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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Key Concepts
- Sprache: Englisch
In this accessible and engagingly written book, Vanessa May invites readers into the rich world of thought, research and study of the highly diverse phenomenon of families and family life. The book explores what is and has been understood by ‘family’ in different sociocultural contexts and how family life intersects with social spheres such as the state, the labour market and the economy. Alongside broad social developments such as (post)colonialism and austerity and their connections with changing family patterns, the book engages interdisciplinary work on time, embodiment and materiality in order to offer a multidimensional perspective on the day-to-day lives of families. Drawing from research in the Global North and the Global South, the text carefully considers how people approach the study of families and thus offers insight into the shape of mainstream family studies today.
The book offers a timely intervention into current debates within family studies and suggests avenues of investigation that deserve further attention, and will be an invaluable resource to students and scholars alike.
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Seitenzahl: 370
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Families
Key Concepts Series
Barbara Adam, Time
Alan Aldridge, Consumption
Alan Aldridge, The Market
Jakob Arnoldi, Risk
Will Atkinson, Class 2nd edition
Colin Barnes and Geof Mercer, Disability
Darin Barney, The Network Society
Mildred Blaxter, Health 2nd edition
Harriet Bradley, Gender 2nd edition
Harry Brighouse, Justice
Mónica Brito Vieira and David Runciman, Representation
Steve Bruce, Fundamentalism 2nd edition
Joan Busfield, Mental Illness
Damien Cahill and Martijn Konings, Neoliberalism
Margaret Canovan, The People
Andrew Jason Cohen, Toleration
Alejandro Colás, Empire
Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality 2nd edition
Mary Daly, Welfare
Muriel Darmon, Socialization
Anthony Elliott, Concepts of the Self 4th edition
Steve Fenton, Ethnicity 2nd edition
Katrin Flikschuh, Freedom
Michael Freeman, Human Rights 4th edition
Russell Hardin, Trust
Geoffrey Ingham, Capitalism
Fred Inglis, Culture
Robert H. Jackson, Sovereignty
Jennifer Jackson Preece, Minority Rights
Gill Jones, Youth
Paul Kelly, Liberalism
Vanessa May, Families
Anne Mette Kjær, Governance
Ruth Lister, Poverty 2nd edition
Jon Mandle, Global Justice
Cillian McBride, Recognition
Marius S. Ostrowski, Ideology
Anthony Payne and Nicola Phillips, Development
Judith Phillips, Care
Chris Phillipson, Ageing
Robert Reiner, Crime
Michael Saward, Democracy
William E. Scheuerman, Civil Disobedience
John Scott, Power
Timothy J. Sinclair, Global Governance
Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism 2nd edition
Joonmo Son, Social Capital
Deborah Stevenson, The City
Leslie Paul Thiele, Sustainability 2nd edition
Steven Peter Vallas, Work
Stuart White, Equality
Michael Wyness, Childhood
Families
Vanessa May
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Vanessa May 2024
The right of Vanessa May to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1842-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1843-2(pb)
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Dedication
In memory of Roona Simpson, dear friend and fellow feminist
Acknowledgements
The writing of this book has in many direct and indirect ways been shaped by my most immediate work context, the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives at the University of Manchester. The work of many of my Morgan Centre colleagues feature on the pages of this book: the late David Morgan himself, much missed by everyone in the Morgan Centre, as well as Alice Bloch, Katherine Davies, Janet Finch, Leah Gilman, Sarah Marie Hall, Brian Heaphy, Sue Heath, Steve Hicks, Jennifer Mason, Petra Nordqvist, Carol Smart and Sophie Woodward. Thank you to all Morganites for all the fun, support and inspiration over the years.
I am also grateful to my colleagues at the Department of Sociology at Manchester who have been instrumental in expanding my sociological horizons. Their work ranges across many fields and I have benefited immensely from being part of such a vibrant and supportive research environment. Their names are too many to list, but the fascinating research conducted by my Sociology colleagues has encouraged me to interrogate my own topics of interest and ways of looking at the world. This no doubt has contributed to the exercise of ‘looking obliquely’ that I undertake in this book.
