Modern Family: between tradition and new (post-family) narratives

Abstract

It is possible to be a couple without marriage commitments and even without living together (as happens to LAT couples); the couple can be restricted to the two partners or include wider relationships; one can be a parent without having generated children with natural relationships. In short, everything suggests that today being a couple and being parents are two possibilities that respond to different life projects, they go on their own. History and social evolution have shown how the classic family made up of mother, father and natural or adopted children becomes just one of the many possibilities of being called a family.

On the basis of these considerations, the aim of this paper is to reflect on the physiological change in family structures. A culturalist conception of the family seems to be affirming itself from many sides, which understands it as a pure cultural product, rather than as a structure that humanizes people, through a relationality that operates through the symbolic exchange between the sexes and between generations (Donati, 2020). The new narratives lead us to take up the challenge of a possible post-human and technoliquid family (Cantelani, 2020) and in order to do this we need to seriously reflect on the fact that thinking of the family only as a question of love, affection and care, it can be very reductive. Rather, it would be necessary to restore originality to family relationships: family forms are the product of collective processes of morphogenesis of social structures and even choices, although they depend on individual emotions and strategies, are more deeply the expression of dynamics of networks of relationships. In other words, in the age of the anthropocene and of the ‘family warming’, it becomes necessary and fundamental to favor a sustainable family, in the sense of giving a new meaning to the elements of its social genome and the ways of connecting them (Donati, 2020)