Current Sociology

Please welcome our Sociologist of the Month for May 2021, Kinneret Lahad (Tel-Aviv University, Israel). Her article for Current Sociology, Holding back and hidden family displays: Reflections on aunthood as a morally charged category, co-authored with Vanessa May (University of Manchester, UK) is Free Access this month.

Could you please tell us about yourself? How did you come to your field of study?

K. Lahad: I am a senior lecturer with the NCJW Women and Gender Studies Program at Tel-Aviv University. My scholarship rests at the intersection of gender studies, sociology and cultural studies; my primary research interests include the sociology of family, singlehood, friendship, temporality, emotions, and more recently affect theory. As a graduate student in the area of cultural studies, I wrote a thesis on cinematic rescue scripts; in an attempt to develop a post-colonial critique of these representations, I turned to the rich literature on gift-giving and social exchange. I immediately fell in love with microsociology and with exploring the interstices of everyday life, and was fascinated by Georg Simmel’s dialectic thinking. I immersed myself in the works of Susan Bordo, Haim Hazan, Hanna Herzog, David Morgan and Eviatar Zerubavel; I continue today to follow their lead in understanding the hidden layers of social life. My love for sociological and feminist theory has determined my research trajectory ever since.

My interest in time and singlehood formed the basis for my first monograph, A Table for One: A Critical Reading of Singlehood, Gender and Time (published by Manchester University Press, and also available in an open access format http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/31183). My research into singlehood and temporality also reflects my ongoing interest in exploring the dialectic of togetherness and aloneness, closeness and distance, and presence and absence – themes that stand at the heart of my new study, on close female friendships. Presently, I am working on a book manuscript tentatively titled The Affective Temporalities of Friendships, and on other research projects including collaborative studies on aunthood (with Vanessa May); affects and intimacy (with Marjo Kolehmainen and Annukka Lahti); toxic friendships (with Jenny van Hooff); “rental families" in Japan (with Ofra Gidoni Goldstein); and self-marriage (with Michal Kravel-Tovi).

What are the wider social implications of your research in the current social climate? How do you think things will change in the future?

K. Lahad: What a wonderful question! Hopefully, my work can be seen as an invitation for research that challenges the conjugal unit as a normative and binding standard. For example: in my research on single life, I theorize singlehood not as an antithesis to couple life, but rather as a topic that merits conceptual consideration on its own terms. That is to say, singlehood should be viewed as a distinct category, one to be considered alongside a range of discursive contexts including therapeutic culture and its gendered affects, post-feminist imperatives, familial ideologies, temporal schedules, and neoliberal dictates to master and manage the self. To extend this point, I am convinced that singlehood – or perhaps aloneness studies – can become an exciting and radical body of knowledge, one from which we can develop new concepts and analytical tools. A sociological analysis of COVID-19 comes to mind as just one example.

However, in formulating a new research agenda and promoting a new politics of singlehood, it is important not to fall prey to binary conceptualizations that seek to distinguish chosen from non-chosen singlehood. These articulations may not only constitute new hierarchies, between those who can and those who cannot follow the “single by choice” discursive formula; it also obscures inconsistencies and hesitations, thus preventing a more dynamic, relational and nuanced reading of personal life.

What prompted Vanessa May and yourself to research the area of your article, “Holding back and hidden family displays: Reflections on aunthood as a morally charged category”?

K. Lahad: This is a co-authored paper written together with Prof. Vanessa May from the University of Manchester. As family sociologists and proud aunts, we were quite surprised to realize that there is hardly any sociological literature exploring this unique social position. While the category of motherhood has been the subject of numerous sociological and feminist studies, the literature on aunthood is quite sparse and deserves more scholarly attention. Our joint research project aims precisely to fill this lacuna and develop more analytical tools in theorizing the understudied topic.

In this paper, our aim was to unpack the ways aunts work out their family responsibilities while being aware of and negotiating familial boundaries. Extending our previous paper (May and Lahad, 2019) this work revolves around the notion of doing moral aunthood and thus aimed to develop a new conceptual lens from which aunthood and everyday moralities can be deciphered. Inspired by the work of Ribbens McCarthy et al. (2003) and building on the ‘family practices’ tradition (Morgan, 1996; 2011) our aim was to examine how aunts experience and interpret the moral dilemmas they face in their relationships with their nieces and nephews.

What do you see as the key findings of the co-authored article?

K. Lahad: By analysing moral dilemmas recounted by aunts without children, posting questions on the Dear Savvy Auntie online forum we see these texts as expressions of everyday moralities. The accounts we have analysed reflect the hesitations, fears and uneasiness associated with negotiating familial boundaries and responsibilities, which are not always clear-cut. Overall, our content analysis revealed that the moral imperative of putting children’s interests first, plays a central role in how the aunts construct themselves as gendered moral subjects. However, the unique familial position of the aunts entails distinctive challenges, as well as particular possibilities and restrictions in terms of resolving these dilemmas.

We found that because of familial boundaries and because aunts can lack a mandate to act, one response to moral dilemmas of aunthood is to not act. In other words, aunts can feel as though they are expected not to act and not to have an opinion on what is going on within the bounds of the family unit. Scott’s recent work (2018) on nothingness and non-doing prompted us to rethink some of the conventional distinctions between activity, thought and feeling. Our analysis shows that non-doing for the aunts in our study is often the result of a conscious decision because of their ‘consciousness of something’ (Scott, 2018: 4), that is, of familial boundaries that are not to be crossed. Whereas Scott is referring to normatively expected acts that remain undone, and therefore become conspicuous, the terrain we are exploring is muddier, in that the aunts were unsure of what could morally be expected of them, as both acting and not acting were likely to have morally ambiguous consequences. We propose that attending to such hidden forms of morality could offer an important analytical tool within sociological analyses, not just about aunts or family relationships, but relationships and social interactions in general.

Do you have any links to images, documents or other pieces of research which build on or add to the article? Or a suggested reading list?

K. Lahad: There are many sources of inspiration for this study among them are the works of:

Finch J and Mason J (1993) Negotiating Family Responsibilities. London: Routledge.
Hayden S (2011) Constituting savvy aunties: From childless women to child-focused consumers. Women’s Studies in Communication 34(1): 1–19.
Milardo RM (2010) The Forgotten Kin: Aunts and Uncles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Morgan DHJ (1996) Family Connections: An Introduction to Family Studies. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Scott S (2018) A sociology of nothing: Understanding the unmarked. Sociology 52(1): 3–19.