Another important source of inspiration is the work of my dear friend Kinneret Lahad, whose influence on my writing is immeasurable. Kinneret has her own unique way of asking novel questions about old problems. Whenever I have felt stuck while writing this book I have tried to emulate Kinneret’s creative knack for finding alternative ways of looking at a seemingly familiar topic.
This work was supported by funding through the Research Group on Migration, Care and Ageing, which is part of the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in Ageing and Care (CoE AgeCare) (grants #312310 and #336669). I want to thank the Director of the Centre, Teppo Kröger, for his kindness and support. The Centre co-Director Sirpa Wrede has been a dear colleague and friend of mine since we were young(ish) PhD students. Sirpa and her research group at the University of Helsinki offered me an intellectual home-away-from-home during my many visits for which I am very grateful. I am sure that my ‘huippis’ colleagues will recognize the influence that our collaboration has had on my thinking about families.
I am very grateful to Jonathan Skerrett at Polity, who originally approached me to write this book. I am indebted to Karina Jákupsdóttir, who had the unenviable task of acting as the book’s editor and whose patience was no doubt severely tested over the many delays this project encountered. I want to thank Karina for her endless kindness and support in helping me row this project to land. Thank you also to the four anonymous reviewers of this book whose encouragement and insightful comments were so helpful at the final stage of completing the manuscript.
It is only fitting that in a book on families I say a few words about my own given and chosen family. The love, sisterhood and friendship I share with Shelley Budgeon, Kinneret Lahad and Sirpa Wrede is a vital source that enriches my life beyond measure. My ‘blood’ family – Tony, Patrick, Minni, Franny and Seb – is small but all the more intense. I am sorry to have missed out on so much due to international travel restriction during the Covid-19 pandemic. In complete contrast, Mark and I more or less constituted each other’s entire social life through numerous lockdowns. One form of entertainment was to come up with an ever-growing list of pet names for our cat. Mewbacca is the glue that holds us together. No but seriously, Mark, thank you.
This book is dedicated to the memory of my dear friend Roona Simpson, who passed away in 2017 in the early stages of writing this book (this will give the reader an indication of just how patient Karina has had to be!). Roona, I miss you. I miss your sense of curiosity and fun, your political passion and strong sense of justice, your vivacity and sharp mind, the sound of your voice and your boundless energy. I so wish I could still talk to you on the phone every week. We would no doubt have chatted about this book. And so much else besides.
1Introduction
Introduction
Key Concepts: Families explores how family scholars have approached the study of ‘family’ as a social institution. Convention dictates that a book such as this begins with a definition of the topic at hand. For many readers in Euro-American societies, the word ‘family’ probably conjures up the image of one or two parents and their biological child(ren). Some might include grandparents in this picture. While at first glance, defining family might seem a fairly straightforward task, by the end of this book I hope the reader will have gained insight into how complex family lives are and how difficult it is to try to pin down this dynamic and multidimensional social phenomenon. Attempts to define ‘family’ in terms of composition are beset with problems because definitions of which constellation of relationships constitutes ‘family’ vary across cultures and over time. I am therefore interested in exploring how ‘family’ has been defined by ‘lay’ people as well as by academics and policymakers, and with which consequences. As such, the aim of this book is to advance critical scholarship within family studies.
My discussions span families across the globe and engage with scholarly work from the Global North and the Global South. A brief note on terminology is necessary at the outset: I use ‘Western’ when I am talking about culture; I refer to Global North and Global South when talking broadly about geographical regions; and I use the term ‘Euro-American family studies’ to signal the fact that family studies is a field dominated by perspectives originating from Europe and North America.
Sociology of attention
This book appears in a series called Key Concepts. I approach the task of providing an overview of the key concepts in family studies by focusing on the act of conceptualizing ‘family’. This means trying to understand how family scholars have conceptualized ‘family’, why they have done so and which dimensions of family life they have noticed, as well as what the consequences of such decisions are for the kind of knowledge that is produced about family life. I do this with the help of Zerubavel’s (2015) sociology of attention that asks just such questions. Zerubavel (2015: 2) defines attention as the ‘mental act of focusing’ and ‘narrowing of our conscious awareness’. Paying attention to something means selectively focusing on specific features while filtering out other details that are not considered pertinent. In other words, some features come to the fore of our consciousness and others fall to the background. As a result, we come to view the world as made up of ‘seemingly discrete, freestanding entities that are somehow separable from their surroundings’ (p. 8). But Zerubavel reminds us that the contours and boundaries that we perceive to exist are the result of how we look at social phenomena, and that changing our conceptual lenses leads to a shift in what we see. In this book, I am interested in exploring what family scholars do and do not see and notice when they study families, and what could be seen, or seen differently, if we used different attentional foci.
