Gendering the Political: Citizenship From Marginal Spaces by Joe B. Turner

Author:Joe B. Turner [Turner, Joe B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367142995
Amazon: 0367142996
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

Domesticity, family and citizenship

The mobilisation of familial domesticity is not new; running through modern nationalism are norms of heteronormativity (Evans 1993; Hanafin 2013; Levine 2006), reproduction (Roseneil et al. 2013; Turner 2008) and home-making (Baxter and Brickell 2014; Porteous and Smith 2001). The nation has been historically imagined through appeals to the familial (Yuval-Davis 1996). Kinship, intimacy, blood-ties, fertility are used as imaginaries of the cohesive nation (McClintock 1993); just as masculine sovereignty is tied to the protection of the ‘motherland’, the sanctuary of the hearth, the innocence and vulnerability of maternity and child rearing (Dowler 2012; Rofel 2002, 185–186). Exploring the metaphorical connections of domesticity and the nation is vital but it is also important to recognise the relationship between domesticity and social control.

A reading of Walter’s approach to ‘domopolitics’ (2004) provides a way to navigate this terrain. To Walters what defines contemporary liberal regimes of government and social ordering (security) is how the state is governed as a ‘home’ or ‘domos’. The relationship between citizen, community and state is configured through a diagram of home which emphasises the nation as a domestic(ated) space of intimacy, emotional ties and familiarity (Darling 2008). This relies on a particular historical depiction of home as: family, sanctuary, land and place; a depiction that calls upon an unquestionable/commensensical desire or ‘will to domesticate the force which threaten the sanctity of home’ (Walters 2004, 242). The form of social ordering linked to the domos produces strategies which filter, classify and monitor subjects through their imbrications, ties and familial connections to an imaginary of home, and/or their disturbance of it. Thus regulating ‘circulations of “good” and “bad”‘ (Darling 2008, 265) means monitoring and fostering the correct morals, behaviours, forms of intimacy, social relations that could emerge in the ‘family home’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.