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University of Warwick institutional repository: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/50750 This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. Mourning Identities: Hillsborough, Diana and the Production of Meaning by Michael J. Brennan A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Warwick Department of Sociology September 2003 Contents Introduction 1 Shifting Focus, Shifting Orientation 1 Biography of the Project 2 The Hillsborough Disaster and the Death of Princess Diana 7 The Inter-Disciplinary and Multi-Method Approach of the Project 10 Outline of the Chapters 16 Chapter 1: Approaches to Death, Dying and Bereavement 22 The Denial and Revival of death 26 Death and Contemporary Social Theory 33 Death Studies: Academic Specialism or Thanatological Ghetto 47 Towards the ‘Sociological Private’ 54 Chapter 2: Mourning, Identity and the Work of the Unconscious 60 The Scandal of Reason: Freud’s Copernican Revolution 65 Misogyny and Medical Discourse: Feminist Critiques of Freud 71 Mortido Destrudo: Freud’s Detour of Theory From Eros to Thanatos 74 Mourning, Loss and the Work of Mourning 82 Kleinian Object-Relations and the Internalisation of ‘Things’ 94 Kristeva and the Pathos of Loss 102 Chapter 3: Cultural Practices and Public Mourning in the Popular Postmodern 109 Cultural Returns: the Postmodernising of Death Ritual 114 The Hillsborough and Diana Events as the Carnivalisation of Death 121 Referents of Loss: Icon, Totem and Symbolic Investments of Meaning 127 The Mourning for Hillsborough and Diana as Mediatised Events 130 Scopophilic Pleasures: The Ethics of Looking and the Pornography of Image 134 Grotesquerie, the Carnivalesque, and the Inversion of Tradition 138 ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ in Mediated Mourning 142 Aspects of Fandom and Public Mourning 144 The Specificity of Iconic and Totemic ‘Public’ Mourning 147 Cultural Mourning and the Semiotics of Loss 152 Chapter 4: Methods, Methodology and Field Notes 166 The History of the Project and the ‘Cultural Circuit’ 168 Ethnographic Endeavours: Bridging the Gap Between Researcher and Researched 176 Condolence Books as Texu(r)al Research 184 In Search of Condolence Books: Practical Issues of Access and Selection 190 Storing, Sampling and Cataloguing Condolence Data 201 Quantitative Content Analysis of Condolence Books 204 From Quantitative to Qualitative: Reconceptualising Condolence Data 215 Analysing Condolence Book Messages 216 Memory Work and the Autobiographical Method 219 Doing Memory Work 229 Coding and Analysing Memory Work 234 Introducing Books of Condolence 240 Chapter 5: Condolence Books Part 1 Hillsborough: the Local, the Totemic and the Popular 257 The Case for Liverpool Exceptionalism 259 Communitas, Liminality and Recognition of the Other 277 Local Structures of Feeling on Merseyside 279 Football, Liverpool and the Shadow of Shankly 285 Exile, Nostalgia and the Spirit of Homeliness 292 No Place like Home: Sportscapes and the Internalisation of Place 297 Linguistic Pathways of Loss 304 Heteroglossia, Intertextuality and the Re-invention of Tradition 316 Chapter 6: Condolence Books Part II Diana: the Global, the Iconic and the Popular Feminine 324 Diana as the Hauntological: Condolence Books as Dialogic Feminine Space 332 Condolence Books and the Cultural Public Sphere 338 Fandom, Celebrity and the Production of Personal Meaning 347 Fandom, Femininity and Popular Fantasy 353 Informal Speech and the Heteroglossia of Language 365 Beyond Media Image: Charity Activism, ‘In-touchness’ and the Ethic of Care 370 Subjective Identification and Transference 377 Chapter 7: Memory, Narrative and the Production of Identity 382 Saturday April 15, 1989 382 Beautiful Woman Dies 384 Truth, Memory and Subjectivity 389 Mourning Hillsborough: Investing in Football, Investing in Place 396 Shadows of Steel: Mourning Masculinities 415 Not-Mourning Diana: Disinvesting in the Popular Feminine 425 The Circulation of Cultural Narratives 447 Biographical Journeys and New Intellectual Directions 449 Conclusion 454 Bibliography 462 Appendix 505 Acknowledgements My particular thanks are due to Canon Noel Vincent of the Anglican Cathedral in Liverpool for providing me with access to the public books of condolence signed following the Hillsborough disaster and to David Horton-Fawkes at the Althorp visitor centre for providing access to a sample of condolence books signed following the death of Princess Diana. I am also grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council for funding this project. Special thanks are due to my academic supervisor, Dr Deborah Lynn Steinberg, for her academic support and advice throughout this project. Finally, and last but not least, I am endebted to Lilach Katz-Brennan for her encouragement and support in helping me see this project through to completion. Declaration I declare that the contents of this thesis are my own work and that