This week, we embark upon the emotionally fraught territory of intimacy, love, and attachment in the context of the family. Taken together, the readings demonstrate the complexity of our current arrangements as they intersect with social class, gender, sexuality, and friendship. Interestingly, while the increasing diversification of households and families in North America is often characterized as the consequence or effect of changing attitudes about love and commitment, all authors very aptly point to the diversification of the family as a significant cause of shifts in our conception of intimacy, love, attachment and thus family. Characterized as a bulwark against the harsh winds of capitalism and individualism, the "normal" family has traditionally assumed the place of emotional bedrock in the hearts of its members. In this, intimacy, love, care and attachment flowed from and between men, women and children within the family, but were tethered together by the cultural and institutional expectation of long-term commitment. As families have diversified (see last week's post about the new data from the Vanier Institute--for the "first time" there are more single Canadian adults and married couples with no children outnumber those with children), the fragile connections of emotional bonds in family life have been rent asunder, reconsidered, and reconfigured. The particular challenges to the bedrock of "long-term commitment" between "husband" and "wife" in this reconfiguration have produced both opportunities and insecurities in the emotional lives of families. Thus Hochschild warns women of the dangers of adopting the emotional styles and scripts of the 1950s white, middle-class businessman in the wake of feminism's "escape" from the cage into the capitalist marketplace. Love, she intimates, might conform better to the requirements of the global economy with a more thoroughgoing spirit of detachment advocated by the cool modern genre, but may come at the cost of more, rather than less, impoverished emotional lives. Underlying Hochschild's (as well as Giddens' and Roseneil and Budgeon's) analyses are two personal yet significant questions about recent transformations in the economy of intimacy and care: (1) at what cost? and (2) for whose benefit? While most of us impute far more individual and psychological explanations to the answers to these questions, this week's readings, above all else, demonstrate that the underlying mechanisms of intimacy and attachment implicit in such endeavors have profoundly social and cultural bases.
To illustrate this point, I cry, "love, love, love": From the romantic partner to the friend, conceptions and expectations of love enrich our personal and inner lives. What love means and how it is defined, however, depend far more on how we enact intimacy in close relationships; these enactments, in turn, are neither fixed nor unitary, but both culturally and historically bound. It is perhaps best to ask, of authors this week: what are the mechanisms of enactment? What are the 'feeling rules' and who defines them? How are these shaped by economic and social conditions of this day, this age, and this place? Cognizant of the familial changes over the past thirty years, each perspective points up different kinds of psychic divestment (and sometimes reinvestment) in related intimate relationships; Giddens highlights the advent of confluent love (as opposed to romantic love), in which a certain kind of intimacy (i.e. what Francesca Cancian would argue is a "feminized", or expressive version of love) focused on "emotional give and take" makes love between two sexually attached individuals potentially more equal but also more contingent. Hochschild worries about the trajectory of feminism as its emancipatory goals are increasingly directed at thinning the personal and emotional lives of women and thus their families. Roseneil and Budgeon shift our gaze towards the possibility of renewed bonds of intimacy and attachment in the context of friendship, community and care. These shifting boundaries--the places of revealing and acting in the name of love--reflect the central role that intimacy has played in defining an emotional and normative ideal of family life as well as its departure from it. Statements such as "my friends are my family" or "friends are the family that you choose" demonstrate how much we define intimacy and attachment with reference to the belief in the emotional and social value of family, even if we do not (or have not) experienced it personally.
Perhaps more than any other intellectual domain, defining feelings, intimacy and love as a social rather than individual experience is difficult for most. It is in this realm, after all, that we tend to embrace agency, the spirit and the unknown--magic, as it were--more than any other. To fully engage the sociological, therefore, it may be useful to juxtapose the arguments presented in this week's readings against a biomedical model of love and attachment articulated most extensively and popularly by Helen Fisher: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYfoGTIG7pY
Her emphasis on "chemistry"--on dopamine receptors, the reptilian brain, and other such bodily predispositions and experiences--contrasts sharply with the social experience of "chemistry", including feeling rules, confluence, and friendship that is the purview of sociology. As such, it is a point of departure for discussing the relationship between the individual and social experience of emotionality and attachment in our everyday lives.
Label your post with your name and "Family and Intimacy".
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