NARRATIVES OF SELF AND RELATEDNESS IN ECO-COMMUNES: Resistance against normalized individualization and the nuclear family Open Access

This paper focuses on eco-communes as sites of resistance and political activism. Based on a post-structuralist narrative analysis of interview materials, this paper elaborates on the ways in which life in a commune is narrated and represented as an identity project with a mission to bring about social change. The environmentalists studied make sense of their choice to live in an eco-commune as something that was triggered and facilitated by important crossroads and fateful moments that they had encountered in their past life. They also work on their identity as eco-communards by discursively problematizing their personal relation to themselves (self) and to others (spouse and family), as well as by constructing new forms of subjectivity, intimacy, and relatedness through communal life. Life in the eco-commune thus represents a form of resistance and political struggle that Michel Foucault has referred to as politics of self; it represents not only direct opposition against the social order of contemporary Western consumer society but also more subtle resistance against the normalized forms of subjectivity that it entails.

Eco-communes can be seen as social and political ‘experiments’, undertaken by a group of people who have decided to arrange their lives in many respects, unconventional ways to bring about social and personal change. In such communal groups, resources, eating, child rearing, social life, living space, political ideology, decision-making and a world-view are usually shared to varying degrees by the group members (Bunker et al. 1999). Usually they also share a more or less explicit political agenda for sustainable development, based on opposing the ‘power of money’ and the prevalent neo-liberal market values for example (Moisander and Pesonen 2002).

A common feature of these diverse ecologically oriented or environmentalist groups is a collective commitment to a modest way of living. Through voluntary simplicity, eco-communards engage in ‘the cultivation of the self’ (Foucault 1985) so as to liberate themselves from the materialistic values and corruptive luxuries of the Western consumer society. By strategically withdrawing themselves from the unnecessary items and conveniences of modern urban life, they strive for more ‘natural’ and sustainable ways of living and being. In doing so, eco-communards use their needs as political instruments; deconstructing needs that consumer society brings about and offers as natural or normal, and cultivating needs that are more in line with their environmentalist objectives. In this sense, people who have voluntarily decided to live in eco-communes are living under a self-imposed regimen of constraints, prohibitions, and prescriptions to bring about political and social change.

Everyday life in an eco-commune, therefore, represents an interesting case of subversive agency in which individual struggle is linked with more collective forms of action (McNay 1992). In this paper, we focus on this struggle and study the ways in which people who have organized their everyday lives around ecologically oriented communal living talk about practices of resistance in their self-narratives.

Drawing from the Foucauldian ideas of political struggle as ‘politics of self’ and moral agency as a mode of self-formation (Foucault 1983, 1985, 1988), Judith Butler's (1990) ideas of resistance as ‘subversive repetition’ as well as from contemporary sociology of family and new kinship studies (Weston 1997; Jamieson 1998; Carsten 2000), we study eco-communes as sites of personal transition and resistance against the normalized forms of subjectivity as well as the forms of intimate relatedness that they entail.

Based on a post-structuralist narrative analysis of interview materials (Davies and Harré 1990; Rappaport 2000; Davies 2003b), we study the ways in which people who live in eco-communes reflect upon and make sense of their current choice of lifestyle and identity as eco-communards. Our analysis suggests that being an eco-communard is an identity project with a political mission to bring about social change, and that in this particular case the eco-communards studied work on this identity project by discursively problematizing their personal relation to themselves (self) and to others (spouse and family), as well as by constructing new forms of intimate relatedness (Carsten 2000) through communal life.

Our study contributes primarily to the sociological literature on political resistance and environmentalism by theoretically elaborating and empirically illustrating the practices and processes through which people may seek to become more actively involved in the environmental movement and to engage in resistance in their everyday life. While much of the existing research has focused on the ideological content and political agenda of environmentalist struggle (Barry 1996; Dobson 2003), and the direct forms of opposition and political activism it entails (Berglund 1998), we focus on the micro practices of power and resistance through which individual members of the environmental movement pursue their political agenda. Overall, we argue that for eco-communards, life in an eco-commune may constitute a site of resistance not only against the unsustainable social order of contemporary consumer society but also against the forms of normalized subjectivity, gender identity, and intimate relatedness that it brings about and offers.

