Family and Intimate Mobilities

C. Holdsworth

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349369331, 9780230594432
• eBook ISBN: 9781137305626
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Politica sociale

This book explores the many varied ways in which family and intimate lives are realized through mobility: from leaving home, courtship, relationship breakdown, moving house, commuting, family holidays through to children's mobilities, documenting how mobility creates, sustains and dissolves family and intimate relations.

1

Introduction

In 2012 a radio programme called Ramblings that aired on BBC Radio 4 featured presenters joining ‘notable and interesting people on a walk through the countryside’ (BBC, 2012). In one episode the presenter Clare Baldwin walked with Stuart and his dog Poppy, who were walking around England to raise money for charity and to raise awareness about mental-health issues. Clare and Stuart, along with Stuart’s partner, discussed the benefits of walking for improving mental health and the simplicity of a life spent walking. Yet at one point in the conversation Stuart bemoaned that one of the problems of modern life is how we have less contact with family now than in the past. All three participants concurred with this observation, and most listeners probably took it as a statement of ‘fact’, similar to statements about the contraction of family connections that are frequently aired on radio and TV. However, given the context, I found the statement intriguing: the programme extolled the virtues of individual mobility and getting away from the trappings of modern life and consumerism while simultaneously identifying that it is because we spend so much time trying to get away from each other that modern life is so damaging. It is precisely this contradiction that has stimulated and sustained the writing of this book. In the course of writing I have become very alert to sweeping generalisations about the intensification of mobility at the expense of family that are very rarely challenged. In the week prior to the airing of the Ramblings programme, the United Kingdom’s coalition government had announced plans to introduce a pilot scheme for universal parenting classes. Defending the intrusion of the state into family life, the TV presenter Katie Allsopp, in a debate on the BBC’s Newsnight programme, had justified the need for state intervention on the premise that families do not live close to each other any more. According to Allsopp, whereas previous generations of mothers relied on the serendipity of living close to their mothers and aunts, presentday mothers are far more isolated. Putting aside for one moment the rather obvious counterclaim that mothers and daughters can stay in touch by using various forms of communication, this statement went unchallenged. Moving away from family members is one of the truths of modern family life. Different publics make the same interpretation of the relationship between family and mobility.

My point is that the assumption of universal dispersal does not stand up to closer inspection; it certainly holds for some individuals, but not all. Try explaining to residents of chawls in Mumbai, where generations of one family share a single domestic space, that the dominant experience of family life in the twenty-first century is isolation. For residents of expanding cities in both the global south and north, but particularly the south, the main pressure of modern living is overcrowding and the lack of opportunity for privacy and intimacy. In the global north a trend towards smaller households is evidenced, as an increasing number of households consist of only one resident. Yet the fragmentation of households does not automatically suggest dispersal. One of the flaws of the dispersal thesis is that it is not balanced and defies the fundamental assumption of Newtonian physics. We cannot all be moving away from each other, as at the same time this mobility will mean we are moving closer to others. I do not deny the intensification of mobility in late modernity, but this is not uniform; not moving away but growing up and staying in contact with friends and family remains a valid experience.

What is intriguing is that the assumption that family life has changed through mobility is rarely contested and is frequently alluded to in public commentary on social change. Yet such a straightforward and uncontested observation should be held up to closer academic scrutiny. In this book I explore both the evidence for the dispersal hypothesis and the possible reasons for its popularity. One possible explanation can be found in the dilemma briefly revealed in the Ramblings programme of the tension between individual and collective mobilities. If the benefits of individual mobility and freedom are emphasised, then this will have implications for more collective experiences. These different meanings of mobility and the tension between the self and more social forms are a quintessential part of family life. For example the main events of family life imply a different patterning of individual and collective mobilities: leaving home, getting married, having children and divorce and widowhood. Individual mobilities associated with these events will have implications for those either left behind or joined through mobility.

