‘Non-Normative’ Family Lives? Mapping Migrant Youth’s Family and Intimate Relationships across National Divides and Spatial Distance

Abstract

In this chapter, questions of ‘non-normative’ lives are addressed globally by mapping the intimate and family lives of migrant youths engaged in relationships across distance and transnational spaces. Whilst there has been much pioneering research in the academic field of family studies reframing debates by problematising and critically interrogating normative understandings of intimacy in family relationships, we argue that what lies at the heart of much analysis is the implicit assumption that ‘doing families’ and intimate relationships is primarily practiced within a structure of co-presence and within the boundaries of the nation-state. For migrants with family members geographically dispersed across the globe, however, doing families and intimacy usually involves them transcending these nation-state boundaries, and crossing cultural divides and spatial distances. Yes, this aspect of family, intimacy and relational life is often overlooked and marginalised in family studies debates including among those commentators that critique heteronormative family models (for example, Weeks et al., 2001; Folger, 2008; Taylor, 2009).