The Red Hat Society (RHS) offers midlife and older women a brief, chosen escape from everyday family, paid, and unpaid work duties. Toying with traditional notions of femininity and aging, the women in this study used a campy performance of gender as embodied in the RHS to both rewrite and reproduce traditional gendered scripts. That is, these midlife and older women enacted elaborate and frivolous alternate feminine identities using their RHS membership as a venue. In doing this, RHS members re-appropriated previously diminishing societal attention and recaptured the heterosexist and ageist male gaze. In their research, the authors found that these older women renegotiated and resisted traditional gender roles through self-defined "fun" activities such as going out in public in hyperfeminine dress and engaging in feminine activities such as lunch, tea, and shopping. RHS members are not fading into the woodwork as society expects of aging women, as they publicly take up leisure space, have fun, and engage in personal leisure that only benefits them. This qualitative work, based on research with seventy study participants, twentyfive individual interviews, and four focus groups with forty-five RHS members, suggests that RHS members use the organization as a site of gendered leisure in pursuit of midlife fun.
Feminist scholars explore the gendered aspects of social reproduction within neoliberal contexts where the responsibility for reproducing daily and intergenerational life is shifted onto individuals and civil society groups. Using qualitative data from 665 self‐administered online questionnaires and 78 interviews with individual makers living in the United States who fabricated and distributed personal protective equipment (PPE) in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic, we consider the gendered contours of this socially reproductive labor that emerged at the household and community levels in response to a pandemic that has been transformed by decades of neoliberal governance strategies. As makers creatively utilized multiple kinds of labor to provide PPE for others, they both reproduced and subverted gendered inequalities in their households and communities. We draw on the “choreography of care work” literature to develop a conceptual framework for future considerations of social reproduction that highlights how its often ignored intricacies are centrally important to how gendered inequalities are reproduced and/or reworked amid disasters. Like a complex dance that is rewritten and enacted in emergent manners, makers creatively deployed multiple kinds of labor within shifting networks of people, technologies, and institutions to ensure social reproduction during the ongoing pandemic.
Sociology is the study of society. However, not all aspects of society get the same scholarly attention by academics. Throughout my research program, I have highlighted some of the lesser‐covered areas of society, like feminine leisure seen in activities such as quilting, knitting, and membership in the Red Hat Society. In this article, I discuss how the development of sociology as a discipline has focused on public matters in society like the economy, leaving non‐economic or private activities with less attention. My research on women's feminine leisure from a third‐wave feminism perspective importantly addresses a gap in the discipline.
This ethnographic study examined women's friendships in Red Hat Society (RHS) chapters. Qualitative data included in-depth interviews (n = 25), a focus group interview (n = 7), participant observation, and examination of RHS publications. Results suggest that participation in the RHS (1) aids in developing and enhancing positive attitudes about self and aging that contribute to overall well-being, (2) offers the opportunity to obtain instrumental and emotional support, and (3) provides social connections that prevent feelings of social isolation. Collectively, these findings highlight the potential buffering role of RHS participation in women's lives.
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