Search results

This article analyses the legal and political issues that govern the spreading phenomenon of unmarried couples living together in post-communist Romania. It intends to show that recent legal reforms remain attached to a highly conservative concept of family life. Despite European directives on gender equality, Romanian legal standards are far from being adapted to the diversity of conjugal configurations now seen in society. Rather than perceive the fundamental historical fact of dissociation between parentage and conjugal ties, the Romanian legislator sees the couple only through the prism of its potential reproductive function.









































Life for unmarried couples : from law to politics in post-communist Romania

The couple is one of the most significant categories of the way that mentalities, social behavior, patterns or practices of everyday life are being redefined in the post-communist period in Romania. Starting from a brief presentation of the state of knowledge about the couple in the Romanian secondary literature, the article focuses on a double deconstruction. First, the author shows that, nowadays, the couple is a discursive category, especially visible through the demographic, legal and also political discourse. Then, life couple is an object of study in the field of political sciences that can provide insights into the overall functioning of the social and political life in the present period of transition.

The article aims at ascertaining to which extent family policies determine, accompany or announce the social and especially family realities, identifiable in the dynamics of socio-demographic data, in order to uncover in depth the contemporary metamorphoses of gender relations. The author thus presents an overview of family policies and gender equality in the European context, and, more specifically, in the framework of the "other" Europe, before and after the fall of communism. This comparative approach is then used in the case study of the particular link between political regimes and the gender divide in Romania. Therefore, the article emphasizes the complexity of relations between gender and family policies, relations which are connected with the multiple ways of conceiving equality, as well as with the plurality of perspectives on family, which underline the articulation of any family policy.

Among several post-communist legislative projects regarding the family life and the couple, three initiatives elaborated in 2002 concerning the co-habitation have occupied a special place. More specifically, the three legislative projects represent different attempts to produce norms on some of the most important aspects of the life beyond the marriage. The author analyzes the three initiatives, as well as the empirical evidence provided by interviews realised with the initiators of the projects. Indeed, the article attempts at seizing the complex game of a democratic society, where the social transformations are constantly "followed" by the update of the legislation. Therefore, the study tries to penetrate the stakes and actual tensions in legislative debates concerning the family life and the couple, where the paradoxical trend of marginalising but also emphasizing the importance of the free union seems to be obvious.

The introduction to the special section "Who Cares for Families? Narrative(s) of Return in Postsocialist Europe" identifies and analyzes its core concept—the narrative of return. Families of today are talked about differently, and how they are narrativized matters. The narrative that stresses that family is under threat and in need of defense or a special form of care, figuring care as restitution of natural, traditional, or family proper, is termed the narrative of return. The trope of return is strongly normative and non-descriptive, as it relies on mythical temporalities that ought to be restored in our present. The article first defines the choice of concepts—narrative, return, care, and threat. Second, it applies this conceptual frame in the transnational context, particularly within the transnational anti-gender campaigns in the populist moment. Third, it focuses on the postsocialist part of Europe, where, as the entire special section aims to demonstrate, the narrative of return gained particular currency. In Eastern Europe, these narratives are integral to larger projects of restoration of national agenda and serve as a tool of double emancipation: from the Soviet past and from the European Union present. Political actors using narrative(s) of return advocate and successfully push through fundamental changes in the political frameworks and value systems of the postsocialist countries. In sum, the article aims to demonstrate the conceptual background of a political tool.