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Do theoreticians have lives? | 7 comments

[new] guilty (Avg. Score: none / Raters: 0) (#2)
by Aileen on Wed Nov 12th, 2003 at 09:50:12 AM EURODISCORDIA TIME
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Yes, that sounds like me - a close friend over many years since we were students together (the word "friend" is so insufficient for defining different kinds of relationships) said not too long ago that he would never have imagined that I would one day be happy in a conventional, long-term hetero relationship, and it still made no sense to him, wouldn´t seem to fit me, but somehow it seems to be working.
Except it doesn´t work. I share living space with three men, one of them an adult, in what is clearly and rigidly delineated as a "family residence" (and government subsidized as such), and we are frequently identified as an exemplary family, living an ideal, but the four of us are, in fact, anything but a self-sustaining functional unit. The model of the "nuclear family" doesn´t work, it is a myth, a lie even.
What motivates people to give in to pressure to divide up into "couples" and "families" or any other kinds of small units? Is it a need for security? An attempt to escape from the stress on individualism and self-reliance propagated by neo-liberal privatization (for lack of a better insight into where the pressure comes from)? But there is no security, there are no guarantees, where human beings are concerned.
I have been wondering whether the idea of the "social factory" might work as a counter-model, but I don´t know enough about what is actually meant by that. Some of the references I have come across sound promising, though.

[ Parent ]

guilty (as a charged term) by ryangriffis, 11/13/2003 01:06:57 AM EURODISCORDIA TIME (none / 0)
- Looking for a better question by Aileen, 11/15/2003 03:14:28 PM EURODISCORDIA TIME (none / 0)
  - The Single Rights Movement, and then some by amy, 11/15/2003 06:46:12 PM EURODISCORDIA TIME (none / 0)
    - What is "a life"? by Aileen, 11/15/2003 08:17:16 PM EURODISCORDIA TIME (none / 0)

Do theoreticians have lives? | 7 comments

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