Family Ideology Research Articles

“We Explain”: Interaction and Becoming a Family in Migration

This paper applies the lens of child language brokering to explore parent–child everyday interaction as an Afghan migrant family re‐grounds itself in the new linguistic and social context of Denmark. Whereas brokering is often seen as children's translating, this ethnographic study shows that children contribute with explaining, rather than only translating. Drawing on linguistic ethnographic data analysis, the study presents that these explaining activities are occasions for children and their parents to re/define their own role relations and for parents to display family ideologies about the quality of family relations to self and others, conveying that this family is thriving.

Strong Woman and Reproduction of Family Ideology: A Critical Analysis of “Alev Alev”

Son dönemde güçlü kadın karakterlerin yer aldığı televizyon dizilerinin sayısında bir artış yaşanmıştır. Alev Alev dizisi de bu diziler arasında yer almaktadır. Çalışma Alev Alev dizisindeki güçlü kadın figürlerin güçlerinin hangi temellere dayandığını sorgulamaktadır. Alev Alev dizisinde güçlü kadın figürler öne çıkarken bu figürlerin dayandığı ideolojik altyapının ne olduğu bir başka inceleme konusu olarak belirmektedir. Gerek ekranın önünde gerek de arkasında yer alan kadınların özel ve kamusal alanlardaki pratikleri akılla birinci ve ikinci dalga feminizmler arasındaki ayrımı getirmektedir. Birinci dalga feminizm özel alandaki ilişkilere doğrudan eğilmezken, ikinci dalga feminizm özel olanın politik olduğunu iddia eder. Çalışmanın kavramsal çerçevesi kadınlık, annelik, süper kadınlık, süper annelik, patriyarka kavramlarını sorgulayacaktır. Eleştirel söylem analizinin kullanıldığı çalışmadaki kavramsal çerçeve, patriyarka, annelik ve kadınlık kimlikleri, feminizmler olarak belirlenmiştir.

Women as Agents of Change: Exploring Women Leaders' Resistance and Shaping of Gender Ideologies in Pakistan.

Despite a growing focus on processes to promote gender equity, women remain significantly underrepresented in leadership positions in the Global South. In the present study we focus on the role of familial experiences in shaping and contesting gender ideologies of Pakistani women in the workplace. We specifically examine the reciprocal ways in which women leaders and their family members shape each other’s gender ideologies regarding the workplace. Data collected and analyzed for this study were semi-structured interviews with eight women in positions of leadership in Lahore, Pakistan, and interviews with one family members of each of the women leaders (thus 16 interviews total). Using thematic narrative analysis, we identified three thematic phases: learning gender expectations, resistance, and familial transformation. These phases reflect the progression of developing, resisting, and influencing individual and familial gender ideologies. We document the manifestation of these phases in three specific domains: education, marriage and motherhood, and the workplace. We then discuss how these findings contribute to understanding the experiences of women leaders and perceptions of their family members regarding women’s role in the workplace. Findings from our research provide novel insights into the ways globalization and capitalism continue to shape the socio-cultural context for women leaders in the Global South.

Care leavers’ notions of the ‘ideal’ family in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT There is a growing interest in the study of young people with care experience both globally and more recently, in the Global South. These young people, also known as care leavers, are not well studied particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. The gap lies mostly in our understanding of care leaver’s family relationships, particularly how they make sense of the term family considering their separation experience. A qualitative phenomenological study was conducted with care leavers in Zimbabwe (n = 30) on their notions of the ‘ideal’ family. The ideology of family has traditionally been based on the heteronormative nuclear family, with two parents in a heterosexual relationship. For care leavers with a history of family separation, the study found that this ideal also included characteristics of love, protection and all needs being met. Care leavers drew from their personal experiences, observations in the community and their lived experiences in institutional care as frames of reference for their constructions of the ‘ideal’ family. The study has implications for social service practitioners and future family studies.

