Queer Individualization: The Transformation of Personal Life in the Early 21st Century

Abstract

This article explores what happens to understandings of social change in the realm of personal life when an empirical investigation is carried out that begins from rather different ontological and epistemological premises from those that have underpinned recent debates. It draws on UK‐based research that was framed by an engagement with sociological theories of individualization, psychoanalytically informed psycho‐social studies and queer theory, and that was designed to explore the psychic and affective dimensions, and the unconventional, counter‐heteronormative practices, of contemporary personal life. The study used the free association narrative interview method to examine the practices and ethics of personal life of people living outside conventional couples. It found considerable levels of psychic conflict and emotional distress, and some mental illness, amongst the people interviewed. Many interviewees told stories of experiencing a fracturing of self as they faced lives in which they felt alone and in which they were expected to be self‐responsible. These experiences, it is suggested, can be understood as tied up with losses contingent upon processes of individualization. However, the research also found evidence of a set of interrelated, counter‐heteronormative relationship practices that served reparatively to suture the selves undone by these processes of individualization: the prioritizing of friendship, the decentring of sexual/love relationships, and the forming of non‐conventional partnerships. The article proposes the notion of queer individualization to capture this set of transformations in the organization and experience of personal life, and suggests the necessity of understanding contemporary personal life as involving both the pain of loss, and new, reparative non‐conventional connections.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Shelley Budgeon and Jacqui Gabb who were researchers on the Friendship and Non‐Conventional Partnership Project, my colleagues in the ESRC Research Group for the Study of Care, Values and the Future of Welfare at the University of Leeds, and Cosmo Howard, Turid Markussen, Judith Stacey, Nina Wakeford, Anna Yeatman, and the Queer Turn Group at the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research, University of Oslo, who commented on earlier versions of the paper.

Notes

1. E.g. Jamieson 1998; Duncan and Edwards 1999; Langford 1999; Silva and Smart 1999; Smart and Neale 1999; Smart 2000; Ribbens McCarthy and Edwards 2002; Ribbens McCarthy et al. 2003; Skeggs 2003.

2. I am referring here specifically to psychoanalytical psycho‐social studies, not to psychoanalysis as a whole, which has been deeply intertwined with queer theory, from the latter's very beginnings. I should also emphasize that psychoanalytical psycho‐social studies differ significantly from discursive psychology in its attention to unconscious processes, and in its concern to explore psychic ambivalence, conflict and investments in discourse—see the debate between Hollway and Jefferson (2005a; 2005b) and Wetherell (2005).

3. It was part of the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) Research Group for the Study of Care, Values and the Future of Welfare, which ran from 1999 to 2005 and was based at the University of Leeds (www.leeds.ac.uk/cava).

4. These figures refer to all persons in the population, not just adults.

5. These figures are the sum of statistics relating to households of one person, two or more unrelated adults, and lone parents.

6. Notable psychoanalytically oriented sociologists include the Frankfurt school; Nancy Chodorow (1999); Ian Craib (1994), and Anthony Elliot (1992, 2001). Other sociologists who resist a straightforward separation of the psyche and the social include Norbert Elias (2001) and Avery Gordon (1997).

7. E.g. Craib 1994; Hollway and Jefferson 2000; Chodorow 1999; Froggett 2002; Hoggett 2000; Rustin 1991; Nielsen 2003; Hollway 2004; Walkerdine et al. 2001.

8. Texts which have come to assume foundational status within queer theory include: Sedgwick 1991; Butler 1991; de Lauretis 1991; Fuss 1991; Warner 1991.

9. In earlier publications a sample of 53 was reported, but further analysis of the data has led to the exclusion of two interviews on the grounds that date of birth and place of residence had been misrecorded, and were actually outside the sample criteria.

10. The majority of the first‐round interviews were conducted by Shelley Budgeon, with a small number by the author. All of the second‐round interviews were conducted by the author.

11. Following Duncan and Smith's (2002) mapping of the geography of family formations on the basis of the 1991 census in the United Kingdom, the project drew its interviewees from three localities characterized by considerable variation in terms of household and family form, and in terms of gender and family cultures. The localities—all in Yorkshire, in northern England—were: inner city Leeds: a multi‐ethnic urban area characterized by a diversity of gender and family practices, a higher than average proportion of women in the labour force, and a large number of single‐person and non‐couple households; Barnsley: a de‐industrialized, former coal‐mining town, which is more conventional in terms of gender and family relations and traditional in terms of household form; and Hebden Bridge: a small town in which alternative middle‐class, “downshifted” lifestyles and sexual non‐conformity are common, and where there is a significant lesbian population.

12. For a detailed exemplification of the research's psycho‐social analysis, see Roseneil 2006b.

13. There are echoes here of Foucault's (1988) discussion of the intensification of relationships to the self and Rose's (1990) analysis of practices of “governing the soul”, albeit that Beck, Beck‐Gernsheim, Giddens, and Honneth place greater emphasis on agency, and less on processes of subjectification, than Foucault and Rose.

14. E.g. Jamieson 1998; Duncan and Edwards 1999; Langford 1999; Silva and Smart 1999; Smart and Neale 1999; Smart 2000; Ribbens McCarthy and Edwards 2002; Ribbens McCarthy et al. 2003.

15. For a detailed example of such an analysis, see Roseneil 2006b.

16. On the rise of the “companionate marriage” model as a dominant ideal in the post‐war era, see Finch and Summerfield 1991.