La parella heterosexual a l’espai públicEscenes de reproducció patriarcal a la vida quotidiana

Résumé

This research has the objective to analyze the configuration of the heterosexual couple in the beginnings of XXI century. AS we are living in a discursive feminist hegemony, this analysis is of particular importance, as the sexual-affective relationships, the cares, the affections and the emotions, are still being built, still mostly through traditional and normative practices. I propose an ethnographic approach about ways of living, thinking the gender in the heterosexual couples, to understand how gender acts and reproduces within these relationships. I start from the base that heterosexual couples is a device of power that reproduces inequalities, which is beginning to be questioned, but which is sustained by strong asymmetries and gender inequalities. The ethnographic approach has allowed me to observe everything that goes unnoticed in everyday life and that shapes the experience of being a couple. The ethnographic writing – an analytic, reflexive and with autoethnographic touches in writing- has been the method and the result. I have elaborated an ethnographic story for each participant couple, where we can observe how couples act, the emotions, the affections, the rituals, and how they inhabit the times and the shared spaces. We also see how they give and receive care within the couple, and what happens when this institution expands, and lives within the framework of the nuclear family. The everyday life, as a look and as a space for knowledge, is a privileged space to understand and bring attention to the knots of the contemporary feminisms. Si, the ethnographic stories, built in public places, reflect the stress, conflicts, and the discomforts that emerge in a relationship with balancing between the gender speeches and the daily life practices. Inhabiting some scenarios through which gender circulates on a persistent way and times strongly marked by patriarchal and capitalist systems. The care scenes are paradigm of the gender acts, as well as for the movements and changes that are taking place in the building of new subjectivities. More egalitarian and fluid, but, at the same time full of contradictions. The strategies and tactics used by the couples to justify, change, or subvert the patriarchal system, that corset and limits the everyday practices, generates small movements, which reproduce the imbalances between masculinity and femininity. Although, we must think about the couple and the family as opportunistic spaces to test the gender. Spaces that, through small daily transgressions, open paths to suggest changes in the patriarchal structures, despite the difficulties that this entails. Because research about the heterosexual couple, not only disputes this institution, but also opens a question about the capitalist system that is being sustained in this model. Questions the romantic love model and its implications in sexist violence, and also the patriarchal foundations on which the family and parenting is sustained. The normative couple evidence heterocentrism as a system, and puts in check the entire structure on which the heterosexual couple is sustained, thus opening the possibility of acting in different areas, from a contextual, situated and feminist position.