Abstract
Foucault did not write about the family as such, and certainly not as the sociology of the family has come to write about it, viz. as a discrete domain of predominantly functionalist sociological thought and empirical endeavour. To read his work through the lens of the family is therefore to set oneself upon a task that must be approached with some caution. Indeed, as this chapter aims to show through selected moments in Foucault’s books and lectures, his interest was always in the modes by which ‘the family’ has served as a site for the exercise of the power/knowledge relations that have surrounded it. Indeed, if ‘the family’ is an arrangement of figures and concerns, it is co-emergent, in a very real sense, with our understandings of it.
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Notes
Vikki Bell, Interrogating Incest: Feminism, Foucault and the Law (London: Routledge, 1993)
Vikki Bell, ‘Biopolitics and the spectre of incest: sexuality and/ in the family’, in Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash (eds), Global Modernities (London: Sage, 1995), 227–43.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Rodney Needham (ed. and trans.) (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1969 [1949]), 24.
James Bernauer, ‘Beyond life and death’, in Timothy Armstrong (ed.), Michel Foucault, Philosopher: Essays (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 260–79 at 268.
Euripides, The Bacchae and Other Plays, Philip Vellacott (trans.) (London: Penguin, 1973), 59.
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© 2012 Vikki Bell
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Bell, V. (2012). Foucault’s Familial Scenes:. In: Duschinsky, R., Rocha, L.A. (eds) Foucault, the Family and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291288_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291288_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-34565-6
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