Postmodernism And Family Diversity

In postmodern family, what does the family look like?

There is no longer one single, dominant, stable family structure such as the nuclear family. Instead, family structures have become fragmented into many different types and now individuals have much more choice in their lifestyles, personal relationships and family agreements.

What do some writers argue about the greater diversity and choice postmodern society?

That it comes with both advantages and disadvantages.

What is an example of the advantages of the greater diversity and choice of postmodern society?

It gives individuals greater freedom to plot their own life course - to choose the kind of family and personal relationships that meet their needs.

What is an example of the disadvantages of the greater diversity and choice of postmodern society?

Greater freedom and choice in relationships means a greater risk of instability, since these relationships are more liely to break up.

What does Stacey argue?

That the greater freedom and choice has benefitted women. IT has enabled them to free themselves form patriarchal oppression and to shape their family arrangements to meet their needs.

What did Stacey use to construct case studies on postmodern families, and what did she find?

She used life history interviews. She found that women rather than men have been the main agents of changes in the family.

What did many of the women Stacey interviewed reject?

The traditional housewife-mother role. They had worked, returned to education as adults, improved their job prospected, divorced and re-married. These women had often created new types of family that better suited their needs.

What are some of the new family structures Stacey found in her interviews?

What she calls the ‘divorce-extended family‘, whose members are connected by divorce rather than marriage. The key members are usually female and may include former in-laws, such as mother and daughter-in-law, or a man’s ex-wife and his new partner.

What is an example of a divorce extended family seen in Stacey’s case studies?

She described how Gamma created a divorce-extended family. She married young, then divorced and cohabited for several years before remarrying. Her second husband had also been married before.

By the time the children of Pam’s first marriage were in their twenties, she had formed a divorce-extended family with Shirley, the women cohabitating with her first husband. They helped each other financially and domestically.

What do such cases like that of Gamma illustrate?

The idea that postmodern families are diverse and that their shape depends on the active choices people make about how to live their lives - for example, whether to get divorced, cohabit, come out as gay, ect.

What does Morgan argue?

That it is pointless trying to make large-scale generalisations about ‘the family‘ as if it were a single thing, as functionalists do. Rather, a family is simple whatever arrangements those involved choose to call their family.

In this view, sociologists should focus their attention on how people create their own diverse family lives and practices.

While not accepting everything postmodernism says about the nature of society today, what have sociologists such as Giddens and Beck been influenced by?

Postmodern ideas about today’s society and have applied some of these to understanding family life.

What do Giddens and Beck explore?

The effects of increasing individual choice upon families and relationships. Their views have therefore become known as the individualisation thesis.

What does the individualisation thesis argue?

That traditional social structures such as class, gender and family have lost much of their influence over us. According to the thesis, in the past, people’s lives were defined by fixed roles that largely prevented them from choosing their own life course.

Everyone was expected to marry and take up their appropriate gender role. By contrast, individuals in today’s society have fewer such certainties or foxed roles to follow.

According to the individualisation thesis, what have we become?

Freed or ‘disembedded‘ from traditional toles and structures, leaving us with more freedom to choose how we lead our lives.

How does Beck describe our freedom from traditional roles?

He says that the ‘standard biography‘ or life course that people followed in the past has been replaced by the ‘do-it-yourself biography‘ that individuals today must construct for themselves.

For Giddens and Beck, this change has huge implications for family relationships and family diversity.

What does Giddens argue?

That in recent decades the family and marriage have been transformed by greater choice and a more equal relationship between men and women. This transformation has occurred because:

• Contraception has allowed sex and intimacy rather than reproduction to become the main reason for the relationship’s existence.

• Women have gained independence as a result of feminism and because of greater opportunities in education and work.

What has happened as a result of greater choice and more equal relationship between men and women?

The basis of marriage and the family has changed. Giddens argues that in the past, traditional family relationships were held together by external forces such as the laws governing the marriage contract and by powerful norms against divorce and sex outside of marriage.

