THE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

Department of Sociology

Introduction to Sociology (SOCI 1001)

First Semester 2023-2024
Dr Travis Kong
3 Oct 2024

Lecture 5
Family in Flux:
Family, marriage, and intimate relationships

Glossary, concepts, ideas: romantic love; pragmatic and romantic marriage; monogamy; extended
and nuclear family; love and property; two marriages; pure relationship; whore feminist; ethical slut;
consuming the romantic utopia; families we choose

Key questions:
 Why do we come to see marriage as the actualisation of love and the pre-condition for sex?
 Why is the idea of romantic love so pervasive?
 What are the major shifts in terms of intimacy and family in modern times?
 Can you name any different lifestyles other than the one-to-one monogamous long-term
heterosexual relationship (or the nuclear family model)?

1. The Great Transformation: From Tradition to Modern (Giddens and Sutton, Ch. 10;
Giddens 1992, Ch.3; Macionis, Ch. 18; Illouz 1997, Ch.1; Weeks 2003, Ch.5)

(a) Marriage
In western societies, especially under the influence of the Roman Catholic church, the most
common form of marriage was monogamy - a contract between a man (husband) and a
woman (wife). However, in most parts of the world (e.g., China), polygamy (major form,
polygyny, one man and many wives) had been the most common form of marriage.

In traditional societies, marriage was usually considered as:

 mundane
 facilitated by an authority (usually parents) through formal procedures rather than
free choice
 mating selections based on rational goals rather than romantic love
 fulfilled economic functions (e.g., property) and political functions (e.g., power,
privilege)
 produced legitimate heirs to continue the family blood
 sex before marriage was forbidden
 Also called pragmatic marriage, arranged marriage

In modern societies, monogamy has become the major norm of marriage with the
following characteristics:
 free choice, based on romantic love
 sex after marriage is preferred
 fulfill emotional functions in the main

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(b) Family
A social institution found in all societies that unites people, usually through kinship (a
social bond based on common ancestry, marriage or adoption) that involves:
 economic cooperation among family members
 sexual activity between spouses
 childbearing and education
 reproduction
 care of the sick and the aged
 recreation

In traditional societies, extended family (or consanguine, ‘shared blood’, family) was the
main form, i.e., a family consists of parents and children as well as other kin.

In modern societies, extended family is still common but nuclear family (or conjugal) is
the ideal form, i.e., a family composed of one or two parents and their immediate offspring,
with the following assumptions:
 breadwinner husband and homemaker wife: sexual gratification and gendered
division of labour
 2-3 biological children: primary socialization

The change of marriage and family is mainly due to industrialisation and modernization

(c) Romantic Love

Romantic love originally represented an attempt to escape from the contradictions and
tensions of strategic social relations in mundane marriage life through the transcendental
love of another person. Tragic in nature, romance was something unattainable in marriage
and was only possible outside of marriage – more or less the case in medieval Europe and
ancient China.

Pre-conditions for the nourishment of a culture of romantic love:

A culture of romantic love first emerged within court societies and became a privileged
body of knowledge and practice of a small group of men and women in the 12th century,
but was democratised in the 18th century mainly through popular culture (e.g. novels,
pornography) under the process of industrialisation and capitalism:
 gender equality was fostered
 women and men could express their sexuality more openly
 the economic position of women was improved
 opportunities for youth to interact increased, without being under much surveillance
of parents
 time for leisure increased, which allowed notion of romantic love to blossom

Romantic love thus became:

 a way of life
 a powerful cultural image
 a potential danger that should be controlled

In modern societies, romantic love has the following meanings:

 clear, all-or-nothing choice - a decisive choice -> love at first sight
 of a unique other – a unique one -> one ‘true’ love
 made in defiance of social forces - overcoming obstacles -> love conquers all
 permanently resolving the individuals’ destiny - love lasts forever -> happy ever after

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2. Early Perspectives on Family and Marriage
(a) Structural functional analysis (e.g., Talcott Parsons):
 Family is the basic unit of a society which serves two basic functions:
 The primary socialisation of children: learn how to become a member of society
 Stabilisation of the adult personalities: regulation of sexual activity
 Prostitution: A safety valve whose function does not threaten the institution of family
(Kinsley Davis, 1976)
Institutions Functions Impacts
Family Reproduction Primary and intimacy
Prostitution Release of stress and pressure Secondary and alienated
 The incest taboo: A norm forbidding sexual relations or marriage between certain
relatives in order to avoid role confusion

(b) Social conflict (Marxist) analysis:

 Property and inheritance: families concentrate wealth and reproduce the class
structure in each new generation
 Patriarchy: families transform women into the sexual and economic property of men
 Family relations are relations of three properties (Randall Collins, 1992 ‘Love and
Property’):
 Erotic property
 Property rights over human bodies
 To legalise sexual activity
 Adultery as the sign of breaking of the central property right, exclusive sexual
access
 Virginity of women – husband’s property rights over her body
 Generational property
 Property rights regarding children
 To legalise the transferring of property via inheritance
 The incest taboo
 Household property
 Property rights over goods held by the family
 Various forms of capital (wages, homes, cars, etc.) that are exchanged between
husband and wife
 Women, usually as a housewife, serve as reproduction of the labour force and
contribute to the hidden economy of the household.
 To legalise the transfer of property/capital between partners
 In the traditional family, women offered erotic property (access to their sexuality) in
exchange for physical property

(c) Social conflict analysis - Feminist Accounts:

 Marriage as a trade, women become possessions
 Marriage as a social and economic necessity, especially for women
 Marriage legitimizes the exploitation of women by men
 The housewife syndrome
 The myth of motherhood

(d) Symbolic interactionist analysis:

 The changing meanings of family
 How family is experienced by different family members
 How different family members (e.g., husband/wife, parents/children, siblings) build
relationships and bonding

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3. Three Major Contemporary Views on Intimate Relationships
(a) Pure relationship as self-reflective project (Giddens 1991, 1992)
Self-identity as reflective project:
‘The transformation of intimacy can be analysed in terms of the building of trust
mechanisms; and ... personal trust relations...are closely bound up with a situation in which
the construction of the self becomes a reflexive project.’ (Giddens 1991: 114)
High modernity: Industrialization; rationalization; expert system; individualism; risk and
new trust mechanism

Pure relationship: relationship of emotional and sexual equality

 Voluntary, egalitarian, communicative and democratic relationships between
individuals
 ‘Confluent love’, in which mutual trust between partners should be established
through disclosing intimacy
 Commitment without guarantee (work ‘until further notice’)
 Not necessarily heterosexual or non-exclusive (i.e., not necessarily monogamous)

Plastic sexuality:
 Decentred sexuality, freed from the needs of reproduction

(b) The feminist critique: The female’s voice, whore feminist, ethical slut, etc. (D’Emilio
and Freedman 1988; Weeks 2003, Ch.5).
 The Victorian discourse that constructed male sexuality as carnal and female
sexuality as romantic or maternal was gradually replaced by a concept of female
sexuality that included erotic desire
 Egalitarianism between the sexes in regards to initiating sex, demanding sexual
satisfaction including orgasm, and patterns of martial, extra-marital and post-marital
sex

The feminist critique of monogamy (Jackson and Scott 2004)

 Sexual exclusivity
 Institutionalization of coupledom
 Resumed ownership of another individual
 Love as false consciousness to exploit women

The whore feminist (Chapkis 1997)

 Female equality based on free choice -> right to engage in prostitution.
 Women and sex ≠ oppression and abuse
 Women and sex = power
 ‘Whore is dangerously free’ (Roberts, 1992):
 resists and defies male power by refusing to allow her sexuality being owned by
one man
 enjoys financial and sexual autonomy that is almost always denied to the
majority of women in patriarchal societies
 Challenge to the notion of proper womanhood
 Subvert conventional sexuality

Ethical slut (Easton & Liszt, 1997)

 Sex-positive: ‘sex is nice and pleasure is good for you’
 Allow for infinite sexual possibilities (open relationships, swing parties, threesome)
 Consent (no lies, coercion, manipulation, etc)
 Honest to ourselves and others

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  Recognize the conflicts that our sexual choices may cause and be ready to deal with
them
 Own our feelings: not controlling or blaming others

(c) Queer critique on (hetero-)normative intimate relationships (Weeks et al 2001)

‘Between tricks and lovers and exes and friends and fuckbuddies and bar friends and bar
friends’ tricks and tricks’ bar friends and gay pals and companions ‘in the life’, queers have
an astonishing range of intimacies’ (Warner 1999)
‘To be “gay”, I think, is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks
of the homosexual, but to try to define and develop a way of life… they have had to invent,
from A to Z, relationships that are still formless’ (Foucault 1996).

‘Without much baggage of traditional gender expectations and heterosexual guidelines and
scripts (e.g., monogamy), queers are “condemned to freedom” in reconstructing
relationships on their own terms’ (Kong 2011).