We also aim to advance the discussion on ‘crossroads’, or on the role of transitions and turning points in the reflexive production of self in contemporary society (Giddens 1991; Bagnoli forthcoming; Bagnoli and Ketokivi 2009), by illustrating how important crossroads in people's life may serve to trigger and facilitate processes of self-transformation and political resistance. Drawing from Judith Butler's (1990, 1997) work on identity and resistance, we argue that the crossroads that people encounter in the course of their life trajectories may represent particular types of ‘failures’ in the adequate performance of the identities and lifestyles that the prevalent cultural systems of representation, e.g., consumer culture and the heterosexual matrix (Butler 1990), sanction as ‘normal’ and ‘desirable’. And as such, we argue, these crossroads may serve as instigators of practices and processes of subversive repetition. Moreover, our study illustrates the relational and socially embedded nature of the processes through which self is reflexively made as well as how agency in these processes can be the combined result of individual choices, social influences, and undeniable fateful events in people's lives.

In contemporary Western consumer society, where citizens have been normalized and subjectivated as consumers, whose role and responsibility is to manage their lives and to keep the markets functioning by choosing and purchasing goods and services, environmentalist struggle would seem to entail a combat with the different forms of discursive power that constitute individuals as subjects (Sklair 1998; Darier 1999; Moisander and Pesonen 2002). Also more generally, political struggle and subversive agency would seem to call for resistance against the government of individualization at the level of the individual, as Michel Foucault (1983) has argued. This transformation requires that people refuse what they are and try to invent, not discover, who they are by creating, developing, and promoting new forms of subjectivity that can be sources of effective resistance to disciplinary power (ibid.). Resistance thus involves an active politics of self.

Judith Butler (1990, 1997) has argued that the possibility of such subversion and resistance may appear in the course of subjectivation, i.e., in the becoming of a subject and the process of subjection. She thus locates agency and the potential for social change in the discursively variable constitution of subjectivity, pointing out that the discursively constituted subject is never fully constituted in subjection. Instead of being produced in its totality at an instant, the subject is constantly in the process of being produced and repeatedly produced. And it is ‘within the practices of repetitive signifying’ that a subversion becomes possible (Butler 1990: 185). She proposes that

Moreover, it is the possibility of repeating the process of subjectivation in a slightly different way; in a way that ‘does not consolidate that dissociated unity, the subject, but … proliferates effects which undermine the force of normalization’, that can bring about resistance (Butler 1997: 93).

Michel Foucault (1988) discusses this in terms of practices of self-formation and techniques of self. He views this form of resistance as an ascetical practice, not in the sense of abnegation but in the sense of an exercise of self upon one's self that seeks to attain a certain mode of being. It involves the subject constituting herself or himself in some determined form through a certain set of practices, e.g., through engaging in games of truth and through exercising power on one's self. These techniques or technology of self involve:

Nevertheless, these active practices of self-formation are not something that the individual invents all by himself or herself. They are patterns that are proposed, suggested, imposed on the individual by his or her culture, society, and social group (Foucault 1988: 11).

Overall, these theoretizations on ‘politics of self’ and ‘subversive repetition’ would seem to offer potentially fruitful tools for the empirical analysis of environmentalist struggle (Darier 1999). In the field of environmental sociology, however, the discussion on resistance as the politics of self has remained fairly abstract and theoretical and further development of the field would therefore seem to benefit from empirical elaborations on the basic ideas and concepts involved. In this paper our aim is to respond to this need by empirically elaborating and illustrating these practices and processes of self-formation and subjectivation in the context of environmentalist political activism.

Our empirical analysis is based on a poststructuralist approach to narrative inquiry (Davies 2003a, b). As Bronwyn Davies (2003b: xx) writes, from this perspective

Accordingly, in this paper we look into the storylines and discursive practices through which people make sense of themselves and their relations with others and how they figuratively, speak/write themselves into existence (ibid.).

When analyzing the data, the Foucauldian theory on subjectivation discussed above provides a way of drawing attention to particular aspects of the texts, to identify the discursive practices through which the subjectivity of the interviewee is constituted in the self-narrative (Davies 2003b). Our primary focus therefore is on ‘discourse, and on shifting patterns of discursive practices, rather on the specificity of the individuals who take up those discourses and make them live’ (Davies 2003a: 147).

Accordingly, our analytical focus is on ‘storytelling’ as a discursive practice, through which the cultural meanings, norms and values are not only reiterated and reproduced but also contested and transformed (Rappaport 2000; Moisander and Valtonen 2006). Therefore, our objective is to analyze the ways in which eco-communards engage in resistance by producing alternative, resistant ‘stories’ about acceptable modes of existence and political society in their self-narratives.

