Sisters and sistering are peculiarly absent from the sociology of the family. Sociologists document women’s roles as mothers, carers, workers, daughters and wives yet neglect their experiences as sisters. Our knowledge of this widespread tie derives more from media images than from women’s own experiences. This article explores several reasons for this marginalization: from the sensational depic- tion of sisters in popular culture as either friends or rivals, and their mythical sta- tus in feminist politics, to the specialized interest of psy professionals and policy makers in childhood rivalry and sibling solidarity among the elderly. It reveals the paradox surrounding the silence of sistering as part of family lives and the visibil- ity of sisterhood in the public and sociological imagination. Drawing on a qualita- tive study of sister relationships among girls and women aged 6–50, it illustrates the complexities of sistering as personal lived experience.

K E Y WO R D S

family / intimacy / siblings / sisterhood / sisters / women’s lives

Introduction

isters and sistering are peculiarly absent from family sociology; so are sibling relationships more generally. While most of us have a sister or brother, whether biological, step or half, the experience of being a sis-

ter or sibling is largely absent from social research on family life. Women’s lives are discussed far more in their roles as mothers, carers, workers, daugh- ters and wives than as sisters. What lies behind this absence? This article explores reasons for this marginalization, drawing on an empirical study of

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sister relationships among girls and women living in England carried out dur- ing 1993–98 (Mauthner, 2002).

Family sociologists show greater interest in vertical parent–child ties than in lateral sibling or friendship ties. They tend to examine women’s servicing roles in domestic life rather than female ties per se more connected with leisure and friendship (O’Connor, 1992). The lack of common expectations, social reg- ulations or institutions around these ties also makes them difficult to define. Unlike motherhood, marriage and ‘the family’, relationships between sisters lack their own social institutions in the public sphere (Clark and Haldane, 1990; Rich, 1984). This tie exists primarily in the private realm of intimate life with no language, public discourse or images of its own. This invisibility is also a feature of other sidelined ties between lesbians and gay men, adopted children and birth parents, step-kin and their relatives, with few social institutions of their own. What these ties share is the way that voluntary negotiation of responsibilities and ‘contracting’, instead of duty, are becoming the prevailing ethos (Finch and Mason, 1993; Giddens, 1992).

Only at particular life stages do sibling ties become crucial and often a site for state interest or even intervention (Sanders, 2004). Some policy makers and practitioners recognize the relevance of sibling ties in decisions surrounding adoption, fostering and schooling in children’s lives (Mullender, 1999). Among the elderly, health and welfare professionals also regard sibling bonds with enthusiasm. When single or widowed siblings live together and care for one another or for their parents, decisions about housing and support frequently attract the attention of social care providers (Matthews, 1987).

In the decades between childhood and old age however, empirical work reveals the complexity of women’s relationships with their sisters, another fac- tor in their silencing. What we know about the lived experience of being a sis- ter or sibling is restricted by age, stage of life and topic with concern about rivalry a dominant theme in psychology. Yet rivalry, when theorized as power relations, offers new insights for theorizing female cultures of intimacy. In fem- inist research, the neglect of sisters might stem from the taboo surrounding power relations between women and reluctance to explore these. While family power dynamics linked to gender and age are well documented (Holland et al., 1998), among sisters and brothers in same-sex bonds they are ignored. In fem- inist politics moreover, women’s investment in the ideals of sisterhood as in- spiration for their activism has perhaps precluded investigating actual sororal ties in women’s lives. This tension between familialism and sisterhood obscures sisters’ family ties. In both the personal and political realms, coming to terms with difference underlies the complexities of female ties. The notion of sisters epitomizes sameness and gender solidarity. Examining hidden facets of the myth of collective sisterhood is a task that feminists have resisted.

This article addresses this neglect primarily with reference to sisters dealing with siblings in passing. It focuses on the social dimension of sistering between women, as opposed to the sistering of men or brothering. It offers several expla- nations for their silencing. The first section considers one of two areas where

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sisters appear on public display: popular culture. Secondly, expert knowledges such as psy discourses where rivalry, pathology and normalization dominate provide another example of visible sisters in the public domain. The third sec- tion contrasts this public visibility with the invisibility of sisters in family research. The final section highlights the sociological relevance of sisters and sis- tering. The article outlines the potential of sibling intimacy for exploring for- mations of gender and identity in family life.