Families of choice:
 Same-sex marriage
 Friends-as-family

Queer (gay men) critique (Kong 2011)

 A separation between sexual and emotional fidelity
 Development of different agreed-upon rules
Models:
 1 + 1= 2 (not assumed, but something to work on)
 2 + 1 (primary - secondary relationship)
 2 + many (‘sex-with-love’ – ‘sex-for-fun’)

4. Doing family (Morgan, 1996, 2001; Silva & Smart, 1999)

 The family is a set of everyday practices rather than an institution
 Families are what families do (Silva & Smart, 1999).
 Family life encompasses (Morgan 1996, 2001):
 Political economy (e.g., allocation of time and resources)
 Moral economy (moral choices concerning health and sickness, life and death)
 Emotional economy (emotional labor, work and bodily concerns)

5. Sexual citizenship (Richardson 2000)

 Conduct-based rights (‘rights to various forms of sexual practices in personal
relationships’)
 The right to participate in sexual activity
 The right to pleasure
 The right to sexual (and reproductive) self-determination
 Identity-based rights (‘rights through self-definition and the development of
individual identities’)
 The right to self-definition
 The right to self-expression
 The right to self-realization
 Relationship-based rights (‘rights within social institutions: public validation of
various forms of sexual relations’)
 The right of consent to sexual practice in personal relationships
 The right to freely choose our sexual partners
 The right to publicly recognized sexual relationships

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6. Latest developments in late-modernity (Giddens 1992; Weeks 2003, Ch 5):
(a) Marriage
Form:
 Serial monogamy as the norm
 Rise of marriage-like institutions: Cohabitation, domestic partnership, civic union,
same-sex marriage, etc.
Characteristics:
 Marry – divorce – remarry
 Singlehood
 Sex and love before marriage
 Fulfill emotional functions in the main

(b) Family
The historic shift from ‘the family’ to the ‘good relationship’ as the site of intimacy is the
story of a growing emphasis on the couple relationship.

The individualization process, in particular the problem of choice, has a contradictory

impact: people have to make things up as they go along, with all the opportunities, but also
hazards and dangers, that this implies.

Re-examination of the definition of family and kinship:

 Traditionally, family is defined through biological links and nuptial arrangements
 Now, a new basis: individuals spending quality time together and forming a
significant primary group
A change in the pattern of relationships which led to a variety of traditional family patterns
takes many forms -> families we choose.

(c) Love and romance (Swidler 1980)

Consuming the romantic utopia (Illouz 1997)
 The notion of individualism and the idea of privacy embedded in the capitalist logic
produce an inescapable loneliness that we try to remedy through the pursuit of love.
 Personal happiness = possessing the partner, establishing relationship and
excluding others (i.e. the ideal form of nuclear family).
 The lover as the central symbol of ultimate significance = making one person the
centre of one’s emotional universe was symptomatic of emotional impoverishment
elsewhere and the exclusivity of love meant qualifying and confining our emotions.
 Love becomes a new religion: It becomes the heart of the transformation of personal
life and the focus of the growth of an emotional democracy:
 Love as consumption
 Marriage as an investment
 Relationship as a transaction in which the partners are “co-workers”
Post-modern intimacy and new romance
The capitalist society encourages people to engage in a rhetoric of individual motives, in
which the central terms are ‘choice’, ‘pleasure’, ‘feelings’ and ‘material condition’:
 The ‘freedom of choice’ as the consumer motive of romance: The ‘shop-and-choose’
outlook is due to a much wider pool of available partners and to the fact that a
marketplace viewpoint - the belief that one should commit oneself after a long
process of information gathering - has pervaded romantic practices.
 Sex becomes the key component of intimacy
 The inclusion of ‘transience’, ‘novelty’, ‘excitement’ and ‘pleasure’ as new
definitions of romance (e.g. ‘Love at first sight’ scenario)
 The rejection of an overarching and comforting life-long romantic narrative: Love as
everyday life is boring and mundane in which both partners have to ‘work’ it
out.
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Key reference texts
Giddens & Sutton, Ch. 10; H Croteau & Hoynes, Ch. 12; Haralabmos & Holborn, Ch.8; Henslin, Ch.
16; Macionis, Ch. 18; Schaefer, Ch. 14

Other suggested readings:

Bernard, Jessie. 1982. The Future of Marriage. New Haven: Yale University Press, Part 1 “Where We
Are Today”.
Chapkis, W. 1997. Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor. New York: Routledge, Chapter 1.
Chapman, Steve and Dave Aiken. 2000. “Towards a New Sociology of Families.” Sociology Review 9
(3):20-23.
D’Emilio, J. and Freedman E.D. 1988. Intimate Matters: a History of Sexuality in America. New
York: Harper & Row.
Easton, D. and Liszt, C. 1997. The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities. San Francisco,
Calif.: Greenery Press.
Farrer, James. 2015. ‘Youth and sexuality in China: A century of revolutionary change’, in Routledge
Handbook of Sexuality Studies in East Asia, edited by Mark McLelland and Vera Mackie.
London: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. The History of Sexuality Volume One: An Introduction. New York: Vintage.
Foucault, Michel. 1996. “Friendship as a way of life.” In Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984), ed. S.
Lotringer, trans. L, Hochroth and J. Johnson. New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 308-12.
Gerson, Kathleen. 2004. Moral Dilemma, Moral Strategies, and the Transformation of Gender, in The
Kaleidoscope of Gender: Prisms, Patterns, and Possibilities, edited by Joan Z. Spade and
Catherine G. Valentine. Australia: Thomson Wadsworth.
Giddens, A. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, Chapter 3 “The
Trajectory of the self”
Giddens, A. 1992. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern
Societies. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, Chapter 3 “Romantic Love and Other
Attachments” and Chapter 4 “Love, Commitment and the Pure Relationship”.
Hong Kong Sociological Association (2009) Special Issue: Doing Families in Hong Kong, Social
Transformations in Chinese Societies Vol 4.
Illouz, E. 1997. Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.
Berkeley and L.A., Calif.: University of California Press, “Constructing the Romantic Utopia”.
Jamieson, L. 1998. Intimacy: Personal Relationships in Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity, Chapter
2, “From the “Family” to Sex and Intimacy”.
Kong, T.S.K. 2011. Chinese Male Homosexualities: Memba, Tongzhi and Golden Boy. London:
Routledge, Chapter 4 “All About family”.
Morgan, David H. J. 1996. Family connections: An introduction to family studies. Cambridge: Polity.
Morgan, David H. J. 2001. Family sociology in from the fringe: The three “economies” of family life.
In R. G. Burgess & A. Murcott (Eds.), Developments in sociology (pp. 227-247). Harlow, England:
Prentice Hall.
Richardson, D. 2000. ‘Constructing sexual citizenship: theorizing sexual rights’, Critical
Social Policy, 20(1): 105-35.
Roberts, N. 1992. Whores in History: Prostitution in Western Society. London: Grafton.
Seidman, S. 1991. Romantic Longings: Love in America, 1830-1980. New York: Routledge.
Silva, Elizabeth B., & Smart, Carol (Eds.) 1999. The new family? London: Sage.
Sternberg, Robert J. 1988. A Triangle of Love: Intimacy, Passion, Commitment. New York: Basic
Books.
Swidler, A. 1980. “Love and Adulthood in American Culture”. In Themes of Work and Love in
Adulthood, ed. Neil J., Smelser, and Erik H., Erikson, pp.120-47. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Swidler, A. 2001. Talk of Love: How Culture Matters. Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press.
Weeks, J. 2003. Sexuality. London: Routledge.
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Weeks, J., Heaphy B., and Donovan, C. 2001. Same-sex Intimacies: Families of Choice and Other
Life Experiments. London: Routledge.
Weston, Kath. 1991. Families We Choose: Lesbians, gays, kinship. New York: Columbia University
Press.

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 APPENDIX (Macionis, Ch. 18)

List of terms

Family
Extended family (or consanguine – shared blood - family): a family consisting of parents and children
as well as other kin.
Nuclear family (or conjugal): a family composed of one or two parents and their children.

Marriage
Endogamy: marriage between people of the same social category (e.g., race, class)
Exogamy: marriage between people of the different social category
Monogamy: marriage between two partners
Polygamy: marriage that unites a person with two or more spouses
Polygyny: marriage that unites one man and two or more women, e.g., Islamic nations
Polyandry: marriage that unites one woman and two or more men, e.g., Tibet

Residential pattern
Patrilocality: a residential pattern in which a married couple lives with or near the husband’s family
Matrilocality: a residential pattern in which a married couple lives with or near the wife’s family
Neolocality: a residential pattern in which a married couple lives apart from both sets of parents

Descent
A patrilineal descent: a system tracing kinship through men
A matrilineal descent: a system tracing kinship through women
Bilateral descent: a system tracing kinship through men and women

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