The researcher-initiated autobiography’s work as an actant in producing knowledge about the social

Abstract

This article addresses how a researcher-initiated autobiography’s work as an actant may offer illuminating insights into how we as humans and nonhumans are associated in networks. The aim is to discuss how the effects of these associations produce knowledge about the social. With inspiration from actor-network theory and by using an example of a researcher-initiated autobiography from the study ‘The Daughters and Sons of Rainbow Families’, the discussion firstly concentrates on how associations between the autobiography and the researcher may produce emotional effects. Secondly, the discussion focuses on how a researcher-initiated autobiography works as an actant ‘in itself’. This indicates the necessity to trace associations between the written events (actants) in the text, and discuss their effects. As an example, the article addresses how associations between written events concerning family members, produce knowledge about the relations between the members.

Keywords

actant actor-network theory autobiography rainbow families researcher-initiated autobiography

Texts have this magic; they are where you are in your body and they connect you with others elsewhere and else when. They coordinate your subjectivity with other subjectivities known and unknown.

(Smith, 1992)

Introduction

John Law, one of the key proponents of actor-network-theory (ANT) writes that ‘the social is nothing other than patterned networks of heterogeneous materials’ (1992: 381). He explains his statement with an example:

Look at the material in the world in this way: It isn’t simply that we eat, find shelter in our houses, and produce objects with machines. It is also that almost all of our interactions with other people are mediated through objects of one kind or another. For instance, I speak to you through a text, even though we will probably never meet. And to do that, I am tapping away on a computer keyboard. At any rate, our communication with one another is mediated by a network of objects – the computer, the paper, the printing press. And it is also mediated by networks of objects-and-people, such as the postal system. The argument is that these various networks participate in the social. They shape it. (1992: 381–382)

Actor-network theory treats social relations as network effects (Law, 1992), and Mol (2010) claims that the theory opens up the possibility of seeing, hearing, reading, sensing and analysing the social life of things. In order to study the social, one has to trace associations and interactions between non-human and human actors, and to analyse the effects of these associations (Latour, 2005).

With inspiration from this theoretical and methodological perspective, the article addresses how a researcher-initiated autobiography work as an actor, or an actant, in order to produce data and as a means for analysing data. According to Latour (1996), an actant is a semiotic definition, i.e. something that acts or to which activity is granted by another. An actant can be literally anything, human or non-human, provided it is granted to be the source of an action, and it should be employed with the same analytical and descriptive framework no matter whether it is a person, a text or a machine. This means that all the actants in a network; i.e. texts, machines, human beings, buildings etc., are all generated in, form part of and are essential to the networks of the social, and all should be analysed in the same terms (Law, 1992; Latour, 1996).

As an actant the researcher-initiated autobiography interacts in networks with other actants (the participant, the researcher, the computer), and as an actant ‘in itself’. This means that in order to discuss how the researcher-initiated autobiography works as a method of producing data and a methodology as a means for analysing data, one has to trace associations between the autobiography and other human or non-human actants. In addition, one has to trace associations between the written events (actants) within the autobiographical text. As an example, one can trace associations between the researcher-initiated autobiography and the researcher, identify effects like emotions, and discuss their effects. The aim is to identify, analyse and discuss effects of associations and their impact in how to produce knowledge about the social. However, before I start the discussion I will situate the researcher-initiated autobiography in the (auto)biographical research tradition.

Autobiographies as methodological approaches

There is a long tradition of including autobiographies as empirical data in qualitative research, particularly within the fields of anthropology, sociology and literature studies (see Abbot, 1988; Bruner, 1987, 1991; Eakin, 1998, 2005; Laslett, 1999; Riessman, 2008; Roberts, 2002; Smith and Watson, 2010). In addition, there are a number of different definitions, or perhaps specifications, of what a narrative, a life story, a memoir, an autobiography, an autoethnography etc. means (see Clandinin, 2007; Denzin and Lincoln, 2011; Denzin, 2014; Gullestad, 1996; Stanley, 1992; Richardson and St. Pierre, 2008; Roberts, 2002; Smith and Watson, 2010). During the last two decades there has also been an astounding proliferation of interpretative (auto)biographical methods, which build on and move beyond the classic versions of life story biographical case studies (Denzin, 2014). These are what Richardson and St. Pierre (2008) call Creative Analytical Practices (CAP). Richardson and St. Pierre describe CAP as different formats where the authors move outside conventional social scientific writing, and the stories covers several new forms in how subjects present their lives (see also Diversi and Moreira 2009; Norris and Sawyer, 2012; Pelias, 2004, 2011; Spry, 2011). According to Denzin (2014), these are ‘the methods by which the “real” appearances of “real” people are created’ (2014: 7).