Towards this end, we thus analyze the self-narratives of eco-communards, focusing on the forms of understanding that they create of themselves. What are they willing to accept, refuse, and change both in themselves and in their circumstances? And what is the role of communal living in their life?

The empirical material used in this study was obtained in a small-scale ethnographic study of four eco-communes located in rural areas of a Nordic country. One of the authors of this paper spent three days in each commune, observing and participating in the everyday activities of the commune as a guest. The number of people living in each commune at the time of the fieldwork ranged from 8 to 31 adults and from 0 to 12 children. In all of the four communes, the majority of members were female. Altogether 12 adult eco-communards were interviewed, nine women and three men, their age ranging from 36 to 66. Both the communes and the interviewees were selected using the snowball technique.

The eco-communards lived and worked together in the commune. All the communes grew some of their own food, and two out of four of them had food and energy self-sufficiency as their goal. They also regularly organized and served as a venue for seminars, workshops and cultural events, or hosted guests interested in environmentalism and communal life. Besides the more or less explicit ecological commitment, three of the communes had no official or explicitly shared political, religious, or other philosophical or ideological commitment or orientation. One of the communes, the oldest and largest commune, was explicitly theosophical in its orientation.

When conducting the interviews, the aim was to let participants choose their own ways of telling their life stories and decide upon the most important themes and events in their lives. Each interview took from 1.5 to 4 hours, and altogether resulted in 225 pages of transcribed text. Three repeatedly occurring major themes were identified in the interviews: meaningful life, work and economy, as well as family and communality. In this article, we focus on the last theme.

In the narratives that we analyzed, eco-communards represent their decision to try out communal living as an important turning point and subversive move that enabled them to problematize and resist the normalized forms of being and identity that consumer society and the prevalent heterosexual matrix (Butler 1990) tend to impose on them. They describe the situation in which they had made this choice as an important crossroad in their life (Bagnoli forthcoming; Bagnoli and Ketokivi 2009).

For some, the decision to move into a commune was a clear turning point or a ‘fateful moment’ (Giddens 1991: 112–4), in which several unexpected events, setbacks, or difficulties had come together in a way that pushed them to make irreversible decisions and to launch into something new. Marianne, a woman in her late fifties, for example, had gotten the impulse to move to a commune only after she was diagnosed with an unpredictable illness, and had to stay at home for weeks to recover. During that period, she ‘by fate’ had happened to see a TV-program about a group of women who wanted to establish an eco-commune. Their ideas about mutual assistance had moved her, and she had decided to join them.

For others, the choice to live in an eco-commune was an outcome of a longer but retrospectively consequential process of ‘searching for meaning in life’. When describing these crossroads and processes of transformation, the interviewees refer to feelings of alienation and aversion towards living a ‘normal life’, spiritual and political awakenings, and failures in performing the gender identity that the prevalent cultural narrative of the heterosexual nuclear family prescribes to them.

In making sense of their personal life-trajectories, the communards represent these moments, turning points, and processes as some sort of instigators of personal transformation and resistance. Crossroads, in their narratives, are incidents and conditions that trigger and facilitate processes of self-formation and change. And they help them to problematize the internalized moral orders, worldviews and identities that set limits for their personal and political pursuits. In other words, the crossroads that these people experienced had served to improve their moral agency by giving them a push to start inventing new ways of thinking and being.

Overall, family and gendered family relations were central themes through which the eco-communards narrated and elaborated these crossroads as well as the practices and processes of personal transformation and resistance that life in an eco-commune had made possible for them. In their self-narratives, they critically draw from the dominant cultural narrative (Rappaport 2000) of the nuclear family, in particular, to re-think family-centered identities and social relations, to refuse the normalized forms of subjectivity they entail and to invent new forms of being that are more in line with their personal aspirations and political objectives. Environmentalist resistance, in these people's narratives then, would seem to entail a combat against the different forms of discursive power that constitute individuals as subjects – politics of self (Foucault 1985, 1988). It is carried out not only in relation to one's self (and nature) but also in relation to others through intimate relationships and social interaction.

