Keywords

Intimacy seems to be placed on an interesting border, either as being the border or as being the borderless. (Mjöberg, 2009, p. 19)

Care is culturally defined by our understanding of inequalities (that define by whom and to whom care is legitimate or mandatory) and legally defined by the assumptions regarding the normativity of relationships. Care is therefore strictly linked with the labour market and the welfare regime, since historically the division of labour assigned women to the private sphere and men to the public one: “it is in the public realm that the boundaries of the private are drawn” (Tronto, 1987, p. 654), with the private being appointed as the sphere of intimacy. In the effort to legitimize certain relationships to the detriment of others, the normativity between the private and the public is reproduced in what I suggest calling “institutionalized relationships”, that is, family, kinship and partnership: those intimate relationships are socially and legally legitimized when they correspond to the ideal of a heteronormative and mononormative subject.

In this chapter I will present how friendship can release intimacy from the normativity imposed on it by the hierarchy of intimacy (Budgeon, 2006), complicating and blurring the boundaries of intimate relationships and proposing a renewed ethics of care. As a starting point, I want to distinguish between intimacy and intimate relationships. Intimacy is defined as a quality of a relationship involving “bodily, emotional and privileged knowledge of the other” (Jamieson et al., 2006, p. 1), while intimate relationships are those that involve a certain degree of intimacy. Therefore, we should talk about a hierarchy of intimate relationships, more than a hierarchy of intimacy, since intimacy can be read as the common denominator that pools care networks, independently from the form that each intimate relationship may take.

Going back to friendship, Roseneil (2004) employs it to reinterpret the ethics of care, bearing in mind the criticism that feminist scholars pointed out. Specifically, there are two main problems with the ethics of care: the semantic reference to the maternal relationship and the invisibilization of the ethics of justice and social equality, linked with the invisibilization of the oppressive and unequal burden of care carried out by women. In contrast with these ethics of care, Roseneil proposes a renewal of friendship as a means of giving and receiving care to/from equals without self-sacrifice and subordination, preserving the autonomy and independence of each individual involved.

In the socio-economic context of Italy, choices outside heteronormativity (Warner, 1991), mononormativity (Pieper & Bauer, 2005) and monomaternalism (Park, 2013) are not granted by laws, since Italy is a Southern European country clustered in the Mediterranean welfare regime, where care is supposed to be granted by the family, and LGBTQFootnote 1 people are not legitimized in their desire to parent, to live outside the couple and to have more than one relationship at a time. Therefore, LGBTQ partners, mothers and friends develop relationships of deep care and material support outside the boxes of traditional institutionalized relationships: the boundaries between love, friendship and family are blurred. The purpose of this chapter is to show how collected narratives are stories of resistance in which “collective action, affective bonds, and convivial social relations are favoured over institutional social arrangements” (Shepard, 2015, p. 2).

The first part of the chapter focuses on those contributions that highlight the subversive and transformative power of friendship, in terms of questioning relational normativity, blurring the boundaries of intimate relationships and redefining care. I review some of the reflections on friendship coming from sociology as well as activism, in order to show how friendship, particularly for LGBTQ people, acquires the transformative potential of questioning the traditional hierarchy of intimate relationships. In the second part, I describe the Italian socio-economic context, based on the assumption that friendship, just like any other forms of relationship, must be analysed within its context (Adams & Allan, 1989). Lastly, I take into account the language used to make friendship intelligible in the current neoliberal economic system that makes use of the romantic imaginary as a way to silence economic hardship. On the contrary, interviews prove that other forms of relationship make it possible for people to stay afloat. I describe these networks as “complicit”, since they entail a subtle emotional understanding, in carrying forward a different worldview.

