Future Building and Emotional Reflexivity: Gendered or Queered Navigations of Agency in Non-Normative Relationships?

Abstract

This article sets out a conceptual framework for examining future building as an emotionally reflexive practice of intimacy and gendered agency. Emotionally reflexive future building is a relational activity, subject to gendering but open to queering. We illustrate this by drawing on cases taken from three qualitative studies that deal with the future building of women in relationships that do not conform to norms around having and rearing children. By referring to the future building of single mothers, women who are undecided about having children and women in non-cohabiting distance relationships we illustrate the significance of reflexively making sense of one’s own and others’ emotions in navigating gendered constraints and opportunities. Anger, despair, ambivalence, love, guilt and other emotions are key in how women with differing degrees of economic security imagine and try to create futures that queer gender.

Social reproduction, labour and austerity: Carrying the future

“…Davis, 2017;D. A. Davis, 2019b;Holmes et al, 2021). Participants were drawn from diverse socio-economic backgrounds and living circumstances.…”

“…Intersections of class, race and gender especially dramatically shape expectations and experiences of reproduction (Briggs, 2017; Jensen, 2018; Saunders, 2020). These inequalities seep into the fabric of everyday life – rising rents, shrinking social housing stock, unsuitable cohabitations, destitution, adults living or moving back home with parents (Taylor, 2021; Wilkinson, 2020); unemployment, indebtedness, insecure and precarious work (Davis & Cartwright, 2019); retreating state support, decimated care infrastructures, welfare and local government (Hall, 2020; Pearson, 2019); and, as the focus of this article, altered possibilities and decisions about reproduction because of changing life-courses, intimacies and affordabilities (Hall, 2022a; Holmes et al, 2021; Lebano & Jamieson, 2020). Stenning’s (2020) research in the North East of England also highlights how austerity has widened the scale of socio-economic inequality, drawing in a ‘squeezed middle’ class, as well as exacerbating ongoing everyday inequalities faced by working-class people (Saunders, 2020).…”

Unsettling maternal futures in climate crisis: towards cohabitability?

“…The uncertainties of the climate crisis require people to engage in future building, imagining and creating their future lives reflexively, emotionally and relationally (Holmes et al, 2021). Emotional reflexivity is central to this process.…”

“…Emotional reflexivity includes interpreting and acting on only partially understood embodied feelings and so there may be unspoken or poorly articulated aspects to real and imagined decisions. Structured social relations frame and constrain what is imagined, felt and done when relating to others (Holmes, 2019;Holmes et al, 2021). Doucet (2021: 22-3) provides some useful possibilities for interrogating the changing structures shaping emotionally reflexive maternal future building.…”

Affective obligations and obliged affections

“…Although socially embedded, intimacy is not just about the social and its tendency to create intimacies in its own image. It also involves reflexive practices, active constructions, negotiations and compromises, and an active present and 'future building' of intimate worlds (Holmes, Jamieson and Natalier, 2021; see also Berlant and Warner, 1998;Seymour, 1999;Jurva and Lahti, 2019). It is constituted through relational practices that build and make up the feelings and experiences of close relationships and a specific affective atmosphere based on feelings of mutual love and of being special to one another (Jamieson, 2011).…”