One of the themes through which the communards narrated the crossroads that led them to try out communal living was the loss of self-respect and connection to one's self in a conventional marriage and nuclear family. Particularly the women, who were all divorced (except the never-married single Karin), explained that in their former lives as wives and mothers they had tended to focus on accommodating others’ expectations and needs, so as to live up to the familial roles in which they were cast. But as a result, they had gradually lost touch with themselves and their own needs. In their stories, the choice to live in a commune was thus an attempt to be freed from constraining gender roles and to invent new liberating and personally more rewarding ways of feeling, being, and doing as women and human beings.

This is the case, for example, in Marianne's story about becoming an eco-communard. Marianne, an independent writer, had divorced a few years ago before coming to the commune. When her children had moved out, she had realized that she wanted to ‘start living a life more of her own’, and not the life of her husband that was waiting for her. In the following extract, Marianne reflects on what she has learned:

Marianne's story is typical among the female communards. Most of these women were in their mid-life, they had already given birth to and raised their children and thus ‘fulfilled their duty’ as wives and mothers, as one of the younger eco-communards (Katja) put it. The transition to empty nest had provided them with a new and changed outlook on life, empowering them to re-think their personal needs, wants, and ecological commitments.

As a result perhaps, reflecting back on their lives, all of these women engage in a thoroughgoing questioning and re-thinking of the prevailing cultural representations and social practices associated with gender and family, as well as the seemingly fixed power relations that they entail. They discuss the role expectations and practices that the categories of ‘mothers’, ‘wives’, and ‘grandmothers’ imply as generally constraining and as something that impedes women from exploring their own wills and wants.

For example, Anneli, a 55-year-old woman with medical training, critically reflects on herself and the nature of power relations in her former marriages. She had divorced twice. At the time of the interview, she had been living in a commune for a year, where she had first come encouraged by an acquaintance. Contrasting the freedom and ‘easy life’ that she has found in the commune with her earlier life as a married wife, she describes how communal living liberates her from the servant-carer role of the wife that she had tended to ascribe to herself in the past.

Moreover, Anneli depicts the eco-commune as an environment where it has been easier for her to give up certain ‘obligatory’ symbols of femininity, such as cosmetics and new clothing. Along similar lines of thinking, Birgitta, another divorced health care professional in her early fifties, suggests that a commune can be a place where the fixed, sexually defined subject positions of a man and a woman can be refused, and people can be ‘just human beings’, which she and many others find personally liberating.On the whole, discussing these ideas Marianne, Anneli, Birgitta and the others indicate that their decision to live in an eco-commune is not only inspired by the possibility to contribute to a lower ‘ecological footprint’ by sharing and saving resources with other people, but also by the opportunity to problematize and break free from certain family-centered gendered identities and practices that they are no longer able or willing to perform.

A questioning and critique of the narrow, strictly home-and-family-centered lifestyles together with an emphasis on the importance of the multiple intimate relationships that communal living offers, was another theme that ran through the self-narratives that we analyzed, and was used to make sense of the crossroads in eco-communards’ lives. Both female and male members talked about the commune as some sort of an extended family or an alternative to the exclusionary couple or the isolated ‘conjugal unit’ that the institution of the nuclear family sanctions.

In their stories, the position where a person grounds his or her identity and personal life solely on family or couple relations is represented as unsatisfactory. The idea that family, home, and love could provide for all that a person needs is something that ‘simply no longer works’ for them. The communards ‘want more’ from life; they need ‘more space’ and a ‘larger circle of people’ to share their interests, activities, and achievements with.

These kinds of ideas are expressed, for instance, by Kalle, a 51-year-old man with an art school education, who had been living in the same commune for over 20 years together with his wife. Kalle criticizes the idea of the isolated family unit, arguing that the ‘frame’, the limits, demands, and expectations that the model of the nuclear family sets for human life, are too tight or outright ‘imprisoning’ and ‘suffocating’ (see also the last extract from Katja's interview). He says that it is simply too much to bear:

In the narratives, the exclusive nature of family and spousal relationships is also something that holds people back from taking on wider societal roles and fully engaging in environmental activism. The story of 50-year-old Helena, who was a founder of one of the communes, is illuminating. Before moving to the eco-commune she too had divorced after a long marriage with three children. She had a background in research and in environmentalist politics, both of which she had found frustrating with respect to her hopes of bringing about social change. Developing an eco-commune was the latest strategy in her ‘ongoing personal project of changing the world’. Talking about her political aspirations, she concludes that they are hard to accomplish when living in a close relationship with a man.In her self-narrative, Helena refers to her prior experience, saying that maintaining a spousal or other exclusive intimate relationship tends to split her energies and direct her attention away from environmentalist goals. To be able to dedicate herself to the political objectives that she finds important, she feels that it is better not to have a close intimate relationship at all. Hence, reflecting back on the 20 years of her former marriage, she concludes that she will ‘never again move in with a man’ to live as an isolated couple. She does not want to ‘be so dependent on just one person’. Nevertheless, she also reproduces the all-pervasive cultural norm and generally felt female desire of a heterosexual love-relationship of ‘having a man beside her’.