The Hierarchy of Intimate Relationships and the Subversive Power of Friendship

I am sick to death of bonding through kinship and ‘the family,’ and I long for models of solidarity and human unity and difference rooted in friendship, work, partially shared purposes, intractable collective pain, inescapable mortality, and persistent hope. (Haraway, 1997, p. 265)

Friendship has long become a legitimate topic of sociological analysis (Adams & Allan, 1989; Eve, 2002; Pahl, 2000; Roseneil & Budgeon, 2004). Nonetheless, it remains a concept difficult to grasp, and it is stuck within the hierarchy of intimate relationships that hides the value of friendship, focusing primarily on kinship and the reproductive couple. However, by decentralizing romantic relationships, we can reveal a whole new world made up of intimate relationships that are nuanced in terms of definition and recognition, yet sturdy in terms of emotional and material support provided. From a sociological perspective, Marilyn Friedman (1993) already foresaw friendship as a source of “self-esteem [and] cultural survival of people who deviate from social norms and who suffer hostility and ostracism from others for their deviance” (p. 219); friendship is revolutionary in its transformative power to refuse oppressive social conventions (Vernon, 2010); as Benjamin Shepard (2015) puts it, “friendship has shown the potential to destabilize (and restructure) unequal societies” (p. 11).

In order to challenge the hierarchy of intimate relationships and to bring friendship to the centre, we need to deconstruct the paradigms of heteronomativity, mononormativity and monomaternalism that structure that hierarchy.

Heteronormativity (Warner, 1991) is defined as the supposed universality of a relational model based on a couple formed by a cohabiting man and woman, whose union is registered by the state, aimed at reproduction and built on romantic love.Footnote 2 Duggan (2003) coined the term “homonormativity” to refer to same-sex couples that aspire at the same normative system, depoliticizing their sexual orientation in favour of assimilation.

Mononormativity (Pieper & Bauer, 2005) is the norm on which romantic love is based and that requires people to have only one sexual-affective relationship at a time. This relationship is meant to have primacy over any other relationship, based on the assumption that it is our partner’s duty to take care of all our anxieties, aspirations and desires, thus causing a form of dependency that can lead to isolation:

To invest in one single relationship, to rely on a single person, to build intimacy and everyday routine with a single person is something that puts us at great risk, both on an emotional and material level. (Acquistapace, 2015, p. 15)

The third concept to challenge is monomaternalism (Park, 2013), defined as an ideology in which biological dictates blend with the socially normative dichotomy of the good/bad mother:

[Monomaternalism] resides at the intersection of patriarchy (with its insistence that women bear responsibility for biological and social reproduction), heteronormativity (with its insistence that a woman must pair with a man, rather than other women, in order to raise children successfully), capitalism (in its conception of children as private property), and Eurocentrism (in its erasure of polymaternalism in other cultures and historical periods). (Park, 2013, p. 7)

Drawing on the Italian saying “di mamma ce n’è una sola” [mother, we only get one], I read “monomaternalism” as the regime inscribed in heteronormativity that recognizes just one mother and just one way of being an appropriate mother, that is, a heterosexual, coupled and monogamous woman. Following Brigitte Vassallo (2018), monogamy should not be read merely as a practice: it’s a way of thinking, based on exclusivity and exclusion, aimed at organizing relational and private life. Shaped by monogamous thought (Vassallo, 2018), heteronormativity, mononormativity and monomaternalism reinforce each other, leading to a hierarchy of intimate relationships. It is actually a well-defined strategy that aims at strengthening not just a moral order but also an economic one (Alabao, 2018; Chiappini Castilhos, 2016; Esteban, 2015; Herrera, 2015). To explain the hierarchy of intimate relationships in the economic and patriarchal organization of relationships, I take the cue from Eleanor Wilkinson (2012), who argued for the concept of compulsory coupledom, drawing from the famous compulsory heterosexuality described by Adrienne Rich (1980). In the same line, Leo Acquistapace (2011, 2015) describes the compulsory couple as normative (two people who satisfy each other’s needs), compulsory (the appropriate adult lifestyle taught since childhood), teleological (aimed at the social and economic reproduction of the nuclear family) and privileged (it gives access to privileges only to those who conform to this model).

Today how are intimacy, friendship and care experienced? Roseneil (2004) highlights the significant findings of her project CAVAFootnote 3 (care, values and the future of welfare) about friendships and non-conventional partnerships:

  1. (a)

    Embeddedness in complex networks of intimacy and care: interviewees are far from being the isolated individuals of recent theorizing of individualization.

