Growing numbers of partners, parents, children, grandchildren and siblings are living far away from each other, yet their opportunities to stay in touch have never been greater. Smartphones, tablets and personal computers are used by parents in London to care for their children in the Philippines. Refugees use phones and international transfers to send money and support to parents overseas. Funerals, weddings and anniversaries prompt return visits by plane and are streamed online to kin around the world.
The mechanisms and processes of globalization are transforming the ways in which people ‘do’ and think about their families. Families, Intimacy and Globalization examines their experiences, charting the tensions between the freedoms and choices of late modern individuals, on the one hand, and the constraints of relational ties of love and obligation, on the other, which produce the ‘floating ties’ of global families and intimate relationships.
Using detailed examples from all corners of the globe and across the life course, from internet dating to parenting to aged care, this thought-provoking book examines the transformation of relationships by the processes of migration and the cultural and economic flows that are central to globalization.
Author(s): Raelene Wilding
Series: Sociology for Globalizing Societies
Publisher: Macmillan Education; Palgrave
Year: 2018
Cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
1 Families, Intimacy and Globalization: An Introduction
Caring for parents from a distance
Defining ‘the family’
Individualization and families
Families in practice
Globalization and migration: a story of turbulent homogeneity
The complexities of global migration
At the intersections: families, intimacy and globalization
Structure of the book
Conclusion
2 Transnational love and partnering
Love and marriage in late modernity
Romantic love and the pure relationship
Marriage and family formation
Love and marriage in globalization
Marriage in a transnational community
Marriage across national and cultural borders
Transnational online dating
Conclusion
3 Distant Couples
A story of love, marriage, mobility and separation
Marital relations and gender equality
The trailing spouse
Commuter couples
LAT relationships
FIFO relationships
Transnational marriages
Conclusion
4 Transnational Parents and Global Care Chains
The contradictory conditions of parenting
Transforming parenting
Global care chains and displaced mothering
The global nanny
Mothering from a distance
Fathering from a distance
The organization of childcare
Conclusion
5 Transnational Childhoods
Growing up in a non-traditional family
Transforming childhood
Children’s experiences in the global care chain
Migrating ‘for the children’
Forced return migration
International adoption
Conclusion
6 Aged Care and Intergenerational Relations
A transnational care crisis
Ageing populations and the care ‘crisis’
The ‘left-behind’ elderly
Transnational aged care
Transnational grandparenting
Conclusion
7 The Global Extended Family: Identities and Relatedness
A dispersed refugee family
The nuclear and extended family
Transnational families
A Caribbean transnational family
A Tongan transnational social field
Indian transnational households
Conclusion
8 Beyond Heteronormative Relationships
The right to be a family
Heterosexuality and the family
Families of choice?
The suffusion of families and friends
Personal life and emotion work
Queer migrations
Transnational families of choice?
Migration and the fluidity of sexual identities
Transnational friendships
Communication technologies and long-distance relationships
Conclusion
9 Families, Intimacy and Globalization: Floating Ties
Distant love?
The world ‘family’?
Globalization of nuclear family ideology
From love to care
Nation-states, institutions and the world family
Floating ties
References
Index
