Abstract
In modern day Britain, the discourse of national heroification is routinely utilised by politicians, educationalists, and cultural industry professionals, whilst also being a popular concept to describe deserving ‘do-gooders’ who contribute to British society in a myriad of ways. We argue that although this heroification discourse is enacted as a discursive devise of encouraging politically and morally desirable behaviour, it is dissociated from the largely under-explored facets of contemporary popular heroism. To compensate for this gap, this paper explores public preferences for heroes using survey data representative of British adults. This analysis demonstrates a conceptual stretching in the understanding of heroism, and allows identifying age- and gender-linked dynamics which effect public choices of heroes. In particular, we demonstrate that age above all determines the preference for having a hero, but does not explain preferences for specific hero-types. The focus on gender illustrates that the landscape of popular heroism reproduces a male-dominated bias which exists in the wider political and cultural heroification discourse. Simultaneously, our study shows that if national heroificiation discourse in Britain remains male-centric, the landscape of popular heroism is characterised by a gendered trend towards privatisation of heroes being particularly prominent among women. In the conclusion, this paper argues for a conceptual revision and re-gendering of the national heroification discourse as a step towards both empirically grounded, and age- and gender sensitive politics of heroes and heroines.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 178-200 |
Number of pages | 23 |
Journal | British Politics |
Volume | 15 |
Early online date | 6 Mar 2019 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Jun 2020 |
Keywords
- heroism
- age
- gender
- political engagement
- Britain
- Political engagement
- Gender
- Heroism
- Age
- ROLE-MODELS
- RUN
- ATTITUDES
- WOMEN
- IMPACT
- LIVES
- MEN
- DIFFERENTIATION
- GENDER-DIFFERENCES
- PARTICIPATION