What we do and do not notice is not merely down to individual choice. This is because, when making sense of the world around us, we make use of an ‘often-shared and therefore ultimately collective sense of relevance and concern’, meaning that we ‘notice and ignore things not only as individuals but also jointly, as parts of collectives’ (Zerubavel, 2015: 9). Members of ‘attentional communities’ share ‘attentional traditions’ and ‘attentional habits’, which in turn help shape what they ‘regard as relevant and to which [they] therefore attend’ (p. 52). These attentional traditions and habits are ones that we pick up through a process of ‘attentional socialization’ (p. 63) during which we learn what to focus on and what not to attend to.
Explaining the relationship between individual minds and sociocultural context is the bread and butter of the social sciences. There exist many theoretical approaches devoted to explaining how people’s thoughts and actions come to be shaped by their relational, social and cultural context, but also how people’s actions contribute to changing conventional ways of thinking and doing (May, 2013). A person will come into contact with a number of attentional communities through their lifetime, including the (sub-)cultures they are born into and the attentional communities they join that cohere around, for example, a particular occupation or interest. Each scientific discipline also has its own attentional conventions. Sociologists, for example, are trained to ‘envision social movements, labor markets, power structures, influence networks, and kinship ties’ (Zerubavel, 2015: 68). Members of an attentional community experience a sense of ‘attentional “togetherness”’ that derives from their ‘collective focus of attention’ that in turn ‘presupposes a shared sense of relevance’ (p. 69). That which falls inside this frame of attention is deemed ‘remarkable (and thus noteworthy)’, while that which falls outside the frame is classified as ‘unnoteworthy’ (p. 22) and is ‘thereby tacitly ignored’ (p. 27).
Members of an attentional community in other words have a shared, usually tacit, understanding of what is worthy of attention and what ‘ought to remain in the background’ (Zerubavel, 2015: 59). As a result, they are ‘perceptually readied’ to notice those features of social reality that ‘reflect [their] collective expectations’ (p. 53). Family scholars for example are trained to notice and foreground specific features of family life, such as relationships between parents and children or family practices in the home. Other features, such as relationships with extended kin and what happens when family members step outside the home, are relegated to the background. According to Zerubavel, features of social life that are foregrounded gain a ‘thing-like quality’ (p. 12) while backgrounded features are seen as ‘shapeless’ and ‘lacking a well-delineated contour’ (p. 14).
In addition to shedding light on attentional conventions in family studies, this book is written as an extended exercise in ‘looking obliquely’ that aims to transcend conventional ways of seeing ‘family’. This entails looking at family through substantive and conceptual lenses that are not usually used in the family studies literature. I wish to enliven family studies by encouraging family scholars to consciously notice the attentional boundaries they adopt and to pay more attention to dimensions of life that are perhaps less obviously about ‘family’, but that nevertheless fundamentally shape how people (family scholars included) think about and ‘do’ families. This exercise in looking obliquely is inspired by Brekhus’s (1998) work on reverse marking by which he means a process of consciously foregrounding features of social life that have hitherto been relegated to the background. Reverse marking is made possible through a ‘nomadic perspective’ which ‘entails shifting to several different analytic vantage points from which to view something’ (p. 47).