Gender Reconfigurations and Family Ideology in Abdul Rauf Felpete’s Latin American Haqqaniyya

This article discusses the ideas about gender contained in the Enseñanzas Sufíes Para Los Tiempos Actuales, a text by Abdul Rauf Felpete, the leader of the Naqshbandiyya Haqqaniyya in Latin America, probably the largest Sufi group in the continent. I analyse these ideas against the backdrop context in which they were produced: on the one hand, a conservative Sufi Islamic frame inspired by Nazim al-Haqqani’s ideas, and on the other, an Argentinian society that was incurring profound gender-related societal changes at the time when the shaykh delivered the sermons contained in the book. This historical moment was characterised by a growing feminist and LGTBQ+ activism and the arrival of a progressive government in Argentina, which over time, positioned this Latin American country in the vanguard of gender and sexual equality rights in the Spanish speaking world. In this context, Rauf Felpete proposes a gender model inspired in a Haqqani form of Islamic conservatism as a remedy to address what he perceives as the threat of civilizational decadence brought about by these changes. I discuss Rauf Felpete’s family ideology, a set of moral norms based on gender determinism and pronatalism, articulated through two key concepts, first, domesticity, understood as a way to regulate female behaviour and, second, motherhood, viewed as a Godly ordained natural instinct. In order to put into practice these gender norms, the devout Haqqani is called to move to the countryside; rural communes are presented as the only possible way of living a pious and authentically Islamic life, a mode of living that implies profound reconfigurations of gender (and of lifestyle, more generally) for his Latin American followers.

Between familism and neoliberalism: the case of Jewish Israeli grandmothers

In this article, we employ grandmothers’ childcare as a lens to explore the changing relations between familism, individualism and neoliberalism. More generally, we examine the connections between the political economy and the intimate moral economy of childcare work performed by grandmothers. Based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with twenty retired women in Israel, we examine how they negotiate, comply and resist the expectations that they will help ‘fill in’ the ‘care deficit’ resulting from neoliberal policies and labour market practices. We show how grandmothers navigate between family ideologies and individualistic cultural imperatives, constituting themselves as agentive subjects who can determine the conditions in which they meet their families’ care expectations while challenging the invisibility of their work. Thus, using Israel as a case study, we argue that familism and individualism, working against each other as well as together, create tensions while mediating the political economy and the intimate moral economy based on the love, commitment and ideology of the ‘good mother’. More broadly, we assert that neoliberalism strengthens family and familism and, at the same time, familism facilitates the neoliberal labour market and economy while also freeing the state from having to support families with children.

From a Pati-Parmeshawar or a Lord to a Partner: How the Conservative Patriarchal Family Ideology Operates and Is Challenged in the Courts

From a Pati-Parmeshawar or a Lord to a Partner: How the Conservative Patriarchal Family Ideology Operates and Is Challenged in the Courts

A Boy's Spiritual Journey: The Cultural and Religious Conflict between Family Relationships and the Conventionalism of Tibetan Buddhism in Sarah Ruhl's The Oldest Boy (2014)

This research paper is mainly concerns with the analyzing of Sarah Ruhl's play The Oldest Boy (2014), critically via considering the clashes of culture, and religion with family ideologies. By Adherents T.S. Eliot’s approach in his Notes towards the Definition of Culture, the paper is devoted to looking at and embodying the cultural and religious rift occurring in Ruhl’s The Oldest Boy. And to stand on the fact of the impact of the cultural and religious conflict on the family relations by passing throughout the main event of the play as to attract a Christian-born child who is only three years’ old to convert to Buddhism, and to be a Tibetan Buddhism Lama. The case is hectic for an American mother with no information on, or faith in, Buddhism. The paper proceeds with the hypothesis that the genuine clash is inner and it lies in the Mother's battle to give up her child or not in the middle of the spontaneous flood of cultural, religious and emotional clashes. The paper concludes that religion is what shapes the culture of countries.