Within these ‘experimental’ formats, the distinctions between author and subject, autobiography and biography, fact and fiction become increasingly blurred. This indicates how individuals select, summarize and reorder events and their meanings, and therefore an autobiography is not simply linear, a chronology, but a complex interlinking of perceptions of the past and the future within the experience of the present and its shifting contexts. Stanley (1992) claims that there is no ‘fixed’ core story in an autobiography. She sees autobiographical work as akin to ‘a kaleidoscope’ consisting of all sorts of elements that needs to be paid attention to, and that everything depends on how you look: ‘Each time you look you see something rather different, composed certainly of the same elements, but in a new configuration’ (1992: 158). In order to understand different texts, it ‘requires considerable knowledge about contexts, history and subjectivity, as well as knowledge about texts’ (Wengraf, 2000:148). These four components Wengraf calls ‘the diamond model’, and he considers all four to be crucial in the work of how to understand a biographic material. From these perspectives, autobiographies are highly personalized texts in which the authors tell stories about their own lived experiences, relating the personal to the cultural (Richardson and St .Pierre, 2008).

Smith and Watson (2010) claim that, as we read autobiographies, they often seem to be ‘speaking’ to us; we ‘hear’ the author’s ‘voice distinctive in its emphasis and tone, its rhythms and syntax, its lexicon and affect’ (2010: 94). This entails using the rhythms and intensities of one’s own language to help the researcher almost hear the written text like a voice, a voice that ‘can seem keen, perhaps worked up, or also doubtful and hesitant’ (Johansen, 2003: 43). However, one can question the perspective of letting readers ‘hear’ participants voices and presenting their ‘exact words’ as if they were transparent. As researchers, we are always already shaping the ‘exact words’ through different power relationships present, by our own exploitative research agenda and the timelines. In the words of Mazzei and Jackson (2012): ‘such practices can lead to (over)simplified knowledge claims, something especially risky when participant “voice” is presented as an expression of “experience” devoid of context’ (2012: 745).

However, within this ‘biographizing’ movement and the ‘turn to biographical methods’ (Wengraf et al., 2002), as far as I have observed, there is no specific focus on what I refer to as ‘researcher-initiated autobiographies’; the autobiographies that are the subject of this article. In the following, I will present a case study as an example on how the researcher-initiated autobiography work as an actant, how we as human and non-human actants associate in networks and how effects of these associations produce knowledge about the social. The case study is an autobiography written by Susanne (age 21), one of the participants in the larger study ‘The Daughters and Sons of Rainbow Families’.

In this article, my arguments unfold in three parts, the first of which provides a brief presentation of my study of rainbow families and explains the reasoning behind the use of researcher-initiated autobiographies as a data source. In the second section, with inspiration from actor-network theory, I begin by discussing a researcher-initiated autobiography’s position as an actant in a network, and I go on to discuss some emotional effects especially derived from the associations between two actants: the researcher-initiated autobiography and me as researcher. In the third section, I present three excerpts from Susanne’s researcher-initiated autobiography to discuss the importance to trace and describe associations between the written events in a text and in order to produce knowledge, the necessity to describe and analyse the effects of these associations.

Methodological approaches in studying rainbow families

The excerpts from the researcher-initiated autobiography referred to in this article are taken from data used for a larger study entitled ‘The Daughters and Sons of Rainbow Families’. Barr (2009) defines the concept of rainbow families as ‘family forms in a broader sense, describing types of families that do not fit into the traditional nuclear family, provided that one or more members of the family identify as homosexual, bisexual or transsexual’ (2009: 22). The study is based on qualitative semi-structured interviews, researcher-initiated autobiographies and selected political documents on partnerships, rainbow families and the best interests of children in relation to family and parentage. The empirical sources for the study include twenty semi-structured interviews and five written autobiographies provided by Danish and Norwegian participants. All twenty-five participants were invited to be interviewed or to write an autobiography. Only five of the participants chose the latter option. In advance, I had developed three main themes that were to be used in relation to both the interviews and the writing of the autobiographies: my family now and then; stigmatization or problems; and what is my life like and who am I?