According to Giddens what do couples look like today?

They are free to define their relationships themselves, rather than simply acting out the roles that have been defined in advance by law or tradition. For example, a couple nowadays don’t have to marry to have children and divorce is readily accessible.

According to Giddens, what holds relationships together today?

It is no longer law, religion, social norms or traditional institutions. instead, intimate relationships nowadays are based on individual choice and equality.

How does Giddens define the king of relationships seen in postmodern society?

As the ‘pure relationship‘, he sees is as typical of today’s late modern society, in which relationships are no longer bound by traditional norms.

What is the key feature of the pure relationship?

The fact that it exists solely to satisfy each partner’s needs. As a result, the relationship is likely to survive only so long as both partners think it is their own interest to do so. Couples stay together because of love, happiness or sexual attraction, rather than because of tradition, a sense of duty or for the sake og the children.

In pure relationships, what are individuals free to do?

To choose to enter and to leave relationships as they see fit. Relationships become part of the process of the individual’s self-discovery or self-identity: trying different relationships becomes a way of establishing ‘who we are‘.

What does Giddens note about individuals having more choice?

That with more choice, personal relationships inevitably become less stable. The pure relationship is a kind of ‘rolling contract‘ that can be ended more or less at the will by either partner, rather than a permanent commitment. This in turn produces greater family diversity by creating more lone-parent families, one-person households, stepfamilies and so on.

What does Giddens see same-sex sex relationships as doing?

Leading the way towards new family types and creating more democratic and equal relationships.

In Giddens’ view, how do same-sex relationships lead the way towards new family types?

This is because they are not influenced by tradition to the extent that heterosexual relationships are (indeed they have generally been stigmatised and even criminalised). As a result, same-sex couples have been able to develop relationships based on choice rather than on traditional roles, since these were largely absent.

What has the lack of influence of tradition enabled those in same-sex relationships to do?

Negotiate personal relationships and to actively create family structures that serve their own needs, rather than having to conform to pre-existing norms in the way that heterosexual couples have traditionally had to do.

What did Weston find?

That same-sex couples created supportive ‘families of choice‘ from among friends, former lovers and biological kin.

What did Weeks find?

That friendship networks functioned as kinship networks for gay men and lesbians.

What is another version of the individualisation thesis put forward by?

Beck.

What does Beck argue?

That we now live in a ‘risk society‘ where tradition has less influence and people have more choice. AS a result, we are more aware of risks. This is because making choices involved calculating the risks and rewards of the different options open to us.

What does our ‘risjk society‘ contrast with?

An earlier time when people’s roles were more fixed by tradition and rigid social norms dictates how they should behave.

What is an example of social norms dictating people’s behaviour in the past?

In the past, people were expected to marry for life, and once married, men were expected to play the role of breadwinner and disciplinarian and to make the important financial decisions, while women took responsibility for the housework, childcare and care of the sick an elderly.

Although the traditional family was unequal and oppressive, what did it provide?

A stable and predictable basis for family life by defining each member’s role and responsibilities.

What are the two trends the patriarchal family has been undermined by?

• Greater fender equality, which has challenged male domination in all spheres of life. Women now expect equality both at work and in marriage.

• Greater individualism, where people’s actions are influenced more by calculations of their own self-interest than by a sense of obligation to others.

What have the trends of greater gender equality and individualism led to?

A new type of family replacing the patriarchal family. Beck and Beck-Gersheim call this the ‘negotiated family‘. Negotiated families do not conform to the traditional family norm, but vary according to the wishes and expectations of their members, who decide what is best for themselves by negotiation. They enter the relationship on an equal basis.

Though the negotiated family is more equal than the patriarchal family, what is the problem?

It is less stable; this is because individuals are free to leave if their needs are not met. As a result, this instability leads to greater diversity by creating more lone-parent families, one person households, remarriages and so on.

