Family and intimate

relations
– from consensus to diversity

Chan Yee-may
SOPY3015 Individual, State and Society
Aim of this session
• To examine the changing concept of intimate relations
and family and its diversified practice in modern
society.
• To explore the social construction and maintenance of
a particular form of family and intimate relation by the
state and other moral commentators in ordering the
society and individual life.
• To relate and understand the role of social policy in
shaping and/or liberalizing the ordering of family life
and intimate relations.
What do people think of intimacy?

• Courtship and romantic love

• Sexual relationship
• Blood ties
• Marriage
• Family
Intimate relation and Intimacy
• Intimate relationship is an interpersonal
relationship that involves physical or
emotional intimacy
• Intimacy is a relatively new sociological word
and has initiated with the rise of feminist
research which began to identify close
personal, heterosexual, relationships as
possible sites of oppression for women.
Intimacy involves:
• Open up of personal boundary;
• Penetration into other’s personal
experience;
• Expanded knowledge and acceptance of
other’s experience and presence;
• Social / Institutional support of this
relationship
Institutionalization of intimacy

• From Feudalistic societies there is a need to

institutionalize intimacy to preserve existing
social order;
• The equation of intimacy to personal / familial
possession
• Institutionalization also served as a tool for
rightful inheritance.
Institutionalization of intimacy

• The development of capitalism/

modernism (from Feudalism) marked the
change of intimacy – change from
marriage as a social institution to marriage
as an institution founded, built and
maintained by lovers themselves.
• The so-called romantic love – free, equal
and reciprocal.
Romantic Love

• Respect for personal privacy and

choice
• Autonomization of intimate
relationship – not formed by external
demand or institutional requirements
Family – an everyday
experience

 Everybody seem to know ‘family’

very well because it is an everyday
experience of great majority of
people in the society.
Positive experience
 Intimate relationships – parent-child; spousal,
siblings, relatives…
 Mutual help and support
 Material support – financial contribution
 Care of children, elderly, those ill, etc.
 Learning and socialization – gender roles, values,
etc.
 Providing shelter and sense of security
 Sharing happiness and sadness…
Negative experience
 Domination (e.g. age domination, gender
domination, economic domination, etc.)
 Inequality (between gender, between age, between
siblings, in terms of division of labour, power,
money, decision making, etc.)
 Neglect and lack of care
 Conflict and struggle
 Violence and abuse (domestic violence, sexual
violence, intimate violence, child abuse, elderly
abuse, etc)…
Family as a social institution
 According to Giddens (1997), family is the most
pervasive social institution. Yet there is a great
variation in the family and marriage pattern across
different culture over different period of time.
 Likewise, Sadye et al (2008) suggested that the
most studied aspect of family remains family
diversities.

Giddens, A. (1997) Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Sadye L. M. Logan , Mikal N. Rasheed , Janice Matthews Rasheed (2008) "Family" The Encyclopedia of Social Work.
Ed. Terry Mizrahi and Larry E. Davis. National Association of Social Workers and Oxford University Press,
Family: Diversity and change
Two traditional features of the family:
1. Family relationships are analysed in terms of the
concept of ‘family cycle’ – consistency in the routine family
pathways or careers that were constructed – people married,
had and raised children, lived as a couple until one spouse died.

2. There was a clear moral and empirical connection

between sex, marriage, and child bearing – these
three elements constitute the cornerstone of family
life.
Traditional understanding on family
 Family has been commonly understood as a universal
institution.
 Traditionally it has been construed as a basic social unit
formed by a man and a woman through marriage (of
whatever types – arranged or romantic).
 Co-residence and sexual relationship are generally
assumed, and are reinforced by law and moral
sanction.
 Reproduction is seen as both legally and morally
granted. Children are given legal status.
Traditional understanding
 Family structure
 Formed by heterosexual partners
 Monogamy (husband and wife)
 Legally or socially sanctioned ( 父母之命、媒妁
之言、三書六禮、拜堂成親 in Chinese
tradition) – e.g. customary marriage in HK(before
1 Oct 1971)
 Co-residence with kin (children, parents, brothers
and sisters, relatives, etc)
Traditional understanding

