Co-Sleeping with Partners and Pets as a Family Practice of Intimacy: Israeli Couples’ Narratives of Creating Kinship

Dana Zarhin, Alexandra Karanevsky-Samnidze, Moriah Aharon

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Despite advances in the sociology of sleep, we know relatively little about the experience of co-sleeping in general and about co-sleeping with pets in particular. This study draws on semi-structured interviews with Israeli couples who raise either a dog or a cat to show that co-sleeping with partners and pets is a family practice of intimacy, which both implicates and constitutes time and space, emotions, as well as the body and embodiment of the interacting parties. Co-sleeping allows couples to constitute their pets as ‘kin’ and to blur the boundaries between humans and animals in two distinct ways: (1) by emphasising the personhood of pets and treating them as children or substitute-partners, and (2) by highlighting the animality of humans. This study enhances sociological understanding of the associations between family practices and time and space and sheds light on how family practices create post-human sensory worlds of kinship.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1053-1069
Number of pages17
JournalSociology
Volume56
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2022.

Keywords

  • body and embodiment
  • co-sleeping
  • companion animals
  • couples
  • family practices
  • human–animal relations
  • kinship
  • pets
  • time and space

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Sociology and Political Science

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