ABSTRACT
It is difficult to read a newspaper, listen to the radio or watch TV today without coming across urgent voices expressing concern over what’s happening to the ‘traditional family’ in contemporary UK society. The focus may be the growing numbers of lone parents, ‘artificial’ or ‘unnatural’ examples of reproduction opened up by technology, debates about same-sex marriages, or increasing rates of divorce and separation. We may ask ourselves ‘what’s going on here?’ As with the topic of crime (Mooney et al., 2004), popular discussions of the family seem to be characterized by both fear and fascination. There is the widespread fear that changes in family lives are leading to greater uncertainties and private troubles in people’s lives. We have, then, a picture of a loss of order and certainty. At the same time, we seem to be fascinated by the departure from the ‘old’ ways of the traditional, father-dominated family in which simple assumptions of what was and wasn’t ‘natural’ predominated. There appears to be a greater diversity today in the ways that our intimate and domestic living arrangements are organized. But does such diversity represent a loss of order or rather new ways of ordering our family lives with new constraints and pressures?