Overall, in problematizing the idea of the family as a site of exclusive intimate relationships, the eco-communards that we studied represent themselves as some sort of pioneers not only in environmental activism but also in subversive intimate relations (Jamieson et al. 2006). To pursue their personal and political objectives they set out to invent and develop new, innovative and more inclusive forms of intimate relations. In the following section, we illustrate how they do this by articulating alternative narratives of family and intimate relationships.

In the narratives that we analyzed, the eco-commune is represented as some sort of an extended or chosen family (Weston 1997) that performs the ‘functions’ of the nuclear family but in a slightly different manner, and with different, potentially empowering and subversive effects. While the commune, as a social arrangement, is a sphere of intimacy and interaction much like a conventional family, it produces and sustains relations that connect people in ways that cannot be described in terms of the standard model of the family and the ideological code it entails (Smith 1993). By living in a commune, people rather seek alternative, more fluid, egalitarian, and democratic forms of intimacy (Stacey 1996).

In describing their everyday life in the commune, the people we interviewed use family as an everyday, working vocabulary and a discourse for assigning meaning to social relations in the commune (Gubrium and Holstein 1993). They repeat and make use of the cultural narrative of the family, reproducing, contesting and transforming the terminology, ideas and practices that are typically associated with family life, as the quote from Birgitta above illustrates. She draws from the cultural narrative of family to construct familiarity and relatedness, but disentangles the provision of affection and companionship to the members of the commune from the fixed gender roles of the nuclear family and the moral order that it entails.

Communal living, we argue, may thus be viewed as a practice of resistance in the particular sense of repeating the process of subjectivation, the becoming of a subject and the process of subjection, in a way that is slightly different and proliferates effects that undermine the force of normalization (Butler 1990, 1997). In the following we will discuss the ways in which the eco-communards engaged in this repetition by articulating and enacting an alternative narrative of the ‘family’ by doing relatedness in their talk.

In reflecting upon their personal development and self-identity, the eco-communards represent the commune as a place that enables the cultivation of personal autonomy in relation to others. In their accounts, this kind of ‘coexistence of high degree of individual autonomy together with a sense of moral obligation’ (Carsten 2000: 26) towards multiple other people is a result of new forms and practices of doing relatedness that do not reproduce the moral order of the nuclear family (Jamieson et al. 2006). Particularly in the self-narratives of single mothers, who generally represent a failure in the representation of the normative kinship and nuclear family (Woodward 1997), the eco-commune is represented as providing an important footing for subversion in personal life, as Katja's story illustrates.

Katja was a divorced mother in her thirties with some university education. She and her three children had been living in an eco-commune for over 2 years at the time of the interview. Before moving into the commune, they had lived abroad with her former husband, who was working there at the time. She tells that during their stay, she had gotten ill, and this had changed the course of her life. She and her husband had gotten a divorce, and she had returned to her home country to live in the commune with her children. As Katja puts it in the following extract, for mothers eco-communes may offer more autonomy and control over their own lives, and a way to get out of unsatisfactory relationships. Moreover, in a commune, single parents are not completely tied to their children because, as she explains, there is a possibility for a ‘broader solidarity’ and sharing – that the children are looked after and loved by many adults instead of only their parents and relatives. Katja also problematizes the norm of exclusive intimate relationships between parents and children:

The re-thinking of family-centered gender identities and practices in the personal narratives of female eco-communards does not imply that they necessarily strive for more ‘masculine’ or ‘instrumental’ roles, tasks, and identities. On the contrary, care for others is a prominent theme through which these women narrate the nature of communal life and their own contribution to it. In their talk, they tend to disentangle their care from the prevailing model of nuclear family, though, and instead tie their practices of care to their personal and political objectives. They thus represent communes as sites that can potentially offer new and different forms of subjectivity both for the people who care – who are usually female – and for the people who are being cared for.

