Alternative Family Structures Research Articles

Single motherhood: A growing sociological and economic existential concern for global communities

Single motherhood as a living condition has become one the greatest alternative family structures in the world, only second to couples living together. For the case of poorer communities, the challenge seems to be greater because women are among the most affected members of society as compared to their male counterparts, when it comes to social and economic privileges. These women who are often left to fend for their families after the death of their husbands, divorced and some never married, struggle with meeting their economic and parental obligation. This causes a lot of challenges that include but are not limited to, homelessness, school dropouts, prostitution, early pregnancies and delinquent behaviors in children, etc. The premise of this article argues the case for single mothers as an express necessity and concern for society, church, and government. The single mothers, being found in these circumstances are exposed to suffering through neglect but also not given due attention as far as economic privileges are concerned. Purpose: whereas it is clear that the world is rallying on the agenda for couples and marriage as the norm for raising children in an ideal environment, it has become increasingly undeniable as to the number of marriages that are ending some in divorce and other societal challenges. Annually as others have posited, 30% of all marriages worldwide end in divorce, others lose their spouses to death and others have never been married before. This article seeks to create an appreciation of the current situation which is not only conspicuous but also undeniable. For societies faced with challenges of economic inequality between males and females, it has become a necessity to create awareness in bridging the knowledge gap in society and provide solutions for the challenge.

Maternal Employment and Childcare Use from an Intersectional Perspective: Stratification along Class, Contractual and Gender Lines in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the UK

Abstract Connecting streams of feminist and comparative social policy literature, this article investigates stratification in maternal employment and childcare use along class, contractual, and gender lines across six countries (Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom) and five family policy models. Detailing the different stratifying factors that intervene in the relation between maternal employment and childcare use offers a concrete analysis of the complex link between social reproduction and work. Employing multivariate regressions and EU-SILC (2007–2018) data, it provides an intersectional perspective to the literature. First, we observe a process of formalization in childcare use with a parallel reduction of nonformal care for couples; this process is slower for single mothers. Second, we document a paradox in relation to the social investment approach: the relation between childcare use and maternal employment is stronger in countries that recently expanded childcare to modify their male-breadwinner orientation, but in these countries childcare use is more stratified along class/contract types, a concern for the outcomes of social investment strategies outside of Scandinavia. Being out of work, being in a lower social class, fulfilling domestic tasks and/or care activities, and having an atypical contract negatively correlates with childcare use in most countries. Third, households where partners have more similar earning levels use childcare to a greater extent. The article also provides models employing different dependent and independent variables, alternative family structures, full and part-time work, formal and nonformal childcare, and rich country details.

O-221 The concept of ‘family' in the era of assisted conception : a sociolinguistic analysis

Abstract Study question Should current societal concerns about how the application of ART has resulted in evolving family structures influence clinical and legislative practice Summary answer Concerns about the role of ART in ‘threatening' historical norms need to be addressed as they cause distress and fail to support valid life choices What is known already Techniques of assisted conception including gamete donation, cryopreservation and surrogacy have enabled many individuals to access unconventional and different family structures. ART modalities that were initially concerned with achieving a child for a hetero-normative couple are now widely accessed by individuals and couples with alternative family structures. Current societal concerns oscillate between anxieties about inappropriate access and recourse to fertility treatments, demographic evidence of declining fecundity and geo-political pressures to optimize social structures. Study design, size, duration A historical review was undertaken of family structures during the historical epoque since records are available of family size, maternal mortality, generational divergence and ‘un-official' family formation. Consideration of literary sources including foundlings, child ‘gifting', adoption and abandonment was involved. Assessment of current cultural norms including Census data information on household composition was accessed. Semi-qualitative interviews with individuals wishing to access fertility treatment with donor gametes.. Participants/materials, setting, methods On-line access to records, census data, historical reviews etc. Main results and the role of chance In the post-industrial era a significant proportion of children lived in families to which they had no genetic link. ‘Excess' children were ‘gifted' to relatives, ‘sent' to live with individuals who offered the opportunity of a ‘better' life or who simply required a servant, or a companion or an heir. Quantitatively this is no different from the current situation in the UK where half of all young children live in a household in which they are not genetically linked to one of the adults who care for them. Deferred marriage or coupledom and age-related subfertility have increased the use of donor eggs. Single women and same sex female partners can now freely access donor sperm. it could be concluded that the current ‘moral panic'about the status of ‘the family' is misguided and historically inaccurate.Contemporary family structures are not so different from what has preceded them, even though the ways in which these longed for children arrive may be nove.l Limitations, reasons for caution These data refer to UK sources and may not be universalisable Wider implications of the findings Practitioners of ART and allied professionals who support their work need to be aware of the needs and entitlements of individuals who seek to form families by accessing ART. Trial registration number Not applicable

