Paper short abstract:

This paper explores care arrangements for unaccompanied minors in Belgium through the narratives of guardians and unaccompanied minors. It aims to assess the inclusionary potential of these relations of care in light of the often insurmountable constraints caused by immigration policies.

Paper long abstract:

Embedded in a larger qualitative study of care arrangements for unaccompanied minor foreigners in Belgium, this paper explores the narratives of guardians and unaccompanied minors about their relations of care. It examines how the minors' care arrangements can generate and accumulate social capital and value for both the unaccompanied minors and their caregivers and increase their feelings of belonging, self-worth and citizenship. It looks at both the unaccompanied minor foreigners and their caregivers as raced and classed intersectional bodies that are worked and reworked in the current capitalist conjuncture through emotions and affect. Their stories provide an interesting lens to the ways utopian imageries of solidarity and humanitarianism, and/or imageries of kinship, cultural heritage and national belonging intersect with the participants' everyday lived realities and practices. However, the inclusionary potential of these care relations is rather limited as they are played out in a discursive and material context that creates opportunities but also often insurmountable constraints for unaccompanied immigrant minors, positioned at the interface between humanitarian concern for children and national control of immigration.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses how swinging challenges (or not) the heterosexual-monogamous relationship model and gender relations in Western societies. The analysis is based on ethnography realized in a swinging club in Lisbon area, interviews with swinger couples and anthropological theoretical review.

Paper long abstract:

Swinging can be defined as a practice in which heterosexual couples have sexual intercourse with other couples or singles in the company and with the consent of the partner. Although swingers belong to the normative group of heterosexuality, they are usually seen as deviant as they don't fit sexual and marital mono-normativity of Western societies. One of its fundamental characteristics is the segregation between sex and love. Thus, swingers consider themselves emotionally monogamous and sexually non-monogamous.

From this perspective, swinging can be seen as a paradoxical and antagonistic way of relationship in which men and women willing to adopt a more hedonistic lifestyle are in conflict with traditional principles acquired throughout life regarding family, relationship, sex, love, and morality.

Although binary gender structure is prevalent in swinging and often acts as a prohibitive factor for certain disruptions, sometimes this boundary is broken enabling women and men to adopt identities, practices and behaviors culturally related to "the other". According to my research, such disruptions occur especially for women, who have the possibility to experience sexual and gender identities more freely and fluidly than men, who are still attached to the precepts of hegemonic masculinity.

This paper discusses how swinging challenges (or not) the heterosexual-monogamous relationship model of Western societies and how gender and sexual identities are reproduced, resignified or denied in this lifestyle. The analysis is based on ethnography realized in a swinging club in Lisbon area, interviews with swinger couples and anthropological theoretical review.

Paper short abstract:

Some Spanish families have re-connected and establish a relationship with the family of the child they adopted overseas. How do they confront hegemonic discourses on adoption & kinship? How do they deal with or reproduce cultural differences and inequalities that cross those relationships?

Paper long abstract:

Transnational adoption has been built over the 'clean break principle': the assumption that it was necessary to cut all ties with the past (including any tie with the birth family) to ensure the inclusion of adopted children in their new family and their new nation. However, some adoptive families have re-connected with their children's first families. This practice is highly controversial in Spain and disapproved by most adoption practitioners and adoptee activists. Some of these families have engaged in different kinds of relationships with their children's first families, ranging from the exchange of letters or e-mails to visiting the birth relatives during the holidays. With an ethnographic approach, the study produced data by participant observation in a listserv where these adoptive families share their experiences and insights, and through in-deep interviews with some of those parents. The paper will examine how they contest not only the hegemonic discourse on adoption in Spain, but also on families and kinship. The analysis will take a close look at how these 'transnational family networks' are crossed by cultural differences, inequalities and power asymmetries, and how adoptive families deal with and/or reproduce them.

Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic research I discuss co-habitation as socio-economic strategies in the WWOOF exchange, where subsistence farmers invite farm volunteers into their homes - as live-in help and extended kin - who contribute to the shared household, thereby contesting the nuclear family ideal.

