| In almost all advanced capitalist democracies, family has become the most contested site for resolving the contradictions in the social everyday.; The Contemporary Family and Its Cultural Representations engages some of the new shifts in family structures and in doing so puts in question the main assumptions of the dominant cultural and literary studies and consequently proposes new theoretical and analytical directions for them. The project focuses on the historical significance of the changes in family structures by inquiring into the new, post-nuclear relations---"lesbigay," "divorce-extended," "transnational," and similar forms of family---that are often regarded as the "family" in the early twenty-first century.; In its analysis of the "new" family, The Contemporary Family and Its Cultural Representations critiques institutional cultural studies by demonstrating how through a mostly culturalist rewriting of the materialist concepts of "class" and "ideology" it has represented the "new" family as the outcome of a transformation of the family into an autonomous realm of individual "equality" and "desire." I argue that in doing so contemporary cultural studies deploys family as a private space for resolving increasingly complex social contradictions and thus legitimates the way things are.; In contrast to the dominant cultural studies, The Contemporary Family and Its Cultural Representations argues for a historical materialist cultural studies which demonstrates that the contemporary family is not a fundamentally new family form. It is not "new" because the conditions of possibility of family---class relations---have not changed. Rather, it is a periodic updating of the privatized family in/of capitalism which is subject to the constraints of the existing class relations. The "new" family is a product of changes in the division of labor under which surplus value is appropriated as well as the deepening of this exploitation. Thus, for the majority, family relations remain relations of "need" and will only be transformed with the transformation of class relations.; Throughout The Contemporary Family and Its Cultural Representations , by close analysis of various cultural practices, I develop a new model of cultural studies that has considerable explanatory power not just for the family but for the everyday in general. |