‘I’m Mum and Dad in One, Basically’: Doing and Displaying ‘Good Lone Motherhood’

Popular discourse continues to equate ‘good’ motherhood with middle class, heterosexual coupledom and lone motherhood with dysfunctionality, despite ever-increasing diversity in family life. Drawing on interviews with lone mothers in two locations in the north of England, this article introduces the concept of ‘good lone motherhood’ to capture a process whereby women internalise nuclear family ideology while simultaneously resisting stigma and taking pride in their achievements in fulfilling practical and emotional demands of lone parenting. Application of a family practices framework is expanded through insights into what ‘doing’ good lone motherhood entails in everyday life and how it is ‘displayed’ to different audiences. Taking a comparative approach involving women in areas with contrasting socio-economic profiles highlights the contextual nature of display. Analysis of agential reflexivity and structural constraints demonstrates ways in which gender and class disadvantages can undermine capacity to ‘successfully’ convey a positive maternal identity.

GENDER INEQUALITY WITHIN A FAMILY: THE REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN’S NOVEL IN SOCIAL MEDIA

A topic about women is always interesting to discuss, including their works, such as a novel. Her life journey has been portrayed in a novel in detail. This paper aims to describe the representation of a women's novel in social media, the factors leading to it, and the values within. It employed a qualitative descriptive method with a feminist literary approach that examined the text from the women's side as a reader. Data were taken from a novel published online in social media and then printed. It was Elena. This study showed that women's novels in social media tend to experience marginalization/discrimination, stereotype/negative labeling, subordination, and excessive burden for women. The dominating cultural construction, patriarchy ideology, and familial ideology are the influencing factors. Women's novel also contains messages about religious values, education values, and the values of patience and endurance. It suggested that further research compared it with other novels published in social media or other media to provide a more comprehensive and varied description.

The Aspects of Familial Ideology Presented in Women’s Novels in the 1950’s

The Aspects of Familial Ideology Presented in Women’s Novels in the 1950’s

공공성의 공간으로서 ‘교회-되기’를 위하여: 비혼여성 문제를 중심으로

This study is about ‘empowering the church’ as a public domain which indicates that the church is a space of public spirits. The article addresses the problem of the loss of empowerment in the church due to the Christian culture in which the authoritative majority has been dominant, a dynamic which effectively closes the place to others. Korean churches have continuously engendered a family ideology that is influenced by a patriarchal Christian culture. In this situation, the minority groups of the church have been suppressed other groups such as unmarried women by patriarchal oppression. However, understanding this and other groups such as other types of families is necessary because the numbers of diverse types of families, such as a single-parent families, are skyrocketing. Jesus comforted minorities and gave the suppressed women the joy of liberation. Thus, the Ecclesia-Church, which succeeds in embodying the spirit of Jesus Christ, needs to become a public place that gives minorities liberation.<BR> This study aims to restore the spirit of the church as the public domain that helps unmarried women and other minorities to build their genuine identity as members of the church. First, we discuss the authentic meaning of ‘public spirit’ and explore how to recover it. Next, we discover how the today’s churches play a spatial role for minorities, especially unmarried women. Consequently, I hope that this study contributes to restoring Jesus Christ’s gospel offering salvation to minorities, which will, in turn, help to empower the church.

The Tibetan stem family in historical perspective

ABSTRACT Despite decades of scholarly interest in the Tibetan marital practice of fraternal polyandry, very little is known about how the Tibetan family system operated in historical contexts. This study, based on a 1958 household register from Kyirong, a former district in Tibet, reconstructs nuances of family dynamics through the aid of interviews with people who were listed in the document. Kyirong’s family system is shown to be very flexible. Although patrilocality was preferred, matrilocality was a viable contingency, and although polyandry was favored, monogamy and polygyny were acceptable. Despite the heterogeneity of Kyirong’s family households, case studies demonstrate how people strove to achieve the monomarital stem family through polyandrous marriages in successive generations. Because polyandry created a surplus of marriageable women, joint families often arose, at least in form, when unmarried women remained with their natal families and had children, or when men discontent with their polyandrous unions moved into an adjunct house with a partner of choice. However, the offspring of these people had no rights of inheritance and thus were not integral to family continuity, so joint families in form functioned more like stem families in practice. Therefore, a discrepancy between etic definitions of form and emic understandings of process emerges when family typologies developed to facilitate cross-cultural research are incompatible with the way people actually understand rights and privileges associated with succession. The data and analysis demonstrate that Kyirong represents a unique version of a stem family society with an unambiguous stem family ideology.

