Emotional Histories of Relational Rupture

By spotlighting emotional histories of relational rupture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in this Forum, we aim to illuminate key aspects of the entwined fields of gender, family and emotions history. We have drawn together scholars interested in developing new approaches and interrogating hitherto under-examined dimensions of the historical emotional experiences of relational rupture, broadly conceived as the dismantling of rapports soldered by intimacy, entanglement, blood ties, chosen families, legal, religious, cultural or community connections or recognition. Such ruptures could be externally enforced – caused by conscription, deportation or other public policies – or they could result from war, disease or death. Alternatively, they might be initiated by those involved, for instance through conversion, estrangement, migration, separation or divorce. In all cases, relational ruptures mobilized complex emotions – often existential in nature, yet also culturally contingent and intimately tied to power, politics and privilege.

Specifically, the articles invite us to rethink rupture itself in different regions around the world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – not as a finality or an end – but as a process of reconfiguring relationships. This lens enables an examination of what family means and highlights its enduring role as a critical site for people to work out how they want to feel, live and interact. Across many world regions in these centuries, the family has been a powerful political, economic and social institution, shaping moral order, regulating sexuality, facilitating both biological and socio-economic reproduction, socializing children, decisively moulding gender norms and deviances and demarcating boundaries between the acceptable and the illicit. For these reasons, as historians have shown, marriage, family and domestic arrangements have figured prominently on the agendas of religious and political leaders, in nation-states and colonial contexts, interlacing macropolitical concerns and developments with the micropolitical dynamics of everyday life.1

Scholars have analysed how people in varied locations have experienced the unravelling of intimate and familial relationships, through processes such as divorce, repudiation, death, estrangement, violence, physical distance or other factors.2 Historians have also examined how individuals and collectives fiercely contested the fallout from relational rupture, including control over wealth and inheritance, the placement and custody of children, the ability to forge new relationships, reputation and community standing, crime and punishment and the authority of particular individuals or institutions to determine these outcomes. Studies have examined the gendered dynamics of families coming together and breaking apart in different contexts – focusing on demographic trends, political controversies, cultural shifts, as well as legal and social change. But we still know far too little of the complexities of embodied, sensorial and emotional aftershocks of varied forms of familial breakups in changing historical landscapes.

In recent decades, the field of emotional history has become a distinct subfield, with scholars speaking of the ‘affective turn’ or ‘emotional turn’ in historical analysis.3 Historians of the family have explored some emotional dimensions of family ideals and practices in the past. They have examined changing emotional ideals and marital standards, demonstrating how rising expectations of romantic love and emotional intimacy over the past centuries – especially in Europe and North America – have both complicated and enriched marital relationships.4 We have learned about the gendered ‘emotionologies’ and ‘emotional practices’ associated with married life in the twentieth century, as well as the heightened expectations placed on women to ‘make marriage work’ – not merely as a practical union but as a harmonious and fulfilling relationship.5 In recent decades, researchers have also traced the shifting emotional ideals of child-rearing, highlighting changes in the expectations and experiences of fatherhood and motherhood.6 By exploring a variety of global settings, they have uncovered previously unrecognized colonial and postcolonial connections and ‘frontiers’ in the ‘emotional formation’ of modern ideals of a happy childhood, both within the family and beyond.7

While significant labour has historically been invested in producing stable, happy and harmonious families, the ability to uphold these ideals has, in most historical contexts, been deeply contingent upon class or caste status, racialization, legal status and sexuality – and liminal or oppressed groups have frequently been denied access to a (publicly sanctioned) family life.8 Moreover, even amongst the privileged sections of society, real-life family experiences were often far more complex – full of pain, secrecy, subjugation and violence – than the neat, idealized portrayals found in etiquette manuals or glossy magazines.9 As John Gillis once phrased it, there is a substantial gap between ‘the families we live by’ and ‘the families we live with’.10 Most scholars would no doubt agree with this characterization, yet only recently have historians of emotions begun to systematically study the darker, more difficult terrains of family life, and the ways in which these dimensions are formed and fractured by economic inequity, colonial divisions, social marginalization, other asymmetrical dynamics, migration or other broader currents.11

Focusing specifically on relational rupture in twentieth- and twenty-first-century North America, Britain and Europe, West and Equatorial Africa, South Asia and South America, the articles aim to expand this research trajectory. These centuries witnessed the development of the modern nation-state, colonization and decolonization and the attendant legal regimes, as well as changing expectations about the rights and obligations of various family members, including spouses and parents, around the world. Globally, a common language of contestations around the rights of individuals, state and non-state actors and public and private institutions to harness emotions to configure and reconfigure family life emerged. While each case is specific to its national context, these themes are threaded throughout the Forum.

