Sistering: Power and Change in Female Relationships

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Summary: Between celebration and lament , a new view of sistering
Review: It is not that often that academics uncover a whole new area of research, and more rarely still do they show us it was right under our noses. Melanie Mauthner, whose study of sistering relationships is both scrupulous and passionate, does just that.
Despite some fashionable representations of sisters in the media, despite the rhetorical use of 'Sisterhood' as a symbol in feminism, research and theorising about actual instances of this family tie have been scarce. The strength of Mauthner's approach is that she doesn't conceive of sistering as a purely 'family tie'. Rather than boxing her subjects into tired Freudian patterns of sibling rivalry, she deploys a range of theoretical approaches, both sociological and literary, to open up the concept of sistering and render it radically dynamic. Much of her analysis is a transposition of sociological studies of 'friendship' onto the kinship tie. It is a liberating move, for it reveals how much sistering can be a matter of altering and going beyond inherited family structures. Not that this is always the case. This is an honest book, based on 37 interviews with sisters of varying backgrounds, not all of whom have close or 'sisterly' feelings for each other (though many do.) A key question raised by the study is precisely how the degree of closeness or distance between sisters affects the power-balance, the happiness and above all the dynamism of their relationships. Broadly speaking, it was the closer relationhips that were the least 'entangling', the least rigid, whereas distant sisters were far more likely to remain in fixed postions determined by traditional family roles - eg, the big sister as surrogate mother. Any woman reading this who has sisters will be drawn into a kind of 'mapping' game, trying to work out where she would figure in the patterns the book reveals. One hopes there is more to come. Mauthner is clear about the focus and limit of her study, but one can easily imagine an expansion of it into questions of sistering and class, sistering within racial and cultural identity. One hopes that she and other academics will expand on the new body of knowledge created here.
Currently in hardback, "Sistering" balances analysis with "slices of life" from the anonymous interviews. The latter make utterly addictive reading, almost as of one has come across a soap opera that is real and thorny, rather than manufactured to appeal. Perhaps I have yet to suppress my Inner Gossip, but I can't help wishing that a paperback version might cater to it, and present the interviews in full.

For it is above all a moving book. Mauthner identifies a hidden 'economy' of caring and nurture, 'emotional work' that is necessary for survival in hard times, and which one cannot simplify either as 'reward in itself' or 'unpaid, unrecognised labour'. It is both, and you find yourself caught between celebration and lament.