Description
Book SynopsisIn France as elsewhere in recent years, legislative debates over single-parent households, same-sex unions, new reproductive technologies, transsexuality, and other challenges to long-held assumptions about the structure of family and kinship relations have been deeply divisive. What strikes many as uniquely French, however, is the extent to which many of these discussionswhether in legislative chambers, courtrooms, or the mass mediahave been conducted in the frequently abstract vocabularies of anthropology and psychoanalysis.
In this highly original book, Camille Robcis seeks to explain why and how academic discourses on kinship have intersected and overlapped with political debates on the familyand on the nature of French republicanism itself. She focuses on the theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, both of whom highlighted the interdependence of the sexual and the social by positing a direct correlation between kinship and socialization. Robcis traces how thei
Trade Review
All in all, this is a superb book that brilliantly links two fields—intellectual history and the history of law and policy—normally kept separate. In particular, Robcis is to be congratulated for not reproducing what often seems the willful obscurity and grandstanding of Lacan and others. Most important of all, Robcis finds her way though two exceptionalclaims to universal validity—French republicanism, which prioritizes the social bond, and American liberalism, which prioritizes the individual, without succumbing to the provincialism and tendentiousness of either.
-- Eli Zaretsky * The Journal of Modern History *
Robcis is a careful, deliberate worker in this book. She moves ably from source to source, establishing arigorous and convincing narrative of the place of the family in republican ideals in the modern period,and is equally adept at drawing evidence from ministerial documents, philosophical engagements, andpolitical platforms.
-- Richard C. Keller * H-France Review *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Part One: The Rise of Familialism
1. Familialism and the Republican Social Contract
2. Kinship and the Structuralist Social Contract
3. The Circulation of Structuralism in the French Public Sphere
Part Two: The Critique of Familialism
4. The "Quiet Revolution" in Family Policy and Family Law
5. Fatherless Societies and Anti- Oedipal Philosophies
Part Three: The Return of Familialism
6. Alternative Kinships and Republican Structuralism
Epilogue: Kinship, Ethics, and the Nation
Bibliography
Index
