Introduction

In the previous chapter I focused on how the women featured experience and narratively construct belonging and non-belonging to Spain and the complex relationships they have with place(s), highlighting that such associations can be imagined and pragmatic, shaped by social ‘locations’, and also contingent on experiences and intentions, or the end point of plot movement (Bakhtin, 1981). In this chapter, the core theme is networks and their connection with spatial, temporal and social locations. I explore how geographical location – where one is from and where one is located – is significant in shaping belonging to networks and how women's networks in the Costa Blanca are also influenced by and reflect their class, age, ethnic and gender positionalities. These retired British women, living in tourist spaces reinforce some of the negative media representations that O’Reilly (2000a) and Oliver (2008) dispel, since they do not integrate with their hosts or attempt to speak Spanish and their consumption habits are typically British and orientated to the past. In Chapter Three I described migration as spanning boundaries and argued that women also reconstituted boundaries once they arrived in Spain. Boundaries are particularly apparent in relation to the kinds of networks in which women engage and how they construct these through their narratives.

This chapter begins with a description of women's ‘social scene’ in the Costa Blanca and presents a discussion of how women with partners and lone women engage in social contact. This is followed by an examination of how married women differently experience and manage the increased amount of time spent with their husbands in retirement. I then present the Silver Ladies club as an example of a gendered social network and lifestyle-based gathering, translocating with class, ethnicity and age. The role of language as constructing and reflecting women's experiences is then considered in relation to social locations and constructions and reflections of Englishness as an ethnic positionality.