

In previous work (Robinson, 2008) I considered the extraordinary and ‘extreme’ behaviour of those involved in a risk-taking sport. I found that for some of my interviewees, the ‘exceptional’ activities associated with climbing were very quickly routinised and came to consist of largely standardised climbing activities; something I conceptualised through the term ‘mundane extremities’. On the other hand, for some of the participants, it was through the mundane practices associated with climbing, such as the time spent freezing on a small ledge on a rock-face that close male friendships were formed, and not, as might be expected, through extreme events such as extraordinary sporting exploits and needless risk taking. This I conceived of as ‘extreme mundanities’ and I therefore argued that risk taking could be conceived of in very mundane contexts. One example I used to illustrate this was the act of choosing, as well as the embodied use of the ‘right’ kind of climbing shoe, which could literally, sometimes, entail life or death in an extreme climbing situation. Indeed, if the concept of ‘mundane extremities’ is applied to Jenny’s choice of ‘shock’ boots here, then the boundaries of the mundane and extraordinary can be re-configured through her act of rebellious agency, in that her outrageous behaviour and appearance becomes more accepted and so routine over time, something Weber (1971) recognised in his concept of a ‘disenchanted world’, where everyday life becomes normal, measured and predictable over the life course. Yet, in other spheres of her life, the re-enchantment of mundane, everyday life is seen by her here as a possibility.

Jenny later told the interviewer:

Yeah, if I had my dream job I think, and I saw a pair of shoes like Christian Louboutins I would just buy them because they would definitely, I would definitely see it as this is a job I really want, in order to get that I need something to really get the eye of the people that are interviewing me … I mean business and that’s how I think if there was any a pair of shoes that would sum up how I am in where I want to be in business is a pair of Christian Louboutins, … they’re it. [laughs] … I guess to start off with when people are looking at you then they’re going to look at what you’re wearing and the shoes on your feet, so definitely get a good pair of shoes before you walk in the interview, not a pair of Doc Martens. [laughs]

However, somewhat contradictorily, she also said,

I think with hopes and dreams comes a lot of sacrifices and one of those would be the comfort of your feet … I would just cope with the pain because what you want to achieve is still more than getting a couple of blisters and having to soak your feet in hot water each night, it’s just one of those things that you have to do, you have to sacrifice something, and it’d just be the comfort of your feet.

The process of growing older, and with the life course transitions that this entails, gives her more disposable income to engage in the shoe consumption of her choice, albeit in an imaginary future. Her entrance to the world of paid work is now marked by a preference for a longed for pair of expensive designer shoes which will transform the everyday routines of work for her, despite the attendant pain, whereas before the comfort of Doc Martens allowed an identity shift in the context of her femininity in a very different way. With Dilley et al. (2014), I argued that shoes from the past or shoes that might be worn in the future can similarly be understood in terms of identity transitions, ones that reflect individuals discovering ‘room for manoeuvre’, and thus agency (Jamie, 2012: 71), within the temporalities of the life course and everyday practices. However, here, it is also her footwear narrative in relation to both her family and work colleagues which allow her to make sense of her experiences reflexively in everyday life, as her choice of shoes and the wearing of them allows her to re-invent the mundane and rebel against its perceived constraints. Lefebvre’s (1971) belief I referred to earlier, that women’s entanglement with the ‘substitutes’ of beauty, femininity and fashion ensure their inability to transform the everyday, does not hold sway here, in that Jenny’s capacity for reflexively critiquing aspects of everyday life she finds restrictive, is creatively engaged with by her choice and use of footwear.

Initially, shoes are the vehicle that allow her to move out of a culture/community that she found oppressive, that is, the known routine world of family relationships. Later, shoes are the means to enable her to find her way in to a new world of work, that she aspires to and which she imagines as extraordinary.

However, this is a complicated and, as already stated, contradictory sense of self conceived of in relation to footwear, when she also says about her shoe buying habits:

Yeah, when I buy shoes I think comfort is one of, if not one of the, one of, if not the top priority in a pair of shoes, if I can’t, if they’re, if I find them sore and I can’t walk in them, they’re not going to be practical for me.

Hence comfort in an everyday work situation remains important, but in the realms of the extraordinary, albeit imagined, the designer shoes can be worn despite an anticipated painful experience. In this way, how she integrates the mundane and the extraordinary in glamorous, yet uncomfortable shoes, can be seen as a moment of precarious balance within an ongoing process that requires repeated attention, through the shoe routines of the everyday.

Conclusion

As Highmore (2002) reminds us, mundane or everyday experiences can also be seen as extraordinary, that is, as subsuming the bizarre or mysterious (or even, as with some of the shoes referred to in this article, exotic, sensuous and glamorous as well as pain giving). And it is this extraordinary element of everyday life which informs the contradictory nature of the mundane. Indeed, as the footwear data demonstrate, the contradictions and complexities evident in people’s relationship to their shoes are played out and negotiated within their everyday wearing of them, through what could be termed their ‘shoe moments’, in the context of mundane social environments and relationships.

However, such ‘moments’ are not necessarily expressed as extreme or ‘peak’ moments, even though the case study approach here makes evident the presence of fears around ageing, escaping the male gaze, finding oneself in unsatisfying, low paid work or a restrictive family environment. In effect, through these footwear examples, the mundane and the extreme aspects of everyday life became enmeshed and inseparable and, thus, the theoretical and empirical separation of the ordinary from the extraordinary became problematic and unworkable.

Gardiner (2000: 6) concludes that:

Whereas for mainstream interpretive approaches, the everyday is the realm of the ordinary, the alternative produced here is to treat it as a domain that is potentially extraordinary. The ordinary can become extraordinary not by eclipsing the everyday, or imagining we can arbitrarily leap beyond it to some ‘higher level’ of cognition or action, but by fully appropriating and activating the possibilities that lie hidden, and typically repressed within it.

Thus, I have argued that the meso-level can, therefore, be seen as the site where the mundane and extraordinary interact, and a focus on women’s footwear practices and experiences in the everyday offers a framework for investigating moments that can be transformative in the space that is created at this meso-level. Further, the data have also demonstrated how agency is a possibility in the making and remaking of particular relationships through the mundane and the extraordinary aspects of everyday life, in a dynamic process of interaction.

Of course, in relation to footwear, such agency cannot happen outside of the material reality of shoe choices and shoe wearing, alongside its elucidation with social relationships and connections to others, whether face to face or imagined. That is how the mundane and the extraordinary can come to be articulated and how gendered identity transitions and, therefore, transformations come into being.