no material contained in this thesis has been submitted for a degree at another university. Whilst no material contained in this thesis has been previously submitted for another degree, one of the publications listed below (Brennan, 2001a) — to which I refer in chapter 3 of this thesis — is a revised version of a dissertation submitted for the MA in Social and Political Thought at the University of Warwick (1998). The papers listed below have been published or presented during the period of study for this Ph.D: (2001a) ‘Some Sociological Contemplations on Daniel J Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”’, Theory, Culture & Society, 18 (4): 83–109. (2001b) ‘Towards a Sociology of (Public) Mourning?’, Sociology, 35 (1): 205–212. (2000a) ‘Explaining Diana’, book review for Cultural Studies, 14(3/4): 607–609. ‘Books of Condolence: Some Cultural Reflections on Condoling in the Popular Postmodern’, at the conference ‘Cultural Returns: Assessing the Place of Culture in Social Thought’, organised by the Pavis Centre at the Open University and held at St. Hugh’s College Oxford, UK, 18–20 September 2002. Abstract ‘Mourning Identities: Hillsborough, Diana and the Production of Meaning’ explores the meaning-making processes which contributed to the widespread public mourning that followed the Hillsborough stadium disaster of 1989 and the death of Princess Diana in 1997. It does so by the textual analysis of a sample of the public condolence books signed following these events and by drawing upon autobiographical stories related to each of them produced using the method known as ‘memory work’. Drawing upon a variety of theoretical frameworks, including psychoanalytic, post- structuralist and Bakhtinian influenced dialogics, it suggests that a range of social identities were ‘hailed’ and discursively mobilised in the public mourning events that followed the Hillsborough disaster and the death of Princess Diana. It further suggests that identification is an indispensable and precursory aspect of public mourning, which is summoned and given shape by epistolary and narrative practices of the self. Public mourning of the sort considered here is theorised along two principal lines: the iconic and the totemic. The former, it is argued, can be seen to relate to the largely feminine global structures of feeling through which the public mourning for Princess Diana were articulated, whilst the latter can be seen to relate to the largely masculine local structures of feeling through which the public mourning following the Hillsborough disaster were configured. In turn, it suggests that aspects of resistance to the public mourning following each of the events considered as case studies here can in themselves be considered as aspects of mourning, albeit for something other than the obvious referents of loss during these events. It further points to the situated social identity of the researcher as both instrumental not only to the motivation for, but to the outcomes of social research. Introduction INTRODUCTION Shifting Focus, Shifting Orientation It is a routine supervision meeting with my Ph.D supervisor Dr. Deborah Steinberg. It is early on in the history of my Ph.D research project and we discuss what the parameters of my research into the public mourning for the death of Princess Diana and following the death of Queen Victoria should be. As I sit in her office and listen to her talk discussion shifts to the similarities between the public mourning scenes that followed the death of Princess Diana and other contemporary events of an ostensibly similar type. She talks about the commemorative and mainly local responses that followed the Dunblane gun massacre in 1996 in which a class of primary school children were tragically killed by a lone gunman. She talks about the ‘expressivist’ public mourning that followed the Hillsborough stadium disaster of 1989 and the mainly local outpouring of grief which transformed the pitch at Liverpool’s Anfield stadium into a sea of flowers. At this point I become animated and engaged. In an instant I am lost in my own thoughts, captivated by the possibilities and questions which a consideration of the mourning after Hillsborough might invoke. I am reminded of the way in which I was, as a teenager, ‘hailed’ by the Hillsborough disaster: my own mortification on hearing the news; my compulsion to tie my beloved Sheffield Wednesday scarf to the ‘shrine’ that had quickly sprung up at the Leppings Lane entrance to my ‘home’ ground; my own morbid fascination with news footage and with collecting newspapers and articles about the disaster. It was here that my project underwent a fundamental shift; that my project ‘came to life’, for in this moment I knew with renewed conviction, vigour and clarity of thought what my project should be about. It was at this point that the project became my project; involving an event that ‘spoke’ personally to me, involved a part of me, and in which I was ‘involved’.