The essays analyse important questions about the gendered emotional history of relational rupture through novel theoretical perspectives, interdisciplinary approaches, methodological innovation and varied sources. They engage anthropology, cultural studies and historical research and theories on emotions. Questions explored are: How did understandings of gender as idea, practice, biology and legal status shape the emotional landscape of relational rupture in different places around the globe? How did shifting political and cultural currents mould the emotional dynamics of power in intimate relationships and their endings? How did experiences of breakup and/or makeup map onto changing ideas of romantic relationships, sex and sexuality, marriage – and vice versa? What were the shifting understandings of and experiences of heterosexuality/ies, homosexuality/ies and bisexuality/ies? How did violence, sexual, physical or psychological, shape decisions to stay in, part from or build relationships? Furthermore, the articles in this forum explore how relational rupture affected or reflected changing ideas of childhood, parenthood, kinship, as well as the self and the collective. In taking seriously and probing historical actors’ expressions of emotion, we ask to what extent did relational rupture operate as a liberatory option in different cultural contexts? When was it ostracizing and associated with shame? In focusing also on the ways in which people stitched together new semblances of familial bonds, the forum explores the complex and fraught cultural, political and emotional investments in varied notions of family life that drove people to salvage broken bonds or create new ones, thereby proffering new definitions and configurations of family.

In probing the interstices and frayed edges of familial relationships on a scale that permits global and comparative analyses, these articles offer expanded interpretations of the gendered dynamics about what constitutes rupture in shifting historical circumstances. Eschewing historical discourses of emotions as ‘feminine’ and logic as ‘masculine’, the articles show that men and women as understood in varied historical contexts experienced, expressed and deployed emotions.12 The communication of feelings was a contested site of changing formulations and norms of manhood and womanhood. Many of the articles speak to questions about the family that are uncomfortable, grey areas, both for individuals and for national publics. What happens when a son speaks of being a survivor of childhood sexual abuse? What happens when a wife admits to being unhappy in her marriage? What happens when a father does not (or cannot) fully acknowledge his children? What happens when a mother is deported? Articles in the Forum reveal how people conceived of family beyond the separate relationships that tend to be the focus of historical literature, such as husband/wife, parent/child or found families, etc.

The Forum proceeds in a loosely chronological fashion as it examines these various historical threads. Death is not necessarily the finite form of relational rupture that it appears to be at initial glance, as Rachel Jean-Baptiste's exploration of the fate of three métis (mixed race) children of a famed French medical doctor Eugène Jamot and an Equatorial African woman named Fatima Labané reveals. Their interracial relationship took place in French Africa in the twentieth-century interwar period of French rule, when discourses of France's ‘civilizing mission’ masked the racism of colonial rule. Jamot brought the children to France but had not acknowledged paternity, leaving them in a state of legal, social and financial limbo after his death in the 1930s. As he sought to clarify their French citizenship status and to receive monetary support, Louis, the eldest of the three, expressed his anxiety and pulled on the heartstrings of his late father's male friends in letters to them. In doing so, Jean-Baptiste argues, he unsettled gendered and racialized emotional schemas and made his humanity, so often denied to colonial subjects, legible. By moving beyond the colonial archive and tracing the longer family history into the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, conducting oral histories and exploring the memories of surviving descendants, Jean-Baptiste finds threads of postcolonial and transnational (re)connection with maternal kin in and between France and former colonies in Africa.

The state and state actors also formulated emotional rhetoric in creating laws that regulated heterosexual divorce and marriage – which ordinary citizens had to invoke and make legible in order to gain the legal authority to remarry – as Sueann Caulfield shows in 1930s–1940s Brazil. Getúlio Vargas, who was president for twelve years after coming to power in a coup in 1935, cast himself as a ‘father’ to the nation, a regime Caufield terms ‘state paternalism’. Catholic and feminist activists had been debating if marriage should be indissoluble or divorce allowed, and the Vargas regime decided that divorce should remain not legal in the civil code. Caufield examines some of the thousands of letters that Brazilians who were desquitados/as, separated but not divorced, wrote to the government, directly addressing Vargas. Caufield argues that the letter writers emotionally communicated their desperation for the ‘father’ to intervene and solve their domestic dilemma. Poor and elite men and women sought compassion for the recognition of divorce so that they could remarry a new partner with whom they formed a household and have their children live with them. While some citizens were deferential in their letters, others were not. Those citizens who urged Vargas to consider legalizing divorce and remarriage were often less deferential, likely, Caulfield posits, because of their class status. Elite letter writers insisted that the state's failure to recognize their plights and ascribe them dignity and personal happiness in their domestic life was antithetical to the modern nation that the regime claimed.

Relational rupture was also initiated and coerced by the state in a show of power to regulate women's sexuality, immigration, citizenry and borders. Jessica Pliley explores how male United States (US) Immigration and Naturalization Service agents acted as instruments of relational rupture in her exploration of three deportation cases involving Canadian women accused of selling sex in the United States between 1936 and 1944. The women were mothers, having given birth to children while living in the United States. Analysing the transcripts of the interrogations, Pliley shows how the management and manipulation of emotions played a role in determining if the accused were ‘immoral’ women deserving of deportation and stripped of their children, or ‘worthy’ mothers deserving of clemency to stay in the country with their U.S. citizen children. Pliley demonstrates that both the accused women and the male agents who interrogated them participated in a process that was both gendered and ritualized in the questioning and storytelling process of deportation. She argues that the agents engaged in emotional labour to obtain their desired result and that the women actively attempted to resist their expulsions, using emotional rhetoric to plead their cases. Pliley's article demonstrates how family separation practices generated an emotional repertoire in service of an anti-immigration bureaucracy.