Paper long abstract:

The trend of small-scale and hobby farmers, organic producers and rural lifestylers, eco-villages and rural communes continues to grow in contemporary, industrialised, urban societies. Some of these subsistence households employ strategies of co-habitation - incorporating volunteers into their family households - for social as well as economic reasons, political activism, austerity measure, attempts to increase self-sufficiency, and coping strategies to deal with rural isolation or loneliness. Like "open spaces", many hosts consider their homes to be "open houses" - utopian visions of sustainability, sharing, inclusion and equality (Sargisson and Sargent 2004). Taking the international WWOOF movement (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) as my empirical context, I explore the sharing of the household of farm hosts and their volunteers as everyday practices. The shared household challenges the norms of the nuclear family ideal and urban household by blurring the spheres of production and consumption. Based on ethnographic research I demonstrate how the sharing of everyday practices creates forms of "relatedness" (Carsten 2000) and 'fictive' kinship. It is a 'kinship of support' (Fischer 2010), but also a 'family of choice' (Maddy 2001) based on exclusion, perpetuating social structures of unequal power, exploitation, and gendered work (Narotzky 1997, Lyon 2010). In discussing processes of how relatedness is established between the inhabitants, I argue that the shared household is part of the participants' imagining of the alternative lifestyle, a social practice of belonging, and strategy against the perceived alienation of urban life and the isolation of the nuclear family.

Paper short abstract:

Through an engagement with the growing trend of ‘love marriages’ in a rapidly transforming north Indian agrarian state, I seek to link transforming aspirations regarding sexual intimacies with potential futures in a post-agricultural society

Paper long abstract:

Ethnographic research in rural Haryana and its capital Chandigarh suggests a shift in aspirations with regard to marital relations in north India. While the panel abstract situates certain relationships of love and care as challenges to the norm of heterosexual, nuclear families among other categories, I utilize these very terms to view specific heterosexual relationships as 'non-normative'. That is, I argue that a growing fascination for self-choice in marriage is viewed as transgression, even by the couples involved, with family-arranged matches being the norm. I will describe how Haryanvis at times evoke the term 'love marriage' to talk about such non-normative relationships but sculpt definitions that both work with and go beyond the so-called western notion of romantic love. Haryanvis 'who date' and couples who opt for arranged or love marriages emphasize the significance of caring (especially by men), sharing and friendship in romantic/marital relations. These aspirations are largely seen as outside the bounds of heterosexual marriage in Haryana, where the purpose of marriage is often to consolidate agricultural land ownership. In this paper I attempt to evolve a conceptual framework for analyzing 'love marriage' as rebellious in a region that has not seen progressive social movements despite its prosperity. Here, utopia could well be imagined as breaking away from communities and coalescing ties. I see the transformations as re-alignments geared towards alternate, ambiguous futures in a neoliberal India, where Haryanvis anticipate moving away from agriculture - and hence its hold on marriage - but not towards industrialization as the inevitable trajectory.

Paper short abstract:

We have been educated to think and feel monogamous way. Our body responds to emotions associated with it. What happens when we propose to feel different? How do you end up spinning the discourse and practice of polyamory? How our body feels when faces polyamory

Paper long abstract:

The polyamory is an alternative within the range of non-monogamy. One decides for a project other than the mainstream relationship that not only questions the parameters of relationships, but invites to feel different. It implies a transformation of corporeal affections (embodiedaffects). A liminal process.(Stenner, 2008)

The discussion use data from the Catalan Polyamory group to exemplify in Original theoretical discussions. The research takes an ethnographic and narrative approach to highlights the affective and emotional transformations involved in emergent subjectivities and uncertain polyamorous. Taking a relational and process-centered ontology of A.N. Whitehead, polyamory could be conceived as the emergent property of a semiotic-uncertain materials ordering constituting an ethical and aesthetical configuration. Being polyamorous constitutes a movement to a liminal space with a different "composition of an affective relationship" (Brown & Stenner, 2001: 9)

We propose the use of metaphors as analytical tool for the study of liminality by its binding between two different logics (ZoltánKövecses, 2000); logics that allow us to see a kind of snapshot of a hotspot. A liminal hotspot, defined as an ocassion of transition, ambivalence and stress adress will be through a metaphor: The monster.