Sisters on Show

Sisters are noticeably absent in the public sphere and public knowledges (Johnson, 1986: 287) in general, and in social research in particular. Public sphere refers to the formal organizations, politics, law, media and academia, and the discourses on high culture and politics that inform public knowledges. Sisters and sistering, or their active relationships with each other, are under- represented unlike mothering and the mother-in-law/daughter-in-law bonds that exist through a long tradition of parody (Cotterill, 1994). Exceptions appear in three sites: cultural representations, feminist politics and discourses about child development and elder care.

Celebrity and Rivalry in Popular Culture

Images and sensational tales about celebrity sisters proliferate in the media, popular culture and fiction (Cartmell et al., 1998; Mackay, 1993). Remember the coverage of tennis champions Venus and Serena Williams at Wimbledon 2000, the rivalry between glamourous entertainers Jackie and Joan Collins, and novelists Margaret Drabble and A.S. Byatt’s arms-length relationship? Stereotypes of rivalry, bitchiness and competitiveness dominate these media images. Journalists wonder whether sisters are the same or different, who is the dutiful angelic sister versus the selfish sister, as if these polarized notions of femininity might encompass all the diversity of sister ties. Film and fiction offer more sophisticated representation, exposing sister jealousies: The Heart of Me, Lovely and Amazing, Hilary and Jackie, A ma Soeur, Mina Tannenbaum, Secrets and Lies, Sense and Sensibility, Gone with the Wind. Countless novels dissect sister dynamics, from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Edith Wharton’s Bunner Sisters, to Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple, Andrea Levy’s Never Far From Nowhere, David G. Wright’s Clara Callan and Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin. Fictionalized accounts rather than sociological narratives vividly convey the tribulations of sister relationships. Yet their social and cultural meanings as lived experience for women’s gendered identities and changing biographies are strangely missing from family research.

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From Rivalry to Solidarity

Another corner of the public realm where sisters surface lies in feminist dreams of sororal solidarity. Sisterhood provided a metaphor for women’s collective action in the 19th and 20th centuries in order to campaign for their rights and mobilize as social and political communities. It emerged from a challenge to the public/political patriarchy of organized fraternity or brotherhood. This notion of sisterhood prevails far more in the feminist imaginary than any ideas grounded in women’s actual experiences of sistering. The tradition of referring to fellow activists in the women’s movement as ‘hermana’ or sister has a long history (Lugones and Rosezelle, 1995). Yet when compared with the messiness and complexity of sistering in domestic life the utopia of female sorority appears flawed. With so many ideals invested in sisterhood, rethinking it through the gap between the myth and embodied sistering presents a challenge. The myth persists precisely because it keeps the tensions and difficulties on the margins. Celebratory elements such as solidarity and support, which sisterhood and sistering share, are revered. Differences remain the stumbling block for both. One way to address this tension between the political and the personal is to accept differences in both spheres. Undeniably, the domestic image of sisters galvanized feminist political collaboration. Likewise in my empirical study some women viewed their own sistering in terms of sisterhood. Curiously some used the terms sisterhood and sistering interchangeably.

The gap between the idealized politicized myth of sisterhood based on sim- ilarity and solidarity at the heart of this social movement and actual lived experiences of sistering in families constitutes another reason for their neglect (Morgan, 1984). When interviewed, women recount conflict, and painful and ambivalent emotions about this sensitive relationship (Mathias, 1992; Sandmaier, 1995). As political ideal though, sisterhood ‘has drawn upon a familial metaphor to evoke an image of non-authoritarian bonding among female peers. It thus sought to retain notions of attachment and loyalty associ- ated with non-contractual family relations’ (Fox-Genovese, 1991: 15–16). While sisterhood has come under scrutiny for ignoring class and race differ- ences, part of its strength and appeal as a political rallying-point lies in its call to collective solidarity. In feminist research this translates into a vision of new knowledge creation about previously invisible aspects of women’s lives.

Sisters and Brothers

This partial visibility of sister relationships and sisterhood in the public sphere is reinforced by the presence of institutionalized brotherhood in several settings where ‘metaphorical bands of brothers, sons, lovers, warriors’ roam and are dominant (Hearn, 1992: 206). While familial ties between brothers seem as undervalued as those between sisters, the fraternal ideal of brotherhood and ‘mutual concern’ prevails in several organizations (Cicirelli, 1995; Ervin-Tripp, 1989: 184). While both sisterhood and brotherhood offer imaginaries of lateral

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solidarities, the implicitly non-familial role of brotherhood as male bonding is by far the more visible and entrenched in many areas of political and social life.

