family and intimacy

I don’t believe I speak solely for myself when I say that this section, dealing with a more or less universal phenomenon, as Giddens would say, was just so interesting! This phenomenon being amour passion (passionate love): “expressing a generic connection between love and sexual attachment” (Giddens). His social historical analysis of the construction of passionate love, with its gender roles resulting in varying responses to this phenomenon, shows insight into its connection to sexual desire and attachment. I am interested in Giddens’ argument that “romantic love introduced the idea of a narrative into an individual’s life – a formula which radically extended the reflexivity of sublime love”; intertwining love with self-narrative. Passionate love then becomes a way of seeing oneself in terms of whom they love romantically, in turn learning as much about their self as they know about the other. This is one way where interest, desire, attachment, love, etc. are institutionalized with institutionalized rituals like wooing, courting, compliments, surprises, flowers, chocolate, love letters, etc.). From romantic comedies, to “the avid consumption of romantic novels and stories” (Giddens), to just thinking of myself and those around me, it has been and still is most often the men that do the romancing with these rituals. I don’t think it was men who started this, but keeping Giddens’ connection of romantic love and self-realization in mind and basing myself on personal experience, I could see how this type of romance does seem to cause more trouble for women, since they are basically taught to expect these things from men. It is the women I know (including myself) who tell stories of the love letters, the compliments, the flowers, and all that nice stuff a boy does, inevitably becoming one of the meanings of romance. I can’t imagine men getting together and getting excited to share all the institutionalized practices they did that day for the woman they are interested in. The institutionalized meaning of romantic love may be great at the beginning of a relationship but it leaves out what really matters for a real happily-ever-after. This leads me into Helen Fisher’s TED talk where she tries to answer the question: what makes a person fall in love with one person and not another? She describes love as an addiction and a need; the god of love lives in a state of need. It is a need. It is an urge. It is a homeostatic imbalance. Like hunger and thirst, it is almost impossible to stamp out (Plato). When someone you love dumps you, logically you should want to forget that person. I know I most certainly wanted to! However as Fisher says, we end up wanting the rejecter even more after we’ve been rejected. Wanting what you can’t have seems like much more of a reality than just a saying, and as Fisher says it becomes an obsession; an addiction.

Family and intimacy

I am skeptical to arguments of causality in general. Whether the diversification of family setups is a cause or consequence off changing attitudes about intimacy, love and commitment lacks of interest for me if the mechanisms and processes are not disentangled. I agree with the idea that explanations should be analyzed using individual, psychological, economic, social and cultural frameworks, as well as with a historical perspective. In this sense, one of the issues that the readings of this week miss, from my point of view, is the role of social networks, specially extended families and local communities. Capitalism seems to be the responsible for individualism and commercialization of intimate life, but what other factors have transformed the roles of neighbors, extended family members, religious institutions and others as sources of support. For example, in the case of migrant families that leave extended family behind, it is natural to create new relationships with friends. Roseneil and Budgeon explore the individualization thesis and the queering of the social thesis and argue that instead of studying the redefinitions of the family, “the exploration of networks and flows of intimacy and care, the extent and pattern of such networks, the viscosity and velocity of such flows, and the implications of their absence, is likely to prove much more fruitful for future research” (2004, p. 153). How do social network resources differ by class and socioeconomic status? In this sense, I would argue that just like in other sociological debates that suffer of the discussion between structure and agency, the social networks framework is useful to understanding social processes and transformations.
About the discussion of love, intimacy and sexuality, I would recover what Giddens talks about romantic and passionate love. If the ideals of love where connected to moral values of Christianity, what happens when Christianity looses power? Is it the case only that sexuality and love are disconnected from morality or is it the case that morality is transformed? How can we get rid of this double morality of what should be and what is good? Giddens also notes that the rise of romantic love coincided with the emergence of the novel and that the romantic literature, which was mainly written by women, is both an expression of weakness and hope. Have the romantic novels transformed into women advice books (also mainly written by women) due to the ‘commercialization of intimate life’ or because Hollywood, popular television and other media has been teaching us how to have sex and those in the writing business do not want to stay away and make us feel we are part of a reality show by telling us how live our wedding day? If, as Hochschild says “cultures differ in the pictures they project of ‘perfect love’” (2003, p. 122), how these different pictures have been portrayed through time and to what extent these cultural preferences act like structural barriers?
Q1. While reading Hochschild, the issue of selection comes always to my mind. Who do you think reads the advice books? Would a policy recommendation be to promote personalized psychological therapy while telling women not to read advice books or at least saying to read them critically?
Q2. Is intimacy a public good? Why do we care? Shouldn’t that stay in the private sphere?
Q3. How can culture dissociate moral values from family arrangements and sexuality? Would this be helpful to put less stress on gays and lesbians, single mothers, cohabitating couples, childless women, and others?

