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Princess Diana's meanings for women: results of a focus group study

Anthropology and Sociology University of Queensland

Philip Smith

Anthropology and Sociology University of Queensland

The death of Princess Diana set in train a series of official and popular responses which are broadly consistent with Durkheimian ideas of civic ritual. Mass media accounts of Princess Diana's purportedly extraordinary appeal are speculative, lack methodological foundation, and fail to give adequate consideration to potential variability in responses to her life and death. In order to explore popular understandings of Diana, focus groups were conducted in Australia with Anglo-Celtic women of different ages within three weeks of her death and funeral. The women professed a diversity of orientations and experiences towards Diana. Significant barriers to identification with Diana included a wealth gap between her and the participants in the study, the routine nature of charity work and suffering for many ordinary people, the irresponsible circumstances of her death and reflexivity about the media as a source of information. Sources of identification included her physical and character attributes, the mothering role and the universal tragedy of death. There was no support in the transcripts for the view that women identified with Diana as a feminist heroine. Caution is expressed about both the generalisability of the results of the study to other groups of women and also the comparability of the study with data collected at other points in time.

Journal of Sociology, Vol. 35, No. 3, 263-278 (1999)
DOI: 10.1177/144078339903500301


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