  2. (b)

    Prioritizing friendship, as opposed to biological kin, particularly for the provision of care, emotional security and support in daily life.

  3. (c)

    Decentring sexual/love relationships, so that sexual relationships are not deemed the sole source of support, care and intimacy.

  4. (d)

    The centrality of friends and practices of self-care in the recovering from painful relational breakdowns.

Going along with this interpretation, Shelley Budgeon (2006) summarizes the importance of friendship in three points: it offers stable reference points for everyday life; it sustains non-conventional identities through the activity of care; and it gives a sense of belonging.

In the cases of ethical non-monogamy (Gusmano, 2018a, b, 2019), lesbian or bisexual motherhood (Gusmano, 2021; Gusmano & Motterle, 2019, 2020; Moreira, 2018; Santos, 2018) or cohabitation with friends as a life choice (Gusmano, 2018c), the deviant behaviour—following Friedman’s concept—is represented precisely by the choice of either living outside mononormativity or monomaternalism or not cohabiting as a couple: it’s a choice that doesn’t answer to the compulsory steps to becoming an adult (Arnett, 2015; Dalessandro, 2019). Actually, interviews show how deserting these compulsory steps isn’t a strategy to avoid adult life responsibilities like the eternal child Peter Pan, but it represents a collective strategy to create alternatives of well-being and happiness beyond the monogamous, heteronormative, family-centred system.

Concerning the research design, this chapter stems from the project Intimate – Citizenship, Care and Choice: The Micropolitics of Intimacy in Southern Europe.Footnote 4 The research aimed at rethinking citizenship, care and choice through the findings of a comparative and qualitative study designed to explore LGBT experiences of partnering (lesbian coupledom and polyamory), parenting (mothers and fathers through assisted reproduction) and friendship (transgender networks of care and living with friends in adult life) in three Southern European countries: Italy, Portugal and Spain. Overall, we carried out around 60 interviews with experts (activists, public employees, lawyers, academics) and 90 interviews with LGBTQ people concerning their biography. For this chapter, I will take into consideration the studies conducted in Italy on polyamory, lesbian/bisexual motherhood and cohabiting with friends in adult life (Table 9.1).

Table 9.1 Interviewees’ data. For the sake of anonymity, pseudonyms and age ranges were used
Full size table

The people interviewed belonged to the spectrum of non-heterosexuality and were between the ages of 25 and 48, Italian and living in Rome at the time of the interview (2015–2018), White and able-bodied. In sociological terms, all of them had low economic capital and high cultural and social capital, meaning that all of them were precarious workers with a medium/high level of education and well-integrated in their sociocultural context, as we will see in the next section.

Precarity and Friendship in Italy

Networks of friends, which often include ex-lovers, form the context within which lesbians and gay men lead their personal lives, offering emotional continuity, companionship, pleasure and practical assistance. (Roseneil & Budgeon, 2004, pp. 137–138)

Friendship does not develop in a vacuum, but it is embedded in a specific historical, geographical and social frame (Adams & Allan, 1989). In the case of Southern Europe, friendship is shaped by the Mediterranean regime (Ferrera, 2008), a mixed welfare model that, until the economic crisis, was based on public healthcare and on retirement granted by employment. Despite retrenchment, this welfare persists due to its strong familism (Pavolini & Raitano, 2015): the limited development of policies regarding social assistance, housing and anti-poverty is supposed to be balanced by the extended family, encouraging a passage from a male breadwinner family model to a family/kinship solidarity model where the breadwinner is responsible not only for the nuclear family but also for other dependent family members (Naldini, 2003). The interesting aspect of this model is the breach toward a dimension of care which reaches beyond the narrow nuclear family, since the family/kinship solidarity model advances that responsibilities are to be shared within the extended family. Although I do not want to romanticize this model—based on gender inequality and women’s unpaid care work in the private space (Pateman, 1988)—I would like to recognize its legacy: learnt from childhood, it concerns the sharing of a large part of family life with relatives well beyond the narrow nuclear family, not only in times of need but also and above all in times of conviviality. In this regard, Tatiana Motterle (2016) refers to non-heterosexual Sunday lunches portrayed by the filmmaker Ferzan Özpetek, describing them as “a perfect representation of the idea of family of choice, where reciprocal care is central, and love and friendship easily blend”.

