Policy constructions of “modern” and “traditional” families: temporality, national identity, and race

Abstract

“The family” is political – central to politics of race and nationalism. Feminist students of nationalism and empire have shown that from colonial times to present day, defining collective identities and boundaries – be they cultural, racial, or national – inevitably involves reference to ‘proper’ family, and proper gender roles, dress, parenting, loving, and sex. Scholars of race and colonialism have also shown how central the notion of “progress” is to constructions of race in European modernity. A teleological imagination of historical time as moving towards progress (civilization, enlightenment, democracy, emancipation, wealth) underpins a categorization of White/Western culture as superior, most civilized, while others are imagined as lagging behind, or even outside of time, locked in what Anne MacClintock (1995: 40) calls “anachronistic space” which is “prehistoric, atavistic, and irrational”. “The family” is a site of political contestation, constructed in parliaments and ministries, but also in the media, street protests, bureaucratic procedures, and courts. In North-Western Europe, where national identity constructions are bound up with teleological notions of modernity and progress, “the traditional family” is habitually projected onto the racialized and often migranticized Other. These “traditional families” (e.g. polygamous or matrifocal families) are construed as “culturally different” products of non-European tradition. Fragile space exists for the inclusion of ‘queer’ families into the imagined national community, when their deviation from traditional family forms is seen as modern and progressive, for instance same-sex, polyamorous, or transgender parent families. However, in different contexts, these dynamics may play out differently, with “the traditional family” being claimed as the cornerstone of national identity, needing protection from internal and external threats. This panel explores the intersection of constructions of families, family forms and family practices as “modern” and/or “traditional” with constructions of national and racial identities and boundaries, in different policy fields and political contexts.

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