Deborah Chambers - A Sociology of Family Life

Trends in western societies indicate that couples no longer feel bound by duty to marry before they have sex. They can decide these steps between themselves, as active agents, if and when they agree to. Giddens claims that this frees up the opportunity for a ‘pure relationship’ between the couple, a relationship in which men and women become equals. Individuals now expect more from intimate relationships and are much more prepared to divorce or move on to the next relationship if either party feels trapped or no longer feels fulfilled. This trend corresponds with a detraditionalization of intimacy. The claim, then, is that, today, intimate relationships are more likely to be egalitarian and fluid, more temporary and short-lived, and yet also more intense. Giddens argues that expectations of a lifelong conjugal relationship, with wife as homemaker and husband as breadwinner, have disappeared.

Individualization and detraditionalization were advanced in the 1990s within ‘late modern’ social theory and remain influential concepts within explanations of contemporary changes in social and personal relationships. This current period of ‘late modernity’ is distinguished from an earlier period of ‘modernity’, up to around the mid twentieth century. Late modernity is viewed as a later phase of modernity, rather than a break from it, in the sense of ‘post-modern society’. Claims of transformation in intimacy are important because they describe the changing condition of western societies in late capitalism characterized by the erosion of tradition and social hierarchy. Extended kinship ties and tight communities are overshadowed by looser and more fragmented social ties. These broader social changes are said to have had dramatic effects on personal and family life. However, the concepts of individualization and detraditionalization are ethnocentric. They do not reflect or account for family life experiences among minority ethnic groups or reflect trends in non-western contexts, as the following chapters show.

Subsequent ways of approaching intimacy and sexuality in present-day family relationships were advanced by authors such as Lynn Jamieson (1998) and Neil Gross (2005). These authors represent a group of British and American academics who have engaged critically with the idea of individualization . Jamieson and Gross questioned the emphasis of the pure relationship in self-obsessed individualism. It disregards the importance of caregiving and the mutual exchange of care and support in families. The idea of the pure relationship undermines the significance of the everyday commitments and caring roles involved in family life, especially in parent–child relationships. A recurring theme of research findings outlined in the following chapters is the strength and durability of family and intimate ties. While personal relationships are clearly changing and adjusting to rising expectations of equality and intimacy in relationships, a compelling body of evidence indicates that commitment and reciprocity remain remarkably buoyant in terms of care for children and older relatives.

The second question is framed by assumptions that today’s intimate relationships are more equal than they were in the past. These assumptions have been interrogated by scholars. Discussions about ‘parenting’ and caring for elderly relatives often obscure the highly gendered nature of caring. Most of the caring work that occurs in families is still placed on women’s shoulders. This issue has been accented by feminist approaches to family forms and meanings, as explored in depth in chapter 3on parenting. Intimate relationships between men and women, and children and parents, tend to be asymmetrical , structured by gender and generational relations of power. Thus, while addressing contemporary changes in intimacy and family relations, authors such as Jamieson have drawn attention to inequalities of gender and age that continue to structure family relationships. A further important theme that characterizes this book, then, is the continuing reproduction of unequal gendered power relations that shape families, which challenges assertions of a ‘democratization’ of intimacy. Changes in parenting values and practices have coincided with women’s rising educational levels and employment, control of fertility, divorce, changing employment patterns for men, and the decline of the ‘breadwinner’ ideal of the husband as the sole earner (see chapter 3).

Debates about changing parenting practices and values indicate that mothers tend to take responsibility for the day-to-day caring for children, despite attempts by governments to encourage fathers to become more involved in family life. The continuing gender imbalance in the home is exacerbated by lack of childcare facilities for working parents in countries such as the USA and UK. Women are still expected to sacrifice employment prospects for children, rather than sharing the responsibilities with male partners. This burden has been amplified and exposed during the Covid-19 pandemic, when children have been home-schooled (Petts et al. 2020). While responses to the pandemic have caused high levels of unemployment disproportionately affecting women and the poor, attempts to shape family life in the interests of capital and the state can be detected in the context of paid employment. Employment practices have not adjusted to family life. Instead, family life is continually having to adapt to changing employment patterns. The following chapters confirm that governments continue to influence the size and structure of families. Yet the decline of welfare support for families in many countries with ageing populations is placing increasing pressures on women with families, and this situation has been exacerbated during the Covid-19 crisis.

Referring to the third question, significant advances in scholarship focusing on same-sex intimacies have contested the fixed categories of ‘family’ and parenting. Research on LGBTQ+ intimacies and queer theory both provide a critical reinterpretation of intimacy and personal life in recognition of the variability and complexities of today’s personal lives and family practices. Certain researchers argue that same-sex couples are more likely to achieve equality in their relationships, following Giddens. Since they are no longer dependent on traditional gender roles, same-sex couples can reinvent the ground rules in their daily lives in areas such as carrying out household tasks (Weeks et al. 1999, and see chapter 2). Using donor reproductive technologies and surrogacy, same-sex couples can have children and bring new approaches to parenting and household arrangements. Contemporary sociology has drawn attention to these major changes in intimacy, rather than advancing a narrow idea of families simply as functions of the reproduction or socialization of children. Today, the sociology of family life approaches families more broadly as conditions and events of personal relations and intimacy, to account for diversity and change.

Placing sexuality at the centre of its analyses of social, political, and cultural issues, queer theory interrogates the privileged ranking of traditional constructions of sex, gender, femininity, masculinity, heteronormativity and heteropatriarchy (Edgar and Sedgwick 1999). Queer theory interconnects the personal to wider socio-political and institutional settings (see Acosta 2018; Fish and Russell 2018; Oswald et al. 2017). Contemporary queer theorists focus on the intersections of sexuality, race, and ethnicity to explain how cultural values influence changes in identities, beliefs, family communication, a sense of belonging, and family policy. Queer theory is now influencing family studies by questioning long-held assumptions about the fixity of intimacy and relationships (van Eeden-Moorefield et al. 2018). The binary notion of gender has been further challenged by transgender families and studies of identity. Heteronormativity is contested by people who identify as nonbinary, genderqueer or pangender, and other identities, and by research on family arrangements. This includes research on cisgender–transgender families (see Allen and Mendez 2018; McGuire et al. 2016; Pfeffer 2017). A range of books has been published that address parents with gender-expansive children, raising questions about gender-affirmative processes in relation to medical professionals, institutions and family policy (see Keo-Meier and Ehrensaft 2018).