This article deals with the causes and consequences of divorce in a group of women with minor children in Spain, a country in Southern Europe that presents a pre-eminently familistic character based on a marked division of gender roles. We detected an imbalance between qualitative and quantitative studies on this topic, of which the latter are more numerous in the recently published literature. For this reason, here we wish to show the people behind the data by conferring two questions making up the analysis axes of this research. First, we deal with the causes of couple breakups, which are related to inequality in the distribution of housework and care tasks in all cases. Second, we analyse their speeches about work and family conciliation after divorce, with particular importance given to the presence, or not, of a strong family network.
Names have heightened importance in adoption, affecting the identities of individuals who are adopted and adoptive family making. In this article, we use critical discourse analysis to gauge how names, and especially children’s forenames, are addressed in the specificities of legal and policy texts governing and guiding the milieu of people affected by adoption in England. We argue that the inclusions, omissions and opacity of content on names we uncover are outcomes of underlying representations of ‘family’ within the texts, whereby ‘family surnaming’ is constructed as the pre-eminent naming issue in adoption, above children’s forename-based identity rights. Our focus on names in adoption advances sociological understandings of the power of names in representing family relationships and individual identities, and of how official discourses of law and policy can privilege some types of relationships over others, and the rights of some family members over others.
The Independent Review of England’s agri-food systems, commonly known as the National Food Strategy (NFS), was commissioned by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in 2019. The NFS report, published in two stages in 2020 and 2021, outlines a range of interventions and policy proposals to achieve better agri-food outcomes in terms of public health and environmental sustainability. This commentary focuses on the challenges associated with incorporating a diversity of voices within the NFS’s evidence base. To achieve this, the NFS mobilised a series of public dialogue events to capture lay perspectives. Led by professional facilitators, these events sought to open a deliberative space to explore the workings of agri-food systems, leading to the publication of a public engagement report in late 2021. While diverse views were recorded, the report found ‘a strong appetite for change’ among the participants, eager to address the problems associated with current agri-food systems. In commenting on the dialogue process, we identify three distinct problematics which arise from the NFS’s public engagement strategy. Firstly, we consider the array of subject positions at play in the report. Secondly, we discuss the ‘epistemologies of engagement’, reflecting on the different forms of knowledge that are enrolled through the process of public engagement. Thirdly, we consider the under-acknowledged politics that are at play in these kinds of public engagement exercises and the limits of ‘co-production’ as a methodological principle. We conclude by drawing out the wider (national and international) implications of this particular form of public engagement which aims to incorporate lay perspectives into policy development processes.
In this article, I argue that care is a useful tool to think about consumption as embedded in social relations within and outside the market, and draw the consequences for moving towards sustainable lifestyles. To do so, I engage in a review of the literature that brings together consumption and care in its various forms. I review three main bodies of work: the literature on consumption that links care to consumer behaviour and consumption practices; the work addressing the commodifications of care and how it feeds in the neoliberal organisation of society; and the literature on climate change and the development of sustainable lifestyles. I close with a reflection on some lessons of care for academic researchers studying sustainability, consumption and a transition towards more sustainable and just societies.
Laurence Godin’s () piece is a very welcome and commendable attempt to provide a broader synthetisation of the current literature on care and consumption, and to generate some critical insights for future work in this area. I am drawing on Godin’s article to make some further observations. These are three-fold, pertaining to our current understandings of care, markets and consumption respectively.
Queer theory, despite its reliance on psychoanalysis, has had remarkably little to say about Lacan. One reason for this is that Lacan’s name came to the fore in queer theory already associated with Judith Butler’s critique of The Signification of the Phallus in Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter. This article revisits this critique and argues that Butler’s objections to Lacan do not hold up to scrutiny, because they disregard the goal of Lacan’s intervention, fail to account for the progression of Lacan’s thinking in the corresponding Seminars and misconstrue Lacan’s theory of desire more generally. It then briefly scrutinises the immediately subsequent Seminars VI and VII and argues that psychoanalysis’ ethical concerns do not map easily onto gender and sexuality as queer theorists understand them; the desire presumed to awaken in the analytic itinerary is not subject to extrinsic, normative regulation, but comes into being as its own law.
This article offers an empirical critique of trauma-informed fear models by documenting how mothers experienced repetitive fear of domestic violence in France. I challenge the reduction of victims’ responses to traumatic ‘terror’ and suggest that the neurological fear models which circulate in training and advocacy discourses fail to acknowledge the domestic setting and the resources on which they draw to respond to fear. Analysing ethnographic data, the article adopts a structural theory of emotion and domestic violence. I draw on Jack Barbalet’s notion of fear containment and rework his model by applying it to non-elite and individual mothers through what I call ‘instrumental’ counterchallenge and submissiveness. I show that their fear practices are combined with fear containment. The article analyses fear as an occasion for knowledge acquisition and an auxiliary for instrumental action. The article highlights the hidden fear responses that go unnoticed when analysis prominently relies on neurological trauma: mothers act on their fears to confirm or overrule fearful anticipations and they experience fear as an occasion for knowledge acquisition to guide future action.