Men organize and bond in patriarchal structures, from the Army, pubs and clubs, trade unions, sport and academia to secret political organizations and protest movements. From political and social brotherhoods and their links with government and the law to artistic associations and brothers and partners in business and industry, these public patriarchies and masculinities are in marked contrast to the private femininities of sistering (Knight, 1983). The absence of similarly constructed organizations based on sisterhood or sistering, except among nuns and nurses, and witches and midwives in the past, and their hidden practices and meanings, stand out against the prevalence of these masculine ‘monocultures’ (Hearn, 1992: 200).

Whereas representations of sisters in popular culture individualize their sis- tering experiences, in feminist politics they become collectivized through myth- ical imagery. Outrageous and eccentric individuality prevails in one sphere where the spotlight shines on the extraordinary or the bizarre. In the other, sol- idarity and collective experience claim to transcend differences through activism for a common purpose. Images of sisterly support and sibling bonding as symbols of sorority and fraternity also permeate fictionalized representations of marginality and queerness and, by extension, gay relationships (Flannery, 1997). When individual gay relationships are misconstrued as sister or brother ties, homosexual rather than sibling bonds become occluded from view. Clearly sisters proffer a rich source of imagery in the cultural and political imagination. Before I connect up these images of sisters from popular culture, fiction and pol- itics with women’s experiences of sistering in their families I first turn to how sisters feature in discourses of expertise about siblings.

Sisters and the Experts

A further domain where sisters are visible lies in psy discourses (Rose, 1996). Here expert knowledges produce various meanings about siblings by theorizing effects of ordinary phenomena such as ‘the age gap’, ‘birth order’ and behaviour like rivalry. This section explores how these knowledges of expertise shape common sense understandings of ‘problem’ and ‘normal’ aspects of sib- ling ties. It confirms the partial ways in which sisters and siblings are visible in public spheres, shaped by adult concerns, especially parents or professionals responsible for children’s welfare. Siblings and sisters’ own perspectives on the issues of greatest concern to them are largely ignored. The missing narratives I suggest are features of both the psy complex and of the laterality of sibling ties.

Rivalry as Pathology

Beyond popular culture, rivalry surfaces as a leitmotiv in psy discourses in childcare manuals and parenting books about how to reduce sibling jealousy

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and encourage friendship (Spungin, 2002; Woolfson, 2002). The age gap, birth order and rivalry are routinely problematized in these texts influenced by child development research. Their portrayal of these issues as requiring parental intervention from toddlerhood onwards draws on research assessing their neg- ative impact on children’s learning, delinquency, health and wellbeing (Murphy, 1992). This adult perspective is concerned with managing children’s difficult behaviours and excludes siblings’ own experiences (Dunn, 1993; Dunn and Boer, 1992; Dunn and Kendrick, 1982). Other features of children’s sibling relationships – disability, sexuality – are equally problematized rather than viewed as part of the wider context of domestic life. Under the psycholo- gists’ gaze these aspects of growing up are pathologized as handicap, incest and eating disorders (Gallagher and Powell, 1989; Laviola, 1992; Vandereycken and Vrecken, 1992).

Far from questioning the importance of these dimensions of sibling ties, I want to challenge an approach that examines them as problems, from a bystander adult perspective. Knowledge based on the most salient topics in sib- lings’ own accounts reveals the significance of lateral relationships in family life. These shape three aspects of gendered identity and the social self. Sister ties pro- vide an early playground where girls and women learn to maintain personal relationships through talk, silence and emotions. They also offer a terrain where they can experiment with juggling tensions between caring and power dynam- ics in intimate bonds. And they constitute a primordial arena, alongside the mother–daughter tie, for early flights of agency and reflections on the mecha- nisms of change in biographical trajectories. My aim is to place these social aspects of sisters’ ties on the sociological map, enhancing those that experts identify as problems.

Discourses of Normalization

Alongside this tendency to pathologize rivalry, other ideas about what is ‘nor- mal’ among sisters and siblings surface in particular areas of social policy. Notions of bonding and role modelling inform specific policies aimed at pro- moting children and young people’s welfare. Decisions about school, fostering and adoption placements aspire to keep siblings together (Kosonen, 1999). Separating them usually constitutes a last resort. Similarly, assumptions about siblings as sources of support inform North American Big Sister/Big Brother social programmes that structure teenagers’ peer ties by pairing them up as role model buddies (Frecknall and Luks, 1992).

These ideas of what constitutes normal sibling relationships reflect adult concerns connected to care. They embody the perspectives of ‘others’ who sur- round and look after siblings, rather than the experiences of siblings themselves – whether child or adult – in education, health and social welfare (Home Office, 1999). This phenomenon partly results from professionals’ greater interest in vertical adult–child rather than lateral sibling ties. Adults’ parental and profes- sional responsibilities and power vis-a-vis children dominate to such an extent

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in psy discourses that they almost preclude any attention to lateral ties. Moreover, legal statutes enshrine and monitor the social and psychological value of vertical ties. Parent–child relationships in both households and profes- sional arenas are carefully regulated by the State. Sibling ties escape this surveil- lance except in cases of incest, abuse and neglect.