Mason’s (2011b) facet methodology helps explicate what reverse marking means in terms of how we as social scientists produce knowledge about the social world. Mason argues that because of the dynamic and multifaceted nature of social phenomena, they can never be grasped in their totality. Mason compares the social phenomena that social scientists study, such as family life, to a gemstone. Social scientific analysis sheds light on particular facets of the gemstone with the help of concepts and methods of investigation. In this scenario, concepts and methods act like lenses; different lenses will refract a different kind of light on the phenomenon that is being studied; and how this light is refracted back to the observer depends on which facet of the phenomenon is being looked at. In other words, as noted above, how we look affects what we see. Mason encourages researchers to adopt a sense of openness and playfulness that opens up the possibility that we are surprised by the social worlds we study, as opposed to finding more or less what we expect. The approach taken in this book is open in two ways: open to questioning the conventional boundaries that are placed around what ‘family’ is and open to exploring how different disciplinary approaches and theories can shed new light on families.
Looking obliquely is partly about reverse marking, in that it is about looking at family life through different analytical vantage points in order to bring into relief that which conventional attentional foci have not attended to. But looking obliquely is also something more, namely making new connections between dimensions of life that are usually not seen as connected. This is what Sousanis (2015: 37) calls ‘stereoscopic vision’ that results when we interweave ‘multiple strands of thought’ so as to create a ‘richly dimensional tapestry’. In the resultant tapestry: ‘Distinct viewpoints still remain, now no longer isolated, each informing the other in iterative fashion viewed as integral to the whole. In this new integrated landscape lies the potential for a more comprehensive understanding’ (Sousanis, 2015: 37, emphases added).
I build such stereoscopic vision by bringing into dialogue work that features families across a range of social science disciplines, including sociology, social anthropology, human geography and urban studies. Each of these has its own attentional traditions that foreground slightly different features of family life. Returning to Mason’s (2011b) terminology of facet methodology, this can be understood as each discipline offering a way of looking at a different facet of ‘family’. Bringing different facets together in a strategic manner allows for fresh perspective on family life.
Postcolonial and decolonial thought
While this book is rooted in and for the most part discusses Euro-American family scholarship, I also engage with postcolonial and decolonial thought as a further way of bringing to view its Eurocentric boundaries of attention. I draw three insights from this body of work (see e.g. Bhambra, 2007; Meghji, 2020; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018; Smith, 1999; Subrahmanyam, 1997; Young, 2016). First, postcolonial and decolonial theorists have brought to light that the wealth of the Global North was built on the forcible extraction of resources and people from the colonized countries in the Global South, which created unequal social and economic conditions that persist. Second, postcolonial and decolonial thinkers have drawn attention to the fact that the emergence of the social sciences coincided with and was intimately tied to colonialism. Social scientific methods used to classify, measure and compare populations and economies were tested and developed in the colonies. These methods were in other words useful tools in extracting resources from and governing the colonies. Social scientific theories were also used to justify the subjugation of indigenous peoples, and it was in conjunction with colonialism that theories of biological ‘race’ emerged. As the discussions in this book show, notions of hierarchical differences between different social groups, defined in terms of social scientific categories of ethnicity, ‘race’ or class, have underpinned how families have been and continue to be policed and governed by a variety of state institutions. Third, postcolonial and decolonial theorists raise awareness of the cultural contingency of core social scientific concepts and methods that have been thought of as ‘universal’. It is this third point that I now go on to unpack, drawing particular inspiration from Bhambra’s postcolonial work.
Similar to feminists who have highlighted the ways in which traditional knowledge production was mainly done by and for men, leaving women’s experiences marginalized if visible at all, Bhambra (2007) lays bare the entwined history of colonialism and the social sciences. Colonialism did not simply mean taking over the rule of colonized countries but was also reflected in whose knowledge came to be valued and presented as ‘scientific’ (see also Smith, 1999). Social scientific knowledge, which served the needs of the colonial powers, gained authority, while other forms of knowledge, such as the knowledge systems of indigenous peoples, came to be marginalized. Postcolonial and decolonial theorists challenge this hierarchy and explicate the relationship between knowledge and politics. The knowledge systems of the colonial powers have come to dominate globally, with wide-ranging consequences that tend to disadvantage indigenous and racialized communities.