The economic harshness described by interviewees refers to the context of Italy, characterized by the economic crisis, education and culture cuts, gentrification and precarity as a life condition. These aspects are exacerbated by living as a student in a capital such as Rome:

Several social issues are actually real: it’s hard to find a job [and] the period of education has been extended (…) in a metropolis where the rent reaches up to 5–600 euros including expenses (. …) Actually, lifetimes that are imposed by capitalism are tough: it means that people have even two, three jobs in order to survive. (Veronica)

As expressed by Veronica, the Italian labour market scenario is composed by a progressive proliferation of non-standard contracts that implies a shortcoming in citizenship and welfare rights, due to the lower or nearly non-existent possibility of access to social rights associated with these types of contracts (pension rights, paid leave for sickness, maternity, unemployment, etc.) (Murgia & Selmi, 2011). Faced with this situation of severe precariousness and lack of access to welfare, networks of friends weave solidarity bonds promoting an alternative economic system based on recognition, reciprocity and redistribution (Esteban, 2011), as happened to Federica, a lesbian single mother who was appointed by one of her friends as heiress in order to grant economic stability both to her and her son: “An extended family exists, it really exists [emphasis added]. You have to build it: it doesn’t come by itself. It is not that relationships come this way, but I can count on relationships that are very solid, very steadfast” (Federica).

This is also the homophobic context from which LGB people choose to move away to freely claim their sexuality (Pieri, 2011). After years of homophobic bullying, Dario left his hometown in the south to move in a big city in the north to attend university, ending up as a celebrated drag queen. After several years of success, drugs and gambling, he moved to Rome where he discovered his dimension, that is, transfeminist activism:

It was the farthest city that I could reach to attend university (. …) From my shitty life in my hometown in the south I went up to the north (. …) That context helped to free me, to be aware about my homosexuality and to freely enjoy it (. …) And then I moved to Rome [,] I started to discover transfeminist politics that is what I’m currently doing, and (…) now I can say that this is the payback, compared to the nasty business of the past. (Dario)

Feminism is a recurring topic in the narratives of interviewees who choose to put friendship before institutionalized relationships, making this bond a picklock to change the world (Cuesta Cremades & Fuster Peiró, 2010) in order to “live other intensities beyond falling in love, i.e. deep friendships, fascinations or political activism” (Alabao, 2018, p. 177). I’m referring also to those choices that make friendship central as a payback for disappointing kinship or empty couple relations (Esteban, 2011):

Well, I don’t think I’ll be in another relationship for a while. But I should have thought about it already, right after the end of the first one. I feel more satisfied by my friends (. …) It’s probably the only relationship we should really care about. (Edoardo)

I saw my parents and I didn’t like the kind of couple they represented, thus I developed other desires (…): I grew up as a person thanks to my friends… friendships that for me were also love bonds. (Emma)

Emma, who often says through the interview how friends have been a safe harbour during her difficult times, underlines how living with friends is not just a way to survive in neoliberalism but also a collective and ethic choice of sharing daily life through reciprocal support, making it a “prospect of struggle, re-appropriation, social transformation and not just a simple way to ‘survive’ job insecurity” (Acquistapace, 2015, p. 146).

My generation’s salvation, to say it in a very trenchant way, is networking. It becomes also a salvation, a political choice. But I don’t choose it only because it’s the only option instead of starving and dying in this society that exploits and oppresses you, but also because it actually represents how I feel. (Emma)

I intentionally use the word “choice” to give voice to friendship and its transformative power especially for people who do not align with conventional models. Obviously, I question the term because the neoliberal motto “yes, you can” only serves to make economic links invisible and pretends that the materiality of life depends only on us and our commitment, without taking into consideration class issues (Taylor, 2009). We are not all starting from the same conditions, and we do not all have the same tools, but what we choose is to share them: “We’re talking about 17, almost 20 years of cohabitation that are not linked to sentimental relationships but that are born from job insecurity, basically, but also from shared life choices” (Alfredo).