The five autobiographies were written by young women aged 19 to 26. An information letter was sent out to the five women, telling them what to bear in mind when writing an autobiography; i.e., to write from a personal perspective and reflect upon their own experiences. They were asked to write about the three aforementioned subjects, in particular, while those who were interviewed were asked more detailed questions concerning each topic. The five participants were also invited to supplement their autobiography with other topics that they themselves deemed important. A guideline of 5–15 pages was suggested for the length of the autobiography, though it was made clear that any length was acceptable. The five electronically written autobiographies were completed within a period of about two months and were all between 6–9 pages in length.

When I planned the data collection for my study of daughters and sons of rainbow families, I wanted to use both interviews and researcher-initiated autobiographies as data sources. My assumption was that the written autobiographies could provide ‘richer’ or more substantive stories than the semi-structured interviews would offer, in that they would contain descriptions of the participants’ practices, experiences, relationships and everyday life, not to mention thoughts and reflections on these matters. However, in this respect, I was wrong: the researcher-initiated autobiographies gave neither ‘richer’ information nor additional thoughts and reflections as compared to the interviews provided. Instead, they gave a particular kind of information, based on the events and topics the participants themselves deemed important to write about, and which differed from the three I had asked them to concentrate on. This means that the participants themselves placed weight on whatever themes they chose to emphasise or downplay in the researcher-initiated autobiography.

None of the autobiographies was linear or chronological accounts of events, but rather complex and blurred stories that consisted of different perspectives, stories and events. They were, in the words of Stanley (1992), all ‘kaleidoscopes’. This made the five autobiographies stand out as being relatively different in both content and form. While one of the participants wrote chronologically and reflected on growing up, all the way from birth through adolescence, another wrote almost exclusively about his/her sexual orientation. While one was keen to focus on matters of acceptance and appreciation, another wrote about how fighting prejudice had been a critical part of growing up. This demonstrates how the researcher-initiated autobiographies may provide the participants with an opportunity to focus on what they consider most important while also supplying valuable information and knowledge to the researcher.

The researcher-initiated autobiography as an actant

Some theorists claim that texts are among the major products, if not the major product, of scientific work (see Callon et al., 1986; Law, 2000; Law, 2009; Smith, 2001). Texts are pivotal in disseminating research results to other people and institutions; and, thereby, paramount to the process of gaining credibility. A researcher-initiated autobiography is the textual product of a process in which the researcher gives participants the opportunity to write their own stories while addressing particular themes provided by the researcher. In this respect, a researcher-initiated autobiography is researcher-driven while also making room for the participant’s own autobiographical text. On one hand, a researcher-initiated autobiography may be compared to a semi-structured interview for example, or to Wengraf’s Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method (BNIM) (2001). On the other hand, the methods differ in that the participant and the researcher never physically meet or converse while working on the researcher-initiated autobiography. Contact occurs exclusively through the written text, which thereby becomes the sole connection between participant and researcher. The researcher’s participation and influence is primarily during the initial phase; i.e. the invitation, selection of themes to be written about and such decisions as the anticipated length of the autobiography. Thereafter the participant is left to her/his own devices and may decide what to write without further guidance, and the researcher’s participation resurfaces when the researcher-initiated autobiography is to be analysed and discussed. From the abovementioned, a researcher-initiated autobiography may emerge as an actant between the participant’s autonomy and the researcher’s research questions. As an actant it has agency; it is produced and materialized by the participant, and its materiality becomes the semiotic text that meets the researcher either on paper or via the computer screen.

Actor-network theory is not about traced networks, but a network-tracing activity (Latour 1996). Therefore, the key aspect is to trace the associations that occur between the actants in a network, and not the actants themselves. By tracing associations, one can identify how action and meaning move and circulate between actants, how they change and what their effects might be (Latour, 2005). From this perspective, the researcher-initiated autobiography not only emerges as a mediator of stories and information between the participant and the researcher, but as an actant within a network of other actants like e.g. the participant, the computer and the researcher.