A postcolonial approach to theorizing thus entails questioning the very basis of social scientific thought (Bhambra, 2007). In this spirit, I engage with postcolonial and decolonial work on families as a way of highlighting the Eurocentric attentional foci of family studies as worthy of analytical attention. What Euro-American family scholars focus on and what they deem worthy of debate are rooted in a Western outlook on families. One such concern relates to the separation between the private sphere of home and the public sphere of work, commerce and politics which emerged in European countries in the wake of industrialization. This distinction underpins Western understandings of family life as mainly sequestered in the private sphere that is seen to exist as separate from the external world. This in turn is reflected in the fact that family scholars tend to be interested in what happens to families in the private sphere of the home.
The influence of postcolonial and decolonial thought is also visible in my effort to discuss, in a meaningful way, family life in global perspective. This means not just describing family diversity across the globe through the lens of established Western sociological thought, a practice that ends up describing ‘other’ societies as ‘apart from the world, or as a failed and incomplete example of something else’ (Mbembe and Nuttall, 2004: 348, 351). Instead, I aim to describe the embeddedness of different parts of the world in the same global system, as encouraged by Subrahmanyam (1997) and Bhambra (2014) who critique the commonly accepted narrative of the Global South and the Global North as having separate histories. In a similar vein, Burawoy (2016) warns scholars against creating a false dichotomy between the Global South and the Global North because these are so deeply entangled in each other. What I take from these warnings against creating dichotomies is that it is important to understand families in any country as affected by global processes past and present and to engage in scholarship from the both the Global South and the Global North in trying to understand the ways in which the histories of the former colonies and the former metropole countries are implicated in each other. For example, I explore the legacies of colonialism in the ‘othering’ and policing of marginalized families that occurs both in the former metropole countries and in the former colonies.
Having said that, this does nevertheless remain a book written by a sociologist in the Global North who was trained in and works within the Western knowledge tradition. For example, although trying to be as genuinely global in outlook as possible, my main focus remains on scholarly debates concerning family in the Global North. But I do so with an awareness of the Eurocentrism of mainstream family studies and, where possible, I try to question the implicit assumption that the characteristics of Euro-American family life or the concerns of Euro-American scholars are universal. Take for example the way in which Western understandings of LGBT+ identities and family lives are often regarded as the unquestioned reference point against which other cultures are compared. Consequently, and fundamentally, other ways of being LGBT+ remain obscured. As Jacob (2013) points out, a postcolonial approach means more than being geographically inclusive – it also means questioning the presuppositions embedded in the analytical categories used. When it comes to family studies, this entails not merely examining family life cross-culturally, but also a more profound questioning of how family is theorized and what family scholars look at, and an attentiveness to the fact that these attentional conventions originate from particular sociocultural contexts.
Example: The Eurocentric boundaries of attention of the individualization thesis
I illustrate the points raised above by exploring, through a postcolonial lens, the boundaries of attention of the individualization thesis. This theoretical approach was influential within family studies in the 1990s and early 2000s, particularly in Europe. Bhambra (2014) has noted that central to the social sciences is an understanding that societies undergo a stadial development, such as the shift from the ‘traditional’ societies of pre-industrial times, to ‘modern’ societies characterized by urbanization and industrialization, to ‘late modern’, post-industrial societies. This stadial view of societies is present also in family studies, and nowhere more clearly than in the individualization thesis which posits that family life in late modern societies represents a break from ‘traditional’ family forms (e.g. Giddens, 1992; Beck, 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995). Late modernity is argued to be characterized by the weakening of traditional institutions such as marriage and a consequent ‘disembedding’ of individuals from traditional roles and mores. Giddens (1992) famously captured this in his concept of the ‘pure relationship’ that is inherently short-lived because couple relationships are no longer bound by the normative constraints of old, such as the belief that marriages should be for life.
While it is impossible to definitively prove or disprove the grand theorizing of the individualization thesis, there is now enough empirical evidence to demonstrate its flaws. Research has shown that people’s lives are not as disembedded from conventional ways of living as claimed by the individualization thesis (Smart, 2007). For example, research on divorce, step-parenting and friendship has debunked the notion of relationships that are easy to end (e.g. Smart and Neale, 1999; Smart et al., 2012; Smart et al., 2001; Ribbens McCarthy et al., 2003). The debate around individualization shaped the research agendas of European family scholarship. For example, according to Gabb and Fink (2015), the dominance of the individualization thesis has meant that enduring relationships became sociologically uninteresting. As a result, we know very little about these relationships, which is odd given that the majority of relationships do endure.
