1,721,020 research outputs found
Researching Intimacy in Families
No full textResearching Intimacy in Families introduces and invigorates understandings of intimacy and family relationships. It offers an incisive engagement with the sociology of intimacy and the methods needed to research families, children and personal life. Using original data the book opens out the theoretical debate on intimacy and illustrates the potential of qualitative mixed-methods in capturing the richness and complexity of family life. Jacqui Gabb brings to life methodology teaching through extensive illustrations of methods in the context of families and childhood research, including innovatory methods and approaches designed and piloted by the author
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Querying the discourses of love: an analysis of contemporary patterns of love and the stratification of intimacy within lesbian families
No full textThis article looks at the discourses of love through an analysis of the 'stratification of intimacy' within lesbian families. I suggest that traditional discourses of love effectively reify our emotions into socially prescribed categories, where 'mature love' is conflated with sex and desire. The love that mothers feel for their child(ren) is set apart, 'instinctive', wholly separate to adult (sexual) love. However this 'stratification of intimacy' obscures the lived experiences and feelings of many parents. In this article the author argues that whom we love is culturally constituted: it is unnecessarily quantified whereby monogamy is (mis)read as the sign of true (adult) love. I illustrate how lesbian mothers' location on the social margins enables them to construct new 'patterns of love' within their 'families of choice' in ways that challenge these traditional discourses of love. This theoretical analysis is based upon 'patterned variations' drawn from qualitative research with 20 lesbian families with children living within the Yorkshire region in the UK
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Sexuality education: how children of lesbian mothers 'learn' about sex/uality
No full textSexuality is something that children experience from an early age. It may be a cause of individual concern and anxiety, but is seldom, if ever, deconstructed at any stage of a child's education. Institutionalized fear and misunderstandings of Section 28 (1988) have effectively removed discussion of sexuality, homosexual or otherwise, from the English school curriculum. This structural silence on sexuality is all too frequently repeated at home. In this article I interrogate how children from lesbian parent households 'learn' about sexuality, looking at the effects of their parents' (homo)sexual orientation on their 'sexuality education'. I consider how sex education is taught in schools; what children traditionally 'learn' about sexuality. I then look at whether sexuality education is any different for children from lesbian parent families; whether these children have greater sexuality knowledge, and, if so, how this has been 'learnt'. I suggest that it may be the ambient presence of sexuality—as both a topic of conversation and mothers' unspoken sexual identity—that means lesbian parent families offer a distinctive form of sexuality education. This article draws on empirical research on sexuality and lesbian parent families with lesbian parent families who lived in the Yorkshire region, UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR
Unsettling lesbian motherhood: Critical reflections over a generation (1990-2015)
Full text linkThis article explores how advancements in equality rights combine with attitudinal changes in UK society and LGBTQ communities to impact on the experience of lesbian mothers over a generation. The author reflects on ordinary moments where sexuality and relationships become meaningful and situate emotions at the heart of analytical enquiry because it is through emotional interactions that micro–macro networks of relations intersect. Autobiography is combined with original data from empirical research to provide analytical entry points, which aims to advance understanding and also facilitate reflection on how we understand and come to know queer parenthood. Whilst there are now many routes into lesbian motherhood and the stigma of queer kinship is diminishing, this article demonstrates the need to problematize the prevailing narratives of coupledom that are emerging and tease apart the conflation of temporal progression, progressive rights and narratives of progress
Locating lesbian parent families
No full textAlthough there is some research on lesbian sexuality and space I contend that such analyses do not account for the ways in which lesbian parent families' actions and subjectivities are structured through the time–space nexus. The particularities of mothers' management of their maternal–sexual identities remain uncharted. In this article I interrogate how lesbian parent families negotiate everyday places, such as the street and schools and how they inhabit and produce space. I address their dis-location within academic studies, situating the home as critical in lesbian parents' consolidation of self. Home represents one of the few places where the sexual and maternal identities of lesbian parents may be reconciled. I suggest that the multiple identifications and subject positions of lesbian mothers and their families need to be acknowledged so that they may be included within the queer cartography of lesbian and gay space. The data cited in this article come from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 18 lesbian mothers and 13 of their children, who live across the Yorkshire region in the United Kingdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR
'I could eat my baby to bits'; passion and desire in lesbian mother-children love
No full textMother-children love and adult-sexual love tend to be differentiated by the absence/presence of passion and desire. In the course of my research on lesbian parent families, the artificiality of this distinction has become transparent. In attempting to describe 'mother love' mothers said repeatedly they loved their children 'to bits', wanting to 'eat them up', feeling 'utterly passionate' towards them. This challenges the traditional sexual-sexless boundaries between parents and children. The intensity of 'maternal love' often means that mother-child intimacy becomes a site of delicate negotiations between desire and love. The legal-moral boundaries that are invoked prohibit intergenerational desire, upholding the incest taboos that dominate Western culture. However the construction of these boundaries neither stop adult-child 'border skirmishes' nor quash children's 'natural' exploration of their sexuality. I explore how bodies and bodily boundaries are used to manage sexuality and desire in families. I consider how mothers negotiate their way through the contradictions of mother-children love, incorporating the passion and desire of this love. I suggest mothers' acknowledgment of their passion does not mean that 'maternal love' is potentially sexual/incestuous, but instead questions its conceptual framing. I suggest that future research on mother-children love might usefully look outside the traditional discourses used to describe and delineate love, towards ones that incorporate non-sexual desire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR
Perverting motherhood? Sexuality and lesbian parent families
No full textSIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DXN056752 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo
Home Truths: Shifting Ethical Contours in Family Research
Full text linkIn this article I interrogate ethical issues that shape contemporary research in childhood and family studies. This aims to update existing literature in this area and reflect on the challenges posed by new approaches to the study of personal life, emotions and relationships. In particular the ethical issues posed by qualitative mixed-methods and psycho-social approaches. This requires us to consider carefully the threading together of data into individual and/or family case studies. It refines understandings of 'harm' and 'distress' and proposes that we accept unsettling narratives in research on emotional-social worlds. Ideas of 'responsible knowing' are reconfigured and a celebration of the messiness of everyday experience and relationality is advanced, including the acknowledgement of conflicting, unfavourable and difficult data as part of routine 'good enough' parenthood. The article draws on experiences and findings from empirical research with families living in the North of England. In the Behind Closed Doors project I interrogated different qualitative methods of researching family relationships and examined the conceptual frameworks through which we make sense of experiences and understandings of 'family intimacy'
Imag(in)ing the queer lesbian family
No full textMotherhood and lesbian sexuality are antithetical to each other within Western culture. One consequence of this dichotomy is that lesbian mothers are constantly denied any fixity of identity. Always being in a state of flux, we are caught in a continual process of becoming. This paper reflects on this fluidity, suggesting that queer mothering challenges prevailing notions of "the family.
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