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*Rethinking “The Family”: A Site for Intimate Failures or Potentials?*
**
Panel proposal for the American Anthropological Association conference
San Francisco, 14-18 November 2012
Panel organizers: Asli Zengin, University of Toronto & Oyman Basaran,
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Universal definitions of family had been a salient topic of anthropological
research until the late twentieth century. Such definitions, however, began
to be challenged and criticized for their inability to cover the broad
range of practices and ideologies associated with the family. In particular
the idea of “The Family” as an autonomous hetero-reproductive, biological
unity has been a paramount one, yet it has been contested by the studies
focusing on the roles played by the new medico-legal technologies of the
body which change the very meaning of *the family* (e.g. reproductive
policies, surrogacy and artificial insemination techniques, sex
reassignment surgeries etc.), the role of “real” and “fictive” kinships in
shaping subjects and the non-normative forms of families. Breaking with the
endless and futile search for “essence,” the family has instead begun to be
regarded as an ideological, social and cultural construct that is embedded
in power relations and mechanisms and that is imbued with certain affective
or emotional orientations and norms.
As a contribution to the recent anthropological explorations on family, in
this panel, we want to rethink *the family *as a border-making site that
produces categories, capacities and forms of inclusion, exclusion and
imagination. We aim to discuss how the concept of family is woven through
discourses, disciplines, and practices of the body, desire, sexuality,
technology, community and politics, and what it means to inhabit the family
on a daily basis as an experiential reality.
More specifically, we seek answers to the following questions: How are the
borders of the family being shaped, contested and reconstructed in relation
to new medical technologies of the body? How do these technologies
transform the family ties, interpersonal relations and domestic norms? How
do non-normative forms of community change the very meaning of family? What
kind of intimate, social, cultural and political borders does the family
draw in our everyday lives? How do we make use of the concept of family in
our theorizations of gender, the body, sexuality, community and politics?
What does it mean to think about the family as an alternative community or
political form? Or does it still, whether in hetero or homo settings,
continue to be a very productive site for certain normativities? As
Halberstam (2011: 71) suggests, should we reject deploying the concept of
family altogether since it is a “false narrative of continuity” that makes
“connection and succession seem organic and natural”? What does it mean to
undermine *the family* and emphasize other modes of relating, belonging,
and caring for political and/or ethical relationships? Or can we talk about
new emergences or creations of crossings between the family as a form and
other forms of relating, belonging and caring? Does that necessarily mean
the foreclosure of other alliances and coalitions, or can we think about
the family as a form, which enables and produces particular intimacies,
bonds and care that would otherwise go invisible and be silenced?
Please submit 250-word abstracts to Asli Zengin at
[log in to unmask] Oyman Basaran at
[log in to unmask] by no later than April 5, 2012.
--
a.z.
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