Just as attention to vertical ties overshadows lateral ties, so do institution- alized bonds connected to parenting ignore sibling relationships. Sibling and friendship ties, of less interest to the State, escape from sociologists’ gaze. One reason for this greater focus on vertical ties based around parenting in both psy and sociology is that the many forms they take, sexuality, marriage and divorce, are intrinsically linked to State policies around reproduction and family life (Cheal, 2002; Ribbens McCarthy et al., 2003). Unsurprisingly, in the context of nuclear patriarchal heterosexual households, intimate ties unconnected with this mission, like siblings, friendships and gay relationships, become sidelined (Hey, 1997; Roseneil, 2003). Avoiding institutionalization, regulation or sub- jection to prescribed norms and sanctions, they remain more ‘free’. By escaping surveillance, these lateral ties and informal social networkds structured around families of choice remain more autonomous in defining their norms (Weeks et al., 1999; Weston, 1991). How specific individuals establish their own sistering practices and discourses and make sense of these is explored in the next section (Morgan, 2003).

Sibling relationships shed interesting light on other marginalized ties. The least institutionalized aspects of intimacy – sibship, friendship and lesbigay rela- tionships – benefit the most from creative attempts to refashion them. Until increased liberalization and corresponding regulation of gay relationships led to their exposure to renewed State surveillance (White, 2003), lesbigay and sibling ties remained the most malleable. They offered options for experiments with notions of choice and negotiation versus duty and obligation (Finch, 1989). These bonds created through families of choice based on the ethic of love pro- vide powerful alternatives to traditional nuclear heterosexual households (Dunne, 2003; VanEvery, 1995).

These lateral ties also allow us to rethink beliefs about the origins of gen- dered identities. Parallels between friendship, gay and sibling ties highlight the extent to which the idea of gender identity formation is premised on the nor- mative concept of sexual difference. What these ties share is their foundation on sexual sameness. The pre-eminence of sexual difference as the basis for gender and identity formation in psy discourses constitutes another element that occludes the significance of early same-sex intimacy in sistering for the shaping of gender (Mitchell, 2003). The whole area of the formation of gendered sub- jectivity in the context of sexual sameness such as sister, brother or friendship ties has barely been explored. Examples of emotional intimacy in sibling ties from psychoanalysis illustrate how sexual sameness in lateral and same-sex ties in childhood and early adulthood might be key formative experiences of iden- tity and self (Mitchell, 2000).

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The inordinate focus on rivalry may partly explain our limited knowledge of sibling lives. Does it explain sociologists’ trepidation to explore rivalry from a more social angle and retheorize sibling ties? From a social perspective it con- stitutes a corollary of power dynamics, part and parcel of relations of desire, sameness and difference, envy and jealousy in family life (Mitchell, 2003). Widening the agenda beyond rivalry broadens our gaze to how families mould social identities in unsettling ways.

Consequently, to counter the legacy of rivalry, a friendship model of sup- port is upheld as the social and emotional ideal. It arises from models of pre- scribed ties that guide us in family interactions through rules and obligations. This attention to rivalry signals appropriate conduct through informal regula- tion. It downplays the inevitability of power relations, conflict and difference in intimate relationships. It reinforces the illusion of similarity as attainable and precludes any interrogation of this desire. Prevailing theorizations offer few tools for deconstructing the rivalry/sameness dichotomy or moving beyond it to theorize its very complexity.

Discourses of Care and Welfare

The effect of what constitutes ‘normality’ in sibling ties is most evident in wel- fare discourses. From childhood rivalry to elderly carers themselves, siblings evolve from cared-for individuals to care providers (Brody et al., 1989). There is a contradiction in how siblings are seen: from rivalry to burden and problem behaviour to solidarity. The State emphasizes support for early socialization and later informal care networks. What links these life stages, childhood and old age, with siblings’ experiences of their bonds? The emotional tensions in the caring practices and power dynamics that fluctuate over a lifetime between the poles of rivalry and solidarity remain overlooked.

Recent studies explore social dimensions of relationships: teenage siblings’ social capital and access to education and employment; and children’s sibling caring and coping practices (Edwards et al., forthcoming 2005; Edwards et al. forthcoming 2006; Smart et al., 2001). As in childhood where the implicit cor- rect way for siblings to behave is as friends, in old age many co-habit and or care for parents (Gold, 1987). More visible in discourses of expertise and wel- fare than as social processes, our knowledge of sibling ties is limited by topic and age. The fact that they escape institutionalization, easy definition or pre- scription casts them to the edge of social investigation.

