Sociology of Family and Intimacy [Seminar]

The family is often perceived as an institution that has always existed in the same form and with the same functions. Thus, the family has no time and appears timeless. This is precisely why the family is considered a natural state. On the other hand, the generalization of wage labor with the consequent consolidation of the "nuclear" family and the shifts in family and personal life contributed to the emotionalization of family relations but also to a "democratization" of the family bond (release of sexuality from reproduction, etc.). Consequently, the emergence of the socio-historical context that shapes new forms of family each time in connection with socio-cultural factors that in turn shape different practices of intimacy (sexual practices, love, romance, etc.) in modern societies is a necessary prerequisite for understanding the experienced world of the family. If the historicization of the family allows us to objectify the family, that is, to examine it as a social relationship, how is it subjectivized through experiential and psychological processes, determining the individual stories of its members? How is the experience individualized to become a subjective experience, determining life plans and paths (social advancement, social decline, social fixation, etc.); How is the objective, the social history, the class position and the cultural environment of the family, connected to the subjective? "How does history become a body"? (P. Bourdieu). Which socio-historical determinations produce the social and the collective that, when articulated with the mental-emotional in the field of family life, form unique biographies, individualities, which are brought into the subjective stories of individuals? In short, how can individuals, as derivatives of a story, reflect on their lives, process the experiences and contradictions that permeate them, and become subjects of their own story?;