Cultural Representations of Widowhood: Social Media and the Declaration of a Status

The lens of widowhood research has moved from a focus on role loss to challenge dominant public narratives of misery and decline, pointing instead to a complexity of experience rooted in personal biography and in gendered life courses.  Cultural gerontology promotes further enquiry outside mainstream sources of scholarly knowledge in the social sciences, to reveal an even more complex and varied picture.  Theatre and film have emerged in some cultural contexts as powerful tools to inform and emancipate widowed women from degrading widowhood rituals and norms. In addition, the rise of social media, with blogs, websites and interactive messaging, has transformed public representations of widowhood. While older women in particular have traditionally had access to a reference groups of widowed age peers, the defining quality of those interactions is different from the new world of social media.  As with structured ‘widow support groups’ in the past, interaction begins amongst strangers, brought together in structured situations through the widowhood status they have in common.  Through social media,  contact begins more anonymously (visiting websites, reading blogs) or highly publicly (creating a website, authoring a blog, filming an online video) and then may lead to interactions and connections beyond one’s local community – through ‘widow conferences’ and meetings, with some becoming sustained interactions. In historical context, one thus sees, over the period of about 75 years, cultural shifts from the public ‘wearing’ of one’s widowhood (‘widow’s weeds’ and other aspects of dress and appearance) – that ended by the 1930s;  to the subsequent ‘invisibility’ and denying of widowhood and bereavement for some decades; to use of social media as a declaration or even reifying of  widowhood, especially amongst younger women, those for whom widowhood is off-time, or for those experiencing dis-enfranchised grief.