The complementary roles between clientelism and familism in social policy development

AbstractWhat drives social policy development? Most of the literature addressing this issue focuses on the economic crisis and the increase in left power as its causation. On the basis of the Indonesian case, this paper engages in a debate about the clouts of clientelism and familial ethics in shaping social policy path development. This article claims that the quick replacement of productivist welfare regimes with the more inclusive system after Asian Financial Crisis is motivated by increased elites' interest in repositioning their clientelistic network within a public institution. This is occurring while familial precepts are being used as effective moral politics in encouraging kinship networks to internalize social risks during the regime replacement process. Overall, the case of Indonesia reflects the common characteristic of welfare regimes development in East Asian countries where efforts to modernize social policy are conditioned under a situation where democracy is not well‐established and the post‐modern family structure has not fully matured either. Consequently, the development of social policy to a large extent is still confined within a huge clientelistic influence and implemented under the familial ideology. This situation has ultimately retarded welfare state development.

‘Save the children!’: Governing left-behind children through family in China’s Great Migration

Existing scholarship on the lives and wellbeing of China’s left-behind children often frames the issues as a function of their parents’ migration, which leaves a significant gap in discussing the role of the state in shaping the institutional framework that these families operate within, cope or struggle with. Through critically interrogating public discourses based on articles from a mainstream newspaper and policy documents since the early 2000s, this article situates a sociological inquiry into the discursive and institutional framework addressing ‘the left-behind children problem’ in China within the problematic of the relationship between children, family, and the state. The analysis reveals seemingly ‘disingenuous’ articulations of left-behind children’s value in the mainstream media and official policies. On the one hand, there seems to be a prevailing concern over the welfare of left-behind children which has grave implications for the country’s future development. On the other hand, the dominant discourse attributes left-behind children’s ‘miserable’ plight to their ‘pathological’ family life, which translates into policy efforts to discipline rural migrant families according to a family ideology rooted in urban middle-class experiences. I argue that such inconsistencies should be contextualized in the state’s neoliberal-authoritarian governance of the migrant population in the post-reform era, which perpetuates a stereotype of ‘the pathological family’ to account for left-behind children’s disadvantages while evading, hence up until recent years avoiding to redress, the political-economic factors underlying their plight. I conclude the article by ruminating on the theoretical, social and policy implications of this study.

Censorship as a Human Dynamic: An International Perspective

By their very nature, democracies around the world affirm belief in intellectual freedom of thought, speech and written word. In every such society, however, a counterforce exists that would limit such freedom and impose restrictions and sanctions against material viewed by some as anti-moral or anti-social. Free speech and censorship are opponents on a battlefield where each side to the conflict feels a righteous and indignant claim on behalf on its own cause.&#x0D; This paper presents a psychological perspective which tries to understand censorship - where it comes from, who "has it" and why, and how it functions in all human beings to keep them psychologically safe and sane.&#x0D; Based on personality theory, this paper explores the psychological indications for censorship as a human dynamic and its bases in family ideology, social group norms, demographic factors and individual personality development. This paper does not consider the legal, moral or politcal aspects of censorship, nor does it recount the may blatant subtle censorship events and conditions in countries around the world. Rather, it considers the individual and group conditions underlying personality development that are likely to result in the individual's inclination to assume legal, moreal and political censorship activities.