Family and Intimacy

In order to understand the current state of intimacy and care, it is necessary for us to change our perception of the notion of family and the heterosexual couple. As the definition of family changes, the definition of intimacy and care is required to change as well. Intimacy and care can also occur between partners who are not living together as family, and within networks of friends. This draws on the idea of considering close friends as your family. There are some people who do not have the desire or are not given to chance to have a nuclear family and so they turn to their friends in order to fulfill practices of care and support, as seen through the lives of Polly, Dale, Karen and Eleanor. They are able to share their personal lives and have an intimate relationship without being sexually involved.

Hochschild argues that feeling is a kind of pre-script to action. It is internal behaviour that we engage in that prepares us to act externally. Thus, there is a clear link between how we feel and how we act. There is more involved than this sense of inner authenticity. Our emotions and actions must be aligned with the norms and expectations that are found in every social setting. Each setting, each definition of the situation, will require different types of emotional responses and thus feeling management. Hochschild calls these scripts for emotions feeling rules: “Feeling rules are what guide emotion work by establishing the sense of entitlement or obligation that governs emotional exchanges”. These feeling rules are social norms that tell us what to feel, when to feel it, where to feel, how long to feel, and how strong our emotions can be. Not following the feeling rules, as dictated by society, tends to put a person in an uncomfortable position. Society, dictates that our main responsibility is to care for family, but if we were to decenter the family, friends would fall into the category that require care and intimacy.

1. Do you think there are different expectations in terms of the way a man and woman should ‘feel’ in public?

2. What is your opinion on the commercialization of intimate life?

3. Do you think that centering lives on friendship and decentering sexual partners is challenging the heterorelational social order? Do you think that along with single parent families, blended families and gay relationships there is room to bring friends into the definition of ‘family’?

Family, Attachment & Intimacy

It is interesting to read about academic ideas love and attachment. As I’m reading, I keep asking myself “oh – is that really how it’s supposed to happen? Am I supposed to feel that way?” Because I come from a divorced family am I really going to have a first-love-that-fails and a second-love-that-works? All though I am not in control of my emotions, I don’t think anyone truly is, I’m not sure that I would subconsciously sabotage an otherwise perfectly fine relationship in order to “project everything bad” onto him so at a later date I could project “everything good on someone else.”

However, I really enjoyed Hochschild’s ideas on feelings, especially in a situation when we know what our reaction should be, and our reaction is completely different. This has most definitely happened to me. Here’s the thing, I’m a crier. I cry at the movie theatre, watching Izzy Stephens and Alex Carev getting married on Grey’s Anatomy, and seeing Tracy Porter catch the game clinching interception at last years Super Bowl. Within a social-situational measuring rod, I’m pretty sure I have violated certain norms in situations based on my tears. For example, no matter what funeral I’m at, I’m going to cry. And I’m not a pretty crier. I get red, and blotchy, and my eyes turn an eerie green. Essentially, if I cry, you’re going to notice. So, even at a funeral of someone else’s grandparent, who I do not know, where I’m just going to show moral support, I end up being in tears as much as the immediate family. Not so appropriate when everyone is looking at you and trying to console you.

Reading Roseniel and Budgeon really made sense to me. Even before my parent’s separated, they relied a lot on the support of friends, as both of them were not from Toronto, and had no family living closer than two hours away. If they couldn’t pick us up from school, one of their friends did. After my parent’s got divorced, each of them definitely leaned on their close friends even more than before for support. My father moved into a house with 3 of his friends, who he remains close with today. My mother, who kept the house in the settlement, leaned on old friends and made lots of new ones. We would go for dinner’s at friends houses, go on vacations with friends of my parent’s and their children (often other divorcees as well). It makes sense to lean on to support from friends when family isn’t available.

