Familial Relations: Spaces, Subjects, and Politics

Abstract

Familial relations: spaces, subjects, and politics`F amilies matter. Irresponsibility. Selfishness. Behaving as if your choices have no consequences. Children without fathers. Schools without discipline. Reward without effort. Crime without punishment. Rights without responsibilities. Communities without control. ... But I repeat today, as I have on many occasions these last few years, that the reason I am in politics is to build a bigger, stronger society. Stronger families. Stronger communities. A stronger society. ... [I]f we want to have any hope of mending our broken society, family and parenting is where we've got to start.'' David Cameron, Monday 15 August 2011 (1) Following rioting in some parts of England in August 2011, British Prime Minister David Cameron asserted that``families matter''.``Broken'' families, he suggested, were a primary cause of the social disorder that provoked the riots. Fatherless families, negligent or ineffectual parents, families``that everyone in their neighbourhood knows and often avoids'' required government intervention, in order to get the nation back on track. Restoring orderly families led to the creation of a``family test'' by which all social policy initiatives would be judged by their effect on the family, but also more police, less bureaucratic red tape, more education, and a restoration of morality in politics. Britain's``security fightback'' must work in tandem with its``social fightback'', Cameron asserted, because social disorder threatens the security of a``great country of good people''. Cameron's speech can be read as an iteration of a familiar conservative reprisalö family values, personal responsibility, strong policing. The family has been a target of state intervention since states began to perceive and orient themselves towards a society. As Donzelot (1979, page 92) argued, creating social order by managing the family was a primary concern in early liberal statecraft. Consequently, the problems of the liberal state were defined around forms of familial intervention, and the family linked individuals to a series of state and nonstate institutions (see Martin, 2012). Most state governmentsöliberal, social democratic, socialist, authoritarian, and otherwiseöcontinue to distribute social citizenship benefits through family-making practices like marriage, childbirth, and care. Immigration policies privilege biological kinship and heteronormative family forms (Simmons, 2008) and familial gender roles often circumscribe women's migration (Yeoh et al, 2005). Yet employment-based migration schemes often require long-term family separation (Graham et al, 2012;Pratt 2004;2009). Nations, citizenship, and states are made in, through, and on behalf of families.So, clearly families do matter. But we also want to ask what makes a family? And if there are many answers to this question, then how exactly do families come to matter, in what ways? Where, when, and to whom do families matter? While geographers have provided rich analyses of gender, social reproduction, and ca...

In the Family Way: Bringing a Mother-Daughter (Matrilineal) Perspective to Retail Innovation and Consumer Culture

“…We have highlighted the multi-generational (heritable) family to show how meaning is translated and transitioned through family signatures. This further demonstrates that family is important to understand the relationship between individuals and culture (Probyn 1998;Bricknell 2012;Harker and Martin 2012) and shows how consumption practices are intersectional (i.e. gendered, sexed, aged, raced, familied and classed).…”

“…Family is a collective identity that is co-constructed in actions, interactions and intergenerational transfers (Epp and Price 2008;Harker and Martin 2012). Individual identity is constrained by family interactions and varying synergies and conflicts that construct family identity (Epp and Price 2011;Connell et al 2011;Barnhart and Penaloza 2012).…”

Learning to love again: ‘Broken families’, citizenship and the state promotion of coupledom

“…Cameron (2011) blamed these acts on a lack of parental responsibility, in particular singling out 'children without fathers'. Making 'stronger families' founded upon 'stable relationships' was again invoked as a key strategy to mend 'broken Britain', with the Prime Minister claiming that '[i]f we want to have any hope of mending our broken society, family and parenting is where we've got to start' (see Harker and Martin, 2012). Families founded upon long-term committed couples were seen as central to the nation, not just in their role in biological reproduction, but also in reproducing appropriate moral codes (Kirby, 2009).…”

Single People's Geographies of Home: Intimacy and Friendship beyond ‘the Family’

“…Thus the rise in singleness can be understood as part of what Buzar et al (2005) understand as the 'second demographic transition': marked by declining household size, a wider array of domestic living arrangements, and the increasing importance of networks of kin and friendship outside of the household. (5) Despite such evident trends, geographers have yet to fully engage with the vast body of literature on the changing norms and practices of intimate life and family formation (see Duncan and Smith, 2002;Harker and Martin, 2012;Roland and Nakano, 2013). As Gill Valentine (2008) notes, there has been a tendency in geography for work on 'the family' to fall within the subfield of children's geographies, and consequently there is still often a heteronormative understanding of 'the family', founded upon the parentchild relationship and assumptions of biological relatedness.…”

“…The paper then moves on to explore how single people have created new forms of home and new spaces of at-homeness with those with whom they are not biologically (or romantically) related. I thus seek to contribute to an emerging body of geographical work examining intimate life by exploring how a queer approach can advance critical geographies of friendship (Bowlby, 2011;Bunnell et al, 2011), families (Harker and Martin, 2012;Valentine, 2008), and the lifecourse (Hopkins and Pain, 2007). In particular, I seek to highlight the multiplicity of desires and intimate attachments beyond the "sanctification of a conjugal couplet" (Povinelli, 2006, page 181).…”