Paper short abstract:

Planning and practicing motherhood within non-monogamous relationships and non-normative families in Catholic Poland will be the core of this presentation. I will focus on challenges such as time management, emotions and coping with social perception, that these familial relationships entail.

Paper long abstract:

In this presentation I will analyse planning and practicing motherhood within non-monogamous relationships and non-normative families – families by choice. I will focus on challenges, both emotional and practical, such as time management, emotions and coping with social perception, that these familial relationships entail.

This paper is a part of my wider anthropological research on women's strategies and practices of living in non-monogamous relationships in conservative Poland. Using ethnographic methods and discourse analysis around emotions and sexuality, I’m scrutinizing relationships in which non-monogamy appear from the perspective of women. I look from the angle of various social environments, also those in which potential non-monogamy is tabooed and stigmatized by a conservative world view and Catholicism.

In the center of my interests is the question of what the decision to have a child looks like and what does it change in non-monogamous relationships.

I aim to answer the following questions: How research participants function in a non-monogamous relationship and how do they emotionally cope with the difficulties and challenges that this type of relationships potentially entails? How do they manage with the thread of stigmatization that can affect both them and the child? What are the definitions of the - family, motherhood and love? How non-monogamous practices and practices of building families by choice coexist with the conservative beliefs in Poland? How are the individuals coping with the political acknowledgment and legitimization of only one form of the family? How does media and church discourse influence the transformation of morality today?