 Family functions
 Reproduction
 Economic production (in agricultural
societies and early industrial societies)
 Education and socialization
 Care of the young and old
 Continuation of traditions
The myths of family
• Family as a universal unit (to distinguish
normal and abnormal families)
• Family as a harmonious unit (implied
well-being of life and satisfaction)
• Family ensure love and support for every
member
Family as a ‘taken-for-granted’
experience
 So family is not a homogeneous and consensual
experience. Instead, family is a varied experience over-
time.
 Some people are happy with the family life at a specific
period of time, but may turn unhappy at another period.
 Some people may experience the positive side of a family
most of the time, but still may experience the ‘dark side’
sometimes, and vice versa.
 The all positive family is only an ideal, but in reality, family
experience varies.
 Family is not a fixed concept but a dynamic process.
Modern family – impacted by
industrialization and urbanization
 The separation of the home and workplace;
 The increased unclarity of household structure;
 The decline in marital fertility;
 The prolonged residence of children in the home of their
parents;
 The lengthened period in which husbands and wives live
together after their children have left home;
 The reintegration of women into productive work.

Sadye L. M. Logan , Mikal N. Rasheed , Janice Matthews Rasheed (2008) "Family" The Encyclopedia of Social
Work. Ed. Terry Mizrahi and Larry E. Davis. National Association of Social Workers and Oxford University Press
Accounting for change
Several factors come into place:
 Economic security both for men and women
 Expansion of individualism and subjectivity
 Loosening of social / external bounds
 The development of contraceptive measures
which separate sex from reproduction
 Relative independence between genders
Demarcations:
Several demarcations ( 區隔 )
occurred:
 Between sex and reproduction

 Between intimacy and institution (marriage)

 Between sex, marriage and family

 Between marriage and living together

 Between intimacy and heterosexuality

Transformation of intimacy –
Giddens’ Thesis
 The influence of traditional sources of authority
and of social bounds has increasingly receded in
favour of an endless and obsessive preoccupation
with personal identity.
 In postmodern societies many more people tend
to build up spontaneous bonds rather than to
construct intimate relationships according to
tradition.
Transformation of intimacy –
Giddens’ Thesis
 According to Giddens (1992), as the emergence of the ‘pure
relationship’, intimacy has been transformed and there are
changes in the nature of marriage.
 Pure relationship is characterised by ‘confluent love’.
 Confluence love refers to the quality of relationship in which
it is the mutual sharing of thoughts and feelings that matters
most. It is based on a relationship of sexual and emotional
equality between men and women (democratized intimacy).
 The pure relationship is developed in line with the
emergence of ‘plastic sexuality’ freed from the ‘needs of
reproduction’.
Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s thesis - the
“individualistion” and “global family”
• They follow a similar line of argument to Giddens:
changes in family life and relationships are being
shaped by the development of modernity (i.e.
increasing individual choice).
• Increased labour market participation (additional
source of income, state benefits and employment)
together with birth control has resulted in women’s
being less economically dependent on men than
previously. They are less trapped in the traditional
domestic division of labour than previous generations
were.
The “individualistion” and “global relationships”
• Marriage model of family and domestic structure become less a
matter of routine, women can increasingly active in constructing
and negotiating their personal lives, their partnership
commitments and the forms of domestic organisation they
involved. Choices and experience of intimacy are becoming
individualised. (Book: The Normal Chaos of Love)
• ‘Love at a Distance - The chaos of global relationships’: they also
investigate various types of long-distance relationships from
marriages that connect continents and cultures to relationships
supported by skype, chat room, globalised maids, prostitutes,
surrogate mothers and work immigrants.
• They explore new types of family relationships the art of an in-
between space, the art of living together with and beyond
boundaries.
Liquid love: on the frailty of human bonds
– Zygmunt Bauman