But it is also instructive to examine and critique the individualization thesis through a postcolonial lens. As noted above, Euro-American social sciences have embraced the narrative of the stage-wise development of societies which depicts advanced industrialized nations as representing ‘progress’, while countries in the Global South have come to be viewed as less developed (Bhambra, 2007; Burawoy, 2016). This dichotomy is implicit in the individualization thesis which argues that the most advanced societies exhibit higher degrees of individualization. In doing so, it unwittingly cements a Eurocentric view which locates ‘progress’ in the Global North from where it spreads to other parts of the world. For example, Giddens’s (1992) work on intimacy in advanced industrialized countries can be read as a narrative of progress towards increased freedoms and greater ‘plasticity’ of identity and relationships. Although both Giddens’s and Beck’s work was embedded in 1990s debates concerning the impact of globalization on societies and individuals, the person presented by the individualization thesis is implicitly Western. Furthermore, the individualization thesis rarely considers the individualized self in light of global inequalities or of the relative privileges, for example of choice and mobility, afforded to (male, white) individuals in the Global North. And yet, during the lengthy and extensive debate that has surrounded this thesis, few family scholars have noticed or commented on the fact that it is underpinned by and lends further credence to a Western knowledge tradition that dominates academia across the globe.
My argument in this book is that it is time for mainstream Euro-American family scholarship to take seriously the challenge that postcolonial and decolonial thought poses to ‘business as usual’ within the social sciences.
The structure of the book
Key Concepts: Families offers both students and scholars an overview of the most important theoretical developments in the field to date; an understanding of family as a social institution that is connected to the world around it; discussions about some key issues shaping contemporary families such as shifts in social norms and technological developments; as well as suggestions for new avenues of study. Each of the chapters investigates family life through a different lens. These lenses help us slice through the phenomenon that is ‘family’, each slice producing a somewhat different picture of what family is, how it is done, by whom and with what consequences at both the individual and social level (see Mason, 2011b).
The first half of the book (Chapters 2 to 4) examines how ‘family’ has been defined, conceptualized and governed across the globe. Family is a social institution that is found in every society. Its global significance is reflected in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948. Article 16 of the declaration defines family as ‘the natural and fundamental group unit of society’ that is ‘entitled to protection by society and the State’ and refers to each person’s ‘right to marry and to found a family’ (UN, n.d.). The preamble of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child from 1989 states that ‘the full and harmonious development’ of children requires that they ‘grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding’ and Article 8 declares that every child has the right to preserve her or his family relations (UN, 1989). Across the globe, family is understood to be made up of blood and affinal ties. Yet what exactly family means and what families look like vary across cultures. Chapter 2 sets the scene for the rest of the book by describing cross-cultural variation in family formations. This is important because Euro-American family studies, which dominates the field, tends to focus on the Global North, meaning that less is known about families in the Global South (Smith, 2006). The aim of Chapter 2 is thus to sensitize the reader to the fact that ‘family’ is an institution that takes many forms and is constantly evolving.
Chapter 3 presents an overview of the state of the field of Euro-American family studies. Inspired by Zerubavel’s (2015) sociology of attention, I explore Euro-American family studies as an attentional community that holds collective understandings about what family is and what is worthy of study. Like everyone, Euro-American family scholars will derive some fundamental notions of what family is from their culture, and even though social scientists are trained to be aware of their own cultural assumptions, we can never fully escape them. I discuss four features of family life that Euro-American family scholars are perceptually readied to notice as well as theoretical approaches that have challenged the assumptions that underpin these attentional conventions: (1) attempts to define ‘the family’ versus an emphasis on family diversity; (2) viewing ‘family’ is a thing that exists in and of itself versus understanding ‘family’ is something that emerges when people ‘do’ family; (3) thinking of relatedness as rooted in biology versus as something that requires work to be brought into being; and (4) assuming that family relationships are central versus not giving family relationships a priori significance. I end the chapter by illustrating how these various attentional boundaries have played out in the study of the family lives of LGBT+ individuals.