Birgitta's thoughts, for instance, illustrate the idea of mutual, non-familial care in eco-communes. According to her, a commune can be a place where people build long-term relationships and grow old, helping and assisting each other, instead of ‘being a burden’ for their children:

For another example, Katja mentions in her self-narrative that she has taken up a self-ascribed ‘role of an older woman’, which involves acting as a ‘mother figure’ for a group of young environmental activists who regularly visit the commune. For her, the eco-commune is a place that provides her the opportunity to assume this personally rewarding role, supporting these young people – who happen to remind her of the time when she was young, ‘but did not have any support at the time’.

All in all, by articulating alternative narratives of caring relationships and autonomy in their everyday life, the female eco-communards thus seem to engage in a repetition of the process of subjectivation in a way that proliferates transformative effects on family-centered gender identities.

In the narratives that we studied, eco-communes are represented as social arrangements and organizations that are more open, inclusive, and collaborative than the conventional nuclear family. Communal life involves forming intimate and ideally egalitarian relationships with multiple, different and changing people, without the guarantee of continuity of these relationships. And as such, communal relatedness needs to be continually worked on through ethical practice. In this sense, relatedness and intimacy are continuously being ‘done’ and ‘under construction’ (Carsten 2000) in the commune.

The fragment from Marianne's self-narrative illustrates this point. She contrasts her new life in the eco-commune with a partnership of two persons, and emphasizes the personally liberating but challenging aspects of maintaining multiple intimate relationships, which require continuous dialogue and co-operation:

In a commune, the replacement of permanent hierarchies of dependence with mutual, partial, or contingent dependencies thus demands constant attention and discussion to maintain equal and harmonious relations among members of the commune. In their self-narratives, the eco-communards refer to this as hard and sometimes stressful work.

Indeed, sharing a home with people who may be total strangers in the beginning, and who later on may turn out to have annoying habits, poses challenges. But for some it is also a good thing – a ‘school of life’ that offers valuable lessons that the more ‘normal’ forms of family life cannot provide, as Johannes, a 50-year-old divorced father with a background in business, points out. In a commune, individuals are constantly faced with and have to interact with many different people. Metaphorically speaking, he says, they are surrounded by different kind of mirrors, which all reflect some aspects of one's self. Johannes, who calls himself a ‘forest mystic’, thus explains:

In their stories, understandably, many of the communards bring up the challenges that communal life may entail, describing the difficulties they have faced in trying to break up hierarchical power relations and to maintain balanced relationships in the commune. For example, Jutta, a small entrepreneur in her mid-fifties, who had lived in several communes with her two children, emphasizes that a fatal question and major challenge in communal life is to find ways to work out the interpersonal conflicts that unavoidably will emerge. In one of the communes she had lived, Jutta had initiated ‘weekly sessions for airing out one's feelings’ to defuse the interpersonal tensions in the commune. But when she had realized that her efforts were in vain, she simply decided to leave. She thus concludes, in her narrative, that it truly is a great challenge to ‘construct a commune, where also the more sensitive people get along mentally’, and which is not just ‘the thing for the really strong or skilled persons’.

As a result, perhaps, open future orientation and the dynamic quality and fluidity of communal relationships (see Carsten 2000) are among the central themes through which the eco-communards reflect upon the ongoing nature of doing relatedness in the commune. While they generally affirm their serious devotion to the commune, they concomitantly also express an open orientation towards their future as regards their way of life. For them, living in a commune, thus, does not necessarily mean a life-long commitment – which is something that they would be expected in a marriage. They rather take it ‘one day at a time’ (Anneli), ‘not worrying too much about the future’ (Marianne). The following quote from Katja, who characterizes herself as a ‘freedom-loving person’, clarifies this view.

For some eco-communards this dynamic quality of communal life turns out to be unbearable, which forces them to leave, while for others it continues to offer opportunities for self-reflection. It seems, therefore, that life in a commune, particularly the relationships with other communards, involves a sort of self-imposed regimen of constraints, prohibitions, and prescriptions that helps the eco-communards engage in critical reflection, so as to improve themselves towards what they aspire to be.

In this paper we have studied eco-communes as forms and sites of resistance that have emerged against the normalized subjectivity of the consumer-citizen. Life in an eco-commune may be viewed not only as environmentalist opposition to the established social order of the western consumer society, but also as a site where generally accepted and normalized ways of being an individual are contested and transformed. It represents an interesting case of subversive agency, in which individual struggle is linked with more collective forms of action.

