Families, Intimacy and Globalization: Floating Ties

Description

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. 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