1. Do you think that Karen and Polly’s living arrangement is better for their daughters that raising them on their own? Is the “queering of the family” a source of confusion for children?

2. Do you believe that the “Cinderella Complex” is detrimental to woman in a relationship? Or in order to have a successful relationship in modern times does a relationship need to “cool” and more detached?

3. Helen Fisher describes romantic love of having the same symptoms of addiction? Do you think that “romantic love is one of the most addictive substances on earth”? Do you think her dating site, Chemistry.com, would be more effective than other dating sites?

Family and Intimacy

"Friends are the family that you choose" is a phrase that is central to the lives of many in terms of love and care. Of course, not all friends are “family”, and the transition from one to the other is an extremely powerful way to redefine a relationship. The rhetoric used in defining a non-blood relative as “family” is powerful, and as mentioned emphasizes the importance of the role of the family within society and individual life. This shift recalls Hochschild’s examination of contexts and measures of emotion. The “family” as those you care for and are most intimate with shapes the context of the individual’s perception of what they “should” feel, and what they really feel. Society, (excuse the broad term) dictates that we have a responsibility to care for family above all, therefore if friends fall into this category of care and intimacy, their grouping must be changed to relieve the dissonance.

Perhaps this idea of “friends as family” instead of a more fluid conception of friends found in Roseneil and Budgeon's work, emerges from a framework of the ideal of the nuclear family, or the family within commercial society, rather than families or individuals who find themselves already displaced from common societal definitions of the family. They discuss the occasional awkwardness of living in an intimate relationship that rests outside of conventional definitions; however, these arrangements still seem to allow for changes in definitions. Perhaps these social movements are key to dismantling the commercialization of the family.

1) How are actions and attitudes towards an individual changed when they become “family”? Has this changed over time? With different laws regarding families, divorce, and child rearing?

2) How is the shift towards intimacy with friends described by Roseneil and Budgeon a reversion to community based care? How is it different?

3) Is the commercialization of intimacy inherently “good” or “bad”?

Week 4: Family, Attachment, and Intimacy

Week 4: Family, Attachment, and Intimacy

Whether it is a consequence or cause, it is of no dispute that in the contemporary world, there exists the diversification of families. In order to meet the diversified needs of these new forms of families, it is only logical to come up with alternatives that satisfy these needs. With more women entering the workforce and the increase in the breaking up of families (due to different reasons), there exists alternative care, intimacy, and emotional work. To make sense of all of this, it is insufficient to look at these alternatives by the heteronormative framework—the “normative nuclear family” model—and ineffectual in explaining the how and why of diversification of care and intimacy. How are we to take into account single parent households, families with no children, cohabiting partners, or those in homosexual relationships? In this aspect, Roseneil and Budgeon’s critique of the heteronormative framework, in regards to the family, care, and intimacy aspects, is quite intriguing. It is interesting to look at the different case studies of Karen and Polly, Dale, and Eleanor and through them, as the authors point out, we are able to see that the concept of love, intimacy, and care are fluid and highly flexible to fit into all situations. For those who are not committed to a “nuclear” family, they tend to turn to friendship—practices of care and support happening away from the (hetero)sexual partnerships. Along with the “decentring” of sexual relationships, the interchangability of lover/partner and friend is very informative.

With the ever-changing definition and formation of families and emotional work, we need to look at these diversifications and alternatives as they are. We should not become fixated in trying to explain the “broken down” families and the interchangeability of lover/friend, care, love, and intimacy by the heteronormative framework for it will only hinder us from fully understanding these new phenomenons.

Q1] Hochschild mentions the commercialization of the intimate life. With regards to this, is emotional investment towards the family a mode of production or consumption? Is the emotional investment towards the spouse/partner different than that of the one towards the children (in the sense of whether it being a mode of production or consumption)?

Q2] The transformation and fluidity of intimacy that Roseneil and Budgeon mention in their work brings about intriguing issues to surface. Can we come up with a concrete definition of “stability” with regards to the diversification of care, intimacy, and love? Can we give a definitive answer to as which form of “family of choice” can provide the most stability to those involved?

Q3] Is the concept of care, intimacy, and love all just a symbolic norm to allow for our society to fully function? Or is it a biochemical reaction where some have the potential to become a loving and caring individual while others have no sense of intimacy whatsoever and is incapable of love?

Intimacy, Love and Attachment: Advice from the Experts

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.

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