Ultra-Orthodox Lesbian Women in Israel: Alternative Family Structures as a Bridge between Religious and Sexual Identities.

The Jewish ultra-Orthodox community enforces strict rules concerning its members’ way of life and demands that their identities be consistent with that of this conservative community. However, such congruence does not exist for ultra-Orthodox women who identify as lesbians. Drawing on social representation theory, this study examines the unique family structures that lesbian ultra-Orthodox women in Israel have adopted to accommodate their conflicting identities. The study employed a qualitative multiple case study design, conducting in-depth interviews with seven ultra-Orthodox lesbian women, and adopted a phenomenological approach to learn about their lived experience. The women had all married young in arranged marriages and all had children. Four of them were still married, while the other three were divorced. In all cases, however, their lesbian identity was kept hidden. The findings reveal the unique family structures these women created that allowed them to maintain their religious way of life on the surface, while remaining committed to their sexual identity in secret. The study extends the social representation theory and promotes an understanding of the multifaceted identity of ultra-Orthodox lesbian women. The findings can aid in designing interventions that can help such women cope with the secret aspects of their life.

Beşinci Çocuk adlı romanda geleneksel aile yapısının alt üst edilmesi

The main objective of this paper is to study the novel called the Fifth Child (1988) by Doris Lessing from a cultural materialist perspective in terms of reflecting the subversion of the traditional family pattern, creating alternative family structure instead of it and eliminating gender roles imposed on women and men. According to cultural materialist theory, meaning is created culturally and some stories or some representations are tried to be more plausible than others. In this regard, the Fifth Child will show how Victorian morality and values were understood and subverted in the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher was the Prime Minister of Britain. This novel is chosen to be studied from this perspective because there is a wish for returning back to Victorian values in 1980s in the novel represented by the couple of Harriet and David. They get married and have children by sticking their gender roles imposed on them by Victorian morality. That is, David is the money provider and Harriet is looking after children and doing households in a Victorian house. Although hegemonic ideologies of Victorian morality such as emphasis on the gender roles and on the family bond exist in this period they are challenged and subverted with the birth of the fifth child called Ben into the family. As a result, the subversion of family bond with the coming of Ben and the subversion of gender roles with Harriet who brings Ben back against the consent of her husband will be illustrated in the paper.

\u201cIt\u2019s a Little Bit Tricky\u201d: Results from the POLYamorous Childbearing and Birth Experiences Study (POLYBABES)