Mari Luz Esteban (2011) talks about communities of reciprocal support, meaning those stable groups of people that choose solidarity in material, political and symbolic everyday life. This well-known experience is lived by lesbian and bisexual mothers who find support in their networks of non-heterosexual parents:

Luca and Marcos, who are this couple of fathers, they gave us a lot of advice [: ] we have them as a reference point. Apart from that, they gave us things that [their daughter] didn’t use anymore (. …) They also gave us the pillow for breastfeeding that we then passed to Alfonso. (Eliana)

In this regard, non-normative communities may represent a safe harbour from which to challenge heteronormativity, mononormativity and monomaternalism: Veronica and Alfredo make reference to the squats where they experienced cohabitation among people gathered for the same political struggle; Bruno refers to the bear community he started to attend through cruising during adolescence; for Rudy, the BDSM community was the gate to self-discovery as a transman; Morgana and Nadia highlight the importance of the polyamory community in finding a bisexual space that does not properly exist in Italy; Nicoletta and Dario refer to transfeminist activism and Emma to feminism, as the frameworks that gave names to how they were already living their lives; all interviewed mothers named Rainbow Families as a point of reference in their path toward maternity: “This strengthens you so much because there are people who did it before you, who had such courage” (Rebecca).

It is not simply about feathering one’s own nest in order to survive, but it is about building other possible landscapes and forms of ethical sharing that could really constitute alternatives to institutionalized relationships and economic harshness. In such a light, the next section will be devoted to this renewed ethics of care.

Care as an Act of Resistance

Through activism and friendship, we strove to create such a new ethics of living. (Shepard, 2015, p. 13)

To question the hierarchy of intimate relationships also means to re-signify the concept of care and for whom care is legitimate or mandatory and also to blur the boundaries between caregivers and care receivers. Feminist ethics of care become a key concept in this redefinition within the neoliberal patriarchal system. A collection of texts from Latin America edited by Norma Mogrovejo (2016) suggests “counter-love” as a definition of these kinds of relationships, thus including all the ways of loving which question romantic love as an expression of capitalism. To this end, Marian Pessah (2016) suggests the term “amorous anarchy” whose central concept is care: “to talk about amorousness in relationships, beyond our affective sexual partner, is a wider term, more communal (. …) We want to disarm and break the system without breaking ourselves” (pp. 59–60).

From interviews, care stands out as a central theme that goes beyond all set parameters, therefore reaching partners’ partner or feeling empathy for the end of a partner’s relationship:

This is a way to take care of the person I interact with: to respect her relationships. It’s a way to… scatter the sense of property, possess, jealousy and territoriality. (Nicoletta)

My boyfriend Alberto was very sad when Marta and I broke up (. …) It was amazing, albeit sad, to go back home… torn by tears, desperate because I broke up, and to find him comforting me. (Morgana)

Moreover, the literature suggests that LGBT people tend to remain friends after a break-up (Formby, 2017; Pahl & Spencer, 2004; Weston, 1991): they transform the shape of their relationship keeping a high level of intimacy. Therefore, the relationship changes, while intimacy persists as a central feature of the bond, as expressed by Chiara when talking about arrangements for the children with her ex-wife:

We were already separated when we decided the school for the children. We go together to get their final grades—there is this sense of doing together things that concern children [:] like two parents who care for them and therefore they support each other, in the sense that we have a common line on their education (. …) I see certain separated couples, damn it! Children are used just like a picklock to quarrel. (Chiara)

Veronica also mentions the widespread care in the squat she lives in, care that is expressed through material support both in daily life and in extraordinary situations (Bidart, 1991):

In our squat there is a network of care [:] in our daily lives (…) we tend to eat together and to share a lot, i.e. our finances, and there is also psychological care when inevitably each one of us has to face a difficult situation (. …) So to say, recently one of us had to undergo surgery and couldn’t share that with her family, nonetheless she has been fully supported by a network of care. (Veronica)