The study of mobility through key events can, though, reinforce a static or immobile reading of family, which is that if family is disrupted by mobility, this can result in the patterning of dispersal rather than in the revealing of the ongoing project of mobility in maintaining, sustaining and dissolving family. A more active and relational reading of family mobility corresponds to recent calls for a mobility turn in social sciences that has sought to challenge the amobile assumption of social-science enquiry. In seeking to invigorate this turn to the mobile, commentators point to the ubiquitous nature of myriad forms of mobility (spatial as well as social) and how mobility and movement are central to people’s lives. The unique argument for this book is that a mobilities approach is pertinent to understanding family practices, and that while the tradition of approaching the family as a dynamic location of activities, rather than as a fixed and bounded group, is now well established in family sociology, the essence of movement intrinsic to family practices has received less attention. The mobilities turn does not just highlight the importance of mobility, but also shows how this movement is increasingly controlled and restricted. This is pertinent to thinking through family mobilities, specifically how these mobilities – on different spatial and temporal scales – are increasingly scrutinised, critiqued and regulated. Through developing synergies between the mobilities turn and family practices, my intention is to contribute to the mobilities approach, which has tended to prioritise the individual mobile body. My account will therefore foreground relational forms of mobility and think through how forms of connectedness are constructed, maintained and severed through mobile practices. The focus on family and intimate mobility developed in this book will provide a new perspective on mobilities that contrasts with more dominant individualised approaches.

The interplay between family practices and mobility can be usefully applied to the assumption of family decline through mobility. From this perspective there would appear to be transparent synergies between individualisation, mobility and family: the first two are essentially part of the same social processes which undermine the third. However, while not dismissing this normative portrayal of family as anti-mobility, a key argument throughout this book is that the oppositional approach to family and mobilities is too limiting and places too much emphasis on the social significance of propinquity and co-presence. As Urry (2007) suggests, families generate mobility and movement on different spatial and temporal scales. Examples of mobility practices that are generated through family practices include commuting, the school run, family visits and looking after relatives, travelling for/to family holidays and events as well as moving house, for example to be closer to ‘good’ schools, new jobs and employment opportunities and other family members.

The implicit assumption linking mobility and individualism against and ultimately counterpoised to family fails to consider the social significance of these mobile practices which are constantly reshaping and framing family and personal life. Distance (whether measured spatially or temporally) does not necessarily reduce the social and emotional significance of bonds between people, but can maintain these. The assumption that we are now living more individualised and isolated lives has been challenged by family sociologists recently; for example Carol Smart (2007) emphasises the importance of ‘connectedness, relationality and embeddedness’ and demonstrates empirically how these are essential themes in personal life. This book will extend this argument and will explore how these bonds between people are created, transformed and retained through movement and mobility. Family mobilities include a complex array of movements, some of which are chosen, deliberate and beneficial, while others are enacted out of obligation or force. Not all movements are necessarily observed or endorsed by significant others. Mobility can be associated with flight, running away from or intending to be with others. Movement can also be chaperoned or restricted. There is, therefore, more to family mobilities than the assumption that mobility and family are in opposition.

In bringing together recent contributions in family and mobility research, this book seeks to add to research in both domains, though the purpose is not to present a comprehensive account of the totality of family and intimate mobilities. Rather, my intention is to position family and intimate mobilities in relation to both theoretical accounts and empirical research. The context of empirical research is not defined: it can be present day, recent past or early modern, and the tension between continuity and change is a key theme for this book. Moreover, in bringing historical research on family mobility into this account I resists the overarching assumption that mobility is synonymous with modernity. This assumption does not hold for many of the practices to be considered here, such as leaving home, courtship and getting married. Empirically, the focus is predominantly western; this is not to dismiss the significance of mobility in the global south – quite the opposite, as to do justice to the variability of global mobility experiences falls outside the remit of this text. I use empirical studies from a number of different sources, including my own research and that of PhD students, as well as reanalysis of studies of family and community in the UK Data Archive, particularly Pahl’s papers on his research on middle-class families in the 1960s. In order to present a more figurative portrayal of mobile bodies I also include discussions of characters and storylines in popular culture, including film and children’s literature. It is a mixed bag of evidence, though the intention is not to be systematic but to think through a number of different positions on family mobility.