Relational rupture also came about because of violence, sexual and/or physical, and Teri Chettiar analyzes the complex questions and emotional landscape surrounding intimate partner violence as it became a social problem in 1970s Great Britain. Because policy makers and the British public wanted to cast battered wives and mothers as blameless victims, the women's lived experiences and conflicted feelings about their abusers were often lost or diminished in the record. Chettiar argues that physical abuse, with its obvious injuries, was more easily understood than were the emotional and psychological effects, which meant that discourse around abuse was, at best, incomplete. Assumptions made by male and female politicians, activists and social workers about how and why a rupture – like leaving an abusive partner – should take place erased the complicated realities of living with, and escaping, violence. By the 1990s, social scientists started to forward more nuanced understandings of the emotional trauma associated with intimate partner violence. Hearing all forms of complaints about violence, Chettiar notes, is essential to make it visible to victims themselves and to the public writ large, as well as a methodological tool for the historian to narrate a more complex history.

Questions about how people voice stories of abuse also animate Lauren Jae Gutterman's article, which explores how and why gay and bisexual men assumed leadership roles in the movement to help male survivors of sexual abuse in the late-twentieth century United States. They did so despite persistent stereotypes about the alleged effects of such abuse on boys, including the idea that they would become abusers themselves or that it had contributed to their homosexuality problem. Often veterans of other activist movements, these men challenged the feminist belief that childhood sexual abuse was a largely female problem as well as ideas about how men were supposed to express (or not express) feelings of pain and vulnerability. In the process, they came to understand familial relational ruptures as necessary and not always detrimental to their personal growth and healing. ‘Coming out’ as survivors, despite what it might do to their families of origins, was thus an inherently political act. Gutterman unearths these narratives through organizational ephemera, television talk shows, published materials and gaining the trust of activists to conduct oral history interviews. The article argues that new ‘emotional formations’ are created by collectives insisting on voicing certain emotional experiences in public and seeking to construct ‘emotional refuges’ – thus contributing to a gradual broader cultural change.

Evaluating how the personal was also political for men after divorce, Theresa Iker explores cultural and legal change through the men's and fathers’ rights movements in the late-twentieth century United States. Iker demonstrates that activists deployed emotional rhetoric in articulating their objectives, conceptualizing this strategy as the formulation of ‘emotional constituencies’. This language helped proponents of fathers’ rights not only to garner public sympathy and attract members but also to mask the financial motives that often animated their activism. Whereas early proponents of men's and fathers’ rights focused angrily on questions related to alimony, by the 1980s, joint child custody and the assessment of child support had become key rallying points. In an era of increasing political conservatism, the men's ‘emotional politcking’, in which they spoke of their love for their children and complained about deprivation, resonated with many Americans, allowing the activists to distance themselves from being cast as ‘deadbeat dads’. By emotionally emphasizing that they were, in fact, victims of gender discrimination, fathers’ rights activists thus contributed to the legitimacy of their cause.

Ammara Maqsood draws on her ethnographic fieldwork in late-2010s Pakistan to explore why unhappily married Pakistani wives of the newer middle classes largely chose not to pursue divorce, despite being unhappily married. In these cases, rupture did not signal the end of relationships but rather contributed to the necessity of developing emotional strategies to remain in otherwise unsatisfying arrangements and to justify doing so. By recounting their marital trials, both to their peers and to Maqsood, the women created emotional worlds that allowed them to make sense of themselves, their lives and their familial roles and obligations. Maqsood demonstrates that a constellation of considerations – financial, personal and familial (as daughters and mothers) – prompted the women's decisions to continue to be married. Rather than hiding their unhappiness, however, these women drew strength and support, and reinforced their identities, through their storytelling. By decentring the assumption that leaving a marriage is the only rational, or feminist, response to marital discontent, Maqsood challenges dominant historiographical narratives in women's and gender history centred on individual agency, freedom and happiness. In doing so, the article complicates understandings of the relationship between individual and family, of selfhood and community.

Collectively, the articles underscore that relationships and the emotions they generate are conditioned, shaped and constrained by broader societal structures, cultural discourses and political agendas. Familial relationships, in all of their complex forms, are never isolated but intertwine with other relationships, and the emotional experiences of relational rupture (and reconfiguration) are formed by these structures and dynamics of power, while also feeding back into them. These findings suggest the need to rethink notions of agency and resistance and feminist theories about the family. In exploring women's and men's expressions of pain, discontent, grievance, worry, anger, powerlessness, and love, healing, passion, renewal and happiness, this forum demonstrates the complex, yet persistent ways in which individuals and groups contested varied formulations of what constitutes ‘the family’ as a critical metaphor, institution and connection – sometimes necessary to break, at other times worth fighting for. It is our hope that scholars working in other contexts will find these approaches useful to their analyses in other time periods and places around the globe.