Many interviewed people rely more on their friends than on their families, especially when their life goes against the normativity experienced within the family of origin. For example, all interviewed mothers had to go abroad to access medically assisted reproduction due to the heteronormative law regulating assisted reproductive techniques in Italy, and many of them could count on networks of friends living in the host country during pregnancy. Besides the wide network of friends, Claudia could count on Adele, a close friend who decided to support her during her motherhood as a single mother:

Adele (…) was willing to help me with my motherhood, and was willing to stand by me to take care of my daughters, and she said, “It’s not like we have to explain how… we’re friends, though for me it is good to stand by you: our way of conceiving this motherhood does not need to be explained to anyone; only we know its meaning and depth” (. …) For me it was just the fundamental element, the pivot that also allowed me to go back and forth from Italy to Spain, also because she lived there. So it was not only a practical help, but also a moral and emotional support in this (…) desire that grew more and more. (Claudia)

All this overflowing care is looking for a language in order to be defined, clashing with the lack of acknowledgement and intelligibility, as expressed by Giorgia, a poly activist interviewed in the study on polyamory:

Basically, you enter a different paradigm when you start to live relationships in this way. Therefore, you start to revalue all the dimensions of intimacy, i.e. friends, comrades, lovers. All the words take on a different meaning: they are constantly redefined. (Giorgia)

This is why we often resort to the language of family, the only one recognized in our heteronormative and mononormative society. Therefore, there are examples of people defining their friends as “brother” or “sister”, although ironically very few interviewees cite their brothers or sisters as belonging to their network of care. In the following quote, Edoardo recalls with nostalgia the time he used to live with his best friend, calling him “brother”: “I basically consider Federico as my brother. [The positive aspect of living together has been], to put it simply, to have my brother always stuck to my ass” (Edoardo).

Accordingly, Alfredo refers to “sisterhood” when talking about the intensity of his relationship with his two housemates, with whom he also shares the difficulties of the artistic path.

This is how sisterhood was born between us, with this very strong and very intense relationship (. …) So we started living together, the three of us, in a very queer way, and it was beautiful because then we started making artistic projects together. (Alfredo)

Actually, the point is not to ascribe greater value to the relationships among siblings. Those terms are used in order to be understood by the outside world, since friendship is not considered as valid as institutionalized relationships. Therefore, language is re-appropriated to convey the symbolic power of relationships, as happens to children of lesbian and bisexual mothers who are used to calling their mothers’ friends aunts and uncles. In the same way, Dario employs the term “family” to define his strong bond with Erika, his lesbian feminist flatmate, when he explains how safeguarded this relationship makes him feel.

I’m discovering another kind of family, outside of the classical one [:] this is a wonderful situation, it makes me feel free, whereas I didn’t feel free, before, in my family. [Erika] knows that, if the cops come, they come for a political problem she can understand: they come for repression, (…) she’ll probably even take care of organizing the protest if I get arrested (. …) If they arrested me, my mum might stop speaking to me, because she doesn’t understand what I’m doing. (Dario)

Being supported in the struggle against repression contributes to redefine kinship not by blood links but by an ethic of how to live in this unequal society.

Others try to make it their own, hijacking the original term “family” in order to keep its meaning of belonging, highlighting the distance from the traditional family: Nadia talks about polyfamily, while Alfredo refers to his “sfamily”.Footnote 5

Polyfamily is a group of people linked by different relationships (…): there are lovers, friends, ex-lovers, people who make love and people who stopped making love (. …) When you talk about friends, they are considered the last important people of your life: that’s why I talk about family (. …) It is a form of mutual assistance: not just emotional, but material and practical, as well. (Nadia)

And that’s the way this amazing trio was born, we call it the “sfamily” [:] I am proud of it. Because words matter (. …) Sfamily because then, before all these annoying discourses about the family even began, I put an “s” at the beginning, and I intend to enjoy this feeling of belonging: (…) we don’t need to say much because we are “accomplices”. (Alfredo)