The number of polyamorous people in Canada is growing steadily, and many polyamorous people are of childbearing age and report living with children. Experiences of polyamorous families, particularly those related to pregnancy and childbirth, have thus far been underrepresented in the literature. The POLYamorous Childbearing and Birth Experiences Study (POLYBABES) sought to explore the pregnancy and birth experiences of polyamorous people. Having previously reported findings relating to experiences with the health system and healthcare providers, this article specifically focuses on the social aspects of polyamorous families’ experiences. We explored the impact of polyamory on one’s self identity, relationship structures, and experiences navigating the social world. Anyone who self-identified as polyamorous during pregnancy and birth, gave birth in Canada within 5 years, and received some prenatal care was eligible to participate in this study. Participants were recruited through social media and interviewed online or in person. Twenty-four participants were interviewed (11 birthing people and 13 of their partners). Thematic analysis was used to explore the data, and four primary themes were identified: deliberately planning families, more is more, presenting polyamory, and living in a mononormative world. Each theme was further broken down into a number of sub-themes. We also collaborated with research participants to create a glossary of terms. By exploring the pregnancy and birth experiences of polyamorous families and focusing on participant voices, this research adds to the limited research on polyamorous families and contributes to the process of breaking down stigma associated with alternative family structures. Further, by creating an accessible glossary of terms, researchers and lay persons alike have been given access to a meaningful resource.

Childhood family structure and complexity in partnership life courses

This study investigated the associations between childhood living arrangements and complex adult partnership trajectories. The authors defined first union dissolution as the event initiating a complex partnership life course, and measured the level of complexity using a weighted cumulative index of subsequent partnership episodes. The analyses were based on a representative sample of the German population born in 1971–73 from the German Family Panel and used multivariate hurdle models to estimate the probability of experiencing the initiation of a complex partnership trajectory, as well as the level of complexity. Results showed that respondents who did not grow up with both biological parents (i.e. those who experienced an alternative family structure) had both a greater likelihood of experiencing the dissolution of their own first union, and followed more complex subsequent partnership trajectories. These associations varied across types of (alternative) family structures experienced during childhood and according to the level of parental partnership (in)stability. This study contributes to our understanding of contemporary partnership complexity and its precursors using a long term life course theoretical and methodological frame. We acknowledge that continuities and disruptions in the development of adult (complex) partnership trajectories can be linked to a growing diversity of family structure in childhood. Thereby, we expand knowledge on intergenerational interdependencies of family instability and complexity beyond the reproduction of the event of union dissolution.

Plato’s Cave and the Image of the Family Home in John McGahern’s The Barracks

This article argues that, in The Barracks, John McGahern’s literary production of the domestic familial space charts the fractures and partitions within that supposed unified space to reveal the anaemic passivity and alienating nausea that overcomes individuals within a prescriptive and totalising hegemony. It will discuss McGahern’s decision to withdraw his first novel from publication, and the reformation of the unpublished text into The Barracks. It expressly considers McGahern’s shifting of the spatial setting from the recognisable trope of the country kitchen to a Garda barracks and the impact this has on Elizabeth’s position within the family home, and therefore society. This article argues that the novel’s form addresses the dislocation of non-hegemonic or alternative family structures. McGahern’s staging of the narrative in the unfit and fractured domestic space of the barracks subverts traditional conceptions of ‘home’. This undermines the supposed impenetrable primacy of the family unit and highlights the bad faith and comely delusion of mid-century Ireland.

Food away from home in Brazil: the role of sociodemographic factors and family structure

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to estimate the determinants of per capita expenditures with disaggregate food away from home (FAFH) including variables such as family structure.Design/methodology/approachThe authors estimated a system of expenditure equations (SUR method) with data from the latest Consumer Expenditure Survey of 2008–2009 – (or Pesquisa de Orçamentos Familiares – POF), considering the complex sample design in estimation procedures.FindingsThe authors found a positive relationship between woman’s opportunity cost of time and FAFH spending only when the authors considered the effects of wife’s education in higher income class. Hiring domestic help diminishes FAFH spending, mostly for lunch and dinner time meals. The presence of children in the household decreases the consumption of most FAFH categories.Social implicationsEven though, Brazilian FAFH consumption has been increasing, the presence of women in the labor market seems to play a small role in the determining this type of food consumption. Family structure plays an important role in determining FAFH.Originality/valueThe contribution of the paper is to estimate FAFH expenditures at the disaggregate level and by income class for Brazil. The authors also included alternative family structure specifications as determinants in the model. The authors considered the sample design characteristics in estimation.