Although in today’s uncertain risk society people turn to the family in the hope of finding security, what are family relationships themselves now subject to?

Greater risk and uncertainty than ever before. For this reason, Beck describes the family s a ‘zombie category‘; it appears to be alive, but in reality it is dead. People want it to be a haven of security in an insecure world, but today’s family cannot provide tis because of its own instability.

What do sociologists who take a personal life perspective, such as Smart and May agree with?

The idea that there is now more family diversity, but they disagree with Beck and Giddens’ explanation of it. They make several criticisms of the individualisation thesis.

What does individualisation thesis exaggerate?

How much choice people have about family relationships today.

What does Budgeon note?

ow the exaggeration of choice in family relationships reflects the neoliberal ideology that individuals to day have complete freedom of choice. In reality, however, traditional norms that limit people’s relationship choices have not weakened as much as the thesis claims.

What does the individualisation thesis wrongly see people as ?

Disembedded, ‘free-foating‘, independent individuals. It ignores the fact that out decisions and choices about personal relationships are made within a social context.

What does the individualisation thesis ignore?

The importance of structural factors such as social class inequalities and patriarchal gender norms in limiting and shaping our relationship choices.

As May notes, this is because Giddens’ and Beck’s view of the individual is simply an ‘idealised version of a white, middle-class man‘. They ignore the fact that not everyone has the same ability as this privileged group to exercise choice about relationships.

What is the personal life perspective’s alternative to the individualisation thesis?

What Smart calls the ‘connectedness thesis‘.

What is the connectedness thesis?

Instead of seeing us as disembedded, isolated individuals with limited choice about personal relationships, Smart argues that we are fundamentally social beings whose choices are always made ‘within a web of connectedness‘.

According to the connectedness thesis, what do we live within?

Networks of existing relationships and interwoven personal histories, and these strongly influence our range of options and choices in relationships.

What did Finch and Mason’s study of extended families find?

That, although individuals can to some extent negotiate the relationships they want, they are also embedded within family connectors and obligations that restrict their freedom of choice.

What do findings such as those of Finch and Mason challenge?

The notion of the pure relationship. Families usually include more than the just the couples that Giddens focuses in, and even couple relationships are not always ‘pure relationships‘ that we can walk away from at will.

For example. parents who separate remain linked by their children, often against their wishes. Smart emphasises the importance of always putting individuals in the context of their past and the web of relationships that shape their choices and family patterns.

What does the connectedness thesis also emphasise?

The role of the class and gender structures in which we are embedded. These structures limit our choices about the kinds of relationships. Identities and families that we can create for ourselves. For example:

• After a divorce, gender norms generally dictate that women should have custody of the children, which may limit their opportunity to form new relationships. By contrast, men are freer to start new relationships and second families.

• Men are generally better paid than women and this gives them greater freedom and choice in relationships.

• The relative powerlessness of women and children as compared with men means that many lack freedom to choose and so remain trapped in abusive relationships.

What do Beck and Giddens argue about the power of structures?

That there has been a disappearance or weakening of the structures of class, gender and family that traditionally controlled out lives and limited our choices. However, May argues that these structures are not disappearing, but simply being re-shaped.

For example, while women in the past 150 years have gained rights in relation to voting, divorce, education and employment, this does not mean that they now ‘have it all’.

What does Einadottir argue?

That while lesbianism is now tolerated, heteronormativity (norms favouring heterosexuality) means that many lesbians feel forced to remain ‘in the closet‘ and this limits their choices about their relationships and lifestyles.

What does the personal life perspective not see increased diversity simply as a result of?

Greater freedom or choice, as Beck and Giddens do. Instead, it emphasises the importance of social structures in shaping the freedoms many people now have to create more diverse types of families.

Although there is a trend towards greater diversity and choice, what does the personal life perspective emphasise?

The continuing importance of structural factors such as patriarchy and class inequality in restricting people’e choices and shaping their family lives.