Chapter 4 questions the boundary that in Western cultures is drawn between the public and the private spheres. It aims to reverse mark the common understanding that family is a private matter by examining the ways in which families have been policed and governed by state institutions. I begin with an historical overview of how particular types of family became the targets of state intervention in Europe and in the colonies. I then move on to discuss how idealized notions of ‘family’ are mobilized in various nationalistic projects, particularly those that are focused on the size, health and composition of the population. The chapter ends with a discussion of how families are governed within modern welfare states where an important consideration is the economic productivity of the nation. Throughout, the chapter aims to depict family lives as shaped by broader forces such as colonialism, neoliberalism and globalization, as reflected in the legacies of colonization and slavery, classed inequalities in family life and the impact of austerity measures.
The second half of the book (Chapters 5–7) is concerned with family life as it is lived in the everyday. Each chapter slices through the phenomenon of ‘family’ with the help of a distinctive conceptual lens that aims to brings to the fore fresh insight into family life. Chapter 5 explores the embodied and material dimensions of family relationships, which are among the lesser studied aspects of family life. Not only do family practices involve co-presence and material objects, but these can be seen as constitutive of family relationships. I engage with two theoretical approaches as a way of bringing to the fore fresh perspectives on embodiment and materiality in family life. At the macro scale, work by social practice theorists helps embed embodiment and materiality, seemingly micro dimensions of family life, in their broader contexts. At the micro scale, Mason’s (2018) work brings out the intangible aspects of embodied and material affinities as a way of conceptualizing the potency of the connections that matter to people.
One attentional tradition among family scholars is to locate family life as mainly taking place in the domestic sphere of the home. Chapter 6 widens our view by exploring families through the lenses of space and mobility. I begin by examining the history of the commonly held view that family equates with home and the gendered distinction that is drawn in Western cultures between the supposedly ‘female’ private sphere of the home and the ‘male’ public sphere of work, economy and politics, as well as how these are reflected in the general view of family life as centred in the home and in the architecture of housing. The chapter also reverse marks another attentional convention among family scholars, namely their tendency to offer sedentary accounts of family life. I argue that that there is more that family scholars can do in terms of attending to movement in and out of the home. Furthermore, I propose that by engaging in dialogue with urban studies, it is possible to gain new insight into the significance that interactions with strangers and acquaintances and activities in public spaces hold for family life.
Embodiment, materiality, space and mobility are largely studied as tangible features of family life. Chapter 7 reverse marks this attentional boundary by exploring the temporal dimensions of family life, which are to a large extent intangible. While various temporal dimensions of family life have gained considerable attention in family studies, these are rarely considered in a holistic fashion. This chapter brings together different temporal frameworks from the organization of daily life to transitions between life stages; different ways of understanding time, as a measurable resource and as relational; and differently valued times, from ‘quality time’ to mundane time that is seen as less valuable to the quality of family relationships. Each dimension of time has normative expectations attached to it in terms of what family members should do when, how often and for how long. Throughout, my interest lies in considering the attentional foci of family scholars, that is, how family scholars have approached the study of the temporality of family life and the consequences of these choices for how they have understood families.
In sum, the chapters in this book approach families both from the perspective of how families are conceptualized by scholars and how families are done in day-to-day life. Within each of the conceptual slices that I use to study the phenomenon that is ‘family’, numerous topics relating to family life will be covered. The book explores different types of family (for example, nuclear families, lone-parent families and LGBT+ families), as well as different notions of kinship and relatedness across the globe. Family life is also investigated from the point of view of different positions within families, such as that of parent, child, grandparent or sibling. Classic sociological topics of investigation, including gender, sexuality, social class and ethnicity, and how these shape people’s experiences of ‘family’, are considered throughout. I use empirical examples that are drawn from a range of literatures that focus not only on families but also on, for example, material culture, housing, urban studies and consumption. In terms of scale, the discussions in this book range from global economic policy to national family policy to day-to-day family life, which further helps to trouble the boundary that is conventionally drawn between the private sphere of the home and the public spheres of economy and politics. Throughout, families are understood as a living part of society, meaning that social transformations inevitably impact how families are thought and done, but also that changes in how people lead their family lives contribute to social transformations.