Remembering Mum and Dad: Family History Making by Children of Eastern European Refugees

This article explores the memory-making of descendants of post-war displaced persons from Eastern Europe now living in Australia. Their processes to uncover their parents’ wartime, refugee and settlement pasts are mediated through public and personal forums. Accordingly, this analysis is framed by a theory of post-memory, which considers the narrative effects of living in close proximity to (the sometimes concealed) stories of their parents’ displacement and family separation. This cohort search for a wider frame to articulate their parents’ pasts as Eastern European (mainly Polish and Latvian) refugees, which is lacking in public discussions around immigration to Australia. They complicate and in some cases undermine celebratory narratives of migration to Australia and of family settlement. On an intimate level, their parents’ experiences are deployed as a means to grapple with their alternative family structures and less-than-conventional childhoods within immigration centres or camps, which were influenced by discriminatory policy for non-British migrants, and single mothers in particular. When adopting a collective lens, these histories are projected onto wider historical understandings of the immigration scheme, which these descendants of displaced persons seek to complicate.

Humor and Latina/o Camp in “Ugly Betty”: Funny Looking

Humor and Latina/o Camp in “Ugly Betty”: Funny Looking

Who counts as a parent for the purposes of filial obligations?

I argue that using a traditional biological account of parenthood causes problems for determining who counts as a parent for the purposes of filial obligations in alternative family structures. I then argue that a better way to understand parenthood is as a role. People who fill the role of parents are parents, regardless of their biological ties to a child. Next, I argue that children can have more than two parents and so can have filial obligations to more than two people. I then demonstrate that understanding parenthood as a role allows us to correctly account for who should be a parent in cases of adoption, surrogacy, and extended families. In the final section I discuss three related worries about allowing a child to have more than two parents.

Embracing Family Diversity through Transformative Educational Leadership, the Ethics of Care, and Community Uplift in Schools

This conceptual paper extends the understanding and application of transformative leadership through the lens of a feminist ethic of care and a community-centric perspective. The authors re-examine the transformative leadership style in relation to the emerging alternative family structures in the United States. The authors also consider the need for a novel transformative leadership approach that infuses the ethics of care to formulate new policies and practices. Finally, the authors provide recommendations for future research that promote care and justice as transformative leadership attributes in diverse school communities. This conceptualization brings community to the forefront of stronger school–community relations.

Shapeshifters: black girls and the choreography of citizenship

In Shapeshifters Aimee Meredith Cox explores how young Black women in a Detroit homeless shelter contest stereotypes, critique their status as partial citizens, and negotiate poverty, racism, and gender violence to create and imagine lives for themselves. Based on eight years of fieldwork at the Fresh Start shelter, Cox shows how the shelter's residents—who range in age from fifteen to twenty-two—employ strategic methods she characterizes as choreography to disrupt the social hierarchies and prescriptive narratives that work to marginalize them. Among these are dance and poetry, which residents learn in shelter workshops. These outlets for performance and self-expression, Cox shows, are key to the residents exercising their agency, while their creation of alternative family structures demands a rethinking of notions of care, protection, and love. Cox also uses these young women's experiences to tell larger stories: of Detroit's history, the Great Migration, deindustrialization, the politics of respectability, and the construction of Black girls and women as social problems. With Shapeshifters Cox gives a voice to young Black women who find creative and non-normative solutions to the problems that come with being young, Black, and female in America.

