Understanding Relationships As “Promiscuous Territories”: Family Practices, Feminist Materialism and IE’s Notion of Work

The paper discusses Institutional Ethnography as a possible way to build a common ground in understanding family life between practice-inspired research and the perspectives that have emerged in recent years from transfeminist and queer movements that have rediscovered materialist feminism and the notion of reproductive work to understand everyday personal relationships and envision ways of overcoming their oppressive dimensions.

The family practices approach (Morgan 1996) has been able to bring together tendencies in family studies that have moved away from essentialist, positivist and categorising approaches towards attention to relational connections, actor perspectives and researcher reflexivity. It remains a fruitful way of challenging current tendencies to re-naturalise family boundaries and gender hierarchies. At the same time, its critical potential for reading family change in relation to structural dynamics has proved limited. Fully recovering the legacy of Dorothy Smith, one of the inspirations for the development of this approach, and building on IE's fruitful entanglement between the anti-essentialist potential of ethnomethodology and a historical materialist ontology, can help to overcome these limitations.

In particular, the paper discusses IE's resonance with current trends in feminist and queer militant research on relational experiences in which the notion of work has become central, renewing the workerist legacy of co-research. Applying Veronica Gago's (2014) metaphor of 'promiscuous territories' to relationships, it argues that the contribution of IE can be crucial to a complex understanding of relational practices that emerge as alternatives to the logics of capitalist valorisation as forms of work, allowing for the mapping of transformative possibilities that lie not only in everyday agency, but in changing the social relations that rule them.