Relationships, Partnerships and Marriages

Telling Moments and Everyday Experience: Multiple Methods Research on Couple Relationships and Personal Lives

“…Routines and practices are vibrant and visceral ( Martens et al, 2013 ) and can be a site of coherence and contestation. Routinization may render invisible the processes and structures through which relationships are understood and afforded meaning, but through iteration and the diurnal what was once different may, over time, become ‘normal’: the marginalized can become mainstream ( Heaphy et al, 2013 ). This temporal dimension of how relationships are made and re-made is crucial: the quotidian of life is dynamic.…”

“…Relationships comprise pragmatics and emotions, choices and lack of choice, contentment and disenchantment – and all the spectrum of feelings and experiences in-between. Research has added significant insight into the range of affective attachments that comprise intimate life ( Duncan and Phillips, 2008 ; Heaphy et al, 2013 ; Jamieson et al, 2006 ; Roseneil, 2005 ; Smart, 2007 ), but there remains a particular absence of sociologically-informed studies of couples in long-term relationships , with regard to both the influence of culture, biography and socio-economic factors on their relationship experience and the interiority of their personal lives ( Smart, 2007 ). This is a significant gap not least because couple relationships in contemporary Britain have continuing appeal across the sexual spectrum despite shifts in the configuration of intimacy and intimate living ( Giddens, 1991 ; Jamieson, 1998 ).…”

Disability Estimates between Same- and Different-Sex Couples: Microdata from the American Community Survey (2009–2011)

“…If laws and popular public opinion (as depicted by media outlets) have the potential to negatively affect individuals in “untraditional” relationships (e.g., unmarried partners and same-sex couples) [9], then investigating if disability rates differ by couple-type is important for public health as evidence does exist that social networks are correlated with various health outcomes. For example, research has shown stable relationships help develop and maintain good health [10].…”

Rethinking Sexual Citizenship

“…A key theme in this strand of work is the extent to which these new moments of citizenship can be understood as a process of assimilation into the mainstream, upholding normative frameworks for social inclusion or as having transformative potential (Barker, 2013). This aspect of the contemporary sexual citizenship agenda has been subject to considerable critical debate, with some writers arguing that legislative and policy change can be transformative including, for example, analyses of how social institutions such as marriage and family might be altered as a consequence of civil recognition of lesbian and gay domestic partnerships and access to parenting rights (Calhoun, 2000; Heaphy et al, 2013; Stacey, 2012), and of the possibilities of changing individual subjectivities – what it might mean to identify as lesbian or gay. One argument is that this ‘conditionality’ demands a particular modality of sexual citizenship, one that is privatised, ‘de-politicised’, ‘de-eroticised’ and domesticated (Warner, 1999) and likely to lead to a de-centring of sexual identity (Bech, 1997; Seidman, 2004).…”

“…More than two decades later this literature has rapidly expanded to become an important area of study across a number of disciplines, encompassing a complex set of debates over the impact of contemporary sexual politics on the reconfiguration of citizenship including: the transformative power of civic inclusion to change meanings of citizenship and sexuality both at the level of social institutions such as marriage and family (e.g. Barker, 2013; Calhoun, 2000; Heaphy et al, 2013; Stacey, 2012; Weeks et al, 2001) and at the level of individual subjectivities (e.g. Bech, 1997; Richardson, 2004; Seidman, 2004); the potential exclusionary effects of processes of ‘sexual democratisation’ (e.g.…”