This article makes a small contribution to Families, Relationships and Societies’ knowledge production. It addresses racialised and ethnicised inequalities experienced in the everyday lives of a family constituted through serial migration, where the adult interviewed (‘Lizzie’) reflected on her childhood experience of leaving the Caribbean to join parents she did not remember and siblings she had never met. It reuses material from a larger study of the retrospective narratives of adults who had been childhood serial migrants. A major finding is that Lizzie’s experience of serial migration was intersectional, linked to her social positioning and her experiences of racism at school and felt outsiderness at home in contrast to feelings of belonging and being valued at the Black-led church she attended. The article argues that, while such family experiences are frequently unrecognised, they pattern children’s experiences, their adult relationships and identities and contribute to, and arise from, historical and sociostructural constructions of society.
A three-level project has been carried out to fulfil the mission of creating common foundations for international research collaboration within and on Asia. The first level is the collection, translation and sharing of important research findings from Asian insider perspectives that had been published or presented in the various languages in Asia. The second is to create a common basis for empirical research by building a database for international comparison. On the third level, effective international collaborative research projects focusing on various topics are made possible. Diversity in Asia has usually been taken to mean diversity of civilisations, but, at a deeper level is found the diversity rooted in kinship structure. This layer plays particularly important roles in constructing local forms of family, gender and intimacy. On top of these, modernisation created another layer. These layers influence each other at various times and to various degrees, constructing a dynamic diversity.
There is a dearth of research on the dissolution of legally formalised same-sex relationships, which can be partly explained by same-sex marriage and civil partnership being relatively recent possibilities. However, it is also the case that divorce as a topic of research has been marginalised in the renewed interest in family and relationships that has focused on diverse intimacies, family forms, family practices, friendships and personal life. This article analyses data from a qualitative study of same-sex divorce and civil partnership dissolution to consider the reasons that partners give for the ending of their formalised relationships. We argue that our analysis illuminates the need to reinvigorate research on divorce and dissolution more generally to fully understand changing social norms as they concern marriage and similar legal arrangements. We do this by analysing the three main reasons our study participants gave for the dissolution of their relationships: finances, infidelity and wellbeing. Such reasons can be read in part through a gendered lens as previous research has tended to do, but they also go well beyond gender to provide insights into how marriage and relationship ideals, aspirations and practices are being reconfigured contemporarily.
During the 1990s, the sociology of the family was vitalised by new and groundbreaking theories of modernity, identity, and the family. At this time the family was put forward as an example of how modern institutions and identities were transforming and changing. Concepts such as individualisation, choice biographies, and reflexivity brought new perspectives to family research. Parallel to this Raewyn Connell’s book Masculinities raised important questions about men’s lives and generated a renewed interest in theories of masculinities. Overall, these parallel theoretical tracks also brought new life to issues on fatherhood. Specifically, a collaborative approach gradually developed between critical studies on men and masculinities and research on fatherhood and fathering. Following a development from functionalist to contemporary theories on fatherhood, possibilities to theorise and redefine fatherhood will be explored. Using a multidimensional theoretical approach to fatherhood will facilitate making connections between the phenomenological (the body, subjectivity), and the sociocultural (welfare regimes, hegemonic structures) aspects of fatherhood. The article also argues that we might have to develop a new theoretical language that does not define acts, performativity and attitudes in terms of fathering/mothering.
In this conclusion, we first sketch out some of the feminist lines of sight on protest camps that the preceding chapters open up before unpicking some of the different stories about feminist mobilisation that emerge from attention to its entanglement with camps. In this way, we show how the book not only engages with protest camps anew, in terms both of their constraints and their limitations, but also reimagines feminism and its relation to protest and camps. We close by briefly suggesting some lines of further inquiry.
In this chapter we trace the feminised, decolonising and revolutionary nature of reoccupations, re-existencias and escrevivências occurring in movement collectives in Ceará, Northeast Brazil: Mãos que Criam, a women’s cooperative that forms part of the Zé Maria de Tomé Movimento Sem Terra Settlement, and three collectives of Afro-Brazilian women poets and artisans of the periphery of Fortaleza. We explore what the sharing of herstories of popular movements and collectives can illuminate regarding reoccupations and defence – not only of physical territories of the rural and urban landscapes but also of the political and of the emancipatory political subject herself. We consider the implications for the politics of knowledge of engaging with such praxis. We focus therefore on pluralising and provincialising conceptualisation, and foreground how this necessarily involves the decolonising of reason bound by modern/coloniality and the enfleshment of epistemology. In particular, we dwell and bring to thought in relation the concepts of the ‘feminisation of resistance’, escrevivência and the gramática da dor e alegria, and their interweaving with the concept and practice of reoccupation.
This ground-breaking collection interrogates protest camps as sites of gendered politics and feminist activism.
Drawing on case studies that range from Cold War women-only peace camps to more recent mixed-gender examples from around the world, diverse contributors reflect on the recurrence of gendered, racialised and heteronormative structures in protest camps, and their potency and politics as feminist spaces.
While developing an intersectional analysis of the possibilities and limitations of protest camps, this book also tells new and inspiring stories of feminist organising and agency. It will appeal to feminist theorists and activists, as well as to social movement scholars.
