Reason, Season, or Life? Heterorelationality and the Limits of Intimacy between Women Friends

Martinussen, Maree

doi:10.1177/1360780418816334

Cited by 9 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…These lines of inquiry lay out the hierarchy of intimate relations (Budgeon, 2006;Martinussen, 2019), in which the sexual couple is assumed to take precedence with friends regarded as necessary but supplementary to the 'primary parts of life' (Martinussen, 2019). This position of friendship might provide a partial explanation as to why in many of the texts we have analysed friendships are regarded as easily 'disposable' when they do not provide support and mutual reciprocity.…”

Section: Difficult Friendshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is my best friend toxic? A textual analysis of online advice on difficult relationships

Lahad

Hooff

2023

Families, Relationships and Societies

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In this article, we analyse how mediated discourses of toxic friendships echo and reconstruct the category of the toxic friend. We ask: what kind of assumptions does the toxic friendship discourse draw on, and what forms of subjectivity and interpersonal relationships are encouraged? Employing a critical discourse analysis of digital texts, we argue that the discursive category of the toxic friend draws on a simplistic set of classificatory dichotomies distinguishing between the good and the toxic friend. We also suggest that the popular labelling of difficult friendships as ‘toxic’ reflects the contemporary diffusion of the notion of toxicity in contemporary public culture. We contend that this discourse reflects the discursive conflation between therapeutic culture and neoliberal wellness logic, with the figure of the toxic friend constructed in ways that support imperatives for self-care and self-governance. While much of the advice situates friendship as an important personal tie, there is very little encouragement to ‘work’ on these relationships. As such, these discourses offer a reductive, disposable approach to friendship ties that overlooks the complexities and lived experiences of friendship relations.

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Section: Difficult Friendshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is my best friend toxic? A textual analysis of online advice on difficult relationships

Lahad

Hooff

2023

Families, Relationships and Societies

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“…However, it can be difficult to prioritize certain friendships over others, since friendships are not automatically arranged from the most important to the least important (Spencer and Pahl 2006, 71-75). The roles of a mother and a spouse, on the other hand, offer a normatively accepted opportunity to prioritize certain relations over others and thus limit the amount of affective responsibility (Martinussen 2019).…”

Section: Negotiating Responsibility and Personal Boundariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Friendship at home: everyday in domestic space shaping friendship intimacies in Finnish small-scale communes

Heinonen

2021

Gender, Place & Culture

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In this article, I examine intimacy in friendship through spatio-temporalities of everyday in Finnish communal living. Based on 31 semi-structured interviews with residents of Finnish small-scale communes, I argue that the everyday in domestic space reshapes intimacies in friendship by enhancing embodied knowledge of others gathered through continuous, routine co-presence in close spatial proximity. This phenomenon, which I call domestic density, introduces intensified negotiations of affective responsibility and personal boundaries to friendship due to the increase and diversification of intimate knowledge. Although the domestic everyday has long been central in feminist discussions of personal relations, it has yet not been examined in detail how domestic space shapes friendship intimacies when friends share a common home. Domestic space entails generative particularities of its own and needs to be included in the analysis of geographies of friendship. For the research participants, the experience of intimacy in domestic space was ambivalent. Reshaping both embodied and verbal practices, the routine everyday in domestic space created novel closeness but also an experience of emotional distance. Moreover, the interviewees utilized a variety of strategies to negotiate questions of affective responsibility and personal boundaries ranging from managing one's emotions to definitions they gave to the roommate-friendship relation.

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“…These are not often found under the rubric of queer research, but they are nonetheless queering. One area that has queering potential but receives little attention in critical social psychology is studies of friendships and chosen families (for exceptions see Griffin, 2000;Martinussen, 2018;Martinussen & Wetherell, 2018b, 2018aMartinussen et al, 2018;Zukas, 1993), which has long been explored in sociology (Budgeon, 2006;Nardi, 1992;Roseneil, 2004;Stacey, 1996).…”

Section: Family Practices To Practices Of Intimate Relating-queerinmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…That is, the specifics of the engagement with whatever aspect of intimate life people are engaged with matter, because practices are contingent and contextual. For instance, when using a practice approach in a recent study about friendships between women, my aim was to map out some of the practical, routinised, and taken‐for‐granted ways of living out friendship (Martinussen, ). One aspect of the research investigated how participants' ideals of intimacy are inflected with discourses of the psy‐complex, but providing detail of the “how” meant that local varieties of psy discourses were detectable, as they were made to fit for the context for my Aotearoa/New Zealand sample.…”

Section: Family Practices: a Transdisciplinary Home For Studies Of Pementioning

confidence: 99%

Critical social psychology and interdisciplinary studies of personal life: Greater than the sum of its parts

Martinussen

2018

Social & Personality Psych

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Singleness, parenting, sexual practices, sibling rivalries, through to meal times, investigating how intimacies and personal lives are organised have always been a mainstay in critical social psychology. However, in the interdisciplinary field of studies of personal life, sociologists often take the lead. In this article, I discuss three illustrative Examples—family practices, queered studies of personal life, and emerging emotional regimes in “late modernity,” and ask how critical social psychology, with its history of investigating the social processes of subjectivity‐making, could be deployed to resolve debates that have emerged within a sociology of personal life. I suggest that clarifying critical social psychology's position in relation to broader studies of personal and intimate life would showcase the distinctiveness of critical social psychological contributions in understanding relational selves, whilst simultaneously fostering interdisciplinary working.

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Reason, Season, or Life? Heterorelationality and the Limits of Intimacy between Women Friends

Cited by 9 publications

References 41 publications

Is my best friend toxic? A textual analysis of online advice on difficult relationships

Is my best friend toxic? A textual analysis of online advice on difficult relationships

Friendship at home: everyday in domestic space shaping friendship intimacies in Finnish small-scale communes

Critical social psychology and interdisciplinary studies of personal life: Greater than the sum of its parts

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