The article illustrates how particular crossroads (Giddens 1991; Bagnoli forthcoming; Bagnoli and Ketokivi 2009), transitions and turning points in people's lives may be crucial in triggering and facilitating processes of critical self-reflection and transformation in their personal lives. For example, many of the eco-communards explained that, at some point in their lives, they had found themselves unable to live as ‘loving wives’ or ‘family men’ any longer, or to fully participate in the consumer society because of their sudden illness. Such ‘failures’ in the adequate performance of identities and lifestyles that are culturally conceived as ‘normal’ and ‘desirable’ (Butler 1990, 1997) had led them to turn to persons and groups that represent alternative values and lifestyles – people who shared the same or similar fate with them (Ketokivi 2009). And with the help of these people, they had found a new way of forming their identities by moving to an eco-commune. The self-narratives of the eco-communards thus highlight the interplay between fate and choice in the decision to live in a commune, as well as the nature of self as profoundly relational.

In the self-narratives of the eco-communards, the commune was constructed as a haven where the individuals are encouraged and empowered to reject their received ways of being and living and to constantly re-invent themselves as individuals through social interaction and personal relationships. Life as an eco-communard was represented as a constant pursuit of autonomy through critical reflection of the immediate socio-economic and emotional environment.

The social arrangements and forms of relatedness adopted in eco-communes question the cultural narrative of the nuclear family and the political implications (Smith 1993) that it has. Living in an eco-commune entails a thoroughgoing questioning of existing categories and systems of representation through which family related relations of power may become fixed and suppressive for women in particular. In a way, moving to an eco-commune creates conceptual space within which the female eco-communards can begin to wonder how they have adopted their ‘identities’, as gendered, sexual subjects as mothers and wives. In this sense, in the politics of self that the eco-communards pursue, environmentalist and the feminist goals are intertwined. Life in an eco-commune represents a way of advocating new values and social structures that are based on domination of neither nature nor women. As many eco-feminists have argued (Merchant 1994; Warren 1997), the root cause of environmental degradation may be attributed to particular oppressive conceptual frameworks that sanction the twin dominations of women and nature.

Similarly, through communal living both male and female communards may resist the individualist idea and practice of personal life as privatized exclusive intimacy, focused on dyadic relationships and love. Through critical self-reflection, the communards thus become more aware of the symbolic and institutional practices that contribute to their subjectivity, and of the ways in which those practices both enable and constrain them. And at the same time, they contribute to the emergence of new forms of thought, or at least new forms of working with existing categories and concepts.

Life in a commune, therefore, opens up the concept of kinship, the idealized notions of family and intimacy in particular, to cultural change (Weston 1997; Carsten 2000). It also raises the question of the role of the family institution in the field of the normalizing power that produces the prevalent forms of western subjectivity, which also tends to assign citizens the role of a consumer. The nuclear family is arguably an important site government, where different techniques of government and normalization are also in operation (Foucault 1983; Rose 1999), producing and sustaining the normative versions of kinship, family, and intimacy that are essential to the working of the materialistic consumer culture and to the logic of things in the Western market economy in general (Donzelot 1979). Perhaps, for at least some people, communal living and the rejection of the ‘normal life’ in a nuclear family represents a means of controlling the relations of power that produce the contemporary Western consumption culture and the materialistic and ecologically unsound values, norms and institutions that it involves.

Kirsi Eräranta, MSocSci, is a doctoral candidate at the University of Helsinki, Department of Sociology. She is currently working on her PhD thesis on Work/family reconciliation and the new politics of welfare. Her research interests include fatherhood, family studies, social policy and poststructuralist feminist theory. She has published on the topics in several Finnish peer reviewed journals and edited books.

Dr Johanna Moisander works as a professor at Helsinki School of Economics, Department of Marketing and Management. She is also adjunct professor at the University of Lapland, Faculty of Business and Tourism. Her research interests currently center on Foucauldian and cultural approaches to business research and qualitative research methodology. She has published, for example, in Consumption, Markets & Culture, Organization, Business Strategy and the Environment and International Journal of Consumer Studies.

Dr Sinikka Pesonen, currently works as a researcher at the Department of Marketing and Management at Helsinki School of Economics. Her research has focused on the interplay between organizations and the natural environment, which she has explored in a narrative framework. Currently her research centres more on gender in organizations. Sinikka Pesonen's work has appeared in Business Strategy and the Environment and in Management Decision.