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Parenthood beyond the norm of coupledom: Negotiating legal vulnerability in a welfare state context
Malmö högskola, Faculty of Health and Society (HS), Department of Social Work (SA). Malmö högskola, Centre for Sexology and Sexuality Studies (CSS).ORCID iD: 0000-0001-7445-1013
2017 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

Theorists point to late modernity as a time of new intimacies where individualism and self-knowledge are central components (Giddens, 1992; Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 1995). According to Plummer (1995), one of the major shifts in intimacy and sexuality the last decades of the 20th century is the constitution of the family. Previous ideas of nuclear family and traditional values has shifted to how family members are chosen rather than biologically given. One of the kinds of relationships and families that represent this move away from the heterosexual nuclear family with biological children is the family with more than two parents, for example one based on a polyamorous relationship. Polyamory means that more than two people are involved in an intimate and/or sexual relationship with one another. Polyamory as a relationship practice bears many similarities with how late modern intimacy is described, and could, according to Barker (2005), be seen as part of a wider transformation of intimacy in postmodern society. Preliminary results from analysis of media representations of polyamorous families show that explicit strategies are deemed necessary for handling the legal vulnerability of the families, but that these strategies depend on the families having both social and economic resources to draw from. Contacts with school and health institutions are reported as both positive and negative, but there is a recurring theme of invisibility that the families perceive – the system is generally designed for coupled parents. Lastly, there are also stories of the importance of community and thus how geography and place are central for offering contact with other families in a similar situation. These conclusions point to the need for further studies of the legal situation for non-coupled families – how are the families faring that do not have the social or economic resources to navigate the legal vulnerability, and how are invisibility and lack of community affecting families outside norms of coupledom?

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2017.
National Category
Social Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-10603Local ID: 23779OAI: oai:DiVA.org:mau-10603DiVA, id: diva2:1407646
Conference
Significant others – Nordic network for Research on Family and Personal Life, Lund, Sweden (Oct 23-24)
Available from: 2020-02-29 Created: 2020-02-29 Last updated: 2022-06-27Bibliographically approved

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Andersson, Catrine

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