Rebel masculinities of star/director/text: James Dean, Nicholas Ray, and Rebel Without a Cause

Director Nicholas Ray is arguably most familiar to cinema culture as the American test case for la politique des auteurs, the influential mode of film criticism formulated at the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma after World War II. Ray was elevated to the status of film ‘author’ for a consistency of vision and style associated with rebellion. Yet, he was known in the film industry as an ‘actor's director,’ both for his background in theater and for bringing Lee Strasberg's ‘The Method’ to Hollywood after it had gained considerable cachet at the Actors Studio in New York since the 1930s. Although Ray was relatively unknown among the movie-going public, his films were (and still remain) recognizable for their male stars, including James Dean, Robert Mitchum, and Humphrey Bogart. In this essay, I look at his most famous film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955), to argue that Ray's reputation as a rebel auteur was as much the product of highbrow auteurist film criticism as the mass cultural persona of ‘rebel male hero’ that the film's star James Dean cultivated. As an actor, Dean was promoted at the vanguard of an innovative and experimental new performance style. Further, his star-performance text reveals a construction of masculinity that the film asks us to view as socially rebellious, which is retroactively linked to Ray. Both the film and the popular press form Dean's image constituted by his self-fashioned sense of authenticity, his non-normative sexuality, his highly publicized death, and the identification with an alternative family structure his role invites.

S/m/othering

Recent scholarship in art education has introduced complex discourses of mothering, m/othering curriculum (Hoeptner-Poling, Guyas, & Keys, 2012; Springgay & Freedman, 2009, 2010), (m)others (Eisenhauer, 2009), m(other)work (Hoeptner-Poling, Guyas, & Keys, 2013), family structures that confront myths of the nuclear family (Rhoades, 2009), non-Western motherhoods (Richmond-Saravia, 2011), and disability (Derby, 2011; Eisenhauer, 2007). Feminist artists and activists have long confronted cultural constructions of motherhood and the pregnant, post-partum, and lactating body in their work (e.g., Kelly, 1973-1979; Opie, 2003; Redman, 1964; Ukeles, 1969). Yet, bodies rendered infertile through either biological or sociocultural exclusion from parenting and the loss(es) associated with infertility remain largely invisible in both artistic practice and academic discourse. This absence is s/m/othering. It perpetuates misunderstandings of the complex reality of mothering and parenting experiences in all their expressions. It at best condones and at worst reproduces discriminatory institutional practices such as routine exclusion of fertility treatments and of benefits for adoptive families from health insurance plans, limiting possibilities for pursuing parenthood. Following the inclusive precedent set by scholars and artists in art and art education (e.g., Eisenhauer, 2007,2010), I argue for both a presence for the experience of infertility along with an expansion of images of motherhood and parenthood within art and art education. I propose a framework for inclusion of the infertility experience within four primary contexts.First, contemporary feminist scholars (e.g., Gupta, 2006) have described a polarization of the discourses surrounding infertility and especially New Reproductive Technologies (NRTs), including invitro fertilization (IVF). This dichotomy represents women as either victims whose selves and bodies are subjected to patriarchal, medicalized surveillance or as capable agents who exercise choice within the context of reproductive rights that align with broader and historical feminist arguments. These binary discourses are pedagogically significant because they reproduce cultural and institutional practices that continue to render infertility hidden and encourage silence and lack of disclosure, diminish cultural support for the grief associated with infertility, limit the choices available to individuals who wish to pursue parenthood, conflate womanhood with motherhood, and reify patriarchal notions about who and what a family is and how that family comes to be (e.g., Throsby & Gill, 2004).Second, globalized medical and economic practices and transnational feminisms (Gupta, 2006) intersect with this polarized view. These junctures further complicate the relationship between access to reproductive care through insurance and national health programs; the quasi-legal selling, renting, regulating, and destroying of human body parts; and the interests of multi-national pharmaceutical corporations, (local, state, and national) governments, and their constituents that include public educational institutions and insurance carriers. Contemporary feminist scholars and artists must address this complexity and work to make the affective and embodied experience of all those experiencing infertility, engaging in the fertility economy, and building alternative family structures not only visible but also central rather than peripheral or anecdotal. For example, contemporary artist Marilee Talkington performed The Creative Process: An IVF Living Art Piece from May through June 2013. In the work, she publicly injected herself with the hormonal drugs necessary for IVF in multiple locations including the San Francisco MOMA, the de Young Museum, and the Golden Gate Bridge. Her injections were live-streamed for online viewers, and she invited others going through IVF to inject with her. Talkington's piece both publicizes the private aspects of the IVF process (including learning to inject oneself with medications) and invites other participants in the process to claim it by making it visible. …

