THE UNIVERSITY Of HONG KONG

Introduction to Sociology (SOCI 1001)

First Semester 2024-2025
Lecturer: Prof. Travis SK KONG
Office: Rm 917, Department of Sociology, The Jockey Club
Tower, The University of Hong Kong
Tel no.: 3917 2055
Email: [email protected]
Tutors: Dr. Charlotte YEUNG [email protected]
(tutor-in-chief)
Ms. Cheryle WONG [email protected]
Mr. Kelvin LAM [email protected]
Ms. Linghan GE [email protected]
Lecture: 4: 30 p.m. – 6: 20 p.m., Thursday
Venue: MW Complex, T2
Moodle: SOCI1001_B
 Lecture 5
Family in Flux:
Family, marriage, and intimate
relationships
 What are the major shifts in
terms of intimacy and family in
modern times?
 Traditional Marriage:

• Forms:
– Monogamy in the West
– Polygamy (polygny) in most parts of the world,
e.g., China
• Characteristics:
– mundane
– facilitated by an authority through formal
procedures rather than through free love
– mating selections based on rational goals rather
than romantic love
– fulfilled economic and political functions
– produced legitimate heirs
– sex before marriage was forbidden
– Also called pragmatic marriage, arranged
marriage
Marriage in modern times
Form:
• Monogamy as the norm

Characteristics:
• Free choice, based on romantic
love
• Sex after marriage is preferred
• Fulfill emotional functions in the
main
 Family
• Definition:
– 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
• reproduction
• childbearing (education)
• care of the sick and the aged
• recreation
 Family in most
traditional societies
Extended family as the main:
• immediate family +
parent/grandparent generation
 Family in modern times
• Extended family is still common but
nuclear family as the ideal form:
• A heterosexual couple:
• Breadwinner husband
• Homemaker wife
-> sexual gratification
-> gendered division of labour
• 2-3 biological children:
-> primary socialization
 Romantic Love:
• In medieval Europe and ancient China:
– Romance was tragic - something
unattainable in marriage and was only
possible outside of marriage
• A culture of romantic love emerged:
– within court societies (12th century)
– the whole Europe (18th century)
 Pre-conditions for the nourishment
of a culture of romantic love:
• gender equality was fostered
• women and men could express their
sexuality more openly
• economic position of women was
improved
• opportunities for youth to interact
increased
• time for leisure increased which
allowed notions of romantic love to
blossom
 Romantic love thus became:
• a way of life
• a powerful cultural image
• a potential danger that should be
controlled
 Romantic Love Myths:

• Love at first sight

• One true love
• Love conquers all
• Happy ever after
Early perspectives on
family and marriage
 Structural functional analysis
(e.g., Talcott Parsons)
• Functions of family:
– The primary socialisation of children
– Stabilisation of the adult personalities
• Prostitution as the safety valve
• Incest taboo (to avoid role
confusion)
 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
 Randall Collins
(“Love and Property”)
• Erotic property
– Property rights over human bodies
– To legalise sexual activity
– Adultery and virginity of women
• Generational property
– Property rights regarding children
– To legalise the transfer of property via inheritance
– The incest taboo
• Household property
– Property rights over goods held by the family
– Capital that are exchanged % husband and wife
– Women as the reproduction of the labour force ->
contribute to the hidden economy of household
– To legalise the transfer of property/capital between
partners
 Feminist Accounts
• Marriage as a trade, women became
possession
• Marriage as an social and economic
necessity, especially for women
• Marriage legitimizes the exploitation of
men over women:
– Housewife syndrome
– The myth of motherhood “that all women
need to be mothers, that all mothers need
their children and that all children need
their mothers’
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
Three major contemporary views on
intimate relationships :

• Pure relationship and disclosing

intimacy
• The feminist critique:
• The female’s voice, whore feminist,
ethical slut, etc.
• The queer critique:
• The challenge from LGBT community
 High modernity and self-identity
(Giddens 1991, 1992)
Self-identity as a reflexive project

High modernity:
Industrialization; rationalization; expert
system; individualism; risk and new trust
mechanism

“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)
Relationship as the site of intimacy
Pure relationship:
 Voluntary, egalitarian, communicative and
democratic relationships between
individuals
 “Confluent love”, in which mutual trust
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
Feminist Critique: The female voice

The feminist critique of monogamy

(Jackson and Scott 2004)
• Sexual exclusivity
• Institutionalization of
coupledom
• Presumed ownership of
another individual
• Love as false consciousness to
exploit women
 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
• Recognize the conflicts that our sexual
choices may cause and be ready to deal
with them
• Own our feelings: not controlling or blaming
others
 Queer critique
“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)
 Queer (gay men) critique
(Kong 2011)

• A separation between sexual and

emotional fidelity

• Development of different agreed-upon

rules:
• no second date
• don’t tell don’t ask
• “open secret”
• tacit acknowledgement
• when one is out of town
• don’t sleep till dawn
• don’t bring him home
 Queer (gay men) critique
(Kong 2011)
• Models:

• 1 + 1= 2 (not assumed, but

something to work on)

• 2 + 1 (primary - secondary
relationship)

• 2 + many (“sex-with-love” – “sex-for-

fun”)
 Doing family
 The family is a set of everyday
practices rather than an institution
 Families are what families do
 Family life encompasses:
 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)
 Sexual citizenship
• 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
 Sexual citizenship
• 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
 Sexual citizenship
• 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
Most recent developments
in late modernity:
• Marriage
• Family
• Love
Marriage in late-modernity
Form:
• Serial monogamy as the norm
• Rise of marriage-like institutions:
Cohabitation, same-sex marriage,
domestic partnership, civic union, “living
apart together”, etc.
Characteristics:
• Marry – divorce – remarry
• Singlehood
• Sex and love before marriage
• Fulfill emotional functions in the main
Family in late modernity
• Nuclear family as the norm
• New forms emerging:
• Childless families
• Cohabitation
• Same sex families
• Surrogate families
• Multiple-partners
• Friends as families
• Singledhood
• “Living apart together”
• many more…
 Love in late-modernity
Consuming the Romantic Utopia (Illouz, 1997)
• Elective affinity between romantic love and
capitalism (sociological imagination)
– The theme of love in mass media
– The romanticization of commodities

• Individualism and privacy

• Personal happiness: possessing the partner +

establishing relationship + excluding others (i.e.
the ideal form of nuclear family)

• Love = happiness and becomes a new religion

Post-modern Intimacy & New Romance
The ‘freedom of choice’ as the consumer
motive of romance

Sex becomes the key component of

intimacy

The inclusion of ‘transience’, ‘novelty’,

‘excitement’ and ‘pleasure’ as new definition
of romance

The rejection of an overarching and

comforting life-long romantic narrative
 Summary:
Tradition Modern Late-modern

Marriage Arranged Free choice Free choice

Mundane Romantic love Romantic love
Polygamy/ Monogamy Serial monogamy
Monogamy Cohabitation

Family Extended Nuclear Nuclear

Family of choice

Romantic Outside Precondition for Precondition for

love marriage marriage couple relationship
Tragic Love myth Love = happiness
Love = Love and consumption
happiness Sex as key component

Site of Kin/family Family/ Couple relationship /

intimacy couple pure relationship