From an actor-network theoretical perspective there is no attempt to hunt for causes, but instead to trace associations and study their effects, and some effects may be rather unexpected. During my work, in particular one effect came rather unexpectedly; the emotional affect the researcher-initiated autobiographies had on me as researcher. By physically holding the original manuscripts in my hands, I became very aware of their intermediary role almost as if hearing the participants’ voices through the written words. To me they encompassed an authority and authenticity precisely because the participants had written every single word. Furthermore, and probably as a result of how I experienced their power and credibility, I felt a kind of respect that was different from what I felt while holding the transcribed interviews in my hands.

In her book The Cultural Politics of Emotions, Sara Ahmed (2004) discusses what emotions do to us. Her perspective is how emotions circulate between objects, examining how they ‘stick’ to us as well as ‘move’ us, and how feelings do not reside in subjects or objects, but are produced as effects of circulation between objects. Ahmed argues that emotions cannot be separated from bodily sensations and she claims that written texts ‘move’ or generate effects. She also suggests that a close reading of texts will offer a possibility to study how ‘figures of speech’ are crucial to the emotionality of texts.

This emotional reaction was the strangest and most unexpected I experienced in using researcher-initiated autobiographies as a qualitative source of data. This does not imply a rejection or devaluation of the importance of the transcribed interviews; however, when compared to the autobiographies, the transcribed interviews became a ‘secondary’ source of data. They were ‘created’ by me as a researcher; I had written them myself and, thus, they somehow seemed to be ‘my’ texts. The autobiographies were written by the participants themselves, either by hand or by the computer. This made me aware of the different effects between the two data sources, and I asked myself the question; what do these emotional effects do? One point worth mentioning is that, in the three articles discussing the findings from my study on daughters and sons of rainbow families my arguments include proportionately frequent use of quotations from the five researcher-initiated autobiographies (Hanssen 2007, 2012 and 2015). In fact, twelve of the twenty-one quotations in the three articles are from the five autobiographies; in other words, more than half of the quotes are from five of the twenty-five study participants. This might reflect the fact that the five researcher-initiated autobiographies were well-written texts in terms of language, fluency and coherence, thus making it easy for me to find good quotations to support my arguments, and can be a plausible explanation for the frequent use of quotations. However, it may in addition stem from my recognition of the authority and authenticity of the autobiographies, and the fact that our emotions cannot be separated from bodily sensations (Ahmed, 2004). This indicates that as researchers, we are shaped by the effect of emotions and the impact they may have on our work. By embracing the multiple ways of how emotions work and move between actors, this would help us to avoid assuming that emotions are ‘within’ actors we assemble, and think more about what actors are ‘doing’ and how they work through emotions to generate effects (Ahmed, 2004).

From an actor-network theoretical perspective, the three articles with the frequent use of quotations from the autobiographies belong to the same network as the rest of the actants: the participants, the researcher, the computers etc. They are inside, and not outside this network, which implies that the network has been extended. In line with Latour (1996) one does not jump outside a network to add an explanation, one extends the existing network.

Susanne’s researcher-initiated autobiography working as an actant

In addition to work as an actant in a network of other actants, a researcher-initiated autobiography also has its own agenda. That is, the autobiography’s content, the associations between the written events in the text and effects of these associations, indicates how it also works as an actant ‘in itself’. In the following, I will present three excerpts from Susanne’s researcher-initiated autobiography as examples on how written events may appear in a researcher-initiated autobiography. In addition, I will focus on the importance to describe, contextualize and analyse all the associations between the events in the text.

Excerpts from Susanne’s autobiography :

Excerpt 1:

Exhausted, tired from playing like any other day, I ran into the house and was met by an unfamiliar sight. My mother sat at the dark brown dining table, hands over her face. ‘Mum, what’s wrong?’ My mother is my role model and, for the first time in my life, I saw her as vulnerable. Her response was short: ‘Go to your room!’ I am the comforting type, so I didn’t give up, and when I tried to pat her on the back, I was rejected. I quickly and voluntarily ran to my room. The situation was critical and my big sister gave me the explanation. ‘They are getting divorced.’ ‘But why?’ ‘Disagreements!’ Like anybody else, I understood ‘disagreements’ as a rational concept. They argued about how to raise children, or religion or something else, but just couldn’t agree. Like the well-behaved little girl I was, I didn’t ask for the reason, and it was much later that I discovered that the disagreement was in their personalities. I felt like a bad child.

