Love in the Time of Aging: Sociological Reflections on Marriage, Gender and Intimacy in India
Love in the Time of Aging: Sociological Reflections on Marriage, Gender and Intimacy in India
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老龄化时期的爱情：印度婚姻、性别和亲密关系的社会学反思
DOI：
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发表时间：
2018
影响因子：
1.5
通讯作者：
Sini Susan Varghese
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Tannistha Samanta;Sini Susan Varghese
从一组老年人和中年人（50岁以上）的妇女和男子谁重新合作（包括婚姻和同居），通过设在城市的阿赫梅达巴德（古吉拉特邦，印度）的婚姻局的援助，我们研究的社会学概念的关系和“做法”的家庭和亲密关系。我们要问的是，这种在这些参与者的生殖后生活中成为亲属的“非规范”过程，是否有希望实现私人领域的民主化，正如吉登斯（1992）所指出的那样，在那里，社会关系的过程优先于其生物/生殖形式。在这个过程中，我们研究了我们的研究参与者如何倾向于组织他们新建立的关系，通过谈判，承诺，社会义务和个人自主权的矛盾紧张局势。以二人一组的形式进行的深入访谈揭示了人格、亲密关系和社会性的性别表达。例如，男性期望他们的关系能够带来怀旧的家庭生活理想，而女性则将重新伴侣关系与社会地位的提高、亲属支持和经济安全联系起来，强调了与种姓内婚理想化的异性结合相关的预期社会效益。重要的是，种姓关系有助于决定老年夫妇对伴侣的偏好和与家庭成员的关系。我们发现，尽管受到传统的社会脚本，妇女在这些关系中使用他们的（后生殖）年龄的解放优势讨价还价与父权制的强迫verilocality和缺乏发言权的合作伙伴的决定。在一个文化规范规定了无性恋和晚年家庭依赖的社会病理学的背景下，这种新形式的关系提供了一种令人振奋的自我披露和亲密关系的叙述，尽管最终再现了性别和世代的社会，经济和象征性等级。
Drawing from a group of older and middle-aged (50 years above) women and men who have re-partnered (includes both marriage and cohabitation) through the assistance of a marriage bureau based in the city of Ahmedabad (Gujarat, India), we examine the sociological notions of relatedness and the “practices” of family and intimacy. We ask whether this “non-normative” process of becoming kin in the post-reproductive lives of these participants, holds promise for a democratization of the private sphere as noted by Giddens (1992) where the social process of relatedness is privileged over its biological/procreational forms. In the process, we examine how our study participants tend to organize their newly established relationships through contradictory tensions of negotiations, commitment, social obligation and personal autonomy. In-depth interviews conducted in a dyadic format revealed gendered expressions of personhood, intimacy and sociality. For example, men expected their relationship to bring in nostalgic ideals of domesticity, whereas women associated re-partnering with increased social status, kinship support and economic security underscoring the expected social benefits associated with caste-endogamous idealized heterosexual unions. Significantly, caste relations were instrumental in determining partner preferences and relationship formation with family members among older couples. We show that despite being circumscribed by conventional social scripts, women in these relationships use their (post-reproductive) age to an emancipatory advantage by bargaining with patriarchal compulsions of verilocality and lack of say in partner decisions. In a context where cultural norms prescribe a social pathology of asexuality and familial dependence in later life, this new form of relatedness offers an uplifting narrative of self-disclosure and intimacy, although ultimately reproducing social, economic and symbolic hierarchies of gender and generation.