Abstract
As a family sociologist, I have often struggled to find an introductory book for students on family studies that transcend the Euro-American mainstream and engages with also postcolonial and decolonial perspectives. Now, I can stop looking. Vanessa May, professor of sociology at Manchester University, has written it. The book Families, published in the Polity series Key Concepts, introduces family studies, theories, and concepts, but it also has a larger aim: to push the boundaries of the field itself. In doing so, May starts from Zerubavel's concept of the sociology of attention (2015), aiming to critically engage with what has been brought to the fore and what has been filtered out and left in the margins. As May writes, “I am interested in exploring what family scholars do and do not see and notice when they study families, and what could be seen, or seen differently, if we used different attentional foci” (p. 2, italics in original). In doing this May problematizes her own position as a family sociologist from the United Kingdom and what that means for her own attentiveness. Her aim is thus not to fully rewrite a whole field of research, but to bring in other perspectives and viewpoints in order to challenge what has been taken for granted.
Each chapter of the book investigates families and family life from a different angle—such as cultural variations of families, the governing of families, but also themes less often highlighted, such as embodied and material dimensions of family life and families and time. By starting out from one of these themes, different theoretical perspectives and empirical studies are introduced, both those that have dominated the field and those often left in the margin, but here placed at the center of analysis.
In the chapter on cultural variations in family forms, May introduces the socially constructed idea of what a family is by describing the variety of families that exist around the globe, offering background to different developments and observing global trends. She does not prioritize the Euro-American idea of what a family is but rather shows its cultural contingency and how families and family life are intrinsically linked to other social structures and spheres. Drawing from research in the global north, May introduces Euro-American theoretical interventions that have come to dominate the field and how different theories and concepts have developed over time. She presents the family practice perspective, new kinship studies, and the sociology of personal life—areas of theorizing that she herself has significantly contributed to. While doing so, she shows how these theories and concepts have challenged conventional ways of thinking about families and advanced the field in important ways. However, and at the same time, none of them have challenged the Eurocentric starting point of the debates. May thus urges us to go further and engage also with the underlying assumptions of discourses and practices. Her argument is that Euro-American cultural ideas and norms about families have shaped the field and continues to be used as a reference point in social understandings of what a family should be.
In the chapter on the governing of families, she explores the emergence of governmentality in Europe and its colonialist roots. She shows how family is a key institution through which populations are governed, in their role in biological and social reproduction of who is a desired citizen and who is not. She brings to the fore how particular families, from working-class and racialized backgrounds, have been defined as “problematic” throughout history up to today. She shows how nation-states are still concerned with controlling population size through different pro-natalist and anti-natalist policies, but also how these policies are directed toward certain groups of people. This is a highly topical issue in many countries, and definitely in Sweden, where the minister of social security for example recently suggested that families with many children should receive less financial support to “prevent them from growing indefinitely,” indirectly targeting migrant families and distinguishing between wanted and unwanted families.
May also analyzes family from more unexpected angles, such as through the lens of materiality and time. She examines how co-presence, tactile and sensory aspects, and materiality are important factors in the doing of family, although often overlooked in family studies. She directs the reader's attention to the mundane acts of everyday life, such as the making of a cup of tea, and the use of information and communication technologies in family life, particularly in transnational families. By examining the meaning of objects, she shows how they constitute and shape family and relationships as well as family remembrance. She challenges the often taken-for-granted assumption that families are synonymous with the home, demonstrating how this perspective fails to account for the ways different forms of mobility, from everyday movements to migration, shape family life. She argues for a holistic approach to studying temporality, enabling the understanding of how different temporal frameworks coexist and are informed by gender, race, and class. Moving beyond the often simplistic division of work time and family time she demonstrates how time shape everyday family life. During the course of one day immediate tasks, such as getting children ready for school, will structure the day. However, so will the feelings of getting older and for example experiencing hot flushes during menopause, sensing the younger generation's view of oneself as “older,” and the presence of death when caring for an older parent. All of this is thereto shaped by gender, race, class, and where in the world one lives. By focusing on temporality, May shows how cultural expectations play out in families—about when, how, and for how long—but also how different types of time are valued differently, such as quality time with children being valued more highly than routine time, and how people navigate these expectations.
Vanessa May's book Families is a much-needed intervention in family studies. It is an excellent introduction to the field and it presents a rich variety of studies, theories and concepts, but it is also much more than “just” an introduction. May pushes the boundaries of the field and argues for a different family sociology, and in doing so, she gives the reader the keys to continue the work that she has laid the foundation for. This is a book that I hope will be read widely by both students and researchers, in and beyond family studies.