Sisters in Families

In contrast with their sporadic public presence, sisters’ lives remain almost com- pletely hidden in the domestic realm. Social dimensions of these ties illustrate the role of female kin in migration patterns and in small family-run businesses (Chamberlain, 1999; Song, 1998, 1999). Allan (1977), Oliker (1989) and

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O’Connor (1987) touch on adult sibling and sister ties in their friendship stud- ies. My own qualitative study documents the intensity of these lateral ties and develops a vocabulary to name and theorize these experiences with. It also brings them into the fold of family sociology and extends our understanding of the social self.

Representing ordinary sistering experiences requires a language with which to describe these as a lived culture. The effects of the social and cultural work- ings of power relations are one reason for the social invisibility of siblings. Since power operates in a way that ignores salient issues for subordinated groups, inevitably the secrecies of the oppressed become privatized. Another reason concerns the visual and textual repertoires used to describe sistering in the pub- lic sphere: these rarely stem from sisters’ lived cultures or represent them in grounded ways. Public language and images do not derive from sisters’ own experiences or knowledges. These public representations of private cultures dis- tort them when they are male-defined and middle class; they also tend to uni- versalize or stigmatize them. In their intimate cultures women clearly possess a linguistic repertoire through which they understand their sistering. Through this language of emotions and power dynamics they voice and silence different features of their relationships to themselves, each other and sociologists (Mauthner, 1998).

The Empirical Study

My auto/biographical study of sistering reveals how emotions and power rela- tions form key concepts through which girls and women experience the intri- cacies of this tie. It answers five questions. Is sistering more of a kinship duty bond or a voluntary friendship tie? What kinds of contact patterns exist among sisters? How do factors such as age, class, ethnicity and geographical proxim- ity affect sistering? How does sistering change over time? How does sistering resemble and differ from female friendship? It involved in-depth, joint and indi- vidual interviews, with 37 girls and women between the ages of six and 50 from diverse social backgrounds (Table 1). This purposive sample was recruited through snowballing.

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Table 1 Summary of the sample

Class Ethnicity Marital status Sexual identity Mothering status

27 middle class 26 white 20 single 36 heterosexual 21 childfree 10 working class 11 black 17 partnered 1 lesbian 16 mothers

(5 Asian; 3 mixed race; 3 Black British)

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Participants recount conflict and nurturing; emotions of appreciation, joy, sad- ness, regret, resignation, ambivalence and impasse emerged from their narra- tives. Theorizing these emotions illuminates their inherent complexity, thus offering a richer account than explanations that rely on polarizing rivalry and support. It also shows how women come to interpret their sistering both past and present. To analyse this complexity, my conceptual framework draws on feminist theories to explore how sisters care for, dominate each other and resist subjugation at a single moment in time and over decades.

The complexity of this potentially egalitarian tie is one reason for its neglect. Rooted in an analysis of caring and power relations, my framework proposes a more refined understanding of these tensions in intimate ties than the rivalry/support dichotomy offers. It combines standpoint and post- structuralist theory with an auto/biographical methodology. The research design consisted of a semi-structured interview organized around topics such as schooling, making and losing friends, sexual relationships, mothering, employ- ment, contact patterns and turning-points; an Ecomap for drawing social kin networks; and a Flowchart to trace chronological moments of change. I anal- ysed the data using grounded theory and compiled detailed biographical case studies. This approach encouraged women to narrate high and low points of their sistering. Telling their stories involved co-constructing auto/biographical narratives of their own and their sister/s’ changing subjectivities with me (Mauthner, 2000).

Relations of Care and Power

Several women like Alice, age 36, Black British, middle-class, single and child- free and the second eldest of five sisters, drew on ‘psy’ discourses when recall- ing transitions in their sistering in order to explain transformations to themselves.

… you know one of the things about being usurped by a younger sister and other things being, you know, with always compared to Eliza my older sister, and I, I’d say that, because of, that my best relationships really are with Joy and Rosemary because there was never any kind of conflict with them in any way. Although, you know, I still have a good relationship with all of them but they’re the, they’re the ones that I never felt threatened by in any way. So, um, so and that sort of came out in therapy because it was all the stuff that hadn’t, you know, hadn’t been dealt with. And the, the nice thing about going, you know, in therapy is that you do feel more, a lot more confident about talking to people and that. One of the first things I did was to talk to Eliza about those things and about what I felt and she said, oh gosh, you know.

