The Sociable Body

Abstract

This chapter examines the bodily basis of masculine belonging and sociability in the particular environment of the fire service. It achieves this by exploring the geography of men’s everyday working lives, with a particular focus on their embodied movement between different areas of the fire station and the outside world. Although women are employed as firefighters, they were not members of the watch we worked with. That said, women’s bodies were evoked in within our data in ways which reveal the particular gendering of the men’s bodies we discuss here. Similarly, while the chapter focuses on occupationally based identity, data also speak to men’s domestic lives, showing how each domain shapes and, indeed, intersects with the other; for example, the four days between tours is often used to pursue ‘fiddle jobs’ which involve skills such as building, plastering and car repair work. Rather than being simply an additional, external occupation, expertise built up in these jobs can be reintegrated into the fire service as men trade favours, helping one another out with DIY projects in the home. Connections between these apparently separate domains of work, sociability and domestic life are therefore evident in the data we consider here.