ABSTRACT
The nature of grief as the emotional response to the experience of loss has been the subject of considerable debate and discussion (Raphael 1983; Stroebe et al. 1993). However, the gendered nature of such a response has received relatively little attention. This chapter therefore begins to address some of the important issues relating to grief as a social construct shaped to a large extent by dominant gender expectations, rather than a ‘natural’ response to loss. Grief is presented as an emotion that needs to be understood in the context of mourning, defined as a socially constructed and codified set of expectations as to how a loss should normatively be dealt with.
