Sasha Roseneil

Background: Cold water swimming is growing in popularity, especially among women. We have previously reported that women felt that cold water swimming helps with their menstrual and menopause symptoms. But little is known about the habits of women who cold water swim. Objectives: To determine the habits of women who cold water swim. Design: This was a mixed-methods study. Methods: An online survey asked women who cold water swim about their experience of swimming and how this affected their menstrual and menopause symptoms. The survey was advertised for 2 months on social media, with a focus on advertising in cold water swimming Facebook groups. In this article, only the questions on the women’s swimming habits were analyzed. Results: The analysis of 1114 women, mainly from the United Kingdom, revealed that most had been swimming for 1–5 years (79.5%). Most swim in the sea (64.4%), and only 15.5% swim alone. The majority (89.0%) swim all year around, swimming for mainly 30–60 min in the summer and 5–15 min in the winter. The women mostly swim wearing swimming costumes (skins) throughout the year. The majority of the free-text responses showed women found mental and physical benefits from cold water swimming. Conclusion: It was not surprising to learn that women swim for longer in the summer than the winter, but hearing how they feel cold water swimming helps their physical and mental health is important. With the limitations on access and safety of many wild swimming sites in the United Kingdom, it is time to ensure that cold water swimming is safer and more supported.

This article offers a discussion of the relationship between psychoanalysis and queer theory through the exploration of the author’s personal experience of withdrawing from contributing to the book Clinical Encounters in Sexuality. Tracing this back through the author’s biographical history of confronting institutionalized mainstream British psychoanalysis, it provides an exploration of the psychosocial dynamics of the exclusion of unacceptable sexual identities, politics, and theoretical perspectives. In so doing, it points toward the challenges posed by a more sociologically informed orientation to psychoanalysis, and to the potentialities of group analysis as a mode of psychoanalytic practice.

This article explores how people who live apart from their partners in Britain describe and understand ‘family’. It investigates whether, and how far, non-cohabiting partners, friends, ‘blood’ and legal ties are seen as ‘family’, and how practices of care and support, and feelings of closeness are related to these constructions. It suggests that people in LAT relationships creatively draw and re-draw the boundaries of family belonging in ways that involve emotionally subjective understandings of family life, and that also refer to normative constructions of what ‘family’ ought to be, as well as to practical recognitions of lived family ‘realities’. This often involves handling uncertainties about what constitutes ‘family’.

This chapter outlines the main characteristics of the Bulgarian intimate citizenship regime and the landscape of social movement activism around issues of intimate citizenship during the communist and post-communist eras. The development of positive legislation in Bulgaria to protect lesbian, gay and bisexual people from discrimination and violence has been directly related to EU accession. The recognition of same-sex relationships has been one of the main goals of lesbian and gay activism in Bulgaria in recent years. The full decriminalisation of same-sex sexuality and the creation of a comprehensive anti-discrimination framework which includes sexual orientation discrimination constitute important shifts in the landscape of heteronormativity in Bulgaria. The chapter suggests that the institutionalisation and regulation of intimacy in Bulgaria has been both implicitly and explicitly heteronormative, radically privileging the conjugal, procreative heterosexual couples, and variously, actively oppressing, excluding, and marginalising those who have acted on, and sought to live out, their same-sex desires and attachments.

The concept of relationality has recently found widespread favour in British sociology, particularly in the emergent sub-field of the sociology of personal life, which is characterized by its attachment to the concept. However, this ‘relational turn’ is under-theorized and pays little attention to the substantial history of relational thinking across the human sciences. This article argues that the notion of relationality in the sociology of personal life might be strengthened by an exploration of the conceptualization of the relational person and relational processes offered by three bodies of literature: the process-oriented thinking of American pragmatism, specifically of Mead and Emirbayer; the figurational sociology of Elias; and psychoanalysis, particularly the object relations tradition, contemporary relational psychoanalysis, and Ettinger’s notion of transubjectivity. The article attends particularly to the processes involved in the individuality, agentic reflexivity and affective dimensions of the relational person.

This article discusses the challenges that continue to exist in the struggle for full and equal citizenship in Norway, focusing particularly on the multidimensional citizenship that has been central to the overarching project of women's movements. It reports on comparative research on the social, economic, multicultural, and intimate dimensions of citizenship which offers grounds to regard Norway as an example of good practice and supportive policies in relation to gendered citizenship, and at the same time highlights that fully equal and just citizenship remains to be achieved, particularly for minoritized women.

This paper contributes to the ongoing refinement of citizenship as a feminist concept through the development of understandings of the relationship between economic and intimate citizenship in contemporary Europe. It draws on two cross-national research projects that each focus on a group of people who might be thought to be affected by particular processes of individualization: the economic “activation” of large numbers of women in increasingly deregulated labour markets, and the progressive detraditionalization of intimate life. The paper examines patterns of intimate life and citizenship that accompany employment in the elder care sector, and patterns of economic life and citizenship that accompany the experience of living outside the conventional family. It argues that there are significant and hitherto unrecognized tensions between “flexible” jobs and the ability of individuals to exercise agency as intimate citizens. It suggests that it is difficult to flourish as an intimate citizen without enjoying a degree of economic autonomy, and that economic autonomy is elusive for women working in the most deregulated sectors of the labour market. It also points to the important role that social policies play in mediating the relationship between intimate and economic citizenship.

Drawing on a European cross-national biographical-narrative study of intimate life, this article discusses the complexity of experiences of ‘togetherness’ and ‘apartness’ amongst people in living apart relationships. We explore the five main ways in which interviewees spoke about and understood their current living apart relationships (as: chosen; temporary; transitional; undecided; and unrecognisable), which we argue shows the need for a broader conceptualisation of this form of intimate relationship than is suggested by the established notion of ‘living apart together’. The article points to interviewees’ varying experiences of receiving or being denied recognition and acceptance by others as belonging to a couple, as well as to their differing degrees of desire for, or rebellion against, expectations that living apart relationships should ‘progress’ towards cohabitation.