Discrimination against unmarried adults has been well documented with respect to such issues as taxes, conditions of employment, and political rhetoric. Less well understood is discrimination affecting medical decisions that may be — literally — a matter of life or death. Since the 1980s, dozens of studies[1] in peer-reviewed medical journals have demonstrated that […]
Who would love me like this? – Fat Single Women and the Normativity of the Couple in Makeover TV Shows (by Susanne Ritter)
The body – especially the closely scrutinized female body – marks the individual as more orless (in)appropriate for the society it exists in. Fatness is commonly seen as being excludedfrom and incompatible with norms of femininity (Taylor 2021) and it is thus especiallystigmatizing for women. Similarly, especially for women, it can be stigmatizing to be […]
Diverse Intimacies: On friendship, communal living, and non-monogamy (By Varpu Alasuutari & Anna Heinonen)
Varpu Alasuutari & Anna Heinonen ”Being part of a couple is widely seen and felt to be an achievement, a stabilizing status characteristic of adulthood”, Sasha Roseneil and colleagues write in their insightful book The Tenacity of the Couple Norm: Intimate Citizenship Regimes in a Changing Europe (2020), arguing that anything else but coupledom sets people in […]
Sinkkuus Suomessa (Marjo Kolehmainen & Annukka Lahti)
Marjo Kolehmainen, Annukka Lahti Marraskuussa Suomessakin vietettii sinkkujen päivää. Vaikka kaupallisuudesta helppo kritisoida markkinakikaksi, on taustalla huomio sinkuista potentiaaisesti merkittävänä asiakasryhmänä. Sinkkujen määrä on lisääntynyt kaikissa länsimaissa merkittävästi 1960-luvulta lähtien etenkin avioerojen yleistymisen myötä. Erityisen paljon sinkkuja on Pohjoismaissa, myös Suomessa. Tätä selittää yksilökeskeinen kulttuuri, hyvinvointivaltioiden tuoma taloudellinen turva, avioerot hyväksyvä luterilainen uskonto sekä naisten […]
Technologies and transformations of the self: Negotiating the single woman in US-UK popular culture (by Kate Gilchrist)
Kate Gilchrist, London School of Economics During the first few months of 2020, when the world was in the first grip of the Covid-19 pandemic, one of the UK’s top-trending shows on TV streaming service Netflix was Love is Blind. While many US and UK reality TV dating shows have followed a similar format , […]
Solo-camping and solo-hotpots: Rethinking practices and perceptions of singlehood in Japan in COVID-time (by Laura Dales and Nora Kottmann)
Being single is an increasingly common experience for Japanese adults. Not only has the average age at first marriage risen continuously over the last decades, so too has the rate of permanent singlehood. In 1990, 5.6% of men and 4.3% of women were “life-long unmarried”, that is to say, never-married at age 50. In 2020, […]
Singlehood and Companionship: Challenges and Opportunities for New Frameworks (by Roua Al Taweel and Tuuli Innola)
Politics of singlehood are a matter of relevance to the majority of people, as most experience singlehood at some point in their life course. As being such a multidimensional issue, singlehood also serves as a fruitful starting point for wide-ranging sociological and feminist conversations. Singlehood can be studied as a social category, an identity, a […]
Singlehood in the Finnish public debate (by Marjo Kolehmainen)
Who would not remember the iconic Sex and the City TV programme that pictured the single lives of four women in the city of New York? Sex and the City and several other fictional television series and movies that have focused on − often female − single protagonists and their wish to form a conventional […]
The figure of the polyamorous single woman in consensual non-monogamy discourse in Belgium (by Katrien De Graeve)
The following text is a shortened version of the keynote speech given by Katrien De Graeve at the launch event for the Research Network of Singlehood Studies that took place on 16-17 December 2019 in Tampere. A picture of a bed, with a romantic, wooden headboard with candles, and covered with orange blankets, has been […]
Living alone during state of emergency (by Tiina Sihto)
Covid-19 and the measures taken by governments around the world in order to control the pandemic have fundamentally changed the way we currently live our everyday lives and organise our relationships with others. Much of the popular media discussion has revolved around challenges faced by dual-earner families with young children and the possible consequences the […]