Using a language that evokes mutual respect and common activism, Alfredo defines his accomplices in queer terms, as does Nicoletta when recalling her first experiences of ethical non-monogamies:

I was lucky enough to meet people that felt what I was feeling (…): there was a deeper acknowledgement of the outcomes of this kind of practice (. …) It’s a political struggle that defines how you live in the world and how you feel things. (Nicoletta)

As a matter of fact, the Merriam-Webster English dictionary defines “accomplice” as “one associated with another especially in wrongdoing”. Etymologically, it comes from Latin, meaning at the same time “involved” and “folded together”, and refers to a person taking part with others in non-normative actions, which is exactly what the people I interviewed mean when they talk about their non-conventional lives. I might suggest that instead of talking about love, family, friendship, and so on, relationships could be divided into two kinds: the ones where self-esteem is hurt, where each decision only gets criticism and bashing in order to generate dependence and isolation, and those which give support through complicity, even within the chaos of precarious lives, thanks to a common desire for recognition, reciprocity and redistribution.

With [my ex-wife], before we broke up, we had begun to attend groups of families, like communes, who did co-housing (. …) What comes back is always the fact of being together, of planning, even with my friends, always these beautiful networks of solidarity: I can say that… I am alone, but if something happens to me, I pick up the phone and they arrive, right? This is what I want in my life. (Chiara)

This may be why the network metaphor is so effective: it makes it clear that friendships cannot be measured on a two-person scale and consist instead of a more complex stratification of complicit relationships.

What suits me the most is precisely to create and experience networks, because it’s the friendship networks that saved me [:] even more than a rescuing network, a network of positive existence, in which you’re given back the beauty of the relationship. (Emma)

We are not meant to stay alone so… we need to be able to count on each other, to create a network in order to support each other. It’s essential (. …) Otherwise, you get nasty. (Edoardo)

It does not matter if the focus is partnering, parenting or friendship: narratives testify how networks of care challenge the rigid boundaries of what is socially expected from intimate relationships, showing a multidimensionality of intimacy rooted in emotional and psychological assistance, companionship, pleasure, economic and material support, beauty and imagination. Of course these networks are a fundamental but not sufficient resource that can’t imply a total refusal of the traditional forms of welfare: there are dimensions of need that cannot be satisfied by networks of care, since those are based on elective communities, and are thus exclusionary in principle (Lo Iacono, 2014). But this is certainly a starting point to decentre kinship and to reveal that other bonds are possible.

Concluding Thoughts

Recognition, reciprocity, redistribution. Three ‘R’s that can inspire a theory. (Esteban, 2011, p. 183)

In the Southern European context, the centrality of the couple and the family hierarchically organizes all relationships: welfare policies of the Mediterranean regime are based on the family—proving to be totally insensitive to the changes in intimate and social life. By questioning the couple as the core of the relational system, friendships and networks of care become central in order to live a serene and non-isolated daily life within a neoliberal economic context. At the same time, not being legally recognized in these networks of care entails an exacerbation of class material conditions that is faced precisely through the establishment of networks of care that prevent institutional homophobia and homophobic violence. Questioning institutionalized relationships actually implies the redefinition of the hierarchy of intimate relationships beyond our personal way of experiencing partnering, parenting or friendship: on one hand, questioning the relational hierarchies allows us to give the same material and emotional weight to blood relatives, friends, lovers, housemates and comrades. On the other hand, it leads to a wider reflection on kinship, on what we identify as family and on the importance of friendships in our life.

Redefining care means to seriously take into consideration the significance of the networks of psychological, emotional and material support, not only because we care but also because it is a way to share and redistribute goods among more than two people in a context of precarious conditions of work, housing and health. In a society in which the mandatory paths to adulthood are a stable job, the construction of a heteronormative and monogamous family and reproduction according to the dictates of monomaternalism, the conscious choice to base one’s own life on friendship and sharing in a network of scarce economic and material resources represents a challenge. “Complicity” thus becomes a way of encouraging this enterprise of carrying forward a new idea of the ethics of care, dismantling the taken-for-granted assumption of heteronormativity, mononormativity and monomaternalism inscribed in becoming adult.