“We Are All Rwandans”1: Repatriation, National Identity, and the Plight of Rwanda's Transferred Children

While much has been written about children caught up in the all too numerous conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, what is not as apparent is the impact these conflicts have on “transferred” children: Those removed from the conflict areas by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), international organizations, and private individuals. The practice of removing children from conflict zones has been a byproduct of many of the most violent events in recent memory: the rescue missions during the Armenian genocide, the Refugee Children Movement, kindertransport and hidden children of the Holocaust, and the lesser-known transfer of children during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. This article addresses the underreported events surrounding the transfer of children during the Rwandan genocide as a way to interrogate the consequences of this practice. It argues that as the most vulnerable of those caught up in unimaginable violence, these children become yet another face of human suffering during the conflict and in the aftermath they become the nexus for issues of identity, repatriation, and assimilation that are mobilized in national discourses of reconciliation and national unity. Of note in the cases of transferred children is how the patterns of familial fracture, alternative family structures, conflicts over the fate of former transferred children, and governments’ transborder claims to their citizens are, on the one hand, mobilized to support transferred children and, on the other, to support and provide legitimation for political policies and the project of creating a new postconflict society.

Innocence, Protection and Failure: Bringing the Child Subject to the Centre of the Politics of the Family. A Response to Cristyn Davies and Kerry Robinson

In response to Davies and Robinson's article looking at how queer families are positioned and position themselves in relation to neoliberalism, this article brings the child to the centre of the debate to examine how reading the child subject in terms of discourses of innocence and protection might work to maintain the hegemony of the normative — that is, heterosexual, nuclear — family, and close down discussions of alternative family structures. In exploring how the child subject is positioned in relation to these ideas, the article draws on Judith Butler's reworking of Adorno's notion of ‘ethical violence’ to suggest that the constraining of possibilities for the constitution of children's subjectivities by limiting their access to ‘difficult knowledges' around sexuality can be read as a kind of violence to the child subject. Turning to the children's voices that emerge from Davies and Robinson's research, it argues that children's failure to enact the position of the innocent child can be seen as a productive or generative space from which to begin to question the terms of this specious positioning. Thus, the article suggests that both the acknowledgement of borderwork as ethically violent towards the child, and the failure of the child to conform to the discourse of innocence together work to destabilise the normative positioning of the heterosexual, nuclear family.

Does Adolescent Family Structure Predict Military Enlistment? A Comparison of Post–High School Activities

This paper investigates the link between adolescent family structure and the likelihood of military enlistment in young adulthood, as compared to alternative post-high school activities. We use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and multinomial logistic regression analyses to compare the odds of military enlistment with college attendance or labor force involvement. We find that alternative family structures predict enlistment relative to college attendance. Living in a single-parent household during adolescence increased odds of military enlistment, but the effect is accounted for by socioeconomic status and early feelings of social isolation. Living with a stepparent or with neither biological parent more than doubles the odds of enlistment, independent of socioeconomic status, characteristics of parent-child relationships, or feelings of social isolation. Although college attendance is widely promoted as a valued post-high school activity, military service may offer a route to independence and a greater sense of belonging.

The well-being of children with gay and lesbian parents

The articles by Loren Marks and Mark Regnerus provide useful opportunities for readers to think about the current state of research on children with gay and lesbian parents. These articles raise two sets of issues. One involves the scientific status of research on this topic, and the other involves concerns about law, social policy, and civil rights. My comments focus on both sets of issues, beginning with the former. (Disclosure: I served for 2 days as a paid consultant on the design of the New Family Structures Study. I did so because I think that new research on gay and lesbian families, as well as other alternative family structures, should be encouraged.)