Alice’s reflection captures one of the study’s findings about the different forms that sistering takes. Alice compares her best friendships with her three younger sisters, all in their early thirties with her current close companionship with Eliza (age 38), the eldest, living with her partner and two sons, who confirms this:

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Eliza: I feel sort of extremely … sort of lucky about the relationship we have. I mean we are sisters but also I think we’re extremely close friends and that the friend- ship helps by the fact that we’re sisters if you see what I mean, because I fee … I’m most relaxed with them … I saw my sisters as friends because … you know … sisters are sisters they’re family, they’re not friends but they are.

In other periods of their lives, Alice and Eliza were less close. Eliza separately recounted an earlier difficult stage during their teens when positioned in their sibling group as mini-mothers, they both cared for their younger sisters while their parents worked.

Eliza: for a long time, it must have been when we were little, I was always definitely regarded as the big sister, I was always in charge when my parents were out and stuff like that and … so there was very much that kind of relationship where I was to look after and look out for them and stuff like that. But … I haven’t been aware that that kind of relationship exists anymore, it doesn’t really, not quite like that [laughs] and so that, that’s changed. But, I’m quite glad really, and now I guess we’re like, really very close friends and we get on really well.

Eliza contrasts this closeness with the caring expectations the oldest sisters endured nearly two decades earlier when their parents moved abroad. This transition stands out for Eliza because in their early twenties she and Alice became carers with parental responsibilities.

Eliza: When my parents went back to [the Caribbean], that was a lot of strain on the relationship, that was a huge change that I’ve suddenly remembered … And, so we had to then, of course, we had to try and find places to live and stuff like that when we’d got back [from holiday], with very little money, again I suppose I was sort of plunged into the looking after mould again when I was breaking out from it at the time. Alice and I we bought a flat together and Joy came to live with us … And so that formed a base for the others basically …

Eliza recalls the emotions and pressures of these obligations and their impact on her tie with Alice:

Eliza: I suppose the tension … we could potentially [have become] broken frag- mented when my parents went but we didn’t. And I … because I hated it … you know for the first year or so I hated it … I’d just got to the stage of my life where I didn’t want to be living with my sisters, you know I wanted to go off and do other stuff and here I was, you know having … I didn’t want it. But we worked through it because … you’re seeing something that you had to do, I had to, I mean Joy had to have somewhere to live she was only 16. And I think Alice felt exactly the same, we never actually talked about that at the time. I think she talked about it to her therapist and then talked about it later but we didn’t talk about how we both felt about … having to take on that responsibility. We both talked about the fact that parents had gone and left us if you like in the lurch but I don’t think we … either of us realised how much we disliked it personally in terms of having to be with each other. But … in a sense we just worked through, we just lived through and … and it helped to bring us together.

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Another reason for their closeness, Eliza speculates looking back, stems from their family being the only Black household in the English town they grew up in during the 1960s. The trials of their previous distant companionship evolved into close companionship. As the caring and power relations shift between sis- ters these ties fluctuate over time. These relations encompass the subject posi- tions of mini-mother, cared for sister and shifting positions where sisters can alternate between these (Mauthner, 2002). The sociological relevance of these four sistering discourses – best friendship, companionship, positioned discourse and shifting positions – lies in the backdrop they provide for understanding for- mations of gendered identity.

Femininity and Identity

The passion in these emotions contributes to the make-up of our gendered selves. Sister relationships, like other intimate ties, are messy. My study reveals how femininity is shaped by structures of family intimacy and how subjectivity is experienced both materially and discursively. What is crucial about this tie is the way that it sheds light on how sister relationships shape girls’ emerging fem- ininities. Growing up and moving between their families of origin and of cre- ation, their experiences of caring/being cared for and changing positions of power reveal many assumptions, which Western culture identifies as femininity or ‘the process through which women are gendered and become specific sorts of women’ (Skeggs, 1997: 98). My definition of femininity includes age, stage of life and caring roles. Sistering takes shape through minute social manifesta- tions of femininity, much as girls and women as daughters, mothers and wives are expected to care for their significant others and often subsume their own needs in the process. Unsurprisingly these expectations are also played out between sisters. Sistering in all its multiple forms constitutes a key part of the way that femininity is socially constructed. The caring work and power rela- tions evident in sistering mirror parallel processes in mothering and daughter- ing that play a significant role in producing femininity elsewhere in family bonds (Lawler, 2002).