My account of family and intimate mobilities begins with a review of the mobilities turn, family practices and personal life in Chapter 2 in order to consider the multiple ways in which family mobility takes place. I explore how family and intimate mobilities can be used to decentre the family without reducing it to a loose gathering of atomised individual pathways. This reading also challenges the rather limited discussion of relationships in mobilities research, which is often dyadic rather than collective. Chapter 3 develops the theme of relationality, but from an individual perspective, by exploring how relationships are shaped through individual mobility. This account of intimate mobility uses a life course framework to unpack how relationships are formed, sustained and broken through mobility and how individual movement is both influenced by and impacts on others. Chapters 4 and 5 each consider collective forms of ‘families on the move’. Chapter 4 focuses on more mainstream academic concerns: moving house and the intra-family movement associated with work and commuting. In bringing these two forms of mobilities together, I consider the relationship between mobility and immobility and how these sustain each other. Staying put and not moving, for example, may be achieved by the daily hypermobility associated with work, leisure and education. The account of collective mobilities is developed in Chapter 5 by using three further case studies of family mobility that return to the theme of decentring the family through a consideration of the child as a mobile subject; nomadic forms of family mobility, including family holidays; and non-linear mobilities between family and other ‘near dwellers’. This chapter is set against grand narratives of social change through mobility, and the case studies are developed to refute the viewpoints that family life has broken down, that children are damaged through mobility or that no one stays in place any more. Chapter 6, which is the final, substantive chapter, reflects on what happens when mobility stops. In this chapter I outline the impossibility of mobility ever actually coming to an end and argue that closeness and belonging are experienced through mobility, rather than despite it. Finally in this chapter I outline how mobility can be denied. Not being able to move on and feeling trapped are not necessarily synonymous with belonging but with fear.

Throughout the text the opposition between the emancipatory potential of mobility and the fear of movement is a constant motif, and thus Cresswell’s (2006) theorisation of nomadic and sedentarist metaphysics is apposite. Yet this binary distinction is heuristic; it is not a question of mobility being either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but rather that mobilities in particular contexts and performed by different subjects will be interpreted somewhere within this dichotomy. The possibility of mobility producing both meanings is also valid. This returns us to the observations made by Stuart when walking with his dog Poppy that while his own personal mobility affords time and space away from others, he is also aware of the lack of conviviality due to geographical and temporal distance from others.

2

Theorising Mobilities and Family Practices

This chapter sets out a theoretical reading of family and intimate mobilities in which I review the main developments in both family practices and mobilities literature and draw out synergies between the two. The main aim is to explore how mobilities can be refashioned through an engagement with family practices and vice versa. The mobilities paradigm is, by nature, fluid and in constant development; and it is fitting with the philosophical bases of the mobilities turn that its relevance to other social science disciplines is explored. Moreover, this engagement should in turn generate re-visionist readings of mobilities.

At the centre of this re-visioning of both family practices and mobilities is the tension between family and relationality. That is, what is at issue is the extent to which we can assume that family has been replaced by a more individualised and reflective reading of personal relationships which emphasises subjective experiences rather than more collective affinities (Gilding, 2010; Ribbens McCarthy and Edwards, 2011). A focus on relationships rather than family is often dyadic and as such does not readily embrace the totality of affinities and intimate relations that are suggested by ‘family’. There are other forms of relationships that pertain to a sense of being a ‘social person’ that are maybe less visible or tangible and might loosely be connected to a shared sense of family (Ribbens McCarthy, 2012). In recent years family researchers have sought to reassert the significance of family, which, while not inadvertently reproducing a functional interpretation of structure, can critically reclaim family ‘as a central organising concept (alongside personal lives) … to address crucial personal, public and political dimensions’ (Gillies, 2011: 10.1).