• Love in the age of consumerism and globalisation, when ties

always be provisional, “commitment to another person or
persons, particularly an unconditional commitment and most
certainly a ‘till death do us part’, for better or for worse and
for richer and poorer kind of commitment, looks ever more a
trap that needs to be avoided at all cost.” (p.70)
• Man with no bonds: Love, a ‘connection’ rather than
‘relation’ (disposability of relationship- to make room for
other goods).
• Dilemma faced by human beings nowadays: security vs
freedom of oneself
New forms of intimacy
 Cohabitation
 Childless families
 Serial monogamy
 Non-marital intimacy
 Living apart together
 Living together apart
 Intimacy of the same sex
 Virtual intimacy and cyber sex
Family diversities
 Family research in the USA and UK showed that the
traditional family patterns have changed, a common
model of family experience could no longer be
assumed.
 Only 23% of all households in UK comprised a
married couple with dependent children. Similar
patterns could be observed across Europe, North
America and Australia.
 While family was more predictable and relatively
easy to grasp in the past, it is now becoming
‘diversified’.
Divorce as a symbol of change
 Marriage was highly ‘institutionalized’, with
spouses’ responsibilities and obligations to one
another being governed by relatively rigid
rules, sanctioned through religious and social
codes that informed appropriate behaviour.
 But this has been changed gradually –
negotiated partnership.
Divorce as a symbol of change
 Yet some scholars argued that divorce does
not represent the break down of family as a
social institution.
 It is because majority of those who divorce
eventually enter into marriage and form
another family.
 So it is monogamy changed to serial
monogamy only.
One-parent household

 One consequence of marital separation and

divorce has been a growth in single parent
households.
 There appears an rapid increase of one-
parent household due not to marital
separation but to unwed motherhood (but
not necessarily unpartnered).
Cohabitation
 More recently, increasing numbers of couples are choosing
cohabitation rather than legal marriage as the most
appropriate mode of constructing their relationship, even
after the birth of children.
 The more cohabitation as a preferred form of partnership,
the more pressure there is for legal recognition to be given
as a mode of commitment.
 Marriage and cohabitation become a lifestyle choice with
no guarantee of permanence – but both requires regulation
for the protection of individual rights.
Stepfamilies
 Haskey (1994) estimated that in UK approximately
one in eight children lived in a household with a
stepparent for some period of time.
 Some children will have serial stepparents as a
result of their parents’ various partnerships.
 In this sense, step-parenthood can no longer be
understood as replacement parenting in any simple
manner.
 New Kinship
• Each year, thousands of children are born in the United
States through the use of donor eggs or sperm, and
experts estimate that there are already more than one
million people born via these “donor gametes”
worldwide (Cahn, 2014)
• The development and widespread of reproductive
technology has changed how families are made and how
relational bonds are created.
• These new relationships complicate the social, cultural,
and economic meanings of family, and where the law fits
into all of this.
Challenges to family institution

 In facing such changes, the conventional concept

of the ‘family’ has faced tremendous challenges.
 David Morgan (1996) suggests to use ‘family’ as
an adjective to describe a variety of ‘family
practices’ instead of to use ‘family’ as a noun to
represent a stable form of social institution.
Challenges to family institution
 The approach currently dominant in the study of
family emphasizes the diversity of family forms and
experiences, and how the membership of families
changes over time, as they break down and reform.
 On the one hand, this approach signifies the
recognition of the changing realities in ‘intimacy’;
while on the other hand it opens up the possibility to
examine other forms of intimate relationships that
exist in the society.
Debates on the ‘individualisation’ thesis
• Nevertheless, other academics have queried on the
prevalence of the notion and experience of
‘individualisation’.
• They argued that the existing of ‘individualisation’ is
actually with class, gender and cultural difference and by
no means be universalised.
• Diversities of intimate relationships and forms of family
may develop, traditional beliefs and expectations are
still intact and affecting the life of individuals based on
gender, class and race in many ways.

Jamieson, L. (1999) ‘Intimacy Transformed? A Critical Look at the ‘Pure Relationship’’, Sociology, 33, 477-494.
Lash, S. (1994) ‘Reflexivity and its Doubles: Structure, Aesthetic, Community’ in Beck, U., Giddens, A. and Lash, S. (eds),
Reflexive modernization: politics, tradition and aesthetics in the modern social order, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 110-173.
Discuss:

1. What are the changes encountered by the

contemporary families in Hong Kong?
2. Do you think the contemporary social policies and
services can meet the challenges faced by
contemporary families in Hong Kong context?
Why?
3. How our family lives have been ordered and
regulated through social policy and discourses on
family?
Way of ordering family – the role of
the state and social policy
• The ordering of families is often formally assigned, rule
bound and institutionalised in governmental agencies.
• Regulation of ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ families by power
holders (e.g. social workers, health professionals and the
police).
• Reinforcing traditional form and functions of family
including the traditional power distribution within family
(gender roles stereotypes)
• The construction of family as a private, well-functioning
and harmonious unit.
 Family discourses
• Family is the vital component of our society. It provides an
intimate environment in which physical care, mutual support
and emotional security are normally available to foster the
development of children into healthy and responsible
members of society. A family which functions well in
discharging its responsibility contributes to the stability and
well being of the society.
Introduction of family and child welfare in SWD website-
http://www.swd.gov.hk/en/index/site_pubsvc/page_family/sub_introducti/

• Many social problems, including juvenile drug abuse,

prostitution and the neglect of elderly people and children,
can be traced back to the family. Better family relationships
mean fewer social problems.
2009-2010 Policy Address, para.82
Objectives of policy and welfare for the
family
• to preserve and strengthen the family as a unit to
develop caring interpersonal relationships,
• to enable individuals and family members to
prevent personal and family problems and to deal
with them when they arise,
• and to provide suitable services to meet needs
that cannot be adequately met from within the
family.
Social Welfare Department - 7.12.2009: Speech by DSW at the International Conference on 'Globalization
and Family Changes: Policy Implications, Service Initiatives and Evidence-based Practice' (English Version
only)
Supporting the family?
 In theory, the government will support the family so
that it can function to meet needs and solve problems
of its members;
 But the government will not provide services in such a
way that gives a ‘wrong’ message that it will replace
the family in taking care of its members (not to intrude
the family’s private functioning).
 It ended up that the government only support when
the family fails (or at the margin of break down)
Supporting the family???
• Supporting the family can sometimes become a rhetoric
• Support (and services) becomes primarily remedial
• Resources are inadequate given
• Also by supporting the notion of “family-as-a-unit”, it tends to
ignores the intra-family problems before they become visible
(e.g. violence, gender oppression, relationship tension, mental
health, economic hardship, etc).
• It also ignores the diversities of family forms, e.g. cohabitation,
homosexual relationships as well as other family forms.
• It is hard to address the challenges / problems arisen from the
‘mismatch’ of the expectation of ‘family members’ towards the
‘content’ of a ‘family’.
Family regulation and state governance
• To stablise family institution is one of a state
strategy to ensure effective governance
• Social policy and services are used and constructed
as a tool as the regulation process
• Government may retrench their role in providing
resources and support to individual members of the
society through reinforcing the important role of
family care (also reinforce the gender/female role
and gender stereotype)
Struggles of liberalisation
• Relaxing the procedure in applying a divorce (shorten the required
years of living apart or being deserted)
• Amendment of Cap.189 Domestic Violence Ordinance to Domestic
and Cohabitation Relationships Violence Ordinance to cover the
protection of same-sex cohabiters.
Domestic Violence (Amendment) Ordinance 2009 to take effect
• The Law Reform Commission proposes for the reform of the sexual
offences in the Crimes Ordinance. These proposals include a newly-
defined offence of rape and the creation of a range of other non-
consensual sexual offences.
The Law Reform Commission of Hong Kong - Publications - Consultati
on paper
• The above changes in legislation reflect some liberalisation of
understanding on intimacy and family, though resistance are still
apparent and strong from moral commentators and religious bodies.
Feminists’ challenges to family policy

 Preference/ assumption of traditional form of family

 Gender division of labour (public spere)
 Stereotype and reinforcement of gender roles distribution
within family (private sphere)
 Rhetoric on community care
 Questioning “family policy” as a social control
 Distinctive fatherhood
 Exploitation of female domestic workers
Further Readings

Barrett, M. and McIntosh, M. (1982) Anti-

social Family (2nd edition). London: Verso.

Lindemann, H. (ed.) (1997) Feminism and

Families. London: Routledge.

Hardings, L. F. (1996) Family, State and

Social Policy. London: Macmillan Press Ltd.

Elliot, F. R. (1996) Gender, Family and

Society. London: Macmillian Press Ltd.