As their usually unspoken expectations of their sisters fluctuate from girl- hood to womanhood, women’s experiences of sistering evolve. On the one hand sistering changes under the influence of life events external to the sister rela- tionship, such as motherhood, leaving home, starting work, marriage, divorce and death, or Alice and Eliza’s parents’ return to the Caribbean. On the other hand, sistering evolves according to internal dynamics such as shifting caring and power relations – varying degrees of control and autonomy between sisters, such as Eliza’s wish ‘to go off’ rather than continue caring for her sisters. Another factor is changing subjectivity, or ‘the conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions of the individual, her sense of herself and her ways of understanding her relation to the world’ (Weedon, 1987: 32).

While sister ties do not form part of women’s traditional servicing role for men they do feature as part of their caring labour for other women. Through

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caring practices and discourses of best friendship and companionship, much of sisters’ social interaction, however minimal if only at family gatherings and rit- uals, contains elements of voluntary association and leisure, as in friendship, as well as obligation and duty typical of other female care work. Both these aspects of leisure and care appear in sisters’ narratives in varying degrees as they fluctuate over the years. For sisters Revi and Vandana, mothers in their early twenties of toddlers, they merge:

Revi: We do shopping together and [sound of train in background] we loving together [laughs]. We fight about pays as well, she says ‘I’m big sister, I’m going to pay’ [laughs]

MM: So you have little fights? Revi: not like fights, she’s going to say ‘OK, um, you my, you my little sister, I’m

going to pay for you’ MM: Ah right right, right, just Revi: And just she thinks que her place is sister and mother, both, she MM: Because you’re older? Vandana: Ya, because I’m older that’s why. (Revi, 21 and Vandana, 25, Asian Pakistani, working-class, elder of five siblings)

Revi explains how Vandana takes charge of their relationship outside the home whey they go shopping and insists on paying for treats. They emphasize their similarities, both married to Asian men with long histories of employment in the UK, and their different aspirations. Revi wanted a second child as she was expected to produce a boy; Vandana was enrolling at college to learn English with a view to entering the labour market.

For teenagers Judith and Nicole who live together, unlike Revi and Vandana, their leisure time is riven with play-fighting:

Nicole: Yeah, so I can like um when she’s not looking I can make a face an’ then go back to crying like so I get my way [laughs].

Judith: Yeah, she very much likes to get her own way. Nicole: And like maybe I make a face and I look back just looking around an’ then

maybe one time she came up and she like, like think that I hadn’t done it. Judith: Yeah. She loves tormenting, like trying to get me in trouble, things like she

exaggerates and then she gets me in trouble and I haven’t done it or whatever and it really gets on my nerves, so I just like …

Nicole: Like yesterday, I um … Judith: I was in the bath and she poured a load of cold water on me. (Judith, 16 and Nicole, 10, White English, working-class)

These teenagers described themselves as more enemies than friends, in contrast with Revi and Vandana. They irritated each other and joked about their distinct personalities and how Nicole often positioned herself as the ‘big sister’.

Laterality and Intimacy

Age and gender, as sites of power, and hierarchical antagonistic relationships dominate empirical work on family lives. This privileges parent–child and

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spousal ties, leading to the obfuscation of more reciprocal lateral ties. The focus on adults rather than children and social research’s normative view of young people and adults linked to independence also squeezes out other facets of intimacy such as long-term connection and dependence as evidenced in sis- tering. Similarly, the focus on marriage as a central commodity in women’s lives overshadows the generational dimension of sister ties. Sisters close in age form a cohort, part of a single generation with many features in common, shaped by the same social and cultural history they grew up in. In the case of sister or sibling groups that straddle more than one generation they transmit and pass on specific familial, class, ethnic or regional values. As Thompson (1996: 14) writes:

Families stories are the grist of social description, the raw material for both history and social change; but we need to listen to them more attentively than that. They are also the symbolic coinage of exchange between the generations, of family trans- mission. They may haunt, or inspire, or be taken as commonplace. But the way in which they are told, the stories and images which are chosen and put together, and the matters on which silences is kept, provides part of the mental map of family members.

Only through work on the ethic of love and negotiation are sociologists dissecting the co-existence and mechanics of power and care in intimacy. Nevertheless, power in female relationships remains a taboo topic except in les- bian relationships (Dunne, 1996).

Sisters in Sociology

My findings map some of the social and cultural processes, meanings and pat- terns in lateral family practices and discourses. The main themes to emerge about sistering include: the oscillations between caring and power dynamics; changing forms of intimacy such as companionship and friendship across life stages; and how both these sets of interactions shape gender identity. I explore elsewhere how sisters experiment with agency in order to rewrite constraining aspects of family scripts (Mauthner, 2002). Thus several reasons illuminate why sistering remains excluded from family sociology compared with other female ties between mothers and daughters and friends. Firstly, its very banality embeds it in domestic lives hidden from sociological scrutiny, similar to house- work or childhood in previous decades. As Eliza says: ‘It just seems so ordinary to me, I don’t think any of us take each other for granted but it, in a negative sense, but we do just take the relationship for granted in a … you know, that they’re there. And they always be.’

