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 […]
Launch speech: The Research Network of Singlehood Studies
Welcome to the home site of the Research Network of Singlehood Studies. The following text is a slightly shortened version of the launch speech by the network coordinators Marjo Kolehmainen and Annukka Lahti, originally written for the launch event that took place on December 17, 2019 in Tampere. Why Singlehood Studies? The Research Network of […]