There are two important developments in family research, which I will discuss, that have sought to engage with the dialectic between the self and the social implied by family; these are family practices which focus on the ‘doings’ of family (Morgan, 2011) and personal lives (Smart, 2007), which prioritise the very different ways that bonds between people are maintained, sustained and broken. Both Smart and Morgan acknowledge commonalities in personal life and family practices, and I do not intend to unpick either the synergies or the contrasts between the two. Rather, for the purposes of developing a theoretical foundation for family mobilities, both approaches provide an alternative to writings about family that rely on structure and form but also resist the opposition between individual and collective affinities that can dominate accounts of individualisation. Moreover, as neither of these approaches is presented as a form of total theory, it is possible to utilise elements from both schemas. From family practices I take the relevance of the everyday as well as a distinction between habit and practice and the significance of practices being recognised and acknowledged by others. Following Morgan (2011), I will mostly restrict discussions to family or family-like relationships. Smart’s (2007) account of personal life not only prioritises the complexity of personal affinities but also widens their scope over time and place.

Yet bringing mobilities into this dialogue between the self and the social can unsettle this relationship in a number of different ways. The mobilities literature has, to some extent, replicated the emphasis on individualised relationality. The need for mobilities to facilitate meeting up with other people is a key narrative (Urry, 2007), though this can emphasise individual connections rather than more social forms. We can imagine an individual agent moving around meeting other people, yet this does not necessarily capture the vitality and complexity of family mobilities as this vision continues to rely on the assumption of dialogic relationships and, moreover, of equality within networks. It also fails to consider interrelationships between others and relies on being able to draw the lines that link people together. The challenge from a mobilities perspective is to recognise both the complexity and the less tangible quality of intimate and family lives. Rather than replacing family with a more individualised notion of networks of relationships, what may be achieved here is a de-centring of family that recognises that mobilities are not just about the meeting of individual needs but can be brought about through relationships with others and are not always intended. In addition, the incorporation of the imaginary as well as physical connectivities can potentially extend the remit of family and intimate mobilities. Mobilities are also bound up with emotional control, facilitating how emotions within intimate relations are managed through spending time apart and together and maybe the fantasising about moving on or meeting up with as-yet-unknown others. The emotional dynamics of family life are driven by personal needs, but we also have to recognise those of others; for example, we might recognise the need to give someone ‘space’ in a relationship. Another limitation of a focus on individual relationships is that it may obscure power dimensions and inequalities within the family (Gilding, 2010). For some, the impossibility of mobility is a more pertinent issue than the freedom to move around to meet people. Exclusion from mobilities can be structural, reinforcing social, economic and cultural distinctions (Cass et al., 2005), and is shaped by gender and age relations within family settings.

Yet while mobilities can bring about a decentring of family, in other aspects a reading of family through a mobilities lens may also re-centre family. For example, the assumed tension between geographical mobility and family life is a long-standing interest in migration research (see, for example, Schneider and Collet, 2009; Schneider and Meil, 2008). Here the incompatibility between the self and the social is highlighted; we are not free to make individual mobility decisions as at times these are constrained by our relationships with others. This incompatibility is overstated, though, as mobility and migration can enable families and individuals to respond to changing and constraining circumstances. Jennifer Mason (2004a) usefully outlines a continuum of relationality, from more individualised forms to those that embrace inclusion and co-presence. Where there is consensus, a truce between fixidity and flow is possible, and this can be manifested through either collective mobility or immobility. For example, family holidays can be an expression of shared collective mobility, though they can also lead to discord and friction. In other contexts, individual relationality legitimises individual action in order to bring about benefits for others, and it is at these moments that family can be reconfigured through individual mobility. For example, offshore workers and long-distance drivers spend time away in order to financially support family members. In between these more extreme experiences, tensions between collective and individual forms will emerge that emphasise the incompatibility between individual (im)mobility and shared affinities. Given that many of us will experience relationality somewhere between these polarised states, in many instances this tension is resolved by a truce between the expectation of movement and the constraints on being mobile, which may be quite fleeting or ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Editors’ Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Theorising Mobilities and Family Practices
• 3. Intimate Mobilities: Moving out, Moving in and Moving on
• 4. Families on the Move I: Moving House and Commuting
• 5. Families on the Move II: Nomadic, Non-Linear and Children’s Mobilities
• 6. Intimate Spaces
• 7. Conclusion: Decentring Family and Intimate Mobilities
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index