Secondly, family sociology’s neglect of lateral relationships reflects its con- cern with hierarchical and/or vertical forms of social life – marriage and par- enting rather than sibling groups. The preoccupation with gendered servicing overshadows women’s identities as friend – a tie where pleasure rather than

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meeting physical dependency needs may be primary (Hey, 1997). Conceptualizing sistering as friendship therefore is in its early stages. Thirdly, greater attention has been paid to sexuality and a critique of romantic love than to female friendship, apart from historical and literary studies (Symes et al., 1999). Lastly, family sociology’s focus on oppressive rather than reciprocal inti- mate ties, to do with inequalities of gender, race, age and class dooms sisters and siblings to invisibility as they are rarely theorized as fluid social relations of care and power.

However in ‘post-socialist’ times (David, 2003) of dissolving and receding traditional kin ties and expanding new forms – reconstituted and ‘families of choice’ – the significance of lateral ties such as sibships and friendship is emerg- ing. As bonds of heterosexuality become less constricting, illustrated by Giddens’ (1992) detraditionalization thesis, and women are less defined through marital status, individuals have more freedom for lateral affiliation, as the individualization thesis suggests. When caring practices and power relations are viewed outside the spotlight of heterosexual intimacy, sociologists can start to theorize them beyond the detraditionalization/ individualization dichotomy. It is in sibship as in friendship that their relevance surfaces for understanding formations of gendered identity over time.

Conclusion

Sistering as a set of gendered social practices that maintain kin connections in and across diverse types of households is a central aspect of family life. This article contrasted the complexity of sistering experiences, more visible in the public domain and as political utopia than in the domestic, with their depiction as sources of rivalry or nurture in popular culture and discourses of expertise. Images and concepts linked to the sensational, stereotypical or pathological idealize sistering. Instead, sociological accounts of sibship, sistering and broth- ering offer a new lateral lens for theorizing complex forms of intimacy and gen- dered identity.

Shifting the gaze from rivalry/support to caring practices and power rela- tions paves the way for greater recognition of the social and emotional signifi- cance of this widespread lateral tie across life stages. The oscillation between caring and power marks out sibship as key for developing a paradigm to theo- rize lateral ties and complement our knowledge of vertical inter-generational bonds. Public representations of sistering that reflect the complexity of this tie can more accurately capture the diversity of women’s lived sibling cultures. Abandoning polarized understandings of sibship as rivalry or friendship promises more nuanced meanings. I have argued for this part of social life to be integrated into the sociology of intimacy, friendship, emotion and gender; and for siblings to be prioritized in work on family life and identity.

These reflections derive from a snapshot of biological sistering in England in the 1990s. Further studies of siblings will uncover the wider impact of lateral

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ties on psychic structures and formations of gendered identity. Social and his- torical dimensions of sibling life and differences of class and ethnicity, geogra- phy and generation, and biological status, including cousins, await further investigation. Our privileging of the vertical over the lateral suggests an eth- nocentric bias in how we explore family, identity and auto/biography (Mitchell, 2003). Moreover, it is the anti-familial and anti-fraternal aspects of sistering, its lateral solidarities, that make it politically interesting. Sisterhood, although a myth already strained, remains a challenge to organized fraternity. The social and cultural meanings of sibship, brothering and brotherhood remain ripe for exploration.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to John Clarke, Jane Franklin, Helen Lucey and Rachel Thomson for com- ments on early drafts and, for encouragement, the Sociology Seminar, Institute of Education, University of London and Women’s Workshop on Family/Household Qualitative Research, London South Bank University. The empirical study was financially supported by: the AL Charitable Trust, the BSA Support Fund and the Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education.

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Melanie Mauthner

Is Lecturer in Social Policy in the Faculty of Social Sciences, at The Open University. She

researches family and friendship cultures, especially siblings, and was part of the course

team who produced DD305 Personal Lives and Social Policy. She is the author of

Sistering: Power and Change in Female Relationships (Palgrave, 2002) and Sisters and

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Brothers: Under Their Skins (Routledge/Taylor & Francis forthcoming) with Rosalind

Edwards, Lucy Hadfield and Helen Lucey.

Address: Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes

MK7 6AA, UK.

E-mail: [email protected]

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