Susanne introduces her autobiography by allowing a single moment from her childhood to stand out as the first representation of herself: the episode when she realised that her parents were getting a divorce. Immediately, the researcher can almost hear the dialogue between Susanne and her sister and is able to sense Susanne’s feelings and reactions while recollecting, at the age of 21, a moment from her childhood that she experienced as dramatic. As reader and researcher, this episode affects me; my curiosity is piqued and I want to know more. What happened to the family? Why did Susanne feel like a bad child?

The moment that Susanne recollects is what Denzin (2014) refers to as an epiphany. Epiphanes are, according to Denzin, ‘interactional moments and experiences which leave marks on people’s lives.//…//. They are often moments of crisis. They alter the fundamental meaning of a person’s life. Their effects may be positive or negative’ (2014: 52). The critical moment in Susanne’s life when she realises that her parents are going to get divorced certainly leaves a mark. How can we understand and analyse the event that Susanne chooses as her first self-representation? For instance, does it portray family relations that discourage open discussion of one’s inner feelings? What are e.g. the associations between this event and others where she writes about relations to her mother, her mother’s new partner and her father, and what effects do these associations produce? In practice, this means that I will have to trace the words, the sentences and the paragraphs where Susanne writes about relations to her mother, her mother’s partner and her father. This indicates that as a researcher, I have to trace associations between all the events in the autobiographical text where she writes about affects and emotions, and further discuss their effects.

Because autobiographical writing varies in both genre and content, we are apt to perceive it as belonging to the borderland between reality and fiction; i.e. somewhere between what ‘really happened’ and the author’s subjective, reflective ideas about what happened. From this perspective, autobiographies may emerge as depictions of false realities and, therefore, as unsuitable sources of research data. Some autobiographies are similar to short stories or novels in the sense that certain phrases and statements are fictitious (Gullestad, 1996). For example in this excerpt, it is reasonable to assume that the quoted conversation between Susanne and her older sister did not flow exactly as Susanne presented it in the introductory excerpt of her autobiography. However, Susanne’s written form of expression brings the story to life and makes it dynamic. Although the specific words she chooses to describe the conversation may be ‘fictitious’, the excerpt nonetheless buzzes with authenticity and credibility as it expresses a powerful life experience. Therefore, an autobiography is not and cannot be referential to life. Memory is selective and limited, and our experiences are always filtered, processed and already interpreted (Gullestad, 1996).

Hunting for the truth is not an adequate approach to analysing and discussing autobiographies. In the terms of actor-network theory, the hunt for causes are downplayed, not to say non-existing. Instead, as a researcher I have to trace the associations between the actants, here the events in the text, and describe and discuss for example their movements, changes and their strength or weakness. To demonstrate an example on how it may work in practice, I will use the ‘reality vs. fiction’ discussion from the excerpt above. Here, I can focus on whether there are other written conversations between actants in the autobiography. If so, I can describe associations between them, and discuss what they do to the text: whether they e.g. make the text easier to read, more interesting to read, or the opposite. This would be a process of producing meaning-making knowledge rather than to focus on whether the conversations really took place or not, whether they are reality or fiction.

The following two excerpts show how Susanne conveys and reflects on her relationship to family members and how she sees herself among peers:

Excerpt 2:

The year was 1995 and we were moving again. This time there were four of us, but the fourth was not my sister. Why is she interfering in my life? Why does she have the right to decide over me? I couldn’t see how it was fair for her to break into my life. She stole my mother’s attention. It was surely this point in the story when I realised what it meant for two women to be lovers. Nevertheless, they had also gotten married. In many ways, it was ok that she was a woman. It provided a well-founded excuse for my parents’ divorce, and then the guilt I had laid on myself could be taken from me. She got it, but it was a ‘relative guilt’; it was ok. If it had been a man, I think the hatred would have been stronger. Then it wouldn’t have been ok. Then he would have come in and taken my dad’s place. However, I was still mad at her; she took my mother from me. And maybe she took my mother’s place. I hated that she was there, under the same roof as me. And now they were going to fight over the mother’s role.

Excerpt 3:

The trousers were the colour of a milk carton, the blouse was striped and the bike was new. I was ready to conquer the world. I had forgotten the previous day and all the nice talk: now it was all about drinking. She had certainly said some nice words to me, and they had sunk in. We could in fact agree on something. I stole 200 crowns and my mother got a crying daughter on the phone at 11 pm. It turned out that I didn’t want to drink after all and the day hadn’t ended up as expected. I was still a nerd, as always, and hadn’t found anyone to hang with that day. I wasn’t popular; I was weird. And that’s why my rebellion grew: because I didn’t want to accept it, at least not in my own head. That was the start of my pitiful and enlightening teenage years.

