We Must Not Define “The Family”!

Bernardes, Jon

doi:10.1300/j002v28n03_03

Cited by 29 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Some scholars began to consider family “an idea or configuration of meanings,” rather than an objective entity (Holstein & Gubrium, , p. 5). In this perspective, family is the enactment of those meanings in domestic life (Bernardes, ; Trost, ; Weigel, ). For example, Morgan's notion of “family practices” emphatically avoids essentializing “the family” and focuses instead on the activities of time, space, emotions, and bodies involved in the “doing” of family (Morgan, , ).…”

Section: Becoming Familymentioning

confidence: 99%

More‐than‐human families: Pets, people, and practices in multispecies households

2017

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Although humans have coexisted with dogs and cats for thousands of years, that coexistence has taken on various meanings over time. Only recently have people openly included their pets as members of the family. Yet, because of the cultural ambivalence toward animals, what it means for a pet to “be” a family member remains unsettled. Drawing from research on family practices including kinship, household routines, childhood socialization, and domestic violence, this paper considers how pets participate in “doing” family and what their presence means for this social arrangement long considered quintessentially human. Today's more‐than‐human families represent a hybrid of relations, human and animal and social and natural, rather than an entirely new kind of family. Becoming family has always been contingent on a cast of nonhuman characters, and recognition of the “more‐than‐human” can enhance sociological understanding, not only of the family but also of other aspects of social life.

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Section: Becoming Familymentioning

confidence: 99%

More‐than‐human families: Pets, people, and practices in multispecies households

2017

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“…Family researchers have emphasized the range and diversity of "emergent and reconfigured forms of family life" (Lempert and DeVault 2000) in contemporary modern societies. According to the 1991 Census, only 14.6 percent of UK households contained one adult male and one adult female, with between 1 and 3 dependent children, where only one of the adults was in employment (Bernardes 1999). The acknowledged existence of family diversity does not, however, necessarily map onto social members' displayed understandings of the family as a normative concept.…”

Section: Implications For the Problem Of Heterosexismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Heteronormativity in Action: Reproducing the Heterosexual Nuclear Family in After-hours Medical Calls

2005

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Heterosexism has become a recognized social problem since the rise of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) activism in the 1970s. One of its manifestations is heteronormativity: the mundane production of heterosexuality as the normal, natural, taken-for-granted sexuality. My research uses conversation analysis to explore heteronormativity as an ongoing, situated, practical accomplishment by people oriented to other actions entirely. I show that family reference terms-across a dataset of 59 after-hours calls to the doctor-are deployed so as to construct a normative version of the heterosexual nuclear family: a married couple, co-resident with their biological, dependent children. I examine the inferences normatively attached to family reference terms, consider how these inferences are used interactionally, and document how this everyday talk-in-interaction both reflects and reconstitutes the culturally normative definition of the family. This research advances our understanding of normativity by showing how a social problem can exist even when there is no orientation to "trouble" in interaction. Here, the persistent and untroubled reproduction of a taken-for-granted heteronormative world both reflects heterosexual privilege and (by extrapolation) perpetuates the oppression of non-heterosexual people, denied access to key social institutions such as marriage and unable to take for granted access to their culture's family reference terms. The article shows how the heteronormative social order is reproduced at the level of mundane social interaction, through the everyday conversational practices of ordinary folk.

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“…This approach emphasizes how there are multiple ways to "do" family (Bulanda, 2011;Hudak & Giammattei, 2014;Nelson, 2006;Sarkisian, 2006;Takacs & Kuhar, 2011). In acknowledging that family can be understood in many ways (Bernardes, 1986(Bernardes, , 1999, this approach centers on thinking of family as an adjective or a verb instead of a noun (Morgan, 1996(Morgan, , 2011 or as a performance instead of a fixed identity (Butler, 1988). Such a practice-centered approach avoids individualization by showing that "one's actions have to be both conveyed to and understood by relevant others if those actions are to be effective as constituting 'family' practices" (Finch, 2007, p. 67).…”

Section: Diversification: Theorizing Family In Postinstitutional Termsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Theorizing Family Change: A Review and Reconceptualization

Knapp

Wurm

2019

J of Family Theo & Revie

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We review how recent family scholarship theorizes recent family change as either a process of deinstitutionalization, in which family can no longer be understood in institutional terms, or a process of diversification, in which family life is expanding but not losing its institutional character. We argue that both approaches emerge out of and depend on a social institutional framework for understanding family that was developed in 20th‐century sociology. Despite producing a wealth of research, both approaches have difficulty adequately conceptualizing the institutional character of family and providing ways of theorizing family change. We introduce an alternative to a social institutional framework, a Weberian institutional logics approach, which provides a different way to understand the institutional character of family life and thereby affords new interpretations and avenues for theory and research on family change in the 21st century.

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We Must Not Define “The Family”!

Cited by 29 publications

References 20 publications

More‐than‐human families: Pets, people, and practices in multispecies households

More‐than‐human families: Pets, people, and practices in multispecies households

Heteronormativity in Action: Reproducing the Heterosexual Nuclear Family in After-hours Medical Calls

Theorizing Family Change: A Review and Reconceptualization

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