One Trend, a Patchwork of Laws. An Exploration of Why Cohabitation Law is so Different throughout the Western World

Abstract Western jurisdictions have adopted remarkably diverging legal approaches to address unmarried cohabitation, ranging between contractual approaches, registered partnerships, and default regimes. This article explores to what extent the large diversity in cohabitation law is prompted by socio-demographic factors, legal tradition and family ideology. The experiences from Belgium, Sweden, England and Wales, New Zealand, and the United States suggest that cohabitation law is mostly ideologically motivated, with socio-demographic factors only having a minor impact. Diverging views on the preservation of the traditional family and the autonomy versus protection of the vulnerable partner-spectrum, in particular, seem to form the backbone of a jurisdiction’s preference for a contractual approach, a registered partnership, or a default regime. Path dependency brings an important nuance to this model. Because existing rights and benefits often prove difficult to turn back, a shift in policy generally fails to eliminate all traces of the former legal framework.

Ideological Shifts and Social Impacts: A Study of Labour Migration from Pakistan to GCC Countries

This research aims to explore the socio-economic impacts of labour migration from Pakistan to GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) countries. Labour migration is a complex and dynamic process which involves multiple factors. Today, it is considered a natural process that happens in every state as a source of cultural diversity and financial contribution. Specifically, the study looks into changes of family ideology of labourers’ families and socio-economic impacts of remittances generated from labour migration on Pakistani society and the families of migrant workers. Primarily, the study focuses on the region of Gujranwala, as the home of the largest number of migrant workers with rural backgrounds in Punjab, Pakistan. The study follows a mixed method approach: a survey and focussed group interviews are used to explore the impact of labour migration in the specific region of Punjab. Fifteen focus group interviews were conducted from the families of labourers and a sixteenth was conducted after data saturation; similarly, 100 participants of surrounding families were selected through convenient sampling. From the interviews major changes in family ideology were children education, migration to cities, purchase of property and religious funding. The quantitative results show that the society (of a particular region) experienced significant impacts in terms of status transformation and breakdown of socio-ethnic hierarchies.

Domestic Violence Against Women by Their Intimate Partner: A Cross Sectional Analysis on Amalgamation of Women's Individual Health Status and Various Risk Factors in Indian

Background: Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is a severe public health issue, and nowadays, it has reached with an acute state in the society. Using a sample of 62,090 ever-married Indian women, this study investigated the impact of women’s individual health condition and various factors associated with respondent’s household, personal, and partner’s socio-economic, demographic & cultural risk behaviors on women’s experience of IPV offense. Method: Multivariable binary logistic regression method (Main effect & Interaction effect) was applied to evaluate the extent of association of risk factors at various levels with the past year's experience of any form of IPV. In the past year prevalence of any form of IPV among Indian ever-married women (n = 62,090) was 32.7 %. Findings: Selected Household-level characteristics, women’s health condition and Individual-level characteristics, and partner’s characteristics are significantly associated with the past-year prevalence of any form of IPV offense against women. Risk behaviors such as conservative family ideology, addiction to alcohol consumption, child marriage, education, women’s financial autonomy, chronic health illness (AOR: 1.43; CI: 1.33-1.53), partner’s domineering attitude, and unemployment were identified as the most important risk factors. Interaction analysis between residential places and selected covariates showed a difference in likelihood between rural and urban parts. Interpretation: Actions to prevent and eliminate IPV offences in India demand collaborative efforts of the national government and public agencies, and local government. Improvement in household level wellbeing, a woman’s personal and partner’s level characteristic is very much necessary to minimize the violence against women by their intimate partner. Funding: None to declare. Declaration of Interest: None to declare.

“Is This Your Baby?”: Gay Fathered Families’ Experiences Navigating Heteronormativity in the United States

ABSTRACT Little research has directly analyzed the ways in which gay fathered families navigate experiences stemming from the fact that their family type stands out and challenges heteronormative family ideologies and the culturally dominant “Standard North American Family” or SNAF model. Using interviews with 37 gay fathers and integrating queer theory as a theoretical tool, this study examines these experiences. Results show that fathers queered the family by openly and honestly addressing family, friends, and strangers that questioned or commented on their families. They also queered education by urging schools to have books and other media normalizing and explaining families outside of the heteronormative SNAF and by challenging how the SNAF is used to organize routine school events. These findings reveal how gay fathered families can broaden our definition of family and change the institutions of the family and education by confronting heteronormative binaries that surround gender, sexuality, and family.