As previously mentioned and in order to analyse Susanne’s relationships and positions among family and peers, we have to identify associations between the written events in the autobiography. The three excerpts are examples on and give us a glimpse of Susanne’s relationships with family and friends, especially in how she writes about her reactions towards the parents’ divorce, her anger towards her mother’s new partner and how she sees herself among peers. From an actor-network theoretical perspective, we can trace associations between the three excerpts, describe how emotions move and change and discuss their effects.

The rest of Susanne’s autobiography is filled with descriptions of various events and corresponding reflections. She writes about her childhood and youth in relatively chronological order; however, she chooses to convey it all through small stories within the larger story. She writes short anecdotes about individual events from her childhood and adolescence that left their mark and contributed to her identity construction; for example, the first time she was drunk and smoked pot, some of the challenges and problems she experienced with boyfriends, her eating disorder, depression and some incidents that happened while living abroad for a while. She also writes about family members and describes some of their roles and the relations between them. Susanne addresses the themes I wanted her to concentrate on as well as other topics she feels are important.

To trace associations and analyse effects in a researcher-initiated autobiography also means to study how the emergence of power-relations, the dominance of certain cultural norms and the existing oppression in society appear in the text. For instance, when Susanne writes that her hate would have been stronger if it had been a man, she both writes about gender and her emotions towards her mother’s partner who is ‘interfering’ in their lives. This indicates that I will have to trace associations between every event where Susanne writes about a childhood in a family constellation that falls outside the heteronormative conceptions related to family, gender and sexuality, and then discuss and analyse the effects of these associations.

Susanne’s researcher-initiated autobiography is an example on how these autobiographies give researchers access and an opportunity to study and analyse subjects’ lives as ‘a kaleidoscope’. The events Susanne writes about in retrospective, those she is asked to write about, but not at least the ones she herself emphasises, gives me as a researcher access to a textual data source originally produced by the participant. The possibility to trace associations between the events and to describe and analyse the effects of these associations, gives me an opportunity to discuss, for example, Susanne’s emotional and relational processes in light of the cultural and structural conditions that surround her. In doing this work, the researcher-initiated autobiography emerges as a data source and a place from which knowledge is produced.

Conclusion

Researcher-initiated autobiographies work as actants on at least two levels. Firstly, they work as actants in a network consisting of other actants like participants, computers and researchers. The associations between these actants produce different effects, and one that I have discussed in this article is how I, as reader and researcher, experienced some rather unexpected emotional reactions when I received the autobiographies from the participants. Reactions that had an impact on e.g. how I used a proportionately large amount of quotations from the autobiographies in my research work. Secondly, the researcher-initiated autobiographies are actants ‘in themselves’. They give the researcher access to trace associations between all the events in the text, both the themes the participants were asked to write about and the ones that in particular concerned them, and to describe and discuss the effects of these associations.

When we analyse a researcher-initiated autobiography, the analysis is characterised by both the researcher’s academic position and the general standpoint of her everyday life. As participants and researchers, we are all positioned entities who write and interpret according to factors such as gender, sexuality, class and the culture’s dominant discourses, factors that will always be apparent because they represent the positions from which participants write and researchers interpret. This is in line with feminist methodological recommendations (see for example, Haraway, 1999; Harding, 2004; Letherby, 2003), where the recognition of the necessity of acknowledging the researchers position and where the researcher is situated in direct relation to the research. From my point of view, focusing at the researcher as an actant in line with other actants in a network really means to situate the researcher in relation to the research.

With inspiration from actor-network theory, I have discussed a researcher-initiated autobiography’s position as a method of producing data and a methodology as a means for analysing data. I hope the discussion has presented how a researcher-initiated autobiography may offer illuminating insights into how we as human and non-human actants interact in networks, and how effects of these interactions and associations produce knowledge.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Author biographies

Jorid Krane Hanssen is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Nord University, Norway. Her research interests lie in the areas of cultural construction of gender and sexuality, and much of her previous research and publication work has centered on the experiences of daughters and sons growing up in Rainbow Families. In addition, her research interests cover methodological issues and discourses.

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